Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Anyone know when and why polyamory became a Rationalist shibboleth?
I don’t exactly why, but based off the dates of various classic lesswrong posts I know it has existed since before 2010 in rationalist culture.
As to inexact reasons why… some key big name starting rationalist (i.e. Yudkowsky for sure, but probably a few others) were into polyamory. (Probably for the obvious reasons of getting to sleep with more people.)
I reckon it goes way back to the movements that produced them. My first thought is ayn rand:
You can see how “The most rational thing is that I fuck your spouse” would appeal to the less wrong folk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Atlas_Shrugged_and_Objectivism
Muhammad also discovered that God wanted him to marry as many women as he liked, but did not want them to remarry after he died. Joseph Smith ‘married’ a lot of younger women too. So I think if you let people rewrite social rules, many of them will decide that the new rule is “I fuck whoever I want, but they only fuck me.”
I always assumed it was a package deal with the California Ideology.
EY has recapitulated a ton of bullshit he learned as a teenager hanging out on the Extropians listserv with older shitty libertarian dudes. The archives are like a proto-LW, with conversations about race and intelligence, sex and kinks, gender differences, armchair geopolitics, etc, mixed in with fantasizing about the glorious transhuman future. I don’t know that anyone was using poly as a term at that point, but everything I’ve read about the Extropians suggests they were eager early adopters of bullshit Evo-psych ideas about men having “evolved” to fuck lots of women.
Oof, if he was raised by Internet Libertarians, I understand why he became such a shitty person.
Sex at Dawn came out in 2010 and was heavily hyped online. It does not seem to have got positive attention in academia. The 2009 edition of The Ethical Slut has polyamory in the title.
Whereas the successful polyamorists know that humans evolved in order to use calendar software.
“Polyamory” is the excuse that abusive men use now the way they used “free love” in the 1960s. I know people who make the poly thing work; they’re honest and communicative, traits that I do not associate with lesswrongs.