Evening all.

I don't know how I feel about inhabiting this place. But I do know I can use it to draft.

Shiri's Slippers

Long time readers will know of my grudge with Scott Alexander, high priest of the SFBA Rationalist Cult. Previously it was suggested that we begin a bombing run of their spaces but I called a 'hold.' Honestly there's no time like the present.

Ultimately my problem with these people is that the demand the status of seriousness without being willing to do the work to be serious. In forums like /r/theschism or themotte, the topics of the day have been, bizarrely, subtracted out of the conversation.

The most important political conversation happening today is about the Supreme Court ruling on the immunity which a President enjoys.

You won't see this talked about.

See I used to think that Scott Alexander's "You Are Still Calling Wolf" was the most damaging piece Scott ever wrote. For his own reputation. For the political damage it did to the brains of his followers.

Scott Alexander doesn't think of himself as a cult leader of course, even though his followers do, and have regular struggle sessions about this fact. See this hilarious exchange in which a twitter thread praises Scott Alexander for not being a prophet.

Now I can't assume everyone has familiarity with the spiritual mechanisms Scott Alexander has engaged with. To recap: Scott Alexander self-consciously wrote Unsong to imitate schizophrenic individuals attempting to write a holy text. Scott Alexander copied the prophet motion without, apparently, understanding what it meant that he did this for his followers.

Then his followers didn't do this either.

The other very very funny recurrence at work here is the SFBA Rationalist Cult's founder, whose work included a number of overtly spiritual calls, led to an early incident in the cult history where they linked hands and sang "We are not a cult." To this day SFBA Rationalist Cultists, when they gather, engage in praise of the founder under an ambiguous amount of irony. And as you all know at this point: in a post-ironic world, all expression is genuine. (I'm referring here to the Valentine's Day musical that some postrats put on as a dating show.)

So these people all have this habitual denial of their spiritual connection. They Think They're Atheists, and atheists can't be in a cult. And if it is a cult, they think it's a benign one, a harmless one, if they're pressed. But secretly, they believe they are an elevated specimen of human thinker, and this was accomplished with Shiri's Slippers.

I thought they were a harmless cult when I first encountered them. The most devastating review of the founder's work was always: what's novel in it isn't good, and what's good in it isn't novel. The SFBA Rationalist Cult literally bricked a bunch of minds in the 2010s and we're only still figuring this out.

Because the consequences of Scott Alexander's foray into politics were that he was one of the foremost beacons of fascism denialism. These people all had a grudge against the academy. They think they're better than schooling. But then they create their own forms and fall down dead wrong.

It turns out that the fools at the academy are better equipped.

There's this crackpot tinge of resentment against the fools at the academy for rejecting their founder's bad writing as bad writing. This is one of the things that make them less a harmless cult and more a destructive torment nexus of incompetence. It's not a coincidence that these people developed idiot confidence and SBF is now under arrest for Big Fraud. They're all frauds. They can't even function as a cult because of their bizarre denial complex around their cultishness.

The consequentialist argument against the utility of the SFBA Rationalist Cult goes something like:

The consequences of Scott Alexander's writing is an island of people separated from mainstream intellectual politics. They're really alone out there.

Fascism

At this point I think it's more important than ever to drag Scott Alexander's flock kicking and screaming into accepting that they were wrong about the fascism. That doesn't mean that I need them to immediately endorse the use of the term 'fascism.'

If there's one thing that I wish they understood, it's that whatever it is that Trumpism represented, the people who were warning of the danger Trump faced were not overreacting. The wolf was real. This incompetence and waste of energy in our politics is an authoritarian bound now by legal processes. They seemed to think that Trump could never succeed at instituting a fascistic purge, and that therefore the people who were warning of Trump's desire to implement a fascist purge were overreacting.

Whether or not the wolf can succeed is somewhat independent of whether or not the wolf exists.

But the real bad wrong turn that Scott Alexander took was writing "Shiri's Scissors."

Shiri's Scissors

Scott postulated a class of controversial statement that caused irrational behavior in people, dividing them from one another. And I was confused by this at first because I was at this point understanding that these people coin phrases as if by instinct. What Scott Alexander was pointing to with "Shiri's Scissors" was the mere word

CONTROVERSIAL.

This is what made Shiri's Scissors an unnecessary concept and bad writing. Controversial topics have always existed.

And I tried to take this up with someone in Scott Alexander's circle and they resisted my notion that it was a pointless concept.

Only now do I understand that there's an alchemical process at work in Shiri's Scissors: it allows people to view controversy as enabling irrational behavior and therefore discarding them.

Instead of controversy being an invitation to dispute, a marker around discourse's present topics of conversation, Shiri's Scissor allowed these cultists to subtract themselves from discourse.

Controversial topics have always existed. Concepts which justified disregarding people who reacted to controversial topics have not.

With Shiri's Scissors

Scott Alexander Cut The Cord

TETHERING

His Cult

To Political Reality

Whether or not you want to use the term fascist, the gathering of physical forces armed with actual weapons to assault the Capitol on 1/6 was an act of war which is exactly the kind of thing the leftists have been warning about. But Scott Alexander and his flock aren't tuned into the Supreme Court hearing today on the most important subject of most thinking minds.

They put Shiri's Slippers on and just walked away. Right off of the map (IN POLITICS THE TERRITORY IS THE MAP IS THE TERRITORY) into a domain of their own making, still bitter at the fact that other people dared find their intellectual contribution bad.

See Shiri's Scissors/Slippers, as a concept, create a reality in which there's just these bizarre artifacts in discourse which are incomprehensible. It makes discourse not just unnecessary but impossible because it contains within it the assumption of the unreasonable (AND THEREFORE, TO THESE BRICKED CULTISTS, INCOMPREHENSIBLE) nature of those with which they interacted with politically.

Postscripts

Cult Takes on Christian Nationalism

An interesting sampling of the topics du jour of these spaces. Both TheMotte and TheSchism platformed this curious bit of "rationality" around the decrease in Christian Nationalism by raw percent. I don't think it's a stretch to say that this is motivated reasoning: these people want to believe that fears of a Christian theocracy are overstated. TheMotte, and TheSchism.

It's not within their capacity to understand that a threatened minority might resort to fascism, the fascism might drive people away from the church, and that Christian Nationalism can still be a very real threat. These are the people who have said nothing about the Trump Supreme Court case.

Cult Takes on Lab Leak Origins for Coronavirus

Now I will admit that I'm more willing to believe that COVID came from zoonosis than I was before engaging this material. But I want to share some reading I've done in Blood Money, a book about Chinese mindsets and tactics in dealing with the US as an adversary.

Roughly, the Wuhan lab was built with the help of French scientists. Then the Chinese government kicked the French scientists out.

It was always a possible black site.

Scott Alexander's coverage of his cult's perfect thinking about perfect thinking about viruses is one of the worst things Scott Alexander wrote, but not the most damaging.

As mentioned earlier, the DEFUSE grant was rejected. Further, the grant said that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was responsible for finding the viruses, and the University of North Carolina would do all the gain-of-function research. This was a reasonable division of labor, since UNC was actually good at gain-of-function research, and WIV mostly wasn't. They had done a few very simple gain-of-function projects before, but weren't really set up for this particular proposal and were happy to leave it for their American colleagues.

Even if WIV did try to create COVID, they couldn't have. As Yuri said, COVID looks like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site. But WIV didn't have BANAL-52. It wasn't discovered until after the COVID pandemic started, when scientists scoured the area for potential COVID relatives. WIV had a more distant COVID relative, RATG-13. But you can't create COVID from RATG-13; they're too different. You would need BANAL-52, or some as-yet-undiscovered extremely close relative. WIV had neither.

Are we sure they had neither? Yes. Remember, WIV's whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn't include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn't close enough to work.

Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn't good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn't as unpopular as it is now) so it's not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did.

If there's one thing I want you to understand, it's this:

These people have almost no ability to understand deception.

The notion that China lies about the purposes of the lab just doesn't enter the picture.

Are you sure the Chinese would not use US science to create a virus that then escaped?

And then lie about it?

We're not going to know the truth. China may never reveal what it knows. But these people are not very good at finding the truth because they're not very good at understanding lies.

And these are the people who believe that AI can be 'aligned.'

They fundamentally don't understand humans. They don't understand deception.

They refuse to see the wolf of the present political era. They have deliberately chosen to walk away from mainstream politics with their Magic Stupid Slippers.

This is what a truly dangerous cult looks like. Most dangerous cults self-destruct. The bad ones are those that get big enough to confuse a large enough number of people.

POV: You're Scott Alexander and you're tired at people yelling at you about the fascism your side missed.

There's also a pattern I want to discourage, where one side will come up with some new trivial finding, or re-dredge up and re-package something that everyone already everyone else had already considered, then release it as THE SMOKING GUN! Then they release another SMOKING GUN!, and another, and after five or six SMOKING GUNS, they say their opponents are stubborn and refuse to yield to evidence, since they've obstinately ignored every single SMOKING GUN! without changing their probability even a little bit.

I've saved the chaser. This is how Scott chose to close his coverage.

But fifth, if the coronavirus' story is a comedy, all of this - Rootclaim, the debate, the $100K - is a tragedy. Saar got $100 million, decided to devote a big part of his life to improving human reasoning, and came up with a really elegant system. He was so confident in his system, and in the power of open discussion, that he risked his money and reputation on an accept-all-comers debate offer . Then some rando who nobody had ever heard of accepted the challenge, turned out to be some kind of weird debate savant, and won, turning what should have been Rootclaim's moment of triumph into a bitter defeat. Totally new kind of human suffering, worthy of Shakespeare.

I look forward to the movie, especially seeing who plays the dashing young blogger who helped the participants meet.

POV: You're the high priest of a cult of reason, worshiping a false god of perfect information, perfectly understood. These people don't just believe that salvation is possible through brainthinking alone, they believe that they have achieved salvation and are enlightened by their own intelligence.

Even as they stand in proud ignorance of contemporary politics.