SneerClub

983 readers

37 users here now

Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

reposting David’s repost of Scott Alexander’s leaked neoreaction and race science emails (circumstances.run)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

hopefully this is alright with @[email protected], and I apologize for the clumsy format since we can’t pull posts directly until we’re federated (and even then lemmy doesn’t interact the best with masto posts), but absolutely everyone who hasn’t seen Scott’s emails yet (or like me somehow forgot how fucking bad they were) needs to, including yud playing interference so the rats don’t realize what Scott is

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The irony of crediting Moldbug with a potent explanation for bad poetry is rather amusing. It's almost a shame that Scott here cops out with a "The margins are too small for my proof", although maybe it is secret mercy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I looked into this one a while back—I'm pretty sure it's the explanation Scott launders in "Whither Tartaria?". Moldbug (2007):

And what has entirely disappeared, as the quotes above should make quite clear, is any sense of a mutually critical aristocratic elite…

There is not even a concept of what it would mean to “succeed” outside this system. There is simply no independent pool of taste.

Alexander (2021):

Best-case scenario, you want a field that talks to itself enough that you get status for impressing other experts with your expertise, not for impressing the public with demagoguery.

But if you talk to yourself too much, you risk becoming completely self-referential, falling into loops of weird internal status-signaling.

Honestly, this kind of involution is already thoroughly discussed within a lot of creative fields (which Alexander admits he hasn't read, so this is likely still downstream of Moldbug). It's just that when a poet says something like this, they usually aren't attributing it to a gigantic 75-year-old New Deal octopus. (Alexander himself leaves it to his commenters to blame socialism.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Don't forget the:

Vile dose of racist ranting.
Simultanously complaining about the elite, but then saying it's only because it's been watered down by the plebs.
Vile understanding of "poetry" as status marker.
Not going back further in time than 19th century, and extremely suspiciously marking the "height" of peotry between 1920a to mid-1960s, not at all coinciding with the civil rights act.

Thank you for reminding me how vile Moldbug is ? ^^

load more comments (3 replies)