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Notes -
How long have you been around rationalist-adjacent spaces?
I found Scott in 2013 or 2014, possibly via LJ. I remember discussing "Universal Love Said the Cactus Person" with a friend IRL who brought it up and he previously had never mentioned reading SSC. Somewhere in there I found /r/SSC because in 2016 I saw a notice for a meetup taking place 5 minutes away from my house and didn't go because I found many people active in /r/SSC off-putting. I stopped paying close attention to Scott after the 2017 Kolmogorov entry. I remember /r/theMotte being created and then /r/SneerClub with the latter being distilled perfection of what I didn't like about so many /r/SSC posters to start with plus reddit overall. I guess that's about where I stopped paying close attention because it was only much later that I became aware of this site starting separately to escape reddit, the TW/schism hullaballo, and some other subsequent happenings.
Because I have a strong memory that works in strange ways, it's a bizarre feeling to recognize a few user names from ancient /r/SSC days (Zorba, Hlynka, gattsuru, etc.), or look into /r/SSC now and see a few users I dislike still plugging away, and realize I've been paying attention (or at least mildly aware) of their written output for a decade.
My first comments at LessWrong were around the end of 2012, early 2013, though I'd been lurking and reading through the Sequences for most of a year before that. I don't think I commented at SSC proper until late spring 2014. Probably entered the tumblr ratsphere in early 2016, though I was never the most active there.
I was aware of moreright, but I never commented over there and I don't think I'd have counted as a lurker.
I think my first exposure to the ratsphere was someone linking the Sword of Good back when it was on Yudkowsky's own site, intending it as a send-up of both Ayn Rand and Terry Goodkind, and kinda being impressed. Clicking around got me to the then-early-Sequences, which hit me a lot more. I'd been through the standard philosophy and sociology courses, and they'd seemed like they were in the process of vanishing up their own tail ends. For all of his more esoteric claims, Yudkowsky could put together a much more compelling argument for why it mattered, and how that relevance could be applied. And Yvain-nee-Scott was a good rejoinder to some of the broader claims.
((albeit not as much as the replication crisis would be to both of them over the next couple years))
Posting on LW turned to posting on SSC-the-site turned to posting on theMotte.
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