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.
Indeed, which is why I trained myself to completely disregard anything that aella says. I see her name, I scroll away. In general, if a poster is bringing up being a woman on a regular basis, I care very little about their output.
Basically, your words and ideas should stand on their own merits, instead of leaning on your personal status. This should really be a completely basic rule of online discourse. Worth comparing eg. /u/2rafa to the guy playacting the persona of a millionaire Irish VC in Bay Area (forgot which account he has now, he went through many over the years). I didn’t know that cimarafa was a woman for months, and when she brings up her wealth or status, it typically is rather loathsome instead of impressive. This is why I respect her. For comparison, the Irish millionaire persona would create a new account every few months, and very quickly start mentioning who he knows, with whom he hangs out, his literal hobby horses, his high status pastimes, size of his properties etc. Utterly disgusting.
In short, if I saw a photo of you on the internet (and I don’t go out and seek them), and you’re not ugly, I don’t care what you have to say, simple as that.
Many years ago, I hang out on an IRC channel, another member of which was a gay guy in his early thirties. He was pretty cool, one of my friends from that channel became close friends with him. He had a Facebook page, instagram, posted frequently, people I did not know would comment to his photos referring to some shared experiences etc (this was during the time when using Facebook was still cool).
Then, after a slip in opsec, it turned out that the whole guy was completely made up by another channel member, a 19-year old girl who spent 3 years creating and maintaining his persona close to every single day, alongside with a dozens of other accounts dedicated to make him more real, and of course her own actual persona.
What was her motive?
She disappeared as soon as she was discovered, and then reappeared a couple of years later, said she is sorry about the whole thing, but refused to discuss it any more. Others didn’t pry, because after a few years has passed, people didn’t care so much.
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