My reading of the post (which is contestable) is that he chose the people as a sort of joke about "here is a controversial or absurdly in-group person I like on this issue". I can't prove that reading is correct, but I don't really see another that makes sense of the post. Some of the people are just too boring choices-Yglesias, for the joke to just be that the list is absurd. 

Thiel and Sanders don't have much in common, but Scott has stuff in common with Thiel and Sanders. (I.e. he shares broadly pro-market views and skepticism of social justice and feminism with Thiel, and possibly pro HBD views, although I don't know what Thiel thinks about HBD, plus an interest in futurism and progress, and he shares redistributive and anti-blaming the poor for being poor economic views with Sanders.) 

Fair enough, this does make me move a bit further in the "overall a joke" direction. But I still think the names basically match his ideological leanings. 

Having now read the whole thing, not just the bit you quoted originally, I think it is sort of a joke but not really: a funny, slightly exaggerated rendering of what his real ideological views actually are, exaggerated a bit for comic effect. I don't think Thorstad was majorly in the wrong here, but maybe he could have flagged this a bit. 

"the Murray pick was absurdist humor" What makes you think that? I would feel better if I thought that was true. 

One thing I will say here that I think shouldn't be controversial:

 At the very least the Cade Metz NYT on Scott fairly clearly did not give readers a misleading impression (whether or not it gave the reader that impression in a fair way.): the article does not state "Scott Alexander is a hardcore white nationalist", or even, in my view, really give people that impression. What it does give the reader as an impression is that he is highly skeptical of feminism and social justice, his community of followers includes white nationalists, and he is sympathetic to views on race on which Black people are genetically intellectually inferior. All these things are true, as anyone who reads Thorstad's blogpost can verify. But more importantly, while I understand not everyone reads Scott and his blog commentators religiously, all these things are fairly obviously true if you've followed Scott's writing closely. (As I have; I used to like it a great deal, before disagreement on exactly this stuff very gradually soured me on it.*) I think it is a failure of community epistemics that a lot of people jumped to "this is a smear" before really checking, or suspending judgment. 


*I actually find this whole topic very emotionally upsetting and confusing, because I think I actually have a very similar personality to Scott and other rationalists, and seeing them endorse what to me is fairly obvious evil-I'm talking here about reactionary political projects here, not any particular empirical beliefs-makes me worried that  I am bad too. Read everything I say on this thread with this bias in mind. 

Disagree votes are going to be predictably confusing here, since I don't know whether people disagree with the main point that most people who defend Scott do think he is friendly towards HBD, or they just disagree with something else, like my very harsh words about (some) rationalists. 

Don't see a significant difference. 

I'd say an obvious difference is that EA family planning orgs aren't doing permanent sterilization. 

I'd also say that the reason Thorstad is upset is probably mostly because he sees Scott's support for the org as "let's get rid of drug addicts children from the next generation because they have bad genes", and-rightly in my view-worries that this is the sort of logic that the Nazis used to justify genocide of the "wrong sort" of people, and that if HBD becomes widely believed people might turn this logic against Black people. Scott could (and would) reasonably protest that there is a big difference between being prepared to use violence for eugenic goals, and merely incentivizing people towards them in non-coerceive ways. But if you apply this to race rather than drug addicts "we should try and make there be less Black people, non-coercively" is still Nazi and awful. 

This sort of eugenic reasoning doesn't actually seem to be what's going on with Project Prevention itself, incidentally. From the Guardian article, it seems like the founder genuinely values the children of drug addicts as human beings, given she adopted them and is just trying to stop them being hurt. From that point of view, I'd say she is probably a bit confused though: it's not clear most children of addicts have lives that are worse than nothing, even though they will be worse than average. So it's not clear it actually helps them to prevent them being born. 

I imagine people inclined to defend Scott are often a) People who themselves agree with HBD or b) people who don't really have an opinion on it (or maybe even disagree with it)* but think that Scott arrived at his "belief" (i.e. >50% credence) in HBD by honest inquiry into the evidence to the best of his ability, and think that is never wrong to form empirical beliefs in this way. I don't think people could believe Scott rejects HBD if they actually read him at all closely. (Though he tends to think and talk in probabilistic terms rather than full acceptance/rejection. As you should!) In the Hanania review he explicitly says he puts "moderate probability" on some HBD views, which isn't that different from what he said in the Brennan email. 

As to WHY people think a) and b), I'd say it is a mixture of (random order, not order of importance):  

1) People like Scott and that biases them.

2) People want to defend a prominent rationalist/EA for tribal reasons.

3) People have a (genuinely praiseworthy in itself in my view) commitment to following the evidence where it leads even when it leads to taboo conclusion, and believe that Scott's belief in HBD (and other controversial far-right-aligned beliefs of his) have resulted from him following the evidence to the best of his ability, and therefore that he should not be condemned for them. (You can think this even if you don't think the beliefs in question are correct. My guess is "the views are wrong and bad but he arrived at them honestly so you can't really blame him" is what less right-leaning rationalists like Kelsey Piper or Ozy Brennan think for example, though they can speak for themselves obviously. Maybe Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks this too actually, he's condemned rationalisms far-right wing in pretty strong terms in the past, though that doesn't necessarily mean he rejects every HBD belief I guess.) 

4) A faction of rationalists (and therefore EAs, and also I guess *some* EAs who aren't rationalists are like this, though my guess is much less) are just, well *bigoted*: they enjoying hearing and discussing things about why women/Black people are bad, because they like hating on women/Black people. As to WHY they are like that, I think (though I may be typical minding here**), that an important part of the answer is that they feel rejected socially, and especially sexually, for their broadly "autistic" personality traits, and also believe that the general culture is "feminizing" against the things that people-mostly, not entirely men-with that type of personality tend to value/overvalue, truth-seeking, honesty even when it upsets people, trying to be self-controlled and stoical. (I actually agree that certain parts of US liberal culture HAVE probably moved too far against those things.) 


*My guess is that Matthew Adelstein/Bentham's Bulldog is probably a Scott-defender who thinks HBD is wrong: https://benthams.substack.com/p/losing-faith-in-contrarianism

**I have autism, and have recently acquired my first ever girlfriend aged 37, and even as my considered belief is that they are in fact quite unfair to feminists in many ways, a lot of the feelings in Scott's Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled posts are very, very familiar to me.