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Notes -
Following up on a discussion with @drmanhattan16 downthread:
I think the answer is usually going to be "yes."
A couple months ago, during some meta-discussion of disappearing threads, I wrote up my thoughts on conspiracy theories as countersignaling. As long as there's incentive to appear cool, independent, unique, there is incentive to push the boundaries of acceptability. It's called "edgy" for a reason.
One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be? The theorist is incentivized to play up their edge, a rebel who won't be cowed rather than an attention-seeker. As an aside, antisemitism is past its heyday because it's not very good for this. Enough people pattern-match it to "attention-seeker" that it loses its edge. This is the result of decades of memetic immune response to those status games. Of course, given that one very definitely can get banned for it, it retains edgy credentials...sometimes.
(Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games; personally, I think that COVID skepticism has a grip on more of the edgelords.)
In the end, some people will find themselves drawn to signal their edge. Those who do so overtly will usually end up banned, unless they signal something really milquetoast, in which case they're probably "cringe." Those with a little more tact, though...they are incentivized to find something under the radar. To maintain that sweet, sweet plausible deniability while still getting a rise out of the opposition. They need something that will prove their status as an independent free-thinker who doesn't fall for the party line.
And they take the black pill.
I hope you'll forgive me for ignoring the main thrust of your post to go off on this tangent, but I've had this rolling around in my head for a while. I hope the rest of you will forgive me for poking fun at things that I'm often guilty of myself.
How to Win Friends and Influence People: the Rationalist Edition
Extreme (emotional) Decoupling. Emotion is weakness, rationality is strength. Utilitarianism and consequentialism are our gods; the more gruesome the morally correct action you're willing to undertake, the greater human good you're able to invoke, the better. Examples: Eliezer 'melt all GPUs' Yudkowsky, Abortion/forced sterilization/[policy harming black people] is eugenic and therefore net good, censorship is worthwhile when you're bearing the lofty weight of future quadrillions of the human pan-galactic human-AI-hybrid diaspora on your shoulders. Humility is for normies and low-status chuds, not you, you beautiful prism of rarefied logic, you.
Long, internally consistent logical chains based on premises with monstrous error bars/uncertainty (see previous points). The longer and harder to follow, the easier it is to obscure and deflect criticism, and the greater your boost in status.
Literature references. Point score is directly correlated with obscurity; actually having read the the work in question is optional. Bonus points for linking SSC pieces, double bonus points if they're from 2016 or earlier.
Write like a high-schooler who just discovered the wonders of a thesaurus. IQ is life. Everyone knows that vocabulary size is correlated to IQ, which is correlated to g, which determines your worth as a human being and position in the hierarchy. What better way to give your stock a little bump than to sprinkle in a few five syllable words that fell out of common use somewhere in the 19th century?
Why post a succinct list with references when you can write a 30,000 character multipost that is a struggle to get through? This (1) gives you wriggle room to claim any characterization of your thesis is a strawman and (2) allows you to...
...respond to people with a half dozen links to your corpus of 10,000 word posts amounting to a small novella for them to read! Remember, the goal is gaining status, not clear communication of ideas or mutually working towards a model of the world. Obscurantism serves the former, brevity will only hurt you. And potentially get you in hot water with the mods.
Complain about the normies in academia, MSM, HR, government, your life, etc vocally and frequently. This communicates that you're smarter than them, and remember, criticism is always easier than defending a thesis or building something worthwhile and thus disproportionately easier for gaining status.
Based.
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