People connected to LessWrong and the Bay Area surveillance industry often cite David Chapman’s “Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” to understand why their subcultures keep getting taken over by jerks. Chapman is a Buddhist mystic who seems rationalist-curious. Some people use the term postrationalist.
Have you noticed that Chapman presents the founders of nerdy subcultures as innocent nerds being pushed around by the mean suits? But today we know that the founders of Longtermism and LessWrong all had ulterior motives: Scott Alexander and Nick Bostrom were into race pseudoscience, and Yudkowsky had his kinks (and was also into eugenics and Libertarianism). HPMOR teaches that intelligence is the measure of human worth, and the use of intelligence is to manipulate people. Mollie Gleiberman makes a strong argument that “bednet” effective altruism with short-term measurable goals was always meant as an outer doctrine to prepare people to hear the inner doctrine about how building God and expanding across the Universe would be the most effective altruism of all. And there were all the issues within LessWrong and Effective Altruism around substance use, abuse of underpaid employees, and bosses who felt entitled to hit on subordinates. A '60s rocker might have been cheated by his record label, but that does not get him off the hook for crashing a car while high on nose candy and deep inside a groupie.
I don’t know whether Chapman was naive or creating a smokescreen. Had he ever met the thinkers he admired in person?
I know both Watson and Myers. Neither of them were interested in “being tastemakers”; both of them stood on the right side of trying to make the skeptic/atheist spaces less of a sexist waste dump, and both of them caught hell for it. Myers was the one who blew the lid off Shermer’s history of sexual harassment (and got blackballed from a lot of skeptics’ events because of it). He was also part of the effort to make Atheism Plus a thing, and Watson was in favor too.* Carrier sued Myers and others after being removed from FreethoughtBlogs on what we’d now call #MeToo reasons. The rage tsunami directed at Watson for saying “guys, don’t do that” was basically the trial run for GamerGate. More than anything else, it was the skeptic movement’s decision that “no actually, being sexist is more fun” which drove out everyone interested in doing more than relitigating Bigfoot.
Harriet Hall got into trouble for just-asking-questions transphobia.
*The McCreight mentioned in that blog post later chose the name “Jey” and uses they/he pronouns.
The only people from those days who I met face to face were Randi and Shermer. I remember sitting at a table afterwards talking about how I wished Shermer would go back to writing skepticism and ditch the bad arguments for Libertarianism.
Myers was happy to have Carrier as one of his bully boys against anyone who refused to toe the constantly shifting party line. He jettisoned Carrier only after the later became embarrassing (it became public that Carrier kept hitting on women who said they were not interested). IMHO that was like the Kray twins ordering a hit on an enforcer who went off the leash. Edit: The FreeThoughtBlogs take on their separation with Carrier begins with Myers and Carrier speaking at a two-speaker event where Carrier meets a young woman.
Two things with echos of our friends were Carrier’s undisclosed sexual relationship with one of the people who hired him to speak, and that the term “polyamory” was used to cover behaviour which does not look good when you describe the specifics. A third was that Dawkins and friends were allergic to history and philosophy, but wanted to share their thoughts on history and philosophy.
Hall published a noncommittal review of a dodgy-sounding book. Scientific skepticism is a method of inquiry not a set of shibboleths. I suspect that her review was not good skepticism, but nobody is a good skeptic on every issue, and it did not seem worthy of retraction (maybe a note that the editors did not endorse it). Back to the original comment, this brings us to the difference between the thing (critical inquiry) and the symbolic representation of the thing (yelling that bigfoot is not real and homeopathy is sugar pills).
“Skepticism” that acts to cover for bad science that hurts people deserves a retraction, not a disapproving shrug.
The sewer-deep Islamophobia from “luminaries” like Richard Dawkins didn’t help, either. One thing that is perhaps easy to miss now in looking back at “New Atheism” is how much it inhabited a shortly after 9/11 cultural space.
And regarding the point above that the analysis needs “Explicit acknowledgement of the role of capitalism and colonialist tendencies in corrupting subcultures”, the term New Atheism itself was a branding gimmick imposed from outside (codified by and perhaps first used in Wired magazine, of all places, AFAIK). The people who were already “in” it looked around and asked, “OK, what exactly is new about it?”. As far as actual arguments went, there was little if anything that Paul Dirac had not already said in 1927.
Shermer is a “sociopath” in the GMS taxonomy. But he rose to prominence in the '90s, co-founding the Skeptics Society in 1991 and publishing Why People Believe Weird Things in 1997. He was considered the old guard by those who came to skepticism/atheism via the '00s blogosphere, who were some combination of “geeks” and “mops”. So, there’s not really the linear order to it that the neat and tidy GMS story calls for.