Fuck it, we ball: on rats, postrats, metarats, nrx what distinguishes and generated them

For this substack I wanted to give people very polished pieces but I’ve only put one out so far and I got a request to give you ‘shitposts but with more room to breathe’ so, instead, we’re doing that. Let’s go:

As some of you know I’ve recently (yesterday) had a small spat with the putanumonit guy. If you wanna check it out click on this tweet, scroll to the top and start reading.

NotRivalVoices @nosilverv

@yashkaf @msutherl @mechanicalmonk1 @natural_hazard disembodiment (dissociation) and many autistic (anti-social) traits (See mark zuck) comes from a response to trauma

It broke into various threads so it’s kinda hard to follow but that’s the gist of it.

After the spat, in a DM, I managed to get my thoughts in order about what unites post-rats and makes them differ from rats and, as bonus, the theory also explains metarats and the conversion of some to nrx and to the sneerclub. I' share the DM below.

The theory

This thesis shows how ambient meaning can be encoded in a work of literature, above and beyond the truth-value of the propositions in that work. The thesis is long (150 words) so here’s an intuition pump instead, using hyperintentionality: basically there’s a million things of saying the same thing, in terms of referents and their relations. (The usual example is contrasting “the evening star” to “the morning star”. They both refer to the same thing “out there” but there is a stylistic difference in using one or another and thus the choice of using one or another is informative.) So we get that stylistic choices - which don’t affect content! - are informative, but what are they informative of? The claim is that it is informative of the author’s worldview. Of how it is like that the world feels to them, of the what-it’s-like to be them, in the world.

This what-it’s-like to be them is a “stimmung” in Heideggerian terminology and an existential feeling in Ratcliffe’s. (I’m really fucking sorry I need to link to two books and a total of 450 pages to get my point across but here we are - maybe this is why Moldbugg’s posts are so long.)

If you don’t wanna read that just think of Eliezer, Moldbugg’s, or Zero HP’s writing. They each have a super strong and distinct from one another vibe to their work. Ask each of the to express the same proposition and you get three very different works that feel very different.

So I’m trying to make the point that you can conceptually separate a work’s content from its vibe.

Given that, and that EY’s has a body of work, his work can be separated into two parts:
(1) content, and
(2) vibe.

I’d claim that the vibe can be summed up with one word: “disembodied”. Reading him you get the what-it’s-like, the feeling, of being an extremely smart mind that forgot it even has a body, much less it is one. (I originally used ‘traumatised’ and ‘autistic’ instead of “disembodied” but people objected to those so I’m using this instead.)

If you’ve met rats irl you’ll be struck by the fact that they very much share that disembodied vibe. I don’t think they picked it up from the work but I do think they were attracted to the work because it matches and validates their vibe, their disembodiment.

So rats are, unknowingly, attracted to the vibe and not the content. The content is an add-on, a superficial sign of group belonging. This makes sense of why the content is evidently not in their minds - they say all the right words but then are riddled with problems of ‘akrasia’ and their inability to do the ‘utility-maximising thing’. This is because it was never about the content in the first place, which is why the content isn’t in their minds. If it were it would be trivial to act on it. It isn’t, they’re just attracted to the vibe and professing the content. As a bonus this neatly explains why they’re so attracted to Eliezer’s fiction. Because it is the pure distillation of what they want in the first place, because it is pure vibe.

So that’s part 1, on rats and their origin.

Part 2 is the kind of objections you can have to Eliezer’s work and what those originated.

As the work can be divided into content and vibe you can get objections to the former or the latter.

The objections to the latter, to its vibe, its mood, its aesthetics, give you the post-rats. They don’t deny Eliezer’s content, but they very much deny his vibe. In this denial they substitute Eliezer’s vibe with whichever other vibe. There is no coherent doctrine, no issue positioning, nothing unifying other than the criticism of rats - knowingly or unknowingly because of their disembodied aesthetic - and an attention to aesthetics, since that is what was being disregarded. This is why postrats aren’t a coherent group and why postrat is just an umbrella term. This is why there are “1000 schools of post-rationality”. Everyone sides in their favorite aesthetic and there is no quorum on it so there isn’t a real group.

You can also have objections to content. In content Eliezer’s work fails in two ways: first, it pretends that it is not a philosophy - but instead the truth. Secondly, it pretends that it is not a politics - but instead the truth. Although it clearly has a very specific philosophical stance and very clearly political aims. Thus it can be critiqued on these two fronts.

Critiques of it as a philosophy have their higher exponent in David Chapman. Chapman claims that it fails as a philosophy of how reason works, that you cannot get there by a mix of first principles math and wrong-headed psychology research programs but instead that you need to study how reasonableness actually works in the world, hence, ethnomethodology. The people that accept this critique call themselves meta-rational as in, they study where and how, in which specific contexts and with what background work rationality in the limited defined scope of the sequences can work.

Critiques of it as a politics comes both from the left and from the right. From the left gets you the sneerclub. From the right you get, back in the day, moreright, and generally the outflow of people from lesswrong to Moldbugg.

In sum:

• EY’s work has a content and a vibe.

• The vibe attracts disembodied people that come to identify as rats

• Some have gained value from the content of the work but denied its vibe. The form these denials varies. The loose collective is known “post-rationalism”

• Denials of content come from a philosophical or political critique.

• The philosophical critique has the highest exponent in David Chapman’s studies of how reasonableness actually works. This is the metarational camp.

• The political critique comes from the left in the form of sneerclub and from the right in the form of more right (back in the day, now everyone just moved on to moldbuggsianism)