[Attention conservation notice: I can’t imagine what you would get out of this if you are not a member of or interested in joining rationalist tumblr.]
[Note: Tumblr rationalists, feel free to comment with anything I’ve missed!]
Absence of rationality content. I’m not going to say that no one posts rationality content on Rationalist Tumblr– bad brains blogging is sort of applied rationality, sinesalvetorem and theunitofcaring have done great posts about effective altruism, and I keep having to scroll past these absolutely incomprehensible arguments about statistics. However, in general, the rationality content is a relatively low percentage, and most of what you’ll encounter is puns, memes, Hamilton, non-Hamilton fandoms, social justice, anti social justice, vagueblogging about whatever one has chosen to hateread, whining about one’s life troubles, and Thus Spoke Carly Rae. In fact, I probably have more rationalist-relevant discussions on Facebook because of people happening to post statuses about rationality than I do on rationalist tumblr.
This seems to really throw people who are used to LW Facebook, r/rational, Slate Star Codex, or other places where one can expect the majority of the discussion to be vaguely related to the alleged topic. I personally like it, because I feel like it makes discussions friendlier if you know the whole person rather than just arguing with them about philosophy. But if this isn’t to your taste then probably you should try somewhere else in the LW Diaspora.
Dogpiling. Rationalists as a whole have a tendency to offer their opinions any time they think they have something remotely relevant to say. They do not have a tendency to check whether fourteen other people have said the same thing. This means that a lot of people’s first introduction to rationalist tumblr is twenty people attempting to explain to them why they should choose dust specks over torture, which is not a very welcoming introduction. On the other hand, it happens to everyone, it does not mean you are disliked, and in fact it probably means people like you and want to be your friend. Otherwise they would just roll their eyes and ignore your post.
Reaction to criticism. As best as I can tell, LW Tumblr tends to collectively view rationality not as a set of beliefs (i.e. Bayesianism is a useful model of human inference, AI is one of the most important existential risks, Eliezer Yudkowsky is always right) but as a set of topics (i.e. Bayesianism, Friendly AI, Eliezer Yudkowsky). So if you post something like “I hate Eliezer, the Singularity is the rapture for nerds, and effective altruism is imperialism and we should have full communism instead”, rationalist Tumblr as a whole will conclude that you are a rationalist and trying to be friends, and will behave accordingly. (“Behaving accordingly” involves reblogging you with long-winded rebuttals; see dogpiling.) Rationalist Tumblr tends to parse statements that are probably intended to be “boo rationalists” as being serious critiques: it tends to go “hmm, maybe the Singularity is the rapture for nerds… well, on one hand, your point is valid because it is an eschatology that’s most popular among Silicon Valley types, but on the object level the Singularity does seem more plausible than the Rapture, and Singulatarians tend to be explicitly universalist…”
Rationalist Tumblr’s exciting friend-making strategy almost never actually works, because apparently most people who write comments about how much a social group sucks are not interested in becoming a member of that group. I have absolutely no idea how we could have predicted this.
I think a lot of people who criticize rationality don’t really understand what is going on because, to be fair, that is a really weird way for an ideology-based social group to work. (Imagine Christians telling Dawkins “you hate Christianity! You’re basically a Christian!”) However, no one has managed to say something sufficiently hateful that rationalist Tumblr, as a whole, has not parsed it as a good-faith critique from a friend that should be considered earnestly. If you don’t want a bunch of rationalists tediously attempting to be friends with you, the only course I’ve found is shutting up about rationality.
Bonobo rationalists. A disproportionate number of Tumblr rationalists are what has sometimes been called ‘bonobo rationalists’, a cluster characterized by polyamory, queerness, being affectionate with each other, the word ‘cute’, Niceness, and a passionate affinity for cuddles. We do have monogamous, celibate, and aro or ace members, and as far as I am aware no one has been a dick to them or deliberately made them feel excluded; however, bonobo rationalist culture can be really off-putting to some people, and it would be surprising to me if no non-poly/non-cuddly/non-Nice people felt alienated. On the other hand, if this sounds like your kind of thing, maybe get a tumblr.
Absence of the alt-right. Despite all the complaints, as best as I can tell there’s one member of the alt-right one is likely to encounter in the course of a normal rationalist-tumblr experience, which is Nydwracu, and most of the content you’ll see from him is him flirting adorably with his boyfriend.
Hamilton. No, we will not shut up about Hamilton. On the other hand, it is legitimately great. Seriously, take two hours out of your life, pull up Hamilton on YouTube, and follow along on Rap Genius. You’ll be glad you did.
Joining rationalist tumblr. Lots of people are nervous about trying to join a new social group. However, we are a bunch of warm, friendly autistics here, and we are not particularly scary. The best strategy to join the group is just to get a Tumblr and start reblogging people; don’t worry if your contributions feel kind of stupid, everyone feels that way sometimes. Remember that we’re a friendly, inclusive group of people who don’t solely talk about rationality: your puns, selfies, or stupid questions that prompt an interesting discussion can also make you a valued member of the community. Many people have joined the community via talking to sinesalvatorem, who is very friendly; I recommend this as a starting point.
I understand that there is an IRC channel, but I don’t participate in it, so I cannot provide advice about that.
Thing of Things 
this is perfect
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I feel you could have said more about Hamilton.
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More seriously, didn’t a bunch of people become part of rationalist tumblr by making criticizing rationalists? The first example to come to mind is the green horse.
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There aren’t many others. And unlike most of the other critics he was legitimately engaging with rationalists from the start, rather than going ‘boo the terrible people’ or vomiting extended frauds top emphasize his point.
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I said “mostly”. Rob, SuSu before he was exposed, and maybe Veronica are success stories, but I’m not exactly optimistic about STI or leviathan-supersystem or reddragdiva.
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David Gerard actually used to be pretty active on LW back in the day; no idea what happened there. (By which I mean, I guess I could look through his old posts on LW but I really don’t care anywhere near enough to do so.)
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reddragdiva is friends with multiple rationalists though?
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To be accurate, though, I had already read most of the sequences long before I found my way to Tumblr. So while I’m critical of “the religion of Bayes” and “oh noes the AIs are coming!” I was still pretty “rationalist adjacent”. Just, I never found my way to the social spaces.
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David Gerard left LW after a (heavily-downvoted and badly written) post implied a position many users found offensive. I could probably hunt down a link, but it’s not really worth reading in either respect.
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Gerard hasn’t commented on lw after replying to http://lesswrong.com/lw/la5/neoreactionaries_why_are_you_neoreactionary/bn2a
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I believe su3u2u1 did, at least until he deleted, but generally most of the critics of LW have not actually become part of the community.
(Also, I think I disagree somewhat with Ozy that most rationalists respond to criticism by trying to befriend people; it’s somewhat true-ish, in the sense that arguing with people is somewhat connected to trying to befriend them, but I don’t think that arguing is quite the same as befriending. This is probably just a matter of semantics, though, and in general I think this post is good.)
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bonobo rationalists:
You missed the: n e o t e n y
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> So if you post something like “I hate Eliezer, the Singularity is the rapture for nerds, and effective altruism is imperialism and we should have full communism instead”, rationalist Tumblr as a whole will conclude that you are a rationalist and trying to be friends, and will behave accordingly. (“Behaving accordingly” involves reblogging you with long-winded rebuttals; see dogpiling.) Rationalist Tumblr tends to parse statements that are probably intended to be “boo rationalists” as being serious critiques: it tends to go “hmm, maybe the Singularity is the rapture for nerds…
This is particularly funny in light of a discussion currently going on in the latest SSC Open Thread.
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I’m not sure that’s limited to rationalist tumblr, it’s one of the most charming things about the community as a whole.
In one of EY’s recent facebook posts I got the impression that even he was finding it weird how people were taking roughly the position of “can we really be sure that [slur commonly used against LW people] isn’t sometimes justified and in good faith”
It makes me thing of an old sci-fi where someone shoots bullets at the alien blob only for it to turn around and thank them earnestly and politely for the “gift of metal” without ever realizing that it was intended to hurt it.
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A good post.
For you, a gift of metal.
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Can confirm that reblogging people and offering them unsolicited long-winded opinions seems to have at least kinda worked for me, and I only showed up recently. I came from the rest of LW diaspora (previously, I was primarily on the IRC channel) rather than the rest of Tumblr (which I’m new to).
Also (good faith) long-winded rebuttals count as friendliness to me too so I guess I fit in, in that respect.
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As someone who follows a lot of rationalists on Tumblr and likes and reblogs many of their posts but has little to interest in Yudkowsky’s work, this is a very useful guide. Thanks for writing this up!
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Which IRC channel is this? Is it specifically rationalist-tumblr-related, or is it #slatestarcodex or the lesswrong channel? (Or do you lack even that knowledge? Which would be totally reasonable.)
Also, I keep wanting to join rationalist tumblr, but I don’t have the bandwidth to read ALL THE POSTS and I have a web archive completion compulsion problem :c (i.e., i have to read ALL THE NEW POSTS or i get twitchy)
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It’s #rattumb on freenode. It’s new and fairly quiet, but there are a few people there.
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Is there a reason you used the name ‘Nydwracu’ rather than the person’s tumblr url? It’s not hard to figure out who you mean or anything, but it seems like the latter would be more useful to someone entering the tumblr community.
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A combination of “can’t spell it”, “too lazy to check”, and “using the name known by most people who want to avoid nydwracu”.
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I just want to note that I find it amusing how so far out of two rationalist-adjacent Tumblr names that I can think of that people can’t spell or keep misspelling, both refer to actual things that can easily be looked up and used as a reference for the spelling.
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Perhaps people are not very good at parsing transliterated Russian, so instead of [Northern Land in Russian] they see [incoherentjumbleofletters].
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> Perhaps people are not very good at parsing transliterated Russian, so instead of [Northern Land in Russian] they see [incoherentjumbleofletters].
Confirming this, at least personally.
I had no idea it was Russian. I thought that it was a fantasy lit name, if it had a source at all and wasn’t just a jumble of letters and sounds that he liked, which was perfectly plausible.
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it was the url of my old music blog
similarly, ‘nydwracu’ was supposed to be a metal act, but i needed a new username before i got around to that
someone once sent me an in-depth analysis of how the meaning of the old english word related to the content of my blog. and it was absolutely right about how it would’ve related to the content of that black metal EP i never got around to recording and probably never will since i don’t go in for that aesthetic anymore
it was also right about the blog. this is one of the reasons i deleted it. i’m watching a fuckin sunrise as i type. let’s resurrect the cult of austraz brahs
~metapolitics~
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Lots of thoughts:
First off, I’d love to interact with rationalist tumblr, but I also don’t want to lose two hours of my life every day to tumblr. How do I reconcile this? Are there special tumblr apps for chrome that streamline the experience, make sure that you don’t start reading two pages of posts that you already read but forgot about because you haven’t read anything for a week, etc?
I’d especially be interested in an app that lets me organize my follows, so that I can, say, check *just* my rationalist tumblr follows without having to sort through any of my other follows.
//So if you post something like “I hate Eliezer, the Singularity is the rapture for nerds, and effective altruism is imperialism and we should have full communism instead”, rationalist Tumblr as a whole will conclude that you are a rationalist and trying to be friends, and will behave accordingly.//
This is great. Rationalist Tumblr just got +5 Silly Points.
//Nydwracu, and most of the content you’ll see from him is him flirting adorably with his boyfriend.//
Huh. I thought that neoreactionaries were strongly Not Cool With Homosexuality.
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I heard neoreactionaries are like super gay. Not like as an insult or anything either, from a person who likes neoreactionaries and from the general consensus. And Nydwracu specifically is also very gay.
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A lot of the people characterized by outsiders as neoreactionaries have very little in common with each other. But Counter Currents is notorious for being queer as a square donut, to take one example, and Gay Coastal Degenerates For Calvinist Theocracy is absolutely a thing.
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> First off, I’d love to interact with rationalist tumblr, but I also don’t want to lose two hours of my life every day to tumblr. How do I reconcile this? Are there special tumblr apps for chrome that streamline the experience, make sure that you don’t start reading two pages of posts that you already read but forgot about because you haven’t read anything for a week, etc?
> I’d especially be interested in an app that lets me organize my follows, so that I can, say, check *just* my rationalist tumblr follows without having to sort through any of my other follows.
Feedly. https://ozymandias271.tumblr.com/rss and https://ozymandias271.tumblr.com/tagged/effective-altruism/rss (to grab a tag from ozy’s most recent post) are both valid feed urls.
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Anyone able to tell me where the IRC channel is? Is it a different one than #lesswrong on FreeNode, which I’ve heard of but aren’t really interested in?
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#rattumb on freenode is new and fairly quiet, but there are a few people there.
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No, we will not shut up about Hamilton.
Look, I was on board well enough until the subject of musical theater came up…
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It’s important to note that rationalist tumblr is modular/a buffet. I find the bonobo stuff mildly irritating and the fandom/shipping stuff very irritating, so I’m just there for the substantive stuff and the trivia/jokes/puns. I have not listened to Hamilton and have no plans to do so. This works just fine; nobody minds if you only participate in the parts of the community that interest you.
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For example, first they will argue with you, and then they will go off tumblr and write a whole post on how much of a jerk you are for making them waste their time arguing with you, and how the community must do Something about this problem?
(As an additional ironic twist, I actually am trying to be friends by posting this :D)
Actually, I think there are two sub-groups: some are in it for the community / personal rationality / EA, and vigorous verbal sparring is just another fun social activity they’re happy to do. But others Have Something to Protect, so they can get more defensive.
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I think that post is Scott trying to break rationalist Tumblr of this habit, possibly because he finds it personally annoying.
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Plus, you’re not actually required to pay much attention to Scott. At least, sure has a somewhat influential blog, so you will be affected by what he is saying, if only through cultural osmosis. But his personal words? His actual complaints?
The point is, I read SCC sometimes (but seldom the comments these day). On the whole, it is occasionally interesting, but it has sorta become an epicenter of those parts of rationalism I most dislike. So I play over on the other side, mostly among the “rationalist adjacent critics” space. I find those parts more pleasant.
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“Rationalist Tumblr’s exciting friend-making strategy almost never actually works, because apparently most people who write comments about how much a social group sucks are not interested in becoming a member of that group.”
1) That’s hilarious – thanks for making my day!
2) It might or might not work that often at the extremes, but I think rationalist engagement might work on the margins. I don’t see myself as a rationalist, but I like hanging out in the comment threads here because it’s such a friendly place to have (or lurk near) civil discussions between people holding strongly opposed viewpoints. In particular, I feel like I’ve learned a lot about some of the priors for some of the more social justice-y viewpoints, and I really appreciate the commenters, who are happy to interact and explain it to us, again, in a constructive, engaging way, and to listen to what everybody else has to say as well.
3) Does really work that way? Because I’ve been thinking about writing a piece on reddit about what worked for me and what didn’t about HPMOR, but I stopped drafting it when I realized EY follows the thread, because sharing one more random dude’s opinions didn’t seem like it was worth potentially hurting someone’s feelings.
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This is by far the worst advice in this post. If you attempt to follow along on Rap Genius while listening to Hamilton (for the first time, no less!), you will pause the music every two measures for at least 90 seconds per pause and get nothing out of it.
The correct procedure is (1) take two hours and listen to the musical itself, (2) listen to it four more times because you can’t help yourself, then (3) spend three sleepless days and nights reading every word of every song’s Rap Genius page.
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I found following along on rap genius very helpful because then I could actually figure out what words were being said. I often have trouble with comprehending lyrics generally though.
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Oh! I was thinking about the annotations, not the lyrics themselves. That’s totally valid. Although there are mistakes and typos I’ve seen on several songs; the libretto is better, and buying it on CD is totally worth it.
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No, don’t follow along with the annotations, you insane person.
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puns, memes, Hamilton, non-Hamilton fandoms, social justice, anti social justice, vagueblogging about whatever one has chosen to hateread, whining about one’s life troubles, and Thus Spoke Carly Rae
I have had (and continue to have) all these popping up on my dash.
So by this measure, I am indeed part of rationalist Tumblr which, um, I must respectfully decline the kind inclusion, mainly due to me not being within a ass’s roar of rationality 🙂
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That’s a good point but have you considered that FRIEND
seriously Ozy just explained that you can’t get tumblr rationalists to stop trying to include you as long as you’re talking about rationalism
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At some point we win everyone over with cute selfies.
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If whinging about my life troubles and vagueblogging/ranting is rationalism, then I’m a rationalist. Otherwise…. 😉
More seriously, I do find a lot of the topics raised to be interesting and even when everyone is in the middle of a row at least it’s intelligent conversation for the most part (name-calling and hair-pulling isn’t very common, at least by general Internet standards).
The “polyamory is the cure for all human sexual problems, adopt this mindset and never no more any jealousy or drama!” enthusiasm leaves me cold, but it’s no skin off my nose and apart from noting that as humans, we will always find some means of creating drama no matter what, I leave them alone.
The “AI risk is real, immediate and it’s going to be the God-Emperor of the world so we’d better make sure it’s friendly then we will all be living in our own personal paradises in the post-scarcity utopia” stuff also leaves me cold, as I think that even if we do achieve anything that can truly be called AI the main problem will not be the AI deciding its goals are antithetical to ours, it will be humans handing over complex problems to AI to run and make decisions, then acting on those decisions and bending them to our whims and political necessities of the day without understanding what we’re doing, as the problem will have become too large and complex for any single group of humans to understand.
I’m much more concerned about human governments using AI to try and run “wars on terrorism/to spread democracy” than I am about God-Emperor AI turning us all into paperclips or computronium.
I also don’t believe we’ll ever have a post-scarcity wonderland where every single human, yes even the people in the favelas of Brazil scavenging on rubbish dumps, will now be rich and leisured. I’m much more inclined to think we’ll have an even more sharply defined society “haves” and “have nots” and the “have nots” will be dealt with by things like involuntary sterilisation (even if dressed up with “get your free government operation and we’ll pay you or give you goodies” like the programmes in India), not being given access to life extension technologies, and other methods to reduce the unwanted surplus of the unemployable underclass.
But then again, I take a generally dim view of human nature and don’t think we’d all be perfect angels if only society had not crushed our free natures beneath its arbitrary dictates.
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That’s okay. None of us are actually rational, and anyone who says otherwise is *definitely* not rational.
We’re aspiring rationalists, and though some of us are further along that path than others, or not as far along as others, we’re all still aspirants.
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“This video is not available in your country due to a copyright claim by Warner Chappell Music.”
Thank you. I feel so enlightened.
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I don’t get it, this is just tumblr in general.
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“Despite all the complaints, as best as I can tell there’s one member of the alt-right one is likely to encounter in the course of a normal rationalist-tumblr experience”
There’s also the special case of Eron – GamerGate isn’t literally the same thing as the Alt Right but it rhymes, and people who want to avoid one tend to want to avoid the other.
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Yeah, the idea that it is only unspellable-name-guy seems to fly in the fact of facts. There are plenty of #gaters in this space, and if you drift into the SCC crowd — well, you’ll hit just about everything you don’t want to.
On the other hand, if you’re eager enough with the block function — I dunno. From time to time I see their stuff, but not that often.
Honestly, most of the alt-right/#gaters/NRx-ers/MRA-types/etc. (but I repeat myself) stuff that I encounter is from my pro-SJ friends who keep on anonymous asks, and then it is just to illustrate how absolutely horrible the typical anonymous ask is. Seeing particularly stupid examples of your enemies is not the same as getting sealioned to death by them.
In contrast to this, we have cute selfies, oceans of selfies, universes of selfies, a vast cosmic array of selfies — more selfies than dust specks. It’s bliss.
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This post is the one that finally got me to listen to Hamilton.
…Thank you.
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okay so this is a small nitpick but we haven’t been Rap Genius since like mid-2014
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As a cold, dysfriendly autistic who internalized the idea that my form of autism in that sphere is the only one, the phrase ‘warm, friendly autistics’ trips my sarcasm meter enough that it kind of wraps around to sounding real again and encourages me to look into this bizarre other reality existing adjacent to things I find interesting.
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Oh man, I wrote rationality-related content on tumblr like once or twice, and being dogpiled by ppl taking me seriously and presenting long-winded agreement or disagreement that I could engage with and get more of people talking to me about what I wrote…
I wish entering fandoms by writing critique of the source material worked that way 😐
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