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The best line on the rationalists, said to me once: these are the people who read the New York Times and took it seriously. What follows next is the response to that disappointment...
Effective Altruism is the most obvious (the Times says first world philanthropy will save the third, and yet it hasn’t happened yet); multiple different diagnoses for Neoreaction, I think.
A lot of people want to trace things back to SV culture, but this seems wrong. E.g., early Paul Graham essays, which are mostly about how to make money on startups, or inside baseball about code.
In the end, the surface level of rationalism—tech stuff, Bayesianism—is a bit of a distraction; it seems much more related to the prior generation of USENET atheism...
Which was mostly about battling an earlier invention of the New York Times: the Creationist Movement which turned out, in the end, not to be the biggest threat to American education.
The Hegelian dialectic turns, however, and the rationalists found themselves to be counter-reformation defenders of the true religion, against a now-heretical New York Times.
This account leaves out some really interesting players (e.g., the cypherpunks, the extropians, and early-90s mailing list culture). But I think these are not actually constitutive.
Scott Alexander is the ideal figure—SA’s politics and Overton window is basically mid-1990s New York Times, so it’s amusing to watch Metz try to cancel him. Basically every objectionable opinion that SA has can be hyperlinked to an article from that era in the Times itself.
Why did they form a cult around the 1990s? Two answers: (1) neoliberalism is, actually, an ideology that you can learn, (2) say anything you like but the 1990s has serious cross-decade temporal soft power.
Like Western AM radio penetrating Eastern Germany, the optimism of 1995’s Tuesday Science Section calls to us in this Facebook hellscape. Sadly, the past is not a place you can visit.
Yes, it’s obvious that they would care about the NYT, but also interesting to ask why they do care. The group understands both itself and the Times as normal-liberal, so I think it’s genuinely puzzling for them. https://twitter.com/JaycelAdkins/status/1360704679156584448?s=20
In retrospect it’s hard to see how it wasn’t? In terms of harmless and marginal, it was top-ten at least. https://twitter.com/edsonedge/status/1360679465907593225?s=20
“Grey Tribe” may just be a synonym for late-90s normal (college) liberal. https://twitter.com/AmmannNora/status/1360708730950672396?s=20
...yup.
Maybe? But the best stuff to come out of the 90s *was* insane... https://twitter.com/leominkus/status/1360711500852297735?s=20
