The contrarian nature of these ideas makes them appealing to people who maybe don’t think enough about the consequences.” The tech industry loves disrupters and disruptive thought,” said Elizabeth Sandifer, a scholar who closely follows and documents the Rationalists. “It is no surprise that this has caught on among the tech industry. Why hold anything back? That was often the answer a Rationalist would arrive at.Īnd perhaps the clearest and most influential place to watch that thinking unfold was on Scott Alexander’s blog. labs, they release products - including facial recognition systems, digital assistants and chatbots - even while knowing they can be biased against women and people of color, and sometimes spew hateful speech. There are good reasons to try and understand that psyche, because the decisions made by tech companies and the people who run them eventually affect millions.Īt Twitter and Facebook, leaders were reluctant to remove words from their platforms - even when those words were untrue or could lead to violence. Slate Star Codex was a window into the Silicon Valley psyche. The ideas they exchanged were often controversial - connected to gender, race and inherent ability, for example - and voices who might push back were kept at bay. They deeply distrusted the mainstream media and generally preferred discussion to take place on their own terms, without scrutiny from the outside world. Friedman said, were “social justice warriors.” They were considered a threat to one of the core beliefs driving the discussion: free speech.Īs the national discourse melted down in 2020, as the presidential race gathered steam, the pandemic spread and protests mounted against police violence, many in the tech industry saw the attitudes fostered on Slate Star Codex as a better way forward. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. “They range politically from communist to anarcho-capitalist, religiously from Catholic to atheist, and professionally from a literal rocket scientist to a literal plumber - both of whom are interesting people.” Fellow commenters on the site, he noted, represented a wide cross-section of viewpoints. “It is the one place I know of online where you can have civil conversations among people with a wide range of views,” said David Friedman, an economist and legal scholar who was a regular part of the discussion.
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