#neoreactionary

Scott Siskind███████████████████████████████ Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:12 PM to me [continuation of our convo from Facebook, because I don't like their chat interface] I said a while ago I would collect lists of importantly correct neoreactionary stuff to convince you I'm not wrong to waste time with neoreactionaries. I would have preferred to collect stuff for a little longer, but since it's blown up now, let me make the strongest argument I can at this point: 1. HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct. https://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/the-facts-that-need-to-be-explained/ http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/survey-of-psychometricians-finds-isteve.html This then spreads into a vast variety of interesting but less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses which should probably be more strongly investigated if we accept some of the bigger ones are correct. See eg http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/theorie/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed .

This is the claim about the appeal of neoreactionaries that was put first, which seems to imply it is the most important one, and it is about "HBD". HBD is an acronym for Human Biodiversity. We can look up what this means if we like, but this seems unfair to Scott. These were written in 2014, in the context of a very specific blogging culture, and even if "human biodiversity" is now widely used by white nationalists and eugenicists this does not mean everyone using the term "human biodiversity" was promoting white nationalism or eugenics.

To understand what this means in context, we can follow his links. The first goes to a post on the now-defunct blog Occidental Ascent, and opens:

Recap: In the US, there is a large stubborn Black-White differential in intelligence (section A). This differential, on the individual and population level, explains a large portion of the social outcome difference. Within populations, intelligence is highly heritable. As such, the behavioral genetic default is that this differential also has a high heritability (section N).

I think that this faithfully previews the contents of the article, which is very long. This blog as a whole seems to be almost entirely about, very explicitly, the relative intelligence of the American Black and White populations.

The second link is to a relatively short post on Steve Sailer's blog about how good psychometricians think Steve Sailer is when surveyed. The following four survey questions appear among the perhaps ten or fifteen total survey items mentioned:

Is there sufficient evidence to arrive at a reasonable estimate of the heritability of intelligence in populations of developed countries?

What are the sources of U.S. black-white differences in IQ?

Is there racial/ethnic content bias in intelligence tests?

[...] whether there was bias against lower SES and Africans in the western world, the mean agreement was about 4 out of 9.

This seems like a fairly high degree of emphasis to place on questions of Black and White IQ, given that this is a post specifically about how good Steve Sailer's blog is. At the risk of inserting my opinion, these are the only interesting or noteworthy questions in the post, which is, otherwise, mostly Steve Sailer reposting a press release about how well-respected Steve Sailer is.

In this context, these are the things Scott is calling "partially correct or at least very non-provably non-correct". Given what he is choosing to link, Scott is saying that he believes the American Black population is probably genetically stupid, and that this is the most important thing that he is interested in the neoreactionaries for saying. There is no other plausible meaning to saying this thing and then linking these articles.

His "less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses" that maybe deserve investigation are, from the links, that inbreeding produces altruism, and whatever is in the book Albion's Seed, which I find completely inscrutable and which he has since reviewed elsewhere. In order to be connected to HBD, the book would need to be interpreted as being about genetics, which it does not mostly seem to be.

We get just a light touch of human racial categorization in the inbreeding/altruism discussion:

i dunno, but i see — maybe — the more inbred clannish fighters (yupik eskimos, moroccan jews, kuwaitis) having more cases of CAH than the more outbred peaceniks (new zealanders, norwegians, even northern italians). also…

but on the whole, there is nothing that seems easy to draw any particular conclusion from in these two links.

(I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by "appreciate", I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge.)

So far as I can tell, Scott has not either left the internet forever or sought some sort of horrible revenge. I am, very honestly, attempting to insert my opinion as little as possible, but there are limits to that. Taken literally, this seems like kind of a fucked up thing to say to a friend. Or a stranger. Anyone really. Why would you say this? Why would you write this in an email and then send it, on purpose, under any circumstance? This is not entirely a rhetorical question. In spite of some effort, I cannot really discern what would lead a person to write or send an email containing this line to another person. It would seem much easier to simply not send the email.

Threatening horrible revenge if people repeat the things that you say is, in general, pretty troubling. It's easy to gloss over it in context if you're just reading the email quickly. It seems like it raises a basic epistemic problem. Are people hiding things because someone has threatened to leave the internet or seek horrible revenge? Is this, in some sense, a normal or common thing that is happening?

The person who leaked these described Scott as 'a vague internet acquaintance', and said that 'no, he did not first say "can I tell you something in confidence?" or anything like that.' If this is what he is comfortable saying in an email to them, what is he comfortable saying in other settings? How thoroughly does he swear other people to secrecy, and about what?

This line also strongly and directly indicates that Scott is deliberately not saying in public what he believes when he discusses race, "HBD", etc. What is being said in public has some relationship to what he believes, but what he believes is a secret that nobody should ever disclose, and he will be very upset with them if they do disclose what he actually believes.

If you think that these are important questions to ask, and to get conclusive answers about, this seems like a very strange thing to do. If the idea itself is important, discussing the idea itself directly would also be very important.

2. The public response to this is abysmally horrible. See for example Konk's comment http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jpj/open_thread_for_february_1824_2014/ala7 which I downvoted because I don't want it on LW, but which is nevertheless correct and important.

This is the linked comment:

The Doctrine of Academic Freedom, Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice from the Harvard Crimson

    No academic question is ever “free” from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?     Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.” When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

This already describes the reality on the ground, though to see it announced explicitly as a good and noble goal, by the upcoming generation, is disturbing. And people like Steven Pinker let are getting old. I'm now updating my trust for the conclusions of academic institutions and culture when they happen to coincide with their political biases downward further.

So far as I can tell, this means that Konk, and also Scott, believe that anything coming out of academic institutions about racism, sexism, heterosexism, or similar topics that agrees with the politics of academic institutions is not likely to be true. One can infer, pretty easily, that they believe the politics of universities are left wing (because they generally are). Then, this means "any academic research supporting left-wing conclusions about race, sex, or queerness is likely false". This is stated very indirectly, but there does not seem to be any actual ambiguity. There is no second, alternative thing that it might mean: it can mean only this.

See also http://radishmag.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/crazy-talk/

This is a page of what we would, nowadays, call "culture war slop". It opens like this:

Conservatives are crazy and racists are stupid, according to the latest research by college professors who could not possibly be biased. It’s scientastic!

The page is very long, but essentially seems to be a list of incidents in which the author believes that universities are deliberately persecuting conservatives. We can infer that Scott believes that universities are deliberately persecuting conservatives, and that this is important.

3. Reactionaries are almost the only people discussing the object-level problem AND the only people discussing the meta-level problem. Many of their insights seem important. At the risk (well, certainty) of confusing reactionary insights with insights I learned about through Reactionaries, see: http://cthulharchist.tumblr.com/post/76667928971/when-i-was-a-revolutionary-marxist-we-were-all-in http://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/review-of-exodus-by-paul-collier/

What object-level problem? What meta-level problem? There are two issues referenced by link in the email so far. One of these is that Blacks are stupider than Whites, and the other is that universities are liberal. We can try to clarify this by following his links.

The first link has rotted. By figuring its name is pretty unique, we can get to a post by Steve Sailer which is plucked from the middle of a Peter Hitchens article, and assume that this was a copy of the same thing on tumblr.

    How I am partly to blame for Mass Immigration     When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.       It wasn't because we liked immigrants, but because we didn't like Britain. We saw immigrants - from anywhere - as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.

This continues about how you would expect, and is a general anti-immigrant piece from Hitchens.

The second link is titled "Review of “Exodus” by Paul Collier", and starts with this:

“Migration has been politicized before it has been analyzed.” – Paul Collier In writing this book, Collier seeks to do two things. First, he wants to continue his work analyzing the poorest societies in the world. Second – and much more interesting – he wants to rescue the immigration debate from Caplanization (or Gmule-ization, if you prefer). Caplanization is the process by which the proponents of a particular policy (in this case unrestricted immigration) argue for it in such a manner than virtually all reasonable people are attracted to the opposite position.

That piece goes on to examine arguments that immigration is bad and is maybe going to destroy America at some length. This genre of argument is, now, extremely familiar to all of us, because various elections have recently been won by people saying these sorts of things.

So the object-level problem is that many nonwhites are genetically inferior and stupid, and the meta-level problem is that Western society is incapable of confronting that fact, and allows those people to immigrate into Western countries. Again, this is obscure, in that what he means by these things is only obvious if you follow his links, but is not ambiguous, in that there is no other plausible meaning for this passage. There is no other "object-level problem" besides racial inferiority mentioned in the email previously, and no "meta-level problem" besides how Western society in 2014 handles race and immigration. The two problems are that nonwhite races are inferior, and Western society and especially its universities are allowing too much immigration, and react badly to being told that nonwhite races are inferior.

There is one less interesting footnote to this passage. There being a certainty that you are, or will sometimes, confuse insights that are not from reactionaries with the insights of reactionaries suggests that quite a lot of what you read is from reactionaries. So we can infer Scott knows most of his reading diet is various reactionaries.

4. These things are actually important I suspect that race issues helped lead to the discrediting of IQ tests which helped lead to college degrees as the sole determinant of worth which helped lead to everyone having to go to a four-year college which helped lead to massive debt crises, poverty, and social immobility (I am assuming you can fill in the holes in this argument).

This seems to be an argument against Griggs v. Duke Power Co., a civil rights case decided in 1971 about enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It finds "that the company's employment requirements did not pertain to applicants' ability to perform the job, and so were unintentionally discriminating against black employees". This is generally taken as banning giving IQ tests to job applicants, and establishes the disparate impact test of civil rights and employment law.

So, the argument is that Griggs, specifically, was wrongly decided, that the practice of giving IQ tests for employment purposes in spite of disparate racial impact should have continued, and society would have less debt, less poverty, and more social mobility if Griggs had been decided the other way.

I think they're correct that "you are racist and sexist" is a very strong club used to bludgeon any group that strays too far from the mainstream - like Silicon Valley tech culture, libertarians, computer scientists, atheists, rationalists, et cetera. For complicated reasons these groups are disproportionately white and male, meaning that they have to spend an annoying amount of time and energy apologizing for this. I'm not sure how much this retards their growth, but my highball estimate is "a lot".

This passage is straightforward enough that it does not seem like it needs explanation.

5. They are correct about a bunch of scattered other things     the superiority of corporal punishment to our current punishment system (google "all too humane" in http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ ). Robin Hanson also noted this, but there's no shame in independent rediscovering a point made by Robin Hanson. I think the Reactionaries are also correct about that it is very worrying that our society can't amalgamate or discuss this belief.

The "all too humane" section's point runs like this:

So once again, we have an uncanny valley. Being very nice to prisoners is humane and effective (Norway seems to be trying this with some success), but we’re not going to do it because we’re dumb and it’s probably too expensive anyway. Being very strict to prisoners is humane and effective – the corporal punishment option. But being somewhere in the fuzzy middle is cruel to the prisoners and incredibly destructive to society – and it’s the only route the progressives will allow us to take. Some Reactionaries have tried to apply the same argument to warfare. Suppose that during the Vietnam War, we had nuked Hanoi. What would have happened?

It is unclear if Scott intended to reference both the pro-corporal-punishment and the pro-nuking-Hanoi positions of the reactionaries. Both are contained in the "all too humane" section of this post of his.

    various scattered historical events which they seem able to parse much better than anyone else. See for example http://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/review-of-the-last-lion-by-paul-reid/

This is a review of a biography of Churchill. It seems unremarkable in its analysis, other than the parts about how Churchill should have made peace with Hitler. Quote is taken from the middle, and is I think a faithful representation of what the review is trying to convey:

The story of the war – in Reid’s telling – is almost nicely split into thirds. In the first third, Britain fights alone. In the second third, Russia does 90% of the fighting. In the last third, the US joins (though Russia still does the vast majority of the fighting and dictates the strategy for all powers combined). In each third, it’s worth considering why Churchill kept wanting to fight Hitler . . . and whether (in hindsight) he made the right decision considering his original objectives. The First Third The mystery of the first third is why Churchill didn’t even consider seeking terms with Hitler during the years Britain fought alone.

Scott appears to think that the neoreactionaries have unique insight into whether or not Churchill should have fought Hitler.

    Moldbug's theory of why modern poetry is so atrocious, which I will not bore you by asking you to read.

Alas, if we want to understand the email, we should go read about Moldbug's theory of poetry, which we are informed is very boring. Fortunately, the part of it that constitutes an actual "theory" is relatively short.

Certainly the best poetry of the 20th century was written from the ’20s through the mid-’60s. [... a full paragraph and a half of nonsense ... ] The great disaster was the enormous expansion of higher education in the ’60s and ’70s. There is a reason so many college campuses have that abominable Brutalist architecture. Almost everyone who went through this gigantic, state-sponsored indoctrination machine had no reason at all to be there (please allow me to introduce you to Albert Jay Nock). They were there to be promoted in social class, perhaps also to avoid the draft. They were certainly not acquiring either vocational skills or wisdom and perspective. And nor are they still—certain areas of science and engineering, of course, excepted.

So poetry became bad after the mid-60s. This is because of the New Deal and/or Great Society higher education policies. These caused too many people to go to college, and this made poetry bad.

Given the racial context of the preceding parts of the email, and Curtis Yarvin's general track record, it is worth noting that the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and greatly expanded access to a university education for Black people, specifically. This happened at the same time as the general expansion of higher education under a series of other policies. This is, technically, ambiguous, but one obvious explanation is that Scott thinks poetry is bad now because Black people can attend universities.

    Michael successfully alerted me to the fact that crime has risen by a factor of ten over the past century, which seems REALLY IMPORTANT and nobody else is talking about it and it seems like the sort of thing that more people than just Michael should be paying attention to.

Michael is most likely Michael Anissimov, a reactionary featured prominently in Scott's Anti-Reactionary FAQ. We can try to make sense of this claim in the context of that FAQ, which argues against Michael Anissimov. An archived copy from six days after this email was written will tell us what Scott's thinking about this was.

This was written (initially) a full year before the email, and the copy we have is almost exactly the same version that was up when the email was written, if it has changed at all. It indicates that Scott believes Michael is wrong about pretty much everything, and that the (relatively constant) homicide rate seems to indicate that the (much higher) crime rate probably means that the crime rate is only high because it is being reported more often.

That Scott already knew this, and he still thinks Michael Anissimov's statements about crime are interesting, is very strange. Almost everything Michael believes about society getting worse appears to be wrong. We know that Scott believes this, because he wrote a helpful FAQ about it. This is probably bad data, and probably doesn't mean anything about crime, actually. We know Scott knows this, too.

It is not clear why, some time later when writing this email, Scott has apparently forgotten what he himself wrote in his FAQ. If the only information offered by Michael Anissimov is that crime rates are high, and this lead to knowing that probably only reports are higher and this is bad data, this would seem like it is barely an insight at all. It's one graph-worth of information that you can source easily. Michael has given Scott one interesting but unimportant fact, a half-dozen lies, and some pretty good content for his FAQ.

I cannot really see what to make of this. There are a few possibilities. Possibly, Scott somehow forgot completely debunking this point. He could, also, have not considered any other way of finding basic statistics about crime. He could be deliberately lying because he thinks it's persuasive, and maybe did not consider that he already debunked this point in public. He could simply like that this statistic started good discussion on his blog, and feel like that's about the same as being interesting and valuable, even though it is so misleading that he debunks it in his FAQ.

None of these really makes it less strange. It seems like either something is wrong with him or he's deliberately lying.

6. A general theory of who is worth paying attention to. Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. RationalWiki provides a steady stream of mediocrity. Almost nothing they say is outrageously wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially educational to someone who is smart enough to have already figured out that homeopathy doesn't work. Even things of theirs I didn't know - let's say some particular study proving homeopathy doesn't work that I had never read before - doesn't provide me with real value, since they fit exactly into my existing worldview without teaching me anything new (ie I so strongly assume such studies should exist that learning they actually exist changes nothing for me). The Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them. Despite considering myself pretty smart and clueful, I constantly learn new and important things (like the crime stuff, or the WWII history, or the HBD) from the Reactionaries. Anything that gives you a constant stream of very important new insights is something you grab as tight as you can and never let go of. The garbage doesn't matter because I can tune it out.

This passage is the one that people seem to pay the most attention to.

"the crime stuff" probably refers to Michael Anissimov's crime statistics, which Scott has apparently debunked and then forgotten about debunking.

"the WWII history" refers, apparently, to the blog post about Churchill, and how Churchill should not have gone to war with Hitler.

"the HBD" refers to point 1 in the email about how Blacks are less smart than Whites.

Saying that he can tune out the garbage shows immense confidence. It does not seem well-supported, given that he is uncritically repeating claims about crime that he has previously debunked.

7. My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts I am monitoring Reactionaries to try to take advantage of their insight and learn from them. I am also strongly criticizing Reactionaries for several reasons. First is a purely selfish reason - my blog gets about 5x more hits and new followers when I write about Reaction or gender than it does when I write about anything else, and writing about gender is horrible. Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people.

2014 was before the terms "clickbait" or "audience capture" were very common, but this seems like a clear indication in those directions.

Second is goodwill to the Reactionary community. I want to improve their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they have), the correct criticisms of class and of social justice, and few other things while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk - would be really useful people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this seems to be working - as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still haven't gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender).

This is a very dense paragraph. Most of it is, mercifully, very clear, so we will not have to read it closely.

Scott wants the goodwill of the Reactionaries, he thinks they have a high intellectual standard, and he thinks their criticisms of class and social justice (and a few other things, which is ambiguous) are correct.

There is ambiguity about what dropping the "monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk" means. Does it mean no longer considering those priorities, or does it mean simply not talking about them, tactically? If his goal is to make them stronger, and to throw out the garbage, it is unclear if the desired end goal is that they should no longer believe these things or no longer say them.

Scott notes that he has not gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender. This is odd, because the traditional concept of "the Cathedral", as articulated by Curtis Yarvin, is almost exactly the same as Scott's complaints in point 2 about universities, and relates to the "meta-level problem" in Scott's point 3. This seems to support the conclusion that he objects not to the content of the types of "-talk" he wants the Reactionaries to dispose of, but only to talking about those things in the way that they do. Still, it is technically ambiguous, and it is probably not possible to be sure this is what he means here.

Third is that I want to spread the good parts of Reactionary thought. Becoming a Reactionary would both be stupid and decrease my ability to spread things to non-Reactionary readers. Criticizing the stupid parts of Reaction while also mentioning my appreciation for the good parts of their thought seems like the optimal way to inform people of them. And in fact I think it's possible (though I can't prove) that my FAQ inspired some of the recent media interest in Reactionaries.

Scott specifically wants to spread "the good parts" of Reactionary thought. These main good parts are, from earlier in the email, their belief in the supremacy of the White race over the Black, their hostility to immigration, and their mistrust of universities. This also includes various odd beliefs like that the expansion of universities are the reason poetry is bad now and that crime is getting worse in a way that is a major problem. These odd beliefs ambiguously hint that the decline of poetry or the rise in crime is due to Black people, and this seems like the most obvious inference from the overall emphasis on race in the email.

He also lists, as a positive, that his Anti-Reactionary FAQ has inspired media interest in Reactionaries. People have sometimes alleged that the Anti-Reactionary FAQ was a subtle exercise intended to spread neoreactionary ideas and interest in them, while only claiming to oppose neoreaction or only opposing it in part. He is directly stating that this is true. Scott is happy that his Anti-Reactionary FAQ is making people more interested in neoreactionaries, and neoreactionary ideas.

This passage does explain the earlier part of the email about not wanting his beliefs publicly known. He explicitly does not want to be known as a Reactionary because he wants to spread Reactionary ideas. Exposing his specific beliefs would run counter to that goal.

Finally, there's a social aspect. They tend to be extremely unusual and very smart people who have a lot of stuff to offer me. I am happy to have some of them (not Jim!) as blog commenters who are constantly informing me of cool new things (like nydwracu linking me to the McDonalds article yesterday)

This also indicates something like audience capture. The Reactionaries are simply fun to talk to, and to know. They are his friends and he likes them.

8. SERIOUSLY SERIOUSLY, the absurdity heuristic doesn't work You're into cryonics, so you've kind of lost the right to say "These people, even tough they're smart, are saying something obviously stupid, so we don't have to listen to them" Drew has even less of a right to say that - he seems to be criticizing the Reactionaries on the grounds of 'you wouldn't pay attention to creationists, would you?" even while he discovered Catholic philosophy and got so into it that he has now either converted to Catholicism or is strongly considering doing so.

This is a tu quoque argument, a type of argumentum ad hominem.

If there is a movement consisting of very smart people - not pseudointellectual people, like the type who write really clever-looking defenses of creationism - then in my opinion it's almost always a bad idea to dismiss it completely.

Scott believes that the previous contents of the email are sufficient to demonstrate that Reactionaries are very smart, and are not pseudointellectual people.

Also, I should have mentioned this on your steelmanning creationism thread, but although I feel no particular urge to steelman young earth creationism, it is actually pretty useful to read some of their stuff. You never realize how LITTLE you know about evolution until you read some Behe and are like "I know that can't be correct...but why not? Even if it turned out there was zero value to anything any Reactionary ever said, by challenging beliefs of mine that would otherwise never be challenged they have forced me to up my game and clarify my thinking. That alone is worth thousand hours reading things I already agree with on RationalWiki.

Behe is Michael Behe, a pseudoscientist who was at the forefront of "intelligent design". "Intelligent Design" was an ideological project, funded by various religious interests, meant to legitimize teaching creationism in high schools. It has failed all legal challenges. This seems like a good comparison to appeal to someone who is used to arguing about Behe. However, everything Behe says is trash. Almost nobody arguing against Behe's ideas is deliberately promoting any of them.

This concludes the email. I have tried to do as little interpretation outside of the text of the email itself as I can. I can hopefully be forgiven for having an opinion at the conclusion.

Scott is, epistemically, a bad actor. He demonstrably lies about what he believes in public. I know this because he has said so. He threatens, maybe "jokingly", people who might expose what he actually thinks. He deliberately chooses the things he says to pander to his reactionary audience.

Perhaps most seriously, Scott takes the exact opposite of the position he believes, because by arguing with or "explaining" ideas he claims to disagree with, he knows he can promote them. He attacks the bailey because he wants to see the motte defended.

Without this specific email, believing these things about him would require a lot of reading into the subtext of what he says. With this email, you can be certain that all of these things are true. There is no plausible reason he would have written them if they were not.

All of this is stated subtly, and with links, but it is not ambiguous. There is only one plausible meaning to all of this.