Listening to Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich (audiobook, not podcast), and learning heaps about people I’ve known were part of the Rationalist orbit for years, but hadn’t dug too much into, like Balaji Srinivasan. He apparently used the red/blue/grey tribe setup in The Network State, which was published long after Scott’s SSC post using the same language.

I remember that Balaji went nutty when the NYT published about Scott Alexander. Durán attributes that to Cade Metz reporting on Balaji telling Yarvin that they might need to intimidate/harass journalists to keep them from reporting on their fascist bullshit, but all the parallels make me wonder how long they knew/read each other. Did Scott influence Balaji first, or the other way around?

Certainly I am amused that none of the Rationalists have been named yet, 3 hours in. I wonder if it rankles, knowing how bad Eliezer has wanted to make something that people would actually pay for, having a whole book written about Thiel and Yarvin and Srinivasan where he doesn’t rate at all because he’s just some podunk little cult leader who has to beg for grants and find girlfriends to live with and do his laundry while he eats the crumbs off of their tables. Or if it stung Scott when Srinivasan’s book was panned as idiotic, knowing that at least some of those ideas were his.