#scott alexander

[segyges]

The Scott Alexander Email: An Explainer

So, Scott Alexander sent an email to someone in 2014. In 2021 the person who got that email thought that Scott was not being honest about his relationship to the neoreactionary movement, so they published it.

Although this has been widely available, even people who have read it have often missed what the email is saying. There are some cases of genuine ambiguity, where there can be more than one meaning. There are also cases where there is only one plausible meaning, but that meaning is expressed indirectly, subtly, or by linking to something else. Because what the email is saying can be difficult to understand, it seems like it would be of general interest to publish an explainer that went over these ambiguities and the links.

It has sometimes been said that this email should not be read because it was released without permission. This seems like a bad position.

First, because information is information. We know, due to the circumstances, that this was somewhat intended to be non-public and that someone had some specific motive to release it, but the information in the email itself is just as useful as it would be if released any other way. We know, for example, about the PRISM surveillance program and most of the planning for the Vietnam War in spite of attempts to conceal those documents. Ignoring information based on where it came from is, epistemically, a bad practice.

Second, because there was actually no confidence broken here. If someone who you are not close with disagrees with you and you send them an email that, among other things, threatens revenge if they tell anyone what's in the email, they do not owe you confidentiality. They do not really owe you anything. It is difficult to see what, precisely, would possibly establish a confidence here, other than the author of the email saying that the receiver can't tell anyone. If someone can articulate a specific and defensible rule which this disclosure violates, I do not know what it is.

We can apply some charity. Information from private parties should be evaluated on whether what is in them is, really, remarkable. There are things that would be maybe discrediting, but are sometimes unremarkable compared with the fact of the release itself, like an affair or a drug problem. In such cases, the main thing you have learned is usually not anything bad about the person whose information is made public, but that someone else wants to embarrass them, since such things are common.

In other cases you learn more remarkable things, like that someone is deliberately lying, or that they are deeply compromised in a manner that makes them a bad source of information. This would tend to outweigh concerns that someone was trying to hurt them for some other cause, and shouldn't be allowed to do so.

I would argue that this email meets that bar.

Spacing has been changed slightly to fit the format, and the text of the email is in blue to set it apart from other quotes.

Without further preamble:

Scott Siskind███████████████████████████████ Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:12 PM to me [continuation of our convo from Facebook, because I don't like their chat interface] I said a while ago I would collect lists of importantly correct neoreactionary stuff to convince you I'm not wrong to waste time with neoreactionaries. I would have preferred to collect stuff for a little longer, but since it's blown up now, let me make the strongest argument I can at this point: 1. HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct. https://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/the-facts-that-need-to-be-explained/ http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/survey-of-psychometricians-finds-isteve.html This then spreads into a vast variety of interesting but less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses which should probably be more strongly investigated if we accept some of the bigger ones are correct. See eg http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/theorie/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed .

This is the claim about the appeal of neoreactionaries that was put first, which seems to imply it is the most important one, and it is about "HBD". HBD is an acronym for Human Biodiversity. We can look up what this means if we like, but this seems unfair to Scott. These were written in 2014, in the context of a very specific blogging culture, and even if "human biodiversity" is now widely used by white nationalists and eugenicists this does not mean everyone using the term "human biodiversity" was promoting white nationalism or eugenics.

To understand what this means in context, we can follow his links. The first goes to a post on the now-defunct blog Occidental Ascent, and opens:

Recap: In the US, there is a large stubborn Black-White differential in intelligence (section A). This differential, on the individual and population level, explains a large portion of the social outcome difference. Within populations, intelligence is highly heritable. As such, the behavioral genetic default is that this differential also has a high heritability (section N).

I think that this faithfully previews the contents of the article, which is very long. This blog as a whole seems to be almost entirely about, very explicitly, the relative intelligence of the American Black and White populations.

The second link is to a relatively short post on Steve Sailer's blog about how good psychometricians think Steve Sailer is when surveyed. The following four survey questions appear among the perhaps ten or fifteen total survey items mentioned:

Is there sufficient evidence to arrive at a reasonable estimate of the heritability of intelligence in populations of developed countries?

What are the sources of U.S. black-white differences in IQ?

Is there racial/ethnic content bias in intelligence tests?

[...] whether there was bias against lower SES and Africans in the western world, the mean agreement was about 4 out of 9.

This seems like a fairly high degree of emphasis to place on questions of Black and White IQ, given that this is a post specifically about how good Steve Sailer's blog is. At the risk of inserting my opinion, these are the only interesting or noteworthy questions in the post, which is, otherwise, mostly Steve Sailer reposting a press release about how well-respected Steve Sailer is.

In this context, these are the things Scott is calling "partially correct or at least very non-provably non-correct". Given what he is choosing to link, Scott is saying that he believes the American Black population is probably genetically stupid, and that this is the most important thing that he is interested in the neoreactionaries for saying. There is no other plausible meaning to saying this thing and then linking these articles.

His "less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses" that maybe deserve investigation are, from the links, that inbreeding produces altruism, and whatever is in the book Albion's Seed, which I find completely inscrutable and which he has since reviewed elsewhere. In order to be connected to HBD, the book would need to be interpreted as being about genetics, which it does not mostly seem to be.

We get just a light touch of human racial categorization in the inbreeding/altruism discussion:

i dunno, but i see — maybe — the more inbred clannish fighters (yupik eskimos, moroccan jews, kuwaitis) having more cases of CAH than the more outbred peaceniks (new zealanders, norwegians, even northern italians). also…

but on the whole, there is nothing that seems easy to draw any particular conclusion from in these two links.

(I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by "appreciate", I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge.)

So far as I can tell, Scott has not either left the internet forever or sought some sort of horrible revenge. I am, very honestly, attempting to insert my opinion as little as possible, but there are limits to that. Taken literally, this seems like kind of a fucked up thing to say to a friend. Or a stranger. Anyone really. Why would you say this? Why would you write this in an email and then send it, on purpose, under any circumstance? This is not entirely a rhetorical question. In spite of some effort, I cannot really discern what would lead a person to write or send an email containing this line to another person. It would seem much easier to simply not send the email.

Threatening horrible revenge if people repeat the things that you say is, in general, pretty troubling. It's easy to gloss over it in context if you're just reading the email quickly. It seems like it raises a basic epistemic problem. Are people hiding things because someone has threatened to leave the internet or seek horrible revenge? Is this, in some sense, a normal or common thing that is happening?

The person who leaked these described Scott as 'a vague internet acquaintance', and said that 'no, he did not first say "can I tell you something in confidence?" or anything like that.' If this is what he is comfortable saying in an email to them, what is he comfortable saying in other settings? How thoroughly does he swear other people to secrecy, and about what?

This line also strongly and directly indicates that Scott is deliberately not saying in public what he believes when he discusses race, "HBD", etc. What is being said in public has some relationship to what he believes, but what he believes is a secret that nobody should ever disclose, and he will be very upset with them if they do disclose what he actually believes.

If you think that these are important questions to ask, and to get conclusive answers about, this seems like a very strange thing to do. If the idea itself is important, discussing the idea itself directly would also be very important.

2. The public response to this is abysmally horrible. See for example Konk's comment http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jpj/open_thread_for_february_1824_2014/ala7 which I downvoted because I don't want it on LW, but which is nevertheless correct and important.

This is the linked comment:

The Doctrine of Academic Freedom, Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice from the Harvard Crimson

    No academic question is ever “free” from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?     Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.” When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

This already describes the reality on the ground, though to see it announced explicitly as a good and noble goal, by the upcoming generation, is disturbing. And people like Steven Pinker let are getting old. I'm now updating my trust for the conclusions of academic institutions and culture when they happen to coincide with their political biases downward further.

So far as I can tell, this means that Konk, and also Scott, believe that anything coming out of academic institutions about racism, sexism, heterosexism, or similar topics that agrees with the politics of academic institutions is not likely to be true. One can infer, pretty easily, that they believe the politics of universities are left wing (because they generally are). Then, this means "any academic research supporting left-wing conclusions about race, sex, or queerness is likely false". This is stated very indirectly, but there does not seem to be any actual ambiguity. There is no second, alternative thing that it might mean: it can mean only this.

See also http://radishmag.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/crazy-talk/

This is a page of what we would, nowadays, call "culture war slop". It opens like this:

Conservatives are crazy and racists are stupid, according to the latest research by college professors who could not possibly be biased. It’s scientastic!

The page is very long, but essentially seems to be a list of incidents in which the author believes that universities are deliberately persecuting conservatives. We can infer that Scott believes that universities are deliberately persecuting conservatives, and that this is important.

3. Reactionaries are almost the only people discussing the object-level problem AND the only people discussing the meta-level problem. Many of their insights seem important. At the risk (well, certainty) of confusing reactionary insights with insights I learned about through Reactionaries, see: http://cthulharchist.tumblr.com/post/76667928971/when-i-was-a-revolutionary-marxist-we-were-all-in http://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/review-of-exodus-by-paul-collier/

What object-level problem? What meta-level problem? There are two issues referenced by link in the email so far. One of these is that Blacks are stupider than Whites, and the other is that universities are liberal. We can try to clarify this by following his links.

The first link has rotted. By figuring its name is pretty unique, we can get to a post by Steve Sailer which is plucked from the middle of a Peter Hitchens article, and assume that this was a copy of the same thing on tumblr.

    How I am partly to blame for Mass Immigration     When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.       It wasn't because we liked immigrants, but because we didn't like Britain. We saw immigrants - from anywhere - as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.

This continues about how you would expect, and is a general anti-immigrant piece from Hitchens.

The second link is titled "Review of “Exodus” by Paul Collier", and starts with this:

“Migration has been politicized before it has been analyzed.” – Paul Collier In writing this book, Collier seeks to do two things. First, he wants to continue his work analyzing the poorest societies in the world. Second – and much more interesting – he wants to rescue the immigration debate from Caplanization (or Gmule-ization, if you prefer). Caplanization is the process by which the proponents of a particular policy (in this case unrestricted immigration) argue for it in such a manner than virtually all reasonable people are attracted to the opposite position.

That piece goes on to examine arguments that immigration is bad and is maybe going to destroy America at some length. This genre of argument is, now, extremely familiar to all of us, because various elections have recently been won by people saying these sorts of things.

So the object-level problem is that many nonwhites are genetically inferior and stupid, and the meta-level problem is that Western society is incapable of confronting that fact, and allows those people to immigrate into Western countries. Again, this is obscure, in that what he means by these things is only obvious if you follow his links, but is not ambiguous, in that there is no other plausible meaning for this passage. There is no other "object-level problem" besides racial inferiority mentioned in the email previously, and no "meta-level problem" besides how Western society in 2014 handles race and immigration. The two problems are that nonwhite races are inferior, and Western society and especially its universities are allowing too much immigration, and react badly to being told that nonwhite races are inferior.

There is one less interesting footnote to this passage. There being a certainty that you are, or will sometimes, confuse insights that are not from reactionaries with the insights of reactionaries suggests that quite a lot of what you read is from reactionaries. So we can infer Scott knows most of his reading diet is various reactionaries.

4. These things are actually important I suspect that race issues helped lead to the discrediting of IQ tests which helped lead to college degrees as the sole determinant of worth which helped lead to everyone having to go to a four-year college which helped lead to massive debt crises, poverty, and social immobility (I am assuming you can fill in the holes in this argument).

This seems to be an argument against Griggs v. Duke Power Co., a civil rights case decided in 1971 about enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It finds "that the company's employment requirements did not pertain to applicants' ability to perform the job, and so were unintentionally discriminating against black employees". This is generally taken as banning giving IQ tests to job applicants, and establishes the disparate impact test of civil rights and employment law.

So, the argument is that Griggs, specifically, was wrongly decided, that the practice of giving IQ tests for employment purposes in spite of disparate racial impact should have continued, and society would have less debt, less poverty, and more social mobility if Griggs had been decided the other way.

I think they're correct that "you are racist and sexist" is a very strong club used to bludgeon any group that strays too far from the mainstream - like Silicon Valley tech culture, libertarians, computer scientists, atheists, rationalists, et cetera. For complicated reasons these groups are disproportionately white and male, meaning that they have to spend an annoying amount of time and energy apologizing for this. I'm not sure how much this retards their growth, but my highball estimate is "a lot".

This passage is straightforward enough that it does not seem like it needs explanation.

5. They are correct about a bunch of scattered other things     the superiority of corporal punishment to our current punishment system (google "all too humane" in http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ ). Robin Hanson also noted this, but there's no shame in independent rediscovering a point made by Robin Hanson. I think the Reactionaries are also correct about that it is very worrying that our society can't amalgamate or discuss this belief.

The "all too humane" section's point runs like this:

So once again, we have an uncanny valley. Being very nice to prisoners is humane and effective (Norway seems to be trying this with some success), but we’re not going to do it because we’re dumb and it’s probably too expensive anyway. Being very strict to prisoners is humane and effective – the corporal punishment option. But being somewhere in the fuzzy middle is cruel to the prisoners and incredibly destructive to society – and it’s the only route the progressives will allow us to take. Some Reactionaries have tried to apply the same argument to warfare. Suppose that during the Vietnam War, we had nuked Hanoi. What would have happened?

It is unclear if Scott intended to reference both the pro-corporal-punishment and the pro-nuking-Hanoi positions of the reactionaries. Both are contained in the "all too humane" section of this post of his.

    various scattered historical events which they seem able to parse much better than anyone else. See for example http://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/review-of-the-last-lion-by-paul-reid/

This is a review of a biography of Churchill. It seems unremarkable in its analysis, other than the parts about how Churchill should have made peace with Hitler. Quote is taken from the middle, and is I think a faithful representation of what the review is trying to convey:

The story of the war – in Reid’s telling – is almost nicely split into thirds. In the first third, Britain fights alone. In the second third, Russia does 90% of the fighting. In the last third, the US joins (though Russia still does the vast majority of the fighting and dictates the strategy for all powers combined). In each third, it’s worth considering why Churchill kept wanting to fight Hitler . . . and whether (in hindsight) he made the right decision considering his original objectives. The First Third The mystery of the first third is why Churchill didn’t even consider seeking terms with Hitler during the years Britain fought alone.

Scott appears to think that the neoreactionaries have unique insight into whether or not Churchill should have fought Hitler.

    Moldbug's theory of why modern poetry is so atrocious, which I will not bore you by asking you to read.

Alas, if we want to understand the email, we should go read about Moldbug's theory of poetry, which we are informed is very boring. Fortunately, the part of it that constitutes an actual "theory" is relatively short.

Certainly the best poetry of the 20th century was written from the ’20s through the mid-’60s. [... a full paragraph and a half of nonsense ... ] The great disaster was the enormous expansion of higher education in the ’60s and ’70s. There is a reason so many college campuses have that abominable Brutalist architecture. Almost everyone who went through this gigantic, state-sponsored indoctrination machine had no reason at all to be there (please allow me to introduce you to Albert Jay Nock). They were there to be promoted in social class, perhaps also to avoid the draft. They were certainly not acquiring either vocational skills or wisdom and perspective. And nor are they still—certain areas of science and engineering, of course, excepted.

So poetry became bad after the mid-60s. This is because of the New Deal and/or Great Society higher education policies. These caused too many people to go to college, and this made poetry bad.

Given the racial context of the preceding parts of the email, and Curtis Yarvin's general track record, it is worth noting that the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and greatly expanded access to a university education for Black people, specifically. This happened at the same time as the general expansion of higher education under a series of other policies. This is, technically, ambiguous, but one obvious explanation is that Scott thinks poetry is bad now because Black people can attend universities.

    Michael successfully alerted me to the fact that crime has risen by a factor of ten over the past century, which seems REALLY IMPORTANT and nobody else is talking about it and it seems like the sort of thing that more people than just Michael should be paying attention to.

Michael is most likely Michael Anissimov, a reactionary featured prominently in Scott's Anti-Reactionary FAQ. We can try to make sense of this claim in the context of that FAQ, which argues against Michael Anissimov. An archived copy from six days after this email was written will tell us what Scott's thinking about this was.

This was written (initially) a full year before the email, and the copy we have is almost exactly the same version that was up when the email was written, if it has changed at all. It indicates that Scott believes Michael is wrong about pretty much everything, and that the (relatively constant) homicide rate seems to indicate that the (much higher) crime rate probably means that the crime rate is only high because it is being reported more often.

That Scott already knew this, and he still thinks Michael Anissimov's statements about crime are interesting, is very strange. Almost everything Michael believes about society getting worse appears to be wrong. We know that Scott believes this, because he wrote a helpful FAQ about it. This is probably bad data, and probably doesn't mean anything about crime, actually. We know Scott knows this, too.

It is not clear why, some time later when writing this email, Scott has apparently forgotten what he himself wrote in his FAQ. If the only information offered by Michael Anissimov is that crime rates are high, and this lead to knowing that probably only reports are higher and this is bad data, this would seem like it is barely an insight at all. It's one graph-worth of information that you can source easily. Michael has given Scott one interesting but unimportant fact, a half-dozen lies, and some pretty good content for his FAQ.

I cannot really see what to make of this. There are a few possibilities. Possibly, Scott somehow forgot completely debunking this point. He could, also, have not considered any other way of finding basic statistics about crime. He could be deliberately lying because he thinks it's persuasive, and maybe did not consider that he already debunked this point in public. He could simply like that this statistic started good discussion on his blog, and feel like that's about the same as being interesting and valuable, even though it is so misleading that he debunks it in his FAQ.

None of these really makes it less strange. It seems like either something is wrong with him or he's deliberately lying.

6. A general theory of who is worth paying attention to. Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. RationalWiki provides a steady stream of mediocrity. Almost nothing they say is outrageously wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially educational to someone who is smart enough to have already figured out that homeopathy doesn't work. Even things of theirs I didn't know - let's say some particular study proving homeopathy doesn't work that I had never read before - doesn't provide me with real value, since they fit exactly into my existing worldview without teaching me anything new (ie I so strongly assume such studies should exist that learning they actually exist changes nothing for me). The Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them. Despite considering myself pretty smart and clueful, I constantly learn new and important things (like the crime stuff, or the WWII history, or the HBD) from the Reactionaries. Anything that gives you a constant stream of very important new insights is something you grab as tight as you can and never let go of. The garbage doesn't matter because I can tune it out.

This passage is the one that people seem to pay the most attention to.

"the crime stuff" probably refers to Michael Anissimov's crime statistics, which Scott has apparently debunked and then forgotten about debunking.

"the WWII history" refers, apparently, to the blog post about Churchill, and how Churchill should not have gone to war with Hitler.

"the HBD" refers to point 1 in the email about how Blacks are less smart than Whites.

Saying that he can tune out the garbage shows immense confidence. It does not seem well-supported, given that he is uncritically repeating claims about crime that he has previously debunked.

7. My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts I am monitoring Reactionaries to try to take advantage of their insight and learn from them. I am also strongly criticizing Reactionaries for several reasons. First is a purely selfish reason - my blog gets about 5x more hits and new followers when I write about Reaction or gender than it does when I write about anything else, and writing about gender is horrible. Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people.

2014 was before the terms "clickbait" or "audience capture" were very common, but this seems like a clear indication in those directions.

Second is goodwill to the Reactionary community. I want to improve their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they have), the correct criticisms of class and of social justice, and few other things while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk - would be really useful people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this seems to be working - as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still haven't gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender).

This is a very dense paragraph. Most of it is, mercifully, very clear, so we will not have to read it closely.

Scott wants the goodwill of the Reactionaries, he thinks they have a high intellectual standard, and he thinks their criticisms of class and social justice (and a few other things, which is ambiguous) are correct.

There is ambiguity about what dropping the "monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk" means. Does it mean no longer considering those priorities, or does it mean simply not talking about them, tactically? If his goal is to make them stronger, and to throw out the garbage, it is unclear if the desired end goal is that they should no longer believe these things or no longer say them.

Scott notes that he has not gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender. This is odd, because the traditional concept of "the Cathedral", as articulated by Curtis Yarvin, is almost exactly the same as Scott's complaints in point 2 about universities, and relates to the "meta-level problem" in Scott's point 3. This seems to support the conclusion that he objects not to the content of the types of "-talk" he wants the Reactionaries to dispose of, but only to talking about those things in the way that they do. Still, it is technically ambiguous, and it is probably not possible to be sure this is what he means here.

Third is that I want to spread the good parts of Reactionary thought. Becoming a Reactionary would both be stupid and decrease my ability to spread things to non-Reactionary readers. Criticizing the stupid parts of Reaction while also mentioning my appreciation for the good parts of their thought seems like the optimal way to inform people of them. And in fact I think it's possible (though I can't prove) that my FAQ inspired some of the recent media interest in Reactionaries.

Scott specifically wants to spread "the good parts" of Reactionary thought. These main good parts are, from earlier in the email, their belief in the supremacy of the White race over the Black, their hostility to immigration, and their mistrust of universities. This also includes various odd beliefs like that the expansion of universities are the reason poetry is bad now and that crime is getting worse in a way that is a major problem. These odd beliefs ambiguously hint that the decline of poetry or the rise in crime is due to Black people, and this seems like the most obvious inference from the overall emphasis on race in the email.

He also lists, as a positive, that his Anti-Reactionary FAQ has inspired media interest in Reactionaries. People have sometimes alleged that the Anti-Reactionary FAQ was a subtle exercise intended to spread neoreactionary ideas and interest in them, while only claiming to oppose neoreaction or only opposing it in part. He is directly stating that this is true. Scott is happy that his Anti-Reactionary FAQ is making people more interested in neoreactionaries, and neoreactionary ideas.

This passage does explain the earlier part of the email about not wanting his beliefs publicly known. He explicitly does not want to be known as a Reactionary because he wants to spread Reactionary ideas. Exposing his specific beliefs would run counter to that goal.

Finally, there's a social aspect. They tend to be extremely unusual and very smart people who have a lot of stuff to offer me. I am happy to have some of them (not Jim!) as blog commenters who are constantly informing me of cool new things (like nydwracu linking me to the McDonalds article yesterday)

This also indicates something like audience capture. The Reactionaries are simply fun to talk to, and to know. They are his friends and he likes them.

8. SERIOUSLY SERIOUSLY, the absurdity heuristic doesn't work You're into cryonics, so you've kind of lost the right to say "These people, even tough they're smart, are saying something obviously stupid, so we don't have to listen to them" Drew has even less of a right to say that - he seems to be criticizing the Reactionaries on the grounds of 'you wouldn't pay attention to creationists, would you?" even while he discovered Catholic philosophy and got so into it that he has now either converted to Catholicism or is strongly considering doing so.

This is a tu quoque argument, a type of argumentum ad hominem.

If there is a movement consisting of very smart people - not pseudointellectual people, like the type who write really clever-looking defenses of creationism - then in my opinion it's almost always a bad idea to dismiss it completely.

Scott believes that the previous contents of the email are sufficient to demonstrate that Reactionaries are very smart, and are not pseudointellectual people.

Also, I should have mentioned this on your steelmanning creationism thread, but although I feel no particular urge to steelman young earth creationism, it is actually pretty useful to read some of their stuff. You never realize how LITTLE you know about evolution until you read some Behe and are like "I know that can't be correct...but why not? Even if it turned out there was zero value to anything any Reactionary ever said, by challenging beliefs of mine that would otherwise never be challenged they have forced me to up my game and clarify my thinking. That alone is worth thousand hours reading things I already agree with on RationalWiki.

Behe is Michael Behe, a pseudoscientist who was at the forefront of "intelligent design". "Intelligent Design" was an ideological project, funded by various religious interests, meant to legitimize teaching creationism in high schools. It has failed all legal challenges. This seems like a good comparison to appeal to someone who is used to arguing about Behe. However, everything Behe says is trash. Almost nobody arguing against Behe's ideas is deliberately promoting any of them.

This concludes the email. I have tried to do as little interpretation outside of the text of the email itself as I can. I can hopefully be forgiven for having an opinion at the conclusion.

Scott is, epistemically, a bad actor. He demonstrably lies about what he believes in public. I know this because he has said so. He threatens, maybe "jokingly", people who might expose what he actually thinks. He deliberately chooses the things he says to pander to his reactionary audience.

Perhaps most seriously, Scott takes the exact opposite of the position he believes, because by arguing with or "explaining" ideas he claims to disagree with, he knows he can promote them. He attacks the bailey because he wants to see the motte defended.

Without this specific email, believing these things about him would require a lot of reading into the subtext of what he says. With this email, you can be certain that all of these things are true. There is no plausible reason he would have written them if they were not.

All of this is stated subtly, and with links, but it is not ambiguous. There is only one plausible meaning to all of this.

What he says is not an attempt to converge on truth, and if it was, you would have no way of knowing that.

[derseprinceoftbd]

A friendly reminder that the joint Worm Fandom+Rationalism movement has killed over 38,615 people, exactly one of whom was a landlord. This is genuinely the most evil force in the world today. A dangerous cult movement is rapidly gaining control of both American youth culture and the U.S. government.

[philippesaner]

Man, it's frustrating how determined rationalists are to pretend that scientific racists are arguing in good faith. This is one of the dumbest arguments I've had in ages; somehow the actual fascist bothers me way less than the people who think that the norms of polite discourse demand lying to yourself.

[jadagul]

Scott's recent post on AI chip regulation made me absolutely livid, in a way that's definitely not healthy for me, but I'm going to process it by blogging a bit and then hopefully I can stop thinking about it as much.

It feels very confident and smug about how this isn't going to be a dystopian surveillance state. But the main thing I was thinking through the entire first part was "couldn't a government abuse these powers to stop people from running cutting-edge AI on their own hardware? Setting up the infrastructure to do that is totally unacceptable." And then I get to part 2 where he says "also we'll need to stop people from running cutting-edge AI on their own hardware."

Like, the big concerns I have about LLMS are that they're being run centrally, on servers, where people can read what we say, and where both companies and potentially the government can regulate how it gets used. The thing I want to make sure happens is this gets decentralized, so people can run it locally, without being observed, and ideally disable stupid ethical blocks like "I won't make porn".

And Scott's post is basically saying "we already don't live in that world, so it's not a problem to move further away from it". But it is! I want people in the AI space actively advocating for more decentralized AI use—and as strong a taboo as we can fashion against the government limiting AI, or really anything about the software we run on our computer. Total legal ban on in-hardware DRM. Crash course on fully homomorphic encryption so we can set it up so that openAI can't read our chat logs. A government commitment to reverse-engineer any model and publish the weights openly.

(I feel like we should all be really worried that the government feels like it can ask openAI to pause a chatbot release. That shouldn't be allowed! That's...well, it's not in the top fifty bad things the Trump administration has done, but it's a serious civil liberties problem that has me deeply worried.)

But the real upshot of this is that I'm definitely not the target audience, and in a real sense, Scott and I are on opposite sides.

Plan A’s regulations on chips bear more than a passing resemblance to the way the United States currently regulates “controlled substances” - potentially addictive medications like Xanax or Adderall. ... But has the existence of controlled substance regulations indirectly plunged the world into Orwellian dystopia? Has it turned life into a global panopticon? I wouldn’t say so.

You see the way we regulate Xanax has introduced one genuinely horrifying civil liberties violation. Sometimes, people want Xanax, and they can't get it. That's a problem and we should fix it. And we shouldn't introduce that problem to private home AI setups if we can avoid it.

[snugglesquiggle]

(Mirrored on my site.)

In retrospect, there is something quite fitting about the concept of a “scissor statement.”

Rationalists are fond of it; just hanging around them over the years, I’ve heard brought up as casual shorthand many times. I myself have used it! It was coined by Scott Alexander almost eight years ago in the short story “Sort By Controversial”. There’s something so amusingly Scott Alexander about it.

If nothing else, it makes for a pretty good story. Four thousand words, yet it’s a brisk, casual read. By turns amusing and disturbingly plausible. If I had to give a blind pitch, think Lovecraft by way of machine learning, stripping away all the gods and monsters without losing that spark of horror beyond comprehension. If anything, it elevates it.

Having long ago familiarized myself with the “twist,” I didn’t expect to find it this compelling on reread, yet I can almost say it holds up.

(And as occasionally happens with rationalist writing, when it speaks of AI, it sounds borderline prescient. Eight years ago means it was about a year before OpenAI would claim their GPT‍-​2 model was too powerful to release, and remember, it took until around GPT‍-​4 for the world at large to really start to appreciate what LLMs were capable of.)

But I don’t bring up that story to glaze its author. The story itself is almost irrelevant. The concept has gained a life of its own, much like “taking the red pill” is divorced from The Matrix (1999).

So, what is a scissor statement?

The idea’s simple and evocative. See, a lot of statements you’ll find yourself saying are innocuous, obviously true things we accept without issue. But of course, there’s plenty of contentious things you know will start a fight.

A scissor statement is that rare chimera that seems totally innocuous…

…and now suddenly half the room is at your throat like one of those John Wick with ten guns pointed at him images used for engagement farming unpopular opinions. (Incidentally, ragebaiting is exactly what Shiri’s scissor was invented to do.)

It is downright impossible to understand why someone would get mad at you after uttering a scissor statement. Isn’t this a settled matter we can all agree on? And on that point, they do agree! It’s obviously false!

The concept of scissor statements reflects a real frustration. Haven’t we all been there? You say something like “Christian bakers shouldn’t have to serve gay weddings” or “Colin Kaepernick should have knelt for the anthem” or “Brett Kavanaugh belongs on the supreme court regardless of those allegations, boys will be boys” and suddenly people look at you like you’re some kind of bigot!

(Real examples, by the way. In the fiction, these issues are all the product of scissor statements.)

But wait, have we all been there? If you have any familiarity with the issues, those statements seem pretty clearly contentious! Only ignorance could blind you to their implications, let alone their literal content. But okay, we aren’t born omniscient, maybe you’re one of today’s lucky 10k, and just didn’t know. You made a blunder, but you can learn and not slip up again.

Let me emphasize: scissor statements do not exist. This is not me being polemic‍ ‍‍—‍ we’re talking about fiction, Scott made it all up, this is basically an SCP.

But again, the idea has outgrown the story that spawned it. I can search through rationalist chats and subreddits and easily find repeated references to this as a meaningful category of thing. (Sure, you can’t literally take the red pill, but you can wake up from the matrix, metaphorically. So aren’t there things that metaphorically behave like scissor statements?)

The natural conclusion is this idea caught on because people felt seen by the frustration and confusion it portrays.

But why?

To quote a climatic passage:

If you just read a Scissor statement off a list, it’s harmless. It just seems like a trivially true or trivially false thing. It doesn’t activate until you start discussing it with somebody. At first you just think they’re an imbecile. Then they call you an imbecile, and you want to defend yourself. Crescit eundo. You notice all the little ways they’re lying to you and themselves and their audience every time they open their mouth to defend their imbecilic opinion. Then you notice how all the lies are connected, that in order to keep getting the little things like the Scissor statement wrong, they have to drag in everything else. Eventually even that doesn’t work, they’ve just got to make everybody hate you so that nobody will even listen to your argument no matter how obviously true it is. Finally, they don’t care about the Scissor statement anymore. They’ve just dug themselves so deep basing their whole existence around hating you and wanting you to fail that they can’t walk it back. You’ve got to prove them wrong, not because you care about the Scissor statement either, but because otherwise they’ll do anything to poison people against you, make it impossible for them to even understand the argument for why you deserve to exist. You know this is true. Your mind becomes a constant loop of arguments you can use to defend yourself, and rehearsals of arguments for why their attacks are cruel and unfair, and the one burning question: how can you thwart them? How can you convince people not to listen to them, before they find those people and exploit their biases and turn them against you? How can you combat the superficial arguments they’re deploying, before otherwise good people get convinced, so convinced their mind will be made up and they can never be unconvinced again? How can you keep yourself safe?

This would resonate with you if you’ve repeatedly run up against this sort of interminable argument, ever felt a schism down the deepest axioms and definitions.

Or to put it bluntly, if you find you keep stumbling into rhetorical blunders‍ ‍‍—‍ almost like you’re making a habit of it. I’d argue this utter incomprehension of controversy can only be so persistent in one’s experience if one has a lot of ignorance of others’ perspective (i.e. privilege), or if after stepping on a rake once, you fail to internalize the presence of rakes enough to look before you step.

There’s an interesting take on The Room (2003) which posited that the movie was a great portrayal of an abusive relationship‍ ‍‍—‍ by accident, in spite of itself. Because the way it portrays the protagonist’s girlfriend as this inexplicably treacherous force tearing apart a man who never did anything wrong is deeply revealing‍ ‍‍—‍ a self‍-​portrait of how the world looks through a warped and ignorant perspective.

Take a closer look at that passage from the story quoted above. It’s inane, preoccupied with the statements themselves, with the words. It takes its own perspective for granted (trivially true) and all that opposes it are fleeting lies cooked up to support a trivial falsehood. Now saying this alone, I admit, would just be nitpicking.

But the words you hear are just a tail, not the dog wagging it. They are the output of another perspective and worldview. People are penetrable to analysis; you can understand them!

I called this passage inane, and I mean that in a etymological sense. It is empty, vacuous, starved of meaning. Where are the stakes? Statements about gay weddings and systemic racism protests and rape culture are not trivial. Maybe they seem that way if you don’t care, if you uttered your “scissor statement” heedless of its implications.

But these thing matter. Have your critics “dug themselves so deep basing their whole existence around hating you,” for no reason other than you uttered a trivial statement, or did that “trivial” statement naturally hook into a prefigured, entrenched system of conflict you were already unwittingly a part of?

(One can imagine a very different, more conscious horror story, where instead of the big reveal being that banal trivialities can tear the world apart, you find that speaking certain words reshapes the world in ways you don’t understand, culminating in a grand reveal that wielding this strange power required that you be at birth drafted into a power struggle you knew nothing about and never asked to be a part of.)

A scissor statement isn’t just someone disagreeing about something you think is self‍-​evident. To believe in even the weak, metaphorical existence of “scissor statements” requires dumbfounding yourself about the source of your disagreements, reifying it into the fruit of some magical, malign influence. In the story, scissor statements are deployed like weapons, inflicted upon us by an unknown faction to manipulate our world’s politics.

It’s like all the feminists arguing with you are pawns in service to some nefarious agenda…

There’s a distinct rhetorical effect to calling something a scissor statement‍ ‍‍—‍ scissors cut symmetrically. It’s neutral, agnostic, blaming both sides equally. If you call something a “ragebait” or “dogwhistle”, there’s an implicit accusation of bad faith. If you call something “misinformation,” you acknowledge that one side is right.

If you call something a “scissor statement”, which side you end up on feels as arbitrary as whether you have the gene for tasting cilantro.

Politics is an alien force acting on you, not a system working through you.

Rationalists were well‍-​primed to accept this sort of framing. After all, politics is the mind‍-​killer. It’s this insidious evolutionary glitch able to flip off the brains of even high INT rationalists and turn them into “slogan‍-​chanting zombies.”

Earlier, I wrote that believing in a scissor statement requires a deep ignorance, or a skill issue in the face of opportunities to learn more. But there’s a third possibility. That the incomprehension here is purely rhetorical, a deliberate dumbfounding.

You treat these disagreements as if they were a geas magicked up by Shiri’s scissor generator because you are smarter than such petty disputes. Some people are just getting helplessly mind‍-​killed by trivial words.

If I had to sum it up in a single word, the concept of a scissor statement is so… infantile.

Is this not a child’s understanding of the world? There are certain no‍-​no words that make the adults punish you and all the other kids start being mean to you. It’s all so unfair!

Why is it this way? IDK, doesnt make any sense, the world is weird and scary sometimes.

Maybe it strikes you that I’m being a little too hard on Scott for this one story written almost a decade ago. Sure, the concept has taken a life of its own, but isn’t that because it’s a useful concept? Nothing wrong with having a compact little allusion like this in your back pocket. Not every word word is chained to its etymology.

Indeed, while writing this post, I was constantly struck by the thought that, well, I’ve seen what debating conservatives is like, there really are people that are fractally wrong on so many issues.

Whatever his follies, at the end of the day Scott isn’t a terrible writer and isn’t devoid of insight.

The idea sticks with people because it kinda do be like that. Hot button issues sometimes are simply baffling.

Since writing this post, I’ve had a few arguments in chatrooms about it. And I find to defend the concept of a scissor statement, you have to retreat from what it literally is.

When the first scissor statement is discovered, two engineers get into an argument over it, can’t reach any agreement, drag in their coworkers, then escalate to the boss, and they proceed to fight for hours until the dissenters get fired. They go on to sue the company, then the boss beats one of them up, getting himself arrested and losing the whole company.

These people literally invented the scissor generator and could not see past the schisms it carved. It’s like some mage cast ⸢Frenzy⸥ on them.

But isn’t this just hyperbole, evocative exaggeration? Sure, there aren’t any actual power words that can mind‍-​whammy you into escalating, inescapable aggro. But the dynamic of mutually dumbfounded conflict exists, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t we have a label for it?

Nevermind that the symmetry of the scissor so rarely bears out in practice‍ ‍‍—‍ the privileged easily get blindsighted by the protests of the oppressed, but that doesn’t mean the oppressed are remotely surprised. But maybe not every scissor cuts along such clear‍-​cut, entrenched lines.

But “the dynamic” is vacuous, question‍-​begging. Scissor statements do exist if you strip away all of the wrongheaded bits until you get the parts that must necessarily map onto reality.

The thing about false insights is that they are real and specific observations, but the real parts aren’t specific and the specific parts aren’t real. “Having a label for it” is a dangerous thing, because labels impart framing. There’s connotations and implicit judgments in every label‍ ‍‍—‍ they aren’t neutral windows into reality.

It happens sometimes in real life, rarely, that a disagreement starts small and snowballs bigger and bigger, in an almost analoguous fashion but crucially, there is no power word that can consistently turn “trivially true” statements into vendettas so intense you’ll get arrested for assaulting them over it. The ontology of how truth and belief formation works would have to be fundamentally different to ever allow them to exist.

Consider antimemes. Are they real? Some ideas are hard to describe or remember, but there isn’t any ideas that can innately erase all records of itself, whether stored on brain or photo or computer file. That is a purely conceptual effect at odds with the mechanics of how the physics of this universe works.

Is it unfair to raise the bar of “scissor statement” so high nothing can ever satisfy it? I often find myself arguing that your terms shouldn’t be useless by definition. We already have a word for “nothing”, so if you have a choice between coining a synonym for the empty set and including anything at all, it’s preferable, practical, to gesture at something real.

But my problem, with both “antimemes are real” and “scissor statements are real” is that this is magic. You are trying to describe the world with magic. Even if you define your magic as only strictly specifically the effects that are actually real, I think the impulse and effect of reasoning magically is cognitive distortion.

Scissor statements suck as an idea to the extent that it reifies your ignorance‍ ‍‍—‍ it shrugs and says oh well, what can you do.

To call it a scissor statement is foreground the words themselves, and elide all else. Does it map onto reality? Can you understand the other position? Did you simply make a mistake? No, the scissor triggered and now everyone is forever fighting Just Because.

But you can rightly accuse me of spitting all this vitriol without justifying where I’m really coming from. Are rationalists‍ ‍‍—‍ is Scott‍ ‍‍—‍ so ignorantly centrist as I imply? This is a rant, and I think it mainly makes sense to those already read‍-​in on the issues I’m dissecting: if you already know and dislike Scott, or rationalists as a whole, or do like them but want to hear out what critics have to say.

And not everyrat who heard me out found this argument convincing. I gesture vaguely at connotations and framing, but nothing substantial enough that we ought to discard the concept of a scissor statement wholesale.

Cards on the table, I make this critique chiefly because I’m already convinced Scott’s work is unsalvageable and rationalists are little better.

If Scott were brilliant and rationalists were as a rule virtuous, yet somehow they yielded a textually identical concept of scissor statement (emphasis on somehow, because the odious centrism is a tad bit baked in) then there’d be no real force behind what I’m saying here.

Imagine a house caught fire and blew up, and it was so intense you can see scorch marks on the next house over (it’s a suburb). I walk over, take a picture of that, and post it saying, “Look at this! what a fire, huh?”

The fire is bad because the property blew up, and the scorch marks just underscore that. If the house blew up without leaving the scorch marks, it’d still be bad, and if it turns out it was actually just a stray firework that went off and nothing else was destroyed, then the scorch marks have little significance.

I find it kinda neat that you can look at this tiny part of Scott’s corpus, and still see the marks of its origin. Dumbfounded, ignorant, and classically centrist. But this only works because it’s not the only evidence thereof‍ ‍‍—‍ it would be downright wrong to believe what I’m saying based on this post alone.

Why is Scott so deplorable to me?

This was just a piece of fiction, and you cannot generalize from an unreliable narrator to divine the author’s true beliefs.

Except. Scott has written millions of words of blog posts over his prolific career. So we can just ask: what does he actually think about political division?

One of Scott’s most influential essays is “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup”, which I’d go as far as to call a foundational piece in the rationalist understanding of politics. It’s influential even outside that niche‍ ‍‍—‍ figures like Sam Altman praise it.

It’s from 2014, so it’s very old work, yet his modern substack puts it as #3 on the list of his articles to start with.

Consider this choice passage:

Compare the Nazis to the German Jews and to the Japanese. The Nazis were very similar to the German Jews: they looked the same, spoke the same language, came from a similar culture. The Nazis were totally different from the Japanese: different race, different language, vast cultural gap. But the Nazis and Japanese mostly got along pretty well. Heck, the Nazis were actually moderately positively disposed to the Chinese, even when they were technically at war. Meanwhile, the conflict between the Nazis and the German Jews – some of whom didn’t even realize they were anything other than German until they checked their grandparents’ birth certificate – is the stuff of history and nightmares. Any theory of outgroupishness that naively assumes the Nazis’ natural outgroup is Japanese or Chinese people will be totally inadequate. And this isn’t a weird exception. Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other”. Nazis and German Jews. Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics. Hutus and Tutsis. South African whites and South African blacks. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Anyone in the former Yugoslavia and anyone else in the former Yugoslavia. So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences. If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.

What an odd thing to say. But I suppose the idea of a “trivially true” statement causing the United States to erupt into civil war is a pretty plausible premise for a story, if you’d describe opposition to National Socialism essentially the same way.

Scott Alexander has been on my mind a lot the past few weeks. Last month, I had the pleasure of helping proofread The Infantile Sepsis, a series of blog posts diving into some pitfalls of rationalist thought more deeply. Our pal Scott features heavily in it.

That is the resource I would point you to if you’d like to learn more about the issues with Scott’s work.

As I publish this, the series is releasing piece by piece, but I waited till now to mention it because there’s about twenty posts already out, making it a substantive read at this point.

In particular, if you want to read someone tearing apart the idea that the fucking holocaust was the product of the “the narcissism of small differences,” as well as the myriad other claims made in that sprawling, incoherent “outgroup” essay, there’s a eight post subseries dissecting that trashfire alone.

If you read this far into my post, you’d definitely get something out of The Infantile Sepsis, even if you aren’t a rationalist, even if you hadn’t heard of Scott Alexander till now. It’s quite an informative and dare I say entertaining read. I’d love it if you gave it a look.

All Branches Lead To Checkmate

The start of a series about the intellectual and scholarly standards of the so-called “rationality” community.

[morlock-holmes]

Okay, guys, after reading a post by @centrally-unplanned I just took that ACX "AI Turing Test" that Scott Alexander did, and I am screaming, as the kids used to say.

You guys are way, way overthinking this.

I thought I would do better than average, and I guess I did; excluding three pictures I had seen before, I got 31/46 correct.

Not great if you're taking the SAT, but I feel like if I could call a roulette spin correctly 2 times out of 3 I could clean up in Vegas.

So, what is the secret of my amazing, D+ performance?

You have to look at the use of color and composition as tools to draw the eye to points of interest.

AI is really bad at this, when left to its own devices.

For example, here:

Part of the reason to suspect that this is AI is the "AI house style" and the bad hands that I literally only noticed right this exact second as I was typing this sentence. Even if the hands were rendered correctly, I would still clock this as AI.

The focal point of this piece ought to be the face of the woman and the little dragon she is looking at (Just noticed the dragon's wings don't match up either), but take off your glasses or squint at this for a second:

Your eye is being drawn by the bright gold sparkles on the lower right side of the piece. That particular bright gold is only in that spot on the image, but there's no reason to look there, it's just an upper arm and an elbow. The bright light source highlighting the woman's horn separates it out as a point of interest.

Meanwhile, the weird aurora streaming out of the woman's face on the left side means that it is blending in with the background.

In other words, the way the image is composed, and the subject matter suggest that your eye should be drawn here:

But the use of color suggests that you should look here:

That's a senseless place to draw the eye towards! It would be a really weird mistake for a human to make! In fact, I think there's a strong argument that the really close cropped picture of the face of the character is a strong improvement. It's still not a particularly good composition, but at least the color contrast now draws the eye to the proper points.

In fact, I would say that a good reason for my performance not being even better was this alarming statement at the start of the test:

I've tried to crop some pictures of both types into unusual shapes, so it won't be as easy as "everything that's in DALL-E's default aspect ratio is AI".

Uh...

So how about this one:

This is a lot better anatomically and in terms of the use of color and light to draw the eye towards sensible parts of the painting. The lighting makes pretty good sense in terms of coming from a particular direction and it also draws the eye to effectively to the face and the outstretched hand of the figure.

It's also a really flat and meaningless composition and subject matter that no renaissance artist would have chosen. What is this angel doing, exactly? Our eye is drawn to the face and hand, and the figure is looking off towards the left side, at, uh, what exactly?

But then I thought, "Well, maybe Scott chopped out a giant chunk of the picture, and this is just a detail from, like, the lower right eighth of some giant painting with three other figures that makes total sense"

This makes sense as a piece of a larger human made artwork, but if you tell me, "Nope, that's the whole thing and this is the original, un-cropped picture" I'd go, "Oh, AI, obviously.

All of the ones I had trouble with were AI art with good composition and use of color, and human ones with bad composition and use of color. For example, this one:

This has three solid points of interest arranged in an interesting relationship with different colors to block them out. I'd say the biggest tells are that the astronauts' feet are out of frame, which is a weird choice, and looking closely now, the landscape and smoke immediately to the right of the ship don't really make sense.

But again; I had to think, "Maybe Scott just cropped it weird and they had feet in the original picture."

Here's another problem:

StableDiffusion being bad at composition is such a known problem that there are a variety of tools which a person can use to manually block out the composition. In fact, let me try something.

I popped open Krita (Which now has a StableDiffusion plugin) and after literally dozens of generations and a couple of different models I landed on ZavyChromaXL with the following prompt:

concept art of two astronauts walking towards a spaceship on an alien planet, with a giant moon in th background, artstation, classic scifi, book cover

And this was the best I could do:

Not great, but Krita has a tool that lets you break an image into regions which each have different prompts, so I quickly blocked something out:

Each of those color blobs has a different part of the prompt, so the green region has "futuristic astronauts" the blue is the spaceship, the orange is the moon, grey is the ground and pink is the sky, which gives us:

Still way too much, so we can use Krita's adaptive patch tool and AI object removal to get:

I'm not saying it's high art, or even any good, but it's better than the stuff I was getting from a pure prompt, because a human did the composition.

But it's still so dominated by AI processes that it's fair to call it "AI Art".

Which makes me wonder how many of the AI pictures I called out as human made because one of the traits I was looking for, good composition, was in fact, actually made by a human.

[stainlesssteellocust]

What's interesting is that I've seen a good few people assume that Jacky and the Pyramid are the only people able to get magic to work, what with the whole spaghetti lockpick analogy, but from my reading they're...not. Oh, they probably are now, and none of the others were ever relevant, sure. But.

The timeline says that the first "small magical effects" were measured by scientists in 1945. I'm pretty sure Jacky wasn't active that early - he'd had an underground reputation for years pre 1971, but 26 years? Someone was doing magical stuff in a lab and getting it scientifically verified back in the 40's.

Plus, consider what he says about the Pyramid. How he doesn't like slamming the door on people and then stopping them from trying to find their own way, because he knows the traps they could fall into. How he hates cops but founded the magic cops, because he knows how dangerous magic can be. You don't need magic cops if magic crime is impossible, and there are only dangers to letting people outside the Pyramid (Eliza was in on it after all) try magic if some of it works.

My guess is that there were probably a fair few governments and corpos trying to build something like Jacky's Numinous Weaponry over the years, and a few would-be wizards with a functioning trick or two in the occult communities he moved in before going public. But any research that wasn't a boondoggle got nipped in the bud once Jacky found out, anyone who didn't join him (not many, since anyone who did figure out a trick would look at him and go I KNEEL) got stopped before they hurt themselves or others, and any old texts or tomes with even a crumb of half-accurate info in them are now in a Pyramid vault where Jacky would read them to the Arseholes when they needed a laugh.

So yeah. There were other wizards, but they were more 'Tonya's lightshow fingers' level with a side order of blowing themselves up as opposed to Jacky '750 Megadeaths an hour' Magus, and maybe the only impact any of them ever had was providing credibility to his 'inverted Pyramid renegades' cover story that nobody believes anyway.

(The whole thing kinda reminds me of something like Unsong, where the names of God become magic spells after Apollo 8 crashes into the crystal sphere that encloses earth and projects a false image of space. Didn't get far but I remember they started patenting the Names and punishing employees for personal use. I should really give that book another go apparently Kissinger teams up with the devil to invade the USSR or something that sounds great

(Or my pet obsession, Charles Stross' Laundry Files books, where magic was always there but didn't really amount to much because they only figured out the scientific underpinnings in the 20th Century. So yes that creepy Lovecraftian tome will kill you, not because it's cursed, but because it's about as accurate as Pliny the Elder's Natural History and if you follow the instructions you are going to explode. Most blood sacrifices aren't because the spell was evil but because it's unoptimised and needs the raw power to brute-force it into actually working, and you could do it bloodlessly with some half-decent code. The easiest spell to cast is "Induce Dementia In Self".

(of course some would argue that that one's undercut a little by the increasing number of exceptions and caveats that appeared as the books went on. Hello Seph hello Elder PHANGs hello Biopunk Fairies hello Actually Functional Necronomicon That Apparently Exists In The Spinoffs)

[opheliagallery]

Emilie Autumn for Abort Magazine Photographer: Scott Alexander