> I think that SlimeMoldTimeMold's rise and fall was actually a pretty big point in favor of the "rationalist community".
That feels like revisionist history to me. It rose to fame in LessWrong and SlateStarCodex, was promoted by Yudkowski, and proliferated for about a year and half before the takedowns finally got traction.
While it was the topic du jour in the rationalist spaces it was very difficult to argue against. I vividly remember how hard it was to convince anyone that SMTM wasn't a good source at the time, because so many people saw Yudkowski endorse it, saw Scott Alexander give it a shout out, and so on.
Now Yudkowski has gone back and edited his old endorsement, it has disappeared from the discourse, and many want to pretend the whole episode never happened.
> (I don't remember any detailed takedowns of SlimeMoldTimeMold coming before that article, but maybe there are).
Exactly my point. It was criticized widely outside of the rationalist community, but the takedowns were all dismissed because they weren't properly rationalist-coded. It finally took someone writing it up in the form of rationalist rhetoric and seeding it into LessWrong to break the spell.
This is the trend with rationalist-centric contrarianism: You have to code your articles with the correct prose, structure, and signs to get uptake in the rationalist community. Once you see it, it's hard to miss.
> It was criticized widely outside of the rationalist community, but the takedowns were all dismissed because they weren't properly rationalist-coded.
Do you have any examples of this that predate that LW article? Ideally both the critique and its dismissal but just the critique would be great. The original HN submission had a few comments critiquing it but I didn't see anything in depth (or for that matter as strident).
Is this "evidence" one of those silly things that rationalists so much love to talk about?
Don't worry, HN commenters can figure out the truth about Yudkowsky's articles from the first principles. They have already figured out that EAs no longer care about curing malaria, despite https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities only being a Google search away.
At the end, they will give you a lecture about how everyone hates people who are smug and talk about things they have no clue about. The lecture will then get a lot of upvotes.
Did you end up presenting the evidence? I'm following the discussion a few days too late, so my apologies if you've already linked to the evidence and ended up deleting it after.
It was Aurornis who made the claim "Yudkowski has gone back and edited his old endorsement" that EnPissant asked evidence for. And nope, he didn't receive it.
Similarly, Aurornis made a claim that "Scott Alexander predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests", when if fact (as the very link provided by Aurornis shows) Scott predicted that the probability of such thing happening was 30%, i.e. it's more likely not to happen.
Elsewhere in this thread, another user, tptacek, claims that "Scott Alexander published some of his best-known posts under his own name". When I asked him for evidence, he said "I know more about this than you, and I'm not invested in this discussion enough to educate you adversarially". Translated: no evidence provided.
.
From my perspective, this all kinda proves my point.
Is the rationality community the only place where people care about evidence? Of course not.
But is the rationality community a rare place where people can ask for evidence in an informal debate and reasonably expect to actually get it? Unfortunately, I think the evidence we got here points towards yes.
Hacker News is a website mostly visited by smart people who are curious about many things. They are even smart enough to notice that some claims are suspicious, and ask for evidence. But will they receive it? No, they usually won't.
And in the next debate on the same topic, most likely the same false claims will be made again, maybe by people who have learned them in this thread. And the claims will be upvoted again.
This is an aspect where the rationality community strives to do better. It is not about some people being smarter than others, or whatever accusations are typically made. It is about establishing social norms where people e.g. don't get upvoted for making unsubstantiated negative claims about someone they don't like, without being asked to back it up, or get downvoted.
That feels like revisionist history to me. It rose to fame in LessWrong and SlateStarCodex, was promoted by Yudkowski, and proliferated for about a year and half before the takedowns finally got traction.
While it was the topic du jour in the rationalist spaces it was very difficult to argue against. I vividly remember how hard it was to convince anyone that SMTM wasn't a good source at the time, because so many people saw Yudkowski endorse it, saw Scott Alexander give it a shout out, and so on.
Now Yudkowski has gone back and edited his old endorsement, it has disappeared from the discourse, and many want to pretend the whole episode never happened.
> (I don't remember any detailed takedowns of SlimeMoldTimeMold coming before that article, but maybe there are).
Exactly my point. It was criticized widely outside of the rationalist community, but the takedowns were all dismissed because they weren't properly rationalist-coded. It finally took someone writing it up in the form of rationalist rhetoric and seeding it into LessWrong to break the spell.
This is the trend with rationalist-centric contrarianism: You have to code your articles with the correct prose, structure, and signs to get uptake in the rationalist community. Once you see it, it's hard to miss.