Drat, I just realized that I let the 10-year anniversary of my first seeing Scott Alexander's writing pass unrecognized by me. It must have been, most likely, January 13th, 2014 that a distant Facebook friend (likely friended from certain philosophical-discourse-ish Facebook groups years earlier but I already couldn't remember; we've certainly never met) posted Scott's Slate Star Codex essay "A Response to Apophemi on Triggers".

Mind you, this isn't the most important 10-year anniversary for me this year, as I didn't follow up on learning who Scott Alexander was or familiarizing myself with Less Wrong or the rationalist community until my spring semester was over several months later, sometime in May 2014, and I didn't (re)adopt the handle Liskantope and start participating in any way until a couple of months later still. When I first read "a response to Apophemi" ten years ago, I'm not sure I registered the name of the author, and I distinctly remember assuming that Slate Star Codex was some sort of community blog or forum, perhaps through glancing at the archives and seeing an implausible number of posts for only one author, and more likely because most of my exposure to "the blogosphere" had been through community blogs / online magazines / something of that sort (e.g. Feministing, Jezebel, Freethought Blogs). But reading a blog post like that was an absolute revelation to me, and I still have fairly vivid memories of some of my thought processes as I went through it section by section. I recall forcefully filing it away in my mind as "I need to follow up on the source of this to see if there's more, but not until this new semester is over and I have more time."

The revelation for me came from not only the (honestly rather earthshaking) event of this being the first article I ever read (as opposed to the occasional poorly-calibrated Facebook comment from that one friend) arguing against the general SJ mentality of the time (I was introduced to the term "Social Justice" through this essay and had internally been referring to it by several other terms up until that time; "woke" wouldn't show up until several years later), and eloquently at that, and not seeming to come from a conservative or otherwise obnoxious viewpoint. It was also that I had just never encountered anyone who wrote quite like this, with so much genuine politeness and compassion for the other party whose views they were arguing against and yet so rhetorically forceful against them at the same time, with a particular combination of intellectual meticulousness, and easy-to-read, semi-informal, lightness to the writing style, through which the general good character of the writer palpably comes through.

(Well, the brief paragraph about "hoisting the black flag" is pretty sinister actually, and I prefer to think that Scott was being carelessly hyperbolic. I don't think I took any notice of it on the first or second reading during 2014, though. At the time I had no idea who the "Heartiste" was that Scott was referring to.)

It's always interesting to reread something from a full decade ago and think about how long that is in "internet years" and how ways of talking about certain things has changed. Scott used the ze/zir pronouns which were (unfortunately) still very popular at the time but, as I recall, not for much longer, and he switched to they/them within a few months of this. He seems to use transsexual interchangeably with transgender (as I remember I kind of did at the time as well) and even used cissexual, which I didn't recall was ever a word. And, of course, although he discussed racism as a name-calling word quite a bit, he basically used "SJ" and "feminism" quite interchangeably, reflecting a perception I shared throughout the first half of the 2010's of SJ being essentially equivalent to (the popular internet form of) feminism.

It's still kind of a mystery to me exactly who Apophemi was. Okay, looking back at their post that Scott was responding to, it seems they were also going by Cyrus Alexander, and were an Oberlin student at the time. But, given that once I got into rationalist community stuff a few months later, I basically never heard anything about them again, and their Wordpress blog's most recent update is from only half a year later, I have to wonder what it is about their blog or this particular essay demanded so much of Scott's attention. Apophemi's post isn't even particularly substantial or hard-hitting or well-written; why did it carry so much weight? Was it just that Apophemi was directly attacking the rationalist community and got a critical number of shares and reblogs? Was Apophemi just a temporarily famous figure in that corner of the online world, rather like the Tumblr-user Hotel Concierge was for a brief period around a year later before becoming almost forgotten? It is interesting that only two (arguably three, counting Ozy, mentioned multiple times not by name in Scott's piece) characters were involved in the first big controversial rat-community-related essay I was exposed to, and then one of them immediately and permanently disappeared from my view.

EDITED TO ADD: I also forgot to mention that Scott's "response to Apophemi" explicitly describes the cancellation attempt against him when he was editor of his college newspaper, and as far as I know, this is the earliest time Scott explicitly talked about this traumatic life event (except that he probably talked about it in his LiveJournal at the time it happened, but as he had locked the pre-college-graduation period of his LJ right before I came across it -- likely primarily because of this incident! -- I and most others have never seen it). He (understandably!) pretty much never mentioned it so explicitly again in the next decade, so my very first introduction to Scott included knowing this about him while I don't think that many among his bulk of later fans did. But it's an interesting (probable) coincidence that, as of several days ago, he first described the event again in his January 24th post on trauma/politics, ten years later to the month.

Now it's May 2024, so ten years to the month after I properly discovered SSC and the online rationalist community -- having read my first SSC post in January 2014, assuming it was written by some minor contributor on some kind of community blog, and setting it aside as something to follow up on once my current new semester of grad school was over didn't count as such. So, ten years to the month since my world was cracked open in a way that I can't describe except to say that I can't recall any other intellectual discovery that impacted my life this profoundly (intellectual discovery not in the sense of learning some new intellectual truth, but as in the discovery of a type of world out there I had wished for since around college but hadn't known existed). I place a lot of sentimental value on recalling calendar dates, and so I spent a little while yesterday evening trying to pin down the calendar date of the day in 2014 I decided to find that blog post again and check out the blog it came from (which led to me discovering Less Wrong as well as launching on a binge reading of Scott's LiveJournal entries).

I still can't figure out what day of May it would have been or even be 100% sure that it wasn't at the start of June 2014 instead. I even went as far as grabbing my old, long-retired laptop which was still a spring chicken and the only computer I used in early 2014 and trying to search for things in the browsing history in hopes that somehow that would give me a clue (old LiveJournal posts did get turned up but I didn't know how to get it to show me the dates I first visited them). Here's what I have for clues:

So I guess I'm left with, most likely hypothesis, roughly May 16-19, 2014 as my breaking-through-into-this-different-world moment; by the end of this week then it will be a full decade. Sorry for putting anyone through such useless rambling on the offchance that they're still reading this.

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Elliot Rodger massacre. While I know this isn't ideally sensitive to the scope of this very real tragedy, I remember it best as kicking off a Memorial Day weekend which formed the zenith (within my radar) of anti- "Nice Guy" rhetoric and of my discomfort with popular feminism. I remember it as a pretty tough weekend for me, pretty bad mental health -wise, not being able to focus on much else, feeling torn by resentment at the (from my point of view) callous approach in the discourse surrounding me simultaneous with guilt for experiencing the resentment and feeling that I, like my vocal "male ally" friends, needed somehow to "repent" of my underlying misogyny.

Shortly after writing the post immediately above, I remembered this 10th anniversary was coming and remembered also that it definitely happened after, but only very shortly after, my Big Revelation about the existence of the online rationalist movement. I even remembered that I stumbled upon a Facebook comment of Scott Alexander himself commenting on the discourse surrounding the tragedy, right after he made the comment (his Facebook profile showed his real last name, so I found out his real name within days of discovering him, a fact which much later made me bemused by the emphasis he later placed on his real identity not being outed by the NYT!). I managed to reconstruct all of this by looking up activity from 10 years ago on Facebook.

So, I concluded that in fact, my Big Revelation almost certainly happened at latest in the May 16-19 window, 2014, and possibly a few days earlier than that.