Thanks for the thoughtful reply and suggested reading. Holy shit, paywalls are hardcore now (NYT link dividing the screen space literally in half) but fortunately there was an archive link to eliminate that issue. I was only really interested in knowing the details around Scott Alexander in so far as I didn’t want to be unknowingly spreading messages from Hitler 2.0 or something, but still without having a dog in this fight, I get the impression the ominous dangers implied about the nefarious Rationalists is overselling the reality of the situation.
The way the author/group’s positions are offhandedly portrayed (especially under the Life in the Grey Tribe heading) definitely raise red flags for me, but just opening a couple of the links and reading the content myself I didn’t come away with nearly the same impression of intent. (NOTE: I’m adding the bolding to certain elements)
NYT
The Grey Tribe was characterized by libertarian beliefs, atheism, “vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up,” and “reading lots of blogs,” he wrote. Most significantly, it believed in absolute free speech.
Right away I can envision another “why would you want to silence me? I’m allowed to say anything if this is a free country!” excuse from some jerk online. I read that post on SSC and it has the following before it even begins:
[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to be explaining and rewording things I have heard from a bunch of other people. Unapologetically America-centric because I’m not informed enough to make it otherwise. Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things.]
There’s also no hits on “speech”, “absolute”, “censor” in the post. It doesn’t come across to me like someone advocating for the unrestricted right to spread their hateful/harmful ideology. A figure like Elon Musk has made his positions pretty clear about why he (nominally, but not actually) believes in absolute free speech, the Grey Tribe post seems to mostly be a criticism about in-group purity testing and self-censorship.
NYT
He said that affirmative action was difficult to distinguish from “discriminating against white men.”
Again, it’s easy to imagine this is going to be another red pill argument about how giving disenfranchised people an equal shot is really just repressing white people etc. With more of the quote providing context it doesn’t read as that (to me):
You’ve probably heard that memo writer James Damore has sued Google for discrimination against conservative white men. It seems like a complicated case: political discrimination is generally legal but might not be in California (see here), and discriminating against white men seems hard to distinguish from affirmative action and various societywide diversity campaigns universal enough that I assume someone would have noticed before now if they were illegal. […]
That NYT piece was really hung-up on his real name throughout though which to me raises questions about their motivations behind their stated concerns. It would be understandable if this was a scenario where some NGO was masquerading as a single real person, but here I can easily understand why someone would prefer to keep their offline identity de-emphasized.
Re: Reddit
In this area I’m going to willfully stick my head in the sand and ignore completely. I just can’t bring myself to want to wade through that collection of bots, bad-faith users, advertisers etc. to try to separate fact from fiction.
I also have contrarian tendencies and I’m not intending this to be a fight about who’s right/wrong – you’re clearly far more familiar with this author and subject than I am. And again, I sincerely appreciate the follow-up info. I can certainly see how some positions taken or discussed can act like a beacon attracting bad elements, but I also think that is nearly universal whenever there’s people involved - and that it’s possible to interpret virtuous things into a call for evil if predisposed. There’s some truth to dangers of gazing into the abyss and all that, but I also think it’s foolish to be concerned that everyone that reads Catcher in the Rye is going to get bad ideas about presidents, ya know?