GeniesLoki

are there assholes? of course. But if anyone told you rats are *disproportionately* assholes versus other groups, that was a gotdam lie.

TBH it's really obviously at least partly an external attack that the community was ill-prepared for, followed by a lot of people making individually rational (ha) choices to not want to be associated with the rationalist reputation.

I was never a rationalist proper in the first place, but I did notice that I needed to add increasingly careful disclaimers about sharing rationalist stuff over time.

(I do think there's an actual asshole problem in some rationalist spaces, especially SSC comment threads, but it's mostly rationalist-adjacents and even there it's closer to an asshole presence than an asshole problem per se)

AFAICT mostly people just really don't like nerds, but it became unpopular to say so overtly once nerd culture was coopted by the mainstream, so they had to hide their dislike by labelling nerds as problematic first and *then* make fun of them for being nerds.

I mean, this is a nice just-so story, but as a nerd there are definitely problems in nerd culture that got worse as it accumulated market share

somehow I doubt that the peaked-in-highschool types who would shove people into lockers are reading a bunch of theory and writing articles about how nerds are problematic, instead of going to the local bar & grilling with their buddies or whatever normies do these days

Oh there are huge problems with nerd culture, I just find most of the attacks on it don't really seem like good faith criticisms, or especially grounded in theory.