I have no idea what this comment said, I first saw it after the ban, but it got me thinking.
Would it be a fair ask for a sort of broad categorical comment when someone gets banned? “Banned for bigotry in this comment.” Or advertising, or personal attacks, or whatever the case may be.
Without that, I at least find the more sterile version a little ominous. I don’t imagine that’s your intent.
I'm nervous about having to give some kind of legally airtight reasoning that lets someone challenge "Aha, you said the reason I got banned was X, but I was no worse at X than this other person who didn't get banned", because usually it's some kind of gestalt. Some people take banning really poorly and get the exact words I use etched into their brain, and I don't want to have to navigate those considerations every time I ban a terrible comment.
I think if the comment had continued to exist, you would find it very obvious why I banned them, and wouldn't be worried. Either this person deleted their comment as soon as it got banned, or Substack messed up and turned a ban into a ban+delete (which sometimes happens). If this keeps happening, I will ask Substack to stop doing that.
> Michelle Obama makes it a point to avoid clothes from white designers
I think it is pretty stupid... and actually counterproductive if the goal is to reduce racism (but perhaps that wasn't the goal).
Fleeing to white neighborhoods may or may not be reasonable, but doing it because of a poll showing responses to a question everyone interprets differently is pretty stupid. For the record, I think it is perfectly okay to be white (or any other color), but I expect people to say stupid things in the polls.
I think Michelle Obama should keep an open mind and be willing to consider clothing designs no matter the race of the artist. There you go!
[Also, Yglesias and Klein are only smart and good at predictions in these bubbles.]
Not sure exactly what you mean by "these bubbles", but nobody can be smart about everything I guess.
[We spend more on interest than we do on the military, but no one is willing to stand up and say that is an issue.]
Good news, Yglesias has been doing more and more writing recently about how Congress should return to focusing on deficit reduction and getting the ballooning debt under control. He was an early leader on housing, maybe in a few years more people will be talking about interest payments (that is, the national debt).
Darn, you beat me to it. I encourage this as a means of relentlessly sassing people who say things because they sound exciting, rather than because they believe them.
People who really believe they may be forced to flee to Canada generally already have businesses there (in that Canada is significantly more likely to let you immigrate... if you're already producing taxes for them.)
Things aren’t exactly low-stress up here either. This was everywhere yesterday as the digital version of a front-page, above-the-fold, all-caps headline:
Oh? Yeah, America's probably going to invade you (in a non-unipolar world, we can't afford an undefended northern border -- and we're not about to give you the high-tech weaponry that you'd need to defend that long, long border). Alberta will be pleased, and Quebec will continue to be irate about everything. You guys are only really upset about it because Canada has constructed a national identity built upon "we're not the dirty Americans." (If America would take over Mexico, there would be some nationalistic "mild anger", but people would be shouting in the streets and screaming in happiness, on the main.)
Canada's known about the American plan to invade Canada for ages, though (This seems to be "treating it seriously" as opposed to "yeah, that might happen."). It's not like Canada doesn't have a plan to invade America (it's fabulous, by the way)...
My commentary about "fleeing to Canada" was related to John McCain getting elected. A very different world back then, much safer.
> Yeah, America's probably going to invade you (in a non-unipolar world, we can't afford an undefended northern border
This is military insanity. Annexing Canada would replace a long northern border with Canada with a long northern border with Russia. Large states 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲 having buffer states. Always have, always will.
This comment is a thoroughly fascinating journey through hitherto unknown and unimagined realms of "what the actual fuck?" I could probably spend days unraveling the strange, thoroughly foreign world model this implies and still not run out of things to unpack.
"in a non-unipolar world, we can't afford an undefended northern border--and we're not about to give you the high-tech weaponry that you'd need to defend that long, long border"
Wowzers, where do we start? I guess we have to untangle the geographic muddle right off: *which* "northern border" are we so concerned about defending. Being part of the sentence with "we can't afford" rather strongly implies you're talking about the northern border of the U.S. But if that were the case, the next sentence would make zero sense: why would the U.S. need to give Canadians *anything* in order for it (the U.S.) to be able to defend it's own border, in it's own territory? So I'm forced to assume you're really, very deeply concerned about *Canada's* ability to defend our Northern border with...the Arctic Ocean?
Which brings us to to the even more puzzling question of "why?" If you're talking about the national security policy you can "afford" as a nation, you have to be imagining this border--Canada's arctic coastline--as some sort of vulnerability that could leave you open to an attack. But an attack on *what*? By *whom*? Russia is the obvious guess for the latter, but...like...you know that Russia already has perfectly direct maritime access to the entire West Coast of the U.S., right? And is very close to Alaska in particular. Of course, none of the choicest U.S. targets are especially close to Russian territory, but invading northern Canada *doesn't bring them any closer.* The notion that Russia landing in force at fucking Whitefish Station or Cape Perry would somehow present a military threat to the mainland U.S. is beyond comical. Watch out! After seizing the Inuvik Tim Horton's to use as a logistic hub, they're perfectly staged for attacks on Seattle and Anchorage, each a mere 2000 miles away. Absolutely diabolical!
But then there's this offhanded notion--barely even worth a couple of words--that the ONLY reason Canadians might be at all upset about armed men showing up to take their land at gunpoint is that it cuts against the grain of our "national identity." This is the point where I earnestly have to wonder whether you've met a single human being ever in your life. I consider myself pretty relaxed and peaceable, and there's a lot of things that *don't* seem worth getting mad about. But if "people steal your land at literal gunpoint and start ordering you around" doesn't make the list, I cannot for the life of me imagine what WOULD. Did you just, like, read WAY too far into the stereotype of Canadians as pathologically polite? Or do you just have such an impossible surfeit of positive affect for the U.S. that you literally can't get your brain to model how somebody could not be pleased at the thought of becoming American? This is an honest question--I genuinely don't understand how you could fail at modeling other humans this badly, and I'd like to understand.
Kind of dwarfed by everything else, but it's also pretty weird that you seemingly don't understand how militaries drawing up contingency plans and gaming out invasion scenarios is normal, unremarkable, non-threatening behavior, even among allies. It's literally their job to be ready for these kinds of things: the gulf between "drawn up plans for this scenario on paper" and "actively working towards putting the scenario in practice" is even wider than the gulf between Canada and Russia.
Sure, but if they indicate they are interested in taking the bet, then you can negotiate the details of how and when it is to be decided. If they ignore or deflect then you know can just mute them as not worth your time. The great thing is that you don't even have to be the one to offer the bet to benefit from its offer. I'm muting "Blondie" now.
I doubt you could tell if "republicans" or "democrats" were being hunted. Perhaps if you say civilians who are not federal employees. There's a substantial number of people whose deaths would absolutely not make the news (care to guess how many non-soldiers we lost in Afghanistan?)
How on Earth is that true. If you were forced to put money on one ideological group being “hunted” by the government, MAGA kind of seems like the side with the brownshirt-like militia-cum-police force that is champing at the bit to hurt innocents.
A couple of kids boarded a bus and had their stupid beef out with gunplay which then killed a true “innocent” who happened to be a bus passenger. (Sadly I cannot gratify you with the knowledge of whether the victim got her just deserts or not as the dead woman’s politics were not made known.) This only made the local news a second time because the judge reprimanded one of the teens for laughing, rolling his eyes, etc. in court. The media likes it when judges get tetchy and Judy-like.
Some few thousand of us in an MSA of 7.8 million read about it because our elderly relatives still take the newspaper.
17, the kid had a long rap sheet already and was already awaiting trial for aggravated robbery when the bus “incident” which was the last incident in some hapless bystander’s life, happened.
I’d say it could happen to anyone, but in fact nobody would read this sort of blog would ever be riding the city bus in this city. Period.
Anyway, thanks to the judiciary, to lawyers, we will be reading about the kid for years and all the people he killed. We all know that by now. Even Reddit which so hates the police (and seems not always to understand their demographic makeup) has come around to displeasure with the generic “DA” and their wild decision making. And one-way pattern of “errors”.
This sort of example is what I think a normal person would conjure if presented with the locution of government-sanctioned “hunting”.
Even if we accept your premise and framing, you're describing a situation where poor governance has reduced enforcement on, and incarnation of, potentially dangerous individuals and also increased the risk for the rest of society.
Hunting implies a situation where people are actively incentivized to go after a particular demographic. You're situation is one people are insufficiently punished for being violent writ large. These are different.
What happened in Houston was wrong, but does not imply that anyone is being hunted.
“Hunting” is a metaphor whose meaning may be fixed and un-metaphor-like for you. Probably a good reason to speak more plainly if you care to extrapolate the future.
Reminds me of another cringe usage that entered the lexicon, to stay, it seems: “the predator” - nearly always in a sexual connection.
It’s a weird slur against actual predators, the only ones that ever were, that is - in the animal kingdom. Who do what they do neither for sex nor to cause suffering. What has that to do with nasty people? I hate that word used in that non-sense, probably unreasonably.
I don't understand how a bystander getting killed in a beef between two POS has anything to do with being Scott Adam's claim of Democrats hunting Republicans.
Can you speak plainly and spell out your logic for this?
Party affiliations of relevant DAs, etc.? Of course, the more relevant binary as to the intended victims is not Dem/Rep but outre, criminal/decent, ordinary.
The etymology of predator is about looting and pillaging, not originally about carnivores. Anecdotally, it's also not my primary assumption when I hear the word.
The predators of Genghis Khan - versus the predators of the natural world. You do you, not sure the former is more firmly planted in the mind. Of course, post-feminism, most young people probably associate it with the rape neologism.
I don't understand this at all. You seem to claim:
1) "Hunting" is a metaphor so broad that "Democrats will hunt Republicans" can be satisfied by an innocent bystander catching a stray during a gunfight, but also
2) "Predator" is a non-metaphor that should only ever refer to non-human carnivores, and never to, e.g., human stalkers, similarities in method notwithstanding.
This seems to me like a version of "Words mean whatever I want them to mean. I get to be grandly metaphorical when it protects my claim from refutation, but hyper-literal when interpreting the claims of others."
I do not agree with you at all that a "normal person" would conceive of your example as one of "government-sanctioned hunting" of Republicans by Democrats. I think a "normal person" would think the verb "to hunt" means something like "to pursue for food or in sport" as Merriam-Webster defines it (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hunt)
This kind of thing is despicable and genuinely boils my blood, and is part of why I identity as a conservative. That being said, never in a thousand years would I refer to this as the government “hunting” any kind of individual or group.
I can’t see the OG comment now, but I assumed the person was gesturing at the idea that rhetoric *when approved by the bien-pensants, media, academia, etc.* will tend to make life dangerous for those on the wrong side of the line.
Gosh, it has gotten hard to type on the phone with that bar in the middle Telling me the website I’m on.
And The criminal class is very much on the right side of the line. That’s more or less foundational to turning the world upside down.
I am not sure why he said this would happen this year.
2nd comment: a trivial example. A friend of mine told me she was going to a funeral a few years ago. Not more than five, can’t recall. A member of a family she had known in her hometown. She was part of a couple that were murdered in the NE, can’t recall city. The killer told the police that he had wanted to watch white children watch their parents die. In that he succeeded.
Now the words of a psycho or drugged-up thug or whatever he was, should never be taken as interesting. So that’s not the interest. None of us are enriched by hearing such things, no matter their bent.
What’s interesting is just that reversal game. Switch it up. Everyone in America would know the names. There would likely be a monument. The media would milk it for all it could to stoke a race war they will never stop hoping for.
As it is, this little story is not even readily google-able.
Scott already wrote in the post about the exact thing you're doing here and how it's corrosive to truth and functional society:
> My thesis is that tolerating claims of “directional correctness” - the thing where someone asks to get a pass because even if they said wasn’t literally true, it “points to” an “emotionally correct” thing - is eventually totally corrosive. It means everyone ratchets up their claims to the highest level they think they can get away with (ie walk back later if challenged, as a motte and bailey). And then you end up with this miasma where maybe 5% of people totally believe you, and 50% of people sort of absorb the connotation and think something like that is true, and then people get terrified of the Democrats and think of them as monsters and treat politics as an existential struggle where they will genuinely get arrested or murdered unless they do it to the Democrats first, and then you get a civil war or something.
Sure - but that’s been the MO of the media for years and years, right down to the “directionally” or more aptly, the “spiritually correct”. All the news, and very nearly only the news, that feels good to print. A war does indeed seem the object.
I suppose there’s virtue in not seeing this coming. That virtue is not unrelated to the above, perhaps.
It seems hard to find a reasonably policy that would reliably stop this.
Imagine you have a list of 100 people. All these people have definitely committed some petty crime. (Graffiti, shoplifting)
All of them have been accused of aggravated robbery, and maybe 60 of them are guilty of that crime. A few of them might commit murder at some point, most won't.
The police can't see the future.
They aren't so draconian as to lock people up long term for shoplifting, or for crimes that the accused hasn't been found guilty of yet.
> And one-way pattern of “errors”.
The errors in the other direction are when an innocent person gets locked up, or when someone who committed a minor crime and is basically safe gets locked up way too long.
Not in America? The errors tend to be (well, except that they are not errors) - out on bail for shooting someone to death, kill somebody else. Or killed somebody but no time served. Various alternatives to serving time. Or charges simply dropped. Or. period During which time case has to have this or that done or go to court, allowed to expire.
It’s extremely common place down here. I hope you don’t think I’m describing something strange. Somebody recently I can’t remember what but they killed somebody and the craziest thing was they had like 45 charges on their record and they were still you know 17 or 19 or whatever.
There was the fellow who left our town after killing his parents, and went to another city and killed a half dozen random people, including a mother pushing a baby in a stroller. That one was interesting because the guy had been in jail quite recently, he had threatened his parents the ones that he had ultimately killed. I don’t imagine that his parents were particularly excited for him to come home as presumably, they were the ones who had called the police. There was a very tiny bit of negative press when it turned out that the local DA had been in contact with the lefty DA in the city north of here, as well as a group in Soros umbrella called Wren Collective. And some nonprofit had bailed the guy out as part of a group bail thing. They admitted they had not really looked at individual cases. In other words, that was a death by lawyer. Or rather 8 deaths or whatever it was.
I realize that these people‘s deaths or other lives, do not have quite the value of the people being bailed, but still
oh joy, another way to screw the poor even further - I'm sure people struggling to make ends meet as is would love to buy "legal liability insurance" with high premiums (because they have no money, so they're high risk!)
God forbid we redistribute things so there aren't as many 'asset-proof' people, let alone get tough on white collar crime.
This proposal is compatible with redistribution, subsidizing insurance for the poor etc. The important thing, though, is that people pay marginal costs for being marginal riskier, thus still incentivizing them to lower their risk (realistically, the insurance organization vouching for them will try to find ways to do this).
"No when we said 'hunting' we meant common crime, and when we said 'republicans' we meant random passerbys of unknown political persuasion"
God that's so idiotic, why do you waste time writing this drivel, who exactly do you think you're gonna convince? Is it like the world's worst performance art? Do you get off this? Why are you doing this?
Lol I think maybe there’s some truth at the bottom of this comment, just deflected on to someone else. I was just curious enough to wonder about how I had somehow been transmogrified into the poster of the comment. It seems it was deleted? But people liked it too well to relinquish it, or there was something more - as you obliquely suggest.
BLM already set fire to Minneapolis. Now Don Lemon's crew is raiding churches. This is brownshirt behavior any way you want to slice it.
Yes, the militias did show up in Gettysburg (that was a grand psyop). They didn't hurt a soul. I don't stand with the militias, to be clear -- but, in general, they also ARE NOT the people going into Philadelphia to "shoot black people." (Citing Field Negro on this one, some dumb f*** does do this, every once in a while, and the cops get called on the illegally brandishing idiot).
>BLM already set fire to Minneapolis. Now Don Lemon's crew is raiding churches. This is brownshirt behavior any way you want to slice it.
What do these have to do with one another? BLM protests in 2020, which factually did not set fire or burn down Minneapolis, I doubt you've been within 500 miles of there, it's perfectly fine.
Don Lemon reported on a controversial protest and interviewed the attendees and church members. He wasn't part of the protest, he didn't interrupt the service. You seem to have basic facts incorrect.
When I read comments like this, it becomes abundantly clear what media sources you turn to and that it is pure propaganda. Neither of the things you mention, even in the most beneficial light to your argument, amount to brown shirts.
Meanwhile, Minneapolis where I have close family and friends, is being terrorized by government backed brown shirts who are stopping people for the color of their skin and asking for papers. The brown shirts are now going door to door, a close friend was asked if he "has any Asian or Mexican neighbors he knows of." ICE is murdering people at a much higher rate than the supposedly dangerous undocumented criminals they are tasked with rounding up.
You've got family and friends in Minneapolis? Did they ever get the post office back? How about the three police stations that were burnt? Yes, I do happen to know someone who was trying to estimate the cost of the BLM protests to Minneapolis. He gave up after he got to the post office. Uncle Hugo's was burnt to the ground, priceless relics were lost, including first editions.
Went through Minneapolis on the train, actually (and yes, I did get off). "It's perfectly fine" does not actually represent anything more than a whitebread characterization of "I never went to a bad part of town." A friend of a friend went to the bad part of town, and was robbed (and, um, dragged along behind the car, because he got his hand stuck in the car door) before walking twenty feet. This is not "perfectly fine" behavior (he lost a thousand dollar camera).
Don Lemon made the story about himself, by bludgeoning parishoners with baity statements, instead of working as an impartial journalist. "The Lieberman Kiss" guy wasn't an "impartial journalist" either... (but he was peaceful, and I support his right to protest and make news).
I do find it funny that the DOJ is going after the front-man, yes.
DOJ x statement: "A house of worship is not a public forum for your protest! It is a space protected from exactly such acts by federal criminal and civil laws! Nor does the First Amendment protect your pseudo journalism of disrupting a prayer service. You are on notice.”
They could have gone anywhere. Go to a public library, camp out in the courtrooms. Have a sit-in at the police headquarters
It's funny that you think I'm turning to media sources at all. Video is video, and it exists regardless of how "hyped" it gets by others.
If I told you there was a documented case of ethnic cleansing in America, could you actually identify the late 20th century court case?
"It’s amazing how confident you are while being four years out of date.
1. The 'Burnt' City: Yes, actually, they did get the Post Office back. The Lake Street station was rebuilt and reopened in 2022. Uncle Hugo's also reopened in 2022. Using fires from six years ago to claim the city is currently a wasteland is pure fantasy.
2. 'Friend of a Friend': Your evidence for the city being a warzone is a 'friend of a friend' story? That’s not data; that’s gossip. Meanwhile, I am telling you about the current reality of my actual family dealing with government agents demanding papers.
3. The Brownshirts: You are cheering for the DOJ (the State) using the KKK Act to threaten a journalist for reporting on a protest. Think about that. The 'Brownshirts' were the State's enforcers. If you support the government arresting reporters and ICE agents interrogating neighbors about their 'Mexican neighbors,' you are the one siding with the Brownshirts here.
Your trivia question about history is just a deflection from the ethnic cleansing happening on our streets right now. I don't need a history book to recognize fascism; I just need to look at who is demanding 'papers' today."
Thank you for the information! I'm glad to see someone bothered to get that post office restored.
I wasn't calling it a warzone, unless you think that Minneapolis being out of pregnancy tests makes it a warzone (which, um? no?)
Friend of a Friend? Yes. I saw the video, his camera was absolutely stolen. You can watch the video on youtube too. This is not gossip, this is "I saw it with my own two eyes." (and yes, over video, but everyone who wants to say something about Renee Good also just "watched video." I watched it with an expert witness for video analysis -- it's not forged).
I hate Real-ID too! Or, um, you're not talking about that, are you? You were in favor of real ID, I take it? And vaccine passports too, maybe? I fully support everyone who's okay with burning their documents as protest for "having to have documents" (and going to prison if necessary). Otherwise, the government is allowed to ask for documentation, not in the LEAST because as of Trump's takeover, there were a million illegals in America who the Courts Had Already Adjudicated (aka Judge say: "yes, you had your day in court, now go home" -- people who just said "no, not going home").
Brownshirts are not government agents. If you want to talk Stasi, KGB, or anyone along those lines, use better words. Brownshirts are roving gangs of antifa, generally paid for by someone (KKK counts, many other groups do, but they are NEVER under the color of the law).
If you truly believe that ICE is out there murdering every brown-skinned person (including, one supposes, the large proportion of ICE that is Tejano), get help. If not, your definition of "ethnic cleansing" is not what the court was using -- that was bonafide murder spree.
If that's brownshirt behavior, so is throwing random people, including US citizens and legal residents, into vans. The members of both sides who get on the news tend to be incredibly deranged and out for blood, and I don't think anyone who thinks attacking uninvolved civilians for their political project is acceptable should be given any quarter by decent people, no matter their political affiliation.
Yeah, I'll say that "throwing random people" into vans is probably not the best way to find the gang members, or whomever they're looking for. Assume they've been tipped off (or that there is SOME reason, that those people aren't just "random"), does that change matters? I presume the issue is that "finding someone in a large apartment building" is a difficult matter, and they want to clear everyone out, and then sort through them.
I find this far less problematic, as a police maneuver, than keeping the Jan 6th people in jail for so long that most of them were "let go for time served."*
*bear in mind jail does not mean prison, and you're getting different treatment there.
Being held for months without a trial is a violation of Constitutional Rights, is it not?
Tossing people into vans for assaulting federal officers was done back in BLM, as well (they're not legally required to tell people where they're going). "Do not touch Officer Friendly" -- the rest of the squad hadn't been deputized, and it was not "federal pokey" if they were assaulted, so they hung back until "stupid reactionaries" took the bait.
Ah, you probably believe the Democrat propaganda the lying mainstream media are feeding to you. About Trump kicking out of the Republican party everyone who didn't become his loyal follower.
Nothing could be further from truth! Those former Republicans have all disappeared from the screens because they are lying in secret mass graves. Trump could only save a selected few from this horrible fate (and yes, he obviously prioritized friends over enemies, that's common sense). That's why there were so many ICE agents recruited recently -- to stop this horrible bloodshed. And of course, now Democrats get angry about ICE agents and make up fake stories about them. Their goal is to abolish ICE and complete the purge, so that no Republican remains alive.
(Almost waiting for someone to post "this, but unironically".)
This thread has attracted many of the most schizophrenic political commentators I have ever seen. I’m almost afraid to even reply to the guy above you.
"Soon Enough"??? are you implying by 'soon' that in 3 years, Democrats will be back in power and then will be hunting Republicans?
If you haven't been keeping up. Republicans are in power, with total control of all 3 branches of government, and with ICE they have a domestic military that is bigger than the rest of the world's 'real' military combined.
Three years is a long time, Dem's are the ones being literally, real life hunted, right now in real time. There wont be an election in 3 years for your paranoia to come to fruition.
It would take a constitutional amendment to get him on the ballot again. (As the last real try for a constitutional amendment was Just That under Reagan, its not out of the realm of possibility), at least for President.
I do not (and I'm pretty sure NO ONE sees Trump as taking the Vice Presidential nomination -- it'd be hilarious though, him trying not to outshine the guy on top) think he'd go for Representative (that's got basically no power your first term, except a very small soapbox). Which leaves Senator, Governor, Mayor or dogcatcher. Again, he's too bombastic to get elected dogcatcher (I hope! And I've voted for him multiple times! Would people really vote for him to "Catch all the dogs? All the cats?")... Governor would be problematic (most are pretty ineffectual).
Any thoughts on him running for Mayor of New York? Could he win?
I would take the bet if you're willing to restrict it to "running for President of the United States." (I think the New York Mayoral is the most likely, otherwise).
So far, the defenses of this in the thread amount to...
"Democrats want to very slightly increase my chances of dying to violent crime." I am curious if when you come back you can come up with something better. Also, are we all ignoring that the comment in question ascribed a political valence to the targets, i.e. that they would be conservative? If anything, since the supposed higher risk of being victimized in violent crime pertains mostly to urban whites, it is probably on net affecting liberals slightly more (and, of course, the spike in crime rates from 2020-2022 is mostly crime committed by black perpetrators against black victims, so even saying it particularly targets *whites* is a bit ridiculous).
In order to suggest that Adams' comment is correct, you would need to establish that there is some large-ish group specifically trying to cause physical harm to conservatives in a systematic way, and that the risks posed by this group are significant and real.
Trump is sending in masked gestapo to round up people on the street based mostly on their skin color and murdering people who get in the way with impunity, but yeah it’s totally the white people who have to fear Democrats.
You'll have to explain further - I've never promised to cover only the world's most important topics, and I don't think this is any worse than, say, my toddlers' music preferences, or silly stories about selling a pen.
Huh? Why exactly is Scott obliged to write a careful article about a controversial figure who's personally attacked him and his friends just because he wrote a careful article about a different controversial figure who's been a major positive influence on his life?
These takes are bizarre, Scott isn't Wikipedia personified, claiming to be the final neutral authoritative word on every topic. He's a blogger with his own opinions and perspectives. If you want writing that valorises Amanda Marcotte and condemns (or just ignores) Scott Adams...you can easily find that elsewhere.
(For what it's worth I think he's become way too scared of expressing controversial opinions in the last few years, and yet people like you want him to go even further. What is with this culture of reader entitlement?)
He's not so obliged, and the point is that it's a lot easier to be careful about a controversial figure if they never said anything unpleasant about you personally, regardless of what else they did.
I don't think Scott is obliged to write a nice article about Marcotte or a mean I've about Adams, which is why I said nothing of the sort.
If Scott wrote a "ding-dong the witch is dead" piece on Marcotte, you bet I'd read that with zeal and attention, because my opinion of her gets lower with every new thing I read from her.
But Scott won't do that, because he's a better person than I am. And this kind of "heh, bet you wouldn't be fair to your enemies, would you, you hypocrite?" sort of needling is unworthy, Adam.
I don't think it's needling. Scott wrote a whole well-regarded article about exactly who it is and isn't easy to be charitable and understanding to!
Noticing who is and isn't within the circle of "ah, a controversial character, but worth seeing the humanity in them" is worth at least a passing mention, I think.
Scott is a kinder and more generous person than most of us, but even that has its shape and limits.
Scott openly admitted that he spent this many words on Adams because he liked the guy. There is no pretense here of a "it's worth seeing the humanity in them" perspective that's supposed to be generalizable to everyone, and literally no one argues that everyone deserves a 10,000-word ACX eulogy. I think you are trying to hint at some kind of hypocrisy on Scott's part, but it just isn't there.
Has she had a notably interesting life? Has she produced both things are great as Dilbert and as bad as Adam’s philosophical novels?
Most people are much less interesting than Adam’s, and I think you are trapped in a prison of tribal thinking if your response to this is WHERE IS THE ARTICLE ABOUT A POLARIZING FIGURE FROM MY TRIBE INSTEAD OF THE BAD TRIBE!
I did not know that much about Adams, but found the article moving and interesting. That’s reason enough to write something!
I think the original essay lays out why he finds Scott Adams so interesting in pretty thorough, clear detail. Adams was a major influence on him when he was young, he really likes Dilbert, he credits Adams with some of the writing talent that gave him this career, and he sees Adams as a cautionary tale for nerds (a group Scott Alexander writes about with regularity). While I, like you, do not think Adams is very interesting since I only rarely saw Dilbert strips and otherwise am only familiar with him from his acerbic, right-wing twitter presence, I enjoyed the original piece as a matter of personal reflection that uses Adams as a foil.
I disagree. Cynicism is corrosive to society, specially to young people trying to understand life. There's a reason U.S tweens and teens are very cynical. It has a lot to do with cynical comedy shows which they consume voraciously. The difference between U.S teens and teens in other cultures where popular shows are less cynical, is huge.
Reality about life / the world - well, there are only perspectives. We are not discussing Newton's laws here.
In life, you can choose to see the same glass as half-empty or half-full. Kids should be encouraged to see it as half full.
I'm not saying his writing shouldn't exist. But that his view is not the only one. It's the cynical one. There are earnest views of the same world. Kids simply don't get exposed to them as much once they're tweens, in America.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw
>Kids should be encouraged to see it as half full.
Sure, but Dilbert wasn't for kids. Everyone else should be encouraged to see the world accurately. Most of the time that involves reminding us that most people who say the glass is half-full are trying to sell you a glass at twice its fair price. Understanding the difference between what people say and what they mean is one of the most important skills in life, and most of Dilbert's humor was rooted in that difference.
Tweens and Teens are very cynical because the more education they get, the stupider they are (IQ test wise). Yes, "everything isn't your fault" is a pretty cynical take.
If Jerry Seinfeld became a super-controversial political figure, and then died, I would also expect some comparable blog posts about him (if not necessarily from Scott, I don't know if he was ever a fan).
This is topic that's frustrating to discuss because any answer other than "BLM is awesome and you're racist if you don't agree" is about all that ever comes of it.
I understand BLM to mean "Blacks in particular are being killed by cops. (Implicitly, more than other races). This has to stop! Black Lives Matter". The problem is, AFAICT, these aren't the facts. Blacks are not killed by cops more than any other race. So, like everyone claims "All Lives Matter" has some ulterior motive than it's plain meaning, and like everyone claims "It's okay to be white" has some ulterior motive. BLM, also has some ulterior motive if it's true that its very foundation is false.
If it's foundation is false, then it's a nonsense statement and "All Lives Matter" is the appropriate response. "Black Lives Matter? Yea, so do Asian Lives and Muslim Lives and Jewish Lives and White Lives .... cops shouldn't kill anyone".
If you want to learn about the evidence that BLM is based on a false belief, Google "Coleman Hughes on BLM" as he's documented it the most. I don't want to summarize his opinion more than I have above. You can read/listen to his evidence and decide for yourself.
At first I was first totally on board with BLM. It's easy to buy into because we basically want to believe it. Coleman changed my mind.
Possible outcomes from this comment: (1) like I mentioned above, I'm labeled as a racist and ignored (2) You go read the evidence and decide yes or no that BLM is based on a false foundation. I find the evidence compelling. I might find counter evidence compelling, but until I do, I don't feel racist to say that I disagree with the statement "black lives matter" in the larger sense (it represents something false). I agree with the statement "black lives matter just as much as everyone else's"
(American) Cops kill more whites than blacks, but they kill blacks at a 2.8x higher rate according to mappingpoliceviolence.org, and I seem to recall an earlier version of the page saying that *unarmed* black people are killed at 5x the rate of unarmed white people. You have different data?
This would surely be a function of who/which people in which areas overwhelmingly *call* the police most, and thus have the most interactions (chases, encounters, standoffs, verbal commands uttered at them)?
Sometimes it seems like people are unaware how much these situations resemble a drama with a large Greek chorus of people.
I've heard enough "driving while black" stories to suspect this isn't the case. I think I saw some clarifying data at one point, but hm, can't recall any detail. (What I do recall: the U.S. doesn't gather enough data)
I recall wanting the police to come watch my old street for speeders. At least once in awhile. (Though just 2 lanes, a busy street, a hill, much speeding or so it seemed to me as a mother, more invested then; many peds and bikes and the path between 3 schools.)
We weren’t awarded any policing and the explanation was that personnel were concentrated in areas with more urgent problems and those problems were 24/7 (another thing people don’t realize - not everybody goes to bed at night!). The other was that they were working traffic accidents during the school zone hours.
Only once in 20 years did a cop come out, within a few days of my calling. I immediately phoned my husband to make sure he wouldn’t get caught in his wife’s speed trap.
That's called "driving while detested minority" is what blacks miss. "driving while white" stories are super common in Hawaii. It's not a race thing, it's a detested local minority thing.
For example, I got a parking ticket last week and a giant "go home haole" remark from some half Filipino, half Chinese, half Tahitian mutt on Oahu as he wrote it. The guy with the big Confederate, wait I mean Kingdom of Hawaii, flag on his oversized redneck, wait I mean moke, truck illegal parked between me and the cop car didn't. Welcome to being a detested minority.
In my city, they did "driving while white" as well as "driving while black" -- obviously there's disparate impact there, but it's a simple principle... "Past midnight, go home, don't go driving into someone else's neighborhood."
I'm not sure what value rebranding "racism" as "prejudice against a detested minority" really adds here.
I think if you remove the slurs, and take the message at face value, the underlying argument is that "I was discriminated against for being white in Hawaii, therefore discrimination against black people is not racism."
...it's like you almost got the point 90% of the way but veered off at the last minute.
1) "Driving while black" etc is a real thing, because cops are 'racist' in the pattern-matching sense -- they treat people differently who "look like" (in many dimensions, context-specific) the people they're trying to catch. This is rightly felt by honest black people as an affront on their dignity & rights.
2) The resentment from #1 makes any discrepancy in shooting data very easy to latch onto and amplify as symbolic of the real problem. Most BLM supporters over-estimate the number of police shootings (especially of unarmed individuals) by a factor of ten or more. 2.8x more likely reads very differently from 25 white dudes and 15 black dudes (stats from 2024, completely ignoring that most of these were good shoots). That doesn't make bad policing ok, but it shows that the headlines & slogans weren't necessarily the core problem.
One can do an honest, race-blind "driving while color" -- in that whites also get pulled over if they're in a black neighborhood. My city's done that, before. Obviously there's disparate impact, here, not gonna deny that.
But it is possible to simply say "go home, after midnight, don't drive around someone else's neighborhood LOOKING for the spikes to pop your tires."
I think this is a largely fair encapsulation of the issue, except we should be prepared to acknowledge, as Scott does in this post, that there are plenty of people out there who're racist according to much stricter versions of racism, people who're not shy about the fact that they feel actual animosity for the races they're pattern-matching. There are plenty of police officers who fall into that category, it almost certainly affects their policing behavior, and people who engage with them are most likely going to notice it, even if their behavior is hard to tease out through stats.
There is also probably a genuine effect where some portion of cops restrain themselves from what they would otherwise consider reasonable escalation, if they think the subject's race would make that controversial. This can also coexist with behavior that projects personal animosity for people of a given race.
The stats are complicated, multifaceted, and by their nature not a sufficient source of information to build a clear model around. And different people may interpret the available stats in different ways while acting at least within ordinary standards of honesty and good faith.
In many areas speeding camera were brought in and then removed because they resulted in more black people getting tickets. The cameras do not, generally, see the driver, they only record the plates. And yet!
What's worse is letting AIs set sentencing guidelines. Somehow the sentencing guidelines always turn out racist (they're designed to keep the worst criminals in prison), even when you tell the AI to take race out of the equation.
But simple per capita numbers are misleading here, because there's another variable: number of interactions with the police. Blacks commit more crimes on a per capita basis than whites, meaning they are going to have more police interactions per capita. Even assuming a completely non-racist police force where there's a fixed chance of a shooting per police encounter regardless of race, the bare fact that blacks have more police interactions per capita would mean they would also have more shooting deaths per capita.
To really be fair, you should also add another variable: behavior in police encounters. If a particular behavior (e.g., disobedience) raises the chance of a police shooting, and blacks behave that way more frequently in police encounters than whites, then you would again assume racial differences in shootings even assuming a completely non-racist police force. At least one academic (Roland Fryer) who studied this question taking into account these kinds of variables found no evidence of discrimination in police shootings (though he did find evidence of discrimination in non-lethal uses of force).
Police shootings are ... odd ducks. I assume "non-lethal uses of force" are generally related to "how much do I presume they'll listen to Stop, I'm a Cop!"*
*This is a Big Deal if you're being called on a drunk and disorderly, or bar brawl.
The black population in America is impoverished compared to the white one. In that context, it's not surprising they have far higher rates of crime (e.g., most serial killers are actually black, look up the statistics). In that context, it is not surprising that the police are more likely to kill a black person (when normalizing for the race ratios) than a white one.
To actually answer the question (are the police racist?) you need to do careful deep thinking and statistics. But, as far as I am aware, based on the the literature of people who have done that, the police are actually not particularly racist. E.g., it's pretty uncontroversial fare in FIRE and heterodox academy circles.
The appropriate denominator there isn’t population share it’s violent crime share. That’s because police disproportionately engage with criminals. Blacks commit 51% of all homicides whereas they comprise only 27% of police shootings. Assuming homicide is a reasonable indicator of violent crime propensity then blacks are actually underrepresented in police shootings.
I don't think you should assume that homicide is a reasonable indicator of violent crime. Many homicides are done as "part of business" and "negotiation" or "settling arguments." These are very, very different from "heat of the moment" homicides or "I slept on it, and my abusive husband needs to die" or "you shot my dog, Ima shoot you."
The facts on the ground with regard to police violence are less relevant to my question than whether a black commentator would be justified in being afraid of, and recommending against any interaction with, Republicans. If fear of republicans is justified, then Scott Adams statement was justified (assuming many Republicans agree with you. Not that you are a Republican, or that you have to be one to disagree with the BLM narrative)
But I personally don't think it was justified. I think 99% of blacks agree it's ok to be white, and 99% of republicans agree black lives matter, and Scott Adams statement was unjustified and immoral fear mongering.
People who identify as gay, more often lesbians than gay men I’ve observed, talk a lot about moving out of state and some small percentage do so. They always cite fear though I’m not aware that anything concrete has happened in that regard. Sometimes curiously, Roe v. Wade enters into it. The other things that I can think of are state legislation around bathrooms and possibly girls sports. I don’t really think there’s a direct line between gay people and this. And the whole bathroom thing has mainly been a boon for contractors and obviously could’ve been avoided, by just never talking about bathrooms as a an important policy area.
These things don’t amount to a threat, so I think it is more just a generalized fear, or in some cases disdain masquerading as fear, or just narcissism.
They receive no criticism for adopting this stance or tone.
I actually had some friends who moved for this reason, though in fact, they had planned it earlier and then kind of adopted the rationale post hoc. And I think part of their motive was never wanting to have to see one of their families again. I think we can all feel jealous if you have that freedom.
In their case, and in all others that I’m aware of, people are always moving somewhere much nicer than here. Just a coincidence I’m sure.
My comment stated that I do not believe it is justified to be afraid of republicans because they disagree with the phrase "black lives matter." Correspondingly, I do not believe Adams was justified in being afraid of blacks because they disagree with the phrase "it is ok to be white." In neither case is rejection of the phrase about the literal words of the motto, but is instead about the political connotations.
Given that you think your friends are silly for leaving the state out of a sense of fear, I assume you consider Adams to be at least as irrational as your friends. As I am sure when Adam said he would avoid blacks, he didn't then plan to move to move to the whitest parts of Appalachia, nor recommended anyone else move to such places.
I don’t know about fear, it’s not native to me. I live in a very mixed area, black and white wise. This is a curious artifact of living in an overwhelmingly majority Hispanic and military city. My daily life involves much more diversity in that narrow sense, than it ever did in my previous city, despite its famously blue nature.
People (strangers) around here of various stripes just act normal as far as I can tell. I mean, except for some people on the street who are on drugs.
Normal is lovely. I highly recommend it.
If there were tension, such as that expressed in the idiot poll, I absolutely would not want to live here. Fear need not enter into it. I’m sorry for people who are fearful where they live.
I don't disagree that this is a bit of an overreaction, but to more explicitly lay out what you're hinting at, it's clear that when gay people leave red states they are mostly leaving the discomfort of regular interactions with homophobic people, and the sense of amorphous fear that accompanies those interactions, than they are genuinely terrified of being violently killed.
This is the same reason rural conservative whites think cities are terrifying, or why white people recently converted to right-wing politics flee San Francisco. They are not actually going to die. Obviously. The absolute chance of being murdered in this country for a specific individual is extremely low, even in cities. They find crime and disorder unpleasant to be around and it triggers an animalistic fear response that they would rather not have to deal with, but this is an embarrassing thing to say out loud, so they pretend they are *genuinely* at risk.
I would say for both groups, being more sincere about what is actually motivating their actions would be good and go a long way toward turning down the temperature. Scott Adams unfortunately was a purveyor of the opposite school, which is that you should write absurd hyperboles where your side will understand immediately what you *really* mean and pretend to agree with your statement because it feels emotionally validating. There are absolutely liberal/gay commentators who do the same thing.
Interesting perspective. I have not seen that fear manifest at all. Kind of more of a non-fear but blowback to a certain Pleasure in defiance of bourgeois norms, which I don’t think would give any pleasure in the absence of said bourgeoisie. Like I think we’re sort of participating in it together Although nothing has ever said on the side of those who are uncomfortable.
I’m surprised to hear this because in so far as the rural population say of a red state is evangelical as supposedly they are, evangelicals tend to be super pro gay now. Protestantism seems to have largely perpetuated itself on identifying with LGBTQ.
And it surely goes without saying that anyone - well, I cant speak for all ethnicities or people from different cultures - people under 40, or 50 really, would probably rather sink into the floor than ever be perceived as homophobic, than which nothing could be “lower status” even if didn’t mean the end of employment.
I may be wrong about this, but I get the feeling from your comment that you yourself are a more conservative-identifying person who lives in a fairly urbanized metro area?
In particular, your read on evangelicals being 'super pro gay' now strikes me as, to be frank, absurd, or the idea of 'protestantism identifying with LGBTQ'. The latter is probably true about liberal, mainline protestant denominations like the Lutherans or Episcopalians, but those are specifically *not* evangelicals.
Pew research from 2025 finds only 36% of American evangelicals believe homosexuality should be accepted by society (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religion-and-views-on-lgbtq-issues-and-abortion/). That's a pretty fundamental level of homophobia, it's not even asking about gay marriage or something where you might be able to construct some handwave-y policy defense.
Regarding your other comment about young people, I again think this might be coming from a lack of experience. That's absolutely true about people who have a college degree. Blue collar young people, especially in rural areas, might be a little less likely to be homophobic than older people, but they aren't especially worried about the status signal sent by their homophobia. This is because they have an entirely alternative status hierarchy to the one of urban, white-collar professionals.
I totally agree about the disingenuous reason, though in relation to disorder. Stated, it is met with: you just want don’t want to see *them*, You just want them to die, or you you just don’t like urban life, or (trash, say): That’s just aesthetics, Or first world problem. Or why don’t you clean up the whole city by yourself if you care about it? Lol.
I have a friend who lives above the Mediterranean, not gay though, Nor of childbearing age - who would exactly espouse the one reason - imagined threat - over the other. Like many such people, she’s probably only the more opinionated about all of it the father remove she is.
I don't disagree with your description of how a standard urban progressive would respond to things. But claiming you are literally at risk of death does not ameliorate this, it actually worsens the mockery one receives from said standard progressive, and makes that mockery genuinely justified. So I'm not sure it really provides a coherent reason to prefer the hyperbole over just factually stating what one believes. If one is so worried about being perceived as unfashionably retrograde by the liberals in their social circle, i.e., they are cowardly, then clearly the best option is to say you want to move 'for the schools' or something more anodyne like that. And if you want to be honest, it's best to be literally honest, rather than hyperbolically overstating what you believe. What the hyperbole does do is provide a thrill, thumbing your nose in the most dramatic way possible at progressive orthodoxy, i.e., 'owning the libs'. But being enslaved to this kind of base emotional indulgence is not exactly any different or better than your enemies.
Evangelicals share a tradition with other forms of dissent or counter culture. Give them a long enough life, and they eventually embrace the thing they were previously obsessed with, the line between those things being tenuous. They’re certainly not part of any older grounding.
As for the rest, your prominent, monied libertarian is likely to (choose to) live in a jurisdiction that grants the town pumpkin patches protective zoning.
My last experience being made uncomfortable was indeed a rural or turning into sprawl area, on a bus returning us from a river toob float. Between the music, the vulgarity, and the actual making out over my head and across the aisle - yeah, I was pretty much in my idea of hell. Made worse by the fact it was raining and the school bus windows were half open, half closed. Not sure which was preferable. Much was palpable - but not fear lol.
They canceled Idaho's pride parade, so... more than you'd think. Of course, those were the gays who'd fled Cali back when "lockdowns" were a thing. Once idaho stopped being cool, they left.
In general? Before "work from home" -- moving is a VERY BIG DEAL. I've moved more than a mile, and that was with carrying everything I owned (except the /serious/ furniture, yes even my pots and rice cookers) -- that took a month of walking back and forth.
And that's not counting "getting a new job" (or two, if you're married).
Most people don't move, unless they absolutely need to.
Most people saying "Ima move to Canada" assume it is easy, and that they won't be illegal, there. Canada has harder immigration regs than America does.
Everyone has a right to their own fears. My own understanding however is that in recent decades there has been a "reverse great-migration" of blacks back to southern states, which are still predominately under southern control. So in practice they don't seem all that afraid, which is something our country can be proud of now.
You're demonstrating the point: anyone who doesn't want to affirm the phrase "Black lives matter" (because of the obvious political connotations it has in addition to its unobjectionable literal meaning) should be able to understand skittishness around the phrase "it's okay to be white." (And vice versa, I'd think.)
But isn't "black lives matter" much more well-known than "it's okay to be white"? I have to imagine the former has close to 100% penetration in the US (plus an easy acronym) but the latter more like 15%. I hadn't heard it prior to this extended discussion.
A lot of people who hear the phrase recognize it as race baiting. Likely because the phrase was specifically chosen for that reason. See this follow-up survey
BLM also refers to a set of organizations that *maybe* promoted riots and *definitely* committed a great deal of fraud, depending which specific chapters you're talking about.
IOTBW is *bait* but lacks any equivalent standing.
I feel like if you asked a person who lived in a cave for the last 20-30 years what kind of things an organization named "black lives matter" would depict they'd say something like "they'd probably show black doctors, scientists, engineers, politicians and/or social workers excelling in their fields; hard working individuals diligently making society better for black folks and overall" and then if you told them it actually focuses on examples of black people getting killed by cops unjustly they would likely be confused as to why it's named that.
I don't feel this is a perspective most people would share. For the majority of people the underlying thesis of "black people's lives have value" is not particularly controversial, only the most wretched groups today would disagree. The majority of people disagrees with something else - namely that there's anything worth fighting for still. They would say that there is no real racism and that black people are doing just as well as any other race in america. That if they do get violently killed, then it must have been their own fault.
As such, showing the examples of clearly unjust murders of black people illustrates the point of BLM very clearly - yes, there's racism, yes, it's strong enough to lead to unjust deaths. As well as in general causing a lot of sympathy to the victims.
I think this comment falls into a fallacy I've seen often enough that it finally crystallized into a name: the "one factor theory of fault". It's the same as saying that, saying that that she shouldn't have worn a summer dress in that area of town is absolving her attackers of primary responsibility. Like the amount of blame for any given act must sum up to 1, rather than a number considerably greater than 1- that if one person is wholly responsible for it, this implies that nobody else is at all responsible for it.
To give an example:
Yes, black lives matter, because all lives matter, and black people are doing just as well as any other race on average, which is to say they do get violently killed and it's "their own fault" to an amount of say 0.7- *but* America has a police state, which has systematically criminalized correlates of being black, and it's that process's fault to an amount *greater* than 1, that is to say, it's the fault of police engagement behavior in situations where they're uncertain of their safety to a factor of 1, *and* it's *also* the fault of american drug law to a factor of 0.6, *and* it's the fault of american gun culture, which to some extent is black culture to another factor of say 0.3 (I don't actually know the numbers here, more of an example than anything).
You can tell that this sums up to a lot more than 1. Yes? I simply think that fault summing up to more than 1 is entirely normal and meaningful. Saying that one particular black person's interaction with the police was extremely stupid and basically asking to be shot, is **simply not taking away a single iota of fault** from the police state America built that put them in that situation to begin with.
(I recommend watching airplane accident reports on Youtube. Things that go wrong nearly always have fault factors of 3 or more.)
What units of fault are you using though? It's natural to have the total fault sum to 1, that is, 100%. It's not an objection to your point, having the total fault to be 100% doesn't mean it lies with one party (although in many cases, some parts are easier or more important to correct than others). But I'm curious about the units.
I think the implications is that anyone who shares any blame could have a fault level 0-1. In an illegal dual to the death, for example, both people could be fully guilty of the death of one of the participants; the killer is fully guilty for having killed, and the dead is fully guilty for having been stupid enough to participate in a duel. The latter's guilt does not mitigate the guilt of the former
I agree that this is a great question. I don't have a perfect answer, so let me list some criteria instead:
- necessity; the degree to which not performing an action would have averted the outcome
- permissibility; whether the action was socially normalized, is moral, or is legal
- predictability; whether the outcome of the action could have been foreseen
- accountability; whether the person was capable of rational analysis in the first place
- freedom; whether the person was reasonably capable of taking another action (ie. under various forms of coercion)
- responsibility; whether the person was charged with averting the outcome.
I believe there are more, depending. Some people may hold "sympathy" as a factor (do I like the person; is it a good person). I believe the factors I've listed should be uncontroversial at least.
edit: On reflection, both coercion and accountability have huge historical debates on them; everyone agrees that *to some extent* they're a factor but they strongly disagree on the magnitude.
Think of a set of cheesecloth squares. Every nutmeg that drops through a single layer of cheesecloth has identified a fault. it's not the entire fault, as the nutmeg needs to drop through ALL the cheesecloths, but... each cheesecloth's failure is orthogonal to the others (and additive in a serial fashion).
Take the case of Antwon Rose Junior.
1) It is inarguable that the cop shouldn't have been "copping" anymore, he was serially terminated from multiple police departments, and had questionable statements about his job.
2) Antwon shouldn't have run from the cop, into a probable ambush zone (aka flight likely to turn to fight, if pursued -- assuming he had the gun, which the police officer suspected he had).
We were lucky enough that this happened in East Pittsburgh, or my city (not east pittsburgh, dumbass lazy protestors couldn't get to East Pittsburgh, so they demanded Peduto ... somehow interfere in a matter he wasn't legally allowed to) might have burnt down.
Last cheesecloth wins! (And, in this sense, you can see the propaganda engine revving up for BLM, trying to find a "good case" that would lead to easily engineered riots).
But the other issue is that "fault" can be more than 100%. Antwon Rose's running might have been a "60%" fault, and the cop being bad is probably a "less than 100%" fault, but maybe not by much. Also, lay in "new cop, new turf" (with a 10% fault, if he knew the area, he might not have been so triggerhappy...)
With enough variables and fault, you can say "this was overfaulted. Reducing a particular variable slightly wouldn't have stopped the killing."
yeah if you talk about this from someone in air travel they'll look at you like you're insane.
like imagine an airline saying, "but if we fix the pilot training, the airports may think that they can get away with skimping on maintenance!"
Like. If things have gotten to that point, your entire part of society needs to collectively step back and figure out whether they actually want safety factors or not.
> Think of a set of cheesecloth squares. Every nutmeg that drops through a single layer of cheesecloth has identified a fault.
One nutmeg is hundreds of times larger at least than a hole in the weave of a cheesecloth. This metaphor makes about as much sense as asking us to imagine some nutmegs falling through a stack of manhole covers. There could be nutmeg-sized holes in a set of manhole covers, if you drilled them.
They're not doing "just as well as any other race on average". They have lower expected lifespans. And while the "Hispanic health paradox" indicates this isn't just attributable to poverty, whatever it is merits more attention than the deaths-by-police that make up only a tiny fraction of that delta.
Okay but if we're talking about lifespan we're not talking about a core BLM claim, to my knowledge. I'm entirely open to the idea that there's unique factors that require special attention and investment towards black health, I just don't think it's the case in the specific cases that usually cause protests *in the way* that it's usually alleged.
Talking about lifespan means talking about lower-case "black lives matter", regardless of upper-case "Black Lives Matter" being grifters who don't care. We don't need to let them monopolize the idea.
>showing the examples of clearly unjust murders of black people illustrates the point of BLM very clearly - yes, there's racism, yes, it's strong enough to lead to unjust deaths
This makes no sense. If examples of unjust murders of whites can be shown, does that mean that anti-white racism led to them?
The underlying thesis is that 'black people's deaths matter' -- and in particular, that the deaths that are caused by law enforcement are somehow MUCH more highly problematic (and worthy of fixing) than the ones caused by ethnic cleansing and/or gangland violence.
This is a valid sentiment, but... it's not "Black Lives Matter."
I must object here, sir. If one would like to prevent more "court decided" cases of ethnic cleansing in America, one should look to which populations do not suffer from "white guilt" (and are thus more likely to support ethnic cleansing). These would, in fact, be populations you'd be trying to reduce, or at least acclimatize enough that they would be willing to stop supporting "ethnic cleansing" as a method of keeping their neighborhoods safe.
However, we saw the democrats very, very openly importing more of this population, including very little effort to stop the "gangland criminal types" most likely to commit ethnic cleansing from entering our country.
Black Lives Matter only when they don't interfere with electoral prospects.
There are still things worth fighting for for all lives. None of us are living in paradise.
It's precisely because I value the lives of my fellow Americans, including African-Americans, that I have a lower opinion of upper-case "Black Lives Matter", who don't sufficiently value black lives to act like rationalists optimizing the preservation of such lives, and instead appear to act in ways that result in a lot more such lives being snuffed out than the deaths they publicize. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/policing-the-police.html If we could put the people at GiveWell in charge of such organizations, African-Americans would be much better off. I suppose it would be proper to constrain them not to just redirect the assets currently spent on expensive houses for BLM heads to people in the Third World (a worthy cause enough for me to donate, but not to direct others donations).
Indeed it's not like cops are anywhere close to the biggest unjust killers of black people, so if they're concerned black lives there's a lot of other factors they can also look at.
That would be true if they couldn't just claim that you were doing racist concern trolling, but they can and do so the black lives will continue to matter until moral improves
I agree. "All lives matter" is equivalent "It's OK to have any skin color".
If you somehow managed to find two soft-spoken mistake theorists, one of which opposed the colorized slogan and the other one supported it, they could have said something like this:
Universalist: I dislike the colorist slogan because I interpret it as having an implicit bias against groups of other color. It's like saying "Don't put roofies into undergraduates' glasses!", surely the goal should be to eliminate flunitrazepam from every beverage!
Colorist: The original intent was to counteract an existing bias against the group mentioned in the slogan. What do you think about "Blondes are smart!"? Does it make you feel like it's unfair against brunettes?
Universalist: No, but the dumb blonde stereotype is known well enough that it has its own Wikipedia page. In the case of your slogan the original bias you were trying to counteract was small if present at all, much less prominent than the slogan itself. It made people not intimately familiar with the problem doubt the sincerity of its authors.
Colorist: I'll admit that the phrasing of the slogan was in part deliberately chosen to provoke a reaction, but what is more important: the data or the vibes? If people think the economy is in a recession, but all indicators show that it's growing, would you tell people who are protesting the closure of their factory that they should just find new jobs?
Universalist: I see what you mean, but I disagree. Even if you are a politician, at some point you have to stop telling your electorate what they want to hear. Even if that factory closure is very real and you are the most honest politician and you are deeply moved by the story of these steelworkers, you can't just decide that factory jobs matter and distort the whole economy to prop them up.
Colorist: It feels like we're going off on a tangent that is not directly relevant.
Universalist: But it is! Factory owners afraid of firing people will stop trying to improve their factories, which will hurt the workers in the long run when they go bankrupt. And if college professors stop failing blondes because they don't want to look like they are perpetuating the dumb blonde stereotype, this will actually hurt blondes!
Colorist: Very well, I have to agree with you. But imagine a slogan that looks like this: "While sexual assault is a serious crime no matter how it is executed and who the victim is, this is a college town and a few high-profile cases of students being drugged by spiked drinks are on everyone's mind (even though it might just be a statistical outlier). Therefore, we would like to draw attention to this specific form of sexual assault, both because fighting it will reduce the overall rates of sexual assault and will provide peace of mind to students around us!" That's not a very good slogan, is it? A good slogan has to concede some veracity to remain memorable. I expect people to be smart enough to unpack it themselves.
Universalist: But you have to deal with people who are either not smart enough or are your political opponents. They will interpret it in the worst possible way. You might say they are not your concern, but some of your supporters might be among those people that are interpreting the message wrong. They will sincerely believe that the most extreme literal interpretation of your slogan is the correct one and will hurt your cause.
Colorist: Well, since you're so eager to speak for me, please speak for me some more: what would you do if you needed a biting slogan to draw attention to the problem and at the same time wanted all people to have a nuanced take on the matter?
Universalist: Uh, I would carefully curate the steering committee and allow only those people who understand the problem deeply.
Colorist: But people don't flock to *your* banners, they flock to the slogan, to the meme. You're not building a snowman, you're diverting an avalanche. You simply can't expect to hand pick every person who hears the slogan and decides to do something about it.
Universalist: Point taken. But this sounds like optimizing for heat, for engagement, not for finding the solution. And if you can't expect to pick every person, why do you argue with people who find your narrow slogan distasteful? They are a natural outcome.
Colorist: Well, I said you couldn't expect to hand pick every person, not that you had to sit back and let them run rampant. You have to explain the meaning of the slogan to those who oppose it and to rein in those on your side who are running away with it. It's politics, you *need* some heat to get people to care, even think tanks publish radical inflammatory papers and don't always go, "in our opinion, lowering the discount rate by 0.25% is the best course of action in the current economy, see the next 200 pages for an explanation".
Universalist: I guess so, look at how much we've managed to agree on simply because I didn't like your slogan.
The universalist says, "They will sincerely believe that the most extreme literal interpretation of your slogan is the correct one and will hurt your cause."
This confuses me because "black lives matter" can be taken (seriously and) literally, and is least offensive when taken literally. It's the subtext of the statement that many disagree with. Saying the phrase is signaling something about your beliefs, and that signal needs a whole bunch of context to be understood. The fact that context is needed is why sometimes the word "dog whistle" is used in politics, as only people with the full context can actually interpret the statement in the spirit in which it was intended.
Consider my reference to the phrases "take him seriously, but not literally" and "dog whistle." These are signals that take some amount of context to parse, but if you know the context, you could probably correctly deduce my political leanings. This is the exact same dynamics as "it's ok to be white" and "black lives matter." These phrases are not (only) said because of their literal meaning, but because of the subtext. And when survey responders reject to these statements which are 'literally' inoffensive, it it typically not the literal statement they object to, but the more subtle signal/dog whistle.
Scott Adams was smart enough to know this; he regularly defended the man for whom the term "take him seriously, not literally" was originally coined. So I think it is legitimate and justified to condemn Adams for his statements about blacks who disagreed with the phrase "it's ok to be white." He knew what they were actually objecting to, and chose to fear monger against black Americans anyways.
Any normal person can agree to both "Black lives matter" and "It's ok to be white". Avoiding them because you believe they must be owned by your political opponents means normies lose.
Most of America (I had the stat as 70%, talking to a pollster) was against BLM by the 2020 election. This is gross mistiming of a "protest movement" designed to swing the dial towards the Democrats.
We'll use your numbers for "just before the election."
Compare the drop (62% down to 42%? Jebus christ). And note I'm pulling from a right-wing pollster, so the extremely high rate of support for BLM is notable, as it cuts against bias. Wish I could pull you a public record of the "just before the election" BLM polling, but it was from a real pollster.
Do you believe preferentially giving blacks LIAR loans was treating them less fairly than whites?
Where are you getting the 42% number from? And how does this support your claim of 70% being OPPOSED to BLM by the 2020 election? (Much stronger than 30% being in favor, which even by your 42% number isn't true.) Why don't you believe the polls I quote that show the relevant timeline? Note that the poll you quote is in the middle of the two I quote at the only time point it has, so I see no reason to doubt the time series based off your numbers.
Edit: So you're taking 42% from one of my polls supposedly, but that number doesn't appear in either. It's 52% peak down to 48% by election in Civiqs and 67% peak down to 55% by the election in Pew. Neither of these support the idea that BLM protests cratered support for BLM since those are comparing two post- (or during-) protest numbers and both show a jump in support compared to the limited polling pre-protests (as does Rasmussen). And nothing close to your 70% opposed number.
I have trouble thinking of a comparable thing. BLM is associated with a political movement with revolutionary goals and a history of grifting. If you could somehow ask it to people who had never heard the term, I hope that everyone but hardcore racists (and lizardmen) would agree that "black lives matter."
My equally charitable guess is that people who had never heard of the "It's OK to be white" controversy thought something like "I think being white carries additional responsibilities as a result of privilege and/or history, so I will answer 'no' or 'not sure.'"
When reading the article, I thought that "all lives matter" might be equivalent, but even that had a very specific history, while I imagine muggles have no Idea about the history of IOTBW.
How do you get from "whites have additional responsibilities" to "therefore its not ok to be white?" That doesn't seem like a valid logical move that people would make.
It would be hard to figure out what proportion of people actually believe "it's not OK to be white" because it was never been a serious topic of conversation outside of this very particular context; a group on 4chan thought it would be fun to troll people, make the left angry, and get Trump elected. The term astroturf doesn't quite apply because its just some weirdos on the internet, but it bears a family resemblance.
The closest thing in the discourse we had to the phrase would probably be "white guilt", so does the term "it is ok to be white" just indicate you are against the concept of white guilt? If it does, then Scott Adam's reaction doesn't make sense, "black people think I should believe in white guilt, therefore I should be afraid of them, walk on the other side of the street, and leave neighborhoods with black people" would be a rather extreme reaction to such a proposition.
I think it is pretty clear that Scott Adams fully understood the context of the phrase, and that people were rejecting it as a motto, not as a literal statement about the value and worth of white lives. Despite this, he chose to fear monger against blacks anyways. He could have been a good person in a thousand other ways; people with reprehensible politics often are rather kind to their family, friends, and fans. But the point under contention is whether that particular statement was unjustified racism.
I hold that it is perfectly legitimate to be against the phrase "black lives matter" and "it is ok to be white" and that no one should interpret this as racism.
Well, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, a word is only the skin covering a living thought - I know what "It's OK to be white" means to me, and you know what it means to you, but both of us are guessing what it meant to the survey respondents.
I agree with you that it's entirely possible to report to a pollster that you don't agree with "It's OK to be white" or "black lives matter" without being racist, and I offered the privilege interpretation above as how I thought that would work for IOTBW.
Out of curiosity, what do you think poll respondents were thinking of when they said they disagreed with or were not sure about "It's OK to be white." Surely 40% of poll respondents couldn't have been aware of 4chan trolling, so what do you think people who had never heard about the term were thinking? Thanks!
Here is another survey that was done on the same question. The survey found a smaller percentages disagreed than the other poll. They also included an open ended response so you can hear people in their own words why they answered the way they did. Mostly it seems like people could tell it was race baiting even without knowing the 4chan context.
Though, some of the follow-up questions, and the percentages associated with those questions are not particularly redeeming, and surprised me. Those results would be a better basis for some of these arguments than the IOTBW phrase.
"It's ok to be white" is inconsistent with the people who go on about "abolishing whiteness", just as "black lives matter" is inconsistent with many forms of anti-black racism.
I had never heard the term "abolish whiteness" but it seems like just a lefty version of "racial blindness"
"When we say we want to abolish the white race, we do not mean we want to exterminate people with fair skin. We mean that we want to do away with the social meaning of skin color, thereby abolishing the white race as a social category."
"Abolish whiteness" is not actually same phrase as "abolish skin color". You obviously can't accomplish the latter by exterminating only one race of people. And if you did say the latter phrase, people would probably be confused.
I want to make sure I understand what you are trying to say. When asked, the people who use the term 'abolish whiteness" seem to be pretty explicit that they mean dismantling the social construct of whiteness. Are you saying that they are lying about this, and that their true intention is genocide? Or are you saying something else?
Take a minute and ask yourself if you would trust that someone claiming they want to 'abolish blackness' or 'abolish Jewishness' and accept that level of horseshit flim-flammery.
I am going to assume your answer is no, because that's the answer most people would give. So why accept them at their word here?
I absolutely 100% condemn the phrase "abolish whiteness" as intentionally inflammatory and stupid. But I also 100% do not believe that term is about genocide. The phrase "take it seriously, but not literally" comes to mind.
However, I wish everyone refused to engage in such trolling, and refused to elect people who used or excused such inflammatory language just because it isn't meant to be taken literally. The world would be better off if we told all such people to go to hell. We wouldn't even be talking right now if people refused to excuse such trolling. To hell with all the inflammatory trolls, whether to my right, or your left.
Just distinguish between lower-case "black lives matter" and upper-case "Black Lives Matter". We don't have to applaud proper nouns just because they claim a nice-sounding name.
I agree, and have said so various times in this comment thread. But it is important to note a similarity in that "It is OK to be white" is a politically charged race-baiting statement, and one does not need to be racist to rebuke it.
My point I want to make is that it would be unjustifiable to conclude Republicans are dangerous racists because they disagree with the statement "black lives matter" and therefore it is also unjustifiable to conclude blacks are dangerous racists because they disagree with the statement "It is OK to be white." Both statements are incredibly politically charged, and the latter was chosen precisely to bait racial antagonism. Adams understood this context, and chose to fear monger against blacks anyways.
"It is OK to be white" is just a statement, if you are not anti-white racist you would not have trouble agreeing with it. "Black lives matter" is nbot obly a statement but also a political movement, as a movement it's pretty controversial.
The logic is perfectly mirrored in blm. "Race baiting only works on those who hate black people, otherwise they would have no issue with the statement black lives matter."
I reject your claim, and the mirror version of it. You can disagree with a motto because of subtext, and you shouldn't be judged for it.
"Black Lives Matter" is a political movement, while "it's ok to be white" is not. Even hardcore racists agree with "black live matter" as a statement, they just think they matter less than white lives. But you have to be absolutely deranged psycho to disagree that lives of black people matter at least in some way.
I tried to find a poll on this, but all the polls ask “Do you agree with the Black Lives Matter movement?” And the word movement messes up the comparison. If black people said they were against the “It’s Ok to be White movement” I would understand that since the movement was just white supremacists on 4chan.
"Black lives matter" is a rallying cry now, not something you can agree or disagree with. And it's a crappy rallying cry to. Because somebody could say, "Yes, I think they matter -- just only 60% as much as white lives." And, by the way, I think that statement captures the real flavor of most Americans who have negative views of blacks think. Only a minority of savagely angry people think blacks should be lynched or shipped off to the worst country in Africa to starve.
Problem is there's no IOTBW organization. BLM is more loaded because it's both a mostly innocuous phrase *and* a highly controversial set of registered organizations.
So if you ask them in, say, 2013 "do black lives matter" you're going to get (I would hope) 85% yes, 10% nitpicking the grammar and seeing an implied if unintentional "only" in there, and 5% lizardmen. Asking it in 2021 means something quite different and requires a lot more clarity about what you mean.
I generally agree with Scott's point of view rather than Bugmaster's, so this should be interpreted as inquisitive hole-poking rather than me staking out a position.
"If Dilbert is an 80th percentile nerd, the 80th percentile persuader is - I don’t know, a used-car salesman? Dilbert’s probably earning more money, especially nowadays when he could make L5 at Google."
What, then, is the Pointy-Haired Boss? As the previous post explained at length, it's a central theme of the strip that he's higher on the totem pole and more successful than Dilbert and the other competent engineers despite lacking any real virtues (unless you count lack of ethics as a virtue).
This actually gets into the reason why I found Adams's whole "charismatic manipulation is what matters" turn a bit odd. The Pointy-Haired Boss isn't charismatic at all! (Dogbert is, but he's less important to the strip's central themes, memorable though he may be.)
I guess you could say that Adams had, at different times, two different theories of why the world is the way it is: the "Dilbert Principle" theory, exemplified by the Pointy-Haired Boss, and the "Win Bigly" theory, exemplified by Dogbert. It would be neat and elegant if he had some grand principle unifying the two, but I'm not aware of any such thing. (Though you could maybe argue that it might have looked something like the "Gervais Principle".)
"Nobody except Scott Adams and a few psychotherapists ever go to hypnotist school. Most don’t even go to any formal persuasion classes. That’s because hypnotism/persuasion isn’t really a lifehack that helps you win all the time at everything."
I don't think that hypothesis is necessary. Even if it were generally useful for a wide variety of goals—as I suspect it is, though I won't try to guess how it stacks up against general intelligence—most people still wouldn't do it because most people don't do hard things even when doing so offers great rewards. That inclination is rare. (I am very, very much including myself here.)
"The salesman with the bright teeth and the firm handshake thinks 'Man, I bet I could get out of this dead-end job if only I were smarter.'"
Does he? That sounds a bit surprising to me—it's not how I imagine non-nerds typically think about intelligence—but I suppose I wouldn't know.
Scott Adams’ interest in hypnosis started when his mother gave birth to his younger sister under hypnosis, supposedly remaining awake but feeling no pain. The same doctor (Adams said it was the only doctor in their small town) later attempted to hypnotize his mother to stop her smoking addiction. Adams said this ultimately failed because hypnosis generally doesn’t work for addictions, but the idea of hypnosis intrigued him enough that he made a study of it. You don’t have to want to manipulate people to be drawn to hypnosis; you just have to be curious about how humans and their minds work—as Adams was. He mentioned his mother’s former doctor when he was on the James Altucher podcast in September 2023.
To clarify, I was talking about general persuasion skills (which I guess Adams idiosyncratically called "hypnosis"), not about actual literal hypnosis, the utility of which I suspect is much narrower.
The PHB is viewed through what is more or less Dilbert's point of view in the comic. Dilbert, as a massive nerd, is unable to perceive (or ignores) what makes the PHB more successful than him, so the PHB is portrayed as someone who is occupying his position unfairly, a cosmic joke or a divine punishment.
I don't think I agree with this reading. A decent fraction of the humor in the strip is at Dilbert's expense, but this particular thing is not. The office workers reading the strip aren't supposed to think "Dilbert is too clueless to see the important reasons why the PHB deserves his position"; they're supposed to empathize with Dilbert and accept the cosmic-joke perspective. See, e.g., Adams saying that the reason the PHB is never named is so that the reader can imagine him as their boss.
I don't think our views are incompatible. The comic is written from Dilbert's point of view, which is tailored to match the way its readers view themselves.
My impression is that the Pointy-Haired Boss is basically a stereotype from the 50s. He even wears a 1950s-style suit. Some fat old guy who's been in middle-management forever, and he collects a high salary for doing nothing because he's a loyal Organization Man in a giant Organization that has tons of money to waste and never fires anyone who shows loyalty. This was already obsolete by the 80s, when companies figured out that they could save massive amounts by doing layoffs and restructuring to remove this sort of person- it was rather infamously a decade of mass layoffs. It makes absolutely no sense today- I can't imagine any manager at a tech company thinking that he's somehow immune to being fired despite being an incompetant idiot, or that everyone else would just accept that as a matter of course. Instead we long for the older days when people had more job security.
I worked in academia under someone who was a real-world analouge to the PHB. She was the director of my area, despite have no experience or education in the field. She had, however, a PhD, was social (you don't always need charisma, but just be able to charm the right people), and not stupid. But she exhibited numerous PHB qualities:
- She had zero interest in the department's field. Never learned about it by working with fellow directors, going to conferences, reading literature, or even working along side us (it's a professional area).
- She didn't respect us and thought she had the answer to everything. You could get 100 people to tell her the sky is blue but she'd insist it was obviously yellow.
- She loved endless meetings that a coworker perfectly described as "holding court."
- She was lazy and engaged in what we might now call "quiet quitting" at the boss level.
- She saw herself as the solution to all of the problems we beneath her created, despite never doing anything.
- She destroyed morale in dozens of ways.
In a past life, in her area of expertise, she may have been a Dilbert, but she was an atrophied PHB in my time there...and she never left. Years and years of taking up space.
Yeah, I don't get the criticism of that part either. 210k subscribers is respectable, but it's still orders of magnitude below what it would take to be mad at someone for only being "vaguely aware" of it.
I found it a useful tidbit. I had been picturing a podcast that reached maybe 500-1500 listeners per episode. Looking at his youtube, he was probably reaching 50k to 150k listeners across different channels. Many more people than I was picturing.
Mr. Alexander doesn’t seem to have accounted at all for Scott Adams’ subscribers on the Locals platform. Most people who were serious CWSA fans subscribed to him on Locals to hear the pre- and post-show commentary, micro-lessons, and evening Man Cave episodes. He also had a decent number of followers on X and often shared clips from his show there.
It's no shame to be 1% of the biggest podcast in the world, the one that moves Presidential elections with a single show. My main update is that Dwarkesh is considered a giant in the AI world (able to get eg Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella), and 80K considered the flagship podcast of the EA movement, and Adams was 20% of a Dwarkesh and 5x 80K.
Scot wasn't perfect but him noticing the huge amount of anti-white racism, and objecting to it, does not make him the racist. He's not the only person sick of the R word going only one direction after all the virulence that has been firehosed our way for the past decade or more.
If it is wrong to want to live in a white neighborhood, why do blacks sometimes move into them to be safer?
"Anti-white racism" is not common at all. I could give you all of the arguments about white people still holding most power in society, but that doesn't matter. I just don't think the vast, vast majority of people, including black people, even including extremely woke professors or whatever, are racist against white people. You can disagree with affirmative action, but calling proponents racist is silly. Most of them are white and framed such policy as uplifting and affirming.
As for the housing comment: it's simple. Black neighborhoods are much poorer, and poverty leads to crime. Richer black people will leave poorer neighborhoods for rich ones. Predominantly black neighborhoods are poorer due to redlining and the historical effects of Jim Crow, slavery, and dispossession.
Not calling a policy that explicitly discriminates based on race and is a blatant violation of civil rights law racist is silly. Why would I give the slightest fuck if the racists described their racist policy that discriminates against me as "uplifting and affirming"?
That's a measurement error my friend. For example car ownership is higher among whites who speed millions of more times a day as a result. Do we want to talk about timecard fraud? Falsifying records? Perjury? Fraud? Insider trading? Illegal employment practices? Not declaring taxable income? Home improvements without a permit? Etc
You haven't actually looked at the measurements, such as which drivers are racking up massive amounts of tickets when police don't seize the vehicles and just send notices. "White collar crimes" such as fraud are also committed more by the poor. The book "Off the Books" is all about people who don't declare taxable income in the ghetto.
Crime leads to poverty, in fact near deterministically; If I vandalize your property, I impoverish you. Stealing, likewise, especially if you account for the usually frivolous nature and/or use of the goods being stolen and the losses caused by safeguarding as well. No, insurance is a completely facetious answer here
The other direction has, if anything, a negative evidence base. Lottery winners or UBI receivers don't have reduced crime. Many poor communities have low crime rates. When average income through crime is measured for career criminals, it often is literally below easily attainable minimum wage work.
Getting prosecuted for crimes leads to poverty. You aren't going to find a single wealthy person who didn't get there without committing crimes. Why Tyrone was prosecuted and not CEO Sir Samantha Weinstein the Fourth, I'll leave it up to you.
I know a moderate number of people in the 7-to-9 figure wealth range, which I'd count as being wealthy, and I'm very confident the vast majority of them haven't committed any felonies.
You'd be surprised what constitutes a felony. It's a felony for example to write a check for under one US dollar or to return an aluminum can for it's refund across state lines.
And I'd be willing to bet nearly all of them have did illegal, or misused legal, drugs, drove at least once over the legal alcohol limit of one beer, had sex while inebriated, or engaged in sex play under the age of consent. Wisconsin has an eight year old on the sex offender registry for playing "I show you mine, you show me yours" with a classmate. And those are just felonies I can think of in a couple seconds. Let's not even get into tax fraud (do you honestly think they declared every penny they made in life), timecard fraud, etc.
What was that book, "we all commit three felonies a day". Or to Cardinal Richelieu "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him".
So to my point, why is Franklin Jackson in prison but not your friends, all things being equal.
"It's a felony for example to write a check for under one US dollar."
No, it's illegal to do this and attempt to circulate the check as currency. You can, however, legally write a check for $.50 as payment.
"or to return an aluminum can for it's refund across state lines."
Not really? There have been some large scale operations busted for doing this, but I can't find any instances where taking an aluminum can across state lines resulted in legal scrutiny.
"Wisconsin has an eight year old on the sex offender registry"
I could find no indication this is true, but I also didn't want to Google around with those search terms too aggressively.
All that aside, it seems like you're playing bait and switch with your arguments here. Lots of dumb things can be felonies without the fact that those things aren't aggressively prosecuted being evidence of racially-biased law enforcement.
I don't think it's at all surprising that people concerned about crime are actually using that as a placeholder for murder, robbery, burglary, rape, etc. and don't actually care about 'crime' when it means writing a 50 cent check, not declaring every penny on their taxes, driving 5mph over, or trading onion futures. I don't see racial bias or measurement error as the cause- these are simply less bad things (in the case of speeding, a good thing if everyone else is doing it) that are technically also crimes. And of course the rates of the technicality crimes would plummet if they were prosecuted like the serious ones.
I think you make a good point regarding DUIs or drug usage convictions being driven by racial profling, but it is undermined by words spent suggesting very different things are equivalent. Nobody is lying awake at night worried that a stranger is going to steal a stapler from their daughter's office.
Who knows, I.was being US centric in that comment. Though I'm sure some Brit could opine on it given the UK seems to over criminalize everything as well.
> You aren't going to find a single wealthy person who didn't get there without committing crimes.
Completely false. People who inherit their wealth are textbook "undeserving" but obviously don't have to commit crimes themselves to "get there"! Crime doesn't pay https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/why_do_the_poor.html and is instead committed by hyperbolic discounters. If you want to actually get ahead, crime isn't the way to do it.
How can you make a statement about the vast majority of people like that? I don’t think anti white racism is necessarily uncommon, I think it is more accurate to say that most white people don’t live in environments where it is generally socially relevant for them.
Statements like “only white people can be racist” that one sometimes hears are racist, because it implies that white people are somehow intrinsically morally inferior.
This is one of those cases where I think academic race studies is actually useful! (if you only look at the theories abstractly and not at their conclusions which are generally not useful). The concepts of microaggressions, or the idea of lived experience, or unconscious racism, or systemic racism. Many of the little injustices against white people count as microaggressions. The lived experience of whites who think people discriminate against them really is valid (who are you to deny it?). Unconscious bias studies really do show that nonwhites are biased against whites. Systems can be "racist" without anybody having a conscious intent to create an inequitable system if they lead to inequitable results. Even some of the 2000-2010s-era critiques (e.g. power + privilege, intersectionality) can be applied here to some degree!
(yes I'm being somewhat impetuous; I think all these theories have major flaws. My true opinion is that both anti-white and anti-black racism are both either very rare or very common, depending on your definition of racism, assuming you apply the term consistently and neutrally, with the exception of a handful of extraordinarily poorly thought-out definitions of racism).
I also think racists are a fringe minority across the political spectrum, but manage to get a disproportionate amount of attention for themselves.
> Black neighborhoods are much poorer, and poverty leads to crime.
False. Lotteries are natural experiments on an individual level. Crime also declined during the Great Depression, rose during the booming 60s, declined again during the Great Recession. Plenty of immigrants come over with hardly anything, work low-status/pay jobs and commit crime at a rate well-below average.
I think the idea is that the least well off white people shoulder the most burden for measures meant to promote equality between races, while rich and powerful white people do about as well as ever. This seems to mean that it has been arranged that the "people still holding most power in society" have decided to make the poor who look like them suffer.
>even including extremely woke professors or whatever, are racist against white people.
Because they've tried to launder the language to where it's literally impossible to be racist against white people in their view. "Whiteness needs abolished, but we don't *really* mean white people, wink wink nudge nudge" is horseshit flim-flammery that no one would accept regarding any other group.
We as real, sane people do not need to participate in their games. Most woke professors- and lots people downstream of them- are wildly, virulently racist.
Did you read the post (and especially footnote 8)? I think Adams' position was a caricatured and exaggerated version of this, and it's the caricature/exaggeration that makes it bad.
He gives one prosocial altruistic explanation (so that if someone accuses him of being selfish, he can show they’re wrong), and then one amoral selfish explanation (so that if someone argues with him about whether it’s really altruistic to oppose estate taxes for millionaires, he can say “Ha, you can’t get me, I already admitted I’m a cold hard realist who doesn’t worry about that kind of fuzzy stuff.”)
My default reading of this style is that the prosocial part is saying "here's my conclusion about the morality of the position", and the selfish part is him being self-aware enough to know some people have the opposite moral intuition, and he thinks they came to different conclusions because they have opposing interests. This is less than maximally scientifically virtuous but I think it is how most people think about controversial issues and it is, mostly, sorta good enough. It doesn't require the kind of tough unflinching scientific honesty that rationalists are supposed to maximally cultivate, but he does restrict himself to backing positions he does genuinely believe moral arguments for (even if he's subject to various forms of bias). This can lead him to oppose an estate tax, but I think it's enough honesty that he wouldn't back something clearly bad rather than controversial (e.g. I don't think Adams would have supported a bill that said sixty year old white men are legally allowed to litter or something, even if he would've benefited from it).
Reading this post has made me like Scott Adams a lot less, whereas reading the first post made me like him a lot more. He's definitely an interesting figure, and I've enjoyed both posts at least.
This quote specifically: "You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children." I just can't stand the smug nihilism and misanthropy he has here.
I'd call it a smug, but earnest, selfishness. "Fair or not, I got mine, jack, and if I die I want to keep it in the family." As a huge fan of fairness, I disagree that "fairness is an argument for idiots and children", but I appreciate the honesty of deriding fairness directly.
What's really awful to me about Scott Adams (and MAGA in general) is the corrosive exaggeration and lying, like "if Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year. Republicans will be hunted. Police will stand down". I now suspect this might explain his tweet implying people are stupid if they thought Trump's question about injecting disinfectant was a question about injecting disinfectant.[1][2]**
I also hate CYA doublespeak.* I didn't follow Adams personally, but Scott described it as 'He gives one prosocial altruistic explanation (so that if someone accuses him of being selfish, he can show they’re wrong), and then one amoral selfish explanation (so that if someone argues with him about whether it’s really altruistic to oppose estate taxes for millionaires, he can say “Ha, you can’t get me, I already admitted I’m a cold hard realist who doesn’t worry about that kind of fuzzy stuff.”'.
* I'm not using "doublespeak" the way Wikipedia defines it, but I lack a better word.
** btw I also hate that every single video about this has a label like "Trump suggests injecting disinfectant". No he didn't, he just asked a question, a very dumb question. The way guys like Adams rushed to Trump's defense reflects badly on them, but the fact that others mislabel a question as a "suggestion" reflects badly on them. Maybe this is "misanthropic", but there's usually plenty of blame to go around.
Honesty/earnestness is quite overrated. "Well I simply like the convenience of aborting the fetus instead of taking precautions" is radically honest but no conservative would find it to be a good point.
Being excessively congratulatory to honesty appears to me in a similar vein as that Norm Macdonald sketch "The worst part is the hypocrisy". Nah, the worst part is the actual thing, and the honesty about it is basically a rounding error.
I know conservatives who would find it to be a good point. They'd follow up with a sincere discussion, which would include discovering (as they have) that black women have difficulties obtaining sex (being in general the least liked race/gender combination), and subsequently compensate for this by "not taking precautions" (as that is a "feel better" thing for guys).
But, you know, what conservative isn't interested in analyzing the free market?
Projected solutions for this include "more black marriage" and other conservative solutions, so...
I'm talking mainly about "alternative facts" where the damage is far greater, like "We project that our forces will be able to subdue Kyiv within two weeks" or "Good chance you'll die within a year if Biden (or Trump) is elected" or "Nuclear reactors are an especially deadly and dangerous form of energy" or "Global warming is caused by the sun/volcanoes/cosmic rays/natural™ variability/evil scientist hoax" or "The vaccine is more dangerous than the disease" or "They're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets".
But even in the case of a personal fact, like dishonesty about why you support abortion, I think personal dishonesty bleeds directly into political dishonesty. If you lie about your own motivations, why not lie about the motivations of others too? Why not play fast and loose with the facts? Why not play the telephone game where you repeat a claim you saw on Twitter with just a little more embellishment than the last guy, until your in-group is sure Trump/Biden is the second coming of Hitler?
I didn't say honesty is a replacement for other virtues or resolves disagreements about values; that's quite the strawman. But if you think modern political disagreements are mainly about values, I think you're wildly off-base. Treating dishonesty (and inaccuracy) as acceptable is pervasive, which leads to dishonesty (and inaccuracy) itself being pervasive, which is why modern political disagreements are mainly about what the facts are, not about values. To some extent abortion is an exception to this, but even here I think many people would have different conclusions about abortion if they had different beliefs about facts (e.g. is God real? This is a factual question, the answer to which may affect one's opinion of abortion. And the way one arrives at the answer to this question, in turn, typically depends on other factual questions, ranging from "do my peers believe in God?" to "how did eukaryotes come to exist?" Your values determine which questions you choose to ask or pay attention to, but whether the answer you believe is correct or incorrect can affect your politics.)
Edit: and to circle back to Adams, he had a wildly negative reaction to some blacks' negative reaction to "it's OK to be white", but if (as it appears) this kicked off the chain of events that turned him MAGA, I doubt he ever engaged honestly with the question of why a survey was done about *these five words in particular*. Even if left-wingers partly caused his transition, that personal dishonesty (among others) mattered; it had an outsized influence on the world. OTOH, if he just axiomatically disliked black people, then sure, okay, that's a values thing.
Probably, but the cool thing about things is that they may be overrated by some while underrated by others. The ones who give undue credit to some of the lowest scum by saying "Well at least he's honest about it" are overrating honesty, while those who often lie are underrating the value of honesty.
Did I not say what's awful about Scott Adams in the *very next paragraph*?
And why not respond to my actual arguments instead of implying again that I was wrong on a different subthread?
But no, I disagree that there is anything wrong in acknowledging that bad people have good qualities. It's downright toxic to refuse to acknowledge the good.
I don't see "lesser humans" as much as "The people who will benefit from the estate tax are not in my monkeysphere, so I don't care about them." A sentiment which, IMO, is common to all humans (except for a few hundred saints).
That's probably fair enough, but on the other hand I really hope that when I die people aren't looking through my entire comment history to find out the worst and dumbest thing I ever said, and then dismissing my entire life based on a dumb comment I wrote one time when I was in a bad mood.
Adams was like Musk in that his worst sin was poor posting discipline, he would post random unfiltered thoughts while in a bad mood, and these are preserved forever with his real name. As a terminal poaster I really wish we could separate people's online lives from their real lives.
You seem to have reacted to the quote as if he had said “fairness is for idiots and children”, when in fact what he was referring to was an argument APPEALING to fairness, something that (in Adam’s view) only idiots and children are naive enough to believe would convince anybody. Agree or disagree, but it’s not the same thing.
You can believe that the estate tax is unfair (which he indicated in other quotes that he did) and still agree with the above statement. Likewise, you can value fairness and agree with it. In fact, the former is predicated on the latter. Nevertheless, it’s perfectly consistent with Adam’s style to point out that “don’t do that to me, it’s not fair!” Is not an effective way of manipulating people, even if it’s true. Don’t see how it comes off as “smug nihilism and misanthropy” any more than other things he said.
The comments from podcast fans saying Scott Alexander didn't appreciate him enough out me off a bit because they have a kinda culty vibe. And seem to not engage with the actual criticisms
Agreed. Coming from a place of having enjoyed dilbert as a kid, and knowing nothing about him post-2005 or so, I walked away from the first post seeing Adams as a quirky and interesting person.
Having finished this post, I'm now updating my view of him as being someone who went off the rails some time in the past decade or so. I like this post, but think I'd be happier if I hadn't read it.
*important disclaimer* kiwifarms is a hateful place that basically lives to collect all the worst parts of peoples lives and display it for entertainment. It's basically an internet tabloid magazine.
On the other hand... some of that stuff is just bad. It seems like he devoted a huge amount of his life to fighting petty grudges with random people on the internet and "proving himself right" in the most obnoxious ways possible.
Honest question: why ride the fence this hard here when you clearly understand that the ambiguity in cases like this is manufactured?
In the body text you lean on literal readings, ignorance of context, and epistemic confusion. But in the footnotes you acknowledge that slogans like this are engineered for deniability and that people reacting to that context are doing so rationally. Once that’s granted, the ambiguity stops being accidental and becomes part of the behavior.
It feels like the analysis already points somewhere that the prose is reluctant to follow. What’s gained by stopping short? Is it methodological caution, audience management, or something else?
I think I would argue that, even if a popular slogan is in some sense a deliberate linguistic trap, this doesn't excuse other people from their social obligations to treat things sensitively when called for. I can see why one might argue that it should—it's arguably a kind of rhetorical self-defense/not-being-Cooperate-Bot—but ultimately I think the world's too complicated for that kind of logic to hold, and being an asshole about this kind of thing (even if one was in a sense driven there by bad actors) causes too much collateral damage and one shouldn't do it.
I read Scott as coming from a kinda similar-ish position, which is why I don't read the footnotes as contradicting the body text. (He doesn't always land the same place I do—I think he sometimes favors a more confrontational posture than I would—but here I'm just talking about this one post.)
He is saying that you know the fact that this phrase was transparently engineered as a gotcha to produce this precise situation (look at how persecuted we are! people don't think it's OK to be white!!), but you still present the conservative argument as if it's good faith. You know this wasn't a good faith effort to accurately gauge the attitudes of black people and then adjust an opinion, it's an intentional tripwire, ragebait, which then is used as a pretense to justify the overt segregationism which was already present.
For some reason you hint at this and make it clear that you realize what is going on, but still play along with the sham. Presumably because you don't want to make hard-to-prove accusations of intent ("methodological caution") or get Adams fans even more upset ("audience management").
To start, let me say I'm optimistic that the survey results probably don't reveal racism so much as skepticism about the question or some personal understanding of the term, so I don't think the responses are likely to have found a reservoir of anti-white racism.
But how is "it's OK to be white" an intentional tripwire or rage bait? My assumption is that the 4chan trolls picked it specifically because they believed that their enemies would disagree that it's OK to be white. A bunch of them probably believe their enemies are anti-white racists.
I mean, I don't know if there were surveys, but if people who hadn't heard of the BLM movement were answering "no" or "I'm not sure" to "Do you agree with the statement that black lives matter?," that would probably be worthy of note, even if the statement was originally drafted by anti-white provocateurs.
It was popularized by trolls to get their enemies to respond in a way that plays badly. And you don't understand how it's an intentional tripwire or ragebait?
BLM as a phrase is similarly loaded, but BLM wasn't a reactionary trolling slogan. Indeed if there was a widespread political movement called "Whites are OK" and then some people came up with the slogan "Black Lives Matter" to satirize that movement and signal opposition, and surveys were asking people "Do you agree that Black Lives Matter?", and then affiliated internet hot take artists flipped out about the results, I would also call that intentional tripwire ragebait.
If it enrages people to hear the statement "It's OK to be white," then I'm more interested in the enraged people than the people who tested it.
I mean, if it enraged segregationists to have black people eat at the segregated food counter, I don't really care if that was intentional on the part of the protestors or not.
Jared Peterson upthread shared a follow up poll which suggests that most people weren't really enraged.
Sadly, Scott Adams seems to have fallen for it, so I do see your point.
It's incredibly easy to defang such a "trap": just agree that it is indeed ok, just as black lives do indeed matter! Only fringe nutters should be unable to escape those "traps".
>this phrase was transparently engineered as a gotcha to produce this precise situation
Do you not see a problem with people being so easily baited into saying, yes in fact white people are evil and it's not okay? I don't mean the survey results- I mean the actual responses of people and especially universities demonizing it instead of treating it as banal.
*How does that not horrify you more than the trolling?*
I think you're trying to say that the literal meaning of "it's ok to be white" doesn't matter because it has a deliberately-intended secondary meaning. Is this correct?
The reason is that not everyone has the underlying context. If somewhere between 40-60% of all people are going to read the statement literally, you have to engage with the literal and the secondary meanings.
First, you've got the literal meaning of "it's okay to be white", which, yeah, it is, and "black lives matter", which, yeah, they do. Only zealots disagree with the literal meaning of the phrases.
Second, you've got the exception-proves-the-rule meaning. "Parking is free on Sundays." "It's okay to have a little salami as a treat." "It's what you eat that matters for weight loss." We could understand these statements to mean parking is not free on Wednesday or Thursday or any day that isn't Sunday, salami is not okay as a dietary staple, and what you eat is more important than exercise. I would guess that many more people who object to either "it's okay to be white" or "black lives matter" interpret the statement in this sense than in the first.
Third, you've got people who know the context and have all sorts of complicated relationships with the statement, and who are no longer interpreting the textual meaning at all.
Surely you can define racism as "a policy and/or attitude that can be used against an individual without bad qualities, based on that individual's membership in a group with alleged average bad qualities". This seems so obvious to me.
Basically, if you are uncomfortable around group X because of certain qualities you believe they often possess, and you are confronted with a member of X who clearly does *not* possess those qualities, *every trace* of your initial bad feelings about that person should immediately disappear, and you should from then on treat them *exactly the same* as you treat non-X people, without the tiniest difference. If you don't do that, you're a racist. The end. If you *do* do that...feel uncomfortable and suspicious of a member of a group unless and until they demonstrate they're not like the archetypal member you have in your mind, upon which you *immediately* lose all negative feelings towards them whatsoever...I'm not sure whether racist is the right word. It would at least depend on many further facts.
Adams does definitely *sound* like he's doing the former. Staying away from blacks even if they'd answered "agree".
So unlike virually every other cancellation, I can see the liberal side here quite strongly.
On a different note, a message to the guy who said "vote for actual fascism": please talk to a person who suffered (or whose relatives suffered) under actual fascism. Then sit down and never open your fucking mouth again.
This definition makes good sense, but I think it fails to cover a situation where someone discriminates on the basis of race, without believing that that race has any particular bad qualities.
E.g. someone could discriminate against Asians because of cultural norms/financial incentives/general jerkishness, without actually thinking that Asians have any particular bad qualities.
"Clearly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Pitbulls, for example, seem to be overrepresented in the category of "suddenly snapping and mauling a small child". At what point does any particular pitbull "clearly" not possess this quality, such that:
* You'd leave your small child with it, and
* Anyone who wouldn't is obviously just prejudiced against pitbulls
German Shepards are also overrepresented in dog bite incidents. They have patience a mile long, though. One should probably not leave one's small child alone with the dog, but...
No kidding. 3.5 million German Shepherds in the United States alone? And only 24 deaths? Ceteris paribus, I'd recommend against owning a german shepherd, but if your only reason is "I like that breed better" I think that the extremely low level of risk shouldn't outweigh that reason.
You don't need all the qualifications about "bad qualities" or "averages". Giving race any influence on decision-making is essentially always racism. This is not hard, and I don't understand why Scott Alexander and this comment section is struggling with it.
There are extremely few phenomena for which a person's race is directly, causally related to the phenomenon of interest (skin cancer, maybe?). In all the other cases, people are using an *imperfect correlation* with race as a proxy to infer something about an individual.
But there are almost always better signals to use! Often, you don't need a proxy. In Scott Alexander's neighborhood example, you can just look at the crime stats, rather than the racial composition of each neighborhood. As you note, for the poll that so alarmed Scott Adams, you can just interact with the black person and see if they're weirded out by you as a white person (or, if you're not white, you can probably just ask them how they feel about white people outright). For whether a person you're hiring will do a good job, you can use the usual "technical interview+call a few references" technique. Etc. If you do need a proxy, you can use a non-racial one (e.g., for the hiring one, you could do it based on the prestige of their education+effusiveness of their recommenders).
For the rare cases where there is *absolutely no other data* that *could be collected* to inform the situation, yeah, then making decisions based on race is OK. But I can't imagine such a circumstance, and I'm confident enough in my inference infer therefrom that such circumstances don't really exist.
Also, I'm sure someone's going to reply with: "but ignoring extant correlations leads to less efficient decision-making!" Yes. Using them is more efficient, but it is unfair to the people inaccurately described by the correlations. That's why we need a social stigma against racism: to force people to pay the (from their perspective) cost of making decisions less efficiently, but more fairly.
>"Using them is more efficient, but it is unfair to the people inaccurately described by the correlations."
"…fairness is an argument for idiots and children."
ETA: For "fairness" to have any meaning it must be simultaneously satisfiable for all parties, but prohibiting use of informative priors is "unfair" to the decision maker; since there's thus no way to be "fair" to everyone, the whole concept can be discarded with prejudice (pun intended).
"Prohibiting use of informative priors" isn't *unfair*. It disadvantages you. Fairness is about balancing the interests/rights of different parties, which is perfectly compatible with burdening one party in one area and the other party in a different area. The main argument for affirmative action, for example, is that some people in a selection process come to it already disadvantaged, and so giving them an artificial advantage increases the fairness. I happen to think that in most contexts affirmative action is a terrible idea and fails at its (ostensible) goals (one might argue about the real goals), but it's not morally incoherent, it's just not very fair and has all sorts of other negative consequences.
>"Fairness is … perfectly compatible with burdening one party in one area and the other party in a different area."
Disagree.
Putting a thumb on the scale is the epitome of unfairness.
ETA:
>"The main argument for affirmative action, for example, is that some people in a selection process come to it already disadvantaged, and so giving them an artificial advantage increases the fairness."
Making the decision maker(s) in said selection process bear the cost of making it more "fair" to the candidate (assuming they are not responsible for the candidate's disadvantage) can in no way be considered fair to them.
Are all inaccurate rules of thumb unfair, or only some? If you use some signal like "call a few references", you're also going to make mistakes. Maybe one candidate would do a great job, but all of their references only speak German, so I don't get a clear picture, and they don't get the job. Is that a fairer mistake than stereotyping? It feels fairer to me, but I don't know how to draw the line in a principled way.
What about someone who needs in-home healthcare preferring to hire women because they are aware that men tend to be more aggressive than women? Is that an unfair stereotype, or is it a vulnerable person using all of the information they have to make the best decision they can?
Why should the interests of people harmed by generalisations outweigh the interests of people harmed by not using generalisations?
For example, say I run an in-home healthcare company and prefer to employ women because they're generally less agressive. I'm sure we can all agree that that's unfair on male applicants who'd be great at the job. But now say I make a point of hiring men so as not to be discriminatory. Seems great -- except I'm now putting my customers at greater risk by hiring people with a greater statistical propensity to violence and agression. That seems pretty unfair to my customers! Why should the unfairness of turning down qualified candidates because of their sex automatically trump the unfairness of putting sick people's wellbeing at greater risk than necessary?
How are you using this information? Is it a general policy, or an informal bias, or a points system? As Jacob said (and I don't think you addressed), when hiring someone you have a lot of information which you can weight in different ways. If you make wise use of this information, you can probably deweight gender. I agree your interest in having more information matters, but if you can reduce the unfairness to the candidates by a lot for only a small increase in risk to your customers, then at some point it becomes morally imperative to do so.
>This is not hard, and I don't understand why Scott Alexander and this comment section is struggling with it.
There's been a multi-decade project to muddle and gerrymander the definition, especially among liberals and progressives, and progressive-leaning liberals are almost certainly overrepresented here. Scott is less friendly to that gerrymandering than most prog-libs, but certainly not *immune* to it or to the social effects of it.
>There are extremely few phenomena for which a person's race is directly, causally related to the phenomenon of interest (skin cancer, maybe?). In all the other cases, people are using an *imperfect correlation* with race as a proxy to infer something about an individual.
Kidney function and response to certain medications are a couple other medical examples that get close. You can do genetic testing that's even more accurate but (mostly) black vs not-black gets you something like 85+% of the accuracy at 0% of the cost. Of course use the more accurate if you have time/can afford it.
There's also quirky stuff like "earwax smell and texture" that's incredibly correlated with iirc Asian vs non-Asian but I don't know of any real effects downstream of it. Maybe non-Asians are more prone to ear canal blockages?
Edit: To be clear this is a lifetime projection of the proportion that commit murder based on contemporary homicide rates, not the current number of living murderers. Murderers presumably tend to die younger than average.
Here's a back-of-the-envelope sanity check:
20k murders a year over a lifetime(70 years) is 1.4m murders in the US. About half of murders are committed by black males, of whom there are about 20m. That's 700k over 20m, or 3.5% murderers if each murderer committed exactly one murder single-handedly. Multiple accomplices and multiple victims could skew that number in either direction, or cancel out.
They don't, at all. This is "back of the napkin math" in the worst way. 900k black men in the US are absolutely not murderers and uncritically believing and spreading it is... dare I say in this comment section... racist?
I (sadly) followed that link. The X post shows some alleged FBI stats on "Murderers per 100,000" as a rate, where white males are 5.2 and black males 95.5.
Let's assume that these "FBI stats" are real. The poster didn't bother linking to anything. They just showed a screen cap of part of a spreadsheet. Sure, that's how factual evidence works.
Then the X poster somehow extrapolates to "[a]ssuming these rates hold, we can project that ... 4.508% of Black Males ... will commit murder in their lifetime" (I omitted the projections for other groups).
Of course, this X poster doesn't show their math, so I don't know _how_ they reached this conclusion. I'm guessing that they assumed that literally every single living black male has a 95.5 in 100,000 chance of committing a murder in a year, and then multiplied that by average lifespan or something. Maybe?
If they _did_ do this, that's hilariously insane. It seems quite likely that many of these murderers are _repeat_ murderers, while the vast majority of non-murderers are _also_ repeat non-murderers.
But I think I've already put more mental energy into this claim then either you or the person you're quoting did!
20k murders a year over a lifetime(70 years) is 1.4m murders in the US. About half of murders are committed by black males, of whom there are about 20m. That's 700k over 20m, or 3.5% murderers if each murderer committed exactly one murder single-handedly. Multiple accomplices and multiple victims could skew that number in either direction, or cancel out.
So by your own math the maximum is 3.5%, which already is significantly less than your original (completely unsubstantiated) claim.
I tried to get Claude to help me figure out to what degree murder rates are driven by people who murder more than one person. There doesn't seem to be great data on this. While serial killers are extremely rare and recidivism after a murder conviction is low, there doesn't seem to be good data on to what degree murder rates are driven by career criminals, e.g. a drug dealer with a twenty year career who murders several people in that time.
But as others have noted, saying that 3.5% of black men are murderers just seems wildly out line with conviction rates.
No, 3.5% was my mean estimate. According to https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf 20% of homicides have multiple offenders while 5% have multiple victims. That could skew the number of murderers above the number of people murdered.
Only about half of homicides with black victims get cleared up, so those convictions might be undercounting by about half.
Your estimate should care about how many perpetrators have multiple victims (possibly over multiple incidents), but that bit about "homicides with multiple victims" seems to be describing how many individual incidents have multiple victims.
Sure, my point was simply that 3.5% was not a maximum estimate as Rolsky claimed.
Another way to show that is to point out that the total number of murders in 2021 when the lifetime projection was made was actually about 15% higher than the 20k I rounded it to. Adjusting for that alone would bring up my estimate to 4%.
To get to 4.5% would only require that black males committed slightly over 55% of homicides rather than 50%, and even 55% is probably an underestimate due to the lower clearance rates of black homicides.
> 3.5% murderers if each murderer committed exactly one murder single-handedly. Multiple accomplices and multiple victims could skew that number in either direction, or cancel out.
The usual explanation for racial disparity in murder rates is gang violence, which I would expect to implicate a very small number of people who are committed enough gang members to kill over it and who probably commit many murders over the course of their careers.
Different explanation for racial disparity in murder rates: unarmed civilians mob-violencing someone. I've seen reports of this in Minneapolis. Over half a dozen men assaulted a single guy (he survived, but with brain damage), for no discernable reason.
Further different explanation: there are fewer pigs in the inner city. Given "relatively" equivalent murder rates for drug-dealing businessmen, your Pagans and other biker gangs have a relatively easier time concealing the murders.
Another good definition of racist could be: Willing to use shoddy, unverified, and inaccurate 'data' to make a specific other race look bad, extremely skeptical and scrutinous of any data that makes their own race look bad.
So much of this reminded me of one of my favorite movie quotes:
"'Not fair?' Who's the fucking nihilist here?!?!"
And the debate over whether saying "White people should avoid all association and proximity with black people because black people are dangerous" is racist brings up an interesting issue - a person can deflect pretty much any accusation of racism simply by claiming to be stupid.
A person can claim that they really do believe that 1/4 of all black Americans want to murder them, or that every Latino man with a tattoo is a violent gang member, therefore their racism is just pragmatism based on their stupid assumptions. And if you point out that they are being stupid, you are an arrogant elitist. So they can't be criticized.
I: “Well good news, you don’t have to rely on mere belief! We have the statistics to say for a fact that [X] and [Y] are false. I can prove it for you in any way you’d like, and here are the sources”
Almost certainly unintentional, but the part where the intellectual brings up unrelated point Y instead of responding to Z feels very true to life anyway.
There are situations in which that is the case! More often than not, though, it’s the normie who has some absolutely insane incorrect conception of the world, and no amount of patient explanation will change their mind. I am an economic analyst and I see this all the time with populist economic ideas.
You think your understanding of economic analysis is correct, and theirs insane and incorrect. You may well be right, but you've done nothing to distinguish yourself to them from, to pick a recent example, people who say " there’s no scientific evidence to prove that a Black woman and a White woman are genetically different."
There’s absolutely a point there, and I’m sure plenty of other good-faith subject matter experts rue the fact that leftist activists posing as experts have destroyed the heuristic for normies that they can trust expert opinion.
It's worse than that: there are plenty of people with genuine expertise who've essentially traded their public credibility to advanced their political goals. That's now made it so you not only have to demonstrate you know what you're talking about but also that you aren't trying to deceive them.
I think that being a nerd and being a 'persuader' are both sneakily bad spots to end up in.
Being a nerd usually implies a fairly serious deficit of social skills. This makes life much harder in many ways. Dating becomes a serious struggle, holding down jobs and the unspoken norms that comes with them becomes a challenge, and the lack of intuitive mimicry of others can delay meeting important life milestones. If a theoretical 'nerd' is not really smart, they might never be able to overcome these gaps. So for many self-proclaimed nerds I really think that being 125 IQ and not 145 IQ can be a life-debilitating outcome that they correctly react terribly to.
Similarly, being solely known as a persuader often implies a lack of intelligence and conscientiousness. If you are as persuasive as someone like Trump, maybe this is fine. But a lack of intelligence and conscientiousness is significantly impairing in terms of life decisions: you maybe commit crimes, gather a criminal record, get fired from jobs, have health issues, so on and so forth. The persuasiveness needs to similarly be really elite to overpower the negatives, and it can ruin someone's life if they are only in the 95th percentile of persuasiveness instead of the 99th percentile.
This is not to say that people cannot both be smart and also have good social skills, or be persuasive while also being intelligent and conscientious. But people who self-identify as 'nerds' are usually in the smart bad social skills pile, and people who call themselves persuaders are usually in the high persuasiveness low conscientiousness pile. These are fairly rough piles to be in if the primary strength is not super elite. The upside to being a 'nerd' might be being rich or incredibly successful, but the median outcome might involve social isolation, depression, and career stagnation owning to struggles with managing unspoken social protocols.
Most of my friends are nerds, are pretty satisfied with their lives, and probably aren't extreme intelligence outliers. The tradeoff you're talking about exists somewhere, but to equate it with "nerds" is to paint with too broad a brush, I think.
The word "nerd" has lost all comprehensible meaning around here, and probably everywhere. It's just become a massive motte-and-bailey, where the motte is that "nerd" means smart but socially inept, and the bailey is that it refers to possessing about a dozen different very specific qualities that have almost nothing to do with each other and that I'm not sure anyone has even demonstrated are statistically linked, though maybe I missed it.
It needs to be totally tabooed, in my opinion. It does nothing but make discourse murkier, rather than clearer, and is a bizarre exception to the general norm of evidence-based and clearly-defined assertions among rationalists.
My guess is that the person you are replying to is using the word to mean “smarter than average but self-consciously bad at social skills” while your friends use it to mean “smarter than average but not especially good at social skills”.
The person I'm replying to argued that "people who self-identify as 'nerds' are usually in the smart bad social skills pile", where by "bad social skills" we mean bad enough to preclude having a good life even if you have an IQ of 125 and no other serious disabilities. I think this goes too far.
Smart people normally have good social skills. When I hear the label 'nerd' I interpret this as intelligent people who identify with some amount of social impediment that prevents them from being able to present as normal and well-adjusted in conventional social contexts. If someone can easily make friends, date around, and code switch in different social environments, in a way where the development of these skills was not effortful and arduous, maybe they have intellectual interests, but I would not call such a person a 'nerd'.
These are skills that most normal people can effortlessly do. So when someone cannot effortlessly do them they really need a big compensatory strength to override this weakness.
I think your assessment of Adams was really fair (I mostly think that because it agrees with my opinion) and you're not speaking at his funeral. I never understood where this "dont speak bad of the dead" reflex comes from.
I find it somewhat ironic that the article Adams praised was "You are still crying wolf", a title that did not age particularly well, nor did its "did this age well?" disclaimer.
Until 2025, I would have said Scott’s “You’re still crying wolf” post aged very well. The first Trump term made a lot of the liberal hyperventilating around Trump & race seem silly. The second makes it seem like they were right all along.
The difference between 2016 and 2024 is that Trump spent the last eight years purging the Republican Party of anyone who might possibly try to tell him "no", so instead of the Trump of the Republican Party we had in his first term, we now have Trump of the MAGA party instead...
Oddly enough, Trump's main criteria for hiring people appears to be autism. Seems someone who has suffered bankruptcies (and subsequently had to Prove Their Investment Would Make Money) values honesty.
Trump may have won an ideological war, but that's a different matter.
Hmm, I thought Trump was someone who had famously suffered bankruptcies, but he doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in honesty (particularly when it takes the form of keeping promises).
He's tried to make decisions without getting the facts, and that always goes poorly (see Afghanistan, where the Theater Kids wouldn't listen to The Oxymoron). If the channels upward are clear, that's already putting him heads and heels over the last guy.
Trump's a bombastic buffoon. But, he really did build the "Southern Border Wall" exactly to the Border Patrol's specs (great wall of china style, it was supposed to be cheap).
The border wall was not a promise the United States made as part of any agreement. But the entire apparatus of free trade agreements and investment in research and employment of aid workers was. The entire first six months of Trump’s second term was full of him tearing up agreements that the United States had made.
It would have been one thing if he just said “no more such agreements, but we will let these expire”, but instead he seems to have done things in the way that makes maximally clear that there is no way the United States can be trusted with an agreement ever again - they will last only until the next president has a whim that he wants to destroy it. Government jobs will be treated as exceptionally unstable jobs that need a wherein, rather than as exceptionally stable jobs that people are willing to take a pay cut for. Other countries will hesitate to make alliances with us, knowing that we might demand their territory at any moment. No one will make free trade agreements as long as the United States can break them with new tariffs on a moment’s notice.
I went back and read it very recently. I think people have misremembered the argument of that post as saying ‘Trump isn’t that bad’ when in fact the argument is really something like ‘TDS based on false, hysterical and trivial attacks on Trump will distract from the yet-unknown but real dangers of a Trump presidency in things that actually matter like geopolitics.’
That is of course what ‘crying wolf’ means: when you complain about false things, the true things that you complain about get ignored. That is exactly what has happened in the last ten years: it’s hard to get some of us on the right to see and object to the genuinely dangerous things that Trump does (eg Greenland) because there is so much noise and complaint about the things he does that are totally fine, normal and good.
Here’s the conclusion of ‘You are still crying wolf’ -
‘Stop centering criticism of Donald Trump around this sort of stuff, and switch to literally anything else. Here is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, whose philosophy of governance basically boils down to “I’m going to win and not lose, details to be filled in later”, and all you can do is repeat, again and again, how he seems popular among weird Internet teenagers who post frog memes. In the middle of an emotionally incontinent reality TV show host getting his hand on the nuclear button, your chief complaint is that in the middle of a few dozen denunciations of the KKK, he once delayed denouncing the KKK for an entire 24 hours before going back to denouncing it again. When a guy who says outright that he won’t respect elections unless he wins them does, somehow, win an election, the headlines are how he once said he didn’t like globalists which means he must be anti-Semitic.‘
I am referring only to the title, not to the post itself. I'd wager that a lot of people who were "accused" of crying wolf in 2016 will now tell you that what is currently happening (ice, Greenland, Venezuela) is the sort of thing they were warning about.
Oh, sure, when you see ICE agents driving around traffic circles, over and over again, with a honking protestor driving behind them -- eventually pulling out of the traffic circle and playing "Turkey in the Straw" -- and then heading over to the next traffic circle?
This is absolutely fascism!
When the ICE agents drive up to the honking protestor's own house, pull into their driveway, and then get out and wave, this Absolutely Calls for calling 911 (yes, we have their transcript). The ICE agents are just standing there, mind you.
It is absolutely "crying wolf" to call 911 simply because you -- who were following the ICE agents -- found that their destination was your own driveway.
But… that’s the whole point of the original fable? The wolf *does* eventually show up! But everyone ignores it because the boy had been crying wolf over nothing for so long that his genuine warning was lost in the noise. Which maps fairly well onto “Democrats were so hysterical over Trump 1 that their more accurate concerns about Trump 2 were ignored, helping him win in 2024”.
I think Democrats were always more afraid of the corrosive impact of Trump on the Republican party than they were of Trump. Trump trying to do something truly bad seemed plausible, and the Republicans were right to push back and say, "but he would never get away with stuff like that." To which the Democrats correctly pointed out that Trump was changing the nature of the GOP such that when Trump inevitably did something bad, Republicans would go along with it because the constant boundary pushing would lead them to be unable to find any red line. So it seems to me the current absence of any redline is directly descended from all of that stuff the left was complaining about in 2016.
>I think Democrats were always more afraid of the corrosive impact of Trump on the Republican party than they were of Trump.
Is there any actual evidence of that? They called Romney fascist too. Joe Biden said Romney was going to put "black people back in chains!" The Democrats *already* thought the Republican party was irredeemably evil. There is something about Trump's... showmanship... that pushed them over some other edge, but I don't think it was any concern about the party.
And when Biden said that, were you concerned that Biden truly thought Republicans wanted to bring back slavery, and was going to act on that belief to arrest Republicans for trying to bring back slavery? Or did you realize that such a plan would never work because not even hardcore democrats would allow it? Or perhaps you were you most concerned that Biden was fanning flames and convincing Democrats to hate and fear Republicans in ways which might lead Democrats to look past and forgive extreme actions that Obama/Biden might do in the future?
If the last, then perhaps you feared Biden's showmanship in the same way I, and many others, have always feared Trump's.
Whether a given politician is evil is irrelevant unless that same politician can convince a large swathe of people to refuse to hold them accountable for their sctions, or can even convince them that their truly is an enemy within and that extreme actions are necessary (ie the situation within the GoP since 2016)
> Here’s the conclusion of ‘You are still crying wolf’ -
In the conclusion of TASCW Scott makes a number of quantified predictions. What do you think of them, both structurally and the degree to which they did and did not come true? The contemporaneous comments don't seem to be public anymore, but I'm sure they could be dug up with a little effort and the commentary on Scott's later re-evaluation is still there.
Quite a few of them still live. There are a few of the following OTs, and of course the subreddit (oh look, there's my username). But the bet logs would be the most relevant and that's not there at a glance.
People forget that a big part of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is that an actual wolf did come along and eat all the sheep. The point isn't that the boy always lies, it's that his lies mean no-one believes him when he starts telling the truth.
Trump has definitely done more things in his second term, and I'll even admit he's done more bad and silly things, but I honestly can't think of anything race-related.
The ICE deployment in Minnesota was sparked by a report that a group of Somali-run daycares were committing fraud. Trump has since gone on to talk about how Somalis are "very low IQ people" and other hateful and insulting remarks. (As recently as today!)
"Someone from Somalia committed fraud, therefore Somalis are bad people and we should deport them" is exactly the sort of exaggerated jumping to conclusions Scott was talking about in his definition of racism.
The difference between a boy crying wolf and a boy with binoculars giving very advanced warning can be very difficult to distinguish for anyone not willing to climb the hill and borrow the binoculars.
I still think it aged fine. People shouldn't have cried wolf about Trump's racism in 2016, because that made it harder to believe the people who pointed out the real wolf (Trump's dictatorial tendencies in 2024). I said in 2024 that I believed this was the real crisis and Trump's dictatorial tendencies were real this time.
Eh, I still think you whiffed on not including the consent decree the doj had on Trump for racial discrimination in housing in 1973. It was an otherwise comprehensive post and ignoring a multiyear doj lawsuit that's explicitly about doing racial discrimination is a big omission.
Black and White testers went to Trump's properties and asked about vacancies. They got disparate results.
From nprs coverage on what followed:
'"They signed what was called a consent order," Kranish says. "Trump fought the case for two years. ... He says it was very easy, but actually he fought the case for two years."
The Trumps took essentially the first settlement offer the federal government provided, Kranish says; the Trumps did not, in fact, have to admit guilt in settling the suit.
"[The settlement] required the Trumps to place ads in newspapers saying that they welcomed black applicants," Kranish says. "It said that the Trumps would familiarize themselves with the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination. So it also specifically said they don't admit wrongdoing, but they did have to take several measures that the Trumps had fought for two years not to take."
Trump claims the Justice Department lawsuit was just one of many housing cases against many landlords, but Kranish says this description is misleading.'
"Persuasion can be fact-based! Here I think of Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, two of our most influential public intellectuals, each with a reach far greater than Adams’. Both are excellent writers and have nonzero charisma, but they are mostly respected for being knowledgable and likely to be right about things."
Here I would commit a major sin of ommission if I did not mention Yascha Mounk's excellent Substack *Persuasion* which has this exact premise (I have no affiliation).
Also, a random note: German has "überzeugen" for the rational, fact-based type of persuasion and "überreden" for the more manipulative kind.
Footnote 7 is closest to my view. I admired Adams’s work before 2016. During 2016 I thought he had some decent insights, but along the way he really tooted his own horn about what a god tier persuader he was and did a lot of Motte & Bailey about Trump and Hillary. After a while I realized I’d never get a straight, factual analysis from the guy because he was clearly trying to pivot into the MAGA pundit sphere, so I stopped following him.
Why is the right question whether Scott Adams would have appreciated the post? He's the one person in this discussion who is absolutely, positively unaffected by whatever you say about him. I've unfortunately learned that just because you might say it doesn't matter how respectfully you/your corpse gets treated after death most relatives will care.
Having said that, for public figures I think your duties to their loved ones are satisfied as long as the vibe of the peace is respectful and not 'thank god that asshole is gone' or 'what a waste of a life' and you mention some positive impacts. People like to know their loved one had an impact and as long as it's not a hit piece they probably aren't hurt by you writing it.
And you aren't doing anything unwise like carrying on a fued or expressing your disdain immediately after death rather than waiting for time to offer emotional distance.
>Why is the right question whether Scott Adams would have appreciated the post? He's the one person in this discussion who is absolutely, positively unaffected by whatever you say about him.
Timeless decision theory, I think?
While the dead can't care what is said about them, most of the living care about what *will* be said about them after they die.
Living in a society where everyone badmouths the dead and doesn't consider their wishes makes people expect the same fate will befall them, causing them suffering at the thought while they live.
Living in a society where everyone respects the dead's wishes means the living can look forward to this future with comfort and satisfaction.
I think it's inevitable with a polarizing figure. People who liked him saw him as a genuinely nice guy treated terribly unfairly, and any unkindness as a continuation of that.
People who didn't, saw him as a crank who dove headfirst into fashy trolling, first ironically and then authentically, and any charity whitewashed that fact.
I think he did an impressive job of holding a holistic view of the guy throughout the article. I'd be flattered if someone saw me so clearly.
I feel awkward including him in a dichotomy of nerd vs. persuader because, although he is obviously a good persuader, I think he also benefits from genuinely understanding AI and technology extremely well. Elon Musk is also in this category, as are many other of the most successful tech CEOs.
I think the focus on persuasion versus facts/evidence kinda misses the point. It's not about how much evidence moves policy, it's about showing respect and not ostracizing high decontextualizers who value literal truth.
What nerds (myself included) are really longing for is any context or mode of presentation where literal truth is considered more important than vibes. It's not about everyone agreeing with you about what the best evidence might be -- engineers disagree with each other all the time -- it's about wanting a space where asserting that "no human life isn't priceless, there is some dollar value we should put on it" or "it should be legal to price-gouge after a disaster to encourage people to stockpile and import" without being accused of being a cold uncaring asshole. What is upsetting isn't the PHB it's the fact that everyone pretends what he says is true even when there is clear proof to the contrary -- not out of stupidity but because most people respond more to the vibe than the literal truth.
Of course the irony here is that of course we too are reacting to a vibe. We are, after all, humans as well but I think the people who find this upsetting would feel much better if other people were willing to admit more often that it's not the literal truth that matters here but the vibe.
>What nerds (myself included) are really longing for is any context or mode of presentation where literal truth is considered more important than vibes.
I've long since stopped being more than vaguely disappointed at this in society (and with family it's no different than any way it can be hard to truly get people with different approaches to life). I suspect that it was very motivating to the Dilbert generation because many of them didn't have any places with like-minded people they could feel a sense of belonging in.
The reason I bothered to comment was not to foment a demand for change but because I think it explains where the bitter angry comments about how ignorance and stupidity always trump evidence and reason. Those people aren't reacting to the fact that some people disagree with them. They are expressing anger that flows from a sense of never feeling accepted and understood. This was much more common back in the day where you didn't have social media or couldn't go find your tribe at comic-con or a maker fest.
Ultimately, for all that nerds express the feeling as -- why isn't the whole world like me -- they mostly just need to find their tribe. The only thing I'd change is to try and convince the rest of the world that there is a different kind of context that nerds/high-decontextualizatizers use to communicate to each other and if you don't speak it use the same caution interpretating it you would with any other subculture (though it would help if nerds could do something similar in reverse).
>The only thing I'd change is to try and convince the rest of the world that there is a different kind of context that nerds/high-decontextualizatizers use to communicate
I'm pretty sure that they are aware on some level, just unwilling to accomodate.
Plausible. It's not something that bothers me much anymore but we are all full of sympathy to problems we experienced when we were young and want to believe there is something that makes it better.
I'm very happy sticking to pure math but I worry that not everyone has that option.
What if the literal truth is that you're a cold uncaring asshole? Oh no that hurts my vibe, I need a nerdspace where we can all be rational and agree with me
Some people are but this is an orthogonal property.
As I indicated at the bottom, ironically, what nerds want is really mostly the same thing everyone else wants -- to feel they have a space where they can have their vibe without being trashed for it.
If nerds had better social skills they would have long ago communicated the message that: sometimes we mean to talk to each other in this unusual context so please don't blunder in assuming it has the same contextual associations as other speech. It's what we do for many groups (religious talk of hell is treated differently than other praise of torture, ethnic groups are assumed to have different cultural contexts etc). Then when some cultural conflict goes down like the Google bro makin what were pretty moderate (and better researched than what it responded to) claims we could say: remember this is that special nerd talk context with different rules for implication.
TBF the fact that nerds keep violating the implicit rule of: yah fine have your thing but don't keep trying to say it's what everyone needs to be doing doesn't help. But it's also true that the underlying problem is that the status we assign literal truth makes people reluctant to admit how much of their talk isn't exactly about that.
The problem isn't that reality isn't decontextualized.
When a decontextualizer tries to tell you the one-sentence 'simple truth' about a complex and hotly debated real-world public policy issue, they are almost always wrong. The context generally matters a lot for those things, and the people who are insulting the armchair decontextualizers are often people who understand enough of the context to recognize their mistake.
Let's assume they are. So what? Most people are wrong about complex contentious topics. If people just disagreed there would be no issue here in the first place. My point is exactly that it's not really about "why doesn't everyone else see I'm right about everything" it's the fact that the rest of the world doesn't think "ohh there goes that silly high-decontextualizatizers again getting caught up answering the wrong question" but rather impute the same motives to them that they would have for giving that answer.
And yes, high-decontextualizatizers are often missing something -- they are making the mistake of assuming that the literal question being asked is what the debate is really about. And it would be fucking amazing if the response from society was: "You idiot don't you understand that's not what we are really talking about. We really care about this other thing over here." But, unfortunately, that's not what happens (even if one is aware enough to understand the real question admitting the true complication undermines rhetoric).
A good example of this is in debates about race and intelligence. Someone asserts something like: it's unscientific to believe that races differ in average intelligence. The high decontextualizer comes in and goes "umm actually, [however you define race and IQ], we are virtually guaranteed by the numbers involved that groups of that size won't be exactly equal" if they are a bit more sophisticated maybe they point to David Reich's argument that we will probably eventually be able to measure such small effects that we will find some non-zero correlation here so it's a bad idea to ground talk of equality in this kind of likely false claim.
And in terms of literal truth I'd claim that argument is correct at least charitably interpreted (relative to a particular environment, definition of the terms etc usual caveats). It's also not what the contentious social conversation is really about. What people actually care about here is that it's not ok to just assume things about someone's ability or behavior based on their skin color (no for quite a few reasons) not some objectively unimportant fact about a potentially arbitrarily small but non-zero correlation.
The problem is the disconnect between the high-decontextualizer who simply has an inherent desire to "umm actually" false claims and the rest of the world. Ideally an aware high-decontextualizer makes it clear they agree with the other people on the real issue of discussion but not everyone is that aware and even when they are if people don't understand why someone would be motivated to be pedantic other than because they want to help the other side they are still going to assume they have some bad motive.
My point is simply that if the reaction was: ohh there go those weird high-decontextualizatizers missing the real issue entirely again (and maybe even: and getting the literal answer wrong) I don't think it would be much of an issue. But that's not really how humans work because it requires accepting a gap between the literal truth of what is being said and what is actually at issue
Ok, it sounds like basically what you want is more autism awareness and more societal tolerance and gentleness towards autistic people. Which, as an autistic um-actually-er, I appreciate and agree with.
But I'm also aware that the big problem is that for contentious political/social issues, the genuinely clueless high-decoupler accounts for about 5% of the people making those comments publicly, and the other 95% are bad actors trying to push their side with knowingly dishonest rhetoric, or useful idiots convinced by those bad actors and parroting their talking points.
I think that those 95% of bad actors and useful idiots *do* deserve social sanctions, in the limited sense of 'people being mad and rude at you'. And I have sympathy for the fact that it's really hard to tell them apart from the 5% of autistic decouplers based on a short anonymous text post on social media.
I'm not sure what the solution is beyond 'social media bad, try to talk to real people who know you well' and 'put in lots of caveats so people are more likely to recognize you, shake your head and blame the game when that fails'.
I broadly agree with your description of the situation -- and honestly my original remarks weren't particularly trying to call for a change just identify that the emotional grievience Dilbert spoke to wasn't as trivial as illustrated (we can't address all sympathetic grievances).
The one place I'd disagree is with the desirability of those social sanctions. Yes absolutely it's often hard for people to distinguish the people whose motivation is to say genuinely ask/debate what is meant by gender from those who wanna play political gotcha (so why can't I identify as an attack helicopter). But I think Scott was exactly right about social punishment being counterproductive until and unless you can coordinate sufficient agreement on the issue.
Indeed, I personally think a big reason it has become so much more acceptable for people to be openly racist etc is because of the tactical mistake of trying to extend those social punishments beyond the range of views where we had that social agreement and the result was to undermine the norms rather than strengthen them. In many cases I agree we should move the norms in those directions but I think social *punishment* can easily backfire.
But I take your point that even if we restrict ourselves to mere voluntary association (do I want to hang out or be in a group with that person) the difficulty in determining motive is always going to be an issue. My hopeful belief is that if there is enough appreciation that some people are just pedantic literal people it will allow enough signals of motive through to improve the situation but maybe not. Mostly I just wanted to emphasize that there was something a bit deeper going on.
But I'm just being picky. I think we basically agree on the broad outlines.
Great post as usual. Really appreciate these "from the comments" posts and wish everyone did them.
Since I was quoted in this one, I want to clarify that my comment — "Adams was vicious and hateful and played a material role in convincing Americans to vote for actual fascism" — was not intended as a reference to the racism controversy, which I didn't follow and was only barely aware of.
It was a reference to his day-to-day Twitter feed and "coffee chats," where he was vicious and hateful towards anyone who opposed MAGA, a movement that is hell-bent on hurting people and destroying American democracy. I can appreciate the nuance and recognize people loved Adams for different reasons, but on sum he was a corrosive and destructive influence on public life. If more Americans behaved like him we'd be in a worse place; if fewer did, we'd be in a better place.
Yeah, 'He built a nice friendly positive community that really helped each other out and had a set of specified hated outgroups that they all vilified and dehumanized and fear-mongered about and made coordinated political and cultural attacks against' doesn't really have the same ring to it as 'He built a nice friendly positive community that really helped each other out.'
A lot of people seem to be focusing on the latter and stopping there.
> If more Americans behaved like him we'd be in a worse place; if fewer did, we'd be in a better place.
That's entirely subjective, isn't it? I do genuinely believe that the world MAGA is building will be strictly better for themselves than the one they will replace. It's just that you're not going to be a part of it. Oh well, that's the price of failing to deal with threats to your existence...
The demographics that have leverage will continue to have a voice, as they will always have the threat of violence. And obviously the country will continue to have laws, you can't have a country without it. Just because you don't like the new rules doesn't mean they don't exist.
Sure, but we found out the hard way that this was simply never the case. Trump did not have to break any laws to achieve immunity for himself or his people. And thus, things really aren't so different now. Everyone is bound, but the law simply privileges the strong above the weak.
I'm probably saying things that other commenters have said both here and on the original post, but:
It kind of relates to the point you make about nerds with high general intelligence finding out that in the end one only ends up being truly good at one thing, i guess :-) : it wasn't a great eulogy, but it was really good Scott Alexander. "Scott Adams — Much More Than You Wanted To Know", as it were. And, yeah, I found that overall your post moved me from "ahah funny comics written by... uh, that guy, the nerd lost in the corporate world who's been ranting about Trump lately" to seeing Adams as a much more interesting person, and also, in a way, putting him more in context? Like, how he's influenced, been influenced by, etc. people and ideas in the world he has now left?
Part of me wants to say that showing people's complexity, and where they stood in the world, is closer to what an eulogy should be than the kind that basically just slaps a "nice person, will be missed" label on someone and buries them... but yeah the one you wrote isn't the kind of eulogy you'd want to give at the funeral in front of the family, precisely because it includes the complexity of the person...
I don't know enough about Scott Adams to know if you were fair to him, but something else that strikes me is how you also (and again not uncharacteristically) abstracted Scott Adams, as an instance of "the nerd", for example. It was interesting to read, but it's the thing that to me seemed less respectful? As if you were both discussing the man himself... and just using him as an example to make your point?
Why is the distance of time that has passed since someone's death related to the degree to which you should share your honest assessment of them? I get the distinction before death vs after death, but not this concept of "so soon after they died."
It's not enough to be right, you have to be right where most others are wrong, in this case, people left of center.
Yglesias was way early to the party of the cause of high housing costs and how widespread the downstream effects are. I think he's also right that there should be markets for kidneys.
I think Klein is right about "everything bagelism" leading to the failure of blue governance, and that overly seeking consensus makes it impossible to do anything.
Okay, I've spent some time on this, and I still think Yglesias is right about housing.
It's a fundamental misunderstanding to point out that household formation hasn't outpaced housing production. Of course it hasn't; there's no place for those households to be!
The fact that cost per square foot has not skyrocketed does not mean that housing is actually affordable; requiring everyone to have an enormous house or nothing is part of how everything is unaffordable.
Shortages in superstar cities don't just affect people in superstar cities. When housing was more affordable there, people could migrate to seek their fortune, and frequently did. Now they can't. This is part of why American domestic migration is at historic lows.
It's not entirely clear to me if he in fact thinks that additional construction won't reduce rents. This is pants on head economic literacy if true, but I'm certainly not buying his Substack to find out.
I spent a non-trivial amount of time reading through his stuff. That is also mostly paywalled, and again, I'm not going to buy his Substack without a really good reason.
If you'd like to do your best to summarize the argument here, I'll be happy to have a look. But I think I've chased your links in good faith, and it's on you to do some of the work at this point.
I’m sorry, I’m cooking/helping my elderly mother all day today. I don’t have time to excerpt though I would another day. You can usually read a free post. If claiming a free post counts as work - well, I envy you.
I would be interested in knowing the correlation between intelligence and persuasion ability.i feel. It is important to this and general nerd discourse.
From what I can tell, contrary to conventional wisdom, cult members and persons laboring under cognitive dissonance are not mouth-breathing morons. In fact, they tend to be *smarter* than average, probably because the intelligent are better at symbol manipulation to reach a desired outcome.
My takeaway from the Scott Adams article was that I wasn't aware that he'd written a book about persuasion, but now I've skimmed through "Win Bigly" it's full of actionable advice. So thank you.
I thought the intent of the first piece was great, but felt the execution to be lacking. I think it was an attempt to look at the human, his failures could have been looked at more charitably and the metapoint of him being a nerd who wanted to break out could have been handled better.
Overall I enjoyed the article and I think you are right Scott would have enjoyed your article.
As a white person, it warms my heart to know that 53% of my black countrymen/countrywomen think it is OK to be white (and another 21% were astute enough to invalidate the premise with a "not sure" answer). Appreciate it y'all.
What can I say. I'm a glass half full kind of guy. This poll seems to demonstrate that the vocal anti-white sentiment is just a loud minority. Hopefully a similar poll will show the same for the anti-black sentiment among the white community. Then we can crank Hendrix's rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner and mellow out a little bit.
Fortunately, there are still plenty parts of the country where this mellowness is in fact, the norm. My own zip code is one. I’d give the edge to the South in this regard.
Of course, don’t tell the NYT as they would not be best pleased to learn there were places where people don’t talk about race all the damn time.
That was my take, too. Given the totality of American history around black/white relations (slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, lynching, separate-but-"equal", systematic abuse by the justice system, etc., etc., etc.,), to have 3/4 of blacks not think white people are clearly bad demonstrates a lot of nuanced, fair-minded thinking. Not enough much as we'd like in an ideal world, but certainly far more fair-minded and nuanced than Scott Adam's reaction.
The obvious conclusion to draw from all that is to stay the f*** away from Scott Adams.
But to make the stakes more clear - would it be an important thing to mention in a eulogy about her? Why is it that black racial resentment is seemingly an expectation and completely forgivable but similar moments of negative racial commentary from white celebrities career destroying? Do you think this is a permanently tenable situation?
Some black people being cranks bother me a lot less than the Harvard professors. Much more corrosive to society when the racist cranks are legitimized on high.
"I’m not Language Czar, but if you force me to define the word “racism” I would call it a bias which makes people take the flaw of an ethnic group (whether real or imagined) further than they would normally go, until whatever core of useful insight they contained becomes caricatured and exaggerated, and they’re being used more to spread hatred and fear than to communicate useful information."
I feel that is original and interesting and have never heard arguments about bigotry expressed that way.
There is a general problem wth all discussions of bigotry whete there are two camps that seem unrelated.
A) Theologian who reads the Bible and his close reading of Corinthians suggests it isn't possible for him to support gay marriage.
B) Guy who screams"I hate f*gs" at strangers in the street who dress differently.
You can argue that they are just different IQ levels of homophobia but that seems a stretch to me, there doesn't seem to be any kind of relationship. Whether a negative view is based on malice does seem really important to any view of what is bigoted.
I also think there are lots of people who are just full of malice, I don't want to give someone like that a pass on racism or homophobia but if some is just regularly shouting or tweeting abuse at everyone it is hard to see them a coherent racists, they just become trolls beyond bigotry which I think describes lots of 4chan and Twitter.
(Sorry for the podcast link, I don't have a transcript, and I'm probably not doing it justice.) The idea being that whether or not you're reacting to something real, it's still worth caring about whether your response to that is just making everything worse.
It raises a question about how people choose to live a little bit.
Imagine a hypothetical where two groups tend to congregate in separate areas.
This is attributed to racism on the part of one group only.
Then efforts are made to challenge this situation.
It can’t be said that they’re wholly unsuccessful because overall people acquire a greater ability to live wherever they like. In particularly among the upper classes of both groups, this happens.
But after years of efforts to make what is perceived as this geographic problem go away, people stubbornly still seem to congregate with their group as to where they live.
It seems to me it is hard to say just because people are past people and they’re dead and nobody now cares what they think that they (both groups) didn’t act based on something they knew about themselves or human nature generally.
And the present people do so act.
Or don’t if the overall pattern stubbornly prevails.
When does it stop being - oh you know, people know something how their own lives - and start being: racism. Where is the line?
I should note that there are a variety of aspects to life where this calculation of sin/wrong could be demanded, race is only unusually and artificially salient at the moment and hopefully won’t be forever so.
This is kind of scary - I feel like this was what everyone knew racism to be before wokeness, and now I worry people vaguely associate it with, like, "anything that promotes whiteness" or whatever and can't even conceive of it just actually involving stereotyping groups unfairly.
I had thought that even as people debated all of wokeness's attempts to expand the racism concept, they were keeping the normal default meaning of the word in mind as a fallback, but seems like maybe not!
It got a lot weirder and worse but I never got the feeling anyone ever had a clear definition even in the 2000s.
Concepts around disparite impact and the idea of the asymmetry of the possiblty of racism have existed for decades, anti-semitism represents bigoted conspiracy theories but very rarely in the modern world seem to be based on race yet is always lumped with racism. For example both sides of the Affirmative Action debate call the other side racist.
Your article against Murderism is a great illustration of the confusion before woke.
I would have phrased it as arguing in bad faith to reach a predetermined conclusion. That gives a bad definition because “bad faith” is less specific than “bias” and implies a moral judgement rather than being purely descriptive. So in my case, at least, it’s not that you were using a meaning of the word I was unfamiliar with; it’s just that you did a better job of putting that meaning into words that I likely could have.
Nothing substantive to add, just wanted to point out for those that are unaware of it, but that "Dogbert Internet Guru" panel you posted instantly made me think of the Key & Peele skit "You gotta hear this funk band"
I continue to admire your writing for its force coupled with attention to nuance. And for the record, I had never heard your definition of “racism” before and was compelled by it. Please keep clarifying “obvious” things!
>Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, two of our most influential public intellectuals, each with a reach far greater than Adams’. Both are excellent writers and have nonzero charisma, but they are mostly respected for being knowledgeable and likely to be right about things.
I doubt that they are respected by the outgroup any more than Adams was, though.
To be specific, I think their outgroup is leftists. Matt Stoller has been spending the week calling Yglesias a "Jeff Epstein Democrat", and if anything I wrote got the level of furiously illiterate rage that Klein got for "Abundance", I'd be a lot less generous about it than him.
> You can’t argue with (1), because the bad thing might be something like ‘crime’, which everyone dislikes. You can’t argue with (2), because sometimes you can find statistics showing it’s literally true.
People can and do argue with everything, mostly by not respecting their interlocutor and not dignifying them with an attempt to reason with them.
Does everyone actually dislike crime? Isn’t it routinely justified as building character, like bullying, and by claiming the victim deserved it for being a victim, rather than a survivor, or for “acting like a bitch”?
> How much “character building” is done for a person who is murdered?
It doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to show you’re tough enough not to care and to make your interlocutor look like a wuss for caring. Short-term defection for status over long-term coöperation. Isn’t it beautiful?
“I think trying to manipulate people is inherently demeaning to the dignity of humankind.”
I have to admit that if someone asked me who the best manipulator I follow is, I would have replied “Scott Alexander. I started reading him 15 years ago as a Right Wing, Christian, and he has manipulated me into agreeing with 90% of his political opinions, and convinced me to shift half of my tithing to EA causes and to work in Biosecurity.”
I define manipulation as any action used to convince someone who what you want. Alexander seems to use a different definition of manipulation than me, one that only includes persuasive techniques that he finds immoral, but I also suspect Adam’s definition of manipulation is closer to mine. The morality of manipulation should be based on what the manipulation achieves, not the methods used. Alexander has used his manipulation to expand EA causes and moderate others opinions, so I consider him a very moral manipulator.
Fair, I’ll use Merriam-Websters Dictionary definition: “to change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one's purpose.” That still describes all of Alexander’s writing, after all, he is extremely artful with his prose. His purpose is to help others donate effectively. He could have spent his time writing boring, just the facts, articles, and I would not have been manipulated and probably not have written anything he wrote.
It is fair to describe unfair manipulation as inherently immoral, but I’m not sure how much of Adam’s writing was unfair vs artful. Certainly Dilbert was artful, not unfair. I haven’t read enough of his other writing to know how unfair he was vs artful.
The general understanding of “manipulation” is that it’s bad. So, if you are using that word, realize you are communicating the “bad” connotation (even if you don’t intend to).
“Artful” doesn’t have that connotation.
Being convinced someone isn’t necessarily “manipulation”.
=====
There’s nothing inherent that makes (some of) Dilbert not being unfair. That is, if there’s an argument for/against that, I’d read it. (A blanket statement about it isn’t very interesting.)
>The general understanding of “manipulation” is that it’s bad
If that were true then it would be reflected in the definition. I certainly don't agree that it's necessarily bad. I think most people think manipulation is good if it's used to achieve a goal that they agree with. For example a poker bluff is an attempt to manipulate one's opponent into folding a superior hand. I don't think anyone thinks that bluffing is bad.
Something like poker is an exception. The person I replied to wasn’t talking about poker.
If the rules/practice of a game include deception (manipulation is considered an example of not being honest), you are basically agreeing to it (implicitly).
The normal/typical use of manipulation isn’t anything like that.
I’m fairly sure you know that.
==========
I don’t read a lot about poker but I suspect “manipulation” isn’t a word anybody really uses to discuss this aspect of the game.
My point is it’s an odd/infelicitous word to describe whatever Scott is doing. I guess you think the use in that particular context is fine?
Manipulation in the intrapersonal sense has to have some element of deception, trickery or deceit. The person being manipulated cannot have the full picture of what is happening and why; the manipulator has to have a distinct intentional agenda hidden from the manipulated. The end goal of manipulation is usually taken to be selfish benefits to the manipulator rather than benevolence to the manipulated or others, so generally you have manipulation being dishonest means for selfish ends, which most would say is immoral. Because it involves dishonesty, even if it is benevolent it is demeaning (you are not worthy of the full picture; there is a status difference between those who manipulate and the sheep).
"manipulation" is more about means that are agnostic to the underlying facts of the matter. Symmetric rather than asymmetric weapons, to use Scott's past terminology.
I appreciate the kind words, but I've tried pretty hard to convince people by listing the facts as I understand them. Yes, there is extra skill in listing the facts in the right order/packaging, but I still think this is importantly different from trying to convince people of random things that might not be true - not just in effect, but in the actions being taken and methods being used. As for the "morality of manipulation should be based on what it achieves", see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/less-utilitarian-than-thou
I didn't know Scott Adams apart from "Dilbert", which I read some of the cartoons and found them funny but didn't follow them. So I have no dog in this fight.
I think the post about him was fair enough, it was "I come to bury Caesar not to praise him". Obviously, the fans will say it wasn't elegiac enough and the not-fans will say it was not critical enough.
My take away from it? The guy was human, he had good points and bad points like the rest of us, some of his bad points were very bad, but he was genuinely a talented cartoonist. Rest in peace.
I had no idea that the creator of Dilbert had such a cultural impact. Saw the strip a few times, never really clicked. Maybe I haven't suffered enough in corporate environments to feel the bite. In any case, Scott's mild and sympathetic criticisms sound quite reasonable to me.
I fall in the category of those who thought the post was very tough on Adams, rather than sympathetic, but I also think it was not unfair to be so, even on the occasion of his death.
I find it a regular phenomenon that people who try to walk back a controversial statement by claiming it was a joke thereby reveal that, if this were true (which it often obviously isn't), they show that they have no idea how to tell a joke. Props to our Scott for pointing out that Adams was very good at telling jokes, so the walk-back is especially unbelievable in his case.
Racism is a form of prejudice. Prejudice consists of judging all members of a class by a characteristic attributable only to some members of that class. Therefore Adams's strictures against all blacks is racist.
On 1, another of Adams' favorite persuasion techniques was pacing and leading. Just as only Nixon could go to China, only S. Alexander could bring warm feelings about a controversial figure to ACX readers. For Adams fans who thought the piece should have been less critical, think what Adams himself would have preferred: the piece as written, or a less critical piece nobody would have trusted or read?
I'm a big Dilbert fan who didn't know much about Adams's wider life and I thought your obituary was an outstanding tribute to a brilliant and complicated man, warts and all, as well as some of your best writing. I posted it on social media and sent it to a few fellow Dilbert fans and they seemed to like it too. I hope the negative comments you got don't deter you from writing things like that again.
Let me say I'm strongly in favor of writing whatever you think about people right after they die, and at any other time. My opinion of Adams from the piece actually went up. I mostly knew him from the Trump support, and I thought he was a typical MAGA charlatan. Scott's obituary was a humane treatment of his life that showed there was a lot more depth there. I didn't even know he'd written books! My opinion of Scott Adams is forever changed as a result. "Scott Alexander finds him interesting" is enough to put him above 99% of prominent Trump supporters in my mind. Some people might've lost respect for him, but whatever. We're here still debating his legacy, and I think if some historian or AI wants to write a history about the rise of Trump in a hundred years, they will get a lot of context about and insight into one of his early supporters from Scott's obituary.
I appreciated your original post. I do not relish his death, though I am glad his voice is retired. Also prostate cancer usually is a very painful way to die which I wouldn't wish on him.
My take, based on much less exposure, was somewhat similar. He seemed to me quite brilliant and Dilbert was similarly masterful. Sadly, unlike Dilbert which was ineffectual at changing corporate culture, his political musings had a much broader effect. My exposure to that aspect of Adams was entirely on Twitter, where he was glib and employed ridicule and ad hominem. He seemed to me more interested in 'gotcha' moments than genuine exchanges; on gaining and playing to followers; on showing us all how smart he was.
Regarding the tone I can only say that, as someone who hadn't thought much about Scott Adams in years and hadn't thought positively about him in longer, this article made me reconsider the man, made me consider flaws of his that resemble flaws of mine, and ultimately left me more sympathetic to him than I started.
Reading this on my phone, I thought you were saying Conversations with Tyler had 5 *cubed* listeners, for some esoteric reason. Realizing that it's instead a lossy 5k suffused me with a warm, elitist glow.
I guess I should add that I thought the Adams obit was beautiful. And that's coming from a non-Dilbert fan who casually thought the guy was a casual lunatic.
Honestly, (from the perspective of someone who doesn't know much about Adams personally) your post read as if you really did admire/appreciate the guy in spite of his faults. To me it did come off as overall positive, and I think that positivity paired with the honesty of what you think of him overall means more than just saying something nice and leaving it at that. I think it was a good thing to post.
The “Republicans will be hunted” tweet was the breaking point for me, when I tipped over from thinking “Adams has had a lot of interesting things to say but seems to be losing his mind” to “he’s totally lost it, there is no longer any wisdom or good-faith communication in his words.”
It was obvious at the time that a) the thing he meant wasn’t true and it was reckless and corrosive to say it; and b) he would try to claim it came true using some kind of disingenuous two-step: either the tactics Alexander calls out here, or else an aggressive variant of the motte-and-bailey where you take some bad thing that happens and say it meets some stretched definition of “Republicans will be hunted.”
Tolerance isn't about pretending people have no flaws and embracing them as perfect, or pretending they have no redeeming qualities and rejecting them totally; it's about seeing them and taking them as they are, and your post does that well.
>Can we dismiss this as a joke? I think Adams has used the manipulation technique of saying things that might or might not be jokes and then strategically sticking to them or saying “What? Me? I was only joking! Haha! You can’t take a joke!” depending on which was more convenient to him at that exact second, enough times that I’m not comfortable letting him have that escape.
Thank you! This is the most frustrating thing about current politics and I wish people would notice it more.
For what it's worth, I read some (all?) Scott Adams books in elementary, loved the comics, have a catbert doll somewhere, and I thought it was a really touching... obituary I'd have called it.
> Can we dismiss this as a joke? I think Adams has used the manipulation technique of saying things that might or might not be jokes and then strategically sticking to them or saying “What? Me? I was only joking! Haha! You can’t take a joke!” depending on which was more convenient to him at that exact second, enough times that I’m not comfortable letting him have that escape.
This is the "clown nose on" / "clown nose off" except Adams did it constantly and pre-emptively. Like other nerds, he had this terrible fear of being proved wrong, and needed to have an escape clause.
> I worry that Adams (and you) are doing something where unless the average person can solve every problem by facts and intelligence alone, then facts+intelligence lose and memes and persuasion win. But the average person also can’t solve every problem by memes+persuasion alone!
I don't think this analysis works. I think what's going on is something you call out yourself a couple paragraphs later.
> The grass is always greener on the other side. The nerd sits in his cubicle and thinks “If only I were more charismatic.” But the salesman with the bright teeth and the firm handshake thinks “Man, I bet I could get out of this dead-end job if only I were smarter.”
There's an SSC post which touches on the theme that different people need different advice.
The world is full of gates. Most of them are implicit - someone does an informal assessment of you and acts on what they assume.
If you pass through a gate like that, what it looks like to you is that there wasn't a gate. But if you didn't measure up, you may notice the gate. The nerd whose life has gone nowhere is aware that his superiors who won't promote him and the women who won't date him are finding fault with his charisma. The problems he has are overwhelmingly due to what he's missing. The problems he would have had if he'd been stupid are problems he doesn't actually have because he isn't stupid.
One comment I might make about intelligence vs charisma generally is that charisma makes you look better on implicit assessments (regardless of your true value), and intelligence makes you look better on explicit assessments (by affecting your true value). The bitter nerd has probably noticed that every time someone 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘴 him to meet a standard, he does, and yet nobody seems to have valued this.
I liked how you pointed out that Dogbert wasn't a thing you could really be, but I disagree with the reasoning a bit. Yes, Dogbert accomplished things of ridiculous scope and which required tremendous credulity on the part of other people. But that feels more to me like simple artistic hyperbole.
What always struck me about Dogbert is that in real life he would have been a terrible con-man because he was entirely up-front about his machinations. He loved gloating about his evil schemes, as if he enjoyed some sort of impunity ftom reputational damage and that people would never come to distrust him. I suppose one could see this as a bit of fourth-wall service, but it seemed more like a cynical take on how people are so stupid that they will accede to your foul plans, time and time again, even if you spell it out for them.
Granted, this somewhat mirrors the way Trump doesn't exactly hide his corruption, even if he doesn't actually come out and say it (though at times he does display a verbal candidness which makes it seems he lacks on some level a moral understanding of what constitutes corrupt behavior). Adams, on the other hand (as you pointed out), appears to have emulated this aspect of Dogbert by explicitly spelling out these manipulation tactics that he then employed, to a degree that makes it seem that he began to lose his grasp of the "absurd" part of his "absurdist humor", and started taking his comic more literally than seriously.
Maybe Dogbert can get away with it because he is a dog, and people like dogs? I think Catbert was a sadistic HR person who also never suffered consequences for his sadism. Ratbert doesn't accomplish much, because he is dumber than either, and also people don't like rats.
>I’ve lived in plurality-black neighborhoods twice in my life, and although they had their problems I never felt afraid for my life.
FWIW I lived in one of those same neighborhoods at the same time you did, and one night I got jumped by two black teens, hospitalized due to their assault, and still carry a scar on my face because of this (which they did so they could steal my $50 handbag that contained my diary and a library book)
"LIBERAL: “It’s Okay To Be White” is a known 4chan white supremacist slogan. They chose it as their slogan precisely so it would be awkward when people called them out for saying it, and so they could retreat to saying “We just said it was okay to be white, which surely nobody can hold against us”. This is stupid, we’re under no obligation to pretend we don’t know this, and those 26% of black people who were against it, were against it on this basis."
"Its ok to be white" was 4 chan troll on libs and progs explicitly becuase many/most are anti white. And you can see the sputtering and non sensible responses such benal statement. Highly effective troll opp.
Even if it is white supremacist in nature rather than a 4chan op to screw with libs/progs (not that its mutually exclusive either) there correct way to handle is yeah duh next question. Instead libs/progs freaked out which is damning. If white being ok is white supremacist I think that points to some great epistemic failure in left of center culture.
Several years late and not properly critical of left of center anti white racism. A similar article could be written about men.
IIRC, there was a splinter group of BLM during the early, heady days of 2019/2020. You'd see occasional signs stating "Black Men Matter" which I think evolved into "Black Fathers Matter."
I don't remember this slogan having any meaningful outcomes though.
>My opinion - it seems plausible to me that many of the 26% of respondents who said they disagreed meant they disagreed with the 4chan slogan version, and that many of the rest were doing “symbolic belief”/”emotive responding”
The whole point of "it's ok to be white" is that there are some people for whom it is not okay to be white, and their reaction to that statement exposes it. That *is* the 4chan version. I don't grant charity to people who come up with a "4chan version" that indicates white supremacy, because they are misunderstanding in a politically convenient way and politically convenient misunderstandings are a thing to discourage.
>I think trying to manipulate people is inherently demeaning to the dignity of humankind.
We have a phrase for "tries to get people to do things in a way that doesn't involve logical arguments". It's called "social skills".
Related the previous post: what are the “best things” that either Weinstein has written before Trump made them insane? I think the closest I can think of is the dialogue with the Evergreen students where he came across as fairly reasonable but I have never read anything either has written about science or technology I thought was insightful.
Re footnote 1 (on Adams' seemingly contradictory statements about fairness): I would say it's coherent to a) believe in the moral value of fairness and b) have definite views about what it covers, while c) finding it a childish subject for debate. Indeed, the most fundamental beliefs are the least amenable to debate.
Good writing on the "it´s ok to be ...", seems like that and the ".. lives matter" statements are causing polarastion rather than anything else. Both sides can project their worst "mind reads" of their opponents into those statements (and ocf the best of their ingroups). Few slogans work that badly.
1. A rich white guy looking for a nice house in a wealthy neighborhood wouldn't end up next to a lot black folks even without actively trying to avoid them.
2. Even without racial motivations, you probably wouldn't want to live too close to a high-crime, low education area, which many predominantly black areas are, especially in cities (not sure about small towns in the south).
3. Even if his main concern is black people hating white people, rather than black people committing more crimes, a poll that says that only a quarter of black people disagree with a motte-and-bailey WS slogan should have moved his priors in the other direction, if anything. In fact, the survey is so shitty and confounding as to be worthless, and really doesn't tell us anything one way or the other.
I don't know what his priors were before, but his conclusion was dumb. People shouldn't put that much stock in polls about agreeing with some verbal statement.
"4chan’s deployment of the “It’s Okay To Be White” slogan was (maybe literally) out of Adams’ book - say something completely inoffensive, make sure everyone knows it has a secret offensive meaning, then retreat back to “What? You’re upset at our totally inoffensive thing?'"
What was the secret offensive meaning? I am not a 4chan nor Scott Adams aficianado, but my overall impression was that a (perhaps unspoken) tenet of Wokeness is white people should bear a certain measure of shame or guilt for their ancestors' crimes, like slavery, ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, etc., and this slogan was meant to kinda illustrate the fallacy or limitations of that idea by saying something obviously true and inoffensive, then watching people flip out about it. Was there more to it? Was I misinterpreting things?
I was going to ask the same thing- the secret offensive meaning comes *entirely* in the predictable reaction.
It's not even really a loaded question. It's just purely inoffensive and for bizarre social signaling reasons a lot of liberals and progressives freak out about it, like "all lives matter." The correct response is a shrug, not "we're going to investigate and expel anyone that put up these signs" (which universities did, or at least claimed they were going to do).
I definitely thought, reading the original article, that it was a corrective tribute to Scott Adams in response to otherwise sloppy mainstream reporting (I think some NYT or similar headline was going viral: "disgraced cartoonist dies" or "Adams, racist dilbert creator, dead"). I'm somewhat amused that there are people who both thought it was a right-wing hagiography and also a left-wing hit piece.
> All nerds must eventually realize they’re not going to immediately dominate everything by intellect alone. (...) If someone deals with this using denial (one of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the nerd who says no, I really am the next Einstein, ie a crackpot, aka the sort of person who gets featured on Sneerclub. If they deal with it using reaction formation (another of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the self-hating nerd, aka the sort of person who joins Sneerclub. [Or maybe this would be projection, or both, idk.]
Denial is sincerely believing that you are the next Einstein, and being happy about it.
Reaction formation is telling everyone that you are the next Einstein, talking about how many retweets your crackpot posts got, showing people the polite replies from university professors you received, and writing a book called The Final Theory of Everything... while also feeling full of doubt, but that only motivates you to spend more time writing the book, which will hopefully prove that you are actually the best.
Projection is feeling uncertain about yourself, but refusing to thing or talk about it, and instead talking about how *other* nerds are not half as smart as they believe to be. (definitely the Sneerclub)
Repression is simply not reflecting on whether you are or aren't a genius... in a situation where you very clearly are not.
Regression is to start crying whenever you contemplate your lack of intellectual achievement.
Sublimation is saying: "At least I can make an AI generate a nice picture. I may not be the greatest scientist, but I am a scientist-artist, and perhaps that's even better" and keep producing more nice pictures.
Intellectualization is saying: "Well, genius or not genius, according to which criteria? We all know that IQ is a myth, and academia is all about networking and political skills. So in the end, there is nothing to fail at."
1. "Several people said that, since my opinion of Adams was mixed at best, it was unkind to write it just after his death. For example, SaintParamaribo writes:
You should have steelmanned S.Adams more, and be more generous to the guy. He JUST died. He actually recommended your blog. He was a mentor to many of us. And your eulogy could’ve been way more generous. I’ve been a follower of both, and reading your eulogy broke my heart.
I appreciate this perspective and debated it with myself before publishing. The considerations were - I think it is bad to insult someone just after they die."
I though rationalists were against sacred cows, that just because someone is (recently) dead we should avoid speaking ill of them?
2. Concerning The Gervais Principal and The Dilbert Principle, the words of some Wehrmacht general also come to mind: "I divide my officers into four classes as follows: the clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous."
This is a little different, because "workers", "middle management" and "upper management" are more like separate classes, while "Wehrmacht officers" are more like one interfluid class.
"The far-right statement isn't: "It's okay to be white" , it is you tearing it down."
The point of a good troll is that it causes the target to react disproportionately and unreasonably to small stimulus. A child poking their sibling in the back of the car that causes them to become so upset they fly into a rage laughs at the schadenfreude of seeing this other person expend so much effort and anger with such little stimulus. Even better if they end up getting in trouble over it from their parents, because the poke was so innocuous that it doesn't get punished but the freakout violent response does.
"It's okay to be white" is a poke. The hidden message within it is not "it's not okay to be a minority" or "white people are superior to other races". It's "you are a racist bigot who hates white people, and rather than accuse you directly I'm going to trick you into exposing yourself. I know you think it's not okay to be white, so I am going to provoke you into throwing a tantrum and admitting this to the world."
And it worked. The people saying it did have ulterior motives, but (in most cases) those motives were not in themselves racist, but anti-racist. I'm sure plenty of white supremacists also used the statement in some sort of motte and bailey attempt to make minorities uncomfortable. But the origin was a troll against anti-white bigots, and it only worked because they existed in large enough numbers to fall for the bait.
There's a history of racists using coded symbols (eg HH, 1488, the Black Sun if most people don't know what the Black Sun is) etc. This is a useful way to both identify others, and to do the equivalent of gay people shouting "We're here! We're queer!" - ie create a sense of strength in numbers so that people aren't afraid they'll be stigmatized.
That is, suppose that 25% of people are racists. 25% is enough to be a respectable political faction, IF they're all able to be open and coordinate into one. The woke win condition is that each of those people is afraid to ever talk about racism, none of them ever learn there are any other racists, and they never coordinate and factionalize. The racist win condition is that they all learn of each other's existence and are able to assert their power as a sizeable faction before the wokes can punish them for showing their hand. Thus the obsession with (for example) crushing people who wear swastika t-shirts - not because the t-shirt is itself harming anyone directly, but for the same reason a victorious invader wouldn't let someone in the occupied territories raise the rebel flag.
Creating a slogan which serves the point of a racist slogan, but is hard to crush (because it's superficially fine) is then not a neutral act, but a direct attack on the anti-racist regime. They don't have a choice of whether to crush it or not (in the same way that China can't decide one day to let Tibetans proudly fly the Tibetan flag, or else they'll look weak), but then they can make fun of the regime by saying "Look, you hate white people so much that you're crushing our apparently harmless and true slogan!"
The "it's okay to be white" being about white supremacy seems to be straight falsehood. I have now spent a little while looking at the sources and if you dig through the idiological papers and articles on the topic to their primary sources it is literally people complaining about anti-white racism, and idiological academics describing that as synonymous with white supremacy.
It's a discussion of white being discriminated against (note a discussion, some say they are not being discriminated against).
E.g.,
'Institutional racism if anything exists against whites. The numbers support a lot of shocking stuff if you look closely. Anti-white racism is steadily increasing while racism against nonwhites has become newsworthy in its rarity and more than balanced out by positive discrimination in favor of them"
I think citing that post would be more convincing if it weren't surrounded by posts like "black trash blame the white man for their failures", "I didn't hate faggots as much as I do now ever since seeing you fucks propagate yourselves like a fucking cancer. Same goes for your kike overlords", and "the immigrants coming to Europe and USA etc. are the lowest of the lowest class in the countries they came from, in other words, they are the filthiest scumbags who where not wanted in their own country".
...or if you hadn't cherry-picked one of the few footnotes from that article which isn't incriminating, eg number 3 says "I think we should spam this stuff on tumblr then post it's okay to be white on their campuses. if all goes well they will start covering our posters with our hitler quotes." Or the one where someone advocates putting "It's Okay To Be White" posters on their campus while saying that "JIDF [will not be] happy about this" , and people react with images like a picture of Hitler drinking a bottle marked "Jew Tears". Or the one where people gloating on how libs took the bait and objected to their harmless pro-white slogan is intermixed with talk of "subhuman nigger races".
I'm trying to give you a graceful compromise where it was pushed by people with motivations from pure trolling to racist-inflected trolling to actual racism, but I really don't think your quest to say it's totally innocent is credible.
Good engagement. I didn't actually cherry pick. I just scanned and those were the first things I can across.
I also think that 4chan provides an unusual context where being extreme taboo is normal, and so yeah, people say crazy things. I don't think that necessarily means that 4chan is racist. For example, I checked pol and one of the top posts today is advocating for racial mixing (and, in 4chan fashion, saying that people who are anti that deserve to be loser incels).
In characterizing, “it's okay to be white” I think you could equally (more fairly and accurately) say, “some people involved in the campaign to troll people for being anti-white, expressed racist sentiments towards other races and expoused white-supremacist views.” That's obviously going to be a true claim, any group advocating for x has it's bad members (e.g., female chauvinist feminists who think all men are evil, etc…)
And in general, both “Black lives matter” and “it's okay to be white” warrant exactly the same response: “of course. All lives matter and it is okay to be any race.” And I am suspicious of anyone who doesn't respond to either statement in that way.
I think that's fine, but that it's worth remembering the original question that led us down this rabbit hole - that is, whether it's possible for the black people on the poll Adams cited to disagree with "it's okay to be white" for any reason other than that they're a hate group and all white people must flee them.
I think that regardless of whether the slogan came from outright white supremacy or just from a 4chan culture of trolling, it's reasonable for those black people to think "Hmmmm, a pro-white slogan coming from an infamously racist message board, pushed by people who use the word nigger and consider us subhuman, with their stated purpose being to humiliate and discredit the anti-racist movement . . . perhaps I should be against this", and that this is a more parsimonious explanation for those 26% disagreers than "they're a hate group".
I totally agree with that. I think Scott Adams reaction to the survey data was ridiculous, but I disagree with giving the framing that the phrase was clearly racist support.
I think the phrase being racist is a pretty strong claim, and I don't think the evidence is necessarily there, and I really do not trust the so-called ‘literature’ (as, as I have argued they literally conflate acknowledgement of white people being discriminated against - some thing which must obviously occur sometimes - with being racist). That people cite this garbage literature as proof that the phrase was racist infuriates me. These types of papers are a complete abuse of academia, and essential launder pure idiology into supposed fact.
For example, I would not be surprised if you traced back the origin of the phrase “Black lives Matter” that some early promoters didn't also either harbour (or in a fit of rage or trolling at least speak) some pretty racist ideas about white people (e.g., statements like “White men perpetrate all violence” or even worse ones like “white people deserve to die” etc…).
See my other comment for how this phrase is literally mainly just people being *against* anti-white discrimination. Essentially by being anti the phrase "it's okay to be white" you are saying white people can't coordinate to address times they are discriminated against.
Most of those coded symbols are meaningless to people who don't know the code. But "it's ok to be white" has an obvious literal meaning, and that is the point of using it!
Germany has laws against displaying swastikas, but the United States is not an occupied country, nor are we China. We have freedom of speech, precisely because our government isn't as terrified as the PRC, or Iran right now. The PRC is like my example of the Soviet joke, in contrast to the United States where, to riff on another Soviet joke, you can shake your fist at the White House and denounce the United States government AND the Russian one.
>There's a history of racists using coded symbols (eg HH, 1488, the Black Sun if most people don't know what the Black Sun is) etc.
There's also a history of racists doing horseshit flim-flammery right out in the open: "whiteness must be abolished! Whiteness is treason to humanity! But we don't *technically* mean white people," wink wink, nudge nudge, unless...
Those people are/were Harvard professors, Yale lecturers, NYT bestsellers instead of... you know, pseudonymous asshats. And yet! The professors were treated as Respectable Experts instead of Virulent Racists, and now we're reaping the whirlwind of that crop.
Plus if you're a Democrat nobody cares about your Nazi tattoo. Funny how that works. The problem isn't the coded symbols, the problem is the obvious double standard.
Yes, I'm against the bad thing when the libs do them, too. You can be against bad things on both sides, instead of using the fact that one side does a bad thing as an excuse to condone bad things on the other side.
I condone absolutely nothing to my right, I'm saying there's a legitimate, massive hypocrisy that gets ignored when appealing to coded symbols and 4chan versus virulent racists like Noel Ignatiev being employed at Harvard.
One is much more damning in my eyes because no one thinks 4chan matters, but way too many people think Harvard matter. No one at the NYT ever defended 1488 they would "whiteness studies." Et cetera and so forth.
Rant over, liberals will always fold before acknowledging progressive racism, water is wet. Have a good one, sorry for wasting your time.
I was writing about Scott Adams, and the "it's okay to be white" slogan was an important part of his story in a way that whatever Harvard professors are doing wasn't. That's why I wrote about it, that's why le raz challenged me about it, and that's why I'm responding to his challenge.
I was more sympathetic to the "Harvard matters and 4chan doesn't" argument before 4chan collectively got elected President.
loved the obit by the way, I thought it was well balanced in dealing with a frustrating and complicated person.
I recognize why that one mattered more re: Scott Adams. It's the point about symbolism that got under my skin, I still think you're broadly missing an important distinction that I can't quite put into words in a satisfying way. So it goes.
In ten years, I suspect Trump will be a bizarre footnote whose long-term major negative was PEPFAR, whiteness studies will have *still* not been razed to the ground, and liberals will still be doing the flim-flammery about it. We can compare notes again then.
I've already said I'm against cancellation. Having removed some of the danger of false positives, I don't think we're obligated to never mention the possibility of true positives. My only claim in the post was that it's possible for black people to worry that this is going on and speak out against it without being "a hate group"
In the post sure, but here in the comments you seem to be going harder to bat for the case that “dog whistle” claims can reasonably be treated as true, and very much that this one in particular is a “true positive”.
How *do* you distinguish between “it’s okay to be white” and “the OK sign” such that one is a false positive and the other is totally reasonable to assume is racist? Both seem be at least partially (magnitude YMMV) deliberate trolling efforts to make hypersensitive SJWs look foolish to normies that don’t spend their time searching the fever swamps of 4chan for the latest intel from the edgelord/maybe-actually-racist coalition.
Whatever positive value you get in detecting secret racists seems to be absolutely overwhelmed by the “looking foolish to normies” effect. Especially since a) you usually don’t have to dig very deep to find the actual racists being much more obviously racist, and b) any coalition whose most powerful act is saying facially positive things that maybe sometimes signal the opposite is pretty weak, and treating them as a powerful secret cabal probably makes them stronger. The actual problem is not that racists are allowed to freely say “it’s okay to be white”, it’s that they are racist. And smacking down anyone who says “it’s okay to be white” will do nothing to make them less racist.
Dog whistles of this type seem to be essentially a flipped version of the motte-and-bailey. In the motte-and-bailey, you say the bailey openly (Abolish the Police!) and retreat to the motte only if strongly challenged (Abolish the Police just means “reallocate some funding to alternative programs like social workers and poverty reduction”). But in the true dog whistle, you can only ever pronounce the motte (it’s okay to be white) and hope that people who already agree with you know that you *really* believe the bailey which must remain unspoken (it’s not okay to be black).And it doesn’t even work that well as a motte because as soon as it is detected, you have to abandon it. So it seems to me that the side that can get away with motte-and-bailey will always be the stronger side compared to the one that has to use dog whistles.
This isn't exactly a complicated problem. The right has identified the exact same problem with this society as you have, but instead of continuing to make utterly futile attempts at attempting to solve it by debating or "trolling", they have come to the conclusion that rotten ideas come from rotten people, and thus need to be eliminated at the source. They are solving a problem that people like you could have never solved yourself, all without you even having to lift a finger. Be grateful that you share a common enemy.
But the right hasn't "solved the problem" either! And by "abandoning clear thinking" they also abandon their best chance of accurately diagnosing the problem and coming up with a solution.
What do you mean, they haven't solved it? These things take time, you can't fault them for failing to take power and change the demographics in just one year. Everyone involved has had plenty of time to identify the problem, just as you have. Unlike you, they are trying for a permanent solution.
TGGP. Given the demographics of the readership, and no reason to suggest otherwise, it's a safe guess to assume he's white. His views are also not anything those in power would find issue with. He is not anything that would make him a liability. His safety is very much in his control. I am simply suggesting that he should make sure he doesn't get in the way of his problems being solved.
>he manipulated thousands of people who might have stood to benefit from an estate tax, or who sincerely believed in fairness-based arguments for an estate tax, to vote against their own interests/beliefs, in order to enrich him personally
This seems unfair to Adams. He may well have had good arguments against the tax (like the standard one about incentives) and thought it net harmful to society - even net harmful to those you imagine "who might have stood to benefit".
It's just that the personal motiviation pushed him over the edge into action.
Again, I would believe that if he hadn't specifically said otherwise (“You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children”)
"This was personal. This was also the day I decided to move from observer to persuader. Until then I was happy to simply observe and predict. But once Clinton announced her plans to use government force to rob me on my deathbed, it was war. Persuasion war.”
I find myself reminded of a footnote in Terry Pratchett's Pyramids:
"Younger assassins, who are usually very poor, have very clear ideas about the morality of wealth until they become older assassins, who are usually very rich, when they come to see injustice has its good points."
Re: "fairness is an argument for idiots and children"
After the ProPublica exposé on COMPAS, where they (implicitly) expected two mutually-incompatible things* to simultaneously be true for the algorithm to be "fair", I came fully around to Adams' perspective.
*Those two things being P(recidivism | score) & E[score | future recidivism] both being race invariant, which requires that base rates also are (they're not). It was never about the particular algorithm, it was just activist innumeracy.
You've turned against one of the fundamental concepts in human morality because once a media organization published an article that used a silly definition of it in one thing?
I sure hope nobody ever comes up with a silly definition of murder!
When I said "…I came fully around to Adams' perspective.", the word "fully" is key; the ProPublica article was just the final straw.
They didn't put it in such clear terms, they just lamented at how *obviously* "unfair" the algorithm was because values for one of the metrics was worse, ceteris paribus, for black defendants than for white.
But in the conterfactual world where the algorithm had been calibrated for that metric, the values for the *other* one would have been unequal in the same direction (due to base rate disparities) and bizarro-ProPublica would've written an equally-scathing article on the same topic.
It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation, and it generalizes to *any* argument based on "fairness". To the extent that undermines a given conception of morality, so much the worse for morality; shut up and calculate.
If me and my buddies proposed a law that the government should confiscate all your money and give it to us, would you object? Would your objection involve it being unfair? If so, why does the fact that there are some marginal cases where it's hard to define unfairness make you want to jettison fairness entirely, as opposed to retreating back to the well-established cases like the confiscation example?
(I don't think you can try to reduce 'don't confiscate my property' to other nonfairness values - sure, it violates a certain norm of property rights, but it seems worse than a fair universally-levied tax that also violates those same property rights norms)
I'm harping on this because one theme of this blog is that all concepts (except maybe hard math) dissolve into meaninglessness when looked at under a microscope, but you've got to try to have some concepts/values anyway, and philosophy is the study of how to do that, rather than overupdate on any one particular concept dissolving. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/
>"If me and my buddies proposed a law that the government should confiscate all your money and give it to us, would you object? Would your objection involve it being unfair?"
Such a scenario would be full-on Conflict and I would do anything in my power to not only resist but also destroy you & your buddies. That might include "fairness"-based arguments that I expect (applying Sturgeon's law to humanity) to be effective on 90% of the electorate. Instrumental convergence in action.
>"…there are some marginal cases where it's hard to define unfairness…"
The marginal cases (e.g., an action that does not fit *any* of the definitions of "fair") are the ones where it's easy to define, which doesn't help most of the time.
>"I don't think you can try to reduce 'don't confiscate my property' to other nonfairness values…"
Disagree. Targeted confiscations would almost certainly be negative sum and that's sufficient for generalized opposition.
>"…one theme of this blog is that all concepts … dissolve into meaninglessness when looked at under a microscope…"
There's a difference of degree that becomes a difference of kind. The word "fair" does not just point to a region of concept space with fuzzy boundaries, but to multiple disjoint regions in conflict with each other. Conflating these incompatible meanings can sway hoi polloi, but it's just a specific instantiation of the "clever arguer"; the persuasiveness of the argument is decoupled from its truth value.
ETA: it's that disjointness and the disingenuousness it enables that the ProPublica article cast into sharp relief.
"Secret meaning"? Would this be like Wittgenstein's private language? The whole point of communication is to rely on common meaning. Scott Adams' response to the poll was dumb (one shouldn't take poll responses so seriously), but so is evaluating a statement based on "secret meaning".
4chan's "it's okay to be white" was an intentional troll campaign. I don't think it was about promoting white supremacy. If it was anything other than pure trolling (and stocking division for fun), it was aimed at pointing out the racism of the left (that they are so anti-white that they would view a simple affirmation of being okay as taboo).
Edit: Having looked into things further, I find the claim the phrase ever had a major racist connotation really dubious. I think Scot is spreading falsehood here.
I don't think "it's an intentional troll campaign" is ever exonerating. "Stop being confused, it was just a thing we were doing to confuse you and then laugh about it!"
But what evidence is there that it was about white supremacy? You have presented none.
4chan has a long history of troll campaigns:
- persuading people they could charge their apple phone in the microwave.
- persuading people that a software update made their phones waterproof
- pool's closed (an arguably anti-racism) trolling of a video game for allegedly racist moderators removing black avatars
- starting a social media campaign idealising "thigh gap" designed to troll feminists (e.g., along the pro/anti-sex feminist divide).
In the context of this long history of not racist (even some anti-racist) trolling. Why is the phrase "it's okay to be white" seen as obviously 4chan promoting white supremacy? Rather than as a) lampooning the lefts anti-white racism, or b) just pure trolling.
You are the one making a claim (that the slogan was about promoting white supremacy). So it should be you providing evidence.
Trolling on its own is not the same as promoting white supremacy!
>The slogan used by the campaign, “It’s okay to be white”, is well-known in the white supremacist movement and dates to at least 2001 when it was used in a song by white power band Aggressive Force. Flyers using the slogan were distributed in the US in 2005 and in 2012 and Ku Klux Klan related groups have used the “#IOKTBW” hashtag on Twitter since 2012 (Anti-Defamation League Citation2018). It has appeared in “white pride” threads on 4chan since at least 2014 (Friedberg and Donovan Citation2020).
Are you lost? We're discussing the slogan "it's ok to be white" and its relation to white supremacy, not whether it's ok to be white (it is, of course).
It's obviously not related, Just because it was used by white supremacist doesn't mean the slogan itself is white supremacist. Even people you don't agree with can be right about one or another thing.
Quoting from the same article, the original posters on 4chan describe their intent: "Based on past media response to similar messaging, we expect the *anti-white* media to produce a shit-storm about these racist, hateful, bigoted fliers … with a completely innocuous message (Friedberg and Donovan Citation2020)."
So you can clearly see that 4chan are objecting to anti-white racism, rather than promoting racial supremacy. Indeed the article you link itself conflates the two in the introduction, arguing that "whites have power" and therefore any objection or concern that they might be discriminated against is "white supremacy."
In short, the article you link is seeped in anti-white racism, and so I don't find it particularly credible as a source. (E.g., it axiomatically stating that there can be no such thing as racism *towards* white people).
Great points about the article, I don't disagree. The slogan was used by white supremacist groups and on 4chan (but I repeat myself) prior to the 2017 flyer campaign, which is why the phrase is seen as a white supremacist slogan. It's because it is a white supremacist slogan, in addition to the innocuous meaning of the words. That's the question I was answering for you.
Give that the article conflates concern over anti-white racism with white supremacy, I don't trust it as a source for your claims (that the slogan was previously used by genuine white supremacists). It's a bit like you quoted a random (insanely idiological) Reddit thread.
A few points:
1. We have also already walked back from the claim that 4chan's campaign itself was motivated by white supremacy.
2. There is no way random people being exposed to the phrase are going to know this alleged history.
The point of using the slogan is obviously to demonstrate the anti-white bigotry of those who oppose it. Just because bad people used it doesn't mean they were wrong on this particular issue.
The "it's okay to be white" being about white supremacy seems to be straight falsehood. I have now spent a little while looking at the sources and if you dig through the idiological papers and articles on the topic to their primary sources it is literally people complaining about anti-white racism, and idiological academics describing that as synonymous with white supremacy.
It's a discussion of white being discriminated against (note a discussion, some say they are not being discriminated against).
E.g.,
'Institutional racism if anything exists against whites. The numbers support a lot of shocking stuff if you look closely. Anti-white racism is steadily increasing while racism against nonwhites has become newsworthy in its rarity and more than balanced out by positive discrimination in favor of them"
Just fyi, the article you linked that makes the claim about the song literally has no cite or source for that claim. Several of their sources are broken links, and of the first source I found that worked, it's literal false characterization of their primary source.
But the trolling works against people who are guilty of exactly the things the trolling is meant to highlight! It's like the Soviet joke about a man being arrested for holding up a blank protest sign: the response itself validates the critique, and the responder couldn't help but respond because they find it unacceptable for anyone to do even the most innocuous thing that could possibly be associated with opposition to them.
The thing is it should make the people freaking out about nothing look *worse*, but it didn't play out that way. The actual racists came out better than the trolls.
Cinna the Poet's claim is bizarre. If their uncle was genuinely a "principled libertarian" then these no way they could become a "alt right bigot" just by listening to the wrong podcasts. Ridiculous and moronic. It makes no sense.
The uncle might have been an unprincipled person who happened to spout libertarians views because the views were fashionable, someone like that could become a genuine "right wing bigot," but my prior is some mixture of Cinna's uncle being not that principled and Cinna being a left wing bigot (I.e., someone who bigotedly conflates disagreement with left wing views as being 'bigotted').
"Cinna the Poet writes:
To share a different perspective on Adams, my uncle was an avid follower. He went from being a principled libertarian whose ideas I respected very much to (I’m sad to say) an alt right bigot. Under the influence of Adams, he had no interest anymore in objective truth or the actual scientific method. Reality was all a matter of spin and “persuasion.”
The phrase “post truth” gets thrown around too much, but Adams fit that description perfectly."
"Cinna the Poet's claim is bizarre. If their uncle was genuinely a "principled libertarian" then these no way they could become a "alt right bigot" just by listening to the wrong podcasts. Ridiculous and moronic. It makes no sense."
This is definitely what I would have thought before the past ten years of US politics.
(I agree you can make this trivially true by no-true-scotsmanning "principled")
I think you are principled (a true Scotsman?). I don't think you could ever be made a right wing bigot, however much you listened to Scott Adams.
I value your opinion and read you writing exactly because I have this impression of you (and that similarly, despite lots of exposure to left wing media, you won't become a left wing bigot either).
Media polarization is a huge problem. But I do trust people who are principled to not become bigots regardless of their local echo chamber. If you are interested, the following article does a great job of highlighting a current media divides, but also that one can have a principled take. https://www.racket.news/p/bluesky-brain-x-brain-two-viral-stories
I think most people don't have principles, they just do whatever they see their friends do. If they identify as X, that's only because their friends identify as X, and are happy to change if their friends change.
Principles are the autistic thing, when you keep trying to do the right thing even if your social environment no longer rewards it, just because it is the right thing.
I found your take on racism very fair and reasonable. Articles that touch on the culture war obviously tend to attract a lot of inflammatory rhetoric- even in a lot of rationalist-adjacent communities, unfortunately- but my guess is that a mostly silent majority of readers would agree with me on that.
Until I read your piece, I had no idea it was a 4chan slogan, doing my best to pay exactly the same level of attention to 4chan as I do to X, none whatsoever.
I loved the piece, loved Adams, but was growing to suspect his meds were affecting him, something I’ve seen in relatives.
Ignore the haters. This was the best eulogy I've ever read. You took a public figure who many if not most of your readership had a negative opinion of, and made him a fascinating and sympathetic, if flawed figure.
And you did it while exploring some personal and compelling ideas about coming to terms with your own limitations. Something that a lot of us can relate to.
Count me among the people who thought it was a great piece. My thoughts about halfway through were that it was like reading something from TLP, but then you did the one thing TLP would *never* do, which is accept the real human on the other end of the psychoanalysis as still worthy of love and respect. If I were Scott Adams, I think I'd have enjoyed it.
I used to enjoy Dilbert as a kid too, though i didn’t have any books. I read it in the newspaper. Right up until Adams’s cancellation it was one of the best strips you could reliably find in the funny pages.
I didn’t know Scott Adams wrote stuff outside of Dilbert until like 2015, and I forget how I found out, but I remember the first thing I read was his commentary on Trump (he started out calling him a “master wizard” but then switched to something less dorky-sounding like “master manipulator” or “master hypnotist” or similar). I found it to have more explanatory power than the rest of what I was hearing about Trump, so I kept paying attention. It also inspired me to read a couple of his books, which I thought were solid though not rave-worthy.
Applying Scott’s model of that presidential race to what I was seeing of it helped me win a couple bets on the election outcome. With the exception of knowing enough to know I’d won my bets, I stopped paying any attention to politics after Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, but I kept checking in occasionally with Adams (at his blog, I think?) because I so appreciated this lens on the world he had given me.
The whole time it was clear he was a Trump supporter, but I’m also one of those people to whom the twist in the movie plot is almost always obvious within ten minutes of the opening credits. So I found his gradual “unmasking” annoying. And I found his increasingly naked alt-rightish partisanship predictable and disappointing.
When Adams finally did the racist rant, which I thought made his cancellation more like a suicide than an assassination, I was sad i wasn’t going to get to read Dilbert anymore. But as a person, or as a public figure, his unsurprising downfall didn’t affect me. I thought your (Scott Alexander’s) elegy was perfect though, and this was a fine follow-up also. Bravo.
More than I ever wanted to know again, but thanks. I'm a bit against digging through everything a person ever said and applying the microscope and/or blowtorch. Change is possible where there is space. The alternative to forgiveness is war.
Re footnote 9: I'd say the manouevre wasn't meant to "fool woke people" in the way described at all. On the contrary, it was meant to *bait* woke people into exactly the reaction they had ("We're not fooled by your racist dog whistle!") and in so doing, expose the hollowness of language that consists purely of connotation and disregards denotation entirely.
I'm very interested in the morality related to persuasion so I'd like to address that aspect of this Highlights post in a general sense, mostly abstracted from Adams as a person, though I'll refer to him.
Lets say that someone plans to do something to you that you find morally offensive, whether it's legal or no. Adam's particular quote "use government force to rob me" does sound like a kind of moral offense, not just a utilitarian calculation where all things are permissible. If you were subject to a moral offense, would it then be okay to try and persuade people to not do that offensive thing?
To take a somewhat extreme example (like I do) if someone showed up at your house to literally rob you and robbing you was in their rational self interest what would be your moral constraints in persuading them to go away and leave you alone?
I do not know where the line comes, but my moral intuition suggests there are levels that are too far. For example, I wouldn't feel comfortable persuading them to kill my neighbor instead of robbing me.
I feel like any moral assessment where we must take a belief (whether moral or factual) as a given is just nihilism in disguise. As you learn pretty quickly while studying WBNEs, everything can be rationalized by assuming crazy enough beliefs.
No, I don't think Scott Adams genuinely believed that raising estate tax to be morally equivalent to being robbed at a gunpoint, and if he did, that's some sort of "immoral incompetence" which still makes his subsequent actions immoral.
Much like we should still condemn the burning of witches of the lynching of supposed plague-spreader even if *taking the perpetrators' stated factual beliefs as given*, it could be rationalized.
Isn't everything 'nihilism in disguise' then? All morality is based on certain unprovable root axioms. And not everyone has the same axioms. This is how people generally avoid nihilism; a rock solid commitment to not examining the truck that their moral root assumptions fell off of.
I don't know what WBNEs are. Sorry.
I grant that actually being robbed at gunpoint would be worse than being taxed at a high rate, so the comparison is a bit melodramatic. But what if Scott Adams had been shaken down by a mob boss? A mob boss who also provided certain services to the community. There's certainly an implied threat of violence in taxation, even if there's not a gun in your face. There's a genuine moral conflict between individual and collective consent and I don't think it's "moral incompetence" to lean one way or another as long as certain basic collective problems like defense, police, and environmental protection are addressed. Adams seems to have a complaint that should be within the Overton Window of discussion, even if we don't agree with it.
I think it's genuinely interesting to say that the burning of witches was wrong even if we assume that witches were actually communing with some malevolent evil spirit. If the worldview of the witch hunters was true then you'd have multiple cases of assault under a modern legal framework. But I'm not clear how admissible the testimony would be under a modern legal framework. Later on in the trial, the accusations did seem to break down, not for being anti-science but for being theologically incoherent.
Asking what to do about a person like Typhoid Mary is a bit more of a genuine edge case, since she actually did cause people to die. It's far better to handle the matter lawfully since hashing out even immoral problems with violence gets messy, quickly. But in Scott Adams case he *did* handle the matter lawfully. So we're discussing what the moral limits of *persuasion* would be in a case like Typhoid Mary.
Weak Bayesian Nash Equilibria are essentially the math-y equivalent of the idea being discussed: an equilibrium where I shoot first because I have an unexpicable and unassailable belief you were going to shoot me is still possible because *if we take believes as exogenous*, I am behaving rationally. It is pretty unsatisfactory because when everything could be an equilibrium, then the concept of equilibrium is useless, so there are many "refinements" where actions and beliefs need to be jointly rational for it to be an equilibrium.
Anyway, if SA was an anarchist, maybe. He sure did not seem to show it before. He sure did not seem to think that say, higher tariffs or immigration restrictions were an affront. If you take believes as given, _and also don't even require consistency_ then literally anything can be justified and what's the point of pretending we are in a moral framework?
Same with the witches, the point is not only that magic is not real and if you are going to murder innocent people you don't get to leave your factual believes unexamined, it's that even such belief always played out in convenient ways. Why was it always vulnerable members of the community who practiced magic? Why it was always the Jews or the weird guy living alone or some other soft target spreading the plague by poisoning the well? Why did these mob justice moments always end with the perpetrators taking the victim's stuff and maybe settling some scores as well?
But even if their believes had been entirely consistent, a moral system where you get to murder innocent people is simply indistinguishable from nihilism. "Criminal incompetence" is a legal concept for a reason. It's be weird if our morality were more permissive tha our laws.
Classic liberals can also believe in certain limitations on government power without being anarchists. Classic liberals (CL) don't seem to have any strong history of opposing tariffs. Just the opposite, tariffs were a significant portion of the small government budget of the early colonies. Classic liberal's opposition to immigration restrictions are often more conditional than outright nationalists (i.e. CL may be okay with immigration in theory but oppose it due to the burden it places on government funded support systems), but even there, there doesn't seem to be a hard line where a person who identifies as a CL with a strong belief in property rights has to also believe in relatively open borders. I'm not certain of Adams's actual beliefs. I'm spitballing here about his actual beliefs. But none of these particular things being discussed seem wildly hypocritical in the context of a classically liberal framework.
(Adams's rant about the Black community may contrast with a CL belief in individualism. But that seems outside the scope of this discussion.)
"Why was it always vulnerable members of the community who practiced magic?"
The marginal members of the community were most vulnerable to the influences of Satan, of course. This was an actual belief. I do agree that there's plenty in the later Salem Witch Trials that violate even classic doctrine of the time as relates to witches. But if we're using the standards of the people of the time then there was a solid doctrinal answer to this particular question.
"But even if their believes had been entirely consistent, a moral system where you get to murder innocent people is simply indistinguishable from nihilism."
I don't think that anyone is advocating for killing innocents here. But critically, we seem to be discussing what makes a person innocent or not innocent and to what degree and how we know it. It's not like people are objectively and universally innocent. A social determination of innocence is conditional on a person's moral system, knowledge, and worldview.
I'm not familiar with "criminal incompetence" as a legal term of art in the American legal system. Are we discussing a form of gross negligence? Or competence to stand trial? Can you refer to a formal usage of the term you're discussing?
Yes I meant "criminal negligence"/"gross negligence". Not American, I translated literally a civil law term without realizing that it actually means almost the opposite in common law (a mental incompetence so severe as to exculpating).
Still, the point stands. In pretty much any legal system, criminal law mostly requires intent, but there are cases where being so ignorant as to cause significant damage is itself criminal, even if one can plausibly deny intent. Same with eg manslaughter vs murder.
If Classical Liberal means *anything*, it is a strong belief in free trade. That's pretty foundational, from Smith to Ricardo to Mills to the opposition to the Corn Laws. Sure, you can absolutely build your own ad-hoc political ideology where you carefully choose first principle so that your perceived interests/insticts can be derived from first principles, but what's the point of the exercise? Just advocate based on your interest/instincts and be done with the pretence.
For the factual believes, one could notice how the Gosples would suggest the opposite ("the meek shall inherit the Earth", and the poor widow is surely meeker than the village magnate, but who is more likely to end up on the stake?), and also it's not entirely clear why it was always marginal members (who if anthing had less access to healthcare and nutritious food) to poison the wells and cause plagues, but again, what's the point?
I mean sure, if you ignore any plausibility test, steelman their believes to the point of making them completely a-historical, and take them as given, then brutalizing and murdering poor people who were not harming anyone is a-OK. But, why would you bother? If you are going to adopt a functionally amoral view of the world, might as well cut the middleman and run with it. Write beutiful paragraphs à la Schopenhauer or de Maistre on how life is but blood soaked altar to itself and seeking justice on this Earth is a fool's errand. More synthetic and much better artistic possibilities tbh.
"If Classical Liberal means anything, it is a strong belief in free trade. "
Okay. I agree.
"For the factual believes, one could notice how the Gosples would suggest the opposite ("the meek shall inherit the Earth", and the poor widow is surely meeker than the village magnate, but who is more likely to end up on the stake?)"
But with God anything is possible. That's the next line (paraphrased) after "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” It often gets cut off, radically changing the meaning of the text.
I mean, I can see where you're going with this and have some sympathy for that direction. But orthodox forms of Christianity do tend to prioritize orthodoxy above other considerations. And I suspect you're not considering that.
"then brutalizing and murdering poor people who were not harming anyone is a-OK. "
Is it certain that a person of the time period in question would have agreed that the victims of witch hunts 'were not harming anyone?' We see this because we have a modern perspective, (which I strongly prefer.)
It seems likely that many people of the time believed witches were genuinely harmful. I don't think that I'm doing the things you're suggesting that I'm doing. I am not discussing a 'functionally amoral' view of the world. I am discussing an attempted moral worldview which is strongly limited by the standards and understanding of its time (and, yes, mixed with the related self-serving power structures. But that's an inevitable part of all formalized moral systems.) It's a view where people have a radically different, perhaps impoverished, method for understanding what "harm" is.
Re: Should I Have Written This At All, I share your childhood fondness for Adams and I found the post heartwarming and respectful. I wouldn't call it brutally honest, it downplayed his flaws about the right amount to make a polite obituary that still seriously engaged with who he was. And I say that having objected to the McCain post.
And pedantic point:
"If Dilbert is an 80th percentile nerd, the 80th percentile persuader is - I don’t know, a used-car salesman? Dilbert’s probably earning more money, especially nowadays when he could make L5 at Google."
I don't even think 80th percentile nerds can get interviews at Google. Google is very elite, do you really mean to say the pool of people they consider hirable is 20% of... people, programmers, whatever this category is?
In my experience, most programmers aren't nerds these days, only normies who have heard that there was money in IT. People who would never program in the free time; people who don't care about things like clean code; people who are looking forward to being promoted to managers; people who don't have an opinion on what is their favorite programming language but will use whatever someone will pay them to use; etc.
So being an 80th percentile nerd could easily mean being a 95th percentile programmer.
Most of the world thinks it has some reason to hate you, and that's true regardless of who you are. This has always been true, yet it has never prevented people from living and working together peacefully. There's no reason to get bent over it now.
The "her plans to use government force to rob me" has some idea of fairness or rights baked in. It's when he says that fairness is for children that it seems to me like self-deprecation, or trying to sound old and wise, or some combination of both.
I re-listened to Tim Ferriss's 2015 podcast interview with Scott Adams. In it, Adams basically validates what Alexander says about wanting to be Dogbert. Also, I think Alexander is more wrong on the ivermectin topic even than he admitted, because Adams has been a medical skeptic woo experimenter since before Trump/MAGA. Explained in my post: https://ashallowalcove.substack.com/p/alas-scott-adams
I think this is a mistake many clever nerds do. Imagining that they can become Dogbert by doing this one simple trick, and then being shocked that it doesn't work, because actual Dogbert would... do something different, or do it with more force, or not announce that he was going to do it, or do a proper followup, or... well, one those things that actual Dogberts instinctively do, and nerds playing Dogbert fail to notice.
Thanks for including my comment. There was an Open Thread some time last year where someone was depressed and reaching out but didn't want to try CBT because it was "brain-washing". I had to smile because I've previously had similar thoughts about CBT, it's like if I'm a piece of shit I don't want to spend my life thinking I'm a nutrient-rich fertiliser just because that's more helpful. I want the Truth!!! I don't know how I moved on from this position exactly, but when I hear about Adams' self-help writing the fear comes back, like it's just manipulation all the way down.
Ashwin here. Thanks for the half-apology. I will take it. I still don't think you've gotten the whole picture, but that's okay. The spirit of your apology was on point. I would love to turn this whole episode into a +ve sum game instead of an argument.
I also made an offer to help with AI Safety cause if you apologised. I have a significantly lower p(doom) than you do, but I gave my word and I intend to keep it. If you want to take me up on this offer, I will share with you what I think the approach should be. Whether you think that's a good idea or not and want to implement is of course, entirely up to you. Here is the tweet where I made this offer: https://x.com/omnishwin/status/2013153451761635481?s=20. It's on the same thread.
At a very high-level, the reason why I'm so confident I can make the AI Safety cause strategy more effective, is not because I'm an expert on the very large number of considerations around the debate, but rather because I can see some very clear persuasion mistakes that I think the AI Safety cause is making. The more involved I get and the more details I understand, the more effectively I can help.
Mistake 1: You are relying far too much on Credibility. Credibility is one of the most important tools for any persuader, but it's also fragile when there is an opposition that wants to destroy it. Instead, you should try out some other strategies. There is a lot to be said about reciprocity here.
Mistake 2: There is a balancing act between getting attention and getting your point across. I actually think you'll have done a great job on the attention part. I think aligning with Whoopi was a huge mistake. The wrong kind of attention from the wrong crowd can erode your credibility faster than you can build it up.
Mistake 3: Too much too fast. Instead of going on all-in on the Pause movement, you should be thinking about the environment you are operating in. Timing is a very important thing in all deals.
Mistake 4: Understanding how politicians think. One thing that Scott never emphasised sufficiently is that every single politician and world leader is either a phenomenal persuader/negotiator themselves or is controlled by one. No exceptions. There is too much to unpack in one comment and it's different for every country/situation. This is where I think I could be the most effective. I have no intention to get into politics, but for what it's worth I've negotiated a lot of big deals (INR 25200 Crore roughly) when I was a lawyer. I don't consider myself world-class or anything, but I do think I can do a better job and give you superior insights worth considering. Some of this may be best discussed in private and there are significant knowledge gaps that I need to plug, but if we work together, I strongly suspect you will be sufficiently impressed.
Mistake 5: The Ideological Turing Test. If you correct this, then you don't need my help or anyone else's help at all. Still, if you wish I am happy to do my bit. The theory around persuasion is far easier to understand than the vast majority of topics you write about. Knowing how fast you read, you'll breeze through it. However, it's more art than science and like all art it requires practice. That too, should not be a biggie for you.
Some positives about the current AI Safety strategy:
1. The IABIED book was written very well. Kudos to Nate Soares in particular;
2. Fear is a powerful emotion. Don't over-leverage this, but I think you've done a great job;
3. Visual persuasion. Yudkowsky does this phenomenally well in some of his stories (the one that comes to mind immediately is the one where he talks about the AI hunting you down in the bunker). It's also the reason why "Show, Don't Tell" is such good writing advice;
4. Credibility - I know I said don't rely on it too much, but getting some very big names on your side was a smart move. Just don't be one-dimensional;
Some low-hanging fruit to consider:
1. You are already a great writer. You also have a lot of knowledge. Persuasion doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you figure out the mechanics of how it works, you will become 100x more influential overnight. You'll breeze past so many people it's crazy. I think of your knowledge base like the oil-fields in Venezuela, so much wealth there for the taking, but it needs to be handled correctly;
2. Your reach and your audience is awesome. Both matter. If you learn what parts to focus on, you could accelerate humanity into the Golden Age by at least 5 years if not more. I do not exaggerate. Remember that it's not just your influence that will be more effective, it will be the influence of all of your readers, many of whom are geniuses;
3. One of the reasons why good natured people lie is because they are afraid of the consequences of what will happen if they are too honest. The more effectively you learn to persuade and present your case, the less you will feel the need to lie. Lying is for the lazy;
4. Innovation. Framing in particular, is not just a useful persuasion tool, it's a great tool for generating new ideas and truth seeking. It's insane how much you can see around corners, if you learn to see things from several different angles all at once.
Some caveats:
1. You will learn things about people and the world that you may not like. Not everyone is a good person. It is hard to predict how your world view changes in advance, but rest assured it will and there will be an emotional toll to pay;
2. You will be attacked relentlessly. The more effective you are in changing people's mind, the stronger the incentive to silence you. You will face backlash. Brace yourself for this. But if you are smart about it, you can take calculated risks and minimise this as well;
3. No matter what, you will make mistakes. This is true of even the best. Adaptability, open-mindedness and constant forward motion are a persuader's best friend. Don't fret. There is no such thing as a fool-proof strategy. You can do everything by the textbook and still not manage to change anyone's mind. On the bright-side, when this happens it's usually an indication that there is some information you are missing;
4. Your own p(doom) may drop significantly. It's hard to explain why in advance;
5. Sometimes you will be successful in influencing the world, but will not get the credit for it. This is an acceptable price to pay of course, but just keep it in mind.
If you want to take this forward, let me know. I owe you at least one weekend worth of work.
I feel kind of bad piling on to the maximally-contentious racism section, but I was a bit surprised by your definition of racism, and your assumption that that definition was something we would all agree on by default? I'd call your thing a good *example* of racism, but by no means the only presentation of the phenomenon.
Let's say that most Texans own a cowboy hat and boots, but that it's only about 80% of them, and that there's a solid 20% who don't really identify with the cowboy lifestyle. One way to be racist would be to round that up to 100%, and staunchly declare that Texans are all cowboys.
But another, equally racist form of racism, would be to reject *non-ethnic forms of evidence* as to whether someone was a cowboy or not. After getting to know somebody from Texas and hearing them explicitly say that they don't have a cowboy hat, a racist might refuse to lower their personal p(cowboy) below 80%. It's not a bias in the understanding of Texans; it's a bias towards ethnology as a sufficient explanation of the human person.
Regardless of how much Adams was SSC!racist, he definitely seems to be doing this other thing, which is treating ethnicity as a fully dispositive piece of evidence, and sufficient basis for deciding how to treat those around him.
Yeah, from the Bayesian perspective, there are two places where you can put race in the equation:
* having priors based on race
* refusing to update your priors based on evidence, because you keep double-counting the race
But in practice, I am afraid that this distinction only matters for rational people, because most of the population is more like "refuses to update no matter what", in which case the former seems exactly like the latter. (And I have no good solution for that.)
"Adams keeps trying to eat his cake and have it too."
Fun fact. The FBI was able to identify the unabomber in part through his use of this unusual formulation of the idiom, rather than the conventional formulation "have your cake and eat it too."
It's obvious that it's okay to be whatever color you are, period, but it's also clear that "It's okay to be white" became a coded expression in the same way that "Christ is King" did later (the more updated version of that is "America First" in the comments section of any video that talks about Israel). It's disingenuous to pretend not to understand that.
The closest I can get to agreeing with Adams on the poll would be that, if I knew that 26 percent of black people thought I was "not okay" because I'm white, I might be wary about interacting with black people out in public, because 26 percent of them (according to the poll) would be hostile to me right out of the gate, and I don't want to deal with that. On the other hand, I have a three out of four chance that it won't be one of the hostile black people, so the avoidance reaction seems unwarranted, based on the odds. Scott Adams himself was way over the top in his reaction to the poll - hyperbolic, broad brush, the whole catastrophe. I didn't know him enough to know if he was an actual racist, but that episode was a huge unforced error on his part.
You don't have to agree that it is coded. In it's literal sense in is obviously true unless you hate white people, and the fact that you ignore the literal meaning in favor of the obscure one means you are uncomfortable with saying positive stuff about white people for some political reason.
Your reply shows that you don't understand what I said at all, and you definitely don't know me. I have spent the last five-plus years, since the Summer of Saint Floyd, trying to pull myself back in off the ledge of becoming a right-wing reactionary, after a lifetime of being a Democrat voter and then feeling immensely betrayed and shocked by the rise of the Woke and how much they were allowed to get away with, up to the highest levels of government, business and academia, and the circus they wanted us to have to live in. That being said, I know a coded expression when I see one, and you can disagree with my point, but I am not "uncomfortable with saying positive stuff about white people."
I don't have to know you, our discussion is not personal. I see you have reasonable views yourself, but for some reason you are unwilling to push back against woke insanity. People like you are one of the reasons right-wing reactionaries gained so much prominence - becaused moderate libs are afraid to counteract progressive overreach people lose faith in them and turn radical.
I don't think the appropriate response to such (claimed) provocation is banning the sentence, or policing others language, or casting aspersions on others' character.
I think both "Black lives Matter" and "It is okay to be white" warrant exactly the same response. "Of course. All lives matter, and it is okay to be of all races."
Frankly, I don't buy the whole, this is a dog whistle for racism claim, etc... In my experience, people making these claims are often just totally detached from reality (and use 'white supremacy' as a generic description for white person who they politically disagree with).
For example, there is a massive overlap between people who characterize "it's okay to be white" as racist, and people who say Nigel Farage and JD Vance are white supremacists, despite both JD and Farage being married to non-white spouses. Their claims don't pass the most basic of smell tests, so why should I give them any credence?
Just because this topic is radioactive, I want to applaud your willingness to engage with it in full nuance.
I identify with finding Adam’s books influential as a child and finding his efforts later in life disappointing. I was conflicted about him when his hedging seemed designed to make his motivations unreadable… by claiming he was explaining things at the same time as claiming to be manipulating you, he was trying to eat his cake and have it too.
——
Ultimately I think he was torn between utilitarianism and deontology without the tools to deal with that contradiction. I think as a result he was wielding power in ways that weren’t always well thought out or beneficial. But I don’t think he was ever malevolent. And I do think there is something to be respected in trying to make the biggest positive impact you can, despite being bad at it.
I see him as a flawed, tragic, and highly influential character worth learning about. And I appreciate your good faith effort to surface those complexities.
As you've heard already, the "bailey" behind It's Okay to be White isn't, "fuck the blacks," it's, "fuck woke people and fuck their double standard that says you're allowed to be racist against whites." And under that understanding, anyone who disagrees with that *is* aggressing against white people, and choosing not to be around them is a very valid thing to do.
Scott, you didn't make a single acknowledgement of that fact. You are instead propagating the implicit blacks vs whites, anyone-who-objects-is-a-racist framing that one side has asserted, to which the other entirely disagrees.
You did the exact same thing previously when you censored a line that said something like "the British right are angry that posting about immigrant crimes can lead to longer jail terms than the crimes themselves" and replaced it with, "they're angry that they can't make racist tweets."
I am not here to relitigate either argument, what I care about is that they were argued entirely in one side's favour, using their sensibilities, their preferred definitions for words, their background concepts and context.
This flunks the Intellectual Turing Test and directly betrays the promise behind the SSC of the old days, which was that whoever you were, you were likely to find yourself fairly represented and a real attempt would be made to understand you. This was what made it a place all sides could come to be and learn interesting things - often about each other.
I don't know if this is you favouring your real views, or if you're giving up too early to too many respectability cascades, or if you're simply taking the winning side on topics you find boring as a shortcut.
But it's corrosive. The effect this has is that I think, Scott is wrong/lying about these things I do understand, so I'll down-weight him when he wants me to care about things I don't understand. Fucked if I care about donating kidneys, vegetarianism, AI risk, or not encouraging my American friends to vote for the next Trump, if the voices talking that way are just playing the same games I hear everywhere else.
I am fast losing faith in the Rationalist project.
not gonna pretend that i am reading this whole comment post either. i appreciate that you read and reflect on comments so meaningfully and thoughtfully.
“Given how much other information he had, updating from one ambiguous poll where 26% of people gave an ambiguously bad answer, to “this entire ethnic group of 30 million people is a hate group…””
It doesn’t sound like that’s what he was doing? In the full context, he seems to be treating the poll as the last straw or perhaps a final confirmation, rather than something that reversed his position. He mentions Don Lemon, he mentions other experiences he’s had where he’s been called racist unfairly.
(I would also quibble that Adams clearly considered the “not sure” people to have given a bad answer too… you don’t have to agree, but it’s disingenuous to reduce it to 26%)
I agree with the overall argument you made in this section, but I think you may have exaggerated the salience Adams gave this one factoid in an effort to make it fit your “updating too strongly on weak information” definition of racism.
One might be able to argue that Adam’s’ mentioning/using this poll at all is the problem. That is, maybe the poll is garbage and Adams should have ignored it. (Which is, maybe, what Alexander was trying to say (hyperbolically).)
I know Scott Adams from my brother listening to him and I remember him going on all these crazy rants on podcasts or shows about how George Floyd wasn’t murdered and his killer, Derek Chauvin, was innocent. The guy was racist to his core.
I think your footnote is more honest than your main text here. Adams FAFO'd. He played the provocation game for years because he liked the attention and engagement. The "avoid black people" comment wasn't a naive slip — it was a miscalculation by someone who understood exactly what he was doing. Hard to invoke free speech martyrdom for someone who got burned by the same dynamics he'd been exploiting.
I found that https://banana2.ai/nano-banana allows you to create Scott Adams-style comics. After all, he excelled most at drawing comics—not saving the world...
No free trial? And of course they only tell you that after you prepare the prompt in something that seems like a free trial dialog...
In case someone has the credits, and wants to spend them on this:
Create a comic in Dilbert style. Three frames. Dilbert is talking to Dogbert. In first frame, Dilbert says "I created a website for rational discussion." In second frame, Dogbert asks: "Did you connect it to the internet?" Dilbert says: "Yes." In third frame, Dogbert says: "That was your first mistake."
I always thought of the nil nisi bonum rule for obituaries this way: it does not mean you are literally banned from mentioning criticism or pointing to defects of the deceased, but it should be coming from a feeling of compassion. I guess this is the Christian view of saying: you can point out that people made mistakes or "sinned", but after all we all do and only God can judge us anyway.
And this seems very clear to me in your review, that it is one of a "fellow nerd" who looks with clear compassion on Adams' life and his struggles.
It’s impossible to understand Scott Adams unless you spent time listening to his podcast. To pull out a few quotes and make assumptions about his character is probably a mistake. He liked ideas and would spend time exploring them, often recreationally. His listeners knew this was an internal dialectic, not a confession of deeply held beliefs. Knowing what Scott Adam’s said or wrote misses the point: Adam’s is best defined by how he thought about things. And he knew that humans are Janus faced and inconsistent, that there is no unification of identity, that humans are a mixture of radically different and contradictory thought impulses. Humans are meant to be complicated. It would be nice if we celebrated that more.
Banned for this comment.
I have no idea what this comment said, I first saw it after the ban, but it got me thinking.
Would it be a fair ask for a sort of broad categorical comment when someone gets banned? “Banned for bigotry in this comment.” Or advertising, or personal attacks, or whatever the case may be.
Without that, I at least find the more sterile version a little ominous. I don’t imagine that’s your intent.
I'm nervous about having to give some kind of legally airtight reasoning that lets someone challenge "Aha, you said the reason I got banned was X, but I was no worse at X than this other person who didn't get banned", because usually it's some kind of gestalt. Some people take banning really poorly and get the exact words I use etched into their brain, and I don't want to have to navigate those considerations every time I ban a terrible comment.
I think if the comment had continued to exist, you would find it very obvious why I banned them, and wouldn't be worried. Either this person deleted their comment as soon as it got banned, or Substack messed up and turned a ban into a ban+delete (which sometimes happens). If this keeps happening, I will ask Substack to stop doing that.
> Michelle Obama makes it a point to avoid clothes from white designers
I think it is pretty stupid... and actually counterproductive if the goal is to reduce racism (but perhaps that wasn't the goal).
Fleeing to white neighborhoods may or may not be reasonable, but doing it because of a poll showing responses to a question everyone interprets differently is pretty stupid. For the record, I think it is perfectly okay to be white (or any other color), but I expect people to say stupid things in the polls.
Remember, 10% of the polled are pro-Ebola.
(Joe Paterno, however, polled at around 2% favorability).
<mildSnark>
>Remember, 10% of the polled are pro-Ebola.
But, but, but - what fraction of the respondents were virus particles? :-)
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2455
</mildSnark>
I think Michelle Obama should keep an open mind and be willing to consider clothing designs no matter the race of the artist. There you go!
[Also, Yglesias and Klein are only smart and good at predictions in these bubbles.]
Not sure exactly what you mean by "these bubbles", but nobody can be smart about everything I guess.
[We spend more on interest than we do on the military, but no one is willing to stand up and say that is an issue.]
Good news, Yglesias has been doing more and more writing recently about how Congress should return to focusing on deficit reduction and getting the ballooning debt under control. He was an early leader on housing, maybe in a few years more people will be talking about interest payments (that is, the national debt).
Low-effort high-temperature snipe, banned.
Have to put a pin in this for now, but will definitely come back. Re: “… hunted” he was right, and will be unquestionably right soon enough.
Care to make a bet? I can put $100 on this not happening.
Darn, you beat me to it. I encourage this as a means of relentlessly sassing people who say things because they sound exciting, rather than because they believe them.
People who really believe they may be forced to flee to Canada generally already have businesses there (in that Canada is significantly more likely to let you immigrate... if you're already producing taxes for them.)
Things aren’t exactly low-stress up here either. This was everywhere yesterday as the digital version of a front-page, above-the-fold, all-caps headline:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/the-decibel/article-military-models-invasion-of-canada-as-trump-threatens-greenland/
Oh? Yeah, America's probably going to invade you (in a non-unipolar world, we can't afford an undefended northern border -- and we're not about to give you the high-tech weaponry that you'd need to defend that long, long border). Alberta will be pleased, and Quebec will continue to be irate about everything. You guys are only really upset about it because Canada has constructed a national identity built upon "we're not the dirty Americans." (If America would take over Mexico, there would be some nationalistic "mild anger", but people would be shouting in the streets and screaming in happiness, on the main.)
Canada's known about the American plan to invade Canada for ages, though (This seems to be "treating it seriously" as opposed to "yeah, that might happen."). It's not like Canada doesn't have a plan to invade America (it's fabulous, by the way)...
My commentary about "fleeing to Canada" was related to John McCain getting elected. A very different world back then, much safer.
So in the multipolar world with an invasion of Canada you imagine, do Canadians get to vote? Or does America give up on democracy in favour of empire.
> Yeah, America's probably going to invade you (in a non-unipolar world, we can't afford an undefended northern border
This is military insanity. Annexing Canada would replace a long northern border with Canada with a long northern border with Russia. Large states 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲 having buffer states. Always have, always will.
Where do you get the idea that Mexico would be generally happy with a USA take-over?
This comment is a thoroughly fascinating journey through hitherto unknown and unimagined realms of "what the actual fuck?" I could probably spend days unraveling the strange, thoroughly foreign world model this implies and still not run out of things to unpack.
"in a non-unipolar world, we can't afford an undefended northern border--and we're not about to give you the high-tech weaponry that you'd need to defend that long, long border"
Wowzers, where do we start? I guess we have to untangle the geographic muddle right off: *which* "northern border" are we so concerned about defending. Being part of the sentence with "we can't afford" rather strongly implies you're talking about the northern border of the U.S. But if that were the case, the next sentence would make zero sense: why would the U.S. need to give Canadians *anything* in order for it (the U.S.) to be able to defend it's own border, in it's own territory? So I'm forced to assume you're really, very deeply concerned about *Canada's* ability to defend our Northern border with...the Arctic Ocean?
Which brings us to to the even more puzzling question of "why?" If you're talking about the national security policy you can "afford" as a nation, you have to be imagining this border--Canada's arctic coastline--as some sort of vulnerability that could leave you open to an attack. But an attack on *what*? By *whom*? Russia is the obvious guess for the latter, but...like...you know that Russia already has perfectly direct maritime access to the entire West Coast of the U.S., right? And is very close to Alaska in particular. Of course, none of the choicest U.S. targets are especially close to Russian territory, but invading northern Canada *doesn't bring them any closer.* The notion that Russia landing in force at fucking Whitefish Station or Cape Perry would somehow present a military threat to the mainland U.S. is beyond comical. Watch out! After seizing the Inuvik Tim Horton's to use as a logistic hub, they're perfectly staged for attacks on Seattle and Anchorage, each a mere 2000 miles away. Absolutely diabolical!
But then there's this offhanded notion--barely even worth a couple of words--that the ONLY reason Canadians might be at all upset about armed men showing up to take their land at gunpoint is that it cuts against the grain of our "national identity." This is the point where I earnestly have to wonder whether you've met a single human being ever in your life. I consider myself pretty relaxed and peaceable, and there's a lot of things that *don't* seem worth getting mad about. But if "people steal your land at literal gunpoint and start ordering you around" doesn't make the list, I cannot for the life of me imagine what WOULD. Did you just, like, read WAY too far into the stereotype of Canadians as pathologically polite? Or do you just have such an impossible surfeit of positive affect for the U.S. that you literally can't get your brain to model how somebody could not be pleased at the thought of becoming American? This is an honest question--I genuinely don't understand how you could fail at modeling other humans this badly, and I'd like to understand.
Kind of dwarfed by everything else, but it's also pretty weird that you seemingly don't understand how militaries drawing up contingency plans and gaming out invasion scenarios is normal, unremarkable, non-threatening behavior, even among allies. It's literally their job to be ready for these kinds of things: the gulf between "drawn up plans for this scenario on paper" and "actively working towards putting the scenario in practice" is even wider than the gulf between Canada and Russia.
With no deadline they can never be proven wrong.
Sure, but if they indicate they are interested in taking the bet, then you can negotiate the details of how and when it is to be decided. If they ignore or deflect then you know can just mute them as not worth your time. The great thing is that you don't even have to be the one to offer the bet to benefit from its offer. I'm muting "Blondie" now.
I doubt you could tell if "republicans" or "democrats" were being hunted. Perhaps if you say civilians who are not federal employees. There's a substantial number of people whose deaths would absolutely not make the news (care to guess how many non-soldiers we lost in Afghanistan?)
How on Earth is that true. If you were forced to put money on one ideological group being “hunted” by the government, MAGA kind of seems like the side with the brownshirt-like militia-cum-police force that is champing at the bit to hurt innocents.
A couple of kids boarded a bus and had their stupid beef out with gunplay which then killed a true “innocent” who happened to be a bus passenger. (Sadly I cannot gratify you with the knowledge of whether the victim got her just deserts or not as the dead woman’s politics were not made known.) This only made the local news a second time because the judge reprimanded one of the teens for laughing, rolling his eyes, etc. in court. The media likes it when judges get tetchy and Judy-like.
Some few thousand of us in an MSA of 7.8 million read about it because our elderly relatives still take the newspaper.
17, the kid had a long rap sheet already and was already awaiting trial for aggravated robbery when the bus “incident” which was the last incident in some hapless bystander’s life, happened.
I’d say it could happen to anyone, but in fact nobody would read this sort of blog would ever be riding the city bus in this city. Period.
Anyway, thanks to the judiciary, to lawyers, we will be reading about the kid for years and all the people he killed. We all know that by now. Even Reddit which so hates the police (and seems not always to understand their demographic makeup) has come around to displeasure with the generic “DA” and their wild decision making. And one-way pattern of “errors”.
This sort of example is what I think a normal person would conjure if presented with the locution of government-sanctioned “hunting”.
So... not hunting then?
Even if we accept your premise and framing, you're describing a situation where poor governance has reduced enforcement on, and incarnation of, potentially dangerous individuals and also increased the risk for the rest of society.
Hunting implies a situation where people are actively incentivized to go after a particular demographic. You're situation is one people are insufficiently punished for being violent writ large. These are different.
What happened in Houston was wrong, but does not imply that anyone is being hunted.
“Hunting” is a metaphor whose meaning may be fixed and un-metaphor-like for you. Probably a good reason to speak more plainly if you care to extrapolate the future.
Reminds me of another cringe usage that entered the lexicon, to stay, it seems: “the predator” - nearly always in a sexual connection.
It’s a weird slur against actual predators, the only ones that ever were, that is - in the animal kingdom. Who do what they do neither for sex nor to cause suffering. What has that to do with nasty people? I hate that word used in that non-sense, probably unreasonably.
I don't understand how a bystander getting killed in a beef between two POS has anything to do with being Scott Adam's claim of Democrats hunting Republicans.
Can you speak plainly and spell out your logic for this?
More context for those outside the Houston area:
https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/houston-metro-bus-shooting-suspects/285-380389de-f993-4cc3-adb7-bf11f8812e91
Party affiliations of relevant DAs, etc.? Of course, the more relevant binary as to the intended victims is not Dem/Rep but outre, criminal/decent, ordinary.
The etymology of predator is about looting and pillaging, not originally about carnivores. Anecdotally, it's also not my primary assumption when I hear the word.
The predators of Genghis Khan - versus the predators of the natural world. You do you, not sure the former is more firmly planted in the mind. Of course, post-feminism, most young people probably associate it with the rape neologism.
I don't understand this at all. You seem to claim:
1) "Hunting" is a metaphor so broad that "Democrats will hunt Republicans" can be satisfied by an innocent bystander catching a stray during a gunfight, but also
2) "Predator" is a non-metaphor that should only ever refer to non-human carnivores, and never to, e.g., human stalkers, similarities in method notwithstanding.
This seems to me like a version of "Words mean whatever I want them to mean. I get to be grandly metaphorical when it protects my claim from refutation, but hyper-literal when interpreting the claims of others."
I do not agree with you at all that a "normal person" would conceive of your example as one of "government-sanctioned hunting" of Republicans by Democrats. I think a "normal person" would think the verb "to hunt" means something like "to pursue for food or in sport" as Merriam-Webster defines it (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hunt)
It's not hunting unless you're wearing a deerstalker hat.
This kind of thing is despicable and genuinely boils my blood, and is part of why I identity as a conservative. That being said, never in a thousand years would I refer to this as the government “hunting” any kind of individual or group.
Well, truly the important thing is the semantic aspect, whichever way you feel about the status quo. May a thousand ACX threads bloom.
Is that not what the exact point of this discussion was?
I can’t see the OG comment now, but I assumed the person was gesturing at the idea that rhetoric *when approved by the bien-pensants, media, academia, etc.* will tend to make life dangerous for those on the wrong side of the line.
Gosh, it has gotten hard to type on the phone with that bar in the middle Telling me the website I’m on.
And The criminal class is very much on the right side of the line. That’s more or less foundational to turning the world upside down.
I am not sure why he said this would happen this year.
2nd comment: a trivial example. A friend of mine told me she was going to a funeral a few years ago. Not more than five, can’t recall. A member of a family she had known in her hometown. She was part of a couple that were murdered in the NE, can’t recall city. The killer told the police that he had wanted to watch white children watch their parents die. In that he succeeded.
Now the words of a psycho or drugged-up thug or whatever he was, should never be taken as interesting. So that’s not the interest. None of us are enriched by hearing such things, no matter their bent.
What’s interesting is just that reversal game. Switch it up. Everyone in America would know the names. There would likely be a monument. The media would milk it for all it could to stoke a race war they will never stop hoping for.
As it is, this little story is not even readily google-able.
Scott already wrote in the post about the exact thing you're doing here and how it's corrosive to truth and functional society:
> My thesis is that tolerating claims of “directional correctness” - the thing where someone asks to get a pass because even if they said wasn’t literally true, it “points to” an “emotionally correct” thing - is eventually totally corrosive. It means everyone ratchets up their claims to the highest level they think they can get away with (ie walk back later if challenged, as a motte and bailey). And then you end up with this miasma where maybe 5% of people totally believe you, and 50% of people sort of absorb the connotation and think something like that is true, and then people get terrified of the Democrats and think of them as monsters and treat politics as an existential struggle where they will genuinely get arrested or murdered unless they do it to the Democrats first, and then you get a civil war or something.
Sure - but that’s been the MO of the media for years and years, right down to the “directionally” or more aptly, the “spiritually correct”. All the news, and very nearly only the news, that feels good to print. A war does indeed seem the object.
I suppose there’s virtue in not seeing this coming. That virtue is not unrelated to the above, perhaps.
It seems hard to find a reasonably policy that would reliably stop this.
Imagine you have a list of 100 people. All these people have definitely committed some petty crime. (Graffiti, shoplifting)
All of them have been accused of aggravated robbery, and maybe 60 of them are guilty of that crime. A few of them might commit murder at some point, most won't.
The police can't see the future.
They aren't so draconian as to lock people up long term for shoplifting, or for crimes that the accused hasn't been found guilty of yet.
> And one-way pattern of “errors”.
The errors in the other direction are when an innocent person gets locked up, or when someone who committed a minor crime and is basically safe gets locked up way too long.
Not in America? The errors tend to be (well, except that they are not errors) - out on bail for shooting someone to death, kill somebody else. Or killed somebody but no time served. Various alternatives to serving time. Or charges simply dropped. Or. period During which time case has to have this or that done or go to court, allowed to expire.
It’s extremely common place down here. I hope you don’t think I’m describing something strange. Somebody recently I can’t remember what but they killed somebody and the craziest thing was they had like 45 charges on their record and they were still you know 17 or 19 or whatever.
There was the fellow who left our town after killing his parents, and went to another city and killed a half dozen random people, including a mother pushing a baby in a stroller. That one was interesting because the guy had been in jail quite recently, he had threatened his parents the ones that he had ultimately killed. I don’t imagine that his parents were particularly excited for him to come home as presumably, they were the ones who had called the police. There was a very tiny bit of negative press when it turned out that the local DA had been in contact with the lefty DA in the city north of here, as well as a group in Soros umbrella called Wren Collective. And some nonprofit had bailed the guy out as part of a group bail thing. They admitted they had not really looked at individual cases. In other words, that was a death by lawyer. Or rather 8 deaths or whatever it was.
I realize that these people‘s deaths or other lives, do not have quite the value of the people being bailed, but still
There actually is a solution to this supposedly unsolvable tradeoff: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/who-vouches-for-youhtml
Make people pay for their actual risk, and don't tolerate the "judgement proof" https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/requirelegalliabilityinsurancehtml career criminals https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/04/misdemeanor-bail.html who repeatedly violate the law figuring they have nothing to lose.
oh joy, another way to screw the poor even further - I'm sure people struggling to make ends meet as is would love to buy "legal liability insurance" with high premiums (because they have no money, so they're high risk!)
God forbid we redistribute things so there aren't as many 'asset-proof' people, let alone get tough on white collar crime.
If you redistribute things, how do you prevent the "asset-proof" people from spending the value and so being asset-proof again?
The problem with getting tough on "white collar crime" is those are the people that hire lawyers to keep them out of jail (which is quite legal).
How do you deal with Solar F*ing Roadways, a clear scam, designed to be a scam, and yet also designed, quite carefully, to be legal?
This proposal is compatible with redistribution, subsidizing insurance for the poor etc. The important thing, though, is that people pay marginal costs for being marginal riskier, thus still incentivizing them to lower their risk (realistically, the insurance organization vouching for them will try to find ways to do this).
I've ridden the bus in Houston.
In the Westchase district?? Wow. Small
World.
"No when we said 'hunting' we meant common crime, and when we said 'republicans' we meant random passerbys of unknown political persuasion"
God that's so idiotic, why do you waste time writing this drivel, who exactly do you think you're gonna convince? Is it like the world's worst performance art? Do you get off this? Why are you doing this?
Lol I think maybe there’s some truth at the bottom of this comment, just deflected on to someone else. I was just curious enough to wonder about how I had somehow been transmogrified into the poster of the comment. It seems it was deleted? But people liked it too well to relinquish it, or there was something more - as you obliquely suggest.
Makes more sense now.
BLM already set fire to Minneapolis. Now Don Lemon's crew is raiding churches. This is brownshirt behavior any way you want to slice it.
Yes, the militias did show up in Gettysburg (that was a grand psyop). They didn't hurt a soul. I don't stand with the militias, to be clear -- but, in general, they also ARE NOT the people going into Philadelphia to "shoot black people." (Citing Field Negro on this one, some dumb f*** does do this, every once in a while, and the cops get called on the illegally brandishing idiot).
>BLM already set fire to Minneapolis. Now Don Lemon's crew is raiding churches. This is brownshirt behavior any way you want to slice it.
What do these have to do with one another? BLM protests in 2020, which factually did not set fire or burn down Minneapolis, I doubt you've been within 500 miles of there, it's perfectly fine.
Don Lemon reported on a controversial protest and interviewed the attendees and church members. He wasn't part of the protest, he didn't interrupt the service. You seem to have basic facts incorrect.
When I read comments like this, it becomes abundantly clear what media sources you turn to and that it is pure propaganda. Neither of the things you mention, even in the most beneficial light to your argument, amount to brown shirts.
Meanwhile, Minneapolis where I have close family and friends, is being terrorized by government backed brown shirts who are stopping people for the color of their skin and asking for papers. The brown shirts are now going door to door, a close friend was asked if he "has any Asian or Mexican neighbors he knows of." ICE is murdering people at a much higher rate than the supposedly dangerous undocumented criminals they are tasked with rounding up.
You've got family and friends in Minneapolis? Did they ever get the post office back? How about the three police stations that were burnt? Yes, I do happen to know someone who was trying to estimate the cost of the BLM protests to Minneapolis. He gave up after he got to the post office. Uncle Hugo's was burnt to the ground, priceless relics were lost, including first editions.
Went through Minneapolis on the train, actually (and yes, I did get off). "It's perfectly fine" does not actually represent anything more than a whitebread characterization of "I never went to a bad part of town." A friend of a friend went to the bad part of town, and was robbed (and, um, dragged along behind the car, because he got his hand stuck in the car door) before walking twenty feet. This is not "perfectly fine" behavior (he lost a thousand dollar camera).
Don Lemon :
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/doj-says-it-may-use-kkk-act-to-prosecute-don-lemon-for-reporting-on-church-ice-protest/ar-AA1UBiKI?ocid=BingNewsSerp
https://nypost.com/2026/01/20/us-news/doj-hints-at-charges-against-don-lemon-for-st-paul-church-invasion/
Don Lemon made the story about himself, by bludgeoning parishoners with baity statements, instead of working as an impartial journalist. "The Lieberman Kiss" guy wasn't an "impartial journalist" either... (but he was peaceful, and I support his right to protest and make news).
I do find it funny that the DOJ is going after the front-man, yes.
DOJ x statement: "A house of worship is not a public forum for your protest! It is a space protected from exactly such acts by federal criminal and civil laws! Nor does the First Amendment protect your pseudo journalism of disrupting a prayer service. You are on notice.”
They could have gone anywhere. Go to a public library, camp out in the courtrooms. Have a sit-in at the police headquarters
It's funny that you think I'm turning to media sources at all. Video is video, and it exists regardless of how "hyped" it gets by others.
If I told you there was a documented case of ethnic cleansing in America, could you actually identify the late 20th century court case?
"It’s amazing how confident you are while being four years out of date.
1. The 'Burnt' City: Yes, actually, they did get the Post Office back. The Lake Street station was rebuilt and reopened in 2022. Uncle Hugo's also reopened in 2022. Using fires from six years ago to claim the city is currently a wasteland is pure fantasy.
2. 'Friend of a Friend': Your evidence for the city being a warzone is a 'friend of a friend' story? That’s not data; that’s gossip. Meanwhile, I am telling you about the current reality of my actual family dealing with government agents demanding papers.
3. The Brownshirts: You are cheering for the DOJ (the State) using the KKK Act to threaten a journalist for reporting on a protest. Think about that. The 'Brownshirts' were the State's enforcers. If you support the government arresting reporters and ICE agents interrogating neighbors about their 'Mexican neighbors,' you are the one siding with the Brownshirts here.
Your trivia question about history is just a deflection from the ethnic cleansing happening on our streets right now. I don't need a history book to recognize fascism; I just need to look at who is demanding 'papers' today."
Thank you for the information! I'm glad to see someone bothered to get that post office restored.
I wasn't calling it a warzone, unless you think that Minneapolis being out of pregnancy tests makes it a warzone (which, um? no?)
Friend of a Friend? Yes. I saw the video, his camera was absolutely stolen. You can watch the video on youtube too. This is not gossip, this is "I saw it with my own two eyes." (and yes, over video, but everyone who wants to say something about Renee Good also just "watched video." I watched it with an expert witness for video analysis -- it's not forged).
I hate Real-ID too! Or, um, you're not talking about that, are you? You were in favor of real ID, I take it? And vaccine passports too, maybe? I fully support everyone who's okay with burning their documents as protest for "having to have documents" (and going to prison if necessary). Otherwise, the government is allowed to ask for documentation, not in the LEAST because as of Trump's takeover, there were a million illegals in America who the Courts Had Already Adjudicated (aka Judge say: "yes, you had your day in court, now go home" -- people who just said "no, not going home").
Brownshirts are not government agents. If you want to talk Stasi, KGB, or anyone along those lines, use better words. Brownshirts are roving gangs of antifa, generally paid for by someone (KKK counts, many other groups do, but they are NEVER under the color of the law).
If you truly believe that ICE is out there murdering every brown-skinned person (including, one supposes, the large proportion of ICE that is Tejano), get help. If not, your definition of "ethnic cleansing" is not what the court was using -- that was bonafide murder spree.
> I just need to look at who is demanding 'papers' today."
No, you also need to forget about who was demanding papers a few years ago.
If that's brownshirt behavior, so is throwing random people, including US citizens and legal residents, into vans. The members of both sides who get on the news tend to be incredibly deranged and out for blood, and I don't think anyone who thinks attacking uninvolved civilians for their political project is acceptable should be given any quarter by decent people, no matter their political affiliation.
Yeah, I'll say that "throwing random people" into vans is probably not the best way to find the gang members, or whomever they're looking for. Assume they've been tipped off (or that there is SOME reason, that those people aren't just "random"), does that change matters? I presume the issue is that "finding someone in a large apartment building" is a difficult matter, and they want to clear everyone out, and then sort through them.
I find this far less problematic, as a police maneuver, than keeping the Jan 6th people in jail for so long that most of them were "let go for time served."*
*bear in mind jail does not mean prison, and you're getting different treatment there.
Being held for months without a trial is a violation of Constitutional Rights, is it not?
Tossing people into vans for assaulting federal officers was done back in BLM, as well (they're not legally required to tell people where they're going). "Do not touch Officer Friendly" -- the rest of the squad hadn't been deputized, and it was not "federal pokey" if they were assaulted, so they hung back until "stupid reactionaries" took the bait.
OT: thank you for correctly using "champing"; even Scott wrote "chomping" in the footnotes.
What are you even predicting here? Are you about to uncover some secret mass grave where all the Republicans who were hunted five years ago ended up?
Ah, you probably believe the Democrat propaganda the lying mainstream media are feeding to you. About Trump kicking out of the Republican party everyone who didn't become his loyal follower.
Nothing could be further from truth! Those former Republicans have all disappeared from the screens because they are lying in secret mass graves. Trump could only save a selected few from this horrible fate (and yes, he obviously prioritized friends over enemies, that's common sense). That's why there were so many ICE agents recruited recently -- to stop this horrible bloodshed. And of course, now Democrats get angry about ICE agents and make up fake stories about them. Their goal is to abolish ICE and complete the purge, so that no Republican remains alive.
(Almost waiting for someone to post "this, but unironically".)
> Almost waiting for someone to post "this, but unironically".
Well, now I'm not doing it.
This thread has attracted many of the most schizophrenic political commentators I have ever seen. I’m almost afraid to even reply to the guy above you.
At least one of the schizophrenics is a regular here that switches accounts every few weeks, so... it's not really anything new here.
WTF do you even mean?
Want to make a bet with specific criteria?
Will this happen before or after the invasion of Greenland?
After the invasion of Greenland, but before the invasion of Venezuela, Iran, and Minnesota.
You think that the typical Republican will be murdered by Biden supoporters between the time period 2020 -- 2021?
$10000 says you're wrong, to be paid at the end of 2021. (5% annual compounded interest if either of us pay late.)
"Soon Enough"??? are you implying by 'soon' that in 3 years, Democrats will be back in power and then will be hunting Republicans?
If you haven't been keeping up. Republicans are in power, with total control of all 3 branches of government, and with ICE they have a domestic military that is bigger than the rest of the world's 'real' military combined.
Three years is a long time, Dem's are the ones being literally, real life hunted, right now in real time. There wont be an election in 3 years for your paranoia to come to fruition.
Bet me that there will be an election in 3 years? If there is one, you will post a banana, as ascii art? if there is not one, I will rickroll you?
Pretty much everyone has elections...
I'm allowed to pick generous conditions for a bet. Everything's negotiable.
A better bet is will Trump be on the ballot - if somehow his approval is above 40% and he's not in a hospital or worse, I bet he will be
It would take a constitutional amendment to get him on the ballot again. (As the last real try for a constitutional amendment was Just That under Reagan, its not out of the realm of possibility), at least for President.
I do not (and I'm pretty sure NO ONE sees Trump as taking the Vice Presidential nomination -- it'd be hilarious though, him trying not to outshine the guy on top) think he'd go for Representative (that's got basically no power your first term, except a very small soapbox). Which leaves Senator, Governor, Mayor or dogcatcher. Again, he's too bombastic to get elected dogcatcher (I hope! And I've voted for him multiple times! Would people really vote for him to "Catch all the dogs? All the cats?")... Governor would be problematic (most are pretty ineffectual).
Any thoughts on him running for Mayor of New York? Could he win?
I would take the bet if you're willing to restrict it to "running for President of the United States." (I think the New York Mayoral is the most likely, otherwise).
This is nonsensical. I'm pretty sure this is just a troll.
So far, the defenses of this in the thread amount to...
"Democrats want to very slightly increase my chances of dying to violent crime." I am curious if when you come back you can come up with something better. Also, are we all ignoring that the comment in question ascribed a political valence to the targets, i.e. that they would be conservative? If anything, since the supposed higher risk of being victimized in violent crime pertains mostly to urban whites, it is probably on net affecting liberals slightly more (and, of course, the spike in crime rates from 2020-2022 is mostly crime committed by black perpetrators against black victims, so even saying it particularly targets *whites* is a bit ridiculous).
In order to suggest that Adams' comment is correct, you would need to establish that there is some large-ish group specifically trying to cause physical harm to conservatives in a systematic way, and that the risks posed by this group are significant and real.
I don't see you setting a date for "soon enough", so that sounds unfalsifiable.
Trump is sending in masked gestapo to round up people on the street based mostly on their skin color and murdering people who get in the way with impunity, but yeah it’s totally the white people who have to fear Democrats.
I'm surprised and disappointed you spent this much time on this subject of Scott Adams. Why?
*spent this much time
P.s: No edit button
You'll have to explain further - I've never promised to cover only the world's most important topics, and I don't think this is any worse than, say, my toddlers' music preferences, or silly stories about selling a pen.
I do think it's interesting to imagine you trying to write an article this circumspect and well considered about, say, Amanda Marcotte.
(She is, so far as I know, still alive, but I don't think you'd be any more likely to write this sort of article about her if that wasn't the case.)
Huh? Why exactly is Scott obliged to write a careful article about a controversial figure who's personally attacked him and his friends just because he wrote a careful article about a different controversial figure who's been a major positive influence on his life?
These takes are bizarre, Scott isn't Wikipedia personified, claiming to be the final neutral authoritative word on every topic. He's a blogger with his own opinions and perspectives. If you want writing that valorises Amanda Marcotte and condemns (or just ignores) Scott Adams...you can easily find that elsewhere.
(For what it's worth I think he's become way too scared of expressing controversial opinions in the last few years, and yet people like you want him to go even further. What is with this culture of reader entitlement?)
He's not so obliged, and the point is that it's a lot easier to be careful about a controversial figure if they never said anything unpleasant about you personally, regardless of what else they did.
I don't think Scott is obliged to write a nice article about Marcotte or a mean I've about Adams, which is why I said nothing of the sort.
I can't imagine Scott doing this, but that's no strike against him - he's not a saint, and that can't be reasonably expected of anybody.
Of course. It's hard enough to be circumspect about any controversial figure in the first place.
If Scott wrote a "ding-dong the witch is dead" piece on Marcotte, you bet I'd read that with zeal and attention, because my opinion of her gets lower with every new thing I read from her.
But Scott won't do that, because he's a better person than I am. And this kind of "heh, bet you wouldn't be fair to your enemies, would you, you hypocrite?" sort of needling is unworthy, Adam.
I don't think it's needling. Scott wrote a whole well-regarded article about exactly who it is and isn't easy to be charitable and understanding to!
Noticing who is and isn't within the circle of "ah, a controversial character, but worth seeing the humanity in them" is worth at least a passing mention, I think.
Scott is a kinder and more generous person than most of us, but even that has its shape and limits.
Scott openly admitted that he spent this many words on Adams because he liked the guy. There is no pretense here of a "it's worth seeing the humanity in them" perspective that's supposed to be generalizable to everyone, and literally no one argues that everyone deserves a 10,000-word ACX eulogy. I think you are trying to hint at some kind of hypocrisy on Scott's part, but it just isn't there.
Being kind and generous to enemies that have attacked you is not a good thing.
Maybe she should have written a comic strip that was influential on his life during elementary school.
Has she had a notably interesting life? Has she produced both things are great as Dilbert and as bad as Adam’s philosophical novels?
Most people are much less interesting than Adam’s, and I think you are trapped in a prison of tribal thinking if your response to this is WHERE IS THE ARTICLE ABOUT A POLARIZING FIGURE FROM MY TRIBE INSTEAD OF THE BAD TRIBE!
I did not know that much about Adams, but found the article moving and interesting. That’s reason enough to write something!
There is an edit button; click the three dots in the upper-right corner of your post and you'll find it.
Because Scott Adams was a significant figure in his life. That's actually a pretty good reason.
Maybe I don't have a coherent view. I'll try to explain here.
I can't understand why anyone so intelligent and reasonable (Scott Alexander) finds this negative person (that's how I see Scott Adams) interesting.
Why do I think he's negative? I find it hard to explain but I am put off by people who are great at self-promotion but lack substance.
What is substance? You know it when you see it.
I have occasionally chuckled at a Dilbert cartoon but also thought it was highly cynical.
That said, Seinfeld and Curb your Enthusiasm are highly cynical too but I think they're brilliant, funny, important...
I think the original essay lays out why he finds Scott Adams so interesting in pretty thorough, clear detail. Adams was a major influence on him when he was young, he really likes Dilbert, he credits Adams with some of the writing talent that gave him this career, and he sees Adams as a cautionary tale for nerds (a group Scott Alexander writes about with regularity). While I, like you, do not think Adams is very interesting since I only rarely saw Dilbert strips and otherwise am only familiar with him from his acerbic, right-wing twitter presence, I enjoyed the original piece as a matter of personal reflection that uses Adams as a foil.
You make excellent points. I guess my original comment is irrational.
Appreciated this response.
"I have occasionally chuckled at a Dilbert cartoon but also thought it was highly cynical."
To me, the question to be asked is not "Is it cynical?" but "Does it accurately describe observable reality?".
I disagree. Cynicism is corrosive to society, specially to young people trying to understand life. There's a reason U.S tweens and teens are very cynical. It has a lot to do with cynical comedy shows which they consume voraciously. The difference between U.S teens and teens in other cultures where popular shows are less cynical, is huge.
Reality about life / the world - well, there are only perspectives. We are not discussing Newton's laws here.
In life, you can choose to see the same glass as half-empty or half-full. Kids should be encouraged to see it as half full.
That sounds like an argument from consequences.
I'm not saying his writing shouldn't exist. But that his view is not the only one. It's the cynical one. There are earnest views of the same world. Kids simply don't get exposed to them as much once they're tweens, in America.
This is hardly reality.
You appear to be arguing with points I wasn't making.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw
>Kids should be encouraged to see it as half full.
Sure, but Dilbert wasn't for kids. Everyone else should be encouraged to see the world accurately. Most of the time that involves reminding us that most people who say the glass is half-full are trying to sell you a glass at twice its fair price. Understanding the difference between what people say and what they mean is one of the most important skills in life, and most of Dilbert's humor was rooted in that difference.
Yeah. I disagree with my own original comment now :).
Robin Hanson's "metacynicism" argued that the old tend to be more cynical than the young. http://robinhanson.com/metacynic.html
Tweens and Teens are very cynical because the more education they get, the stupider they are (IQ test wise). Yes, "everything isn't your fault" is a pretty cynical take.
If Jerry Seinfeld became a super-controversial political figure, and then died, I would also expect some comparable blog posts about him (if not necessarily from Scott, I don't know if he was ever a fan).
I'm curious what percentage of Republicans would agree with the statement "black lives matter." That seems the most comparable thing
Edit: Please read this article before responding to me saying the same thing as everyone else: https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/its-ok-to-be-white-rasmussen-poll/
This is topic that's frustrating to discuss because any answer other than "BLM is awesome and you're racist if you don't agree" is about all that ever comes of it.
I understand BLM to mean "Blacks in particular are being killed by cops. (Implicitly, more than other races). This has to stop! Black Lives Matter". The problem is, AFAICT, these aren't the facts. Blacks are not killed by cops more than any other race. So, like everyone claims "All Lives Matter" has some ulterior motive than it's plain meaning, and like everyone claims "It's okay to be white" has some ulterior motive. BLM, also has some ulterior motive if it's true that its very foundation is false.
If it's foundation is false, then it's a nonsense statement and "All Lives Matter" is the appropriate response. "Black Lives Matter? Yea, so do Asian Lives and Muslim Lives and Jewish Lives and White Lives .... cops shouldn't kill anyone".
If you want to learn about the evidence that BLM is based on a false belief, Google "Coleman Hughes on BLM" as he's documented it the most. I don't want to summarize his opinion more than I have above. You can read/listen to his evidence and decide for yourself.
At first I was first totally on board with BLM. It's easy to buy into because we basically want to believe it. Coleman changed my mind.
Possible outcomes from this comment: (1) like I mentioned above, I'm labeled as a racist and ignored (2) You go read the evidence and decide yes or no that BLM is based on a false foundation. I find the evidence compelling. I might find counter evidence compelling, but until I do, I don't feel racist to say that I disagree with the statement "black lives matter" in the larger sense (it represents something false). I agree with the statement "black lives matter just as much as everyone else's"
(American) Cops kill more whites than blacks, but they kill blacks at a 2.8x higher rate according to mappingpoliceviolence.org, and I seem to recall an earlier version of the page saying that *unarmed* black people are killed at 5x the rate of unarmed white people. You have different data?
This would surely be a function of who/which people in which areas overwhelmingly *call* the police most, and thus have the most interactions (chases, encounters, standoffs, verbal commands uttered at them)?
Sometimes it seems like people are unaware how much these situations resemble a drama with a large Greek chorus of people.
I've heard enough "driving while black" stories to suspect this isn't the case. I think I saw some clarifying data at one point, but hm, can't recall any detail. (What I do recall: the U.S. doesn't gather enough data)
You could be right about traffic stops.
I recall wanting the police to come watch my old street for speeders. At least once in awhile. (Though just 2 lanes, a busy street, a hill, much speeding or so it seemed to me as a mother, more invested then; many peds and bikes and the path between 3 schools.)
We weren’t awarded any policing and the explanation was that personnel were concentrated in areas with more urgent problems and those problems were 24/7 (another thing people don’t realize - not everybody goes to bed at night!). The other was that they were working traffic accidents during the school zone hours.
Only once in 20 years did a cop come out, within a few days of my calling. I immediately phoned my husband to make sure he wouldn’t get caught in his wife’s speed trap.
That's called "driving while detested minority" is what blacks miss. "driving while white" stories are super common in Hawaii. It's not a race thing, it's a detested local minority thing.
For example, I got a parking ticket last week and a giant "go home haole" remark from some half Filipino, half Chinese, half Tahitian mutt on Oahu as he wrote it. The guy with the big Confederate, wait I mean Kingdom of Hawaii, flag on his oversized redneck, wait I mean moke, truck illegal parked between me and the cop car didn't. Welcome to being a detested minority.
In my city, they did "driving while white" as well as "driving while black" -- obviously there's disparate impact there, but it's a simple principle... "Past midnight, go home, don't go driving into someone else's neighborhood."
I'm not sure what value rebranding "racism" as "prejudice against a detested minority" really adds here.
I think if you remove the slurs, and take the message at face value, the underlying argument is that "I was discriminated against for being white in Hawaii, therefore discrimination against black people is not racism."
...it's like you almost got the point 90% of the way but veered off at the last minute.
Genuinely impressive.
They got big trucks in Hawaii? I woulda thought that the gas prices alone would drive them off.
My best interpretation of the BLM data is that:
1) "Driving while black" etc is a real thing, because cops are 'racist' in the pattern-matching sense -- they treat people differently who "look like" (in many dimensions, context-specific) the people they're trying to catch. This is rightly felt by honest black people as an affront on their dignity & rights.
2) The resentment from #1 makes any discrepancy in shooting data very easy to latch onto and amplify as symbolic of the real problem. Most BLM supporters over-estimate the number of police shootings (especially of unarmed individuals) by a factor of ten or more. 2.8x more likely reads very differently from 25 white dudes and 15 black dudes (stats from 2024, completely ignoring that most of these were good shoots). That doesn't make bad policing ok, but it shows that the headlines & slogans weren't necessarily the core problem.
One can do an honest, race-blind "driving while color" -- in that whites also get pulled over if they're in a black neighborhood. My city's done that, before. Obviously there's disparate impact, here, not gonna deny that.
But it is possible to simply say "go home, after midnight, don't drive around someone else's neighborhood LOOKING for the spikes to pop your tires."
I think this is a largely fair encapsulation of the issue, except we should be prepared to acknowledge, as Scott does in this post, that there are plenty of people out there who're racist according to much stricter versions of racism, people who're not shy about the fact that they feel actual animosity for the races they're pattern-matching. There are plenty of police officers who fall into that category, it almost certainly affects their policing behavior, and people who engage with them are most likely going to notice it, even if their behavior is hard to tease out through stats.
There is also probably a genuine effect where some portion of cops restrain themselves from what they would otherwise consider reasonable escalation, if they think the subject's race would make that controversial. This can also coexist with behavior that projects personal animosity for people of a given race.
The stats are complicated, multifaceted, and by their nature not a sufficient source of information to build a clear model around. And different people may interpret the available stats in different ways while acting at least within ordinary standards of honesty and good faith.
In many areas speeding camera were brought in and then removed because they resulted in more black people getting tickets. The cameras do not, generally, see the driver, they only record the plates. And yet!
What's worse is letting AIs set sentencing guidelines. Somehow the sentencing guidelines always turn out racist (they're designed to keep the worst criminals in prison), even when you tell the AI to take race out of the equation.
But simple per capita numbers are misleading here, because there's another variable: number of interactions with the police. Blacks commit more crimes on a per capita basis than whites, meaning they are going to have more police interactions per capita. Even assuming a completely non-racist police force where there's a fixed chance of a shooting per police encounter regardless of race, the bare fact that blacks have more police interactions per capita would mean they would also have more shooting deaths per capita.
To really be fair, you should also add another variable: behavior in police encounters. If a particular behavior (e.g., disobedience) raises the chance of a police shooting, and blacks behave that way more frequently in police encounters than whites, then you would again assume racial differences in shootings even assuming a completely non-racist police force. At least one academic (Roland Fryer) who studied this question taking into account these kinds of variables found no evidence of discrimination in police shootings (though he did find evidence of discrimination in non-lethal uses of force).
https://fryer.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force
Police shootings are ... odd ducks. I assume "non-lethal uses of force" are generally related to "how much do I presume they'll listen to Stop, I'm a Cop!"*
*This is a Big Deal if you're being called on a drunk and disorderly, or bar brawl.
I think they're related to how much they actually DO listen to "Stop, I'm a cop!"
The black population in America is impoverished compared to the white one. In that context, it's not surprising they have far higher rates of crime (e.g., most serial killers are actually black, look up the statistics). In that context, it is not surprising that the police are more likely to kill a black person (when normalizing for the race ratios) than a white one.
To actually answer the question (are the police racist?) you need to do careful deep thinking and statistics. But, as far as I am aware, based on the the literature of people who have done that, the police are actually not particularly racist. E.g., it's pretty uncontroversial fare in FIRE and heterodox academy circles.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differences-in-homicide-rates-are-poorly-explained-by-economics/
The appropriate denominator there isn’t population share it’s violent crime share. That’s because police disproportionately engage with criminals. Blacks commit 51% of all homicides whereas they comprise only 27% of police shootings. Assuming homicide is a reasonable indicator of violent crime propensity then blacks are actually underrepresented in police shootings.
I don't think you should assume that homicide is a reasonable indicator of violent crime. Many homicides are done as "part of business" and "negotiation" or "settling arguments." These are very, very different from "heat of the moment" homicides or "I slept on it, and my abusive husband needs to die" or "you shot my dog, Ima shoot you."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
The facts on the ground with regard to police violence are less relevant to my question than whether a black commentator would be justified in being afraid of, and recommending against any interaction with, Republicans. If fear of republicans is justified, then Scott Adams statement was justified (assuming many Republicans agree with you. Not that you are a Republican, or that you have to be one to disagree with the BLM narrative)
But I personally don't think it was justified. I think 99% of blacks agree it's ok to be white, and 99% of republicans agree black lives matter, and Scott Adams statement was unjustified and immoral fear mongering.
People who identify as gay, more often lesbians than gay men I’ve observed, talk a lot about moving out of state and some small percentage do so. They always cite fear though I’m not aware that anything concrete has happened in that regard. Sometimes curiously, Roe v. Wade enters into it. The other things that I can think of are state legislation around bathrooms and possibly girls sports. I don’t really think there’s a direct line between gay people and this. And the whole bathroom thing has mainly been a boon for contractors and obviously could’ve been avoided, by just never talking about bathrooms as a an important policy area.
These things don’t amount to a threat, so I think it is more just a generalized fear, or in some cases disdain masquerading as fear, or just narcissism.
They receive no criticism for adopting this stance or tone.
I actually had some friends who moved for this reason, though in fact, they had planned it earlier and then kind of adopted the rationale post hoc. And I think part of their motive was never wanting to have to see one of their families again. I think we can all feel jealous if you have that freedom.
In their case, and in all others that I’m aware of, people are always moving somewhere much nicer than here. Just a coincidence I’m sure.
My comment stated that I do not believe it is justified to be afraid of republicans because they disagree with the phrase "black lives matter." Correspondingly, I do not believe Adams was justified in being afraid of blacks because they disagree with the phrase "it is ok to be white." In neither case is rejection of the phrase about the literal words of the motto, but is instead about the political connotations.
Given that you think your friends are silly for leaving the state out of a sense of fear, I assume you consider Adams to be at least as irrational as your friends. As I am sure when Adam said he would avoid blacks, he didn't then plan to move to move to the whitest parts of Appalachia, nor recommended anyone else move to such places.
I don’t know about fear, it’s not native to me. I live in a very mixed area, black and white wise. This is a curious artifact of living in an overwhelmingly majority Hispanic and military city. My daily life involves much more diversity in that narrow sense, than it ever did in my previous city, despite its famously blue nature.
People (strangers) around here of various stripes just act normal as far as I can tell. I mean, except for some people on the street who are on drugs.
Normal is lovely. I highly recommend it.
If there were tension, such as that expressed in the idiot poll, I absolutely would not want to live here. Fear need not enter into it. I’m sorry for people who are fearful where they live.
I don't disagree that this is a bit of an overreaction, but to more explicitly lay out what you're hinting at, it's clear that when gay people leave red states they are mostly leaving the discomfort of regular interactions with homophobic people, and the sense of amorphous fear that accompanies those interactions, than they are genuinely terrified of being violently killed.
This is the same reason rural conservative whites think cities are terrifying, or why white people recently converted to right-wing politics flee San Francisco. They are not actually going to die. Obviously. The absolute chance of being murdered in this country for a specific individual is extremely low, even in cities. They find crime and disorder unpleasant to be around and it triggers an animalistic fear response that they would rather not have to deal with, but this is an embarrassing thing to say out loud, so they pretend they are *genuinely* at risk.
I would say for both groups, being more sincere about what is actually motivating their actions would be good and go a long way toward turning down the temperature. Scott Adams unfortunately was a purveyor of the opposite school, which is that you should write absurd hyperboles where your side will understand immediately what you *really* mean and pretend to agree with your statement because it feels emotionally validating. There are absolutely liberal/gay commentators who do the same thing.
Interesting perspective. I have not seen that fear manifest at all. Kind of more of a non-fear but blowback to a certain Pleasure in defiance of bourgeois norms, which I don’t think would give any pleasure in the absence of said bourgeoisie. Like I think we’re sort of participating in it together Although nothing has ever said on the side of those who are uncomfortable.
I’m surprised to hear this because in so far as the rural population say of a red state is evangelical as supposedly they are, evangelicals tend to be super pro gay now. Protestantism seems to have largely perpetuated itself on identifying with LGBTQ.
And it surely goes without saying that anyone - well, I cant speak for all ethnicities or people from different cultures - people under 40, or 50 really, would probably rather sink into the floor than ever be perceived as homophobic, than which nothing could be “lower status” even if didn’t mean the end of employment.
I may be wrong about this, but I get the feeling from your comment that you yourself are a more conservative-identifying person who lives in a fairly urbanized metro area?
In particular, your read on evangelicals being 'super pro gay' now strikes me as, to be frank, absurd, or the idea of 'protestantism identifying with LGBTQ'. The latter is probably true about liberal, mainline protestant denominations like the Lutherans or Episcopalians, but those are specifically *not* evangelicals.
Pew research from 2025 finds only 36% of American evangelicals believe homosexuality should be accepted by society (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religion-and-views-on-lgbtq-issues-and-abortion/). That's a pretty fundamental level of homophobia, it's not even asking about gay marriage or something where you might be able to construct some handwave-y policy defense.
Regarding your other comment about young people, I again think this might be coming from a lack of experience. That's absolutely true about people who have a college degree. Blue collar young people, especially in rural areas, might be a little less likely to be homophobic than older people, but they aren't especially worried about the status signal sent by their homophobia. This is because they have an entirely alternative status hierarchy to the one of urban, white-collar professionals.
I totally agree about the disingenuous reason, though in relation to disorder. Stated, it is met with: you just want don’t want to see *them*, You just want them to die, or you you just don’t like urban life, or (trash, say): That’s just aesthetics, Or first world problem. Or why don’t you clean up the whole city by yourself if you care about it? Lol.
I have a friend who lives above the Mediterranean, not gay though, Nor of childbearing age - who would exactly espouse the one reason - imagined threat - over the other. Like many such people, she’s probably only the more opinionated about all of it the father remove she is.
I don't disagree with your description of how a standard urban progressive would respond to things. But claiming you are literally at risk of death does not ameliorate this, it actually worsens the mockery one receives from said standard progressive, and makes that mockery genuinely justified. So I'm not sure it really provides a coherent reason to prefer the hyperbole over just factually stating what one believes. If one is so worried about being perceived as unfashionably retrograde by the liberals in their social circle, i.e., they are cowardly, then clearly the best option is to say you want to move 'for the schools' or something more anodyne like that. And if you want to be honest, it's best to be literally honest, rather than hyperbolically overstating what you believe. What the hyperbole does do is provide a thrill, thumbing your nose in the most dramatic way possible at progressive orthodoxy, i.e., 'owning the libs'. But being enslaved to this kind of base emotional indulgence is not exactly any different or better than your enemies.
Evangelicals share a tradition with other forms of dissent or counter culture. Give them a long enough life, and they eventually embrace the thing they were previously obsessed with, the line between those things being tenuous. They’re certainly not part of any older grounding.
As for the rest, your prominent, monied libertarian is likely to (choose to) live in a jurisdiction that grants the town pumpkin patches protective zoning.
My last experience being made uncomfortable was indeed a rural or turning into sprawl area, on a bus returning us from a river toob float. Between the music, the vulgarity, and the actual making out over my head and across the aisle - yeah, I was pretty much in my idea of hell. Made worse by the fact it was raining and the school bus windows were half open, half closed. Not sure which was preferable. Much was palpable - but not fear lol.
How much of "I'm moving to Massachusetts/California/Canada!" is performative?
I don’t know, but it’s pretty easy to perform when you’re getting a quality of life upgrade on all the metrics you didn’t mention as important to you.
They canceled Idaho's pride parade, so... more than you'd think. Of course, those were the gays who'd fled Cali back when "lockdowns" were a thing. Once idaho stopped being cool, they left.
In general? Before "work from home" -- moving is a VERY BIG DEAL. I've moved more than a mile, and that was with carrying everything I owned (except the /serious/ furniture, yes even my pots and rice cookers) -- that took a month of walking back and forth.
And that's not counting "getting a new job" (or two, if you're married).
Most people don't move, unless they absolutely need to.
Most people saying "Ima move to Canada" assume it is easy, and that they won't be illegal, there. Canada has harder immigration regs than America does.
Everyone has a right to their own fears. My own understanding however is that in recent decades there has been a "reverse great-migration" of blacks back to southern states, which are still predominately under southern control. So in practice they don't seem all that afraid, which is something our country can be proud of now.
You're demonstrating the point: anyone who doesn't want to affirm the phrase "Black lives matter" (because of the obvious political connotations it has in addition to its unobjectionable literal meaning) should be able to understand skittishness around the phrase "it's okay to be white." (And vice versa, I'd think.)
But isn't "black lives matter" much more well-known than "it's okay to be white"? I have to imagine the former has close to 100% penetration in the US (plus an easy acronym) but the latter more like 15%. I hadn't heard it prior to this extended discussion.
A lot of people who hear the phrase recognize it as race baiting. Likely because the phrase was specifically chosen for that reason. See this follow-up survey
https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/its-ok-to-be-white-rasmussen-poll/
Normal people should be able to affirm both statements. Treating them as taboos is letting the nutters win.
BLM also refers to a set of organizations that *maybe* promoted riots and *definitely* committed a great deal of fraud, depending which specific chapters you're talking about.
IOTBW is *bait* but lacks any equivalent standing.
I feel like if you asked a person who lived in a cave for the last 20-30 years what kind of things an organization named "black lives matter" would depict they'd say something like "they'd probably show black doctors, scientists, engineers, politicians and/or social workers excelling in their fields; hard working individuals diligently making society better for black folks and overall" and then if you told them it actually focuses on examples of black people getting killed by cops unjustly they would likely be confused as to why it's named that.
I don't feel this is a perspective most people would share. For the majority of people the underlying thesis of "black people's lives have value" is not particularly controversial, only the most wretched groups today would disagree. The majority of people disagrees with something else - namely that there's anything worth fighting for still. They would say that there is no real racism and that black people are doing just as well as any other race in america. That if they do get violently killed, then it must have been their own fault.
As such, showing the examples of clearly unjust murders of black people illustrates the point of BLM very clearly - yes, there's racism, yes, it's strong enough to lead to unjust deaths. As well as in general causing a lot of sympathy to the victims.
I think this comment falls into a fallacy I've seen often enough that it finally crystallized into a name: the "one factor theory of fault". It's the same as saying that, saying that that she shouldn't have worn a summer dress in that area of town is absolving her attackers of primary responsibility. Like the amount of blame for any given act must sum up to 1, rather than a number considerably greater than 1- that if one person is wholly responsible for it, this implies that nobody else is at all responsible for it.
To give an example:
Yes, black lives matter, because all lives matter, and black people are doing just as well as any other race on average, which is to say they do get violently killed and it's "their own fault" to an amount of say 0.7- *but* America has a police state, which has systematically criminalized correlates of being black, and it's that process's fault to an amount *greater* than 1, that is to say, it's the fault of police engagement behavior in situations where they're uncertain of their safety to a factor of 1, *and* it's *also* the fault of american drug law to a factor of 0.6, *and* it's the fault of american gun culture, which to some extent is black culture to another factor of say 0.3 (I don't actually know the numbers here, more of an example than anything).
You can tell that this sums up to a lot more than 1. Yes? I simply think that fault summing up to more than 1 is entirely normal and meaningful. Saying that one particular black person's interaction with the police was extremely stupid and basically asking to be shot, is **simply not taking away a single iota of fault** from the police state America built that put them in that situation to begin with.
(I recommend watching airplane accident reports on Youtube. Things that go wrong nearly always have fault factors of 3 or more.)
What units of fault are you using though? It's natural to have the total fault sum to 1, that is, 100%. It's not an objection to your point, having the total fault to be 100% doesn't mean it lies with one party (although in many cases, some parts are easier or more important to correct than others). But I'm curious about the units.
I think the implications is that anyone who shares any blame could have a fault level 0-1. In an illegal dual to the death, for example, both people could be fully guilty of the death of one of the participants; the killer is fully guilty for having killed, and the dead is fully guilty for having been stupid enough to participate in a duel. The latter's guilt does not mitigate the guilt of the former
I agree that this is a great question. I don't have a perfect answer, so let me list some criteria instead:
- necessity; the degree to which not performing an action would have averted the outcome
- permissibility; whether the action was socially normalized, is moral, or is legal
- predictability; whether the outcome of the action could have been foreseen
- accountability; whether the person was capable of rational analysis in the first place
- freedom; whether the person was reasonably capable of taking another action (ie. under various forms of coercion)
- responsibility; whether the person was charged with averting the outcome.
I believe there are more, depending. Some people may hold "sympathy" as a factor (do I like the person; is it a good person). I believe the factors I've listed should be uncontroversial at least.
edit: On reflection, both coercion and accountability have huge historical debates on them; everyone agrees that *to some extent* they're a factor but they strongly disagree on the magnitude.
Think of a set of cheesecloth squares. Every nutmeg that drops through a single layer of cheesecloth has identified a fault. it's not the entire fault, as the nutmeg needs to drop through ALL the cheesecloths, but... each cheesecloth's failure is orthogonal to the others (and additive in a serial fashion).
Take the case of Antwon Rose Junior.
1) It is inarguable that the cop shouldn't have been "copping" anymore, he was serially terminated from multiple police departments, and had questionable statements about his job.
2) Antwon shouldn't have run from the cop, into a probable ambush zone (aka flight likely to turn to fight, if pursued -- assuming he had the gun, which the police officer suspected he had).
We were lucky enough that this happened in East Pittsburgh, or my city (not east pittsburgh, dumbass lazy protestors couldn't get to East Pittsburgh, so they demanded Peduto ... somehow interfere in a matter he wasn't legally allowed to) might have burnt down.
Last cheesecloth wins! (And, in this sense, you can see the propaganda engine revving up for BLM, trying to find a "good case" that would lead to easily engineered riots).
But the other issue is that "fault" can be more than 100%. Antwon Rose's running might have been a "60%" fault, and the cop being bad is probably a "less than 100%" fault, but maybe not by much. Also, lay in "new cop, new turf" (with a 10% fault, if he knew the area, he might not have been so triggerhappy...)
With enough variables and fault, you can say "this was overfaulted. Reducing a particular variable slightly wouldn't have stopped the killing."
yeah if you talk about this from someone in air travel they'll look at you like you're insane.
like imagine an airline saying, "but if we fix the pilot training, the airports may think that they can get away with skimping on maintenance!"
Like. If things have gotten to that point, your entire part of society needs to collectively step back and figure out whether they actually want safety factors or not.
> Think of a set of cheesecloth squares. Every nutmeg that drops through a single layer of cheesecloth has identified a fault.
One nutmeg is hundreds of times larger at least than a hole in the weave of a cheesecloth. This metaphor makes about as much sense as asking us to imagine some nutmegs falling through a stack of manhole covers. There could be nutmeg-sized holes in a set of manhole covers, if you drilled them.
They're not doing "just as well as any other race on average". They have lower expected lifespans. And while the "Hispanic health paradox" indicates this isn't just attributable to poverty, whatever it is merits more attention than the deaths-by-police that make up only a tiny fraction of that delta.
Okay but if we're talking about lifespan we're not talking about a core BLM claim, to my knowledge. I'm entirely open to the idea that there's unique factors that require special attention and investment towards black health, I just don't think it's the case in the specific cases that usually cause protests *in the way* that it's usually alleged.
Talking about lifespan means talking about lower-case "black lives matter", regardless of upper-case "Black Lives Matter" being grifters who don't care. We don't need to let them monopolize the idea.
>showing the examples of clearly unjust murders of black people illustrates the point of BLM very clearly - yes, there's racism, yes, it's strong enough to lead to unjust deaths
This makes no sense. If examples of unjust murders of whites can be shown, does that mean that anti-white racism led to them?
The underlying thesis is that 'black people's deaths matter' -- and in particular, that the deaths that are caused by law enforcement are somehow MUCH more highly problematic (and worthy of fixing) than the ones caused by ethnic cleansing and/or gangland violence.
This is a valid sentiment, but... it's not "Black Lives Matter."
I must object here, sir. If one would like to prevent more "court decided" cases of ethnic cleansing in America, one should look to which populations do not suffer from "white guilt" (and are thus more likely to support ethnic cleansing). These would, in fact, be populations you'd be trying to reduce, or at least acclimatize enough that they would be willing to stop supporting "ethnic cleansing" as a method of keeping their neighborhoods safe.
However, we saw the democrats very, very openly importing more of this population, including very little effort to stop the "gangland criminal types" most likely to commit ethnic cleansing from entering our country.
Black Lives Matter only when they don't interfere with electoral prospects.
There are still things worth fighting for for all lives. None of us are living in paradise.
It's precisely because I value the lives of my fellow Americans, including African-Americans, that I have a lower opinion of upper-case "Black Lives Matter", who don't sufficiently value black lives to act like rationalists optimizing the preservation of such lives, and instead appear to act in ways that result in a lot more such lives being snuffed out than the deaths they publicize. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/policing-the-police.html If we could put the people at GiveWell in charge of such organizations, African-Americans would be much better off. I suppose it would be proper to constrain them not to just redirect the assets currently spent on expensive houses for BLM heads to people in the Third World (a worthy cause enough for me to donate, but not to direct others donations).
I don’t think it’s at all confusing for a group that is opposing alleged unjustified killings of Xes to use the phrase “X lives matter”.
It's unfortunate though that such a group gets to claim the name while ignoring the much larger number of other deaths for that group!
Indeed it's not like cops are anywhere close to the biggest unjust killers of black people, so if they're concerned black lives there's a lot of other factors they can also look at.
Not just can, but if you ARE concerned with black lives, you would seem to have an obligation to look into the largest factors.
That would be true if they couldn't just claim that you were doing racist concern trolling, but they can and do so the black lives will continue to matter until moral improves
I agree. "All lives matter" is equivalent "It's OK to have any skin color".
If you somehow managed to find two soft-spoken mistake theorists, one of which opposed the colorized slogan and the other one supported it, they could have said something like this:
Universalist: I dislike the colorist slogan because I interpret it as having an implicit bias against groups of other color. It's like saying "Don't put roofies into undergraduates' glasses!", surely the goal should be to eliminate flunitrazepam from every beverage!
Colorist: The original intent was to counteract an existing bias against the group mentioned in the slogan. What do you think about "Blondes are smart!"? Does it make you feel like it's unfair against brunettes?
Universalist: No, but the dumb blonde stereotype is known well enough that it has its own Wikipedia page. In the case of your slogan the original bias you were trying to counteract was small if present at all, much less prominent than the slogan itself. It made people not intimately familiar with the problem doubt the sincerity of its authors.
Colorist: I'll admit that the phrasing of the slogan was in part deliberately chosen to provoke a reaction, but what is more important: the data or the vibes? If people think the economy is in a recession, but all indicators show that it's growing, would you tell people who are protesting the closure of their factory that they should just find new jobs?
Universalist: I see what you mean, but I disagree. Even if you are a politician, at some point you have to stop telling your electorate what they want to hear. Even if that factory closure is very real and you are the most honest politician and you are deeply moved by the story of these steelworkers, you can't just decide that factory jobs matter and distort the whole economy to prop them up.
Colorist: It feels like we're going off on a tangent that is not directly relevant.
Universalist: But it is! Factory owners afraid of firing people will stop trying to improve their factories, which will hurt the workers in the long run when they go bankrupt. And if college professors stop failing blondes because they don't want to look like they are perpetuating the dumb blonde stereotype, this will actually hurt blondes!
Colorist: Very well, I have to agree with you. But imagine a slogan that looks like this: "While sexual assault is a serious crime no matter how it is executed and who the victim is, this is a college town and a few high-profile cases of students being drugged by spiked drinks are on everyone's mind (even though it might just be a statistical outlier). Therefore, we would like to draw attention to this specific form of sexual assault, both because fighting it will reduce the overall rates of sexual assault and will provide peace of mind to students around us!" That's not a very good slogan, is it? A good slogan has to concede some veracity to remain memorable. I expect people to be smart enough to unpack it themselves.
Universalist: But you have to deal with people who are either not smart enough or are your political opponents. They will interpret it in the worst possible way. You might say they are not your concern, but some of your supporters might be among those people that are interpreting the message wrong. They will sincerely believe that the most extreme literal interpretation of your slogan is the correct one and will hurt your cause.
Colorist: Well, since you're so eager to speak for me, please speak for me some more: what would you do if you needed a biting slogan to draw attention to the problem and at the same time wanted all people to have a nuanced take on the matter?
Universalist: Uh, I would carefully curate the steering committee and allow only those people who understand the problem deeply.
Colorist: But people don't flock to *your* banners, they flock to the slogan, to the meme. You're not building a snowman, you're diverting an avalanche. You simply can't expect to hand pick every person who hears the slogan and decides to do something about it.
Universalist: Point taken. But this sounds like optimizing for heat, for engagement, not for finding the solution. And if you can't expect to pick every person, why do you argue with people who find your narrow slogan distasteful? They are a natural outcome.
Colorist: Well, I said you couldn't expect to hand pick every person, not that you had to sit back and let them run rampant. You have to explain the meaning of the slogan to those who oppose it and to rein in those on your side who are running away with it. It's politics, you *need* some heat to get people to care, even think tanks publish radical inflammatory papers and don't always go, "in our opinion, lowering the discount rate by 0.25% is the best course of action in the current economy, see the next 200 pages for an explanation".
Universalist: I guess so, look at how much we've managed to agree on simply because I didn't like your slogan.
The universalist says, "They will sincerely believe that the most extreme literal interpretation of your slogan is the correct one and will hurt your cause."
This confuses me because "black lives matter" can be taken (seriously and) literally, and is least offensive when taken literally. It's the subtext of the statement that many disagree with. Saying the phrase is signaling something about your beliefs, and that signal needs a whole bunch of context to be understood. The fact that context is needed is why sometimes the word "dog whistle" is used in politics, as only people with the full context can actually interpret the statement in the spirit in which it was intended.
Consider my reference to the phrases "take him seriously, but not literally" and "dog whistle." These are signals that take some amount of context to parse, but if you know the context, you could probably correctly deduce my political leanings. This is the exact same dynamics as "it's ok to be white" and "black lives matter." These phrases are not (only) said because of their literal meaning, but because of the subtext. And when survey responders reject to these statements which are 'literally' inoffensive, it it typically not the literal statement they object to, but the more subtle signal/dog whistle.
Scott Adams was smart enough to know this; he regularly defended the man for whom the term "take him seriously, not literally" was originally coined. So I think it is legitimate and justified to condemn Adams for his statements about blacks who disagreed with the phrase "it's ok to be white." He knew what they were actually objecting to, and chose to fear monger against black Americans anyways.
I agree that Adams' reaction to the poll was most likely disingenuous.
Sorry if I misinterpreted what you were trying to say. I did enjoy reading the back-and-forth that you wrote out
Any normal person can agree to both "Black lives matter" and "It's ok to be white". Avoiding them because you believe they must be owned by your political opponents means normies lose.
Most of America (I had the stat as 70%, talking to a pollster) was against BLM by the 2020 election. This is gross mistiming of a "protest movement" designed to swing the dial towards the Democrats.
This is very wrong. https://civiqs.com/results/black_lives_matter?uncertainty=true&zoomIn=true&annotations=true
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/06/14/support-for-the-black-lives-matter-movement-has-dropped-considerably-from-its-peak-in-2020/
https://jacobin.com/2020/06/black-lives-matter-blm-polling-donald-trump
We'll use your numbers for "just before the election."
Compare the drop (62% down to 42%? Jebus christ). And note I'm pulling from a right-wing pollster, so the extremely high rate of support for BLM is notable, as it cuts against bias. Wish I could pull you a public record of the "just before the election" BLM polling, but it was from a real pollster.
Do you believe preferentially giving blacks LIAR loans was treating them less fairly than whites?
Where are you getting the 42% number from? And how does this support your claim of 70% being OPPOSED to BLM by the 2020 election? (Much stronger than 30% being in favor, which even by your 42% number isn't true.) Why don't you believe the polls I quote that show the relevant timeline? Note that the poll you quote is in the middle of the two I quote at the only time point it has, so I see no reason to doubt the time series based off your numbers.
Edit: So you're taking 42% from one of my polls supposedly, but that number doesn't appear in either. It's 52% peak down to 48% by election in Civiqs and 67% peak down to 55% by the election in Pew. Neither of these support the idea that BLM protests cratered support for BLM since those are comparing two post- (or during-) protest numbers and both show a jump in support compared to the limited polling pre-protests (as does Rasmussen). And nothing close to your 70% opposed number.
I have trouble thinking of a comparable thing. BLM is associated with a political movement with revolutionary goals and a history of grifting. If you could somehow ask it to people who had never heard the term, I hope that everyone but hardcore racists (and lizardmen) would agree that "black lives matter."
My equally charitable guess is that people who had never heard of the "It's OK to be white" controversy thought something like "I think being white carries additional responsibilities as a result of privilege and/or history, so I will answer 'no' or 'not sure.'"
When reading the article, I thought that "all lives matter" might be equivalent, but even that had a very specific history, while I imagine muggles have no Idea about the history of IOTBW.
How do you get from "whites have additional responsibilities" to "therefore its not ok to be white?" That doesn't seem like a valid logical move that people would make.
It would be hard to figure out what proportion of people actually believe "it's not OK to be white" because it was never been a serious topic of conversation outside of this very particular context; a group on 4chan thought it would be fun to troll people, make the left angry, and get Trump elected. The term astroturf doesn't quite apply because its just some weirdos on the internet, but it bears a family resemblance.
The closest thing in the discourse we had to the phrase would probably be "white guilt", so does the term "it is ok to be white" just indicate you are against the concept of white guilt? If it does, then Scott Adam's reaction doesn't make sense, "black people think I should believe in white guilt, therefore I should be afraid of them, walk on the other side of the street, and leave neighborhoods with black people" would be a rather extreme reaction to such a proposition.
I think it is pretty clear that Scott Adams fully understood the context of the phrase, and that people were rejecting it as a motto, not as a literal statement about the value and worth of white lives. Despite this, he chose to fear monger against blacks anyways. He could have been a good person in a thousand other ways; people with reprehensible politics often are rather kind to their family, friends, and fans. But the point under contention is whether that particular statement was unjustified racism.
I hold that it is perfectly legitimate to be against the phrase "black lives matter" and "it is ok to be white" and that no one should interpret this as racism.
Well, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, a word is only the skin covering a living thought - I know what "It's OK to be white" means to me, and you know what it means to you, but both of us are guessing what it meant to the survey respondents.
I agree with you that it's entirely possible to report to a pollster that you don't agree with "It's OK to be white" or "black lives matter" without being racist, and I offered the privilege interpretation above as how I thought that would work for IOTBW.
Out of curiosity, what do you think poll respondents were thinking of when they said they disagreed with or were not sure about "It's OK to be white." Surely 40% of poll respondents couldn't have been aware of 4chan trolling, so what do you think people who had never heard about the term were thinking? Thanks!
Here is another survey that was done on the same question. The survey found a smaller percentages disagreed than the other poll. They also included an open ended response so you can hear people in their own words why they answered the way they did. Mostly it seems like people could tell it was race baiting even without knowing the 4chan context.
https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/its-ok-to-be-white-rasmussen-poll/
Though, some of the follow-up questions, and the percentages associated with those questions are not particularly redeeming, and surprised me. Those results would be a better basis for some of these arguments than the IOTBW phrase.
Those are very interesting, thanks for sharing that!
"It's ok to be white" is inconsistent with the people who go on about "abolishing whiteness", just as "black lives matter" is inconsistent with many forms of anti-black racism.
I had never heard the term "abolish whiteness" but it seems like just a lefty version of "racial blindness"
"When we say we want to abolish the white race, we do not mean we want to exterminate people with fair skin. We mean that we want to do away with the social meaning of skin color, thereby abolishing the white race as a social category."
"Abolish whiteness" is not actually same phrase as "abolish skin color". You obviously can't accomplish the latter by exterminating only one race of people. And if you did say the latter phrase, people would probably be confused.
I want to make sure I understand what you are trying to say. When asked, the people who use the term 'abolish whiteness" seem to be pretty explicit that they mean dismantling the social construct of whiteness. Are you saying that they are lying about this, and that their true intention is genocide? Or are you saying something else?
Take a minute and ask yourself if you would trust that someone claiming they want to 'abolish blackness' or 'abolish Jewishness' and accept that level of horseshit flim-flammery.
I am going to assume your answer is no, because that's the answer most people would give. So why accept them at their word here?
I absolutely 100% condemn the phrase "abolish whiteness" as intentionally inflammatory and stupid. But I also 100% do not believe that term is about genocide. The phrase "take it seriously, but not literally" comes to mind.
However, I wish everyone refused to engage in such trolling, and refused to elect people who used or excused such inflammatory language just because it isn't meant to be taken literally. The world would be better off if we told all such people to go to hell. We wouldn't even be talking right now if people refused to excuse such trolling. To hell with all the inflammatory trolls, whether to my right, or your left.
That's just like his opinion, you can't force anyone to like black people. Any person is entitled to some aesthetic preferences.
People are not an aesthetic preference. Fear mongering is not an aesthetic preference.
I did not claim it is. It's just whether you prefer to interact with one person or another is often determined by aesthetics.
Just distinguish between lower-case "black lives matter" and upper-case "Black Lives Matter". We don't have to applaud proper nouns just because they claim a nice-sounding name.
Black Lives Matter is imbued with illiberal ideological subtext. One does not need to be racist to rebuke it.
I agree, and have said so various times in this comment thread. But it is important to note a similarity in that "It is OK to be white" is a politically charged race-baiting statement, and one does not need to be racist to rebuke it.
My point I want to make is that it would be unjustifiable to conclude Republicans are dangerous racists because they disagree with the statement "black lives matter" and therefore it is also unjustifiable to conclude blacks are dangerous racists because they disagree with the statement "It is OK to be white." Both statements are incredibly politically charged, and the latter was chosen precisely to bait racial antagonism. Adams understood this context, and chose to fear monger against blacks anyways.
How do you know he understood that context?
"It is OK to be white" is just a statement, if you are not anti-white racist you would not have trouble agreeing with it. "Black lives matter" is nbot obly a statement but also a political movement, as a movement it's pretty controversial.
"It is OK to be white" was chosen by 4chan because it was effective for race baiting. A fact that many people pick up on when they hear the term:
https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/its-ok-to-be-white-rasmussen-poll/
"Race baiting" only works on those who hate white people, otherwise they would have no issue with the statement.
The logic is perfectly mirrored in blm. "Race baiting only works on those who hate black people, otherwise they would have no issue with the statement black lives matter."
I reject your claim, and the mirror version of it. You can disagree with a motto because of subtext, and you shouldn't be judged for it.
You do need more fringe beliefs to reject lower-case "black lives matter" instead of upper-case "Black Lives Matter".
"Black Lives Matter" is a political movement, while "it's ok to be white" is not. Even hardcore racists agree with "black live matter" as a statement, they just think they matter less than white lives. But you have to be absolutely deranged psycho to disagree that lives of black people matter at least in some way.
Leftist rhetoric often treats critique of black group attitudes as presumptively racist, regardless of evidence or symmetry.
Obviously black lives matter. All lives matter.
"All lives matter" implies that "black lives matter". So everyone who says that should be able to pass.
I tried to find a poll on this, but all the polls ask “Do you agree with the Black Lives Matter movement?” And the word movement messes up the comparison. If black people said they were against the “It’s Ok to be White movement” I would understand that since the movement was just white supremacists on 4chan.
I didn't look too deeply, but I couldn't find anything either. However, this follow-up poll provides useful context
https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/its-ok-to-be-white-rasmussen-poll/
"Black lives matter" is a rallying cry now, not something you can agree or disagree with. And it's a crappy rallying cry to. Because somebody could say, "Yes, I think they matter -- just only 60% as much as white lives." And, by the way, I think that statement captures the real flavor of most Americans who have negative views of blacks think. Only a minority of savagely angry people think blacks should be lynched or shipped off to the worst country in Africa to starve.
Problem is there's no IOTBW organization. BLM is more loaded because it's both a mostly innocuous phrase *and* a highly controversial set of registered organizations.
So if you ask them in, say, 2013 "do black lives matter" you're going to get (I would hope) 85% yes, 10% nitpicking the grammar and seeing an implied if unintentional "only" in there, and 5% lizardmen. Asking it in 2021 means something quite different and requires a lot more clarity about what you mean.
https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/its-ok-to-be-white-rasmussen-poll/
I generally agree with Scott's point of view rather than Bugmaster's, so this should be interpreted as inquisitive hole-poking rather than me staking out a position.
"If Dilbert is an 80th percentile nerd, the 80th percentile persuader is - I don’t know, a used-car salesman? Dilbert’s probably earning more money, especially nowadays when he could make L5 at Google."
What, then, is the Pointy-Haired Boss? As the previous post explained at length, it's a central theme of the strip that he's higher on the totem pole and more successful than Dilbert and the other competent engineers despite lacking any real virtues (unless you count lack of ethics as a virtue).
This actually gets into the reason why I found Adams's whole "charismatic manipulation is what matters" turn a bit odd. The Pointy-Haired Boss isn't charismatic at all! (Dogbert is, but he's less important to the strip's central themes, memorable though he may be.)
I guess you could say that Adams had, at different times, two different theories of why the world is the way it is: the "Dilbert Principle" theory, exemplified by the Pointy-Haired Boss, and the "Win Bigly" theory, exemplified by Dogbert. It would be neat and elegant if he had some grand principle unifying the two, but I'm not aware of any such thing. (Though you could maybe argue that it might have looked something like the "Gervais Principle".)
Relatedly:
"Nobody except Scott Adams and a few psychotherapists ever go to hypnotist school. Most don’t even go to any formal persuasion classes. That’s because hypnotism/persuasion isn’t really a lifehack that helps you win all the time at everything."
I don't think that hypothesis is necessary. Even if it were generally useful for a wide variety of goals—as I suspect it is, though I won't try to guess how it stacks up against general intelligence—most people still wouldn't do it because most people don't do hard things even when doing so offers great rewards. That inclination is rare. (I am very, very much including myself here.)
"The salesman with the bright teeth and the firm handshake thinks 'Man, I bet I could get out of this dead-end job if only I were smarter.'"
Does he? That sounds a bit surprising to me—it's not how I imagine non-nerds typically think about intelligence—but I suppose I wouldn't know.
Scott Adams’ interest in hypnosis started when his mother gave birth to his younger sister under hypnosis, supposedly remaining awake but feeling no pain. The same doctor (Adams said it was the only doctor in their small town) later attempted to hypnotize his mother to stop her smoking addiction. Adams said this ultimately failed because hypnosis generally doesn’t work for addictions, but the idea of hypnosis intrigued him enough that he made a study of it. You don’t have to want to manipulate people to be drawn to hypnosis; you just have to be curious about how humans and their minds work—as Adams was. He mentioned his mother’s former doctor when he was on the James Altucher podcast in September 2023.
To clarify, I was talking about general persuasion skills (which I guess Adams idiosyncratically called "hypnosis"), not about actual literal hypnosis, the utility of which I suspect is much narrower.
The PHB is viewed through what is more or less Dilbert's point of view in the comic. Dilbert, as a massive nerd, is unable to perceive (or ignores) what makes the PHB more successful than him, so the PHB is portrayed as someone who is occupying his position unfairly, a cosmic joke or a divine punishment.
I don't think I agree with this reading. A decent fraction of the humor in the strip is at Dilbert's expense, but this particular thing is not. The office workers reading the strip aren't supposed to think "Dilbert is too clueless to see the important reasons why the PHB deserves his position"; they're supposed to empathize with Dilbert and accept the cosmic-joke perspective. See, e.g., Adams saying that the reason the PHB is never named is so that the reader can imagine him as their boss.
I don't think our views are incompatible. The comic is written from Dilbert's point of view, which is tailored to match the way its readers view themselves.
This is not consistently the case, I think. When Dilbert is being obviously clueless, the strip highlights this in a way that encourages the reader to laugh at him rather than find him relatable. E.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20230301164932/https://dilbert.com/strip/2007-07-04
My impression is that the Pointy-Haired Boss is basically a stereotype from the 50s. He even wears a 1950s-style suit. Some fat old guy who's been in middle-management forever, and he collects a high salary for doing nothing because he's a loyal Organization Man in a giant Organization that has tons of money to waste and never fires anyone who shows loyalty. This was already obsolete by the 80s, when companies figured out that they could save massive amounts by doing layoffs and restructuring to remove this sort of person- it was rather infamously a decade of mass layoffs. It makes absolutely no sense today- I can't imagine any manager at a tech company thinking that he's somehow immune to being fired despite being an incompetant idiot, or that everyone else would just accept that as a matter of course. Instead we long for the older days when people had more job security.
I worked in academia under someone who was a real-world analouge to the PHB. She was the director of my area, despite have no experience or education in the field. She had, however, a PhD, was social (you don't always need charisma, but just be able to charm the right people), and not stupid. But she exhibited numerous PHB qualities:
- She had zero interest in the department's field. Never learned about it by working with fellow directors, going to conferences, reading literature, or even working along side us (it's a professional area).
- She didn't respect us and thought she had the answer to everything. You could get 100 people to tell her the sky is blue but she'd insist it was obviously yellow.
- She loved endless meetings that a coworker perfectly described as "holding court."
- She was lazy and engaged in what we might now call "quiet quitting" at the boss level.
- She saw herself as the solution to all of the problems we beneath her created, despite never doing anything.
- She destroyed morale in dozens of ways.
In a past life, in her area of expertise, she may have been a Dilbert, but she was an atrophied PHB in my time there...and she never left. Years and years of taking up space.
As is most typically the case, you're much kinder than necessary to your critics.
On CWSA, "1% of Joe Rogan" seems in line with the relevance your original post implied. Did you just think it was something like "0.01% of Joe Rogan"?
Yeah, I don't get the criticism of that part either. 210k subscribers is respectable, but it's still orders of magnitude below what it would take to be mad at someone for only being "vaguely aware" of it.
I found it a useful tidbit. I had been picturing a podcast that reached maybe 500-1500 listeners per episode. Looking at his youtube, he was probably reaching 50k to 150k listeners across different channels. Many more people than I was picturing.
It’s really hard to understand numbers of social media followers! Random grad students have thousands of Twitter followers!
Mr. Alexander doesn’t seem to have accounted at all for Scott Adams’ subscribers on the Locals platform. Most people who were serious CWSA fans subscribed to him on Locals to hear the pre- and post-show commentary, micro-lessons, and evening Man Cave episodes. He also had a decent number of followers on X and often shared clips from his show there.
*Dr. Alexander
This is bigger bullshit than expecting people to keep track which Brits have been knighted.
His entire schtick is "politically enlightened psychiatrist", surely it isn't hard to remember.
All of those podcasts have followers on multiple platforms; I still think YouTube gives us a good OOM estimate.
It's no shame to be 1% of the biggest podcast in the world, the one that moves Presidential elections with a single show. My main update is that Dwarkesh is considered a giant in the AI world (able to get eg Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella), and 80K considered the flagship podcast of the EA movement, and Adams was 20% of a Dwarkesh and 5x 80K.
Scot wasn't perfect but him noticing the huge amount of anti-white racism, and objecting to it, does not make him the racist. He's not the only person sick of the R word going only one direction after all the virulence that has been firehosed our way for the past decade or more.
If it is wrong to want to live in a white neighborhood, why do blacks sometimes move into them to be safer?
"Anti-white racism" is not common at all. I could give you all of the arguments about white people still holding most power in society, but that doesn't matter. I just don't think the vast, vast majority of people, including black people, even including extremely woke professors or whatever, are racist against white people. You can disagree with affirmative action, but calling proponents racist is silly. Most of them are white and framed such policy as uplifting and affirming.
As for the housing comment: it's simple. Black neighborhoods are much poorer, and poverty leads to crime. Richer black people will leave poorer neighborhoods for rich ones. Predominantly black neighborhoods are poorer due to redlining and the historical effects of Jim Crow, slavery, and dispossession.
Not calling a policy that explicitly discriminates based on race and is a blatant violation of civil rights law racist is silly. Why would I give the slightest fuck if the racists described their racist policy that discriminates against me as "uplifting and affirming"?
Blacks commit more crime at all income levels and in all countries.
That's a measurement error my friend. For example car ownership is higher among whites who speed millions of more times a day as a result. Do we want to talk about timecard fraud? Falsifying records? Perjury? Fraud? Insider trading? Illegal employment practices? Not declaring taxable income? Home improvements without a permit? Etc
But it's also true for well-documented crimes like homicide.
You haven't actually looked at the measurements, such as which drivers are racking up massive amounts of tickets when police don't seize the vehicles and just send notices. "White collar crimes" such as fraud are also committed more by the poor. The book "Off the Books" is all about people who don't declare taxable income in the ghetto.
Citations needed. ("Bill Cosby" isn't "all countries")
Crime leads to poverty, in fact near deterministically; If I vandalize your property, I impoverish you. Stealing, likewise, especially if you account for the usually frivolous nature and/or use of the goods being stolen and the losses caused by safeguarding as well. No, insurance is a completely facetious answer here
The other direction has, if anything, a negative evidence base. Lottery winners or UBI receivers don't have reduced crime. Many poor communities have low crime rates. When average income through crime is measured for career criminals, it often is literally below easily attainable minimum wage work.
Getting prosecuted for crimes leads to poverty. You aren't going to find a single wealthy person who didn't get there without committing crimes. Why Tyrone was prosecuted and not CEO Sir Samantha Weinstein the Fourth, I'll leave it up to you.
I know a moderate number of people in the 7-to-9 figure wealth range, which I'd count as being wealthy, and I'm very confident the vast majority of them haven't committed any felonies.
You'd be surprised what constitutes a felony. It's a felony for example to write a check for under one US dollar or to return an aluminum can for it's refund across state lines.
And I'd be willing to bet nearly all of them have did illegal, or misused legal, drugs, drove at least once over the legal alcohol limit of one beer, had sex while inebriated, or engaged in sex play under the age of consent. Wisconsin has an eight year old on the sex offender registry for playing "I show you mine, you show me yours" with a classmate. And those are just felonies I can think of in a couple seconds. Let's not even get into tax fraud (do you honestly think they declared every penny they made in life), timecard fraud, etc.
What was that book, "we all commit three felonies a day". Or to Cardinal Richelieu "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him".
So to my point, why is Franklin Jackson in prison but not your friends, all things being equal.
"It's a felony for example to write a check for under one US dollar."
No, it's illegal to do this and attempt to circulate the check as currency. You can, however, legally write a check for $.50 as payment.
"or to return an aluminum can for it's refund across state lines."
Not really? There have been some large scale operations busted for doing this, but I can't find any instances where taking an aluminum can across state lines resulted in legal scrutiny.
"Wisconsin has an eight year old on the sex offender registry"
I could find no indication this is true, but I also didn't want to Google around with those search terms too aggressively.
All that aside, it seems like you're playing bait and switch with your arguments here. Lots of dumb things can be felonies without the fact that those things aren't aggressively prosecuted being evidence of racially-biased law enforcement.
I don't think it's at all surprising that people concerned about crime are actually using that as a placeholder for murder, robbery, burglary, rape, etc. and don't actually care about 'crime' when it means writing a 50 cent check, not declaring every penny on their taxes, driving 5mph over, or trading onion futures. I don't see racial bias or measurement error as the cause- these are simply less bad things (in the case of speeding, a good thing if everyone else is doing it) that are technically also crimes. And of course the rates of the technicality crimes would plummet if they were prosecuted like the serious ones.
I think you make a good point regarding DUIs or drug usage convictions being driven by racial profling, but it is undermined by words spent suggesting very different things are equivalent. Nobody is lying awake at night worried that a stranger is going to steal a stapler from their daughter's office.
This is, quite literally, the worst argument in the world:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
> You aren't going to find a single wealthy person who didn't get there without committing crimes.
What crimes did JK Rowling commit?
Who knows, I.was being US centric in that comment. Though I'm sure some Brit could opine on it given the UK seems to over criminalize everything as well.
I think JK Rowling got accused of British thought-crimes AFTER she became rich.
> You aren't going to find a single wealthy person who didn't get there without committing crimes.
Completely false. People who inherit their wealth are textbook "undeserving" but obviously don't have to commit crimes themselves to "get there"! Crime doesn't pay https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/why_do_the_poor.html and is instead committed by hyperbolic discounters. If you want to actually get ahead, crime isn't the way to do it.
How can you make a statement about the vast majority of people like that? I don’t think anti white racism is necessarily uncommon, I think it is more accurate to say that most white people don’t live in environments where it is generally socially relevant for them.
Statements like “only white people can be racist” that one sometimes hears are racist, because it implies that white people are somehow intrinsically morally inferior.
Looking at https://www.ljzigerell.com/?p=9002, anti-white racism seems to be considerably more common in the US than racism against other groups.
This is one of those cases where I think academic race studies is actually useful! (if you only look at the theories abstractly and not at their conclusions which are generally not useful). The concepts of microaggressions, or the idea of lived experience, or unconscious racism, or systemic racism. Many of the little injustices against white people count as microaggressions. The lived experience of whites who think people discriminate against them really is valid (who are you to deny it?). Unconscious bias studies really do show that nonwhites are biased against whites. Systems can be "racist" without anybody having a conscious intent to create an inequitable system if they lead to inequitable results. Even some of the 2000-2010s-era critiques (e.g. power + privilege, intersectionality) can be applied here to some degree!
(yes I'm being somewhat impetuous; I think all these theories have major flaws. My true opinion is that both anti-white and anti-black racism are both either very rare or very common, depending on your definition of racism, assuming you apply the term consistently and neutrally, with the exception of a handful of extraordinarily poorly thought-out definitions of racism).
Those "unconscious bias studies" are worthless in terms of actual behavior. Fear not, white people!
I also think racists are a fringe minority across the political spectrum, but manage to get a disproportionate amount of attention for themselves.
> Black neighborhoods are much poorer, and poverty leads to crime.
False. Lotteries are natural experiments on an individual level. Crime also declined during the Great Depression, rose during the booming 60s, declined again during the Great Recession. Plenty of immigrants come over with hardly anything, work low-status/pay jobs and commit crime at a rate well-below average.
I think the idea is that the least well off white people shoulder the most burden for measures meant to promote equality between races, while rich and powerful white people do about as well as ever. This seems to mean that it has been arranged that the "people still holding most power in society" have decided to make the poor who look like them suffer.
>even including extremely woke professors or whatever, are racist against white people.
Because they've tried to launder the language to where it's literally impossible to be racist against white people in their view. "Whiteness needs abolished, but we don't *really* mean white people, wink wink nudge nudge" is horseshit flim-flammery that no one would accept regarding any other group.
We as real, sane people do not need to participate in their games. Most woke professors- and lots people downstream of them- are wildly, virulently racist.
Did you read the post (and especially footnote 8)? I think Adams' position was a caricatured and exaggerated version of this, and it's the caricature/exaggeration that makes it bad.
He gives one prosocial altruistic explanation (so that if someone accuses him of being selfish, he can show they’re wrong), and then one amoral selfish explanation (so that if someone argues with him about whether it’s really altruistic to oppose estate taxes for millionaires, he can say “Ha, you can’t get me, I already admitted I’m a cold hard realist who doesn’t worry about that kind of fuzzy stuff.”)
My default reading of this style is that the prosocial part is saying "here's my conclusion about the morality of the position", and the selfish part is him being self-aware enough to know some people have the opposite moral intuition, and he thinks they came to different conclusions because they have opposing interests. This is less than maximally scientifically virtuous but I think it is how most people think about controversial issues and it is, mostly, sorta good enough. It doesn't require the kind of tough unflinching scientific honesty that rationalists are supposed to maximally cultivate, but he does restrict himself to backing positions he does genuinely believe moral arguments for (even if he's subject to various forms of bias). This can lead him to oppose an estate tax, but I think it's enough honesty that he wouldn't back something clearly bad rather than controversial (e.g. I don't think Adams would have supported a bill that said sixty year old white men are legally allowed to litter or something, even if he would've benefited from it).
Reading this post has made me like Scott Adams a lot less, whereas reading the first post made me like him a lot more. He's definitely an interesting figure, and I've enjoyed both posts at least.
This quote specifically: "You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children." I just can't stand the smug nihilism and misanthropy he has here.
I'd call it a smug, but earnest, selfishness. "Fair or not, I got mine, jack, and if I die I want to keep it in the family." As a huge fan of fairness, I disagree that "fairness is an argument for idiots and children", but I appreciate the honesty of deriding fairness directly.
What's really awful to me about Scott Adams (and MAGA in general) is the corrosive exaggeration and lying, like "if Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year. Republicans will be hunted. Police will stand down". I now suspect this might explain his tweet implying people are stupid if they thought Trump's question about injecting disinfectant was a question about injecting disinfectant.[1][2]**
I also hate CYA doublespeak.* I didn't follow Adams personally, but Scott described it as 'He gives one prosocial altruistic explanation (so that if someone accuses him of being selfish, he can show they’re wrong), and then one amoral selfish explanation (so that if someone argues with him about whether it’s really altruistic to oppose estate taxes for millionaires, he can say “Ha, you can’t get me, I already admitted I’m a cold hard realist who doesn’t worry about that kind of fuzzy stuff.”'.
* I'm not using "doublespeak" the way Wikipedia defines it, but I lack a better word.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXwIw0V0YcY
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/g7j9p2/scott_adams_is_imploding/
** btw I also hate that every single video about this has a label like "Trump suggests injecting disinfectant". No he didn't, he just asked a question, a very dumb question. The way guys like Adams rushed to Trump's defense reflects badly on them, but the fact that others mislabel a question as a "suggestion" reflects badly on them. Maybe this is "misanthropic", but there's usually plenty of blame to go around.
Honesty/earnestness is quite overrated. "Well I simply like the convenience of aborting the fetus instead of taking precautions" is radically honest but no conservative would find it to be a good point.
Being excessively congratulatory to honesty appears to me in a similar vein as that Norm Macdonald sketch "The worst part is the hypocrisy". Nah, the worst part is the actual thing, and the honesty about it is basically a rounding error.
I know conservatives who would find it to be a good point. They'd follow up with a sincere discussion, which would include discovering (as they have) that black women have difficulties obtaining sex (being in general the least liked race/gender combination), and subsequently compensate for this by "not taking precautions" (as that is a "feel better" thing for guys).
But, you know, what conservative isn't interested in analyzing the free market?
Projected solutions for this include "more black marriage" and other conservative solutions, so...
I'm talking mainly about "alternative facts" where the damage is far greater, like "We project that our forces will be able to subdue Kyiv within two weeks" or "Good chance you'll die within a year if Biden (or Trump) is elected" or "Nuclear reactors are an especially deadly and dangerous form of energy" or "Global warming is caused by the sun/volcanoes/cosmic rays/natural™ variability/evil scientist hoax" or "The vaccine is more dangerous than the disease" or "They're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets".
But even in the case of a personal fact, like dishonesty about why you support abortion, I think personal dishonesty bleeds directly into political dishonesty. If you lie about your own motivations, why not lie about the motivations of others too? Why not play fast and loose with the facts? Why not play the telephone game where you repeat a claim you saw on Twitter with just a little more embellishment than the last guy, until your in-group is sure Trump/Biden is the second coming of Hitler?
I didn't say honesty is a replacement for other virtues or resolves disagreements about values; that's quite the strawman. But if you think modern political disagreements are mainly about values, I think you're wildly off-base. Treating dishonesty (and inaccuracy) as acceptable is pervasive, which leads to dishonesty (and inaccuracy) itself being pervasive, which is why modern political disagreements are mainly about what the facts are, not about values. To some extent abortion is an exception to this, but even here I think many people would have different conclusions about abortion if they had different beliefs about facts (e.g. is God real? This is a factual question, the answer to which may affect one's opinion of abortion. And the way one arrives at the answer to this question, in turn, typically depends on other factual questions, ranging from "do my peers believe in God?" to "how did eukaryotes come to exist?" Your values determine which questions you choose to ask or pay attention to, but whether the answer you believe is correct or incorrect can affect your politics.)
Edit: and to circle back to Adams, he had a wildly negative reaction to some blacks' negative reaction to "it's OK to be white", but if (as it appears) this kicked off the chain of events that turned him MAGA, I doubt he ever engaged honestly with the question of why a survey was done about *these five words in particular*. Even if left-wingers partly caused his transition, that personal dishonesty (among others) mattered; it had an outsized influence on the world. OTOH, if he just axiomatically disliked black people, then sure, okay, that's a values thing.
I disagree: I find hypocrisy much more grating that the lack of whatever virtue one is preaching.
Honesty is considered overrated by people who like to lie.
Probably, but the cool thing about things is that they may be overrated by some while underrated by others. The ones who give undue credit to some of the lowest scum by saying "Well at least he's honest about it" are overrating honesty, while those who often lie are underrating the value of honesty.
Fair enough.
Did I not say what's awful about Scott Adams in the *very next paragraph*?
And why not respond to my actual arguments instead of implying again that I was wrong on a different subthread?
But no, I disagree that there is anything wrong in acknowledging that bad people have good qualities. It's downright toxic to refuse to acknowledge the good.
I don't see "lesser humans" as much as "The people who will benefit from the estate tax are not in my monkeysphere, so I don't care about them." A sentiment which, IMO, is common to all humans (except for a few hundred saints).
I came down to the comments to say the same thing. This quote did more to lower my opinion of Adams than anything in the first piece.
That's probably fair enough, but on the other hand I really hope that when I die people aren't looking through my entire comment history to find out the worst and dumbest thing I ever said, and then dismissing my entire life based on a dumb comment I wrote one time when I was in a bad mood.
Adams was like Musk in that his worst sin was poor posting discipline, he would post random unfiltered thoughts while in a bad mood, and these are preserved forever with his real name. As a terminal poaster I really wish we could separate people's online lives from their real lives.
You seem to have reacted to the quote as if he had said “fairness is for idiots and children”, when in fact what he was referring to was an argument APPEALING to fairness, something that (in Adam’s view) only idiots and children are naive enough to believe would convince anybody. Agree or disagree, but it’s not the same thing.
You can believe that the estate tax is unfair (which he indicated in other quotes that he did) and still agree with the above statement. Likewise, you can value fairness and agree with it. In fact, the former is predicated on the latter. Nevertheless, it’s perfectly consistent with Adam’s style to point out that “don’t do that to me, it’s not fair!” Is not an effective way of manipulating people, even if it’s true. Don’t see how it comes off as “smug nihilism and misanthropy” any more than other things he said.
I reacted similarly. I’m glad to have read them both.
The comments from podcast fans saying Scott Alexander didn't appreciate him enough out me off a bit because they have a kinda culty vibe. And seem to not engage with the actual criticisms
Agreed. Coming from a place of having enjoyed dilbert as a kid, and knowing nothing about him post-2005 or so, I walked away from the first post seeing Adams as a quirky and interesting person.
Having finished this post, I'm now updating my view of him as being someone who went off the rails some time in the past decade or so. I like this post, but think I'd be happier if I hadn't read it.
If you really want to start disliking him, take a look into this thread: https://kiwifarms.st/threads/scott-raymond-adams-scottadamssays-real-coffee-with-scott-adams.123740/
*important disclaimer* kiwifarms is a hateful place that basically lives to collect all the worst parts of peoples lives and display it for entertainment. It's basically an internet tabloid magazine.
On the other hand... some of that stuff is just bad. It seems like he devoted a huge amount of his life to fighting petty grudges with random people on the internet and "proving himself right" in the most obnoxious ways possible.
Re: “It’s Okay to Be White”
Honest question: why ride the fence this hard here when you clearly understand that the ambiguity in cases like this is manufactured?
In the body text you lean on literal readings, ignorance of context, and epistemic confusion. But in the footnotes you acknowledge that slogans like this are engineered for deniability and that people reacting to that context are doing so rationally. Once that’s granted, the ambiguity stops being accidental and becomes part of the behavior.
It feels like the analysis already points somewhere that the prose is reluctant to follow. What’s gained by stopping short? Is it methodological caution, audience management, or something else?
I think I would argue that, even if a popular slogan is in some sense a deliberate linguistic trap, this doesn't excuse other people from their social obligations to treat things sensitively when called for. I can see why one might argue that it should—it's arguably a kind of rhetorical self-defense/not-being-Cooperate-Bot—but ultimately I think the world's too complicated for that kind of logic to hold, and being an asshole about this kind of thing (even if one was in a sense driven there by bad actors) causes too much collateral damage and one shouldn't do it.
I read Scott as coming from a kinda similar-ish position, which is why I don't read the footnotes as contradicting the body text. (He doesn't always land the same place I do—I think he sometimes favors a more confrontational posture than I would—but here I'm just talking about this one post.)
I am so confused by your question that I don't even know which side you're saying I should have been more on.
He is saying that you know the fact that this phrase was transparently engineered as a gotcha to produce this precise situation (look at how persecuted we are! people don't think it's OK to be white!!), but you still present the conservative argument as if it's good faith. You know this wasn't a good faith effort to accurately gauge the attitudes of black people and then adjust an opinion, it's an intentional tripwire, ragebait, which then is used as a pretense to justify the overt segregationism which was already present.
For some reason you hint at this and make it clear that you realize what is going on, but still play along with the sham. Presumably because you don't want to make hard-to-prove accusations of intent ("methodological caution") or get Adams fans even more upset ("audience management").
To start, let me say I'm optimistic that the survey results probably don't reveal racism so much as skepticism about the question or some personal understanding of the term, so I don't think the responses are likely to have found a reservoir of anti-white racism.
But how is "it's OK to be white" an intentional tripwire or rage bait? My assumption is that the 4chan trolls picked it specifically because they believed that their enemies would disagree that it's OK to be white. A bunch of them probably believe their enemies are anti-white racists.
I mean, I don't know if there were surveys, but if people who hadn't heard of the BLM movement were answering "no" or "I'm not sure" to "Do you agree with the statement that black lives matter?," that would probably be worthy of note, even if the statement was originally drafted by anti-white provocateurs.
It was popularized by trolls to get their enemies to respond in a way that plays badly. And you don't understand how it's an intentional tripwire or ragebait?
BLM as a phrase is similarly loaded, but BLM wasn't a reactionary trolling slogan. Indeed if there was a widespread political movement called "Whites are OK" and then some people came up with the slogan "Black Lives Matter" to satirize that movement and signal opposition, and surveys were asking people "Do you agree that Black Lives Matter?", and then affiliated internet hot take artists flipped out about the results, I would also call that intentional tripwire ragebait.
If it enrages people to hear the statement "It's OK to be white," then I'm more interested in the enraged people than the people who tested it.
I mean, if it enraged segregationists to have black people eat at the segregated food counter, I don't really care if that was intentional on the part of the protestors or not.
Jared Peterson upthread shared a follow up poll which suggests that most people weren't really enraged.
Sadly, Scott Adams seems to have fallen for it, so I do see your point.
You can only be baited if you are indeed the nutter the trolls believe you to be. Just don't be so easily trolled!
It's incredibly easy to defang such a "trap": just agree that it is indeed ok, just as black lives do indeed matter! Only fringe nutters should be unable to escape those "traps".
>this phrase was transparently engineered as a gotcha to produce this precise situation
Do you not see a problem with people being so easily baited into saying, yes in fact white people are evil and it's not okay? I don't mean the survey results- I mean the actual responses of people and especially universities demonizing it instead of treating it as banal.
*How does that not horrify you more than the trolling?*
I think you're trying to say that the literal meaning of "it's ok to be white" doesn't matter because it has a deliberately-intended secondary meaning. Is this correct?
The reason is that not everyone has the underlying context. If somewhere between 40-60% of all people are going to read the statement literally, you have to engage with the literal and the secondary meanings.
And also, as somebody earlier on pointed out, "Black Lives Matter" was similarly engineered.
There are more than just two readings.
First, you've got the literal meaning of "it's okay to be white", which, yeah, it is, and "black lives matter", which, yeah, they do. Only zealots disagree with the literal meaning of the phrases.
Second, you've got the exception-proves-the-rule meaning. "Parking is free on Sundays." "It's okay to have a little salami as a treat." "It's what you eat that matters for weight loss." We could understand these statements to mean parking is not free on Wednesday or Thursday or any day that isn't Sunday, salami is not okay as a dietary staple, and what you eat is more important than exercise. I would guess that many more people who object to either "it's okay to be white" or "black lives matter" interpret the statement in this sense than in the first.
Third, you've got people who know the context and have all sorts of complicated relationships with the statement, and who are no longer interpreting the textual meaning at all.
The piece was great... please don't self-censor.
Surely you can define racism as "a policy and/or attitude that can be used against an individual without bad qualities, based on that individual's membership in a group with alleged average bad qualities". This seems so obvious to me.
Basically, if you are uncomfortable around group X because of certain qualities you believe they often possess, and you are confronted with a member of X who clearly does *not* possess those qualities, *every trace* of your initial bad feelings about that person should immediately disappear, and you should from then on treat them *exactly the same* as you treat non-X people, without the tiniest difference. If you don't do that, you're a racist. The end. If you *do* do that...feel uncomfortable and suspicious of a member of a group unless and until they demonstrate they're not like the archetypal member you have in your mind, upon which you *immediately* lose all negative feelings towards them whatsoever...I'm not sure whether racist is the right word. It would at least depend on many further facts.
Adams does definitely *sound* like he's doing the former. Staying away from blacks even if they'd answered "agree".
So unlike virually every other cancellation, I can see the liberal side here quite strongly.
On a different note, a message to the guy who said "vote for actual fascism": please talk to a person who suffered (or whose relatives suffered) under actual fascism. Then sit down and never open your fucking mouth again.
This definition makes good sense, but I think it fails to cover a situation where someone discriminates on the basis of race, without believing that that race has any particular bad qualities.
E.g. someone could discriminate against Asians because of cultural norms/financial incentives/general jerkishness, without actually thinking that Asians have any particular bad qualities.
Now that I think about it, this is pretty much the 'Eric the restaurant-owner' example from Scott's old post on the definition of racism (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/).
If Jan 6 wasn't Trump going full fascist, it was close enough that I don't care about the difference and I'm still going to call him one. :P
>I'm not sure whether racist is the right word
Well, the polite society happens to be sure, and even has a name for that - "systemic racism".
> clearly does not possess those qualities
"Clearly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Pitbulls, for example, seem to be overrepresented in the category of "suddenly snapping and mauling a small child". At what point does any particular pitbull "clearly" not possess this quality, such that:
* You'd leave your small child with it, and
* Anyone who wouldn't is obviously just prejudiced against pitbulls
German Shepards are also overrepresented in dog bite incidents. They have patience a mile long, though. One should probably not leave one's small child alone with the dog, but...
German shepherds are much less overrespresented than pitbulls.
No kidding. 3.5 million German Shepherds in the United States alone? And only 24 deaths? Ceteris paribus, I'd recommend against owning a german shepherd, but if your only reason is "I like that breed better" I think that the extremely low level of risk shouldn't outweigh that reason.
https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/dog-bite-statistics/
Of course, this is only looking at deaths -- it is possible that pitbulls have "instincts" that lead to deaths more often than most dogs.
You don't need all the qualifications about "bad qualities" or "averages". Giving race any influence on decision-making is essentially always racism. This is not hard, and I don't understand why Scott Alexander and this comment section is struggling with it.
There are extremely few phenomena for which a person's race is directly, causally related to the phenomenon of interest (skin cancer, maybe?). In all the other cases, people are using an *imperfect correlation* with race as a proxy to infer something about an individual.
But there are almost always better signals to use! Often, you don't need a proxy. In Scott Alexander's neighborhood example, you can just look at the crime stats, rather than the racial composition of each neighborhood. As you note, for the poll that so alarmed Scott Adams, you can just interact with the black person and see if they're weirded out by you as a white person (or, if you're not white, you can probably just ask them how they feel about white people outright). For whether a person you're hiring will do a good job, you can use the usual "technical interview+call a few references" technique. Etc. If you do need a proxy, you can use a non-racial one (e.g., for the hiring one, you could do it based on the prestige of their education+effusiveness of their recommenders).
For the rare cases where there is *absolutely no other data* that *could be collected* to inform the situation, yeah, then making decisions based on race is OK. But I can't imagine such a circumstance, and I'm confident enough in my inference infer therefrom that such circumstances don't really exist.
Also, I'm sure someone's going to reply with: "but ignoring extant correlations leads to less efficient decision-making!" Yes. Using them is more efficient, but it is unfair to the people inaccurately described by the correlations. That's why we need a social stigma against racism: to force people to pay the (from their perspective) cost of making decisions less efficiently, but more fairly.
>"Using them is more efficient, but it is unfair to the people inaccurately described by the correlations."
"…fairness is an argument for idiots and children."
ETA: For "fairness" to have any meaning it must be simultaneously satisfiable for all parties, but prohibiting use of informative priors is "unfair" to the decision maker; since there's thus no way to be "fair" to everyone, the whole concept can be discarded with prejudice (pun intended).
"Prohibiting use of informative priors" isn't *unfair*. It disadvantages you. Fairness is about balancing the interests/rights of different parties, which is perfectly compatible with burdening one party in one area and the other party in a different area. The main argument for affirmative action, for example, is that some people in a selection process come to it already disadvantaged, and so giving them an artificial advantage increases the fairness. I happen to think that in most contexts affirmative action is a terrible idea and fails at its (ostensible) goals (one might argue about the real goals), but it's not morally incoherent, it's just not very fair and has all sorts of other negative consequences.
>"Fairness is … perfectly compatible with burdening one party in one area and the other party in a different area."
Disagree.
Putting a thumb on the scale is the epitome of unfairness.
ETA:
>"The main argument for affirmative action, for example, is that some people in a selection process come to it already disadvantaged, and so giving them an artificial advantage increases the fairness."
Making the decision maker(s) in said selection process bear the cost of making it more "fair" to the candidate (assuming they are not responsible for the candidate's disadvantage) can in no way be considered fair to them.
Are all inaccurate rules of thumb unfair, or only some? If you use some signal like "call a few references", you're also going to make mistakes. Maybe one candidate would do a great job, but all of their references only speak German, so I don't get a clear picture, and they don't get the job. Is that a fairer mistake than stereotyping? It feels fairer to me, but I don't know how to draw the line in a principled way.
What about someone who needs in-home healthcare preferring to hire women because they are aware that men tend to be more aggressive than women? Is that an unfair stereotype, or is it a vulnerable person using all of the information they have to make the best decision they can?
Why should the interests of people harmed by generalisations outweigh the interests of people harmed by not using generalisations?
For example, say I run an in-home healthcare company and prefer to employ women because they're generally less agressive. I'm sure we can all agree that that's unfair on male applicants who'd be great at the job. But now say I make a point of hiring men so as not to be discriminatory. Seems great -- except I'm now putting my customers at greater risk by hiring people with a greater statistical propensity to violence and agression. That seems pretty unfair to my customers! Why should the unfairness of turning down qualified candidates because of their sex automatically trump the unfairness of putting sick people's wellbeing at greater risk than necessary?
How are you using this information? Is it a general policy, or an informal bias, or a points system? As Jacob said (and I don't think you addressed), when hiring someone you have a lot of information which you can weight in different ways. If you make wise use of this information, you can probably deweight gender. I agree your interest in having more information matters, but if you can reduce the unfairness to the candidates by a lot for only a small increase in risk to your customers, then at some point it becomes morally imperative to do so.
>This is not hard, and I don't understand why Scott Alexander and this comment section is struggling with it.
There's been a multi-decade project to muddle and gerrymander the definition, especially among liberals and progressives, and progressive-leaning liberals are almost certainly overrepresented here. Scott is less friendly to that gerrymandering than most prog-libs, but certainly not *immune* to it or to the social effects of it.
>There are extremely few phenomena for which a person's race is directly, causally related to the phenomenon of interest (skin cancer, maybe?). In all the other cases, people are using an *imperfect correlation* with race as a proxy to infer something about an individual.
Kidney function and response to certain medications are a couple other medical examples that get close. You can do genetic testing that's even more accurate but (mostly) black vs not-black gets you something like 85+% of the accuracy at 0% of the cost. Of course use the more accurate if you have time/can afford it.
There's also quirky stuff like "earwax smell and texture" that's incredibly correlated with iirc Asian vs non-Asian but I don't know of any real effects downstream of it. Maybe non-Asians are more prone to ear canal blockages?
"If 0.1% of whites are murderers, and 0.2% of blacks are murderers..."
And if anyone's interested in an actual estimate of the proportion of murderers:
0.06% of white females
0.3% of white males
0.4% of black females
4.5% of black males
- https://x.com/fentasyl/status/1595607934167392257/photo/1
Edit: To be clear this is a lifetime projection of the proportion that commit murder based on contemporary homicide rates, not the current number of living murderers. Murderers presumably tend to die younger than average.
Here's a back-of-the-envelope sanity check:
20k murders a year over a lifetime(70 years) is 1.4m murders in the US. About half of murders are committed by black males, of whom there are about 20m. That's 700k over 20m, or 3.5% murderers if each murderer committed exactly one murder single-handedly. Multiple accomplices and multiple victims could skew that number in either direction, or cancel out.
What are the sources?
What are the definitions? Is this just convincted murderers? Does it mix in manslaughter? What about drivers of cars?
I also question this statistic. 4.5% of black men have committed murder? Those numbers don't work out.
They don't, at all. This is "back of the napkin math" in the worst way. 900k black men in the US are absolutely not murderers and uncritically believing and spreading it is... dare I say in this comment section... racist?
No way 4.5% of black males are murderers.
I (sadly) followed that link. The X post shows some alleged FBI stats on "Murderers per 100,000" as a rate, where white males are 5.2 and black males 95.5.
Let's assume that these "FBI stats" are real. The poster didn't bother linking to anything. They just showed a screen cap of part of a spreadsheet. Sure, that's how factual evidence works.
Then the X poster somehow extrapolates to "[a]ssuming these rates hold, we can project that ... 4.508% of Black Males ... will commit murder in their lifetime" (I omitted the projections for other groups).
Of course, this X poster doesn't show their math, so I don't know _how_ they reached this conclusion. I'm guessing that they assumed that literally every single living black male has a 95.5 in 100,000 chance of committing a murder in a year, and then multiplied that by average lifespan or something. Maybe?
If they _did_ do this, that's hilariously insane. It seems quite likely that many of these murderers are _repeat_ murderers, while the vast majority of non-murderers are _also_ repeat non-murderers.
But I think I've already put more mental energy into this claim then either you or the person you're quoting did!
Here's my own back-of-the-envelope calculation:
20k murders a year over a lifetime(70 years) is 1.4m murders in the US. About half of murders are committed by black males, of whom there are about 20m. That's 700k over 20m, or 3.5% murderers if each murderer committed exactly one murder single-handedly. Multiple accomplices and multiple victims could skew that number in either direction, or cancel out.
So by your own math the maximum is 3.5%, which already is significantly less than your original (completely unsubstantiated) claim.
I tried to get Claude to help me figure out to what degree murder rates are driven by people who murder more than one person. There doesn't seem to be great data on this. While serial killers are extremely rare and recidivism after a murder conviction is low, there doesn't seem to be good data on to what degree murder rates are driven by career criminals, e.g. a drug dealer with a twenty year career who murders several people in that time.
But as others have noted, saying that 3.5% of black men are murderers just seems wildly out line with conviction rates.
No, 3.5% was my mean estimate. According to https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf 20% of homicides have multiple offenders while 5% have multiple victims. That could skew the number of murderers above the number of people murdered.
Only about half of homicides with black victims get cleared up, so those convictions might be undercounting by about half.
Your estimate should care about how many perpetrators have multiple victims (possibly over multiple incidents), but that bit about "homicides with multiple victims" seems to be describing how many individual incidents have multiple victims.
Sure, my point was simply that 3.5% was not a maximum estimate as Rolsky claimed.
Another way to show that is to point out that the total number of murders in 2021 when the lifetime projection was made was actually about 15% higher than the 20k I rounded it to. Adjusting for that alone would bring up my estimate to 4%.
To get to 4.5% would only require that black males committed slightly over 55% of homicides rather than 50%, and even 55% is probably an underestimate due to the lower clearance rates of black homicides.
> 3.5% murderers if each murderer committed exactly one murder single-handedly. Multiple accomplices and multiple victims could skew that number in either direction, or cancel out.
The usual explanation for racial disparity in murder rates is gang violence, which I would expect to implicate a very small number of people who are committed enough gang members to kill over it and who probably commit many murders over the course of their careers.
Different explanation for racial disparity in murder rates: unarmed civilians mob-violencing someone. I've seen reports of this in Minneapolis. Over half a dozen men assaulted a single guy (he survived, but with brain damage), for no discernable reason.
Further different explanation: there are fewer pigs in the inner city. Given "relatively" equivalent murder rates for drug-dealing businessmen, your Pagans and other biker gangs have a relatively easier time concealing the murders.
Most homicides in the black community are not gang violence but personal beefs between people who feel disrespected by each other.
This implies 900,000 black men in the US are murderers, which is more than 130 times the number of black men convicted of murder in 2023.
It's not even remotely believable that 1 in 22 black men are murderers.
Another good definition of racist could be: Willing to use shoddy, unverified, and inaccurate 'data' to make a specific other race look bad, extremely skeptical and scrutinous of any data that makes their own race look bad.
Are you implying there's data in which African-Americans don't have massively higher homicide rates than other races?
'X>Y' and 'X=20Y' are different claims, and you don't get credit for the first one when you make the second and are wrong.
So much of this reminded me of one of my favorite movie quotes:
"'Not fair?' Who's the fucking nihilist here?!?!"
And the debate over whether saying "White people should avoid all association and proximity with black people because black people are dangerous" is racist brings up an interesting issue - a person can deflect pretty much any accusation of racism simply by claiming to be stupid.
A person can claim that they really do believe that 1/4 of all black Americans want to murder them, or that every Latino man with a tattoo is a violent gang member, therefore their racism is just pragmatism based on their stupid assumptions. And if you point out that they are being stupid, you are an arrogant elitist. So they can't be criticized.
NORMIE: “I support these political positions!”
INTELLECTUAL: “why is that?”
N: “because of my belief in [X] and [Z]!”
I: “Well good news, you don’t have to rely on mere belief! We have the statistics to say for a fact that [X] and [Y] are false. I can prove it for you in any way you’d like, and here are the sources”
N: “don’t tell me what to believe, elitist!”
Many such cases.
The next step is sometimes the normie citing a garbage source to say that X and Y are true.
Very often the case.
Almost certainly unintentional, but the part where the intellectual brings up unrelated point Y instead of responding to Z feels very true to life anyway.
Haha I’ll leave it in.
If the "Normies" know that "Intellectuals" would say the same thing regardless of what was actually true, it's correct to ignore them.
There are situations in which that is the case! More often than not, though, it’s the normie who has some absolutely insane incorrect conception of the world, and no amount of patient explanation will change their mind. I am an economic analyst and I see this all the time with populist economic ideas.
You think your understanding of economic analysis is correct, and theirs insane and incorrect. You may well be right, but you've done nothing to distinguish yourself to them from, to pick a recent example, people who say " there’s no scientific evidence to prove that a Black woman and a White woman are genetically different."
There’s absolutely a point there, and I’m sure plenty of other good-faith subject matter experts rue the fact that leftist activists posing as experts have destroyed the heuristic for normies that they can trust expert opinion.
It's worse than that: there are plenty of people with genuine expertise who've essentially traded their public credibility to advanced their political goals. That's now made it so you not only have to demonstrate you know what you're talking about but also that you aren't trying to deceive them.
I thought you did a great job. The takedown was the tribute, more than a hagiography would have been.
I must have missed it in the initial article, I didn't realize he died until you highlighted a comment saying so
It was in the first sentence of the post, but in a slightly roundabout way that probably made more sense if you'd already heard the news.
I think that being a nerd and being a 'persuader' are both sneakily bad spots to end up in.
Being a nerd usually implies a fairly serious deficit of social skills. This makes life much harder in many ways. Dating becomes a serious struggle, holding down jobs and the unspoken norms that comes with them becomes a challenge, and the lack of intuitive mimicry of others can delay meeting important life milestones. If a theoretical 'nerd' is not really smart, they might never be able to overcome these gaps. So for many self-proclaimed nerds I really think that being 125 IQ and not 145 IQ can be a life-debilitating outcome that they correctly react terribly to.
Similarly, being solely known as a persuader often implies a lack of intelligence and conscientiousness. If you are as persuasive as someone like Trump, maybe this is fine. But a lack of intelligence and conscientiousness is significantly impairing in terms of life decisions: you maybe commit crimes, gather a criminal record, get fired from jobs, have health issues, so on and so forth. The persuasiveness needs to similarly be really elite to overpower the negatives, and it can ruin someone's life if they are only in the 95th percentile of persuasiveness instead of the 99th percentile.
This is not to say that people cannot both be smart and also have good social skills, or be persuasive while also being intelligent and conscientious. But people who self-identify as 'nerds' are usually in the smart bad social skills pile, and people who call themselves persuaders are usually in the high persuasiveness low conscientiousness pile. These are fairly rough piles to be in if the primary strength is not super elite. The upside to being a 'nerd' might be being rich or incredibly successful, but the median outcome might involve social isolation, depression, and career stagnation owning to struggles with managing unspoken social protocols.
Most of my friends are nerds, are pretty satisfied with their lives, and probably aren't extreme intelligence outliers. The tradeoff you're talking about exists somewhere, but to equate it with "nerds" is to paint with too broad a brush, I think.
Nerds probably select into social groups with other nerds that have similar IQs to them.
Okay, but then why is it bad to be one?
The word "nerd" has lost all comprehensible meaning around here, and probably everywhere. It's just become a massive motte-and-bailey, where the motte is that "nerd" means smart but socially inept, and the bailey is that it refers to possessing about a dozen different very specific qualities that have almost nothing to do with each other and that I'm not sure anyone has even demonstrated are statistically linked, though maybe I missed it.
It needs to be totally tabooed, in my opinion. It does nothing but make discourse murkier, rather than clearer, and is a bizarre exception to the general norm of evidence-based and clearly-defined assertions among rationalists.
My guess is that the person you are replying to is using the word to mean “smarter than average but self-consciously bad at social skills” while your friends use it to mean “smarter than average but not especially good at social skills”.
The person I'm replying to argued that "people who self-identify as 'nerds' are usually in the smart bad social skills pile", where by "bad social skills" we mean bad enough to preclude having a good life even if you have an IQ of 125 and no other serious disabilities. I think this goes too far.
Smart people normally have good social skills. When I hear the label 'nerd' I interpret this as intelligent people who identify with some amount of social impediment that prevents them from being able to present as normal and well-adjusted in conventional social contexts. If someone can easily make friends, date around, and code switch in different social environments, in a way where the development of these skills was not effortful and arduous, maybe they have intellectual interests, but I would not call such a person a 'nerd'.
These are skills that most normal people can effortlessly do. So when someone cannot effortlessly do them they really need a big compensatory strength to override this weakness.
What does "INCLUDED UNDER PROTEST" mean in section 4?
It just means Scott [Alexander] would rather not address this topic, but enough people have demanded that do so such that he feels he ought to.
I think your assessment of Adams was really fair (I mostly think that because it agrees with my opinion) and you're not speaking at his funeral. I never understood where this "dont speak bad of the dead" reflex comes from.
I find it somewhat ironic that the article Adams praised was "You are still crying wolf", a title that did not age particularly well, nor did its "did this age well?" disclaimer.
Until 2025, I would have said Scott’s “You’re still crying wolf” post aged very well. The first Trump term made a lot of the liberal hyperventilating around Trump & race seem silly. The second makes it seem like they were right all along.
The difference between 2016 and 2024 is that Trump spent the last eight years purging the Republican Party of anyone who might possibly try to tell him "no", so instead of the Trump of the Republican Party we had in his first term, we now have Trump of the MAGA party instead...
Oddly enough, Trump's main criteria for hiring people appears to be autism. Seems someone who has suffered bankruptcies (and subsequently had to Prove Their Investment Would Make Money) values honesty.
Trump may have won an ideological war, but that's a different matter.
Hmm, I thought Trump was someone who had famously suffered bankruptcies, but he doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in honesty (particularly when it takes the form of keeping promises).
He's tried to make decisions without getting the facts, and that always goes poorly (see Afghanistan, where the Theater Kids wouldn't listen to The Oxymoron). If the channels upward are clear, that's already putting him heads and heels over the last guy.
Trump's a bombastic buffoon. But, he really did build the "Southern Border Wall" exactly to the Border Patrol's specs (great wall of china style, it was supposed to be cheap).
The border wall was not a promise the United States made as part of any agreement. But the entire apparatus of free trade agreements and investment in research and employment of aid workers was. The entire first six months of Trump’s second term was full of him tearing up agreements that the United States had made.
It would have been one thing if he just said “no more such agreements, but we will let these expire”, but instead he seems to have done things in the way that makes maximally clear that there is no way the United States can be trusted with an agreement ever again - they will last only until the next president has a whim that he wants to destroy it. Government jobs will be treated as exceptionally unstable jobs that need a wherein, rather than as exceptionally stable jobs that people are willing to take a pay cut for. Other countries will hesitate to make alliances with us, knowing that we might demand their territory at any moment. No one will make free trade agreements as long as the United States can break them with new tariffs on a moment’s notice.
most people overstay their visa (or asylum application)
still an effective barrier is important to at least be able to understand what's going on, and then to control the situation
diverting funds and doing a stunt physical barrier was the typical trash reality solution that Trump always did and does unfortunately
It still holds up well in 2026.
I went back and read it very recently. I think people have misremembered the argument of that post as saying ‘Trump isn’t that bad’ when in fact the argument is really something like ‘TDS based on false, hysterical and trivial attacks on Trump will distract from the yet-unknown but real dangers of a Trump presidency in things that actually matter like geopolitics.’
That is of course what ‘crying wolf’ means: when you complain about false things, the true things that you complain about get ignored. That is exactly what has happened in the last ten years: it’s hard to get some of us on the right to see and object to the genuinely dangerous things that Trump does (eg Greenland) because there is so much noise and complaint about the things he does that are totally fine, normal and good.
Here’s the conclusion of ‘You are still crying wolf’ -
‘Stop centering criticism of Donald Trump around this sort of stuff, and switch to literally anything else. Here is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, whose philosophy of governance basically boils down to “I’m going to win and not lose, details to be filled in later”, and all you can do is repeat, again and again, how he seems popular among weird Internet teenagers who post frog memes. In the middle of an emotionally incontinent reality TV show host getting his hand on the nuclear button, your chief complaint is that in the middle of a few dozen denunciations of the KKK, he once delayed denouncing the KKK for an entire 24 hours before going back to denouncing it again. When a guy who says outright that he won’t respect elections unless he wins them does, somehow, win an election, the headlines are how he once said he didn’t like globalists which means he must be anti-Semitic.‘
I am referring only to the title, not to the post itself. I'd wager that a lot of people who were "accused" of crying wolf in 2016 will now tell you that what is currently happening (ice, Greenland, Venezuela) is the sort of thing they were warning about.
Oh, sure, when you see ICE agents driving around traffic circles, over and over again, with a honking protestor driving behind them -- eventually pulling out of the traffic circle and playing "Turkey in the Straw" -- and then heading over to the next traffic circle?
This is absolutely fascism!
When the ICE agents drive up to the honking protestor's own house, pull into their driveway, and then get out and wave, this Absolutely Calls for calling 911 (yes, we have their transcript). The ICE agents are just standing there, mind you.
It is absolutely "crying wolf" to call 911 simply because you -- who were following the ICE agents -- found that their destination was your own driveway.
Yes, this specifically is the exact and only thing I was referring to.
Focusing on the title instead of the content is dumb.
But… that’s the whole point of the original fable? The wolf *does* eventually show up! But everyone ignores it because the boy had been crying wolf over nothing for so long that his genuine warning was lost in the noise. Which maps fairly well onto “Democrats were so hysterical over Trump 1 that their more accurate concerns about Trump 2 were ignored, helping him win in 2024”.
I think Democrats were always more afraid of the corrosive impact of Trump on the Republican party than they were of Trump. Trump trying to do something truly bad seemed plausible, and the Republicans were right to push back and say, "but he would never get away with stuff like that." To which the Democrats correctly pointed out that Trump was changing the nature of the GOP such that when Trump inevitably did something bad, Republicans would go along with it because the constant boundary pushing would lead them to be unable to find any red line. So it seems to me the current absence of any redline is directly descended from all of that stuff the left was complaining about in 2016.
>I think Democrats were always more afraid of the corrosive impact of Trump on the Republican party than they were of Trump.
Is there any actual evidence of that? They called Romney fascist too. Joe Biden said Romney was going to put "black people back in chains!" The Democrats *already* thought the Republican party was irredeemably evil. There is something about Trump's... showmanship... that pushed them over some other edge, but I don't think it was any concern about the party.
And when Biden said that, were you concerned that Biden truly thought Republicans wanted to bring back slavery, and was going to act on that belief to arrest Republicans for trying to bring back slavery? Or did you realize that such a plan would never work because not even hardcore democrats would allow it? Or perhaps you were you most concerned that Biden was fanning flames and convincing Democrats to hate and fear Republicans in ways which might lead Democrats to look past and forgive extreme actions that Obama/Biden might do in the future?
If the last, then perhaps you feared Biden's showmanship in the same way I, and many others, have always feared Trump's.
Whether a given politician is evil is irrelevant unless that same politician can convince a large swathe of people to refuse to hold them accountable for their sctions, or can even convince them that their truly is an enemy within and that extreme actions are necessary (ie the situation within the GoP since 2016)
> Here’s the conclusion of ‘You are still crying wolf’ -
In the conclusion of TASCW Scott makes a number of quantified predictions. What do you think of them, both structurally and the degree to which they did and did not come true? The contemporaneous comments don't seem to be public anymore, but I'm sure they could be dug up with a little effort and the commentary on Scott's later re-evaluation is still there.
> The contemporaneous comments don't seem to be public anymore, but I'm sure they could be dug up with a little effort
Why do you believe there were contemporaneous comments?
Quite a few of them still live. There are a few of the following OTs, and of course the subreddit (oh look, there's my username). But the bet logs would be the most relevant and that's not there at a glance.
People forget that a big part of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is that an actual wolf did come along and eat all the sheep. The point isn't that the boy always lies, it's that his lies mean no-one believes him when he starts telling the truth.
Correct.
Trump has definitely done more things in his second term, and I'll even admit he's done more bad and silly things, but I honestly can't think of anything race-related.
.
The part where Hispanic looking citizens get abducted without any sort of due process seems pretty racist to me, using Scott's definition from above.
The ICE deployment in Minnesota was sparked by a report that a group of Somali-run daycares were committing fraud. Trump has since gone on to talk about how Somalis are "very low IQ people" and other hateful and insulting remarks. (As recently as today!)
"Someone from Somalia committed fraud, therefore Somalis are bad people and we should deport them" is exactly the sort of exaggerated jumping to conclusions Scott was talking about in his definition of racism.
The difference between a boy crying wolf and a boy with binoculars giving very advanced warning can be very difficult to distinguish for anyone not willing to climb the hill and borrow the binoculars.
That article is still very good.
I still think it aged fine. People shouldn't have cried wolf about Trump's racism in 2016, because that made it harder to believe the people who pointed out the real wolf (Trump's dictatorial tendencies in 2024). I said in 2024 that I believed this was the real crisis and Trump's dictatorial tendencies were real this time.
Eh, I still think you whiffed on not including the consent decree the doj had on Trump for racial discrimination in housing in 1973. It was an otherwise comprehensive post and ignoring a multiyear doj lawsuit that's explicitly about doing racial discrimination is a big omission.
Black and White testers went to Trump's properties and asked about vacancies. They got disparate results.
From nprs coverage on what followed:
'"They signed what was called a consent order," Kranish says. "Trump fought the case for two years. ... He says it was very easy, but actually he fought the case for two years."
The Trumps took essentially the first settlement offer the federal government provided, Kranish says; the Trumps did not, in fact, have to admit guilt in settling the suit.
"[The settlement] required the Trumps to place ads in newspapers saying that they welcomed black applicants," Kranish says. "It said that the Trumps would familiarize themselves with the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination. So it also specifically said they don't admit wrongdoing, but they did have to take several measures that the Trumps had fought for two years not to take."
Trump claims the Justice Department lawsuit was just one of many housing cases against many landlords, but Kranish says this description is misleading.'
"Persuasion can be fact-based! Here I think of Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, two of our most influential public intellectuals, each with a reach far greater than Adams’. Both are excellent writers and have nonzero charisma, but they are mostly respected for being knowledgable and likely to be right about things."
Here I would commit a major sin of ommission if I did not mention Yascha Mounk's excellent Substack *Persuasion* which has this exact premise (I have no affiliation).
Also, a random note: German has "überzeugen" for the rational, fact-based type of persuasion and "überreden" for the more manipulative kind.
You can find a similar nuance in English:
überzeugen = to convince, überreden = to talk someone into something
Footnote 7 is closest to my view. I admired Adams’s work before 2016. During 2016 I thought he had some decent insights, but along the way he really tooted his own horn about what a god tier persuader he was and did a lot of Motte & Bailey about Trump and Hillary. After a while I realized I’d never get a straight, factual analysis from the guy because he was clearly trying to pivot into the MAGA pundit sphere, so I stopped following him.
Why is the right question whether Scott Adams would have appreciated the post? He's the one person in this discussion who is absolutely, positively unaffected by whatever you say about him. I've unfortunately learned that just because you might say it doesn't matter how respectfully you/your corpse gets treated after death most relatives will care.
Having said that, for public figures I think your duties to their loved ones are satisfied as long as the vibe of the peace is respectful and not 'thank god that asshole is gone' or 'what a waste of a life' and you mention some positive impacts. People like to know their loved one had an impact and as long as it's not a hit piece they probably aren't hurt by you writing it.
And you aren't doing anything unwise like carrying on a fued or expressing your disdain immediately after death rather than waiting for time to offer emotional distance.
>Why is the right question whether Scott Adams would have appreciated the post? He's the one person in this discussion who is absolutely, positively unaffected by whatever you say about him.
Timeless decision theory, I think?
While the dead can't care what is said about them, most of the living care about what *will* be said about them after they die.
Living in a society where everyone badmouths the dead and doesn't consider their wishes makes people expect the same fate will befall them, causing them suffering at the thought while they live.
Living in a society where everyone respects the dead's wishes means the living can look forward to this future with comfort and satisfaction.
It's astonishing to me that anyone thought you were not kind enough to him, especially given how incredibly charitable you're being to him about race.
I think it's inevitable with a polarizing figure. People who liked him saw him as a genuinely nice guy treated terribly unfairly, and any unkindness as a continuation of that.
People who didn't, saw him as a crank who dove headfirst into fashy trolling, first ironically and then authentically, and any charity whitewashed that fact.
I think he did an impressive job of holding a holistic view of the guy throughout the article. I'd be flattered if someone saw me so clearly.
Great work not including Sam Altman in your list of persuaders 😆
I feel awkward including him in a dichotomy of nerd vs. persuader because, although he is obviously a good persuader, I think he also benefits from genuinely understanding AI and technology extremely well. Elon Musk is also in this category, as are many other of the most successful tech CEOs.
I thought it was strategic ambiguity, now I'm confused how Ilya made it!
I do agree with you about him, Elon, etc, though.
I think the focus on persuasion versus facts/evidence kinda misses the point. It's not about how much evidence moves policy, it's about showing respect and not ostracizing high decontextualizers who value literal truth.
What nerds (myself included) are really longing for is any context or mode of presentation where literal truth is considered more important than vibes. It's not about everyone agreeing with you about what the best evidence might be -- engineers disagree with each other all the time -- it's about wanting a space where asserting that "no human life isn't priceless, there is some dollar value we should put on it" or "it should be legal to price-gouge after a disaster to encourage people to stockpile and import" without being accused of being a cold uncaring asshole. What is upsetting isn't the PHB it's the fact that everyone pretends what he says is true even when there is clear proof to the contrary -- not out of stupidity but because most people respond more to the vibe than the literal truth.
Of course the irony here is that of course we too are reacting to a vibe. We are, after all, humans as well but I think the people who find this upsetting would feel much better if other people were willing to admit more often that it's not the literal truth that matters here but the vibe.
>What nerds (myself included) are really longing for is any context or mode of presentation where literal truth is considered more important than vibes.
I recommend sticking to pure math.
I've long since stopped being more than vaguely disappointed at this in society (and with family it's no different than any way it can be hard to truly get people with different approaches to life). I suspect that it was very motivating to the Dilbert generation because many of them didn't have any places with like-minded people they could feel a sense of belonging in.
The reason I bothered to comment was not to foment a demand for change but because I think it explains where the bitter angry comments about how ignorance and stupidity always trump evidence and reason. Those people aren't reacting to the fact that some people disagree with them. They are expressing anger that flows from a sense of never feeling accepted and understood. This was much more common back in the day where you didn't have social media or couldn't go find your tribe at comic-con or a maker fest.
Ultimately, for all that nerds express the feeling as -- why isn't the whole world like me -- they mostly just need to find their tribe. The only thing I'd change is to try and convince the rest of the world that there is a different kind of context that nerds/high-decontextualizatizers use to communicate to each other and if you don't speak it use the same caution interpretating it you would with any other subculture (though it would help if nerds could do something similar in reverse).
I sympathize, but my reply was serious.
>The only thing I'd change is to try and convince the rest of the world that there is a different kind of context that nerds/high-decontextualizatizers use to communicate
I'm pretty sure that they are aware on some level, just unwilling to accomodate.
Plausible. It's not something that bothers me much anymore but we are all full of sympathy to problems we experienced when we were young and want to believe there is something that makes it better.
I'm very happy sticking to pure math but I worry that not everyone has that option.
What if the literal truth is that you're a cold uncaring asshole? Oh no that hurts my vibe, I need a nerdspace where we can all be rational and agree with me
Some people are but this is an orthogonal property.
As I indicated at the bottom, ironically, what nerds want is really mostly the same thing everyone else wants -- to feel they have a space where they can have their vibe without being trashed for it.
If nerds had better social skills they would have long ago communicated the message that: sometimes we mean to talk to each other in this unusual context so please don't blunder in assuming it has the same contextual associations as other speech. It's what we do for many groups (religious talk of hell is treated differently than other praise of torture, ethnic groups are assumed to have different cultural contexts etc). Then when some cultural conflict goes down like the Google bro makin what were pretty moderate (and better researched than what it responded to) claims we could say: remember this is that special nerd talk context with different rules for implication.
TBF the fact that nerds keep violating the implicit rule of: yah fine have your thing but don't keep trying to say it's what everyone needs to be doing doesn't help. But it's also true that the underlying problem is that the status we assign literal truth makes people reluctant to admit how much of their talk isn't exactly about that.
Maybe that is the truth! Oh, well, moving on.
The problem isn't that reality isn't decontextualized.
When a decontextualizer tries to tell you the one-sentence 'simple truth' about a complex and hotly debated real-world public policy issue, they are almost always wrong. The context generally matters a lot for those things, and the people who are insulting the armchair decontextualizers are often people who understand enough of the context to recognize their mistake.
Let's assume they are. So what? Most people are wrong about complex contentious topics. If people just disagreed there would be no issue here in the first place. My point is exactly that it's not really about "why doesn't everyone else see I'm right about everything" it's the fact that the rest of the world doesn't think "ohh there goes that silly high-decontextualizatizers again getting caught up answering the wrong question" but rather impute the same motives to them that they would have for giving that answer.
And yes, high-decontextualizatizers are often missing something -- they are making the mistake of assuming that the literal question being asked is what the debate is really about. And it would be fucking amazing if the response from society was: "You idiot don't you understand that's not what we are really talking about. We really care about this other thing over here." But, unfortunately, that's not what happens (even if one is aware enough to understand the real question admitting the true complication undermines rhetoric).
A good example of this is in debates about race and intelligence. Someone asserts something like: it's unscientific to believe that races differ in average intelligence. The high decontextualizer comes in and goes "umm actually, [however you define race and IQ], we are virtually guaranteed by the numbers involved that groups of that size won't be exactly equal" if they are a bit more sophisticated maybe they point to David Reich's argument that we will probably eventually be able to measure such small effects that we will find some non-zero correlation here so it's a bad idea to ground talk of equality in this kind of likely false claim.
And in terms of literal truth I'd claim that argument is correct at least charitably interpreted (relative to a particular environment, definition of the terms etc usual caveats). It's also not what the contentious social conversation is really about. What people actually care about here is that it's not ok to just assume things about someone's ability or behavior based on their skin color (no for quite a few reasons) not some objectively unimportant fact about a potentially arbitrarily small but non-zero correlation.
The problem is the disconnect between the high-decontextualizer who simply has an inherent desire to "umm actually" false claims and the rest of the world. Ideally an aware high-decontextualizer makes it clear they agree with the other people on the real issue of discussion but not everyone is that aware and even when they are if people don't understand why someone would be motivated to be pedantic other than because they want to help the other side they are still going to assume they have some bad motive.
My point is simply that if the reaction was: ohh there go those weird high-decontextualizatizers missing the real issue entirely again (and maybe even: and getting the literal answer wrong) I don't think it would be much of an issue. But that's not really how humans work because it requires accepting a gap between the literal truth of what is being said and what is actually at issue
Ok, it sounds like basically what you want is more autism awareness and more societal tolerance and gentleness towards autistic people. Which, as an autistic um-actually-er, I appreciate and agree with.
But I'm also aware that the big problem is that for contentious political/social issues, the genuinely clueless high-decoupler accounts for about 5% of the people making those comments publicly, and the other 95% are bad actors trying to push their side with knowingly dishonest rhetoric, or useful idiots convinced by those bad actors and parroting their talking points.
I think that those 95% of bad actors and useful idiots *do* deserve social sanctions, in the limited sense of 'people being mad and rude at you'. And I have sympathy for the fact that it's really hard to tell them apart from the 5% of autistic decouplers based on a short anonymous text post on social media.
I'm not sure what the solution is beyond 'social media bad, try to talk to real people who know you well' and 'put in lots of caveats so people are more likely to recognize you, shake your head and blame the game when that fails'.
I broadly agree with your description of the situation -- and honestly my original remarks weren't particularly trying to call for a change just identify that the emotional grievience Dilbert spoke to wasn't as trivial as illustrated (we can't address all sympathetic grievances).
The one place I'd disagree is with the desirability of those social sanctions. Yes absolutely it's often hard for people to distinguish the people whose motivation is to say genuinely ask/debate what is meant by gender from those who wanna play political gotcha (so why can't I identify as an attack helicopter). But I think Scott was exactly right about social punishment being counterproductive until and unless you can coordinate sufficient agreement on the issue.
Indeed, I personally think a big reason it has become so much more acceptable for people to be openly racist etc is because of the tactical mistake of trying to extend those social punishments beyond the range of views where we had that social agreement and the result was to undermine the norms rather than strengthen them. In many cases I agree we should move the norms in those directions but I think social *punishment* can easily backfire.
But I take your point that even if we restrict ourselves to mere voluntary association (do I want to hang out or be in a group with that person) the difficulty in determining motive is always going to be an issue. My hopeful belief is that if there is enough appreciation that some people are just pedantic literal people it will allow enough signals of motive through to improve the situation but maybe not. Mostly I just wanted to emphasize that there was something a bit deeper going on.
But I'm just being picky. I think we basically agree on the broad outlines.
Great post as usual. Really appreciate these "from the comments" posts and wish everyone did them.
Since I was quoted in this one, I want to clarify that my comment — "Adams was vicious and hateful and played a material role in convincing Americans to vote for actual fascism" — was not intended as a reference to the racism controversy, which I didn't follow and was only barely aware of.
It was a reference to his day-to-day Twitter feed and "coffee chats," where he was vicious and hateful towards anyone who opposed MAGA, a movement that is hell-bent on hurting people and destroying American democracy. I can appreciate the nuance and recognize people loved Adams for different reasons, but on sum he was a corrosive and destructive influence on public life. If more Americans behaved like him we'd be in a worse place; if fewer did, we'd be in a better place.
Yeah, 'He built a nice friendly positive community that really helped each other out and had a set of specified hated outgroups that they all vilified and dehumanized and fear-mongered about and made coordinated political and cultural attacks against' doesn't really have the same ring to it as 'He built a nice friendly positive community that really helped each other out.'
A lot of people seem to be focusing on the latter and stopping there.
> If more Americans behaved like him we'd be in a worse place; if fewer did, we'd be in a better place.
That's entirely subjective, isn't it? I do genuinely believe that the world MAGA is building will be strictly better for themselves than the one they will replace. It's just that you're not going to be a part of it. Oh well, that's the price of failing to deal with threats to your existence...
I think an America that sheds the rule of law and democracy will be worse for everyone.
The demographics that have leverage will continue to have a voice, as they will always have the threat of violence. And obviously the country will continue to have laws, you can't have a country without it. Just because you don't like the new rules doesn't mean they don't exist.
"Rule of law" doesn't mean that you have laws, it means that even the most powerful people are meaningfully bound by them.
Sure, but we found out the hard way that this was simply never the case. Trump did not have to break any laws to achieve immunity for himself or his people. And thus, things really aren't so different now. Everyone is bound, but the law simply privileges the strong above the weak.
I'm probably saying things that other commenters have said both here and on the original post, but:
It kind of relates to the point you make about nerds with high general intelligence finding out that in the end one only ends up being truly good at one thing, i guess :-) : it wasn't a great eulogy, but it was really good Scott Alexander. "Scott Adams — Much More Than You Wanted To Know", as it were. And, yeah, I found that overall your post moved me from "ahah funny comics written by... uh, that guy, the nerd lost in the corporate world who's been ranting about Trump lately" to seeing Adams as a much more interesting person, and also, in a way, putting him more in context? Like, how he's influenced, been influenced by, etc. people and ideas in the world he has now left?
Part of me wants to say that showing people's complexity, and where they stood in the world, is closer to what an eulogy should be than the kind that basically just slaps a "nice person, will be missed" label on someone and buries them... but yeah the one you wrote isn't the kind of eulogy you'd want to give at the funeral in front of the family, precisely because it includes the complexity of the person...
I don't know enough about Scott Adams to know if you were fair to him, but something else that strikes me is how you also (and again not uncharacteristically) abstracted Scott Adams, as an instance of "the nerd", for example. It was interesting to read, but it's the thing that to me seemed less respectful? As if you were both discussing the man himself... and just using him as an example to make your point?
Why is the distance of time that has passed since someone's death related to the degree to which you should share your honest assessment of them? I get the distinction before death vs after death, but not this concept of "so soon after they died."
Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias “likely to be right about things”?! What “things”?
It's not enough to be right, you have to be right where most others are wrong, in this case, people left of center.
Yglesias was way early to the party of the cause of high housing costs and how widespread the downstream effects are. I think he's also right that there should be markets for kidneys.
I think Klein is right about "everything bagelism" leading to the failure of blue governance, and that overly seeking consensus makes it impossible to do anything.
He is not right about housing. Read Moses Sternstein.
Okay, I've spent some time on this, and I still think Yglesias is right about housing.
It's a fundamental misunderstanding to point out that household formation hasn't outpaced housing production. Of course it hasn't; there's no place for those households to be!
The fact that cost per square foot has not skyrocketed does not mean that housing is actually affordable; requiring everyone to have an enormous house or nothing is part of how everything is unaffordable.
Shortages in superstar cities don't just affect people in superstar cities. When housing was more affordable there, people could migrate to seek their fortune, and frequently did. Now they can't. This is part of why American domestic migration is at historic lows.
It's not entirely clear to me if he in fact thinks that additional construction won't reduce rents. This is pants on head economic literacy if true, but I'm certainly not buying his Substack to find out.
Here’s a recent piece, but he’s written more extensively about it:
https://www.therandomwalk.co/p/when-it-comes-to-housing-its-the?triedRedirect=true
I spent a non-trivial amount of time reading through his stuff. That is also mostly paywalled, and again, I'm not going to buy his Substack without a really good reason.
If you'd like to do your best to summarize the argument here, I'll be happy to have a look. But I think I've chased your links in good faith, and it's on you to do some of the work at this point.
I’m sorry, I’m cooking/helping my elderly mother all day today. I don’t have time to excerpt though I would another day. You can usually read a free post. If claiming a free post counts as work - well, I envy you.
Some things, but not all things.
I would be interested in knowing the correlation between intelligence and persuasion ability.i feel. It is important to this and general nerd discourse.
From my experience there isn't really any correlation, or if there is it's pretty weak.
I've found it mostly correlates with confidence.
How do you account for collider bias?
From what I can tell, contrary to conventional wisdom, cult members and persons laboring under cognitive dissonance are not mouth-breathing morons. In fact, they tend to be *smarter* than average, probably because the intelligent are better at symbol manipulation to reach a desired outcome.
Not quite the same thing, I know.
My takeaway from the Scott Adams article was that I wasn't aware that he'd written a book about persuasion, but now I've skimmed through "Win Bigly" it's full of actionable advice. So thank you.
I thought the intent of the first piece was great, but felt the execution to be lacking. I think it was an attempt to look at the human, his failures could have been looked at more charitably and the metapoint of him being a nerd who wanted to break out could have been handled better.
Overall I enjoyed the article and I think you are right Scott would have enjoyed your article.
As a white person, it warms my heart to know that 53% of my black countrymen/countrywomen think it is OK to be white (and another 21% were astute enough to invalidate the premise with a "not sure" answer). Appreciate it y'all.
What can I say. I'm a glass half full kind of guy. This poll seems to demonstrate that the vocal anti-white sentiment is just a loud minority. Hopefully a similar poll will show the same for the anti-black sentiment among the white community. Then we can crank Hendrix's rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner and mellow out a little bit.
Fortunately, there are still plenty parts of the country where this mellowness is in fact, the norm. My own zip code is one. I’d give the edge to the South in this regard.
Of course, don’t tell the NYT as they would not be best pleased to learn there were places where people don’t talk about race all the damn time.
That was my take, too. Given the totality of American history around black/white relations (slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, lynching, separate-but-"equal", systematic abuse by the justice system, etc., etc., etc.,), to have 3/4 of blacks not think white people are clearly bad demonstrates a lot of nuanced, fair-minded thinking. Not enough much as we'd like in an ideal world, but certainly far more fair-minded and nuanced than Scott Adam's reaction.
The obvious conclusion to draw from all that is to stay the f*** away from Scott Adams.
Do you think it's healthy for a celebrity like Pam Grier to just bald-faced lie about being exposed to racially motivated lynchings as a child?
Should a single actress have much impact on our thoughts?
Should a single cartoonist?
But to make the stakes more clear - would it be an important thing to mention in a eulogy about her? Why is it that black racial resentment is seemingly an expectation and completely forgivable but similar moments of negative racial commentary from white celebrities career destroying? Do you think this is a permanently tenable situation?
Yes, Scott Adams should have more impact. He was known for his writing, in which many found insights.
Why didn't you answer any of the other questions?
I also don't think we should be mad at people who answer "Not sure" in polls. It's not like answering polls is their job.
47% is one hell of a minority. What can I say. I'm a glass half empty kind of person.
Some black people being cranks bother me a lot less than the Harvard professors. Much more corrosive to society when the racist cranks are legitimized on high.
"I’m not Language Czar, but if you force me to define the word “racism” I would call it a bias which makes people take the flaw of an ethnic group (whether real or imagined) further than they would normally go, until whatever core of useful insight they contained becomes caricatured and exaggerated, and they’re being used more to spread hatred and fear than to communicate useful information."
I feel that is original and interesting and have never heard arguments about bigotry expressed that way.
There is a general problem wth all discussions of bigotry whete there are two camps that seem unrelated.
A) Theologian who reads the Bible and his close reading of Corinthians suggests it isn't possible for him to support gay marriage.
B) Guy who screams"I hate f*gs" at strangers in the street who dress differently.
You can argue that they are just different IQ levels of homophobia but that seems a stretch to me, there doesn't seem to be any kind of relationship. Whether a negative view is based on malice does seem really important to any view of what is bigoted.
I also think there are lots of people who are just full of malice, I don't want to give someone like that a pass on racism or homophobia but if some is just regularly shouting or tweeting abuse at everyone it is hard to see them a coherent racists, they just become trolls beyond bigotry which I think describes lots of 4chan and Twitter.
Agreed. This “obvious” definition does a lot of work. It feels obvious to me too, but I’ve never heard anyone put it this way before.
I'm reminded of (part of) the discussion here.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=pGiNrIxxpe8
(Sorry for the podcast link, I don't have a transcript, and I'm probably not doing it justice.) The idea being that whether or not you're reacting to something real, it's still worth caring about whether your response to that is just making everything worse.
It raises a question about how people choose to live a little bit.
Imagine a hypothetical where two groups tend to congregate in separate areas.
This is attributed to racism on the part of one group only.
Then efforts are made to challenge this situation.
It can’t be said that they’re wholly unsuccessful because overall people acquire a greater ability to live wherever they like. In particularly among the upper classes of both groups, this happens.
But after years of efforts to make what is perceived as this geographic problem go away, people stubbornly still seem to congregate with their group as to where they live.
It seems to me it is hard to say just because people are past people and they’re dead and nobody now cares what they think that they (both groups) didn’t act based on something they knew about themselves or human nature generally.
And the present people do so act.
Or don’t if the overall pattern stubbornly prevails.
When does it stop being - oh you know, people know something how their own lives - and start being: racism. Where is the line?
I should note that there are a variety of aspects to life where this calculation of sin/wrong could be demanded, race is only unusually and artificially salient at the moment and hopefully won’t be forever so.
This is kind of scary - I feel like this was what everyone knew racism to be before wokeness, and now I worry people vaguely associate it with, like, "anything that promotes whiteness" or whatever and can't even conceive of it just actually involving stereotyping groups unfairly.
I had thought that even as people debated all of wokeness's attempts to expand the racism concept, they were keeping the normal default meaning of the word in mind as a fallback, but seems like maybe not!
It got a lot weirder and worse but I never got the feeling anyone ever had a clear definition even in the 2000s.
Concepts around disparite impact and the idea of the asymmetry of the possiblty of racism have existed for decades, anti-semitism represents bigoted conspiracy theories but very rarely in the modern world seem to be based on race yet is always lumped with racism. For example both sides of the Affirmative Action debate call the other side racist.
Your article against Murderism is a great illustration of the confusion before woke.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
I would have phrased it as arguing in bad faith to reach a predetermined conclusion. That gives a bad definition because “bad faith” is less specific than “bias” and implies a moral judgement rather than being purely descriptive. So in my case, at least, it’s not that you were using a meaning of the word I was unfamiliar with; it’s just that you did a better job of putting that meaning into words that I likely could have.
Nothing substantive to add, just wanted to point out for those that are unaware of it, but that "Dogbert Internet Guru" panel you posted instantly made me think of the Key & Peele skit "You gotta hear this funk band"
I continue to admire your writing for its force coupled with attention to nuance. And for the record, I had never heard your definition of “racism” before and was compelled by it. Please keep clarifying “obvious” things!
>Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, two of our most influential public intellectuals, each with a reach far greater than Adams’. Both are excellent writers and have nonzero charisma, but they are mostly respected for being knowledgeable and likely to be right about things.
I doubt that they are respected by the outgroup any more than Adams was, though.
To be specific, I think their outgroup is leftists. Matt Stoller has been spending the week calling Yglesias a "Jeff Epstein Democrat", and if anything I wrote got the level of furiously illiterate rage that Klein got for "Abundance", I'd be a lot less generous about it than him.
> You can’t argue with (1), because the bad thing might be something like ‘crime’, which everyone dislikes. You can’t argue with (2), because sometimes you can find statistics showing it’s literally true.
People can and do argue with everything, mostly by not respecting their interlocutor and not dignifying them with an attempt to reason with them.
Does everyone actually dislike crime? Isn’t it routinely justified as building character, like bullying, and by claiming the victim deserved it for being a victim, rather than a survivor, or for “acting like a bitch”?
How much “character building” is done for a person who is murdered?
Criminals probably like crime.
> How much “character building” is done for a person who is murdered?
It doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to show you’re tough enough not to care and to make your interlocutor look like a wuss for caring. Short-term defection for status over long-term coöperation. Isn’t it beautiful?
>Isn’t it routinely justified as building character,
No, it isn't. Everyone who isn't a criminal actually does dislike crime. I suspect even criminals dislike crime when it happens to them.
Mark Kleiman found that people are willing to pay a very hefty amount to avoid crime, leading to the conclusion that America is horribly underpoliced.
“I think trying to manipulate people is inherently demeaning to the dignity of humankind.”
I have to admit that if someone asked me who the best manipulator I follow is, I would have replied “Scott Alexander. I started reading him 15 years ago as a Right Wing, Christian, and he has manipulated me into agreeing with 90% of his political opinions, and convinced me to shift half of my tithing to EA causes and to work in Biosecurity.”
I define manipulation as any action used to convince someone who what you want. Alexander seems to use a different definition of manipulation than me, one that only includes persuasive techniques that he finds immoral, but I also suspect Adam’s definition of manipulation is closer to mine. The morality of manipulation should be based on what the manipulation achieves, not the methods used. Alexander has used his manipulation to expand EA causes and moderate others opinions, so I consider him a very moral manipulator.
“I define manipulation as any action used to convince someone who what you want.”
If the interest is communicating with other people, your definition should really be one that is shared generally (not some private one).
“The morality of manipulation should be based on what the manipulation achieves, not the methods used.”
If the method is lying, it still could be immoral regardless of the outcome.
Fair, I’ll use Merriam-Websters Dictionary definition: “to change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one's purpose.” That still describes all of Alexander’s writing, after all, he is extremely artful with his prose. His purpose is to help others donate effectively. He could have spent his time writing boring, just the facts, articles, and I would not have been manipulated and probably not have written anything he wrote.
It is fair to describe unfair manipulation as inherently immoral, but I’m not sure how much of Adam’s writing was unfair vs artful. Certainly Dilbert was artful, not unfair. I haven’t read enough of his other writing to know how unfair he was vs artful.
The general understanding of “manipulation” is that it’s bad. So, if you are using that word, realize you are communicating the “bad” connotation (even if you don’t intend to).
“Artful” doesn’t have that connotation.
Being convinced someone isn’t necessarily “manipulation”.
=====
There’s nothing inherent that makes (some of) Dilbert not being unfair. That is, if there’s an argument for/against that, I’d read it. (A blanket statement about it isn’t very interesting.)
>The general understanding of “manipulation” is that it’s bad
If that were true then it would be reflected in the definition. I certainly don't agree that it's necessarily bad. I think most people think manipulation is good if it's used to achieve a goal that they agree with. For example a poker bluff is an attempt to manipulate one's opponent into folding a superior hand. I don't think anyone thinks that bluffing is bad.
I didn’t say “necessarily”.
Something like poker is an exception. The person I replied to wasn’t talking about poker.
If the rules/practice of a game include deception (manipulation is considered an example of not being honest), you are basically agreeing to it (implicitly).
The normal/typical use of manipulation isn’t anything like that.
I’m fairly sure you know that.
==========
I don’t read a lot about poker but I suspect “manipulation” isn’t a word anybody really uses to discuss this aspect of the game.
My point is it’s an odd/infelicitous word to describe whatever Scott is doing. I guess you think the use in that particular context is fine?
> If that were true then it would be reflected in the definition.
No. Dictionary definition often miss important nuance in meaning.
No careful user of English would generally use “manipulation” and “bluffing” interchangeably.
> I think most people think manipulation is good if it's used to achieve a goal that they agree with.
Most people are going to see manipulation as a form of being dishonest regardless of the goal.
Manipulation in the intrapersonal sense has to have some element of deception, trickery or deceit. The person being manipulated cannot have the full picture of what is happening and why; the manipulator has to have a distinct intentional agenda hidden from the manipulated. The end goal of manipulation is usually taken to be selfish benefits to the manipulator rather than benevolence to the manipulated or others, so generally you have manipulation being dishonest means for selfish ends, which most would say is immoral. Because it involves dishonesty, even if it is benevolent it is demeaning (you are not worthy of the full picture; there is a status difference between those who manipulate and the sheep).
"manipulation" is more about means that are agnostic to the underlying facts of the matter. Symmetric rather than asymmetric weapons, to use Scott's past terminology.
I appreciate the kind words, but I've tried pretty hard to convince people by listing the facts as I understand them. Yes, there is extra skill in listing the facts in the right order/packaging, but I still think this is importantly different from trying to convince people of random things that might not be true - not just in effect, but in the actions being taken and methods being used. As for the "morality of manipulation should be based on what it achieves", see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/less-utilitarian-than-thou
I didn't know Scott Adams apart from "Dilbert", which I read some of the cartoons and found them funny but didn't follow them. So I have no dog in this fight.
I think the post about him was fair enough, it was "I come to bury Caesar not to praise him". Obviously, the fans will say it wasn't elegiac enough and the not-fans will say it was not critical enough.
My take away from it? The guy was human, he had good points and bad points like the rest of us, some of his bad points were very bad, but he was genuinely a talented cartoonist. Rest in peace.
> Rest in peace
But will he, given the deathbed conversion of questionable purity?
"Between the saddle and the ground is the mercy of God"
I had no idea that the creator of Dilbert had such a cultural impact. Saw the strip a few times, never really clicked. Maybe I haven't suffered enough in corporate environments to feel the bite. In any case, Scott's mild and sympathetic criticisms sound quite reasonable to me.
I fall in the category of those who thought the post was very tough on Adams, rather than sympathetic, but I also think it was not unfair to be so, even on the occasion of his death.
I find it a regular phenomenon that people who try to walk back a controversial statement by claiming it was a joke thereby reveal that, if this were true (which it often obviously isn't), they show that they have no idea how to tell a joke. Props to our Scott for pointing out that Adams was very good at telling jokes, so the walk-back is especially unbelievable in his case.
Racism is a form of prejudice. Prejudice consists of judging all members of a class by a characteristic attributable only to some members of that class. Therefore Adams's strictures against all blacks is racist.
What does "Also share to Notes" mean?
Notes are public posts, so that option is to allow you to make your comment a separate public post on your profile as well as a comment on this post.
On 1, another of Adams' favorite persuasion techniques was pacing and leading. Just as only Nixon could go to China, only S. Alexander could bring warm feelings about a controversial figure to ACX readers. For Adams fans who thought the piece should have been less critical, think what Adams himself would have preferred: the piece as written, or a less critical piece nobody would have trusted or read?
I'm a big Dilbert fan who didn't know much about Adams's wider life and I thought your obituary was an outstanding tribute to a brilliant and complicated man, warts and all, as well as some of your best writing. I posted it on social media and sent it to a few fellow Dilbert fans and they seemed to like it too. I hope the negative comments you got don't deter you from writing things like that again.
Let me say I'm strongly in favor of writing whatever you think about people right after they die, and at any other time. My opinion of Adams from the piece actually went up. I mostly knew him from the Trump support, and I thought he was a typical MAGA charlatan. Scott's obituary was a humane treatment of his life that showed there was a lot more depth there. I didn't even know he'd written books! My opinion of Scott Adams is forever changed as a result. "Scott Alexander finds him interesting" is enough to put him above 99% of prominent Trump supporters in my mind. Some people might've lost respect for him, but whatever. We're here still debating his legacy, and I think if some historian or AI wants to write a history about the rise of Trump in a hundred years, they will get a lot of context about and insight into one of his early supporters from Scott's obituary.
Same here actually. I still hate him for the impact he had on me and mine, but I feel less certain that everyone ought to hate him.
This is a seriously nice piece to write given how Adams acted and shows genuine patience and care. Kudos
I appreciated your original post. I do not relish his death, though I am glad his voice is retired. Also prostate cancer usually is a very painful way to die which I wouldn't wish on him.
My take, based on much less exposure, was somewhat similar. He seemed to me quite brilliant and Dilbert was similarly masterful. Sadly, unlike Dilbert which was ineffectual at changing corporate culture, his political musings had a much broader effect. My exposure to that aspect of Adams was entirely on Twitter, where he was glib and employed ridicule and ad hominem. He seemed to me more interested in 'gotcha' moments than genuine exchanges; on gaining and playing to followers; on showing us all how smart he was.
Regarding the tone I can only say that, as someone who hadn't thought much about Scott Adams in years and hadn't thought positively about him in longer, this article made me reconsider the man, made me consider flaws of his that resemble flaws of mine, and ultimately left me more sympathetic to him than I started.
Reading this on my phone, I thought you were saying Conversations with Tyler had 5 *cubed* listeners, for some esoteric reason. Realizing that it's instead a lossy 5k suffused me with a warm, elitist glow.
I guess I should add that I thought the Adams obit was beautiful. And that's coming from a non-Dilbert fan who casually thought the guy was a casual lunatic.
Honestly, (from the perspective of someone who doesn't know much about Adams personally) your post read as if you really did admire/appreciate the guy in spite of his faults. To me it did come off as overall positive, and I think that positivity paired with the honesty of what you think of him overall means more than just saying something nice and leaving it at that. I think it was a good thing to post.
The "speaker for the dead" analogy rang true.
The “Republicans will be hunted” tweet was the breaking point for me, when I tipped over from thinking “Adams has had a lot of interesting things to say but seems to be losing his mind” to “he’s totally lost it, there is no longer any wisdom or good-faith communication in his words.”
It was obvious at the time that a) the thing he meant wasn’t true and it was reckless and corrosive to say it; and b) he would try to claim it came true using some kind of disingenuous two-step: either the tactics Alexander calls out here, or else an aggressive variant of the motte-and-bailey where you take some bad thing that happens and say it meets some stretched definition of “Republicans will be hunted.”
Tolerance isn't about pretending people have no flaws and embracing them as perfect, or pretending they have no redeeming qualities and rejecting them totally; it's about seeing them and taking them as they are, and your post does that well.
What about Adams' idea of the Talent Stack? It is his healthy response to finding out that he’s not in the 99.9999% of anything.
He wrote a whole book about it!
>Can we dismiss this as a joke? I think Adams has used the manipulation technique of saying things that might or might not be jokes and then strategically sticking to them or saying “What? Me? I was only joking! Haha! You can’t take a joke!” depending on which was more convenient to him at that exact second, enough times that I’m not comfortable letting him have that escape.
Thank you! This is the most frustrating thing about current politics and I wish people would notice it more.
For what it's worth, I read some (all?) Scott Adams books in elementary, loved the comics, have a catbert doll somewhere, and I thought it was a really touching... obituary I'd have called it.
> Can we dismiss this as a joke? I think Adams has used the manipulation technique of saying things that might or might not be jokes and then strategically sticking to them or saying “What? Me? I was only joking! Haha! You can’t take a joke!” depending on which was more convenient to him at that exact second, enough times that I’m not comfortable letting him have that escape.
This is the "clown nose on" / "clown nose off" except Adams did it constantly and pre-emptively. Like other nerds, he had this terrible fear of being proved wrong, and needed to have an escape clause.
> I worry that Adams (and you) are doing something where unless the average person can solve every problem by facts and intelligence alone, then facts+intelligence lose and memes and persuasion win. But the average person also can’t solve every problem by memes+persuasion alone!
I don't think this analysis works. I think what's going on is something you call out yourself a couple paragraphs later.
> The grass is always greener on the other side. The nerd sits in his cubicle and thinks “If only I were more charismatic.” But the salesman with the bright teeth and the firm handshake thinks “Man, I bet I could get out of this dead-end job if only I were smarter.”
There's an SSC post which touches on the theme that different people need different advice.
The world is full of gates. Most of them are implicit - someone does an informal assessment of you and acts on what they assume.
If you pass through a gate like that, what it looks like to you is that there wasn't a gate. But if you didn't measure up, you may notice the gate. The nerd whose life has gone nowhere is aware that his superiors who won't promote him and the women who won't date him are finding fault with his charisma. The problems he has are overwhelmingly due to what he's missing. The problems he would have had if he'd been stupid are problems he doesn't actually have because he isn't stupid.
One comment I might make about intelligence vs charisma generally is that charisma makes you look better on implicit assessments (regardless of your true value), and intelligence makes you look better on explicit assessments (by affecting your true value). The bitter nerd has probably noticed that every time someone 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘴 him to meet a standard, he does, and yet nobody seems to have valued this.
I liked how you pointed out that Dogbert wasn't a thing you could really be, but I disagree with the reasoning a bit. Yes, Dogbert accomplished things of ridiculous scope and which required tremendous credulity on the part of other people. But that feels more to me like simple artistic hyperbole.
What always struck me about Dogbert is that in real life he would have been a terrible con-man because he was entirely up-front about his machinations. He loved gloating about his evil schemes, as if he enjoyed some sort of impunity ftom reputational damage and that people would never come to distrust him. I suppose one could see this as a bit of fourth-wall service, but it seemed more like a cynical take on how people are so stupid that they will accede to your foul plans, time and time again, even if you spell it out for them.
Granted, this somewhat mirrors the way Trump doesn't exactly hide his corruption, even if he doesn't actually come out and say it (though at times he does display a verbal candidness which makes it seems he lacks on some level a moral understanding of what constitutes corrupt behavior). Adams, on the other hand (as you pointed out), appears to have emulated this aspect of Dogbert by explicitly spelling out these manipulation tactics that he then employed, to a degree that makes it seem that he began to lose his grasp of the "absurd" part of his "absurdist humor", and started taking his comic more literally than seriously.
Maybe Dogbert can get away with it because he is a dog, and people like dogs? I think Catbert was a sadistic HR person who also never suffered consequences for his sadism. Ratbert doesn't accomplish much, because he is dumber than either, and also people don't like rats.
>I’ve lived in plurality-black neighborhoods twice in my life, and although they had their problems I never felt afraid for my life.
FWIW I lived in one of those same neighborhoods at the same time you did, and one night I got jumped by two black teens, hospitalized due to their assault, and still carry a scar on my face because of this (which they did so they could steal my $50 handbag that contained my diary and a library book)
"LIBERAL: “It’s Okay To Be White” is a known 4chan white supremacist slogan. They chose it as their slogan precisely so it would be awkward when people called them out for saying it, and so they could retreat to saying “We just said it was okay to be white, which surely nobody can hold against us”. This is stupid, we’re under no obligation to pretend we don’t know this, and those 26% of black people who were against it, were against it on this basis."
"Its ok to be white" was 4 chan troll on libs and progs explicitly becuase many/most are anti white. And you can see the sputtering and non sensible responses such benal statement. Highly effective troll opp.
Even if it is white supremacist in nature rather than a 4chan op to screw with libs/progs (not that its mutually exclusive either) there correct way to handle is yeah duh next question. Instead libs/progs freaked out which is damning. If white being ok is white supremacist I think that points to some great epistemic failure in left of center culture.
Several years late and not properly critical of left of center anti white racism. A similar article could be written about men.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/opinion/democrats-racial-politics.html
My thoughts on men:
https://x.com/civic_enjoyment/status/1946596646822760503?s=20
https://x.com/civic_enjoyment/status/1860842934805180483?s=20
Someone should have come with "black men's lives matters" and point out that most victims of police violence are black *and* male.
IIRC, there was a splinter group of BLM during the early, heady days of 2019/2020. You'd see occasional signs stating "Black Men Matter" which I think evolved into "Black Fathers Matter."
I don't remember this slogan having any meaningful outcomes though.
>My opinion - it seems plausible to me that many of the 26% of respondents who said they disagreed meant they disagreed with the 4chan slogan version, and that many of the rest were doing “symbolic belief”/”emotive responding”
The whole point of "it's ok to be white" is that there are some people for whom it is not okay to be white, and their reaction to that statement exposes it. That *is* the 4chan version. I don't grant charity to people who come up with a "4chan version" that indicates white supremacy, because they are misunderstanding in a politically convenient way and politically convenient misunderstandings are a thing to discourage.
>I think trying to manipulate people is inherently demeaning to the dignity of humankind.
We have a phrase for "tries to get people to do things in a way that doesn't involve logical arguments". It's called "social skills".
See the discussion in the post about the job interview vs. the telepath.
Related the previous post: what are the “best things” that either Weinstein has written before Trump made them insane? I think the closest I can think of is the dialogue with the Evergreen students where he came across as fairly reasonable but I have never read anything either has written about science or technology I thought was insightful.
I distinctly remember at least one of them seeming very sane on the Sam Harris podcasts about that issue.
Re footnote 1 (on Adams' seemingly contradictory statements about fairness): I would say it's coherent to a) believe in the moral value of fairness and b) have definite views about what it covers, while c) finding it a childish subject for debate. Indeed, the most fundamental beliefs are the least amenable to debate.
Good writing on the "it´s ok to be ...", seems like that and the ".. lives matter" statements are causing polarastion rather than anything else. Both sides can project their worst "mind reads" of their opponents into those statements (and ocf the best of their ingroups). Few slogans work that badly.
1. A rich white guy looking for a nice house in a wealthy neighborhood wouldn't end up next to a lot black folks even without actively trying to avoid them.
2. Even without racial motivations, you probably wouldn't want to live too close to a high-crime, low education area, which many predominantly black areas are, especially in cities (not sure about small towns in the south).
3. Even if his main concern is black people hating white people, rather than black people committing more crimes, a poll that says that only a quarter of black people disagree with a motte-and-bailey WS slogan should have moved his priors in the other direction, if anything. In fact, the survey is so shitty and confounding as to be worthless, and really doesn't tell us anything one way or the other.
I don't know what his priors were before, but his conclusion was dumb. People shouldn't put that much stock in polls about agreeing with some verbal statement.
"4chan’s deployment of the “It’s Okay To Be White” slogan was (maybe literally) out of Adams’ book - say something completely inoffensive, make sure everyone knows it has a secret offensive meaning, then retreat back to “What? You’re upset at our totally inoffensive thing?'"
What was the secret offensive meaning? I am not a 4chan nor Scott Adams aficianado, but my overall impression was that a (perhaps unspoken) tenet of Wokeness is white people should bear a certain measure of shame or guilt for their ancestors' crimes, like slavery, ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, etc., and this slogan was meant to kinda illustrate the fallacy or limitations of that idea by saying something obviously true and inoffensive, then watching people flip out about it. Was there more to it? Was I misinterpreting things?
I was going to ask the same thing- the secret offensive meaning comes *entirely* in the predictable reaction.
It's not even really a loaded question. It's just purely inoffensive and for bizarre social signaling reasons a lot of liberals and progressives freak out about it, like "all lives matter." The correct response is a shrug, not "we're going to investigate and expel anyone that put up these signs" (which universities did, or at least claimed they were going to do).
I definitely thought, reading the original article, that it was a corrective tribute to Scott Adams in response to otherwise sloppy mainstream reporting (I think some NYT or similar headline was going viral: "disgraced cartoonist dies" or "Adams, racist dilbert creator, dead"). I'm somewhat amused that there are people who both thought it was a right-wing hagiography and also a left-wing hit piece.
> All nerds must eventually realize they’re not going to immediately dominate everything by intellect alone. (...) If someone deals with this using denial (one of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the nerd who says no, I really am the next Einstein, ie a crackpot, aka the sort of person who gets featured on Sneerclub. If they deal with it using reaction formation (another of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the self-hating nerd, aka the sort of person who joins Sneerclub. [Or maybe this would be projection, or both, idk.]
Denial is sincerely believing that you are the next Einstein, and being happy about it.
Reaction formation is telling everyone that you are the next Einstein, talking about how many retweets your crackpot posts got, showing people the polite replies from university professors you received, and writing a book called The Final Theory of Everything... while also feeling full of doubt, but that only motivates you to spend more time writing the book, which will hopefully prove that you are actually the best.
Projection is feeling uncertain about yourself, but refusing to thing or talk about it, and instead talking about how *other* nerds are not half as smart as they believe to be. (definitely the Sneerclub)
Repression is simply not reflecting on whether you are or aren't a genius... in a situation where you very clearly are not.
Regression is to start crying whenever you contemplate your lack of intellectual achievement.
Sublimation is saying: "At least I can make an AI generate a nice picture. I may not be the greatest scientist, but I am a scientist-artist, and perhaps that's even better" and keep producing more nice pictures.
Intellectualization is saying: "Well, genius or not genius, according to which criteria? We all know that IQ is a myth, and academia is all about networking and political skills. So in the end, there is nothing to fail at."
1. "Several people said that, since my opinion of Adams was mixed at best, it was unkind to write it just after his death. For example, SaintParamaribo writes:
You should have steelmanned S.Adams more, and be more generous to the guy. He JUST died. He actually recommended your blog. He was a mentor to many of us. And your eulogy could’ve been way more generous. I’ve been a follower of both, and reading your eulogy broke my heart.
I appreciate this perspective and debated it with myself before publishing. The considerations were - I think it is bad to insult someone just after they die."
I though rationalists were against sacred cows, that just because someone is (recently) dead we should avoid speaking ill of them?
2. Concerning The Gervais Principal and The Dilbert Principle, the words of some Wehrmacht general also come to mind: "I divide my officers into four classes as follows: the clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous."
This is a little different, because "workers", "middle management" and "upper management" are more like separate classes, while "Wehrmacht officers" are more like one interfluid class.
I don't understand the distinction you're trying to draw between a sacred cow (bad) and a moral principle (good).
I agree with your Prussian general analogy, and mentioned the same quote in my Gervais post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-principle
A sacred cow cannot be questioned, regardless of circumstances.
If I say I debated it with myself, doesn't that mean it's not a sacred cow?
Even sacred cows undergo some scrutiny. Otherwise we'd think them self-evident.
Re footnote 9, I feel like Scott is missing the point of "It's Okay to be white". To summarize the end of the shortest quality contribution from the Motte: https://www.vault.themotte.org/post/the_shortest_quality_contribution
"The far-right statement isn't: "It's okay to be white" , it is you tearing it down."
The point of a good troll is that it causes the target to react disproportionately and unreasonably to small stimulus. A child poking their sibling in the back of the car that causes them to become so upset they fly into a rage laughs at the schadenfreude of seeing this other person expend so much effort and anger with such little stimulus. Even better if they end up getting in trouble over it from their parents, because the poke was so innocuous that it doesn't get punished but the freakout violent response does.
"It's okay to be white" is a poke. The hidden message within it is not "it's not okay to be a minority" or "white people are superior to other races". It's "you are a racist bigot who hates white people, and rather than accuse you directly I'm going to trick you into exposing yourself. I know you think it's not okay to be white, so I am going to provoke you into throwing a tantrum and admitting this to the world."
And it worked. The people saying it did have ulterior motives, but (in most cases) those motives were not in themselves racist, but anti-racist. I'm sure plenty of white supremacists also used the statement in some sort of motte and bailey attempt to make minorities uncomfortable. But the origin was a troll against anti-white bigots, and it only worked because they existed in large enough numbers to fall for the bait.
It was trivially easy to avoid, just as it's trivially easy to agree that black lives do indeed matter.
100% black lives matter and it is okay to be white. All lives matter, and all races are okay.
Combine the sentences: problem solved.
Now you're onto something.
This is why Hockey gives you two minutes for instigating.
I think it's more complicated than that.
There's a history of racists using coded symbols (eg HH, 1488, the Black Sun if most people don't know what the Black Sun is) etc. This is a useful way to both identify others, and to do the equivalent of gay people shouting "We're here! We're queer!" - ie create a sense of strength in numbers so that people aren't afraid they'll be stigmatized.
That is, suppose that 25% of people are racists. 25% is enough to be a respectable political faction, IF they're all able to be open and coordinate into one. The woke win condition is that each of those people is afraid to ever talk about racism, none of them ever learn there are any other racists, and they never coordinate and factionalize. The racist win condition is that they all learn of each other's existence and are able to assert their power as a sizeable faction before the wokes can punish them for showing their hand. Thus the obsession with (for example) crushing people who wear swastika t-shirts - not because the t-shirt is itself harming anyone directly, but for the same reason a victorious invader wouldn't let someone in the occupied territories raise the rebel flag.
Creating a slogan which serves the point of a racist slogan, but is hard to crush (because it's superficially fine) is then not a neutral act, but a direct attack on the anti-racist regime. They don't have a choice of whether to crush it or not (in the same way that China can't decide one day to let Tibetans proudly fly the Tibetan flag, or else they'll look weak), but then they can make fun of the regime by saying "Look, you hate white people so much that you're crushing our apparently harmless and true slogan!"
The "it's okay to be white" being about white supremacy seems to be straight falsehood. I have now spent a little while looking at the sources and if you dig through the idiological papers and articles on the topic to their primary sources it is literally people complaining about anti-white racism, and idiological academics describing that as synonymous with white supremacy.
For example:
Article about how the slogan is racist.
https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/viral-slogan-its-ok-be-white/#footnote1_2dw9kt6
"The phrase was used synonymously with “white pride” on 4chan’s right wing /pol/ board since at least 2014,1 "
Primary source they quote: https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/25483813/#q25486605
It's a discussion of white being discriminated against (note a discussion, some say they are not being discriminated against).
E.g.,
'Institutional racism if anything exists against whites. The numbers support a lot of shocking stuff if you look closely. Anti-white racism is steadily increasing while racism against nonwhites has become newsworthy in its rarity and more than balanced out by positive discrimination in favor of them"
I think citing that post would be more convincing if it weren't surrounded by posts like "black trash blame the white man for their failures", "I didn't hate faggots as much as I do now ever since seeing you fucks propagate yourselves like a fucking cancer. Same goes for your kike overlords", and "the immigrants coming to Europe and USA etc. are the lowest of the lowest class in the countries they came from, in other words, they are the filthiest scumbags who where not wanted in their own country".
...or if you hadn't cherry-picked one of the few footnotes from that article which isn't incriminating, eg number 3 says "I think we should spam this stuff on tumblr then post it's okay to be white on their campuses. if all goes well they will start covering our posters with our hitler quotes." Or the one where someone advocates putting "It's Okay To Be White" posters on their campus while saying that "JIDF [will not be] happy about this" , and people react with images like a picture of Hitler drinking a bottle marked "Jew Tears". Or the one where people gloating on how libs took the bait and objected to their harmless pro-white slogan is intermixed with talk of "subhuman nigger races".
I'm trying to give you a graceful compromise where it was pushed by people with motivations from pure trolling to racist-inflected trolling to actual racism, but I really don't think your quest to say it's totally innocent is credible.
Good engagement. I didn't actually cherry pick. I just scanned and those were the first things I can across.
I also think that 4chan provides an unusual context where being extreme taboo is normal, and so yeah, people say crazy things. I don't think that necessarily means that 4chan is racist. For example, I checked pol and one of the top posts today is advocating for racial mixing (and, in 4chan fashion, saying that people who are anti that deserve to be loser incels).
In characterizing, “it's okay to be white” I think you could equally (more fairly and accurately) say, “some people involved in the campaign to troll people for being anti-white, expressed racist sentiments towards other races and expoused white-supremacist views.” That's obviously going to be a true claim, any group advocating for x has it's bad members (e.g., female chauvinist feminists who think all men are evil, etc…)
And in general, both “Black lives matter” and “it's okay to be white” warrant exactly the same response: “of course. All lives matter and it is okay to be any race.” And I am suspicious of anyone who doesn't respond to either statement in that way.
I think that's fine, but that it's worth remembering the original question that led us down this rabbit hole - that is, whether it's possible for the black people on the poll Adams cited to disagree with "it's okay to be white" for any reason other than that they're a hate group and all white people must flee them.
I think that regardless of whether the slogan came from outright white supremacy or just from a 4chan culture of trolling, it's reasonable for those black people to think "Hmmmm, a pro-white slogan coming from an infamously racist message board, pushed by people who use the word nigger and consider us subhuman, with their stated purpose being to humiliate and discredit the anti-racist movement . . . perhaps I should be against this", and that this is a more parsimonious explanation for those 26% disagreers than "they're a hate group".
I totally agree with that. I think Scott Adams reaction to the survey data was ridiculous, but I disagree with giving the framing that the phrase was clearly racist support.
I think the phrase being racist is a pretty strong claim, and I don't think the evidence is necessarily there, and I really do not trust the so-called ‘literature’ (as, as I have argued they literally conflate acknowledgement of white people being discriminated against - some thing which must obviously occur sometimes - with being racist). That people cite this garbage literature as proof that the phrase was racist infuriates me. These types of papers are a complete abuse of academia, and essential launder pure idiology into supposed fact.
For example, I would not be surprised if you traced back the origin of the phrase “Black lives Matter” that some early promoters didn't also either harbour (or in a fit of rage or trolling at least speak) some pretty racist ideas about white people (e.g., statements like “White men perpetrate all violence” or even worse ones like “white people deserve to die” etc…).
Jesse Singal has a good article related to this topic of extremely low quality pseudo-academia: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/if-you-cant-accurately-quote-someone
See my other comment for how this phrase is literally mainly just people being *against* anti-white discrimination. Essentially by being anti the phrase "it's okay to be white" you are saying white people can't coordinate to address times they are discriminated against.
Most of those coded symbols are meaningless to people who don't know the code. But "it's ok to be white" has an obvious literal meaning, and that is the point of using it!
Germany has laws against displaying swastikas, but the United States is not an occupied country, nor are we China. We have freedom of speech, precisely because our government isn't as terrified as the PRC, or Iran right now. The PRC is like my example of the Soviet joke, in contrast to the United States where, to riff on another Soviet joke, you can shake your fist at the White House and denounce the United States government AND the Russian one.
>There's a history of racists using coded symbols (eg HH, 1488, the Black Sun if most people don't know what the Black Sun is) etc.
There's also a history of racists doing horseshit flim-flammery right out in the open: "whiteness must be abolished! Whiteness is treason to humanity! But we don't *technically* mean white people," wink wink, nudge nudge, unless...
Those people are/were Harvard professors, Yale lecturers, NYT bestsellers instead of... you know, pseudonymous asshats. And yet! The professors were treated as Respectable Experts instead of Virulent Racists, and now we're reaping the whirlwind of that crop.
Plus if you're a Democrat nobody cares about your Nazi tattoo. Funny how that works. The problem isn't the coded symbols, the problem is the obvious double standard.
Yes, I'm against the bad thing when the libs do them, too. You can be against bad things on both sides, instead of using the fact that one side does a bad thing as an excuse to condone bad things on the other side.
I am against both! Both are bad!
I condone absolutely nothing to my right, I'm saying there's a legitimate, massive hypocrisy that gets ignored when appealing to coded symbols and 4chan versus virulent racists like Noel Ignatiev being employed at Harvard.
One is much more damning in my eyes because no one thinks 4chan matters, but way too many people think Harvard matter. No one at the NYT ever defended 1488 they would "whiteness studies." Et cetera and so forth.
Rant over, liberals will always fold before acknowledging progressive racism, water is wet. Have a good one, sorry for wasting your time.
I was writing about Scott Adams, and the "it's okay to be white" slogan was an important part of his story in a way that whatever Harvard professors are doing wasn't. That's why I wrote about it, that's why le raz challenged me about it, and that's why I'm responding to his challenge.
I was more sympathetic to the "Harvard matters and 4chan doesn't" argument before 4chan collectively got elected President.
loved the obit by the way, I thought it was well balanced in dealing with a frustrating and complicated person.
I recognize why that one mattered more re: Scott Adams. It's the point about symbolism that got under my skin, I still think you're broadly missing an important distinction that I can't quite put into words in a satisfying way. So it goes.
In ten years, I suspect Trump will be a bizarre footnote whose long-term major negative was PEPFAR, whiteness studies will have *still* not been razed to the ground, and liberals will still be doing the flim-flammery about it. We can compare notes again then.
This is how you end up with random schmoes getting canceled for using the international diving hand signal for “OK”.
I've already said I'm against cancellation. Having removed some of the danger of false positives, I don't think we're obligated to never mention the possibility of true positives. My only claim in the post was that it's possible for black people to worry that this is going on and speak out against it without being "a hate group"
In the post sure, but here in the comments you seem to be going harder to bat for the case that “dog whistle” claims can reasonably be treated as true, and very much that this one in particular is a “true positive”.
How *do* you distinguish between “it’s okay to be white” and “the OK sign” such that one is a false positive and the other is totally reasonable to assume is racist? Both seem be at least partially (magnitude YMMV) deliberate trolling efforts to make hypersensitive SJWs look foolish to normies that don’t spend their time searching the fever swamps of 4chan for the latest intel from the edgelord/maybe-actually-racist coalition.
Whatever positive value you get in detecting secret racists seems to be absolutely overwhelmed by the “looking foolish to normies” effect. Especially since a) you usually don’t have to dig very deep to find the actual racists being much more obviously racist, and b) any coalition whose most powerful act is saying facially positive things that maybe sometimes signal the opposite is pretty weak, and treating them as a powerful secret cabal probably makes them stronger. The actual problem is not that racists are allowed to freely say “it’s okay to be white”, it’s that they are racist. And smacking down anyone who says “it’s okay to be white” will do nothing to make them less racist.
Dog whistles of this type seem to be essentially a flipped version of the motte-and-bailey. In the motte-and-bailey, you say the bailey openly (Abolish the Police!) and retreat to the motte only if strongly challenged (Abolish the Police just means “reallocate some funding to alternative programs like social workers and poverty reduction”). But in the true dog whistle, you can only ever pronounce the motte (it’s okay to be white) and hope that people who already agree with you know that you *really* believe the bailey which must remain unspoken (it’s not okay to be black).And it doesn’t even work that well as a motte because as soon as it is detected, you have to abandon it. So it seems to me that the side that can get away with motte-and-bailey will always be the stronger side compared to the one that has to use dog whistles.
“If you want to see the world more clearly, avoid joining a tribe. But if you are going to war, leave your clear thinking behind and join a tribe."
I like that. Maybe the wisest thing I've heard from Adams.
An honest statement, which was also a declaration of war against people like me who don't consider ourselves to be at war.
Why? This doesn't have to be your war. You can simply watch as they do what needs to be done.
Once they "abandon clear thinking" people who don't have every reason to believe that what they're doing is not actually "what needs to be done".
This isn't exactly a complicated problem. The right has identified the exact same problem with this society as you have, but instead of continuing to make utterly futile attempts at attempting to solve it by debating or "trolling", they have come to the conclusion that rotten ideas come from rotten people, and thus need to be eliminated at the source. They are solving a problem that people like you could have never solved yourself, all without you even having to lift a finger. Be grateful that you share a common enemy.
But the right hasn't "solved the problem" either! And by "abandoning clear thinking" they also abandon their best chance of accurately diagnosing the problem and coming up with a solution.
What do you mean, they haven't solved it? These things take time, you can't fault them for failing to take power and change the demographics in just one year. Everyone involved has had plenty of time to identify the problem, just as you have. Unlike you, they are trying for a permanent solution.
When they attack you for who you are you aren't given much of a choice.
Thankfully for them, the person I'm replying to is not a liability. Unless he makes himself one, of course.
And who is? What does your statement have to do with anything?
TGGP. Given the demographics of the readership, and no reason to suggest otherwise, it's a safe guess to assume he's white. His views are also not anything those in power would find issue with. He is not anything that would make him a liability. His safety is very much in his control. I am simply suggesting that he should make sure he doesn't get in the way of his problems being solved.
>he manipulated thousands of people who might have stood to benefit from an estate tax, or who sincerely believed in fairness-based arguments for an estate tax, to vote against their own interests/beliefs, in order to enrich him personally
This seems unfair to Adams. He may well have had good arguments against the tax (like the standard one about incentives) and thought it net harmful to society - even net harmful to those you imagine "who might have stood to benefit".
It's just that the personal motiviation pushed him over the edge into action.
Again, I would believe that if he hadn't specifically said otherwise (“You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children”)
A utilitarian argument (ex: incentives make us all richer) isn't about fairness. Maybe he had one. It's uncharitable to assume he didn't.
"This was personal. This was also the day I decided to move from observer to persuader. Until then I was happy to simply observe and predict. But once Clinton announced her plans to use government force to rob me on my deathbed, it was war. Persuasion war.”
I find myself reminded of a footnote in Terry Pratchett's Pyramids:
"Younger assassins, who are usually very poor, have very clear ideas about the morality of wealth until they become older assassins, who are usually very rich, when they come to see injustice has its good points."
Re: "fairness is an argument for idiots and children"
After the ProPublica exposé on COMPAS, where they (implicitly) expected two mutually-incompatible things* to simultaneously be true for the algorithm to be "fair", I came fully around to Adams' perspective.
*Those two things being P(recidivism | score) & E[score | future recidivism] both being race invariant, which requires that base rates also are (they're not). It was never about the particular algorithm, it was just activist innumeracy.
You've turned against one of the fundamental concepts in human morality because once a media organization published an article that used a silly definition of it in one thing?
I sure hope nobody ever comes up with a silly definition of murder!
You're better than that, Scott.
When I said "…I came fully around to Adams' perspective.", the word "fully" is key; the ProPublica article was just the final straw.
They didn't put it in such clear terms, they just lamented at how *obviously* "unfair" the algorithm was because values for one of the metrics was worse, ceteris paribus, for black defendants than for white.
But in the conterfactual world where the algorithm had been calibrated for that metric, the values for the *other* one would have been unequal in the same direction (due to base rate disparities) and bizarro-ProPublica would've written an equally-scathing article on the same topic.
It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation, and it generalizes to *any* argument based on "fairness". To the extent that undermines a given conception of morality, so much the worse for morality; shut up and calculate.
Still not sure what you're trying to say.
If me and my buddies proposed a law that the government should confiscate all your money and give it to us, would you object? Would your objection involve it being unfair? If so, why does the fact that there are some marginal cases where it's hard to define unfairness make you want to jettison fairness entirely, as opposed to retreating back to the well-established cases like the confiscation example?
(I don't think you can try to reduce 'don't confiscate my property' to other nonfairness values - sure, it violates a certain norm of property rights, but it seems worse than a fair universally-levied tax that also violates those same property rights norms)
I'm harping on this because one theme of this blog is that all concepts (except maybe hard math) dissolve into meaninglessness when looked at under a microscope, but you've got to try to have some concepts/values anyway, and philosophy is the study of how to do that, rather than overupdate on any one particular concept dissolving. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/
>"If me and my buddies proposed a law that the government should confiscate all your money and give it to us, would you object? Would your objection involve it being unfair?"
Such a scenario would be full-on Conflict and I would do anything in my power to not only resist but also destroy you & your buddies. That might include "fairness"-based arguments that I expect (applying Sturgeon's law to humanity) to be effective on 90% of the electorate. Instrumental convergence in action.
>"…there are some marginal cases where it's hard to define unfairness…"
The marginal cases (e.g., an action that does not fit *any* of the definitions of "fair") are the ones where it's easy to define, which doesn't help most of the time.
>"I don't think you can try to reduce 'don't confiscate my property' to other nonfairness values…"
Disagree. Targeted confiscations would almost certainly be negative sum and that's sufficient for generalized opposition.
>"…one theme of this blog is that all concepts … dissolve into meaninglessness when looked at under a microscope…"
There's a difference of degree that becomes a difference of kind. The word "fair" does not just point to a region of concept space with fuzzy boundaries, but to multiple disjoint regions in conflict with each other. Conflating these incompatible meanings can sway hoi polloi, but it's just a specific instantiation of the "clever arguer"; the persuasiveness of the argument is decoupled from its truth value.
ETA: it's that disjointness and the disingenuousness it enables that the ProPublica article cast into sharp relief.
"Secret meaning"? Would this be like Wittgenstein's private language? The whole point of communication is to rely on common meaning. Scott Adams' response to the poll was dumb (one shouldn't take poll responses so seriously), but so is evaluating a statement based on "secret meaning".
I'm trying to figure out what you're replying to, but CTRL+F "secret meaning" in this post turns up nothing.
Try CTRL+F "secret offensive meaning".
See my response at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-scott/comment/203643756
4chan's "it's okay to be white" was an intentional troll campaign. I don't think it was about promoting white supremacy. If it was anything other than pure trolling (and stocking division for fun), it was aimed at pointing out the racism of the left (that they are so anti-white that they would view a simple affirmation of being okay as taboo).
Edit: Having looked into things further, I find the claim the phrase ever had a major racist connotation really dubious. I think Scot is spreading falsehood here.
I don't think "it's an intentional troll campaign" is ever exonerating. "Stop being confused, it was just a thing we were doing to confuse you and then laugh about it!"
But what evidence is there that it was about white supremacy? You have presented none.
4chan has a long history of troll campaigns:
- persuading people they could charge their apple phone in the microwave.
- persuading people that a software update made their phones waterproof
- pool's closed (an arguably anti-racism) trolling of a video game for allegedly racist moderators removing black avatars
- starting a social media campaign idealising "thigh gap" designed to troll feminists (e.g., along the pro/anti-sex feminist divide).
In the context of this long history of not racist (even some anti-racist) trolling. Why is the phrase "it's okay to be white" seen as obviously 4chan promoting white supremacy? Rather than as a) lampooning the lefts anti-white racism, or b) just pure trolling.
You are the one making a claim (that the slogan was about promoting white supremacy). So it should be you providing evidence.
Trolling on its own is not the same as promoting white supremacy!
>The slogan used by the campaign, “It’s okay to be white”, is well-known in the white supremacist movement and dates to at least 2001 when it was used in a song by white power band Aggressive Force. Flyers using the slogan were distributed in the US in 2005 and in 2012 and Ku Klux Klan related groups have used the “#IOKTBW” hashtag on Twitter since 2012 (Anti-Defamation League Citation2018). It has appeared in “white pride” threads on 4chan since at least 2014 (Friedberg and Donovan Citation2020).
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2025.2529402#abstract
Ah, so that means it’s not ok to be white. Isn’t this a guilt by association trip.
Are you lost? We're discussing the slogan "it's ok to be white" and its relation to white supremacy, not whether it's ok to be white (it is, of course).
It's obviously not related, Just because it was used by white supremacist doesn't mean the slogan itself is white supremacist. Even people you don't agree with can be right about one or another thing.
Quoting from the same article, the original posters on 4chan describe their intent: "Based on past media response to similar messaging, we expect the *anti-white* media to produce a shit-storm about these racist, hateful, bigoted fliers … with a completely innocuous message (Friedberg and Donovan Citation2020)."
So you can clearly see that 4chan are objecting to anti-white racism, rather than promoting racial supremacy. Indeed the article you link itself conflates the two in the introduction, arguing that "whites have power" and therefore any objection or concern that they might be discriminated against is "white supremacy."
In short, the article you link is seeped in anti-white racism, and so I don't find it particularly credible as a source. (E.g., it axiomatically stating that there can be no such thing as racism *towards* white people).
Great points about the article, I don't disagree. The slogan was used by white supremacist groups and on 4chan (but I repeat myself) prior to the 2017 flyer campaign, which is why the phrase is seen as a white supremacist slogan. It's because it is a white supremacist slogan, in addition to the innocuous meaning of the words. That's the question I was answering for you.
Give that the article conflates concern over anti-white racism with white supremacy, I don't trust it as a source for your claims (that the slogan was previously used by genuine white supremacists). It's a bit like you quoted a random (insanely idiological) Reddit thread.
A few points:
1. We have also already walked back from the claim that 4chan's campaign itself was motivated by white supremacy.
2. There is no way random people being exposed to the phrase are going to know this alleged history.
The point of using the slogan is obviously to demonstrate the anti-white bigotry of those who oppose it. Just because bad people used it doesn't mean they were wrong on this particular issue.
I think you are spreading falsehood.
The "it's okay to be white" being about white supremacy seems to be straight falsehood. I have now spent a little while looking at the sources and if you dig through the idiological papers and articles on the topic to their primary sources it is literally people complaining about anti-white racism, and idiological academics describing that as synonymous with white supremacy.
For example:
Article about how the slogan is racist.
https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/viral-slogan-its-ok-be-white/#footnote1_2dw9kt6
"The phrase was used synonymously with “white pride” on 4chan’s right wing /pol/ board since at least 2014,1 "
Primary source they quote: https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/25483813/#q25486605
It's a discussion of white being discriminated against (note a discussion, some say they are not being discriminated against).
E.g.,
'Institutional racism if anything exists against whites. The numbers support a lot of shocking stuff if you look closely. Anti-white racism is steadily increasing while racism against nonwhites has become newsworthy in its rarity and more than balanced out by positive discrimination in favor of them"
Just fyi, the article you linked that makes the claim about the song literally has no cite or source for that claim. Several of their sources are broken links, and of the first source I found that worked, it's literal false characterization of their primary source.
In other words, bullshit.
It took me about 5 seconds to google the album mentioned and the song titled "It's ok to be white".
Too bad about the broken links. The internet archive / waybackmachine can pull up dead links sometimes.
See my response at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-scott/comment/203643756
But the trolling works against people who are guilty of exactly the things the trolling is meant to highlight! It's like the Soviet joke about a man being arrested for holding up a blank protest sign: the response itself validates the critique, and the responder couldn't help but respond because they find it unacceptable for anyone to do even the most innocuous thing that could possibly be associated with opposition to them.
The thing is it should make the people freaking out about nothing look *worse*, but it didn't play out that way. The actual racists came out better than the trolls.
Cinna the Poet's claim is bizarre. If their uncle was genuinely a "principled libertarian" then these no way they could become a "alt right bigot" just by listening to the wrong podcasts. Ridiculous and moronic. It makes no sense.
The uncle might have been an unprincipled person who happened to spout libertarians views because the views were fashionable, someone like that could become a genuine "right wing bigot," but my prior is some mixture of Cinna's uncle being not that principled and Cinna being a left wing bigot (I.e., someone who bigotedly conflates disagreement with left wing views as being 'bigotted').
"Cinna the Poet writes:
To share a different perspective on Adams, my uncle was an avid follower. He went from being a principled libertarian whose ideas I respected very much to (I’m sad to say) an alt right bigot. Under the influence of Adams, he had no interest anymore in objective truth or the actual scientific method. Reality was all a matter of spin and “persuasion.”
The phrase “post truth” gets thrown around too much, but Adams fit that description perfectly."
"Cinna the Poet's claim is bizarre. If their uncle was genuinely a "principled libertarian" then these no way they could become a "alt right bigot" just by listening to the wrong podcasts. Ridiculous and moronic. It makes no sense."
This is definitely what I would have thought before the past ten years of US politics.
(I agree you can make this trivially true by no-true-scotsmanning "principled")
I think you are principled (a true Scotsman?). I don't think you could ever be made a right wing bigot, however much you listened to Scott Adams.
I value your opinion and read you writing exactly because I have this impression of you (and that similarly, despite lots of exposure to left wing media, you won't become a left wing bigot either).
Media polarization is a huge problem. But I do trust people who are principled to not become bigots regardless of their local echo chamber. If you are interested, the following article does a great job of highlighting a current media divides, but also that one can have a principled take. https://www.racket.news/p/bluesky-brain-x-brain-two-viral-stories
I think most people don't have principles, they just do whatever they see their friends do. If they identify as X, that's only because their friends identify as X, and are happy to change if their friends change.
Principles are the autistic thing, when you keep trying to do the right thing even if your social environment no longer rewards it, just because it is the right thing.
strive to be the kind of person Scott Alexander posts about when you die
I found your take on racism very fair and reasonable. Articles that touch on the culture war obviously tend to attract a lot of inflammatory rhetoric- even in a lot of rationalist-adjacent communities, unfortunately- but my guess is that a mostly silent majority of readers would agree with me on that.
You did nothing wrong
Until I read your piece, I had no idea it was a 4chan slogan, doing my best to pay exactly the same level of attention to 4chan as I do to X, none whatsoever.
I loved the piece, loved Adams, but was growing to suspect his meds were affecting him, something I’ve seen in relatives.
Ignore the haters. This was the best eulogy I've ever read. You took a public figure who many if not most of your readership had a negative opinion of, and made him a fascinating and sympathetic, if flawed figure.
And you did it while exploring some personal and compelling ideas about coming to terms with your own limitations. Something that a lot of us can relate to.
Count me among the people who thought it was a great piece. My thoughts about halfway through were that it was like reading something from TLP, but then you did the one thing TLP would *never* do, which is accept the real human on the other end of the psychoanalysis as still worthy of love and respect. If I were Scott Adams, I think I'd have enjoyed it.
I used to enjoy Dilbert as a kid too, though i didn’t have any books. I read it in the newspaper. Right up until Adams’s cancellation it was one of the best strips you could reliably find in the funny pages.
I didn’t know Scott Adams wrote stuff outside of Dilbert until like 2015, and I forget how I found out, but I remember the first thing I read was his commentary on Trump (he started out calling him a “master wizard” but then switched to something less dorky-sounding like “master manipulator” or “master hypnotist” or similar). I found it to have more explanatory power than the rest of what I was hearing about Trump, so I kept paying attention. It also inspired me to read a couple of his books, which I thought were solid though not rave-worthy.
Applying Scott’s model of that presidential race to what I was seeing of it helped me win a couple bets on the election outcome. With the exception of knowing enough to know I’d won my bets, I stopped paying any attention to politics after Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, but I kept checking in occasionally with Adams (at his blog, I think?) because I so appreciated this lens on the world he had given me.
The whole time it was clear he was a Trump supporter, but I’m also one of those people to whom the twist in the movie plot is almost always obvious within ten minutes of the opening credits. So I found his gradual “unmasking” annoying. And I found his increasingly naked alt-rightish partisanship predictable and disappointing.
When Adams finally did the racist rant, which I thought made his cancellation more like a suicide than an assassination, I was sad i wasn’t going to get to read Dilbert anymore. But as a person, or as a public figure, his unsurprising downfall didn’t affect me. I thought your (Scott Alexander’s) elegy was perfect though, and this was a fine follow-up also. Bravo.
More than I ever wanted to know again, but thanks. I'm a bit against digging through everything a person ever said and applying the microscope and/or blowtorch. Change is possible where there is space. The alternative to forgiveness is war.
Re footnote 9: I'd say the manouevre wasn't meant to "fool woke people" in the way described at all. On the contrary, it was meant to *bait* woke people into exactly the reaction they had ("We're not fooled by your racist dog whistle!") and in so doing, expose the hollowness of language that consists purely of connotation and disregards denotation entirely.
I'm very interested in the morality related to persuasion so I'd like to address that aspect of this Highlights post in a general sense, mostly abstracted from Adams as a person, though I'll refer to him.
Lets say that someone plans to do something to you that you find morally offensive, whether it's legal or no. Adam's particular quote "use government force to rob me" does sound like a kind of moral offense, not just a utilitarian calculation where all things are permissible. If you were subject to a moral offense, would it then be okay to try and persuade people to not do that offensive thing?
To take a somewhat extreme example (like I do) if someone showed up at your house to literally rob you and robbing you was in their rational self interest what would be your moral constraints in persuading them to go away and leave you alone?
I do not know where the line comes, but my moral intuition suggests there are levels that are too far. For example, I wouldn't feel comfortable persuading them to kill my neighbor instead of robbing me.
That's a fair point.
I feel like any moral assessment where we must take a belief (whether moral or factual) as a given is just nihilism in disguise. As you learn pretty quickly while studying WBNEs, everything can be rationalized by assuming crazy enough beliefs.
No, I don't think Scott Adams genuinely believed that raising estate tax to be morally equivalent to being robbed at a gunpoint, and if he did, that's some sort of "immoral incompetence" which still makes his subsequent actions immoral.
Much like we should still condemn the burning of witches of the lynching of supposed plague-spreader even if *taking the perpetrators' stated factual beliefs as given*, it could be rationalized.
Isn't everything 'nihilism in disguise' then? All morality is based on certain unprovable root axioms. And not everyone has the same axioms. This is how people generally avoid nihilism; a rock solid commitment to not examining the truck that their moral root assumptions fell off of.
I don't know what WBNEs are. Sorry.
I grant that actually being robbed at gunpoint would be worse than being taxed at a high rate, so the comparison is a bit melodramatic. But what if Scott Adams had been shaken down by a mob boss? A mob boss who also provided certain services to the community. There's certainly an implied threat of violence in taxation, even if there's not a gun in your face. There's a genuine moral conflict between individual and collective consent and I don't think it's "moral incompetence" to lean one way or another as long as certain basic collective problems like defense, police, and environmental protection are addressed. Adams seems to have a complaint that should be within the Overton Window of discussion, even if we don't agree with it.
I think it's genuinely interesting to say that the burning of witches was wrong even if we assume that witches were actually communing with some malevolent evil spirit. If the worldview of the witch hunters was true then you'd have multiple cases of assault under a modern legal framework. But I'm not clear how admissible the testimony would be under a modern legal framework. Later on in the trial, the accusations did seem to break down, not for being anti-science but for being theologically incoherent.
Asking what to do about a person like Typhoid Mary is a bit more of a genuine edge case, since she actually did cause people to die. It's far better to handle the matter lawfully since hashing out even immoral problems with violence gets messy, quickly. But in Scott Adams case he *did* handle the matter lawfully. So we're discussing what the moral limits of *persuasion* would be in a case like Typhoid Mary.
Weak Bayesian Nash Equilibria are essentially the math-y equivalent of the idea being discussed: an equilibrium where I shoot first because I have an unexpicable and unassailable belief you were going to shoot me is still possible because *if we take believes as exogenous*, I am behaving rationally. It is pretty unsatisfactory because when everything could be an equilibrium, then the concept of equilibrium is useless, so there are many "refinements" where actions and beliefs need to be jointly rational for it to be an equilibrium.
Anyway, if SA was an anarchist, maybe. He sure did not seem to show it before. He sure did not seem to think that say, higher tariffs or immigration restrictions were an affront. If you take believes as given, _and also don't even require consistency_ then literally anything can be justified and what's the point of pretending we are in a moral framework?
Same with the witches, the point is not only that magic is not real and if you are going to murder innocent people you don't get to leave your factual believes unexamined, it's that even such belief always played out in convenient ways. Why was it always vulnerable members of the community who practiced magic? Why it was always the Jews or the weird guy living alone or some other soft target spreading the plague by poisoning the well? Why did these mob justice moments always end with the perpetrators taking the victim's stuff and maybe settling some scores as well?
But even if their believes had been entirely consistent, a moral system where you get to murder innocent people is simply indistinguishable from nihilism. "Criminal incompetence" is a legal concept for a reason. It's be weird if our morality were more permissive tha our laws.
Classic liberals can also believe in certain limitations on government power without being anarchists. Classic liberals (CL) don't seem to have any strong history of opposing tariffs. Just the opposite, tariffs were a significant portion of the small government budget of the early colonies. Classic liberal's opposition to immigration restrictions are often more conditional than outright nationalists (i.e. CL may be okay with immigration in theory but oppose it due to the burden it places on government funded support systems), but even there, there doesn't seem to be a hard line where a person who identifies as a CL with a strong belief in property rights has to also believe in relatively open borders. I'm not certain of Adams's actual beliefs. I'm spitballing here about his actual beliefs. But none of these particular things being discussed seem wildly hypocritical in the context of a classically liberal framework.
(Adams's rant about the Black community may contrast with a CL belief in individualism. But that seems outside the scope of this discussion.)
"Why was it always vulnerable members of the community who practiced magic?"
The marginal members of the community were most vulnerable to the influences of Satan, of course. This was an actual belief. I do agree that there's plenty in the later Salem Witch Trials that violate even classic doctrine of the time as relates to witches. But if we're using the standards of the people of the time then there was a solid doctrinal answer to this particular question.
"But even if their believes had been entirely consistent, a moral system where you get to murder innocent people is simply indistinguishable from nihilism."
I don't think that anyone is advocating for killing innocents here. But critically, we seem to be discussing what makes a person innocent or not innocent and to what degree and how we know it. It's not like people are objectively and universally innocent. A social determination of innocence is conditional on a person's moral system, knowledge, and worldview.
I'm not familiar with "criminal incompetence" as a legal term of art in the American legal system. Are we discussing a form of gross negligence? Or competence to stand trial? Can you refer to a formal usage of the term you're discussing?
Yes I meant "criminal negligence"/"gross negligence". Not American, I translated literally a civil law term without realizing that it actually means almost the opposite in common law (a mental incompetence so severe as to exculpating).
Still, the point stands. In pretty much any legal system, criminal law mostly requires intent, but there are cases where being so ignorant as to cause significant damage is itself criminal, even if one can plausibly deny intent. Same with eg manslaughter vs murder.
If Classical Liberal means *anything*, it is a strong belief in free trade. That's pretty foundational, from Smith to Ricardo to Mills to the opposition to the Corn Laws. Sure, you can absolutely build your own ad-hoc political ideology where you carefully choose first principle so that your perceived interests/insticts can be derived from first principles, but what's the point of the exercise? Just advocate based on your interest/instincts and be done with the pretence.
For the factual believes, one could notice how the Gosples would suggest the opposite ("the meek shall inherit the Earth", and the poor widow is surely meeker than the village magnate, but who is more likely to end up on the stake?), and also it's not entirely clear why it was always marginal members (who if anthing had less access to healthcare and nutritious food) to poison the wells and cause plagues, but again, what's the point?
I mean sure, if you ignore any plausibility test, steelman their believes to the point of making them completely a-historical, and take them as given, then brutalizing and murdering poor people who were not harming anyone is a-OK. But, why would you bother? If you are going to adopt a functionally amoral view of the world, might as well cut the middleman and run with it. Write beutiful paragraphs à la Schopenhauer or de Maistre on how life is but blood soaked altar to itself and seeking justice on this Earth is a fool's errand. More synthetic and much better artistic possibilities tbh.
"If Classical Liberal means anything, it is a strong belief in free trade. "
Okay. I agree.
"For the factual believes, one could notice how the Gosples would suggest the opposite ("the meek shall inherit the Earth", and the poor widow is surely meeker than the village magnate, but who is more likely to end up on the stake?)"
But with God anything is possible. That's the next line (paraphrased) after "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” It often gets cut off, radically changing the meaning of the text.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2019&version=NIV
I mean, I can see where you're going with this and have some sympathy for that direction. But orthodox forms of Christianity do tend to prioritize orthodoxy above other considerations. And I suspect you're not considering that.
"then brutalizing and murdering poor people who were not harming anyone is a-OK. "
Is it certain that a person of the time period in question would have agreed that the victims of witch hunts 'were not harming anyone?' We see this because we have a modern perspective, (which I strongly prefer.)
It seems likely that many people of the time believed witches were genuinely harmful. I don't think that I'm doing the things you're suggesting that I'm doing. I am not discussing a 'functionally amoral' view of the world. I am discussing an attempted moral worldview which is strongly limited by the standards and understanding of its time (and, yes, mixed with the related self-serving power structures. But that's an inevitable part of all formalized moral systems.) It's a view where people have a radically different, perhaps impoverished, method for understanding what "harm" is.
Re: Should I Have Written This At All, I share your childhood fondness for Adams and I found the post heartwarming and respectful. I wouldn't call it brutally honest, it downplayed his flaws about the right amount to make a polite obituary that still seriously engaged with who he was. And I say that having objected to the McCain post.
And pedantic point:
"If Dilbert is an 80th percentile nerd, the 80th percentile persuader is - I don’t know, a used-car salesman? Dilbert’s probably earning more money, especially nowadays when he could make L5 at Google."
I don't even think 80th percentile nerds can get interviews at Google. Google is very elite, do you really mean to say the pool of people they consider hirable is 20% of... people, programmers, whatever this category is?
In my experience, most programmers aren't nerds these days, only normies who have heard that there was money in IT. People who would never program in the free time; people who don't care about things like clean code; people who are looking forward to being promoted to managers; people who don't have an opinion on what is their favorite programming language but will use whatever someone will pay them to use; etc.
So being an 80th percentile nerd could easily mean being a 95th percentile programmer.
Most of the world thinks it has some reason to hate you, and that's true regardless of who you are. This has always been true, yet it has never prevented people from living and working together peacefully. There's no reason to get bent over it now.
The "her plans to use government force to rob me" has some idea of fairness or rights baked in. It's when he says that fairness is for children that it seems to me like self-deprecation, or trying to sound old and wise, or some combination of both.
I re-listened to Tim Ferriss's 2015 podcast interview with Scott Adams. In it, Adams basically validates what Alexander says about wanting to be Dogbert. Also, I think Alexander is more wrong on the ivermectin topic even than he admitted, because Adams has been a medical skeptic woo experimenter since before Trump/MAGA. Explained in my post: https://ashallowalcove.substack.com/p/alas-scott-adams
> wanting to be Dogbert
I think this is a mistake many clever nerds do. Imagining that they can become Dogbert by doing this one simple trick, and then being shocked that it doesn't work, because actual Dogbert would... do something different, or do it with more force, or not announce that he was going to do it, or do a proper followup, or... well, one those things that actual Dogberts instinctively do, and nerds playing Dogbert fail to notice.
This makes me want our Scott to do a modern update/review of his 'You are still crying wolf' piece, given the last year of developments.
Thanks for including my comment. There was an Open Thread some time last year where someone was depressed and reaching out but didn't want to try CBT because it was "brain-washing". I had to smile because I've previously had similar thoughts about CBT, it's like if I'm a piece of shit I don't want to spend my life thinking I'm a nutrient-rich fertiliser just because that's more helpful. I want the Truth!!! I don't know how I moved on from this position exactly, but when I hear about Adams' self-help writing the fear comes back, like it's just manipulation all the way down.
Ashwin here. Thanks for the half-apology. I will take it. I still don't think you've gotten the whole picture, but that's okay. The spirit of your apology was on point. I would love to turn this whole episode into a +ve sum game instead of an argument.
I also made an offer to help with AI Safety cause if you apologised. I have a significantly lower p(doom) than you do, but I gave my word and I intend to keep it. If you want to take me up on this offer, I will share with you what I think the approach should be. Whether you think that's a good idea or not and want to implement is of course, entirely up to you. Here is the tweet where I made this offer: https://x.com/omnishwin/status/2013153451761635481?s=20. It's on the same thread.
At a very high-level, the reason why I'm so confident I can make the AI Safety cause strategy more effective, is not because I'm an expert on the very large number of considerations around the debate, but rather because I can see some very clear persuasion mistakes that I think the AI Safety cause is making. The more involved I get and the more details I understand, the more effectively I can help.
Mistake 1: You are relying far too much on Credibility. Credibility is one of the most important tools for any persuader, but it's also fragile when there is an opposition that wants to destroy it. Instead, you should try out some other strategies. There is a lot to be said about reciprocity here.
Mistake 2: There is a balancing act between getting attention and getting your point across. I actually think you'll have done a great job on the attention part. I think aligning with Whoopi was a huge mistake. The wrong kind of attention from the wrong crowd can erode your credibility faster than you can build it up.
Mistake 3: Too much too fast. Instead of going on all-in on the Pause movement, you should be thinking about the environment you are operating in. Timing is a very important thing in all deals.
Mistake 4: Understanding how politicians think. One thing that Scott never emphasised sufficiently is that every single politician and world leader is either a phenomenal persuader/negotiator themselves or is controlled by one. No exceptions. There is too much to unpack in one comment and it's different for every country/situation. This is where I think I could be the most effective. I have no intention to get into politics, but for what it's worth I've negotiated a lot of big deals (INR 25200 Crore roughly) when I was a lawyer. I don't consider myself world-class or anything, but I do think I can do a better job and give you superior insights worth considering. Some of this may be best discussed in private and there are significant knowledge gaps that I need to plug, but if we work together, I strongly suspect you will be sufficiently impressed.
Mistake 5: The Ideological Turing Test. If you correct this, then you don't need my help or anyone else's help at all. Still, if you wish I am happy to do my bit. The theory around persuasion is far easier to understand than the vast majority of topics you write about. Knowing how fast you read, you'll breeze through it. However, it's more art than science and like all art it requires practice. That too, should not be a biggie for you.
Some positives about the current AI Safety strategy:
1. The IABIED book was written very well. Kudos to Nate Soares in particular;
2. Fear is a powerful emotion. Don't over-leverage this, but I think you've done a great job;
3. Visual persuasion. Yudkowsky does this phenomenally well in some of his stories (the one that comes to mind immediately is the one where he talks about the AI hunting you down in the bunker). It's also the reason why "Show, Don't Tell" is such good writing advice;
4. Credibility - I know I said don't rely on it too much, but getting some very big names on your side was a smart move. Just don't be one-dimensional;
Some low-hanging fruit to consider:
1. You are already a great writer. You also have a lot of knowledge. Persuasion doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you figure out the mechanics of how it works, you will become 100x more influential overnight. You'll breeze past so many people it's crazy. I think of your knowledge base like the oil-fields in Venezuela, so much wealth there for the taking, but it needs to be handled correctly;
2. Your reach and your audience is awesome. Both matter. If you learn what parts to focus on, you could accelerate humanity into the Golden Age by at least 5 years if not more. I do not exaggerate. Remember that it's not just your influence that will be more effective, it will be the influence of all of your readers, many of whom are geniuses;
3. One of the reasons why good natured people lie is because they are afraid of the consequences of what will happen if they are too honest. The more effectively you learn to persuade and present your case, the less you will feel the need to lie. Lying is for the lazy;
4. Innovation. Framing in particular, is not just a useful persuasion tool, it's a great tool for generating new ideas and truth seeking. It's insane how much you can see around corners, if you learn to see things from several different angles all at once.
Some caveats:
1. You will learn things about people and the world that you may not like. Not everyone is a good person. It is hard to predict how your world view changes in advance, but rest assured it will and there will be an emotional toll to pay;
2. You will be attacked relentlessly. The more effective you are in changing people's mind, the stronger the incentive to silence you. You will face backlash. Brace yourself for this. But if you are smart about it, you can take calculated risks and minimise this as well;
3. No matter what, you will make mistakes. This is true of even the best. Adaptability, open-mindedness and constant forward motion are a persuader's best friend. Don't fret. There is no such thing as a fool-proof strategy. You can do everything by the textbook and still not manage to change anyone's mind. On the bright-side, when this happens it's usually an indication that there is some information you are missing;
4. Your own p(doom) may drop significantly. It's hard to explain why in advance;
5. Sometimes you will be successful in influencing the world, but will not get the credit for it. This is an acceptable price to pay of course, but just keep it in mind.
If you want to take this forward, let me know. I owe you at least one weekend worth of work.
I feel kind of bad piling on to the maximally-contentious racism section, but I was a bit surprised by your definition of racism, and your assumption that that definition was something we would all agree on by default? I'd call your thing a good *example* of racism, but by no means the only presentation of the phenomenon.
Let's say that most Texans own a cowboy hat and boots, but that it's only about 80% of them, and that there's a solid 20% who don't really identify with the cowboy lifestyle. One way to be racist would be to round that up to 100%, and staunchly declare that Texans are all cowboys.
But another, equally racist form of racism, would be to reject *non-ethnic forms of evidence* as to whether someone was a cowboy or not. After getting to know somebody from Texas and hearing them explicitly say that they don't have a cowboy hat, a racist might refuse to lower their personal p(cowboy) below 80%. It's not a bias in the understanding of Texans; it's a bias towards ethnology as a sufficient explanation of the human person.
Regardless of how much Adams was SSC!racist, he definitely seems to be doing this other thing, which is treating ethnicity as a fully dispositive piece of evidence, and sufficient basis for deciding how to treat those around him.
Yeah, from the Bayesian perspective, there are two places where you can put race in the equation:
* having priors based on race
* refusing to update your priors based on evidence, because you keep double-counting the race
But in practice, I am afraid that this distinction only matters for rational people, because most of the population is more like "refuses to update no matter what", in which case the former seems exactly like the latter. (And I have no good solution for that.)
"Adams keeps trying to eat his cake and have it too."
Fun fact. The FBI was able to identify the unabomber in part through his use of this unusual formulation of the idiom, rather than the conventional formulation "have your cake and eat it too."
I'm glad there's one other person who uses this proverb in the obviously-more-comprehensible way.
It's obvious that it's okay to be whatever color you are, period, but it's also clear that "It's okay to be white" became a coded expression in the same way that "Christ is King" did later (the more updated version of that is "America First" in the comments section of any video that talks about Israel). It's disingenuous to pretend not to understand that.
The closest I can get to agreeing with Adams on the poll would be that, if I knew that 26 percent of black people thought I was "not okay" because I'm white, I might be wary about interacting with black people out in public, because 26 percent of them (according to the poll) would be hostile to me right out of the gate, and I don't want to deal with that. On the other hand, I have a three out of four chance that it won't be one of the hostile black people, so the avoidance reaction seems unwarranted, based on the odds. Scott Adams himself was way over the top in his reaction to the poll - hyperbolic, broad brush, the whole catastrophe. I didn't know him enough to know if he was an actual racist, but that episode was a huge unforced error on his part.
You don't have to agree that it is coded. In it's literal sense in is obviously true unless you hate white people, and the fact that you ignore the literal meaning in favor of the obscure one means you are uncomfortable with saying positive stuff about white people for some political reason.
Your reply shows that you don't understand what I said at all, and you definitely don't know me. I have spent the last five-plus years, since the Summer of Saint Floyd, trying to pull myself back in off the ledge of becoming a right-wing reactionary, after a lifetime of being a Democrat voter and then feeling immensely betrayed and shocked by the rise of the Woke and how much they were allowed to get away with, up to the highest levels of government, business and academia, and the circus they wanted us to have to live in. That being said, I know a coded expression when I see one, and you can disagree with my point, but I am not "uncomfortable with saying positive stuff about white people."
I don't have to know you, our discussion is not personal. I see you have reasonable views yourself, but for some reason you are unwilling to push back against woke insanity. People like you are one of the reasons right-wing reactionaries gained so much prominence - becaused moderate libs are afraid to counteract progressive overreach people lose faith in them and turn radical.
I don't think the appropriate response to such (claimed) provocation is banning the sentence, or policing others language, or casting aspersions on others' character.
I think both "Black lives Matter" and "It is okay to be white" warrant exactly the same response. "Of course. All lives matter, and it is okay to be of all races."
Frankly, I don't buy the whole, this is a dog whistle for racism claim, etc... In my experience, people making these claims are often just totally detached from reality (and use 'white supremacy' as a generic description for white person who they politically disagree with).
For example, there is a massive overlap between people who characterize "it's okay to be white" as racist, and people who say Nigel Farage and JD Vance are white supremacists, despite both JD and Farage being married to non-white spouses. Their claims don't pass the most basic of smell tests, so why should I give them any credence?
Just because this topic is radioactive, I want to applaud your willingness to engage with it in full nuance.
I identify with finding Adam’s books influential as a child and finding his efforts later in life disappointing. I was conflicted about him when his hedging seemed designed to make his motivations unreadable… by claiming he was explaining things at the same time as claiming to be manipulating you, he was trying to eat his cake and have it too.
——
Ultimately I think he was torn between utilitarianism and deontology without the tools to deal with that contradiction. I think as a result he was wielding power in ways that weren’t always well thought out or beneficial. But I don’t think he was ever malevolent. And I do think there is something to be respected in trying to make the biggest positive impact you can, despite being bad at it.
I see him as a flawed, tragic, and highly influential character worth learning about. And I appreciate your good faith effort to surface those complexities.
As you've heard already, the "bailey" behind It's Okay to be White isn't, "fuck the blacks," it's, "fuck woke people and fuck their double standard that says you're allowed to be racist against whites." And under that understanding, anyone who disagrees with that *is* aggressing against white people, and choosing not to be around them is a very valid thing to do.
Scott, you didn't make a single acknowledgement of that fact. You are instead propagating the implicit blacks vs whites, anyone-who-objects-is-a-racist framing that one side has asserted, to which the other entirely disagrees.
You did the exact same thing previously when you censored a line that said something like "the British right are angry that posting about immigrant crimes can lead to longer jail terms than the crimes themselves" and replaced it with, "they're angry that they can't make racist tweets."
I am not here to relitigate either argument, what I care about is that they were argued entirely in one side's favour, using their sensibilities, their preferred definitions for words, their background concepts and context.
This flunks the Intellectual Turing Test and directly betrays the promise behind the SSC of the old days, which was that whoever you were, you were likely to find yourself fairly represented and a real attempt would be made to understand you. This was what made it a place all sides could come to be and learn interesting things - often about each other.
I don't know if this is you favouring your real views, or if you're giving up too early to too many respectability cascades, or if you're simply taking the winning side on topics you find boring as a shortcut.
But it's corrosive. The effect this has is that I think, Scott is wrong/lying about these things I do understand, so I'll down-weight him when he wants me to care about things I don't understand. Fucked if I care about donating kidneys, vegetarianism, AI risk, or not encouraging my American friends to vote for the next Trump, if the voices talking that way are just playing the same games I hear everywhere else.
I am fast losing faith in the Rationalist project.
not gonna pretend that i am reading this whole comment post either. i appreciate that you read and reflect on comments so meaningfully and thoughtfully.
“Given how much other information he had, updating from one ambiguous poll where 26% of people gave an ambiguously bad answer, to “this entire ethnic group of 30 million people is a hate group…””
It doesn’t sound like that’s what he was doing? In the full context, he seems to be treating the poll as the last straw or perhaps a final confirmation, rather than something that reversed his position. He mentions Don Lemon, he mentions other experiences he’s had where he’s been called racist unfairly.
(I would also quibble that Adams clearly considered the “not sure” people to have given a bad answer too… you don’t have to agree, but it’s disingenuous to reduce it to 26%)
I agree with the overall argument you made in this section, but I think you may have exaggerated the salience Adams gave this one factoid in an effort to make it fit your “updating too strongly on weak information” definition of racism.
One might be able to argue that Adam’s’ mentioning/using this poll at all is the problem. That is, maybe the poll is garbage and Adams should have ignored it. (Which is, maybe, what Alexander was trying to say (hyperbolically).)
I know Scott Adams from my brother listening to him and I remember him going on all these crazy rants on podcasts or shows about how George Floyd wasn’t murdered and his killer, Derek Chauvin, was innocent. The guy was racist to his core.
The image I’d had of Scott Adams in my mind was deeply biased by his recent political turns, and your eulogy brought needed nuance to that.
I think your footnote is more honest than your main text here. Adams FAFO'd. He played the provocation game for years because he liked the attention and engagement. The "avoid black people" comment wasn't a naive slip — it was a miscalculation by someone who understood exactly what he was doing. Hard to invoke free speech martyrdom for someone who got burned by the same dynamics he'd been exploiting.
I found that https://banana2.ai/nano-banana allows you to create Scott Adams-style comics. After all, he excelled most at drawing comics—not saving the world...
No free trial? And of course they only tell you that after you prepare the prompt in something that seems like a free trial dialog...
In case someone has the credits, and wants to spend them on this:
Create a comic in Dilbert style. Three frames. Dilbert is talking to Dogbert. In first frame, Dilbert says "I created a website for rational discussion." In second frame, Dogbert asks: "Did you connect it to the internet?" Dilbert says: "Yes." In third frame, Dogbert says: "That was your first mistake."
You get one trial for the Pro version or two trials for the free version.
I always thought of the nil nisi bonum rule for obituaries this way: it does not mean you are literally banned from mentioning criticism or pointing to defects of the deceased, but it should be coming from a feeling of compassion. I guess this is the Christian view of saying: you can point out that people made mistakes or "sinned", but after all we all do and only God can judge us anyway.
And this seems very clear to me in your review, that it is one of a "fellow nerd" who looks with clear compassion on Adams' life and his struggles.
> because even if they said wasn’t literally true
Typo, missing a "what".
It’s impossible to understand Scott Adams unless you spent time listening to his podcast. To pull out a few quotes and make assumptions about his character is probably a mistake. He liked ideas and would spend time exploring them, often recreationally. His listeners knew this was an internal dialectic, not a confession of deeply held beliefs. Knowing what Scott Adam’s said or wrote misses the point: Adam’s is best defined by how he thought about things. And he knew that humans are Janus faced and inconsistent, that there is no unification of identity, that humans are a mixture of radically different and contradictory thought impulses. Humans are meant to be complicated. It would be nice if we celebrated that more.
You were not unfair.