Among the Rationalists

Harpers has an interesting article up, Come With Us If You Want To Live: Among the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley. Here’s an ungated version. There’s a lot of space given over to the musings of my long-time friend Michael Vassar. I have to admit that the writer does impart effectively the Michael’s general affect. To me this quote from Michael is very important:

“The current ecosystem is so totally fucked up,” Vassar said. “But if you have conversations here”—he gestured at the hotel—“people change their mind and learn and update and change their behaviors in response to the things they say and learn. That never happens anywhere else.”

This is true. Not as true as you would hope, but it happens. The fact that you could change someone’s mind in one single conversation is the reason I spent a fair amount of time with the “Less Wrong community” between 2008 and 2011, and still consider many of them friends and acquaintances (I’ve drifted a bit since starting grad school in 2011, but I keep in touch and see them whenever I’m in SF or NYC).

In the article above I know basically all of the non-famous people listed on some level personally. A lot of the description is a little gratuitous, but I have to concede that the author accurately conveyed the aesthetic. Though the stuff about apocalyptic libertarianism is way overdone. For most of the time I’ve known Michael his politics have been that of a moderate Democrat, though he’s open to heterodoxy, and sounded like a post-political elitist who had soured on possibility of genuine capitalism the last time I talked to him at length (in September of 2014). Eliezer does call himself a small-l-libertarian, but he isn’t very political, and he was a supporter of Barack Obama from what I recall. Among the run-of-the-mill people who associate with LW and MIRI the dominant ethos is nerd, not libertarian. Here’s the 2013 LW survey results for politics:

POLITICAL:
Communist: 11, .7%
Conservative: 64, 3.9%
Liberal: 580, 35.5%
Libertarian: 437, 26.7%
Socialist: 502, 30.7%
Did not answer: 42, 2.6%

COMPLEX POLITICAL WITH WRITE-IN:
Anarchist: 52, 3.2%
Conservative: 16, 1.0%
Futarchist: 42, 2.6%
Left-libertarian: 142, 8.7%
Liberal: 5
Moderate: 53, 3.2%
Pragmatist: 110, 6.7%
Progressive: 206, 12.6%
Reactionary: 40, 2.4%
Social democrat: 154, 9.5%
Socialist: 135, 8.2%
Did not answer: 26.2%

I suspect the libertarianism aspect had more to do with the role of Peter Thiel* in the community, and, the fact that this piece was being published in Harper’s, where the idea of apocalyptic libertarians would be an easy pitch. One can find the same apocalyptic aspect to many environmentalist movements, but I doubt they’d be as interesting to Harper’s readers since they’d be sympathetic to that sort of apocalyptic pessimism.

* In relation to Thiel’s politics, I should add that many LW/Singulatarian people I’ve talked to are in total denial about his viewpoints when they deviate from their own. Some progressives who admire him refuse to believe that he’s a conservative-libertarian. Others are totally confused as to his avowal that he is some sort of Christian.