In Paul Fussell’s book on class (I think), he says that people are really worried about differentiating themselves from the class immediately below them, but largely ignorant of the customs and sometimes even existence of the classes above them. When I found SSC, and then The Motte, and stuff like TLP, I was astonished to find a tier of the internet I had had no idea even existed. The quality of discourse here is . . . usually . . . of the kind that “high brow” (by internet standards) websites THINK they are having, but when you see the best stuff here you realize that those clowns are just flattering themselves. My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?
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In terms of generalists intelligently discussing general topics, I think there's a visible quality gap between the discourse here and the ACX commentary section, and, since in my three or so attempts to comment on the blog many years ago I never got anyone to respond to me whereas baiting some people into engagement on the Motte is trivial, that gap has probably been around for a while. I'm not aware of anything significantly above that on the internet for general discourse, but if you simply want raw displays of computational power and well-trained neural nets no matter the topic, it is hard to compete with Math Overflow comment sections (or, if you find the leveraging of domain knowledge to be "cheating", the same demographic could be found in a more immature stage over at AoPS back in the days; no idea how it looks nowadays).
I've always been pretty unimpressed with the blog commentariat. Getting engaged with there, as far as I can tell, is mostly a function of posting quickly enough because Scott often engages with comments for a few hours after posts which draw more interests to comments he touches and being a known entity there. Whatever quality that causes people here to care what aella has to say seems greatly amplified there and perhaps that is contributing to my, relative to this place, low opinion of them.
What exactly is the problem with caring what aella has to say, though? I know there's a lot of people especially around here who find her morally/ideologically unpalatable, but I haven't seen it argued much that what she says is wrong or uninteresting.
Whenever she actually tries to form arguments I find them pretty low quality, which is fine in itself, a lot of my output is probably properly categorized as low quality. I don't have that much of a problem with her herself and she's probably quite pleasant to talk to. But one cannot escape what seems quite clear, she is widely discussed not because of the quality of her ideas but because of her identity as a female in rationalist adjacent circles and more even than that, a female who talks about sex. It is painfully obvious to me that whenever I see her propelled into a discussion it's by the motive force of sexually frustrated nerds incapable of looking away.
It all violates a kind of value that I'm not sure people get instilled with on the modern internet anymore, no one is supposed to know we're all dogs. Be honest with me right now, if it was found out that some nobody unattractive or male rationalist showered a shockingly low number of times a year do you think it would be cross posted to half a dozen platforms with hundreds of comments each?
I do want to make it clear what I'm not saying, I'm not saying that women rationalists should not be sharing their perspective and even including the fact that they are a women where relevant, some of the posts I most look forward to reading are from our few female posters. It's not even her behavior itself I'm against, although to the degree that she's manipulating the male rationalists it is. It's that we're all supposed to be better than this and yet so many of us can't even treat our fellows with big boobies as equals. The places that are less able to do so I think less of.
But I don't follow her myself, perhaps there is some deep well of Aella insights and I'm missing out, if you can find some interesting point she's made I'd be happy to read it, but I've yet to come across one.
Amen. The amount of male rationalists/EAs that chase women in the space, often without even realizing it themselves, is one of the cringiest things I've seen. I'm also convinced that it's a big reason EA is having trouble spreading to normies - attractive women that come in get pounced upon and actively pushed out.
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