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Citation needed.
Two thirds of the top level posts are about some combination of AI, HBD, Trans weirdness, Indian caste dynamics, Elon Musk, Polyamory or Aella gangbang dialectic. Nobody outside of Silicon Valley talks or cares about any of that stuff.
Most of the polyamory/aella gangbang posts are from christians/social conservatives saying polyamory and the sexual revolution have failed, fun is bad and you'll pay.
Normal Christians outside of Silicon Valley wouldn’t even know who Aella is, or that polyamory is a thing.
Every normal Christian in America has heard of the Mormon church.
And? That’s completely orthogonal to the point I’m making. Joe Sixpack from Indiana didn’t hear about Mormon polygamy and then because of that decide to log on to the Motte and write a 2000 word essay about Bay Area rationalist polycules and what that says about Scott Alexander’s moral fibre and views of society. That’s clearly a very inside-baseball take from someone who is immersed in the rationalist milieu.
Sure. But "someone who is immersed in the rationalist milieu" and "someone who works in Silicon Valley" are not synonymous, as numerous commenters have taken great pains to explain to you.
Maybe not a 100 percent overlap on the Venn diagram, but certainly a very strong correlation. Frankly I don’t know why you are so perturbed by the idea that you feel the need attempt to employ such casuistry to push back against it.
I'm not "perturbed" by anything: it's simply that your assertion that everyone on the Motte works in Silicon Valley is extremely obviously erroneous.
I don't know if we've ever done a user survey here, but Scott does one of his readers every year, and only 58% of his readers live in the US, and less than 50% work in computer science-related fields. If you assume that there's a lot of overlap between the kinds of people who read Scott and the kinds of people who post here, I'd hazard a guess that at most forty per cent of Motte users work in Silicon Valley - quite a long ways from "all" or "a very strong correlation". I wouldn't be remotely surprised if the real figure was as low as twenty per cent, or ten.
TracingWoodgrains did a user survey back in the Reddit days and only two-thirds of posters lived in the US (I don't know how much the demographics have changed since the migration from Reddit).
I will admit that there are few types of fallacious argument I find more obnoxious than sneering Bulverism, especially when it's based on an untrue assertion.
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