If the “Intellectual Dark Web” is being silenced, why must w

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I really think medicine needs to look into IQ as seriously as it looks into cancer, mainly because on our current model of economics which suggests that one has to earn their right to a decent standard of living with work, with automation one of two problems will occur - either the dwindling quantity of jobs a human can do that a computer can't do cheaper or nearly all jobs of the future demanding every gram of acuity a person of a 110+ IQ can manage to summon up, and by our standards of meritocratic distribution it would mean that eventually only a tiny percent would have any right to be here. It's a truly awful picture.

What I think litters the dialog is the current political distrust that people have for each other and, reaching back to an IDW member here - Bret Weinstein - he often brings up the several resource horizons or ways in which human societies optimize and bring in more resources, one of them being transfer horizon - or taking from people who can't defend what they have - when either new land or new technology aren't available fast enough to meet growth. He has deep concerns about us steering off into that culvert if we go into a period of economic contraction. I'm also thinking back to an Intelligence Squared debate I recently watched debating the proposition 'Automation Will Crush Democracy' and while these things tend to be a bit low and poppy Yascha Mounk cleaned the floor on the 'for' side of the debate.

I'm not sure what we'll do, just that people clearly don't trust each other much and we're getting so cynical about one another's motivations - Ezra Klein really seemed to typify a holder of the opinion that 'evil' facts need to be buried when debating w/ Sam Harris - that we're willing to even distort reality, almost in Roman Catholic ways, for the sake of preventing supposed greater evils. I'm almost wondering if this doesn't sit similarly to the stem-cell debate, where it was seen as horrible and controversial for a while in that aborted embryos/fetuses were needed but at some point they figured out that they could be extracted from the olfactory nerves of live adults and I haven't heard anything about the debate yet. I think people's fears really are that we're seeing a permanent bottleneck in human capacity and that if that's the case it will justify all forms of genocide. My concern is mostly that it will be justified to such people if we have massive economic collapse, if the welfare state runs dry on money to provide for people, and it becomes too seductive for the elites to cull the masses based on their seeming uselessness in the face of the IQ floor for available jobs being way over their heads. I think this is where we're better off really facing this one sooner than later because at least for right now we're in far less danger of going in such directions and even if we find out it's a hard stop we might be able to build a better moral bulwark against that sort of reaction.

This was interesting, 14:50 - 15:25, we were talking about Charles Murray and for a few seconds Thomas Sowell chimes in to his defense. Not that I'm particularly surprised but I think it's yet another bit of evidence that the vilification of Murray is something of a political litmus test.

Yeah... Jesus famously said: love thy neighbour - which, for centuries, promptd europeans to travel to the middle east to kill people.
I guess partially to blame is this "you can do everything you want" and "believe in yourself" and "go out and change the world" narratives that are prevalent in the west. On the other extreme, there's the Emperor and his assassin narrative in China, where the assassin does not kill the emperor, for even though the emperor is a brutal dictator, the states of the empire are finally not at war with each other.

I guess there will be a culling of the useless people somehow - maybe just by building walls and watching civil wars and famines from afar. The 'Elysium' scenario.
Which, of course, is already the case.

I am wondering about that 'everything is getting better' story though. Mainly, in regards to the poorest people on the planet. Somehow I have the idea they might have done subsistence farming before they got on the wealth ladder - meaning, from subsistence farming without monetary income to living in a slum on between a dollar and two a day. Measured by income, that is a huge step in the right direction - but I'm wondering if that's the right tool to measure with, looking at the life circumstances.
Mind you, this success has been on the cost of the middle class, while the upper class increased their wealth beyond anything seen in human history. Elysium it is...

I'm sure there are a lot of ways in which that's worse, although I do need to watch more specials on Africa because they'll be going to middle-income under much different conditions. The last few I've seen it's been popularized in rural areas for farmers who depend on their sales at market for the survival of their families encorporating bicycles as a step up. Seems like there are countries in the continent that have been very economically progressive, Benin comes to mind in how much even movies from the 1990's looked like they were filmed in Canada, Ivory Coast and Ghana seem to be a similar story, and as far as I know Rawanda has seen significant Chinese investment. One of the things that seems to hurt their economies right now is the dumping of western produce on them, which makes their farming less competitive in comparison, and a lot of EU standards that they have difficulty complying with (one example was size measurements for bananas).

I'm taking a guess that they won't be progressing through the industrial age of slums, rather they might shift from relatively agrarian to relatively service and technological foundations and it might be quite the attractive place to me in fifty or so years time. I do think Africa is going through what America went through in the 1930's and 40's in terms of modern medicine meaning if you have ten to fourteen kids nearly all of them are likely to survive and consequently I think they'll be going through similar shifts in the coming decades of households with both husband and wife working in some integrated sector of the economy rather than sustenance farming, heck, I'm sure once the politics is tidied up there are lots of corporate farms in the US who would love to help take that responsibility off their hands and grow millions of square miles of coffee, grain, and whatever else and sending them off to their cubicals or behind the Starbucks counter.

I actually have a bit more hope for their transition even to a post-work world because they don't have as much institutional baggage as we do. What I'm concerned about more in the west is that the inertia of our institutions as all these changes hit will be like several titanics hitting icebergs. We've made all kinds of pacts with our citizens in different places, different states, etc. that were built on predictions about the future that were glib in their time and we've ensconced these as bread-and-butter, irremovable and unmodifiable. Social Security is a great example of an institution where technically it wasn't meant for people to retire at 65 and live til 95 and the time to have adjusted it upward to 70 might have been at least five or ten years ago.

Seems like one of the problems with being in an aging democracy that's hit its decadent phase is both the avarice and the refusal to take care of old problems, no matter how apparent they are, if kicking the can down the road or even worsening the problem ensures more votes. Africa's clearly had a much rougher road getting here, just to think of how many genocides in the tens of millions were occurring even through the 1990's and 2000's, and I'm really thinking we could see a spectacularly positive metamorphoses over there as the incentive structures change, possibly even something as radical as comparing Imperial Japan to modern-day.

This is really interesting, and I'm glad to see disparate people I listen to online come together and discuss eachother.

0ThouArtThat0 I remember as a college panpsychist debater and I remember him having quite pleasant and detail-oriented debates with a friend of his, Prof. Cory Anton, whose a reductive materialist as far as I can tell but who also gives a lot of credence to the complexity of what we have and I always found their debates refreshing.

This is the first time I've heard him touch on politics, he opens this by stating that it's him and a couple of his friends, they all identify as being on the left, and the friend who speaks first actually indicates that he's active in various social justice projects and foundations in Southern California.

They're largely discussing the left right divide, their take on Jordan Peterson, they briefly hit the IDW, and later in the conversation they tough on Bret Weinstein and Evergreen, Jonathan Haidt's work on tribalism, so I think it will be quite interesting to hear some very well-educated and thoughtful guys of this sort talking on the people involved in this article:

I don't think it is at all, given that it's both a fairly new term and one that has meaning outside of psychology and neuroscience. In fact that's basically why I chose it - this is a term which, properly understood, synthesises ideas from a range of fields in a way that I don't think Peterson is capable of.


The thing is that it's not complete garbage, and anyone who fails to recognise that is quite quickly going to find themselves out of their intellectual depth whenever a topic which relies on a strong understanding of the concept comes up. And given that the way you are perceived affects you in every field of life, that's basically every topic outside of hard science (and many topics within it). This is the sort of concept which many children today have little difficulty with, so it's rather worrying for this lot that they get so confused by it.

Steven Pinker chatting with Jordan Peterson on his new book Enlightenment Now:

Niall Ferguson chimes in on IDW (a little past 10 minutes in) on The Rubin Report:

Whether it's called the "red pill", "dark enlightenment", "alternative right" or the "intellectual dark web", it's the same hypocrisy - people who talk on and on about how "SJWs" have a victimhood complex and then claim their freedom of speech is being repressed whenever someone criticizes them, even tho their ideology is extremely popular and supported by the President of the United States.

IDW has nothing to do with red pill, alt-right, MGTOW, Kekistan, or anything like that.

Not to be hard-headed, partisan, or anything like that - it just doesn't.

The majority shareholders of IDW are 80's/90's left-wingers and progressives who, as Eric Weinstein put it, saw the Atlantic, NPR, New York Times, etc. get taken out from underneath them as vehicles for forward thinking bastions of liberal enlightenment thought and get supplanted by a strange sort of reactionary cult that wears the trappings of leftism and progressivism but more accurately is parasitic to the brand. They're deeply concerned with the state of journalism crumbling, with the anti-science new guard, and Eric's joke in naming them is not that they're necessarily shut out or prevented from speaking for the most part but that the new guard who has control of the media now sees them as a competing organ and for quite a while has tried to pretend that they, or their way of thinking, doesn't exist.

Eric in further detail:

Tell that to the people in, like, any Jordan Peterson comment section. His fanbase is suffused with alt-righters, and he uses a lot of the same rhetoric as the so-called "alt-lite" that clusters around Breitbart. In fact, I distinctly remember hearing Milo Yiannapoulis mentioned as an "IDW" figure. It's the kinder gentler spin on the same broadly-defined ideology.

And fwiw, I do agree that the type of "feminism" pushed on platforms like twitter and tumblr is toxic. In fact, I came here in large part to escape from those types of abusive and shame-driven social platforms. But those problems don't come from intersectional theory, they come from the misapplication of intersectional theory. The original third wave feminists in the 80s and 90s were themselves rebelling against the melodramatic rhetoric, prudishness, hostility and victimhood narratives of second wave feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. So I guess that makes me a third waver who rejects the "fourth wave".

That was part of the smear campaign. They also said Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich were affiliated.


I think Sargon might have had the closest thing to a foothold on understanding why people would band Jordan Peterson (whose anti-idenity politics) with the alt-right and it had something to do with the alt-right being for hierarchies, and Jordan Peterson defending hierarchies of competence, the critics in question considered themselves rather strictly anti-hierarchy (a term they consider interchangeable with patriarchy) and so they banded the alt-right and Jordan Peterson together. The self-reliance message is something that's a bit more cross-spectrum and I believe that tends to be a favorite for those who'd score more to the libertarian left or libertarian right quadrants of the political compass test.

In a way I'm starting to wonder if the whole range of libertarian left to libertarian right is getting banded together as alt-right by the pro-statist and authoritarian types on both the left and right.

Another thing we have to think carefully about - Karen Staughan interviewed Chris Cantwell (of VICE Charlottesville fame) and he's spoken very highly of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. If we go guilt by association then we'd suggest Jonathan Haidt is a gateway drug to the alt-right.


They all seem to have slightly different viewpoints on it. Sam's against intersectional theory as he's against most modern forms of identity politics because it puts tribalism over truth, Jordan would agree with Sam but also add that individual experiences of oppression vary all the way down the individual level and that liberal democracy is a government that attempts to elevate the individual. I think Bret's said that he has sympathies with the ideas albeit he's deeply concerned with the bad actor problem and how useful it is for bad actors to weaponize good faith movements.

A 16 minute chat from Bret on the distinct problems that sociopathy presents to culture as well as those who have the condition and pegging its place in human evolution:

I'm a libertarian leftist and that's why I can't stand Jordan Peterson, who glorifies corporal punishment of children (there's a passage where he fantasizes about physically throwing a two-year-old across a playground for hurting his toddler on the monkey bars), supports rigid conservative Christian sexual and gender roles ("enforced monogamy" etc) and uses dog-whistle anti-Semitic rhetoric. The idea of academia being "corrupted" by "postmodern neo-Marxists", who happen to all be Jewish and/or gay philosophers and must be "uprooted" mirrors 1930s fascist rhetoric about "cultural Bolshevism" that lead to the expulsion of the Frankfurt School (and Albert Einstein, who was a Jewish socialist) from Europe.

I don't bring that up as a character insult, btw - I hate it when people trivialize the horror of fascism by using it as a petty pejorative. But in a very literal sense, his rhetoric sounds fascist - he used "the trains leaving the station on time" as an example of noble cosmological order, which mirrors the adage that "at least Mussolini made the trains run on time". He also takes influence from the far-right 1930s German philosopher Martin Heidegger, while despising left-wing Jewish philosophers influenced by Heidegger such as Jacques Derrida.

btw, I have to say that a huge part of why I have the political views I do is because that's the side of the political spectrum which seems most pro-neurodiversity. Even tho the type of "feminism" on Twitter and Tumblr is very toxic, petty, annoying and hostile, elsewhere I've seen intersectional feminists speak up for autism acceptance in a way I've never seen from the "IDW". Here is a feminist article which speaks out against the vilification of neurodivergent and disabled men and says that men shouldn't be mocked for their appearance, conversational habits or living scenario: https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/02/neckbeard-cartoon/

Meanwhile the right-wing, in my experience, is very hostile to autistic people. I often see right-wingers in internet comments use "autistic" as an insult along with insults like "sperging out", "autistic screeching" etc. I went to a philosophy meetup once that had a lot of anarcho-capitalists and "intellectual dark web" types and it was one of the most ableist social settings I've ever encountered - I was yelled at, grabbed without permission by a stranger, and compared to a baby and a school shooter. In my experience, socialist and feminist spaces tend to be very affirming and accommodating and right-wing social spaces (including "libertarian" rightist spaces) tend to be the most hostile.

I won't say much in response to that aside from clarify that you just suggested there's salient evidence somewhere to comfortably call him an anti-Semite and I won't dive off into the ironies that I see in that aside from to say that I see them. Past that I'll leave you to your feelings, it's not the kind of thing where I feel its fruitful to attempt any sort of point-by-point refutation on.

Maybe the only other thing I'll offer - that's a cloud you can get yourself out from under with your own research, and very little I can say here will serve as any exchange of like value for your own efforts.

I'm not saying he consciously hates Jewish people, I'm saying he's internalized a far-right narrative and promotes ideas that play to people's unconscious bigotry. When I say "fascism" I mean an ideology that promotes hierarchy and nationalism, opposes diversity and views authoritarian instincts as natural, unavoidable and good. I'm aware that he doesn't literally want a dictatorship, but the narrative he's promoting helps to normalize the same rhetoric used by fascists. That was my point.

And this isn't about "feelings", I want to keep it to facts and ideology. Calling one's opponent hysterical is a nice way to avoid having to make a counter-argument. btw, if you think I'm consumed with ressentiment over this or something you've read it wrong - I've been doing really well lately. I didn't share my experience of ableism from the right-wing because I want pity, but to warn other autistic people not to waste their time sucking up to an ideology which hates them.