💬 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.
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.