It keeps being falsely stated that the NYT "exposed" Mr. Scott's identity. As correctly states in the NYT Scott was using his name in connection with the blog for years.
It really colors my judgment of him that he would attack the free press this way. It's funny a so called "rationalist" doesn't want to be attached to his own writings, because you know people might attack him and well that would hurt his feelings.
The stated reason for protecting his identity is that he’s a practicing psychiatrist who regularly receives threats from people who disagree with their perceptions of his blog content (hardly mere “concern for his feelings”). In what way was he “attacking” the free press? TFA notes that he was positively metered (“to a fault”) in his dealings with the NYT. Moreover, what does doxxing him add to the story?
Ok, if it's a problem he's a practicing psychiatrist, that's an ethical issue HE has created by doing the blog. I don't think the NYT is responsible for running his practice ethically.
Don't make comments that jeopardize your business, then blame other people for "being irrational", when they correctly attribute those comments to you, it's simple accountability.
Again the doxxing is a complete myth, everyone knew his name already, he just didn't want attention draw to the fact he's actually being paid a quarter million dollars to do what he's doing.
He addresses most of your concerns in his own post on why he was shutting down his blog; rather than restating them here I suggest you go read it. Also, I find it particularly abhorrent that one oughtn’t be able to write about controversial topics anonymously, and at least a little ironic given that we’re both doing exactly that.
Pseudonymously. It would be difficult to match these accounts to real people but not impossible (dang probably has access to enough signal to make an educated guess).
As I understand it, if a patient Googles him and reads about his views it can affect the patient’s treatment. Even in the general “ordinary writers” case, writing pseudonymously is a well-established convention, and many people including the NYT are happy to protect one’s identity if they have the right politics.
I think the idea is that therapy should focus on the patient and anything that might distract the course of therapy is harmful to the patient (deprives them of effective therapy treatment).
Ideally. Or in case they might agree with him. The therapeutic relationship should be one where the therapist offers the patient a mirror/lens/toolbox regarding their own views and behavior, and a patient's beliefs about their therapist's biases one way or another can interfere with that.
The majority of the psychiatric community disagrees with you. They believe the patient should not form personal relationships with psychiatrists and therapists, including not being aware of a psychiatrist’s positions on political and social issues. They have patients with a wide range of views, some of whom rely on their treatment to maintain their psychological well-being and mental health. It can be dangerous for them to have that relationship disrupted by disagreements about orthogonal issues. Psychiatrists are not primarily concerned to protect themselves, although that is a factor; they are largely motivated by a desire to avoid endangering their patient by disrupting their treatment.
You might want to argue that it’s Alexander’s fault for writing a semi-pseudonymous blog in the first place, but that doesn’t help his patients. And I might agree with the view that exposing him is justified if the article actually revealed something of public interest-that he was a Nazi or a pedophile, for example-but it doesn’t. It’s a thin tissue of spurious guilt by association and mischaracterization. The NYT have decided that any risk to Alexander’s patients is less important than naming him in a low-quality hit piece. What they have done is immoral.
So he shouldn't have written a highly publicized psuedo anonymous blog.
He chose this avenue, as a rationalist he must have estimated the risk, and took it.
NYT didnt doxx him, because he is the one who chose to publicized himself. You can't eat the cake and have it too.
They protect sources exposing things that won't be exposed without anonimity, how does Scott Siskind fit this description?
It’s pretty easy to say in hindsight that Scott should have predicted from the earliest days that journalism in general and NYT in particular would have shifted sharply toward capriciousness and sensationalism and that his blog would have been so successful as to piss off the newspaper of record. Whatever, you can have that point if you want it—Scott should have been more careful.
> NYT didnt doxx him, because he is the one who chose to publicized himself. You can't eat the cake and have it too.
To be clear, you are arguing that “blogging under a pseudonym” is exactly the same thing as one of the most popular papers in the world publishing your real name in a hit piece?
> They protect sources exposing things that won't be exposed without anonimity, how does Scott Siskind fit this description?
I’m having a hard time parsing this. Can you rephrase?
He knew his real name was an open secret. He published at least 1 piece under both names. He thought about starting over with a new pseudonym but decided not to.
It's pretty understandable "a so called "rationalist" doesn't want to be attached to his own writings, because you know people might attack him" and that would hurt his aims.
Post early 2000s fascism, I've taken to viewing stuff sort of functionally. Whether it's been through exposure to alt-righters, or exposure to using drug addicts (some of whom have died of it, by now), it strikes me as existentially important that many, many people will brazenly lie about stuff fundamental to their position, for advantage (as defined by them).
As such, the LAST thing you can do is take people at face value and present them your own face value and intentions/needs. People are in conflict over many things, and people are really clever when they're not really childish: it strikes me that the easy ones to read are the ones so childish that they can't even comprehend anything being different from them, and so they lash out and make up ill-conceived demons to rant against. Those folks are easy to spot.
It doesn't take much cognitive development to identify 'this, the other, is different from me' and to imaginatively populate their mental space with your version of their own drives and wishes. And what do you do then? You tailor what you yourself present, to what will get by their filters and produce the effect you want.
And that's why people lie as much as they do.
Almost by definition, rationalists are beyond the primitive level of cognition where everyone is just copies of them: otherwise, other rationalists would argue with them and criticize their position. So we're looking at positions being defended by people who're capable of interpreting the other, and either correctly identifying outside values or making up some 'SJW' phantasm (some of which is likely to actually exist!) that brainlessly lashes out against 'rationality'.
So, practicing rationalists looking to get results will be MORE likely to lie than SJWs and QAnons and the like: and it's the most natural thing in the world to expect a great deal of sketchiness and calculating, in terms of how things are presented.
The bottom line is: does the belief system seek a sort of postmodern coexistence with all manner of conflicting beliefs and scenarios? Or is it a One True System seeking to destroy opposing systems? If it's the latter, it's gonna be cloaked in layers of lies, and we see that in Dark Enlightenment thinking: it would be foolish to present it in starkest form, like the alt-right stuff one has to be 'pilled' into it rather than dumped in at the deep end.
I think this gets to a much more interesting question about Rationality, which, if applied properly and carefully, can loop back into the NYT's question about things like racism and sexism.
Think about Chesterton's saying about the fence:
> In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
Rationalists are the more modern type of reformer here (and so are hackers, founders who like to disrupt things, etc., so this worldview also tends to be popular on this site). Absent a convincing argument from first principles as to why the fence should exist, they think it's clear that it shouldn't.
The sort of reformer that Chesterton calls "intelligent" I would perhaps rather call wise, in that this isn't a matter of personal cognitive capacity. (In fact, people who are more intelligent are probably better at being the "more modern" type of reformer, simply because they can more easily formulate those arguments!) They trust that someone else has put up that fence for a reason, and they aren't interested in relitigating it from first principles every time a reformer wanders by.
The truly wise reformer also knows that this only works if there's a good reason to believe the argument exists, whether or not they know the argument themselves. They have to be working in a framework where fences don't get constructed without reason in the first place. Which is a fine approach at scale: you can't scale understanding all the arguments yourself (which is why they don't want to relitigate every single one), but you can scale building a society where someone has made those arguments before building up any fences. In order to do this, they have to at least occasionally listen to the "more modern" reformers, especially when they do come back and say, look, I found out why people originally thought the fence was a good idea, and here's why I think they were wrong to do so.
Society at large tends to be more like the second type of reformer, but perhaps without that depth of wisdom. When they look at some norm in society (be it monogamy, or particular ways to phrase things, or as the article says, whether it's acceptable to eat coffee beans instead of brewing them), they tend to be unwilling to deeply question it, because they trust (rightly or wrongly) that the rest of society has converged on it for a reason. They get annoyed at children who ask "Why" all the time, and they certainly don't do so themselves.
Rationalists tend to be more like the first type of reformer. If you can't explain why the norm of monogamy is good, it's probably bad. If your argument is "It makes me feel bad," they say you should question those feelings - see the linked story at the end about "polyhacking," i.e., arguing yourself into being polyamorous because your own emotions don't make sense from first principles. (They've even invented a new term, "compersion," for a feeling which is the opposite of jealousy - you could argue that they've invented a new emotion, seeing as not enough people felt it for it to have a name already.)
Both approaches have their upsides and downsides, and I would be skeptical of either approach taken to its extreme. And it's the "more intelligent type of reformer" that controls societ...
> Rationalists are the more modern type of reformer here (and so are hackers, founders who like to disrupt things, etc., so this worldview also tends to be popular on this site). Absent a convincing argument from first principles as to why the fence should exist, they think it's clear that it shouldn't.
Maybe this was true 5-10 years ago but my sense is that "rationalists" have grown up (sometimes literally -- they were in their early 20s, now they're in their late 20s, early 30s). Scott Alexander doesn't seem like this "modern type of reformer" to me and I think a lot of people are on the same trajectory as him.
I think this is a phase of personal development and it usually ends by 30. Also, plenty of the people I'd put into this category ("modern type of reformers") are not grey tribers, they're blue-tribers. "Abolish the police," "open the borders" is exactly this kind of reform.
The difference between the blue tribers and the grey tribers -- when it comes to naive calls for reform -- is that the former are more emotional and the latter are more analytical. Neither of them are wise.
> In the other direction, this also explains why the Grey Tribe has "vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up," quoting the Slate Star Codex post linked in the NYT article (which references another Chesterton work, as it happens). To the more modern type of reformer, the gender-checking gate in front of romantic partnership obviously has no point, needs to be torn down, and really the problem is all the people defending the gate because it historically existed. Which, yes, they're right about that! But the Blue Tribe knows that if you actually want gay rights to happen, you've got to play by the rules of the "more intelligent" reformer - who is wrong in this case - and affirmatively argue for taking down the fence instead of simply questioning it.
We're getting pretty close to gay rights these days. Personally, I think Will & Grace had more to do with that than either kind of reformer. Americans have become more comfortable with homosexuality as they became exposed to gay people who are "normal". In other words, the perception of gay people has shifted from hustlers and tortured married men looking for sex in dive bars to well-dressed, polite lawyers.
Reformers played some role in that process but I think it's a mistake to view progress like this as the result of "winning an argument".
1. I did not know that, thanks! (I meant that it was invented by the modern polyamory community sometime in the last decade or two, more than specifically by Rationalists, but I was wrong about that, too.)
2. But, interestingly enough, if you read about the Kerista Commune that coined the term (a hippie commune, more or less, in the Haight in the 1970s onwards), among their precepts is this:
> 12. Rational Approach to All Things -This includes mystical and emotional phenomena; No acceptance of lapsing into irrational self-identity.
and later version of their precepts included these:
> 3. Rationality - Using reason and logic are basic approaches in all conversation, behavior, and inquiry; no acceptance of strong feelings, mystical intuition or unreasonable statements are being truth of any truth.
> 4. The Search for Truth through the Elimination of Contradictions - Working definition of truth: a very large body of premises which do not contradict each other. Contradictions between stated beliefs and actions, between two people's different versions of the same event, or anything else are encountered and analyzed to discover the most accurate picture of reality.
They were certainly a separate group from the present-day Rationalists linked to Yudkowsky et al., but I think their approach to handling their own feelings may have been very similar, and they definitely took the counter-culture approach of not finding society's previous acceptance of a norm of any value in evaluating the worth of that norm. I suspect the "Polyhacking" document would not have been out of place among the Keristans.
(As for schadenfreude, it's true that English doesn't have a native word for it, but it's certainly well-documented as an emotion throughout history - Psalm 35 talks about enemies who sneer, rejoice wrongfully, and maliciously wink, while saying, "Aha, aha!" One modern translation identifies what they do as gloating, which seems to be substantially similar. And apparently Aristotle had a term for it, epichairekakia: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...)
Polyamory and CNM are essentially urbanite rebrandings of very ancient customs that are still practiced in various parts of the world. The rebranding is there to create a sense of sophistication and mental flexibility, when in truth it's simply a factor of specific personality types engaging in something not only natural to them but widespread across time and place. Most people in open relationships across history did not pause to reflect on the rational aspect of what they were doing or how it reflected on their open-mindedness, and just went for it. If having open relationships were more mainstream in the West, I doubt that rationalists would write so much about it or value it so much as a part of their identity since there would not be the draw of demonstrating your uniqueness.
This article was much better (more interesting, enlightening) than the NYT hack job. The whole “how can we tenuously paint this person as a racist?” thing the media (or rather “half a dozen outlets”) is doing is dull and creepy. Interestingly not long ago Yglesias was writing the disingenuous articles, so I’m really happy to see he’s turned a corner, and he deserves praise for doing so.
His views have always differed somewhat from mine, but that doesn’t make him disingenuous. Rather, I think he used to write very charitably toward his tribe and very uncharitably toward other tribes (dealing in caricatures, demonizing, exaggerating, snarking, finding nothing praiseworthy, etc). He seems much more humble and earnest nowadays, even while I still often disagree with him.
I don't think he's changed at all. He's still incredibly snarky and even sarcastic in a way I don't like, particularly on Twitter, but I don't think has ever had those other traits you're labeled him with.
In the twitter-verse, Matt is well known for his occasional "hot takes". But he is among the people who pushes the envelope ever so lightly all time and is still tolerated by woke twitter and I am glad for his role. He made out somewhat OK from the recent Harper letter controversy.
I’m going to echo others that I really don’t think he’s changed. He has beliefs and is here to tell you what he thinks is right, not to project some aurora of neutrality. However, he will also read opposing opinions and is happy to discuss them, always in good faith and with an open mind.
It’s my opinion. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve heard others echo similar sentiments. Seems likely that you and I are just looking at different characteristics. In whatever case I don’t think it will be interesting to dissect this further, and I’ll end by saying I appreciate Matt’s recent stuff for whatever reason.
I knew before reading the article this would be a defence of views which hold other lives to be worth less than the author (racism), because they felt the need to be so abstract.
Nobody is going to ostracise you if you hold interesting views on string theory, or economics, or local government ,or free love, or many other controversial topics on which society has a settled opinion.
However if you hold views which require the submission of others to your will or hold other lives to be worth less than yours you can expect to be ostracised from society because those views are inimical to the functioning of the society which lets you express them and simply enforces consequences for doing so. The consequences for such behaviour are neither surprising nor unjust.
"I knew before reading the article this would be a defence of views which hold other lives to be worth less than the author (racism)"
People like Charles Murray have not asserted this, to my knowledge. He supports race-neutral policies, such as a universal basic income. The assumption that all talents or personality traits are equally distributed among all demographic groups is not necessary to support equality under the law.
Murray may not have asserted this, but by the time his ideas make it to the street level you get racist tiki torch marches and cops murdering black people in public.
A thinker cannot simply wash their hands of the manifestation of their ideas, especially once that manifestation becomes stupidly obvious.
Sometimes an unrelated example helps:
Marxists do this all the time when they hand wave away the awful history of Communism. “Marx advocated evolution toward communism, not dictatorship.” Okay, maybe so, but virtually every large scale society to attempt to adopt Marxism ends up as some kind of totalitarian state that oppresses people at huge scale. At some point it’s reasonable to conclude that there is something very wrong with Marxism.
Maybe Murray didn’t intend to help resurrect Naziism, but he played a central role in doing so.
Back to the Rationalists, this is one of my huge problems with them and it’s evident in that paragraph about BLM. They reason in an absolute vacuum. They never seem to look down at the street to see what their ideas are doing down there.
If UBI is racist, then it seems to me that literally everything is racist.
You cannot change a government policy without somehow, somewhere affecting some minority. If we are going to going to call that racism, then we really cannot even have policy discussions.
Obviously Murray is a particularly controversial person, but UBI is obtaining small amounts of broad support in general.
I guess it just feels a bit exhausting to me. While I understand the reasoning behind what you wrote (and it's logical and internally consistent), I also feel one could just as reasonably make the case that not supporting UBI is racist.
Don’t you see the problem here? Racism is bad and people are right to be frustrated about it, but an increasing number of people have abused this frustration in order to prevent critical analysis of their views. You say nobody will ostracize me for interesting views on local government, but in some circles claims like “Lincoln High is a good school name” or “we should have test-based admissions” are considered racist.
If the zeitgeist has advanced so far that even an abstract defense of free thought is racist, as you seem to be claiming, that’s a pretty big reason for concern.
Frankly I think those are invented problems, invented to defend the status quo. You are also equating someone somewhere saying something is racist with broader censure - nobody us going to be ostracised for saying Lincoln high is a good school name.
I didn't say 'an abstract defense of free thought is racist', I said I knew the article would be defending a racist because of the excessive abstraction in the title to dance around the actual problem, which is not interesting views but racist views, something quite distinct.
It's not an invented problem. Multiple college acquaintances of mine have specifically announced they're ostracizing people for a similar naming dispute at my alma mater. I'm not saying you'll be instantly expelled from polite society for disagreeing with the consensus, but there's an increasing range of topics where you have to seriously weigh whether the benefit of thinking critically about them is worth the risk of losing friends.
> I find the level of abstraction involved in rationalist discourse a little untenable.
And here's the kind of “interesting writing” it refers to:
> Five million people participated in the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter campaign. Suppose that solely as a result of this campaign, no currently-serving police officer ever harms an unarmed black person ever again. That’s 100 lives saved per year times let’s say twenty years left in the average officer’s career, for a total of 2000 lives saved, or 1/2500th of a life saved per campaign participant. By coincidence, 1/2500th of a life saved happens to be what you get when you donate $1 to the Against Malaria Foundation. The round-trip bus fare people used to make it to their #BlackLivesMatter protests could have saved ten times as many black lives as the protests themselves, even given completely ridiculous overestimates of the protests’ efficacy.
This is a pretty controversial take (one that I have some pretty major objections to – e.g., BLM isn't about everyone with dark skin, but a specific group of people who are being persecuted in a specific way), but it isn't racist.
To me it's a contrived argument to support racism without looking like it's supporting racism. A veneer of misdirection and logic doesn't make something less racist if the end goal is a more racist society.
I'm not sure I understand how that would be implicitly or explicitly supporting racism. You think the end goal of that proposal is a more racist society? Donating money to the Against Malaria Foundation?
"Supporting Black Lives Matter" is not equivalent to "not being racist".
The argument is an attempt to make you not care about BLM. First it makes an axiomatic assumption about what BLM is about, saving lives and only saving lives. Not long term impact of high incarceration rates, not about the perpetual fear many minorities live in, not about the non lethal abuses by police and so on. Then it tries to use emotional blackmail about dying children in Africa. In reality, people don't value things far away as much as those close by so it's inherently a false equivalence.
It's a hack job of an argument designed to make you not value BLM and I can only presume due to its hack job nature that the end goal is a more racist society.
It sounds like you disagree with their argument, which is fine, but then you go on to harshly criticize an interpretation that you've imposed on it. There are plausible alternative interpretations which are both reasonable and likely, so why not assume best intentions? That's the bedrock of productive debate.
I’m not sure I’m fully on board with GP’s conclusion, but their first paragraph is spot on. SSC’s whole shtick is thinking deeply from first principles, so it is very… let’s say curious, that his assessment of BLM would be so shallow.
Scott Alexander has a known blind spot for convenient examples. When he's found something that seems to perfectly make the point he needs, he often doesn't stop to consider “hang on, does that actually fit the point, or am I blatantly distorting the evidence?”. It's something I do a lot, so I can't really blame him; fortunately, he isn't practised at deliberate deception so it's fairly obvious when he's doing it.
Trying to follow your train of thought here: do you think his first principles are in favor of the subjugation of humans based on immutable characteristics?
And does his support of Malaria prevention based on a utilitarian calculation that it'll help save the most lives (including more black lives) therefore prove he is in favor of subjugating black people based on their race?
You’re riding this train a lot farther than I’m willing to go. All I’m saying is that his myopic description of BLM is very obviously a straw man. It may or may not have been intentional, but it’s certainly worth asking why, since setting up straw men is basically antithetical to quote unquote rationalist precepts.
He sorted BLM into the “trying to save lives”, then observed that it was inefficient at saving lives. I don't think he thought about it hard enough to realise that BLM is not just about saving lives; it's also about improving them, nor that the death toll of the things BLM fights against is higher than just direct police murders.
Judging others' goals by your own heuristics isn't a hard mistake to make, though it creates very flimsy straw arguments.
As someone who wants to maximize their time/money for impact: How should we value the impact of BLM's 'improvement' efforts, compared to the 'improvement' of black lives that stems from Malaria prevention?
Then how should we balance improvement and saving lives?
Thanks for clarifying. So it was myopic of him to assume that the core focus of BLM was to _save_ black lives (particularly from police violence)? And that understanding of BLM is a straw man?
As a minority myself, that was my mental model of BLM as well, as this movement was given fuel by deaths of African-Americans after interactions with police officers. And much of the rhetoric/protests/media coverage was around how the police are racists, and if only we could defund the police, it would save black lives.
It seems like you are poking at the idea that BLM isn't just about _saving_ black lives, but also _improving_ black lives. To be fair to Scott, he doesn't also factor in how Malaria prevention _improves_ black lives either. So it's not like he's not doing an apples-to-apples comparison along a very key factor. I would personally argue that the incremental value of being alive compared to being dead is much greater than any marginal increase in quality of life.
How would you improve and help Scott with his calculation, accounting for the value of BLM's 'improving' black lives efforts? And how would you then weight the improvement of black lives stemming from Malaria prevention?
He’s right that one core goal is saving Black lives. But there’s also a more primal aspect, whereby many people in the US simply won’t acknowledge that Black lives matter. Which plays out in a lot of ways, but it also defies the sort of utilitarian calculus Scott seems to want to do here.
The reason I’m saying it’s myopic is that yes, it’s also about systemic racism and the prison-industrial complex and a ton of other things that probably even vary person-to-person. And even if Scott doesn’t realize that from the jump, surely he realizes that it deserves more than a single paragraph comparing it to fighting malaria… right?
Anyway, if you’re committed to looking at this through this strictly utilitarian lens, let me save us both some time and say we probably won’t be able to agree.
Thanks for responding in kind. As someone frequently faced with tough trade-off decisions, I tend to try to take a utilitarian view (or simple pros vs cons) of the issues at hand. It feels very natural to me to try to compare the value of each of the choices before me (for decisions that matter), in order to maximize the efficacy of my time/money. So I find the disagreeing on using a utilitarian approach here interesting.
I may be reading into this wrong, so do pushback if I'm off here, but I'm picking up the sense that you feel that whatever value BLM provides to society cannot (and perhaps should not?) be measured/quantified? Since BLM is targeting nebulous goals ('systemic racism') that vary from person-to-person, then any attempts to compare the efficacy of its efforts to other initiatives should be duly questioned?
I accept that some things are hard to quantify. But I'm not sure I fully comprehend why we shouldn't _try_, if that's a held view (if it's not, ignore this sentence).
I also think Scott deserves some grace here. That paragraph in question wasn't meant to be the sole point of his post. It was merely an anecdote to suggest that it's important to think about the impact/efficacy of your actions if you're trying to improve the world. Not all actions have equal impacts. A point I very much agree with.
With the caveat that I am but one very insignificant person with regard to all this, here’s my take:
I broadly agree with the utilitarian goal of maximizing the efficacy of one’s aid. But the reason I can’t fully co-sign is that I feel there are some things that aren’t really quantifiable. Example: a classic response to BLM is that police commit relatively few murders compared to murders overall. My feeling is that the people entrusted to protect and serve have an additional responsibility; that violence + abuse of power is somehow “worse” than violence on its own. But how do you quantify that? How many “normal” murders are equal to one “police” murder? I don’t even know how to begin answering that question.
And I don’t think BLM should be immune from pushback because some of its goals can’t be objectively measured! But I do think a lot, if not most, criticism has been from a place of prejudice. That we’re going to look back on this in 50 years the way we look back on the Civil Rights Movement now, where some of the goals will have been achieved and basically everyone pretends they would have supported it all along (even though they oppose the contemporary version because they’re not protesting nicely or whatever). So when people see shallow dismissals, I think their guards (justifiably!) go up, because they know where it’s coming from more often than not.
I’m not trying to deny Scott the grace you’re talking about. I know it was a mostly throwaway paragraph in a longer essay. I’m just noting that his whole thing is supposed to be about digging into the strongest versions of uncomfortable arguments to get at the truth. Straw manning is supposed to be anathema — so when he does it, I think it’s worth questioning why.
One of Scott Alexander's goals is to end world poverty. He's focusing on international inequality more than national inequality, because he thinks that'll be more effective. If a lot of activists did what he recommends, that would effectively create a more racist society in the US, but it would also reduce the impact of racism (specifically, colonialism) in other countries.
I maintain that this isn't racism; it's just him having different priorities. I'm not even confident enough to say his priorities are wrong; only that I have good reasons to disagree with some of them (e.g. attacking problems that can be solved short-term frees up resources for solving long-term problems later, and your investments into solving a problem go further when there's public support, so BLM advocacy right now might be a time-sensitive problem (above and beyond the deaths it causes; I don't know how to weigh deaths v.s. deaths, and I'm suspicious of people who do)).
If I'm reading your comments correctly (please do correct me if I'm wrong here), it seems like you are suggesting any commentary that would suggest that the BLM movement isn't most optimally trying to improve black lives, is therefore racist?
Is BLM unquestionable? To question it, or to suggest other pathways to improve black lives would be misdirection from BLM, and therefore is racist?
From a high-level perspective, this style of thinking seems like it's the most racist of all (and a very popular take!). Suggesting that we shouldn't be thinking through how to most optimally improve black lives, and that we should constrain our thinking to whatever the current popular incarnation of a solution is (BLM!), isn't a recipe for progress.
^ It should be noted that this isn't an opinion the article author agrees with! Here is how he describes that quote:
> This is an extremely hot take! And while I would not say this paragraph is typical of SSC content, it does a good job of expressing the SSC view of most of what passes for politics in the United States of America — it doesn’t matter at all. [...] I would not endorse the SSC worldview.
It should be noted that the author of this post co-founded Vox (a very left-leaning outlet by any measure) and worked there up until a few months ago. That in itself shouldn't shield him from criticism, but I think the piece is a lot more nuanced than you're giving it credit for.
I think it's an interesting article, but don't agree with the premise that racist views are interesting views, or that rejection of racism leads to other views being suppressed.
That's really not the author's premise. I'm struggling to find a quote that works out of context, but this one might do:
> In the (liberal, coastal, urban, very political) circles that I travel in everyone (especially parents) knows and acknowledges that men and women are, on average, different in ways that end up mattering for the distribution of outcomes. But everyone also believes that sexism and misogyny are significant problems in the world, and that the people struggling against those problems are worthy of admiration and praise. So to leap into a conversation about sexism and misogyny yelling “well actually Giolla and Kajonius find that sex differences in personality are larger in countries with more gender equality” would be considered a rude and undermine-y thing to do. Which is just to say that most people are not rationalists — they believe that statements can be evaluated on grounds beyond truth and falsity. There is suspicion of the guy who is “just asking questions.”
I mean, he supported Bernie in the primaries. He's not David Brooks or whatever, he's pretty firmly on the left hand side of American politics. Like, his last book was essentially an extended argument for throwing away all immigration restrictions.
> I knew before reading the article this would be a defence of views which hold other lives to be worth less than the author (racism), because they felt the need to be so abstract.
Wait, which part of the article is doing this? The excerpt where Alexander argues that it's better to spend energy accumulating resources to donate to malaria prevention efforts than to spend energy going to BLM protests? That doesn't strike me as a view that "hold[s] other lives to be worth less than the author"?
The money used to feed Alexander would also be better used as donation to malaria funds, but I don't think he would argue that he should starve to death as I am sure he believes he has a right to self-preservation. He's arguing against BLM's right for self-preservation though, clearly because he perceives them to not have the same rights as himself.
And that's the most charitable point of view that I can possibly have on this incredibly racist point of view. I think what he actually meant was something far more racist.
I see. I guess I parse his argument a little differently.
I see the SSC argument as "I would like to spend 100 units of resource (time, money, etc) improving black lives. The line between (donating money to malaria prevention) and (black lives improved in Africa) is much clearer to me than the line between (donating money to/attending events organized by BLM) and (black lives improved in the USA). Therefore, I should spend my 100 units on malaria prevention."
Maybe this is what you mean by "arguing against BLM's right for self-preservation": taken to its extreme, this argument says that all of the effort behind BLM should just pivot to malaria prevention. In that case, the argument does look racist, because it's taken all of the resources devoted to agitating for societal change and re-allocated them to narrower medical assistance that's unlikely to produce the same kind of societal change.
I don't think SSC is arguing for a complete pivot in resource allocation. I think he's arguing that more, but not all, attention should be spent on malaria prevention, and he sees malaria prevention as ultimately contributing to more improvement of black lives. But now I think I understand your response better, because it is in the above sense possible to interpret his argument as saying BLM is not itself a worthy cause. But I don't read it that way.
I've heard about SSC's racism for years, but no one has ever been able to pinpoint anything written that's racist.
Instead it's about a feeling. It has to do with with the general gist of what's written and not written.
If you say you support freedom, the radical left says that's a dogwhistle for racism, since you really mean 'freedom to be racist'.
If you advocate or discuss any problem other than racism, the radical left would say that you're really saying that racism is not the foremost issue in the world, and that's racist.
If you appeal to mostly white men, the radical left says you're racist because you do not have outreach, or you don't represent minority voices.
If you support free speech, you're racist since you're just dogwhistling support for racist speech.
They will never say this of course, but it really has a lot more to do with image than concrete words or actions.
Joe Rogan never did anything racist and has even endorsed Sanders--but he seems* like he could be racist at a glance (muscular, interested in hyper masculine activities, probably drives a pick-up truck) so therefore he is.
I'm willing to consider that there is some racism in the blog, but after years of accusations and no proof, I am skeptical.
That sounds like a lot of strawmen at once, and hard to directly address.
How about: if they're tone deaf about issues of race, then there's probably a reason. Could be just avoids the issue. Could be any number of other things, some of them pretty awful.
I really don't want to strawman anything. I certainly welcome anyone to explain where the racism is.
Part of the issue is that just asking 'where is the racism?' tends to gets responses that are--in summary--something like 'well if you don't see it, then you're just blind (if they are being charitable) or racist yourself'.
I know what I wrote is going to be very controversial, but you have to remember this is a condensed feeling that took me years to realise. I saw this same conversation play out 100 times:
--Someone post a link to SSC
--someone else says 'oh that guy is so racist'
--Then some poor fool asks 'wait, how is any of that racist?'
That is: there isn't paragraph or argument that is racist per se, but instead a general gist. It's much more about what is not said than what is.
Obviously we have a major communication problem here that I am not sure we can resolve. To some people, the rationalist community is so racist that they feel they shouldn't even have to explain why. If you cannot see it, you're being blind, racist, or as you mention: tone-deaf.
To others, there isn't anything racist about it, and they are left confused about why discussions about Moloch and cost disease are racist.
I'm sure all that is true and borne of experience.
Sometimes I'm concerned when a topic is adjacent to serious issues of bias, and nobody is talking about it. We can get very comfortable not talking about issues that don't impact us.
Using the R-word is often unfair, waters down the meaning of the word and provokes feelings of being wrongly viewed. But being the victim of bias can be worse than all that. If we err on the side of being alert to potential bias especially if we are not the victim, then maybe that's not unhealthy.
> And critically by “highly recommend it to you” I do not mean “I agree with all the takes.” I think contemporary society is willing itself into a state of incredible stupidity by people wanting to evaluating the worthwhileness of reading something purely on the basis of whether or not it’s correct.
I think this is a very good point that I don't see raised very often.
I find myself self-censoring on controversial topics far more often than I think is healthy for deep, mutual understanding.
I have some friends with whom I could debate the James Damore memo, where Jordan Petersen is making some points based in reason and science, the extent to which “Defund the Police” is honest vs hyperbolic, or under what circumstances saying “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” is sensible vs incendiary.
I have other friends with whom those discussions would be impossible. It is this group that we could probably learn more from each other, but the heat from the conversation vastly exceeds the light (for everyone, not just me).
What I see as the underlying problem is that most of those topics are fairly limited in scope. They are interpreted as controversial and potentially mind-expanding topics, but they are only controversial in the sense that sports teams are controversial. There might be mutual understanding, but it probably won't be that deep.
As an example: to what extent could we influence the gender balance of computer science graduates (or appropriately-skilled entry-level applicants) with upstream efforts?
That feels to me like a lot more than bikeshedding (assuming there's an answer other than "zero point zero zero")
My current view on this is that it makes more sense to see it as a distribution of personality types and that gender is a red herring. It takes a fairly specific type of person to pursue computer science and coding for intrinsic reasons, and it is difficult enough that it takes some degree of intrinsic motivation to do well enough at it for it to be profitable. As it stands, the salary draw is already as high as it probably can be (in fact, I believe salaries to be in a bubble) in the US at least, and there are enough scholarships, programs, and free resources that almost anyone who is even somewhat motivated and not socio-economically crushed at the onset can start the process with some degree of ease and the expectation of high rewards at the end.
Hence the extrinsic draw of the profession is already as strong as you could expect. There is still cultural stigma, but that is being erased naturally since programmers have a high socio-economic status for the most part and indoor activities are more and more popular and mainstream. The only real problem left is intrinsic motivation, and if it is tied to your personality type as per my hypothesis, I don't see how you could meaningfully change it. Or to be more precise, the mechanisms of change that are available to us are already well underway.
> there are enough scholarships, programs, and free resources that almost anyone who is even somewhat motivated
This might be the hinge upon which we could pivot though. Does everyone really have the at-home internet access, quiet location to focus for 60-90 minutes at a time, with a desk, screen, and keyboard such that adding a Raspberry Pi is enough to get started? I can literally reach out and touch my 2 27" monitors, my work laptop, my personal computer, a KVM switch, and a Mac for each of my primary-school age kids, each with their own 27" 4K monitor, keyboard, chair, etc. That, coupled with my career as a model of what "normal" is, makes it a lot more likely that they'll end up in computing than the average Cambridge, MA schoolkid.
I don't think anything of what I described is "intrinsic" to them. If that's the case, there's chance for intervention to beneficially change things (rather than simply over-riding intrinsic preferences, which I think is bad.)
> and not socio-economically crushed at the onset
This is another one, of course, partially touched on above, and definitely inter-related.
By socio-economically crushed, that is essentially what I was referring to. Until some hypothetical post-scarcity future rolls around, we can't be in every household stopping every abusive parent or helping every kid have a quiet study space. But in a developed country, I would still wager that for the vast majority of people who could enjoy social mobility from coding, the extrinsic pieces are there for the most part, the awareness of the possibility is there, and the main obstacle is having enough intrinsic motivation/ability to get there.
To be perfectly clear, I am not making a by-the-bootstraps argument, just trying to look at the situation as objectively as my biases allow me to. It might be far, far easier for the scion of a tidy bourgeois home to make it, but unless they have the right personality type they are still highly likely to fail eventually. They'll go further than a student with the same personality type but fewer resources, but the roadblock will still appear later in the sequence, possibly at the very end. Conversely, a disadvantaged kid with the right personality type will typically have the possibility to get to the launchpad zone towards a better life. At the very least, the conditions and probability distributions have never been better compared to other careers and aspirations.
What could change this is to have better opportunities for mediocre coders, but it appears to be going the opposite way. Due to the extrinsic rewards there is now a glut of such employees that might pop their own code-monkey bubble soon while leaving the outrageous tech salaries for the higher tranches intact for at least a bit longer (if there is in fact a separate bubble as well for the latter).
I think these topics are deeper than that, but the way they are presented and discussed in modern society is shallow. The arguments are caricatures and merely tactics in a game of argumentation. They are not good faith discussions about important subjects.
> I find myself self-censoring on controversial topics far more often than I think is healthy for deep, mutual understanding
I've been finding more and more that I have to bite my tongue around people, even that I know also. The most upsetting part is when you see otherwise intelligent people fall into fallacious anti-patterns. One such anti-pattern that I see right now is black and white reasoning. For instance disagreeing with something being labelled racist means you support racism. Essentially, if you can shift the conversation from a complex topic (is this action racist) to a simple one (we shouldn't be racists) then it becomes easier to form an opinion and castigate your opponent.
I have to wonder how much of this is the person on the other side trying to copout of a topic which they haven't thought about, versus the influence of twitter-like agitprop. I think it's likely a fusion of both.
I have to wonder how much of this is the person on the other side trying to copout of a topic which they haven't thought about, versus the influence of twitter-like agitprop. I think it's likely a fusion of both.
You might be surprised to learn that it's often neither. This stuff is rooted in the decades-long academic tradition of critical race theory.
Misapplication of that theory it might or might not be. But in the spirit of the topic of the article posted here, it might be worth looking at the academic origins of this movement.
You might or might not agree with the ideas proposed therein. I certainly have mixed feelings about it. But you can't dismiss a movement as illegitimate without at least trying to understanding it.
That said, people who really buy into critical race theory can be difficult to debate or discuss with, much like any other "extreme" or "total" view of the world. But you must respect the fact that, for many, this is not an academic debate but a life-or-death fight for justice, equality, and freedom.
Don't dismiss what you don't understand. Feel free to disagree, but don't dismiss it.
I think you may have missed my point, and that quote you are using is just on the borderline of being taken out of context. Perhaps that's my fault for using the word 'agitprop' in place of groupthink, stunting, or something else less loaded.
I'm not dismissing postmodernity and associated schools of thought, rather I'm dismissing lazily shoe-horning your opponents ideas into a more simplistic, easier to attack strawman. It might sound like postmodernism, but it definitely is not.
Postmodern critical theory is about deconstruction, context and narrative structures -- the absolute opposite of black and white thinking and strawmaning. The latter is what I am dismissing.
The sorts of bad faith strawmen I am referring to are about as close to postmodernism as new age woo peddlers' arguments are to quantum mechanics. It's debasing to the true theory to even call them misapplications. To your point, I dismiss this sort of behavior because I understand it.
I´ve always been curious about reading and listening to the most crazy people, for the same reason doctors are interested into studying the most pathological cases, such as split-brain patients: because it can teach you a lot about normal people too.
On the same line, the tumultuous times in which french moralists such as La Rochefoucauld lived certainly helped them sharpen their remarks.
Saw some surprising / not-surprising statistics on Nielsen television ratings of the U.S. Senate impeachment hearings.
- CNN/MSNBC viewership ratings were constant throughout the proceedings.
- FOX viewership ratings were high for opinion commentary before, during breaks, and after, but dropped to nominal any time house impeachment managers presented evidence.
Fox viewership quite literally tuned out the opposing viewpoint, while MSNBC/CNN viewership did not.
If “contemporary society” is learning self-government on the job as we transition to a relatively post-toil socio-economy, how can mistakes be mostly constructive so it’s safe to learn?
> “It only remains for men to create a good organization for the state... and to arrange it in such a way that their self-seeking energies are opposed to one another, each thereby neutralising or eliminating the destructive effects of the rest... As hard as it may sound, the problem of setting up a state can be solved even by a nation of devils (so long as they possess understanding).” — Kant, Political Writings : https://books.google.com/books?id=v7v3CwAAQBAJ&pg=PT79&lpg=P...
‘Possessing understanding’ cannot be parenthetical.
>Fox viewership quite literally tuned out the opposing viewpoint, while MSNBC/CNN viewership did not.
If you think that, you're a partisan that has tuned out the opposing viewpoint :-)
I mean, the reason MSNBC/CNN viewership didn't tune out during the time "house impeachment managers presented evidence" was because that was already their own viewpoint.
The Nielsen ratings timelines show a fact not a motive.
It is factual that viewers of one channel tuned out during an opposing viewpoint, viewers of the other two channels did not tune out during an opposing viewpoint.
Your assertion may be why MSNBC/CNN didn't tune out during house presentations, but doesn't explain why they didn't tune out during defense presentations.
---
Meanwhile, research on "approach-avoidance" behavioral patterns suggests there is a partisan difference in the degree of partisanship one needs one's sources to exhibit:
There's also good evidence that this kind of "selective exposure" is disproportionately powerful among Republicans. "One study found that adding the FNC logo to a news story increased the probability that Republicans would choose to read the story by 25 percentage points, whereas adding CNN’s logo or NPR’s logo reduced the chance by 10 points," Grossmann and Hopkins write. "No equally strong effects occurred among Democrats."
"Thus, as the audience become polarized over matters of politics and public policy, rational media owners stand to gain market share by injecting more rather than less political bias into the news (Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2006). ... A further implication of voters’ increased exposure to one-sided news coverage is an ‘‘echo chamber’’ effect—the news serves to reinforce existing beliefs and attitudes."
The system needs a way to systematically correct for this.
>Your assertion may be why MSNBC/CNN didn't tune out during house presentations, but doesn't explain why they didn't tune out during defense presentations.
That's the case with the Fox audience too: your assertion doesn't explain why they tuned out during defense presentations as well.
In any case, I didn't intend to make an assertion whether this is a one side problem, but highlight that not all participants are exposing themselves to all information. Borrowing the most neutrally or bi-partisan phrased positioning of the problem from the research I linked above:
"Republicans preferred to read news reports attributed to Fox News and to avoid news from CNN and NPR. Democrats and liberals exhibited exactly the opposite syndrome—dividing their attention equally between CNN and NPR, but avoiding Fox News. This pattern of selective exposure based on partisan affinity held not only for news coverage of controversial issues but also for relatively 'soft' subjects such as crime and travel."
I intended to relay a concerning metric illustrating this problem, to motivate a step back and ask what can be done to address that "‘Possessing understanding’ cannot be parenthetical."
---
> If you think that, you're a partisan that has tuned out the opposing viewpoint :-)
> But even more so, social media incentivizes the wrong kind of reading. Today you read someone from a rival school of thought in order to find the paragraph or sentence that, when pulled out of context and paired with a witty Twitter quip, will garner you lots of little hearts. I’m as guilty of doing this as anyone. A lot of very smart people have poured a lot of time and energy into making you want to collect those little hearts.
> That said, the way you learn things and get smarter is to read strong writers and try to understand what they’re saying [...] and why it is people believe that.
Interestingly enough, the blog author skips over the modern concept of Humanism as applied and mixed into Rationality.
I was pleasantly surprised by the actions of the newspaper, New Humanist -- it is a Rationalist publication but mixes in Intersectional analysis seamlessly to provide quality journalism without accidentally moving towards the "Nazi" or "Racist" side of the spectrum as many other supposedly "Rationalist" newspapers do, by acknowledging that at a certain point it is not appropriate or rational to implicitly support these ideologies through trying to obtain a purely "Rationalist" understanding of the world, and that one's own rational understanding must be tempered by learning from the experienced of the systemically oppressed, otherwise you risk eliminating them from the "equation", and your consideration.
It's a very worthwhile newspaper to read, it is high quality and I cannot recommend it enough.
> I’m happy someone is pursuing these questions, but I don’t find the contemplations of these extreme scenarios to be particularly enlightening.
Indeed.
As a final note, it is worth it to know that Scott Alexander only decided he disliked the article from the NYT, not when he found out they were going to "out" him, but when he realised it was going to have a critical lens! Highly amusing!
As a final note, it is worth it to know that Scott
Alexander only decided he disliked the article from the
NYT, not when he found out they were going to "out" him,
but when he realised it was going to have a critical
lens! Highly amusing!
I have seen absolutely no evidence to support this sentence. Nor do you present any yourself in this post. Pure unsubstantiated rumor is rarely productive or useful.
It links to the bottom of the thread in question. The gist of it is that, Scott Alexander communicated and had an open dialogue with the reporter, he knew that his name was going to be published (At the least, he didn't demand anonymity). The reporter initially had a positive take on SSC. The person in the linked tweet spoke to the reporter and introduced them to a different perspective, and put them in contact with other people with a slightly negative perspective of the blog. As soon as the reported started contacting those people, however, Scott suddenly had a problem with his name being published, and the blog was deleted.
My policy regarding unsubstantiated rumor is to ignore it not go trying figure out if it's true or not. The burden is on the person spreading the rumor to back it up not on me to do it for them. If you had linked the above in your original comment it would have been of marginally more value than than the unsubstantiated statement.
That said your link does not in fact substantiate your statement that I can see. It is speculation on twitter also with no substantiation. Rumors frequently have a long chain where links in the chain use previous links as substantiation. It's why rumor is so unproductive in the first place. It poses as fact but if you chase it far enough frequently ends up being false or misleading.
No, all of the statements are there, they're first-hand accounts. The rest can easily be derived from given evidence.
They state first that they talked to the reporter, who had a positive bent.
They state that the reporter became increasing interested in a second perspective on SSC.
Third, it is a fact that Scott Alexander knew that the reporter was doing the article, and did not request anonymity (Otherwise the reporter would not have disclosed his name at any stage). So it can be seen that anonymity was not of interest to Scott when the reporter started out on the article.
Four, Scott Alexander deleted the site immediately after the reporter started seeking out opposing views. He did not do this at any time beforehand, when it would have been more prudent to do so.
Your first statement is verifiable as is your second. The third however is not. It is speculation as is the fourth. Since your rumor hinges on the third and the fourth it must still be considered unsubstantiated.
The hit piece is dramatic, but does it matter? 10 years ago I used to read the weekend NYTimes as a ritual, now I don't know anyone who bothers and would even be a bit suspicious of someone who did because their social and professional lives have become a game of musical chairs of denunciations.
I don't think defending interesting writing on controversial topics needs a defense, it just needs privacy. His conclusion is sufficient. "But something about the internet is making people into infantile conformists with no taste or appreciation for the life of the mind and frankly I’m sick of it."
The fact that you would be suspicious of someone who regularly reads The New York Times says more about you than it does people who read The New York Times.
One could think that, but if I said we could rationally form insights into someones psychological make up by going through their pornHub history, few would disagree, and yet if I imply their choice of lifestyle pornography yields similar tells, it's just me? I'm not sure I'd agree. :)
Like any symbolic luxury good, it's an expression of alignment to what someone perceives to be power. It signals their beliefs about the world. Do they just enjoy it? Sure, but they enjoy it because it reinforces the story they tell themselves about their identity. It's like if they read USA Today or even Slate Star Codex. Today's NYT is written to arouse sentiments I prefer to keep at arms length.
One of my least favorite trends in rationalist communities is taking extremely weak signals and using mental gymnastics to amplify those signals into some more dramatic conclusion. Apply overt formal writing style combined with some cleverly disguised fallacies (“few would disagree...”) and the piece has an air of faux sophistication and manufactured consensus.
Meanwhile, you’re arguing that you can draw sweeping conclusions about a person simply because they read a certain publication. Ironic, given the rationalist community’s original embrace of exploring a wide array of perspectives and writings rather than letting pre-conceived biases dominate one’s thinking.
I think you’re projecting your own habit of tying your identity to the material you read. Plenty of people read NYT articles without aligning themselves with the NYT, without thinking of themselves as part of the NYT community, and without building an identity around being an NYT reader. Plenty of people read NYT articles even though they disagree with them. Simply reading the NYT doesn’t turn someone into a self-described NYT person in the way that many people thinking reading SSC turns them into a rationalist.
Rationalist communities were fun when they were more about exploring ideas from different angles and less about identifying as a group with superior thoughts and beliefs.
It’s ironic that rationalists spend so much energy criticizing people who won’t tolerate the out group, while simultaneously being intolerant of what they define as the out group.
New communities will appear. Perhaps not ones as international, but that's okay; smaller groups can be better, because they're less vulnerable to evaporative cooling of beliefs; the group just disbands when people start leaving.
When groups get into happy death spirals, it's often easier to just start a new one.
The irony is that non-conformist thinkers tend to sound similar after a while. The guiding thread is that they place value on being controversial and non-conformist for its own sake. I can understand the emotional draw of it and have been subject to it myself, but because they define themselves in opposition to the mainstream, they can never really escape its orbit. Just like Satanists draw crosses upside down instead of new symbols, and hipsters dress the same way.
The real irony is that the rationalist community’s strong reaction to this article as propelled it to a level of popularity that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
Without the months of speculation and build-up and the seeming desire for everyone to write their own nit-picks of what the article got wrong (while deliberately ignoring what it might have gotten right), this article likely wouldn’t have received much traction at all.
I'm probably heavily projecting my own personal flaws here, but I've come to believe that the driving force behind that community is to feel smart and be recognized as such in some public forum. Therefore their strategic thinking was compromised from the start in this particular instance. There was no chance of them collectively deciding to follow your proposition.
>The real irony is that the rationalist community’s strong reaction to this article as propelled it to a level of popularity that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
It wouldn't need much popularity to do damage. A modestly popular article exposing the guy would be enough for him to have personal consequences. People have been cancelled (from their jobs) for less.
On the other hand, the big reaction might stop the next such bullying, or at least make the next journalist consider that they're doing something scummy and tacky.
>The irony is that non-conformist thinkers tend to sound similar after a while.
Non-comformist means outside the mainstream.
There's no infinite variety outside the mainstream, and even if there was, it doesn't matter in its entirety (nobody will call you a non-conformist for writing about butterflies, even if it's not mainstream).
What most matters is the subset of the variety of topics directly opposed by conformist views.
So, that's what non-comformists explore primarily. And that's the value in having non-conformists.
Not some variety of millions of irrelevant viewpoints on this and that - but as a counter-voice to what's promoted 24/7 on all mainstream sources.
It's possible I am viewing the situation too harshly, but so far non-conformism been disappointing. I do agree with you that it's nice that there at least are some people doing something else. I am bringing criticism without proposing solutions, but I find it fun to discuss those topics to begin with.
Essentially it falls into a few categories.
- The free-speech crowd: while I appreciate that they go against the mainstream media and the neoliberal consensus, they tend to default to invoking values and symbolic victories without much in way of an actual plan or policy proposals. Essentially a new form of the aestheticization of politics in a different context. From Trump to Parler, it all feels very postmodern in a way and keeps changing randomly.
- The intellectual dark web: these spend most of their time hinting at controversy and reiterating their stance as free thinkers, but it rarely goes beyond questioning SJW ideology and arguing for just a more optimistic version of the current form of capitalism. (Pinker, for example) It's frustrating because it really seems like they could band together to produce some great things.
- Various self-help authors or commentators whose career is based on debates, media production, and who essentially promote the same ideas as the dark web, but in a more packageable format and with a focus on personal improvement and subscription or ad based revenue generation. (Shapiro, JBP)
- Rationalists: spend most of their time discussing lifestyle differences and AI. The latter is obviously very important, but they don't really address current problems and prefer to talk about Bayesian statistics in their own zone, or provide thrill-seeking to tech workers. It's unclear what they even achieve with all that rationality other than discussing it. HPMOR is great, though.
- The modern day far-left: those who aren't aligned with the mainstream and who don't pursue idpol are mostly in a state of disarray, in small numbers, a mirror version of the commentators described above, or subject to tankism
All in all, many of them are doing better than me on the front of ideas but it's not very motivating.
But there's no real endgame anyone has, it's just a pushback against "mainstream media and the neoliberal consensus" aka, the establishment, modern big tech, bipartisan monoculture, and so on.
An endgame would require some positive vision for the future (whether it includes adopting some elements from the past or inventing new ones). But there might not be any.
History creates those visions (that is, historical forces, changes in material conditions, new opportunities, demographic changes, etc) not will alone. The thinkers thinking the visions usually come later (and even if they come before the historical changes, they're ignored, until the landascape is ready for their ideas).
I don't know that I'd call it a ritual, but I skim the NYT front and "World" pages daily, weekend or otherwise, because I like to think it helps me keep track of which way the wind is blowing, and among US media I'm pretty sure that, most days, the NYT blows hardest.
Timing aside - and does timing matter as much now as it did back when news papers were still a thing? - Metz's article carefully doesn't say, but very strongly implies, that SSC and its community serve as a "transmission belt" using privileged access to trendsetters in the tech industry to deliver fascist ideas into that industry's main stream of thought.
Will that become part of the post-Russiagate narrative being developed around the industry as a whole, not least by the NYT itself? I don't know. But it could. And, as someone who wishes for nothing more than to have a time portal open from 2347 into his living room just long enough for a history of the 20th century to fall out, this is the sort of stuff I find really interesting and diverting to think about.
edit: On reflection, one wonders what the NYT's perspective on Hacker News would be. I think there's a reasonable chance we'll get to find out. And that would be interesting, too!
What incentive would the NYT (or similar media outlets) have to NOT imply that Hacker News is supportive home to white supremacists, racists, fascists, right-wing extremists, and rampant sexism? (outside of whether they find HN the right interesting target or not)
There are no standards or penalties for using logical fallacies in media writing.
As a journalist, all you need to do is craft your wording to imply a connection to be able to smear your target (or to make a nice click-worthy article with hot-takes). Here's a few different tactics that you can use:
-does your target have at least 1 or 2 members of its community who have said something outside the norms of the present?
-is there anybody who is within 2-3 degrees of relationship between the leadership at the site that sometimes say things outside the norms of the present?
-are there members of the community who are part of another community that doesn't have sufficient equal representation along identity lines? (i.e. this is a tech community, tech underrepresents some minorities, therefore, this site is racist)
-does the racial/gender makeup of the community not align with the broader US population?
This idea of which way the wind is blowing is accurate for me as well. I used to read the FT and Economist for a similar reason which was 'this is what people who make business decisions use as their level of understanding.'
What changed is that the views in them no longer had any durable meaning or predictive power. The necessary ingredient in news has always been conflict, this is what makes a story a story, but when you can fabricate infinite conflict by applying a hyperbolic (ideological) lens to some second hand facts, it (cheaply) produces an approximation of news, but without any importance or value because the conflict is manufactured. So-called "fake news," was less about fabricated events so much as it was about fake conflict.
Net-net, dropping mainstream news some years ago has improved my overall quality of life tremendously.
> [I] would even be a bit suspicious of someone who did...
Am I reading this right, that you'd consider dissociating from somebody over their associations... because their associations include news sources that discuss dissociation on the basis of one's associations?
I still know more people who trust the NYT than who flat out don't trust it. Even among those who have grown slightly weary (and wary) of it, there's still a weight to the brand name they just can't shake off. It's been the paper of record for their entire lives. So, if someone's only exposure to Alexander is him being called a racist in the gray lady, it unfortunately makes it harder to get them to read his fascinating, thoughtful, sometimes atonal, occasionally dubious, always worth thinking about articles.
I read SSC for years. I still like his writing about psychiatry.
They didn't call him a racist. They pointed out where he aligned himself with racists and where he didn't. They left out him saying he likes eugenics.[1]
> Well-known books like Toby Ord’s “The Precipice” and Philip Tetlock’s “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction” are important parts of the rationalist firmament.
Aside: I was pretty into the roguelikes that descend from the Moria/Angband line for the better part of a decade. I'd frequently get to know people in that community and, after some light googling, realise they were famous in some other field.
I learned about Toby Ord through a terrific game he wrote called Sil [0], which is a nearly-unrecognizable fork of NPPAngband that sticks tightly to the theme of the Silmarillion. It's a very tight game, and it oozes atmosphere--especially neat considering there is no sound, and only an ASCII-character terminal-like display.
This was also how I first discovered Nick Bostrom and "Superintelligence"; Toby Ord was a postdoc of Bostrom's at the time, and following the chain I stumbled into this work.
I guess roguelikes might appeal to rationalists in particular; there's a lot to reason about in there, but sometimes random things happen and there's just nothing you can do :)
Interesting; I learned about Toby Ord through a terrific interactive fiction (IF) game he wrote called All Things Devours [0], highly recommended (and very friendly to someone mostly unfamilair with IF as a genre, as I was).
I have to wonder if the NYT piece had much traction at all outside of the few internet communities who knew it was coming. The piece is not great, but ironically that’s what propelled it to widespread popularity. With a single article, the NYT writer managed to steal the focus of an entire community and get his otherwise uninteresting article spread far and wide across the internet. More clicks for him.
That said, I do think there is plenty of room for criticism of internet rationalist communities. There are a lot of people riding the coattails of blogs like SSC to use rationalism as a tool to lend credibility to their flawed assumptions.
However, the audience for criticisms of rationalist communities is very small. Self-described rationalists seem interested on contrarian takes about everything but themselves.
I can’t believe the anti-Semitism at the NYT is so unapologetic that they gladly doxxed a Jewish man in this climate of hate and violence. Blood is on their hands.
The article claims the nytimes story is like this:
> Scott Alexander’s blog is popular with some influential Silicon Valley people.
> Scott Alexander has done posts that espouse views on race or gender that progressives disapprove of.
> THEREFORE, Silicon Valley is a hotbed of racism and sexism.
But this just isn't accurate. The first sentence is right. The second is part of the profile (though not the entire point). And the stated conclusion is not in the article at all.
I hadn't noticed "rationalists" of this particular type before today. I'm not impressed.
This part is pretty bad:
> Metz is very interested to paint Alexander as racist, by writing for example that “in one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in ‘The Bell Curve.’”
Metz doesn't call Alexander a racist. The author feels Metz paints Alexander as a racist simply by raising an association with well known accused racist Charles Murray. Yet... if that inference is generally clear, then why did Alexander choose to make a point about UBI by associating himself with Charles Murray?
My guess is the author feels attacked by the nytimes (or maybe the "tribe" the nytimes belongs to) and is fighting back (Fighting a little dirty, too, since it seems to be portraying the story inaccurately.)
The self-described rationalist community made their mind up about the article long before it was published, or even written.
I think you’re right that the rationalist communities feel like they need to defend themselves and fight back, while refusing to even consider anything that could be viewed as criticism of their community.
The modern self-described rationalist communities feel more like a place for people who have built their personal identities around the idea of being intellectual non-conformists than for people who genuinely want to discuss topics from different perspectives.
The article is worse than you are portraying it. They go out and tie Murray to Alexander then in the next sentence remind the reader Murray is a racist.
"In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”"
You say "Metz doesn't call Alexander a racist", but that sentence is clearly trying to get his readers to think that.
There are many proponents of basic income, why choose a known racist?
Probably not because you are racist. I'd wager it is because you are a troll out to illicit heated responses and get more attention. And I'm not sure it's done knowingly or rationally.
"Even though I like both basic income guarantees and eugenics, I don’t think these are two things that go well together – making the income conditional upon sterilization is a little too close to coercion for my purposes. Still, probably better than what we have right now."[1]
> why did Alexander choose to make a point about UBI by associating himself with Charles Murray
You didn't read the article, yet you want to infer the reason why Alexander did something?
If you actually read the article, he chose Murray because his opinon it fit a particular quadrant in a box chart, namely the "Pessmistic Cooperative" view on poverty. He also "associated" himself in that same diagram with Bernie Sanders, Lenin and School Lunches.
I hope you take this as a learning experience. Please read the article before jumping to conclusions.
I did answer your question. You completely ignored what I wrote, maybe because you don't like being proven wrong.
I'm not sure if you are implying that I'm a "rationalist", but if you are, you're jumping to conclusions again. You have a glaring habit of making pretty bad assumptions and I really hope you change yourself. It's a very bad trait that appears to be pretty common in your responses.
I've never heard of this blog before this article or even rationalism, but your question made me curious about why he chose to refer to Murray. But instead of just jumping to conclusions and assuming things like you, I actually bothered to read the article. This is something you didn't do. Honestly, you should learn from this.
>>> Compared to the mass public, the biggest difference between rationalists and everyday Americans is almost certainly that Americans are very religious.
Oddly enough, the people I've known from the past generation who were the most skillful and verbose rationalists were all educated at Catholic universities. I'm not sure they were all still religious by the time I met them. My uncle could demolish any idea or argument.
Yglesias’s piece is much better than the Times’, and much better than other takes, but he’s still missing a few things.
1. Scott is worth reading.
2. Sometimes Scott tackles controversial topics and takes positions I disagree with, but we should not stop reading everything he writes because of that.
3. One controversial topic Scott sometimes writes about is race, and in particular race science, by which I mean the genetic correlations between race and traits like IQ.
4. Scott chose to write under a quasi-pseudonym, Scott Alexander, most of the time, precisely because he didn’t want his controversial takes to affect the rest of his life and community.
5. In building his blog, Scott appealed to and courted several different groups. The most important groups for the purpose of this discussion are Rationalists, neoreactionaries, so-called race realists, and tech people.
6. Some of the tech people he appealed to are prominent, and they would eventually support him both publicly and privately.
7. At the same time and independent of Scott, America has undergone a shift in its appraisal of both technology and race, and American society has become more polarized for reasons that are too complex to explore here.
8. Technology is seen as more important in American society, and many of its effects are now interpreted as potentially harmful. This has raised the profile of tech leaders in the public eye, and has made the media more critical of them. (They can be important, or they can be ignored by the critical press, but they cannot expect to be both.)
9. Race-baiting became common during the Trump years, even as critical race theory went more mainstream among liberals.
10. If Scott had simply written a blog that was popular among tech people, the mainstream media would have covered him with a puff piece.
11. Scott repeatedly convinced journalists not to profile him, however, because he did not want the increased attention. (Did he know where it would lead?)
12. If Scott had simply moderated a comment section where race realism was widespread, he would have been just another wing nut on the Internet, deserving no notice outside the SPLC. But Scott did both.
13. I personally believe Scott saw the contradictions and strategic flaws in his choices. He had built a blog that was both influential among famous people, widely read by “race realists”, and written under a quasi-pseudonym.
14. Which brings us to the media. They write stories about important and famous people, because their readers want to know about those people. Journalists don’t care about those important and famous people as people; they care about them as stories. As decision makers who may affect the rest of us.
15. The best stories are surprising, and when something is surprising, sometimes it is surprising because it has been kept hidden, because it is shameful.
16. Scott was hiding something. Not just his full name, but the extent to which his blog was enmeshed with neoreactionary movements and so-called race realism.
17. Scott is still hiding things; he is giving a distorted version of events. (And to re-iterate, I will continue to read his posts although I see him being disingenuous about these issues.) He says he has only spoken with Thiel once. Yes, but Scott worked at a startup funded by Thiel, Metamed. Scott is close with one of Thiel’s mentees, Balaji Srinivasan. Both Balaji and Thiel funded the startup of Curtis Yarvin/Mencius Moldbug, even as Scott discussed Yarvin’s writings in depth on his popular blog.
18. Some of his prominent tech supporters were aware of Scott’s interest in race science and continued to support him publicly. Others were probably not aware.
19. That is the root cause that resulted in Scott receiving the coverage he did. It was not about Scott. It was not because of any personal animosity that the Times or its reporters bear towards him. It is because he managed to bring prominent tech people and race scientists together on one blog for years, and keep it hidden, until it blew...
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 85.6 ms ] threadIt really colors my judgment of him that he would attack the free press this way. It's funny a so called "rationalist" doesn't want to be attached to his own writings, because you know people might attack him and well that would hurt his feelings.
Don't make comments that jeopardize your business, then blame other people for "being irrational", when they correctly attribute those comments to you, it's simple accountability.
Again the doxxing is a complete myth, everyone knew his name already, he just didn't want attention draw to the fact he's actually being paid a quarter million dollars to do what he's doing.
You might want to argue that it’s Alexander’s fault for writing a semi-pseudonymous blog in the first place, but that doesn’t help his patients. And I might agree with the view that exposing him is justified if the article actually revealed something of public interest-that he was a Nazi or a pedophile, for example-but it doesn’t. It’s a thin tissue of spurious guilt by association and mischaracterization. The NYT have decided that any risk to Alexander’s patients is less important than naming him in a low-quality hit piece. What they have done is immoral.
They protect sources exposing things that won't be exposed without anonimity, how does Scott Siskind fit this description?
> NYT didnt doxx him, because he is the one who chose to publicized himself. You can't eat the cake and have it too.
To be clear, you are arguing that “blogging under a pseudonym” is exactly the same thing as one of the most popular papers in the world publishing your real name in a hit piece?
> They protect sources exposing things that won't be exposed without anonimity, how does Scott Siskind fit this description?
I’m having a hard time parsing this. Can you rephrase?
Post early 2000s fascism, I've taken to viewing stuff sort of functionally. Whether it's been through exposure to alt-righters, or exposure to using drug addicts (some of whom have died of it, by now), it strikes me as existentially important that many, many people will brazenly lie about stuff fundamental to their position, for advantage (as defined by them).
As such, the LAST thing you can do is take people at face value and present them your own face value and intentions/needs. People are in conflict over many things, and people are really clever when they're not really childish: it strikes me that the easy ones to read are the ones so childish that they can't even comprehend anything being different from them, and so they lash out and make up ill-conceived demons to rant against. Those folks are easy to spot.
It doesn't take much cognitive development to identify 'this, the other, is different from me' and to imaginatively populate their mental space with your version of their own drives and wishes. And what do you do then? You tailor what you yourself present, to what will get by their filters and produce the effect you want.
And that's why people lie as much as they do.
Almost by definition, rationalists are beyond the primitive level of cognition where everyone is just copies of them: otherwise, other rationalists would argue with them and criticize their position. So we're looking at positions being defended by people who're capable of interpreting the other, and either correctly identifying outside values or making up some 'SJW' phantasm (some of which is likely to actually exist!) that brainlessly lashes out against 'rationality'.
So, practicing rationalists looking to get results will be MORE likely to lie than SJWs and QAnons and the like: and it's the most natural thing in the world to expect a great deal of sketchiness and calculating, in terms of how things are presented.
The bottom line is: does the belief system seek a sort of postmodern coexistence with all manner of conflicting beliefs and scenarios? Or is it a One True System seeking to destroy opposing systems? If it's the latter, it's gonna be cloaked in layers of lies, and we see that in Dark Enlightenment thinking: it would be foolish to present it in starkest form, like the alt-right stuff one has to be 'pilled' into it rather than dumped in at the deep end.
Think about Chesterton's saying about the fence:
> In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
Rationalists are the more modern type of reformer here (and so are hackers, founders who like to disrupt things, etc., so this worldview also tends to be popular on this site). Absent a convincing argument from first principles as to why the fence should exist, they think it's clear that it shouldn't.
The sort of reformer that Chesterton calls "intelligent" I would perhaps rather call wise, in that this isn't a matter of personal cognitive capacity. (In fact, people who are more intelligent are probably better at being the "more modern" type of reformer, simply because they can more easily formulate those arguments!) They trust that someone else has put up that fence for a reason, and they aren't interested in relitigating it from first principles every time a reformer wanders by.
The truly wise reformer also knows that this only works if there's a good reason to believe the argument exists, whether or not they know the argument themselves. They have to be working in a framework where fences don't get constructed without reason in the first place. Which is a fine approach at scale: you can't scale understanding all the arguments yourself (which is why they don't want to relitigate every single one), but you can scale building a society where someone has made those arguments before building up any fences. In order to do this, they have to at least occasionally listen to the "more modern" reformers, especially when they do come back and say, look, I found out why people originally thought the fence was a good idea, and here's why I think they were wrong to do so.
Society at large tends to be more like the second type of reformer, but perhaps without that depth of wisdom. When they look at some norm in society (be it monogamy, or particular ways to phrase things, or as the article says, whether it's acceptable to eat coffee beans instead of brewing them), they tend to be unwilling to deeply question it, because they trust (rightly or wrongly) that the rest of society has converged on it for a reason. They get annoyed at children who ask "Why" all the time, and they certainly don't do so themselves.
Rationalists tend to be more like the first type of reformer. If you can't explain why the norm of monogamy is good, it's probably bad. If your argument is "It makes me feel bad," they say you should question those feelings - see the linked story at the end about "polyhacking," i.e., arguing yourself into being polyamorous because your own emotions don't make sense from first principles. (They've even invented a new term, "compersion," for a feeling which is the opposite of jealousy - you could argue that they've invented a new emotion, seeing as not enough people felt it for it to have a name already.)
Both approaches have their upsides and downsides, and I would be skeptical of either approach taken to its extreme. And it's the "more intelligent type of reformer" that controls societ...
Maybe this was true 5-10 years ago but my sense is that "rationalists" have grown up (sometimes literally -- they were in their early 20s, now they're in their late 20s, early 30s). Scott Alexander doesn't seem like this "modern type of reformer" to me and I think a lot of people are on the same trajectory as him.
I think this is a phase of personal development and it usually ends by 30. Also, plenty of the people I'd put into this category ("modern type of reformers") are not grey tribers, they're blue-tribers. "Abolish the police," "open the borders" is exactly this kind of reform.
The difference between the blue tribers and the grey tribers -- when it comes to naive calls for reform -- is that the former are more emotional and the latter are more analytical. Neither of them are wise.
> In the other direction, this also explains why the Grey Tribe has "vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up," quoting the Slate Star Codex post linked in the NYT article (which references another Chesterton work, as it happens). To the more modern type of reformer, the gender-checking gate in front of romantic partnership obviously has no point, needs to be torn down, and really the problem is all the people defending the gate because it historically existed. Which, yes, they're right about that! But the Blue Tribe knows that if you actually want gay rights to happen, you've got to play by the rules of the "more intelligent" reformer - who is wrong in this case - and affirmatively argue for taking down the fence instead of simply questioning it.
We're getting pretty close to gay rights these days. Personally, I think Will & Grace had more to do with that than either kind of reformer. Americans have become more comfortable with homosexuality as they became exposed to gay people who are "normal". In other words, the perception of gay people has shifted from hustlers and tortured married men looking for sex in dive bars to well-dressed, polite lawyers.
Reformers played some role in that process but I think it's a mistake to view progress like this as the result of "winning an argument".
But rationalists didn't invent the word compersion.[1] And people felt schadenfreude before there was a word for it.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/compersion
2. But, interestingly enough, if you read about the Kerista Commune that coined the term (a hippie commune, more or less, in the Haight in the 1970s onwards), among their precepts is this:
> 12. Rational Approach to All Things -This includes mystical and emotional phenomena; No acceptance of lapsing into irrational self-identity.
and later version of their precepts included these:
> 3. Rationality - Using reason and logic are basic approaches in all conversation, behavior, and inquiry; no acceptance of strong feelings, mystical intuition or unreasonable statements are being truth of any truth.
> 4. The Search for Truth through the Elimination of Contradictions - Working definition of truth: a very large body of premises which do not contradict each other. Contradictions between stated beliefs and actions, between two people's different versions of the same event, or anything else are encountered and analyzed to discover the most accurate picture of reality.
They were certainly a separate group from the present-day Rationalists linked to Yudkowsky et al., but I think their approach to handling their own feelings may have been very similar, and they definitely took the counter-culture approach of not finding society's previous acceptance of a norm of any value in evaluating the worth of that norm. I suspect the "Polyhacking" document would not have been out of place among the Keristans.
(As for schadenfreude, it's true that English doesn't have a native word for it, but it's certainly well-documented as an emotion throughout history - Psalm 35 talks about enemies who sneer, rejoice wrongfully, and maliciously wink, while saying, "Aha, aha!" One modern translation identifies what they do as gloating, which seems to be substantially similar. And apparently Aristotle had a term for it, epichairekakia: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...)
Vicarious joy is well documented throughout history though. And compersion is just vicarious joy in a specific context.
Maybe some of his views just differ from yours?
Nobody is going to ostracise you if you hold interesting views on string theory, or economics, or local government ,or free love, or many other controversial topics on which society has a settled opinion.
However if you hold views which require the submission of others to your will or hold other lives to be worth less than yours you can expect to be ostracised from society because those views are inimical to the functioning of the society which lets you express them and simply enforces consequences for doing so. The consequences for such behaviour are neither surprising nor unjust.
People like Charles Murray have not asserted this, to my knowledge. He supports race-neutral policies, such as a universal basic income. The assumption that all talents or personality traits are equally distributed among all demographic groups is not necessary to support equality under the law.
A thinker cannot simply wash their hands of the manifestation of their ideas, especially once that manifestation becomes stupidly obvious.
Sometimes an unrelated example helps:
Marxists do this all the time when they hand wave away the awful history of Communism. “Marx advocated evolution toward communism, not dictatorship.” Okay, maybe so, but virtually every large scale society to attempt to adopt Marxism ends up as some kind of totalitarian state that oppresses people at huge scale. At some point it’s reasonable to conclude that there is something very wrong with Marxism.
Maybe Murray didn’t intend to help resurrect Naziism, but he played a central role in doing so.
Back to the Rationalists, this is one of my huge problems with them and it’s evident in that paragraph about BLM. They reason in an absolute vacuum. They never seem to look down at the street to see what their ideas are doing down there.
edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: UBI isn't inherently bad but Murray's version is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127207
You cannot change a government policy without somehow, somewhere affecting some minority. If we are going to going to call that racism, then we really cannot even have policy discussions.
Obviously Murray is a particularly controversial person, but UBI is obtaining small amounts of broad support in general.
I guess it just feels a bit exhausting to me. While I understand the reasoning behind what you wrote (and it's logical and internally consistent), I also feel one could just as reasonably make the case that not supporting UBI is racist.
If the zeitgeist has advanced so far that even an abstract defense of free thought is racist, as you seem to be claiming, that’s a pretty big reason for concern.
I didn't say 'an abstract defense of free thought is racist', I said I knew the article would be defending a racist because of the excessive abstraction in the title to dance around the actual problem, which is not interesting views but racist views, something quite distinct.
> I find the level of abstraction involved in rationalist discourse a little untenable.
And here's the kind of “interesting writing” it refers to:
> Five million people participated in the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter campaign. Suppose that solely as a result of this campaign, no currently-serving police officer ever harms an unarmed black person ever again. That’s 100 lives saved per year times let’s say twenty years left in the average officer’s career, for a total of 2000 lives saved, or 1/2500th of a life saved per campaign participant. By coincidence, 1/2500th of a life saved happens to be what you get when you donate $1 to the Against Malaria Foundation. The round-trip bus fare people used to make it to their #BlackLivesMatter protests could have saved ten times as many black lives as the protests themselves, even given completely ridiculous overestimates of the protests’ efficacy.
(from https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-ever...)
This is a pretty controversial take (one that I have some pretty major objections to – e.g., BLM isn't about everyone with dark skin, but a specific group of people who are being persecuted in a specific way), but it isn't racist.
"Supporting Black Lives Matter" is not equivalent to "not being racist".
It's a hack job of an argument designed to make you not value BLM and I can only presume due to its hack job nature that the end goal is a more racist society.
And does his support of Malaria prevention based on a utilitarian calculation that it'll help save the most lives (including more black lives) therefore prove he is in favor of subjugating black people based on their race?
Judging others' goals by your own heuristics isn't a hard mistake to make, though it creates very flimsy straw arguments.
Then how should we balance improvement and saving lives?
As a minority myself, that was my mental model of BLM as well, as this movement was given fuel by deaths of African-Americans after interactions with police officers. And much of the rhetoric/protests/media coverage was around how the police are racists, and if only we could defund the police, it would save black lives.
It seems like you are poking at the idea that BLM isn't just about _saving_ black lives, but also _improving_ black lives. To be fair to Scott, he doesn't also factor in how Malaria prevention _improves_ black lives either. So it's not like he's not doing an apples-to-apples comparison along a very key factor. I would personally argue that the incremental value of being alive compared to being dead is much greater than any marginal increase in quality of life.
How would you improve and help Scott with his calculation, accounting for the value of BLM's 'improving' black lives efforts? And how would you then weight the improvement of black lives stemming from Malaria prevention?
The reason I’m saying it’s myopic is that yes, it’s also about systemic racism and the prison-industrial complex and a ton of other things that probably even vary person-to-person. And even if Scott doesn’t realize that from the jump, surely he realizes that it deserves more than a single paragraph comparing it to fighting malaria… right?
Anyway, if you’re committed to looking at this through this strictly utilitarian lens, let me save us both some time and say we probably won’t be able to agree.
I may be reading into this wrong, so do pushback if I'm off here, but I'm picking up the sense that you feel that whatever value BLM provides to society cannot (and perhaps should not?) be measured/quantified? Since BLM is targeting nebulous goals ('systemic racism') that vary from person-to-person, then any attempts to compare the efficacy of its efforts to other initiatives should be duly questioned?
I accept that some things are hard to quantify. But I'm not sure I fully comprehend why we shouldn't _try_, if that's a held view (if it's not, ignore this sentence).
I also think Scott deserves some grace here. That paragraph in question wasn't meant to be the sole point of his post. It was merely an anecdote to suggest that it's important to think about the impact/efficacy of your actions if you're trying to improve the world. Not all actions have equal impacts. A point I very much agree with.
I broadly agree with the utilitarian goal of maximizing the efficacy of one’s aid. But the reason I can’t fully co-sign is that I feel there are some things that aren’t really quantifiable. Example: a classic response to BLM is that police commit relatively few murders compared to murders overall. My feeling is that the people entrusted to protect and serve have an additional responsibility; that violence + abuse of power is somehow “worse” than violence on its own. But how do you quantify that? How many “normal” murders are equal to one “police” murder? I don’t even know how to begin answering that question.
And I don’t think BLM should be immune from pushback because some of its goals can’t be objectively measured! But I do think a lot, if not most, criticism has been from a place of prejudice. That we’re going to look back on this in 50 years the way we look back on the Civil Rights Movement now, where some of the goals will have been achieved and basically everyone pretends they would have supported it all along (even though they oppose the contemporary version because they’re not protesting nicely or whatever). So when people see shallow dismissals, I think their guards (justifiably!) go up, because they know where it’s coming from more often than not.
I’m not trying to deny Scott the grace you’re talking about. I know it was a mostly throwaway paragraph in a longer essay. I’m just noting that his whole thing is supposed to be about digging into the strongest versions of uncomfortable arguments to get at the truth. Straw manning is supposed to be anathema — so when he does it, I think it’s worth questioning why.
I maintain that this isn't racism; it's just him having different priorities. I'm not even confident enough to say his priorities are wrong; only that I have good reasons to disagree with some of them (e.g. attacking problems that can be solved short-term frees up resources for solving long-term problems later, and your investments into solving a problem go further when there's public support, so BLM advocacy right now might be a time-sensitive problem (above and beyond the deaths it causes; I don't know how to weigh deaths v.s. deaths, and I'm suspicious of people who do)).
If I'm reading your comments correctly (please do correct me if I'm wrong here), it seems like you are suggesting any commentary that would suggest that the BLM movement isn't most optimally trying to improve black lives, is therefore racist?
Is BLM unquestionable? To question it, or to suggest other pathways to improve black lives would be misdirection from BLM, and therefore is racist?
From a high-level perspective, this style of thinking seems like it's the most racist of all (and a very popular take!). Suggesting that we shouldn't be thinking through how to most optimally improve black lives, and that we should constrain our thinking to whatever the current popular incarnation of a solution is (BLM!), isn't a recipe for progress.
> This is an extremely hot take! And while I would not say this paragraph is typical of SSC content, it does a good job of expressing the SSC view of most of what passes for politics in the United States of America — it doesn’t matter at all. [...] I would not endorse the SSC worldview.
> In the (liberal, coastal, urban, very political) circles that I travel in everyone (especially parents) knows and acknowledges that men and women are, on average, different in ways that end up mattering for the distribution of outcomes. But everyone also believes that sexism and misogyny are significant problems in the world, and that the people struggling against those problems are worthy of admiration and praise. So to leap into a conversation about sexism and misogyny yelling “well actually Giolla and Kajonius find that sex differences in personality are larger in countries with more gender equality” would be considered a rude and undermine-y thing to do. Which is just to say that most people are not rationalists — they believe that statements can be evaluated on grounds beyond truth and falsity. There is suspicion of the guy who is “just asking questions.”
That's assuming that everything that gets labelled as racist is justly labelled as such.
Wait, which part of the article is doing this? The excerpt where Alexander argues that it's better to spend energy accumulating resources to donate to malaria prevention efforts than to spend energy going to BLM protests? That doesn't strike me as a view that "hold[s] other lives to be worth less than the author"?
And that's the most charitable point of view that I can possibly have on this incredibly racist point of view. I think what he actually meant was something far more racist.
I see the SSC argument as "I would like to spend 100 units of resource (time, money, etc) improving black lives. The line between (donating money to malaria prevention) and (black lives improved in Africa) is much clearer to me than the line between (donating money to/attending events organized by BLM) and (black lives improved in the USA). Therefore, I should spend my 100 units on malaria prevention."
Maybe this is what you mean by "arguing against BLM's right for self-preservation": taken to its extreme, this argument says that all of the effort behind BLM should just pivot to malaria prevention. In that case, the argument does look racist, because it's taken all of the resources devoted to agitating for societal change and re-allocated them to narrower medical assistance that's unlikely to produce the same kind of societal change.
I don't think SSC is arguing for a complete pivot in resource allocation. I think he's arguing that more, but not all, attention should be spent on malaria prevention, and he sees malaria prevention as ultimately contributing to more improvement of black lives. But now I think I understand your response better, because it is in the above sense possible to interpret his argument as saying BLM is not itself a worthy cause. But I don't read it that way.
Instead it's about a feeling. It has to do with with the general gist of what's written and not written.
If you say you support freedom, the radical left says that's a dogwhistle for racism, since you really mean 'freedom to be racist'.
If you advocate or discuss any problem other than racism, the radical left would say that you're really saying that racism is not the foremost issue in the world, and that's racist.
If you appeal to mostly white men, the radical left says you're racist because you do not have outreach, or you don't represent minority voices.
If you support free speech, you're racist since you're just dogwhistling support for racist speech.
They will never say this of course, but it really has a lot more to do with image than concrete words or actions.
Joe Rogan never did anything racist and has even endorsed Sanders--but he seems* like he could be racist at a glance (muscular, interested in hyper masculine activities, probably drives a pick-up truck) so therefore he is.
I'm willing to consider that there is some racism in the blog, but after years of accusations and no proof, I am skeptical.
How about: if they're tone deaf about issues of race, then there's probably a reason. Could be just avoids the issue. Could be any number of other things, some of them pretty awful.
Part of the issue is that just asking 'where is the racism?' tends to gets responses that are--in summary--something like 'well if you don't see it, then you're just blind (if they are being charitable) or racist yourself'.
I know what I wrote is going to be very controversial, but you have to remember this is a condensed feeling that took me years to realise. I saw this same conversation play out 100 times:
--Someone post a link to SSC
--someone else says 'oh that guy is so racist'
--Then some poor fool asks 'wait, how is any of that racist?'
That is: there isn't paragraph or argument that is racist per se, but instead a general gist. It's much more about what is not said than what is.
Obviously we have a major communication problem here that I am not sure we can resolve. To some people, the rationalist community is so racist that they feel they shouldn't even have to explain why. If you cannot see it, you're being blind, racist, or as you mention: tone-deaf.
To others, there isn't anything racist about it, and they are left confused about why discussions about Moloch and cost disease are racist.
It's a bit meta, but I think this is a good example of Conflict versus disease https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
Sometimes I'm concerned when a topic is adjacent to serious issues of bias, and nobody is talking about it. We can get very comfortable not talking about issues that don't impact us.
Using the R-word is often unfair, waters down the meaning of the word and provokes feelings of being wrongly viewed. But being the victim of bias can be worse than all that. If we err on the side of being alert to potential bias especially if we are not the victim, then maybe that's not unhealthy.
I think this is a very good point that I don't see raised very often.
I have some friends with whom I could debate the James Damore memo, where Jordan Petersen is making some points based in reason and science, the extent to which “Defund the Police” is honest vs hyperbolic, or under what circumstances saying “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” is sensible vs incendiary.
I have other friends with whom those discussions would be impossible. It is this group that we could probably learn more from each other, but the heat from the conversation vastly exceeds the light (for everyone, not just me).
We are mostly stuck in eternal bikeshedding.
That feels to me like a lot more than bikeshedding (assuming there's an answer other than "zero point zero zero")
My current view on this is that it makes more sense to see it as a distribution of personality types and that gender is a red herring. It takes a fairly specific type of person to pursue computer science and coding for intrinsic reasons, and it is difficult enough that it takes some degree of intrinsic motivation to do well enough at it for it to be profitable. As it stands, the salary draw is already as high as it probably can be (in fact, I believe salaries to be in a bubble) in the US at least, and there are enough scholarships, programs, and free resources that almost anyone who is even somewhat motivated and not socio-economically crushed at the onset can start the process with some degree of ease and the expectation of high rewards at the end.
Hence the extrinsic draw of the profession is already as strong as you could expect. There is still cultural stigma, but that is being erased naturally since programmers have a high socio-economic status for the most part and indoor activities are more and more popular and mainstream. The only real problem left is intrinsic motivation, and if it is tied to your personality type as per my hypothesis, I don't see how you could meaningfully change it. Or to be more precise, the mechanisms of change that are available to us are already well underway.
> there are enough scholarships, programs, and free resources that almost anyone who is even somewhat motivated
This might be the hinge upon which we could pivot though. Does everyone really have the at-home internet access, quiet location to focus for 60-90 minutes at a time, with a desk, screen, and keyboard such that adding a Raspberry Pi is enough to get started? I can literally reach out and touch my 2 27" monitors, my work laptop, my personal computer, a KVM switch, and a Mac for each of my primary-school age kids, each with their own 27" 4K monitor, keyboard, chair, etc. That, coupled with my career as a model of what "normal" is, makes it a lot more likely that they'll end up in computing than the average Cambridge, MA schoolkid.
I don't think anything of what I described is "intrinsic" to them. If that's the case, there's chance for intervention to beneficially change things (rather than simply over-riding intrinsic preferences, which I think is bad.)
> and not socio-economically crushed at the onset
This is another one, of course, partially touched on above, and definitely inter-related.
To be perfectly clear, I am not making a by-the-bootstraps argument, just trying to look at the situation as objectively as my biases allow me to. It might be far, far easier for the scion of a tidy bourgeois home to make it, but unless they have the right personality type they are still highly likely to fail eventually. They'll go further than a student with the same personality type but fewer resources, but the roadblock will still appear later in the sequence, possibly at the very end. Conversely, a disadvantaged kid with the right personality type will typically have the possibility to get to the launchpad zone towards a better life. At the very least, the conditions and probability distributions have never been better compared to other careers and aspirations.
What could change this is to have better opportunities for mediocre coders, but it appears to be going the opposite way. Due to the extrinsic rewards there is now a glut of such employees that might pop their own code-monkey bubble soon while leaving the outrageous tech salaries for the higher tranches intact for at least a bit longer (if there is in fact a separate bubble as well for the latter).
I've been finding more and more that I have to bite my tongue around people, even that I know also. The most upsetting part is when you see otherwise intelligent people fall into fallacious anti-patterns. One such anti-pattern that I see right now is black and white reasoning. For instance disagreeing with something being labelled racist means you support racism. Essentially, if you can shift the conversation from a complex topic (is this action racist) to a simple one (we shouldn't be racists) then it becomes easier to form an opinion and castigate your opponent.
I have to wonder how much of this is the person on the other side trying to copout of a topic which they haven't thought about, versus the influence of twitter-like agitprop. I think it's likely a fusion of both.
You might be surprised to learn that it's often neither. This stuff is rooted in the decades-long academic tradition of critical race theory.
Misapplication of that theory it might or might not be. But in the spirit of the topic of the article posted here, it might be worth looking at the academic origins of this movement.
Here's a nice summary article https://spectator.us/topic/anti-racism-really-means-debate-w...
You might or might not agree with the ideas proposed therein. I certainly have mixed feelings about it. But you can't dismiss a movement as illegitimate without at least trying to understanding it.
That said, people who really buy into critical race theory can be difficult to debate or discuss with, much like any other "extreme" or "total" view of the world. But you must respect the fact that, for many, this is not an academic debate but a life-or-death fight for justice, equality, and freedom.
Don't dismiss what you don't understand. Feel free to disagree, but don't dismiss it.
I'm not dismissing postmodernity and associated schools of thought, rather I'm dismissing lazily shoe-horning your opponents ideas into a more simplistic, easier to attack strawman. It might sound like postmodernism, but it definitely is not.
Postmodern critical theory is about deconstruction, context and narrative structures -- the absolute opposite of black and white thinking and strawmaning. The latter is what I am dismissing.
The sorts of bad faith strawmen I am referring to are about as close to postmodernism as new age woo peddlers' arguments are to quantum mechanics. It's debasing to the true theory to even call them misapplications. To your point, I dismiss this sort of behavior because I understand it.
On the same line, the tumultuous times in which french moralists such as La Rochefoucauld lived certainly helped them sharpen their remarks.
And that's exactly why I read the comment forums on Hacker News and elsewhere.
- CNN/MSNBC viewership ratings were constant throughout the proceedings.
- FOX viewership ratings were high for opinion commentary before, during breaks, and after, but dropped to nominal any time house impeachment managers presented evidence.
Fox viewership quite literally tuned out the opposing viewpoint, while MSNBC/CNN viewership did not.
If “contemporary society” is learning self-government on the job as we transition to a relatively post-toil socio-economy, how can mistakes be mostly constructive so it’s safe to learn?
> “It only remains for men to create a good organization for the state... and to arrange it in such a way that their self-seeking energies are opposed to one another, each thereby neutralising or eliminating the destructive effects of the rest... As hard as it may sound, the problem of setting up a state can be solved even by a nation of devils (so long as they possess understanding).” — Kant, Political Writings : https://books.google.com/books?id=v7v3CwAAQBAJ&pg=PT79&lpg=P...
‘Possessing understanding’ cannot be parenthetical.
If you think that, you're a partisan that has tuned out the opposing viewpoint :-)
I mean, the reason MSNBC/CNN viewership didn't tune out during the time "house impeachment managers presented evidence" was because that was already their own viewpoint.
It is factual that viewers of one channel tuned out during an opposing viewpoint, viewers of the other two channels did not tune out during an opposing viewpoint.
Your assertion may be why MSNBC/CNN didn't tune out during house presentations, but doesn't explain why they didn't tune out during defense presentations.
---
Meanwhile, research on "approach-avoidance" behavioral patterns suggests there is a partisan difference in the degree of partisanship one needs one's sources to exhibit:
There's also good evidence that this kind of "selective exposure" is disproportionately powerful among Republicans. "One study found that adding the FNC logo to a news story increased the probability that Republicans would choose to read the story by 25 percentage points, whereas adding CNN’s logo or NPR’s logo reduced the chance by 10 points," Grossmann and Hopkins write. "No equally strong effects occurred among Democrats."
http://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2009/iyengar-redmedia-bluem...
The concern I'm raising is not that, but this:
"Thus, as the audience become polarized over matters of politics and public policy, rational media owners stand to gain market share by injecting more rather than less political bias into the news (Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2006). ... A further implication of voters’ increased exposure to one-sided news coverage is an ‘‘echo chamber’’ effect—the news serves to reinforce existing beliefs and attitudes."
The system needs a way to systematically correct for this.
That's the case with the Fox audience too: your assertion doesn't explain why they tuned out during defense presentations as well.
In any case, I didn't intend to make an assertion whether this is a one side problem, but highlight that not all participants are exposing themselves to all information. Borrowing the most neutrally or bi-partisan phrased positioning of the problem from the research I linked above:
"Republicans preferred to read news reports attributed to Fox News and to avoid news from CNN and NPR. Democrats and liberals exhibited exactly the opposite syndrome—dividing their attention equally between CNN and NPR, but avoiding Fox News. This pattern of selective exposure based on partisan affinity held not only for news coverage of controversial issues but also for relatively 'soft' subjects such as crime and travel."
I intended to relay a concerning metric illustrating this problem, to motivate a step back and ask what can be done to address that "‘Possessing understanding’ cannot be parenthetical."
---
> If you think that, you're a partisan that has tuned out the opposing viewpoint :-)
FWIW, I watched exhaustively, and on Fox News.
Though I have a deep knowledge of the relevant pop culture and players, mostly because it's forced down our throats anyway...
> But even more so, social media incentivizes the wrong kind of reading. Today you read someone from a rival school of thought in order to find the paragraph or sentence that, when pulled out of context and paired with a witty Twitter quip, will garner you lots of little hearts. I’m as guilty of doing this as anyone. A lot of very smart people have poured a lot of time and energy into making you want to collect those little hearts.
> That said, the way you learn things and get smarter is to read strong writers and try to understand what they’re saying [...] and why it is people believe that.
I was pleasantly surprised by the actions of the newspaper, New Humanist -- it is a Rationalist publication but mixes in Intersectional analysis seamlessly to provide quality journalism without accidentally moving towards the "Nazi" or "Racist" side of the spectrum as many other supposedly "Rationalist" newspapers do, by acknowledging that at a certain point it is not appropriate or rational to implicitly support these ideologies through trying to obtain a purely "Rationalist" understanding of the world, and that one's own rational understanding must be tempered by learning from the experienced of the systemically oppressed, otherwise you risk eliminating them from the "equation", and your consideration.
It's a very worthwhile newspaper to read, it is high quality and I cannot recommend it enough.
> I’m happy someone is pursuing these questions, but I don’t find the contemplations of these extreme scenarios to be particularly enlightening.
Indeed.
As a final note, it is worth it to know that Scott Alexander only decided he disliked the article from the NYT, not when he found out they were going to "out" him, but when he realised it was going to have a critical lens! Highly amusing!
Anyway, the note is copied pretty much verbatim from the Rational Wiki page on him: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander
Which links here: https://web.archive.org/web/20200623184053/https://twitter.c...
It links to the bottom of the thread in question. The gist of it is that, Scott Alexander communicated and had an open dialogue with the reporter, he knew that his name was going to be published (At the least, he didn't demand anonymity). The reporter initially had a positive take on SSC. The person in the linked tweet spoke to the reporter and introduced them to a different perspective, and put them in contact with other people with a slightly negative perspective of the blog. As soon as the reported started contacting those people, however, Scott suddenly had a problem with his name being published, and the blog was deleted.
That said your link does not in fact substantiate your statement that I can see. It is speculation on twitter also with no substantiation. Rumors frequently have a long chain where links in the chain use previous links as substantiation. It's why rumor is so unproductive in the first place. It poses as fact but if you chase it far enough frequently ends up being false or misleading.
No, all of the statements are there, they're first-hand accounts. The rest can easily be derived from given evidence.
They state first that they talked to the reporter, who had a positive bent.
They state that the reporter became increasing interested in a second perspective on SSC.
Third, it is a fact that Scott Alexander knew that the reporter was doing the article, and did not request anonymity (Otherwise the reporter would not have disclosed his name at any stage). So it can be seen that anonymity was not of interest to Scott when the reporter started out on the article.
Four, Scott Alexander deleted the site immediately after the reporter started seeking out opposing views. He did not do this at any time beforehand, when it would have been more prudent to do so.
I don't think defending interesting writing on controversial topics needs a defense, it just needs privacy. His conclusion is sufficient. "But something about the internet is making people into infantile conformists with no taste or appreciation for the life of the mind and frankly I’m sick of it."
Like any symbolic luxury good, it's an expression of alignment to what someone perceives to be power. It signals their beliefs about the world. Do they just enjoy it? Sure, but they enjoy it because it reinforces the story they tell themselves about their identity. It's like if they read USA Today or even Slate Star Codex. Today's NYT is written to arouse sentiments I prefer to keep at arms length.
Meanwhile, you’re arguing that you can draw sweeping conclusions about a person simply because they read a certain publication. Ironic, given the rationalist community’s original embrace of exploring a wide array of perspectives and writings rather than letting pre-conceived biases dominate one’s thinking.
I think you’re projecting your own habit of tying your identity to the material you read. Plenty of people read NYT articles without aligning themselves with the NYT, without thinking of themselves as part of the NYT community, and without building an identity around being an NYT reader. Plenty of people read NYT articles even though they disagree with them. Simply reading the NYT doesn’t turn someone into a self-described NYT person in the way that many people thinking reading SSC turns them into a rationalist.
You're less rational than you think.
It’s ironic that rationalists spend so much energy criticizing people who won’t tolerate the out group, while simultaneously being intolerant of what they define as the out group.
When groups get into happy death spirals, it's often easier to just start a new one.
Without the months of speculation and build-up and the seeming desire for everyone to write their own nit-picks of what the article got wrong (while deliberately ignoring what it might have gotten right), this article likely wouldn’t have received much traction at all.
Besides, I don't see any "let's stragetically be hush about it, so the article goes unnoticed" ever working.
The mere publishing of the article, with no reaction, would be enough to have personal consequences for the blogger.
At least with the big commotion, the shittiness of NYT publishing it has come under scutiny too.
So the reaction might be strategically good too.
It wouldn't need much popularity to do damage. A modestly popular article exposing the guy would be enough for him to have personal consequences. People have been cancelled (from their jobs) for less.
On the other hand, the big reaction might stop the next such bullying, or at least make the next journalist consider that they're doing something scummy and tacky.
Non-comformist means outside the mainstream.
There's no infinite variety outside the mainstream, and even if there was, it doesn't matter in its entirety (nobody will call you a non-conformist for writing about butterflies, even if it's not mainstream).
What most matters is the subset of the variety of topics directly opposed by conformist views.
So, that's what non-comformists explore primarily. And that's the value in having non-conformists.
Not some variety of millions of irrelevant viewpoints on this and that - but as a counter-voice to what's promoted 24/7 on all mainstream sources.
Essentially it falls into a few categories.
- The free-speech crowd: while I appreciate that they go against the mainstream media and the neoliberal consensus, they tend to default to invoking values and symbolic victories without much in way of an actual plan or policy proposals. Essentially a new form of the aestheticization of politics in a different context. From Trump to Parler, it all feels very postmodern in a way and keeps changing randomly.
- The intellectual dark web: these spend most of their time hinting at controversy and reiterating their stance as free thinkers, but it rarely goes beyond questioning SJW ideology and arguing for just a more optimistic version of the current form of capitalism. (Pinker, for example) It's frustrating because it really seems like they could band together to produce some great things.
- Various self-help authors or commentators whose career is based on debates, media production, and who essentially promote the same ideas as the dark web, but in a more packageable format and with a focus on personal improvement and subscription or ad based revenue generation. (Shapiro, JBP)
- Rationalists: spend most of their time discussing lifestyle differences and AI. The latter is obviously very important, but they don't really address current problems and prefer to talk about Bayesian statistics in their own zone, or provide thrill-seeking to tech workers. It's unclear what they even achieve with all that rationality other than discussing it. HPMOR is great, though.
- The modern day far-left: those who aren't aligned with the mainstream and who don't pursue idpol are mostly in a state of disarray, in small numbers, a mirror version of the commentators described above, or subject to tankism
All in all, many of them are doing better than me on the front of ideas but it's not very motivating.
But there's no real endgame anyone has, it's just a pushback against "mainstream media and the neoliberal consensus" aka, the establishment, modern big tech, bipartisan monoculture, and so on.
An endgame would require some positive vision for the future (whether it includes adopting some elements from the past or inventing new ones). But there might not be any.
History creates those visions (that is, historical forces, changes in material conditions, new opportunities, demographic changes, etc) not will alone. The thinkers thinking the visions usually come later (and even if they come before the historical changes, they're ignored, until the landascape is ready for their ideas).
Timing aside - and does timing matter as much now as it did back when news papers were still a thing? - Metz's article carefully doesn't say, but very strongly implies, that SSC and its community serve as a "transmission belt" using privileged access to trendsetters in the tech industry to deliver fascist ideas into that industry's main stream of thought.
Will that become part of the post-Russiagate narrative being developed around the industry as a whole, not least by the NYT itself? I don't know. But it could. And, as someone who wishes for nothing more than to have a time portal open from 2347 into his living room just long enough for a history of the 20th century to fall out, this is the sort of stuff I find really interesting and diverting to think about.
edit: On reflection, one wonders what the NYT's perspective on Hacker News would be. I think there's a reasonable chance we'll get to find out. And that would be interesting, too!
There are no standards or penalties for using logical fallacies in media writing.
As a journalist, all you need to do is craft your wording to imply a connection to be able to smear your target (or to make a nice click-worthy article with hot-takes). Here's a few different tactics that you can use:
-does your target have at least 1 or 2 members of its community who have said something outside the norms of the present?
-is there anybody who is within 2-3 degrees of relationship between the leadership at the site that sometimes say things outside the norms of the present?
-are there members of the community who are part of another community that doesn't have sufficient equal representation along identity lines? (i.e. this is a tech community, tech underrepresents some minorities, therefore, this site is racist)
-does the racial/gender makeup of the community not align with the broader US population?
What changed is that the views in them no longer had any durable meaning or predictive power. The necessary ingredient in news has always been conflict, this is what makes a story a story, but when you can fabricate infinite conflict by applying a hyperbolic (ideological) lens to some second hand facts, it (cheaply) produces an approximation of news, but without any importance or value because the conflict is manufactured. So-called "fake news," was less about fabricated events so much as it was about fake conflict.
Net-net, dropping mainstream news some years ago has improved my overall quality of life tremendously.
Am I reading this right, that you'd consider dissociating from somebody over their associations... because their associations include news sources that discuss dissociation on the basis of one's associations?
I still know more people who trust the NYT than who flat out don't trust it. Even among those who have grown slightly weary (and wary) of it, there's still a weight to the brand name they just can't shake off. It's been the paper of record for their entire lives. So, if someone's only exposure to Alexander is him being called a racist in the gray lady, it unfortunately makes it harder to get them to read his fascinating, thoughtful, sometimes atonal, occasionally dubious, always worth thinking about articles.
They didn't call him a racist. They pointed out where he aligned himself with racists and where he didn't. They left out him saying he likes eugenics.[1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200228054021/https://slatestar...
Aside: I was pretty into the roguelikes that descend from the Moria/Angband line for the better part of a decade. I'd frequently get to know people in that community and, after some light googling, realise they were famous in some other field.
I learned about Toby Ord through a terrific game he wrote called Sil [0], which is a nearly-unrecognizable fork of NPPAngband that sticks tightly to the theme of the Silmarillion. It's a very tight game, and it oozes atmosphere--especially neat considering there is no sound, and only an ASCII-character terminal-like display.
This was also how I first discovered Nick Bostrom and "Superintelligence"; Toby Ord was a postdoc of Bostrom's at the time, and following the chain I stumbled into this work.
I guess roguelikes might appeal to rationalists in particular; there's a lot to reason about in there, but sometimes random things happen and there's just nothing you can do :)
[0] http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/sil/index.html
[0] http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/devours/reviews.htm...
That said, I do think there is plenty of room for criticism of internet rationalist communities. There are a lot of people riding the coattails of blogs like SSC to use rationalism as a tool to lend credibility to their flawed assumptions.
However, the audience for criticisms of rationalist communities is very small. Self-described rationalists seem interested on contrarian takes about everything but themselves.
> Scott Alexander’s blog is popular with some influential Silicon Valley people. > Scott Alexander has done posts that espouse views on race or gender that progressives disapprove of. > THEREFORE, Silicon Valley is a hotbed of racism and sexism.
But this just isn't accurate. The first sentence is right. The second is part of the profile (though not the entire point). And the stated conclusion is not in the article at all.
I hadn't noticed "rationalists" of this particular type before today. I'm not impressed.
This part is pretty bad:
> Metz is very interested to paint Alexander as racist, by writing for example that “in one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in ‘The Bell Curve.’”
Metz doesn't call Alexander a racist. The author feels Metz paints Alexander as a racist simply by raising an association with well known accused racist Charles Murray. Yet... if that inference is generally clear, then why did Alexander choose to make a point about UBI by associating himself with Charles Murray?
My guess is the author feels attacked by the nytimes (or maybe the "tribe" the nytimes belongs to) and is fighting back (Fighting a little dirty, too, since it seems to be portraying the story inaccurately.)
I think you’re right that the rationalist communities feel like they need to defend themselves and fight back, while refusing to even consider anything that could be viewed as criticism of their community.
The modern self-described rationalist communities feel more like a place for people who have built their personal identities around the idea of being intellectual non-conformists than for people who genuinely want to discuss topics from different perspectives.
"In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”"
You say "Metz doesn't call Alexander a racist", but that sentence is clearly trying to get his readers to think that.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200228054021/https://slatestar...
You didn't read the article, yet you want to infer the reason why Alexander did something?
If you actually read the article, he chose Murray because his opinon it fit a particular quadrant in a box chart, namely the "Pessmistic Cooperative" view on poverty. He also "associated" himself in that same diagram with Bernie Sanders, Lenin and School Lunches.
I hope you take this as a learning experience. Please read the article before jumping to conclusions.
> I hope you take this as a learning experience.
Frankly, I think I'm learning to not bother to engage "rationalists" on the internet.
I'm not sure if you are implying that I'm a "rationalist", but if you are, you're jumping to conclusions again. You have a glaring habit of making pretty bad assumptions and I really hope you change yourself. It's a very bad trait that appears to be pretty common in your responses.
I've never heard of this blog before this article or even rationalism, but your question made me curious about why he chose to refer to Murray. But instead of just jumping to conclusions and assuming things like you, I actually bothered to read the article. This is something you didn't do. Honestly, you should learn from this.
I guess if you’re interested, go back, read it again, and think about it in relation to the article. If not, that’s cool too.
Oddly enough, the people I've known from the past generation who were the most skillful and verbose rationalists were all educated at Catholic universities. I'm not sure they were all still religious by the time I met them. My uncle could demolish any idea or argument.
1. Scott is worth reading.
2. Sometimes Scott tackles controversial topics and takes positions I disagree with, but we should not stop reading everything he writes because of that.
3. One controversial topic Scott sometimes writes about is race, and in particular race science, by which I mean the genetic correlations between race and traits like IQ.
4. Scott chose to write under a quasi-pseudonym, Scott Alexander, most of the time, precisely because he didn’t want his controversial takes to affect the rest of his life and community.
5. In building his blog, Scott appealed to and courted several different groups. The most important groups for the purpose of this discussion are Rationalists, neoreactionaries, so-called race realists, and tech people.
6. Some of the tech people he appealed to are prominent, and they would eventually support him both publicly and privately.
7. At the same time and independent of Scott, America has undergone a shift in its appraisal of both technology and race, and American society has become more polarized for reasons that are too complex to explore here.
8. Technology is seen as more important in American society, and many of its effects are now interpreted as potentially harmful. This has raised the profile of tech leaders in the public eye, and has made the media more critical of them. (They can be important, or they can be ignored by the critical press, but they cannot expect to be both.)
9. Race-baiting became common during the Trump years, even as critical race theory went more mainstream among liberals. 10. If Scott had simply written a blog that was popular among tech people, the mainstream media would have covered him with a puff piece.
11. Scott repeatedly convinced journalists not to profile him, however, because he did not want the increased attention. (Did he know where it would lead?)
12. If Scott had simply moderated a comment section where race realism was widespread, he would have been just another wing nut on the Internet, deserving no notice outside the SPLC. But Scott did both.
13. I personally believe Scott saw the contradictions and strategic flaws in his choices. He had built a blog that was both influential among famous people, widely read by “race realists”, and written under a quasi-pseudonym.
14. Which brings us to the media. They write stories about important and famous people, because their readers want to know about those people. Journalists don’t care about those important and famous people as people; they care about them as stories. As decision makers who may affect the rest of us.
15. The best stories are surprising, and when something is surprising, sometimes it is surprising because it has been kept hidden, because it is shameful.
16. Scott was hiding something. Not just his full name, but the extent to which his blog was enmeshed with neoreactionary movements and so-called race realism.
17. Scott is still hiding things; he is giving a distorted version of events. (And to re-iterate, I will continue to read his posts although I see him being disingenuous about these issues.) He says he has only spoken with Thiel once. Yes, but Scott worked at a startup funded by Thiel, Metamed. Scott is close with one of Thiel’s mentees, Balaji Srinivasan. Both Balaji and Thiel funded the startup of Curtis Yarvin/Mencius Moldbug, even as Scott discussed Yarvin’s writings in depth on his popular blog.
18. Some of his prominent tech supporters were aware of Scott’s interest in race science and continued to support him publicly. Others were probably not aware.
19. That is the root cause that resulted in Scott receiving the coverage he did. It was not about Scott. It was not because of any personal animosity that the Times or its reporters bear towards him. It is because he managed to bring prominent tech people and race scientists together on one blog for years, and keep it hidden, until it blew...