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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30479 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past. This is an exposé on the RationalWiki editor behind several cancellations of intelligence researchers including Bo Winegard and Noah Carl.

He used to be a white nationalist on Stormfront before flipping to the other extreme and attacking the reputations and destroying the careers of academics by writing defamatory articles under multiple pseudonyms.

He was later banned from RationalWiki for, among other things, writing articles about and doxxing other editors. Although he was easily able to ban evade and continued to use RationalWiki to attack academics.

This overall situation has created a climate of fear among intelligence researchers. Two prominent and tenured academics, who had not previously been attacked by Smith, initially offered to write this article; both later reneged out of concern over what Smith might do to their careers in retaliation. I ultimately agreed to write it because as someone outside academia, my career is less vulnerable than theirs to these types of attacks.

There are few places on the internet I've got more disdain for than RationalWiki. It's a cesspit, on the same tier as /r/Sneerclub. Even rdrama is at least funny and not nearly as malicious.

And it's also squatting on a perfectly good name for a wiki that could deal with actual rationality for one.

What sort of people actually use rationalwiki? It's also seemed pretty terrible to me.

Anyone who hears about Emil Kirkegaard, Steve Sailer et al, for the first time, googles them, and picks the result that shows up very near top.

This was true before they became (in)famous enough to have Wikipedia pages. Not that there’s a big ideological gulf between Rationalwiki and Wikipedia.

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