💬 0 🔁 8 ❤️ 26 · The Scott Alexander Email: An Explainer · So, Scott Alexander sent an email to someone in 2014. In 2021 the person who got that email thought that Scott was not being honest about…
I wonder if this is just a really clumsy attempt to invent stretching the overton window from first principles or if he really is so terminally rationalist that he thinks a political ideology is a sliding scale of fungible points and being 23.17% ancap can be a meaningful statement.
That the exchange of ideas between friends is supposed to work a bit like the principle of communicating vessels is a pretty weird assumption, too. Also, if he thinks it’s ok to admit that he straight up tries to manipulate friends in this way, imagine how he approaches non-friends.
Between this and him casually admitting that he keeps “culture war” topics alive on the substack because they get a ton of clicks, it’s a safe bet that he can’t be thinking too highly of his readership, although I suspect there is an esoteric/exoteric teachings divide that is mostly non-obvious from the online perspective.
So, by that token, if hypothetically you think that the Nazis got a few things right (not the war, racism or genocide, of course, or even the degenerate art, but maybe, say, the smoking bans and well-paved roads and perhaps the odd Wagnerian opera), the way to convince people is to start ranting about blood and soil and the need to exterminate the üntermenschen and wait for the nice normie liberals to politely meet you part of the way?
@Architeuthis @dgerard “…impossible to ever take anything he writes in good faith.”
See also this unguarded moment from Tumblr. All the alpha is in bad faith social engineering!
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/9lj3g7
I wonder if this is just a really clumsy attempt to invent stretching the overton window from first principles or if he really is so terminally rationalist that he thinks a political ideology is a sliding scale of fungible points and being 23.17% ancap can be a meaningful statement.
That the exchange of ideas between friends is supposed to work a bit like the principle of communicating vessels is a pretty weird assumption, too. Also, if he thinks it’s ok to admit that he straight up tries to manipulate friends in this way, imagine how he approaches non-friends.
Between this and him casually admitting that he keeps “culture war” topics alive on the substack because they get a ton of clicks, it’s a safe bet that he can’t be thinking too highly of his readership, although I suspect there is an esoteric/exoteric teachings divide that is mostly non-obvious from the online perspective.
So, by that token, if hypothetically you think that the Nazis got a few things right (not the war, racism or genocide, of course, or even the degenerate art, but maybe, say, the smoking bans and well-paved roads and perhaps the odd Wagnerian opera), the way to convince people is to start ranting about blood and soil and the need to exterminate the üntermenschen and wait for the nice normie liberals to politely meet you part of the way?
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2015/08/08