I believe in freedom of speech for people that I don't want to talk to. There is no contradiction in that.

There is simply no other way to explain this email [0] that he wrote.

One critical point, he discusses "criticizing" the neoreactionaries, and says he disagrees with them on several points.

> I want to improve their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they have), the correct criticisms of class and of social justice, and few other things while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk - would be really useful people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this seems to be working - as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still haven't gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender).

There are a "few other things" he thinks they're right about, but he specifically lists all four things that he thinks are problematic. None of them are race science, which implies that race science is one of the "few other things" he thinks they're correct about.

You can put this together with enough of his public writing to see where he stands on the issue. He's clearly aligned with "race realism".

This entire email is also accompanied by a threat never to reveal these thoughts of Scott's. Why? Because he knows that being outed for his real views would do serious damage to his reputation. That's also why he got mad at the NYT, because they had his number and he didn't want anyone to find out about his real politics.

If you're the kind of person who is naive enough to think "He wrote an anti-reactionary FAQ, how could he be a reactionary?", I am sorry, but you're dealing with a lying snake.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lm36nk/comment/g...

There is a legal difference as well as a technical difference. AIs don't learn the same way human brains do. The law does not treat these things the same. You may want to draw an analogy between the two and say they're "basically the same", but they are not basically the same. They aren't the same at all, outside of a very weak analogy. Is training kind of sort of like human learning? Yes. That doesn't mean anything. Dogs are kind of sort of like children, but if you try to treat your child the way you treat your dog, you end up in prison. Because children aren't dogs, either in reality, or in the eyes of the legal system.

Please, AI boosters, stop using this one. Human brains aren't clocks. Human brains aren't computers. Human brains aren't LLMs. AI training does not mimic human learning in any significant way.

We don't need three garbage corporate operating systems mismanaged by MBAs, we already have two!

This is so insanely out of touch. Most people will never be able to afford a house over $200k, even in Austin. I live here, you apparently live in California. As a resident, let me tell you that Austin is not affordable, and definitely not "inexpensive". Housing here is relatively inexpensive compared to the most expensive metros in the world, it's not relatively inexpensive compared to the US housing market, or more relevantly, the Texas housing market. This isn't the Bay Area, it's the middle of Texas.

> A lot of "ugly" 5-over-1's have been built in Austin, and it's working to keep the place affordable for working class people.

Austin isn't affordable for working class people and it hasn't been for a long time, so no, those new constructions aren't keeping it affordable, they've just stopped the insane rent increases that were coming every year for more than a decade. A living wage in Austin for a single person is $100,000, for a family it's $200,000, and that is well above the median household income of ~$90,000. Working class people are well below the median and aren't making $90,000 per year. These numbers are from an article in our local newspaper from this week. [0]

[0] https://www.statesman.com/news/local/article/austin-cost-of-...

Good thing I'm not running for office, and instead am merely having a conversation on the internet. I would vote for someone running on that issue, though!

> But if you're undocumented, it's already a massive pain to participate in society.

So I should be fine with any changes that embiggens that pain? I am not.

"Undocumented" doesn't mean "residing illegally" anyway, it just means "lacking documents", which is a state that many perfectly legitimate US citizens find themselves in. But we should want people who are here illegally and everyone else to be able to use the world wide web and computers regardless of their legal status, just like everyone should be allowed to eat and buy food regardless of their legal status, because that's just basic humanity.

It's not because of pandemic overhiring, and if that were true, the layoffs in 2021-2022 would have handled it. It's 2026. The people getting laid off (on average) haven't worked at these companies since before the pandemic, they got hired in ~2023 (average tenure at a tech company is ~3 years).

It's not because of AI either. Nobody is replacing jobs with AI, AI can't do anyone's job.

It's not because of interest rates. People hired like crazy when interest rates were this high in the oughts.

It's because Elon Musk's Twitter purchase and subsequent management convinced every executive in tech that you can cut to the bone, fuck your product's quality completely, and be totally fine. It's not true, but the downsides come later and the cash influx comes now, so they're doing it anyway.

There's some speculation in the comments about what is or isn't in the pledge. I recommend reading it yourself.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/03/ratepayer-protec...

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/03/rate...

This is about marketing, about getting people to know and care that the thing you built exists. You can execute perfectly (in terms of making a great product) and not get a single eyeball.

99% of incoming calls to my phone are spam. I won't pick up an unknown number unless someone has already contacted me and told me to be expecting a phone call, or it's a call from someone I already know (people I already know don't call me either).

That is to say, your mileage may vary on what counts as a "suitable medium".

(MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW)

For example, in the first season, the characters we follow are not inventing the PC - that has been done already. They're one of many companies making an IBM clone, and they are modestly successful but not remarkably so. At the end of the season, one of the characters sees the Apple Macintosh and realizes that everything he had done was a waste of time (from his perspective, he wanted to change the history of computers, not just make a bundle of cash), he wasn't actually inventing the future, he just thought he was. They also don't really start from being underfunded unknowns in each season - the characters find themselves in new situations based on their past experiences in ways that feel reasonable to real life.

I'm saying that you shouldn't call photographs paintings because they aren't paintings. I don't particularly care if people make AI "music" or "art" and I don't particularly care if they consume it (people have been consuming awful media for the entire history of humanity, they aren't going to stop because I say so), but if you give me a ham sandwich and call it a hamburger I am going to be annoyed and tell you that it isn't a hamburger and to stop calling it that because you're misleading people who actually appreciate hamburgers.

AI "art" isn't art. I don't care whether you like it. It's like fractals or rock formations or birdsong - it may be aesthetically appealing to some people, but that isn't the definition of art.

I hope you finish the book. I would buy it.

But the OP was making a much stronger claim, that it is, in principle, impossible to learn anything on one's own, and that HAS to be wrong, for the reasons I listed.

> Effort doesn’t equal improvement unless it's guided.

This obviously has to be false. Progress is made, people learn better ways to play golf and do all the other things. At the frontier, people simply MUST be doing self-guided experimentation and learning from objective results, and since this has always been true, there was once someone who could not play golf at all (because no one could) who figured out how to hit a ball with a club correctly on their own, without learning from anyone else, because that person was the first person who did it. Thus, self-guidance must be possible and self-improvement must also be.

> But if you repeat the same shitty swing for 10 years with no feedback, you’ll end up exactly where you started.

You always have feedback. If your ball doesn't go where you intended, your swing was bad in some way. If you keep doing the same thing without making adjustments based on measured outcomes, yeah, you won't improve. But you can try different things and figure out what works and what doesn't without ANY instruction or outside guidance.

It's also interesting that you draw a a correlation between "hard to fire" and "incompetent". It's very hard to fire Elon Musk, what does that make you conclude about him?

I've never experienced customer service half that good from ANY corporation.