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)

the ostensible asshole problem is that neurotypicals can't deal with autist straight shooters

While I agree with you, your framing here of "straight shooters just tell it like it is" misses the essential nuance of "sometimes straight shooters are factually incorrect, and their straight-shooting makes them sound like an asshole."

Essentially, it comes across as claiming epistemic confidence of 100% on any topic. That's intellectual dishonesty, straight-up. "But it's a mathematical proof therefore it's 100% logical and-" and there's a 0.5% chance that you fucked up your own proof, get over yourself.

straight-shooting doesn't mean you're 100% confident