IIRC, it's a blog that's very influential in the "rationalist" community, which I think spun out of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong. So very long-winded posts on miscellaneous topics.
I remember at the peak of the 2016 post-election meltdown the SSC subreddit hosted a sort of "ask Trump supporters anything" thread. Despite the absolute insanity of the time and only a minuscule fraction of the sub's readership supporting Trump, the conversation was interesting, calm and uniformly civil.
There were a few Social Justice types that used to comment there too; again, all very civil, although there was sometimes the sense that they were regarded as an interesting zoo exhibit.
Not that I have a problem with SSC, I think it's a cool blog.
Really it's not derisive, it's self defense.
Its called the “Democratic Party”, and it is a proper noun, which distinguishes it visiually form the common use of “democratic”.
Obama's team launched https://democrats.org/ in 2009 or so. I really think people shouldn't get upset over "Democrat".
Not really. "Democrat Party" is literally just a shibboleth used by opposing partisans who are upset that "democratic" is an adjective with positive associations. Everything else is just a post-hoc rationalization.
The usage in that domain name is as a noun. "Joe is a Democrat" is fine. That's a noun. "Democrat politicians" is not fine. That's an adjective.
A lot of the public declarations coming from "rationalist" communities remind me of public declarations of sin coming from certain religious groups. Though it presents itself as self-effacing, it ends up being affirming. You rarely see the thought extend to "therefore, outgroups that I've been deriding perhaps know better than my ingroup."
Particularly interesting when there are biases that have almost become dogma in certain "rationalist" circles, such as the preoccupation with godlike artificial superintelligence.
It's because rationality that's committed to a narrow definition of what rationality means typically leads to irrationality at some terminal point.
When people describe themselves as "rationalist" they typically mean "instrumental reason" which is a form of reasoning that has its own bias and baked in values (e.g. western modern values, often supremely meritocratic, technocratic, utilitarian values) which are different from the values powering the methods and forms of reasoning of other cultures and other historical periods. There's a tendency for a superiority complex to creep in where one who takes undue pride in one's "reasoning" sees only one mode of reasoning as the one true reasoning (one true value system).
Ancient cultures had value systems that were entirely different than ours, this doesn't make our scientific reasoning "better" it makes our reasonings incommensurable until you commit to some system of shared values as the one true system of values (e.g. self-preservation, but there's nothing saying that's what humanity should value and in fact one could argue that one of the important facets of being human is the capability to reject this value).
It's better at coming to the correct conclusions about objective aspects of the world (better – not perfect, mind you). This is useful if your value system prioritises knowledge, though knowledge is pretty useful for all sorts, so I think science is good unless your value system penalises knowledge-generation.
In general, the quotes in this context signal an ideological opposition.
Would you agree that each of those words can be used in "a specific jargony way" and that putting quotation marks around either very likely signals opposition?
There's a similar dynamic with rationalism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism
Some have given a definition of rationalist (or rationalist-adjacent) as : Eliezer Yudkowsky is a rationalist, and anyone who spends a lot of time arguing with rationalists is a rationalist.
This is quite a different thing that the sense of the word described in the Wikipedia article.
Personally, I'm rather fond of the group, but there are still cases where I find myself using quote marks when describing it.