The Grey Tribe

the neo-reactionary movement has already given us the Zizian murder cult, the FTX fraud and bankruptcy, Curtis Yarvin’s whole deal, and the worst fanfic that can exist under currently understood laws of nature.

I sense a certain preoccupation on the side of the writer, or dare I say a partisan bias! On a positive note, this time nobody suggested that the fanfic existed first, and the other stuff grew out of that, so that's a positive.

Craft, community, it's all one thing! Neoreaction, effective altruism, Bayes' Theorem: If you ever thought how to best spend your money on charity or if you ever used a spam filter before LLMs, you're basically Peter Thiel.

Just like rationalists in other fields

The accusation is clear: Rationalists are by definition not domain experts. They are autodidacts, outsiders, MENSA types who haven't properly taken the cursus honorum and instead just barge into established fields with nothing but spreadsheets and first-principles thinking.

I think this isn't quite true. There is a lot of academic support for ideas like effective altruism, bayesian inference, compatibilism/materialism, or the Many-Worlds Interpretation.

I also happen to think there is often merit to "barging into" other fields, such as that time when C++ programmers barged into Neil Ferguson's CovidSim. Yes, they weren't epidemiologists. Yes, they were providing ammo to antivaxxers, and some antivaxxers knew C++ and had a field day. But you can't just say "I will guard my cherished conclusions until somebody with the right credentials produces a proof or counterexample, any proof or counterexample or empirical data first produced by an outsider doesn't count!"

That piece just nutpicks, but so can I! I can nutpick and sanewash witht he best of them.

I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.

(Emphasis mine)

I find this relateable and understandable. You can't just tell your story without somebody trying to use it as ammo in the culture wars, trying to draw much broader conclusions about a much broader group of people!

There was a time in the 90s and early 2000s when the tabloid journalist planning a hit piece was a stock character, but when newspapers started dying, it wasn't just journalists who circled the wagons. It became culturally distasteful to say "don't believe everything you read in the papers".

Then Geoff posed a thought experiment: What if Tyler took a pill, then started floating off the ground, and touched down five minutes later — then would Tyler feel that he needed to use a scientific tool in order to trust his own observations? What if Tyler took another pill from the same jar, and the second time he took the pill he floated off the ground, then touched down five minutes later? How long would it take for Tyler to conclude that each pill made him float for five minutes?

I have to admit something. I only wrote this to talk about this bit! What would you do? Would you just keep on taking pills until you come to a conclusion? Obviously not!

First you would ask a friend to observe you and take video. You would ingest the pill in a controlled environment. You would tether yourself to the ground.

Then you would try to lift increasingly heavy weights. You would test whether the pill works differently on an empty or full stomach. You would give the pill to a test subject, without mentioning flight, to see if the effect is different. You could try to prime them about machine elves and try again. Off the top of my head, depending on other factors and the outcomes of the first experiment, there are so many other things to test, and so many follow-up questions.

Like, is the flight caused by a force exerted on the ground, or are you moving the air? Do you just become lighter? Where does your mass go? Does your body become a jet engine? How would you stabilise yourself? Does it make a noise when you fly? Is the energy stored in the pill or taken from your body?

The existence of this pill wouldn't just contradict what we know about flight, or what we know about pills. It would contradict basic biology, basic chemistry, or basic physics. It might violate the laws of thermodynamics. The most remarkable thing about this pill isn't that it makes you fly. Before that, it's more remarkable that you survive, that you land after five minutes, and that the pill doesn't violently dissipate its energy as soon as you open the jar.

So at the very least, I would need a stopwatch, and two video cameras, one for myself, and one for the observer, so I could make sure this isn't a completely subjective thing. There is only one problem: If the pill makes me think I fly, and if it makes it all look completely real, I think I'll be too far gone already. As my confidant sees me violently convulse on the ground for five minutes, I am experiencing an hour, with five minutes of flight, and fifty-five minutes of excited review of the data that feel completely real.

Your answer is, "Yes of course I'd use scientific tools to check your own observations, duh".

Leverage itself obviously deserves a not particularly subtle hostility, because as described by the people who were there it was Peter Thiel giving a guy a lot of money to start a cult.

That's the very clear takeaway from the non-hostile, primary source.

I suppose any large philosophy is subject to cultish thinking but there's something I find particularly odd about it coming from rationalism.

Every homeopath will tell you that people thought Gallileo was crazy, too.

I really don't want to defend Leverage Research in order to defend the sequences, or Slate Star Codex, or Everything Studies, or some really good LW posts by Stuart Armstrong, Luke Muehlhauser, or whoever. I care about ideas.

But he was everywhere. People talked about him. People talked about him missing the point of Squid Game. People talked about the Mr Beast production handbook. People talked about retention editing.

I had watched three Mr Beast videos, just to see what the fuss is about. They are about things that are really expensive, and they feel like trailers, but then the thing that's teased isn't even happening. There is only a trailer, no video. That's retention editing. Also, we blew up a Lamborghini.

The thing that really messed me up happened later. I began to see Mr Beast everywhere on YouTube. Not everybody wanted to be PewDiePie or tried to emulate him, but now everybody was slowly starting to emulate Mr. Beast. Everybody slowly took pieces from his production handbook.

(or if they have, then they're not experiencing the same thing most people mean when they say "sex")

bc it seems that to them, "sex" is a mildly pleasurable activity on par with a walk in the park or eating ice cream, which inspires no passion, elicits no strong feelings, which no one should experience intensely or care very much about, and which matters as much as and should be talked about in the same way as the content of your average HR policy email. all very cool and clean and antiseptic.

The very first experience it has with the base crew is that they save it from people shooting at it, give it warm hugs, and kill the people trying to deatroy it. After that it attacks and impersonates an unknown (at the time) member of the crew. After that it gets surrounded by dogs who are angry but too scared to approach, then it changes, then it attacks the huskies, and only then does anyone in the base camp treat it with hostility.

The entire first act of the movie is devoted to establishing that they know each other with an Intimacy so deep they can anticipate one another's actions and attitudes. They have been in an isolated arctic base for months and months where they can barely leave the same building. They are in one another's personal space throughout the movie. It's a vital plot point that the Thing can immitate people down to memories and personality traits. It's a vital metaphorical point as well. It's so deeply and fundamentally superficial and factually incorrect to call them unfamiliar with each other that it implies total inattention to what is happening on screen.

The Thing is, at heart, not a movie about any singular decision or behavior creating a bad outcome. Baked into the 1982 movie is failure, death, entropy, inevitable loss. It's not a movie that's meant to have a right solution, or a right decision - but when someone comes at this very bleak story without a good grounding in horror, there's a kind of urge to treat it like a puzzle. If only they were closer. If only they communicated.

That's not meeting it where it's at, because it rests on a situation where none of those elements really exist. People acted the best they could in the circumstances with the tools and information they had - and it simply was not enough. Nearly everyone dies. Even with the ambiguous ending, whoever is human is going to die, because it's winter in Antarctica and he is hundreds of miles from anywhere with no shelter and no food and no transportation. That's the sort of horror it is, the idea that when faced with extinction humanity's best efforts won't succeed. Creating an interpretation where if we had "just" this or that is shying away from the bleakness. But at the same time, not facing up to the idea that some things really might not be solvable, that the worst can happen in spite of it all, is a necessary skill. Not one we need to indulge in constantly, but we should have that knowledge.

In brief, fandom seems to be predominantly comprised of people who only want to talk about what isn't in the media. There is a fandom for The Thing on tumble, and it's very much about ideas that come from the movie, but not about anything innthe actual film. The few times I've had the misfortune to enjoy media with a large fandom, I find almost exclusively shipping, fantasies about specific characters antithetical to the subject matter, and an almost oppositional distaste for any of the actual intended or unintended meaning in the media. None of those are a problem per se, because the world is a big place and it doesn't matter in the grand picture what people want to pretended about a book or movie or TV series. This is mostly a me problem, where I can be perfectly fine and ignore what comes across my dashboard, but this is also a me post, which means I can complain about the phenomenon.

Anyway, where I find it frustrating is the encroachment of fandom focus on what isn't in the media into my little wading pool of enjoying digging through the ideas that are in the media, when a "what if it was completely different" idea inspired by the media gains so much traction that it begins to be treated as a reflection of the text, sometimes even exiting its primary fandom, like The Thing, into general circulation. Which is how you get people discussing the "creature is misunderstood" not-present ideas of The Thing by fandoms, while effectively ignoring the vastly more significant elements of the film relating to the Reagan era 1980s, cold war paranoia, and so on. Once a fandom non-textual idea propagates far enough, it not only occludes the ideas inside the original media, in my experience it almost invariably excises anything that was challenging about it. For example, how rapidly fandom's latched onto the idea of Remmick in Sinners as a misunderstood tragic figure - rather than anything to do with what the film is saying about systemic racism. It feels like a companion behavior towards people whose take away from media like Breaking Bad, Fight Club, or Obsession is that the male protagonist is meant to be viewed in a positive light - because that is an easy and more comfortable option than for example treating any character who isn't a guy or isn't white or isn't straight as a vital, human person at the center of the film.