We old stagers knew, or at least strongly suspected, that Substack wasn't really ready to handle the sort, quantity, and depth of comments that SSC and its scions generates. That we're back to the dear old days of comment threads disappearing stage right into infinity due to how many responded evokes a nostalgic sigh 😀
Oh I dunno, should I ever find myself in Tamil Nadu and in need of getting uPVC windows installed, I'll know where to look! 😀 Our first spam advertisement, is this some kind of achievement?
Do you know, I actually *would* be fascinated to hear about the mould-busting properties of shellac? Post away and educate, enlighten, and thrill us all!
Please do, it brings me back to my 70s childhood and the many wonders of the world that would be brought to us in documentaries and travelogues, like "Balham, Gateway to the South": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ewUOSlRDkk
I'd bet $500 you it was vague or you were reading it poorly. I read a lot of media criticism, and I'd guess at least 50% of it comes down to stuff like this.
Do journalists at the NYT monitor the comment sections on their articles directly? I'd assume it was done centrally or algorithmically as its done for most large news sites. So your comments being caught may be coincidental.
This is ridiculous. Simply look up the company, and you can see it was started in 1895 in Italy. The article in question says it was a heritage Italian brand owned by LVMH. Given that it was started by over 100 years ago in Italy and then purchased by a French company, the reporter's description is entirely fair.
I can't say why your comment was blocked, but you were offering a correction to something that wasn't wrong.
First, yes, I was wrong, and it was established in Paris, not somewhere in Italy. That's my goof entirely. The link I meant to include was something else, but it didn't prove the specific claim I was trying to make, either. Another goof by me.
So I'll revise my comments. There are plenty of indications it's considered an Italian brand (as well as French one), and not simply where the shoes are manufactured. If nothing else, the default language for the site is Italian, not French or English.
I'm sorry if I'm coming across like an a-hole. I shouldn't have been aggressive with you. I just don't think the example you highlighted is really damning.
For some reason I was curious about this but the top hit for the relevant search terms led me to a _different_ article with the same mistake:
> It is also LVMH’s first minority stake in a jewelry brand, as well as its first investment in a jewelry brand since the acquisition of Bulgari in 2011 (and its sixth in an Italian family-owned brand after Pucci, Fendi, Loro Piana, Berluti and Bulgari).
Maybe, but it's also fairly unsurprising that a New York Times journalist would simply be ignorant of a fact within their supposed field of expertise. I've never heard of Berlutti but it certainly sounds Italian, it would be an easy mistake to make.
I'd have to read it to be sure. I've seen so many assertions like this that are really the result of something more basic that I a question the author's claim.
The nytimes reporting on India is full of errors, big and small. It is a complicated country, and they clearly cannot be bothered to get it right. And they get really crazy extremists to write opinion pieces on India, consistently. They definitely have an India problem.
I stopped taking their news reporting seriously because I understand India pretty well, and this made me wonder if they're too ideological.
I like A.O. Scott (movie reviews), Jane Brody (wellness), Bari Weiss (who left) and the past year's articles on covid, specially the data visualisation. They seem to have a really good data dept.
This is an example of an important more general point. All of us depend largely on second hand information. One way of deciding what sources to trust is to find some overlap between what the source covers and what you already know and judge it by that.
You can get a lot of it by going through the archive.org, if you don't wanna feed them the pageviews. It's slow to load and mildly inconvenient, but it lets you check if that article is really as bad as all your friends are saying without rewarding the people who wrote it.
I can’t tell if your many comments on this are serious. Many people, including Marxists and probably Marx himself couldn’t explain Marx’s political positions because they changed, were contradictory, and his theories were heavily dependent on now obscure 19th century philosophy. His writing is virtually incomprehensible and not worth studying in any event. I’m really surprised that anyone who has [tried] reading and understanding Das Kapital could believe there is anything worthwhile in Marx. Is this is your thing more power to you but at the same time the effort might be better spent on other things.
It being interesting to hear your thoughts for a change, instead of just remarks how other people get it wrong. I'm probably not the only one who's struggled to figure out what's really Marxism and what's just strawman or tropes (and lack the will to actually read the texts myself). Maybe you're in a position to correct some myths and provide some insight.
I'm actually quite curious: how do you see Marxism applying to the modern society? Like, in a paragraph or two: how would the US be different if Marx (or maybe better: you) had your way?
I don't know much about Marxism, so i'm gonna try to get some answers by employing Cunningham's law, and posting my thoughts which are quite likely misguided, so someone can correct me :)
Maybe there are some policies that could be interesting to explore for modern USA:
* housing: It seems like a lot of areas that housing stock has turned into a market for speculators that are driving prices into the millions and simultaneously homelessness is rampant. I would say something is not working well here.
Maybe exploring ideas could be interesting such as :
American corporations currently do some things that aren't always a good idea for the company and its workers, such as stock buybacks.
* workers owning (or participating in) the means of production
In some countries if a company is big enough, the workers automatically get to elect a few worker representatives to the board of the company. I think the worker representitives will tend to give a more healthy direction to the company, and avoid taking unnecessary risks that benefit only stock holders.
I'm not the OP, but I feel in general that when people are thinking about communism often compare modern american society to the agrarian society of russia 100 years ago with its famines. They never imagine that capitalistic societies could and have been responsible for famines as well, and other suffering in the world. Also I get the impression that they feel that if we had a comminist country now, it would somehow revert to using donkey powered agriculture and forego any technology. And often people seem to think that communism and totalitarianism are one and the same or always go together.
I think it would be great to look at history and learn from things different societies have tried rather than villifying other ideas or systems. Is any country ever a pure example of capitalism, communism or any other system?
Is america capitalist even though tesla and spacex received so much government funding? even though the banks were bailed out by public funds back in 2009? A lot of what USA does doesn't feel very capitalistic and free market but rather socialism for rich bankers and capitalism for the poor.
As of my writing this (admittedly a few days later), your comments on this post contain 6,710 words. I didn't count your blockquotes of other people, and I didn't count URLs - those are not your words.
Not saying this is good or bad - just updating you on the number.
Ah, marxbro. For you it is forever 1867. As a fan of Sherlock Holmes, I empathise; are we too not forever 1895 as Starrett says? (Though to my personal tastes in the Canon, it is always 1880s):
221B
By Vincent Starrett
Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears–
Only those things the heart believes are true.
A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
I didn't realize Mao was such a good poet. Wish he'd stuck to that. Long as we're copy-pasting poetry, I'll put in an entry too. The whole thing's too large to quote, but here's a fragment:
Ah sir! A poetry exchange! You leave me starry-eyed with wonderment and pleasure! Let me try and find something good in exchange - from the Metrical Dindshenchas, which is a collection of poems explaining place names:
Port Láirge [Lárac is an Irish word meaning "limb or thigh", hence the derivation from the thighbone washed up here; also the moral of the story - don't get involved with mermaids, it'll only end badly]
There is here a limb from the body of a king:
over the streaming currents the sea bore him
towards the noble love, long-limbed, winsome,
of hundred-wounding Cithang's only son.
From Inis Aine of the heroes
Rot ever-fierce, won his goal,
the chieftain renowned in every land:
he was a gentle border-champion.
By land and massive sea
fared the faultless prince's son;
his left hand to the pure Ictian Sea
his right to the country of enduring Britons.
And there he heard the sound,
it was a lure of baleful might,
the chant of the mermaids of the sea
over the pure-sided waves.
The loveliness of the sea-maids equalled any wealth
fairer than any human shape were
their bodies above the waves of the tide,
with their tresses yellow as gold.
The hosts of the world would fall asleep
listening to their voice and their clear notes;
Rot would not give up for woman's troth
union with their bodies, with their pleasant bosoms.
As much of them as was under water —
it was a secret with no kindly power —
was big as a broad bright hill
of shell-fish and heaps of weed.
The son of Cithaing gave strong fervent love:
no love was got in return;
Rot found, without persistence in beseeching them,
the evil fate that was the custom of the women-folk.
Choked and killed was Rot
and his noble body overcome,
until he would have been thankful, as ye may guess,
to be dead and torn piecemeal.
There came from the east across the narrow sea,
till it found a level shore of Erin,
a thigh-bone, from the sole upward, as thou mayest guess,
so that here rests his noble limb.
Therefore to be told of in every land
is Port Lairge of the broad shields;
men that are swift in the field if there be strife,
There can be beauty in the nefarious. Doesn't mean that the nefarious should be applauded, or even accepted. I'm sure the CCP pour money into the arts.
I'm not really sure it can be said that "communism is a failed theory" (even assuming you're referring to socialism, which is what the USSR and PRC used to practice).
Stalin was a monster, and Mao was a well-intentioned lunatic, but ultimately the USSR went from feudalism to Sputnik in 40 years and the USSR had lower homelessness than Russia's had since. That's... not exactly what I'd call "only bringing misery into the world". (The PRC is more complicated; its current ascendance can't fairly be attributed to socialism since it's been closer to fascist since Deng, but saying it made everything worse is also kind of dodgy given that pre-Mao China had warlords everywhere.)
Yes, my comment was more of a broadside rather than a rapier's cut.
"feudalism to Sputnik in 40 years and the USSR had lower homelessness than Russia's had since. "
I am not historian or political scientist, though to reach sputnik, the road was littered with millions of corpses through farm collectivization/famines/etc. Can one call "prime time USSR" (let's say the 1960s or 1970s) true "communism"?
A definition is : "Communism, political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society."
However, private property still existed, and the differences between the peassant class and the politburo is, in my eye, laughable and disqualifies the USSR (or China) as being "communist" (except, perhaps, in the short aftermath of the creation of the USSR, before the politburo became corrupt fat cats, worse than their capitalist equals?), unless one defines communism as "a society that initially aimed for the lofty ideals of pure socialism, however due to the human foibles of it's ruling class morphed into a surveillance state where the majority of citizens had little, colelctivization occured to an extent, and where corruption was endemic, especially within the ruling class."
IMHO as you can't take a theoretical political system and create it in reality true to it's word (as human desire will stuff it up unless you have a system that takes that into account), communism may seem to have it's positives, however, as it has been shown multiple times, people aren't all "equal" (as you have the corrupt fatcats at the top), it doesn't last (all communist regimes morphed into pseudo- or total-capitalist economies eventually), and thus it is a failure. That's my laymans take. Unless there's a kibbutz out there that works in a communist fashion (do they all do?) though, of course, that's on a much smaller scale so is incomparable.
1) I mean, I think we both agree that kibbutzim are not the same sort of thing as the USSR (do we?). I refer to the latter as "socialist" rather than "communist" because they called themselves socialist (the PRC still claims to be socialist, but they're lying). I think the USSR's atrocities/successes and the pre-Deng PRC's atrocities/successes are evidence regarding socialism, and the benefits of kibbutzim vs. their downsides are evidence regarding communism.
2) The debate regarding communism is pretty easy; communes are actually pretty nice at sub-Dunbar scales, but disintegrate immediately when scaled up past that, so despite not being responsible for the USSR's and PRC's various atrocities communism (in this strict sense) is totally nonviable as an organisational structure for millions (absent radical change to human nature). Would you agree with this?
3) Socialism is more complicated; you had a significantly above-average level of atrocities*, and a significantly above-average rate of progress, so overall it comes down to how much you value atrocities vs. progress and what amount of each you could expect from any future socialist country. Would you agree with this overall assessment?
*To fairly compare atrocities between the socialist countries and the West you have to include corporate atrocities like Minamata Disease and the Sampoong Department Store on the Western side, as otherwise you're counting industrial atrocities like Chernobyl on one side but not the other. I agree that the USSR and PRC *still* had more of them than the West - the Holodomor and Great Leap Forward aren't that easily outweighed.
Compare the USSR to Japan. Both were very poor societies at the beginning of the 20th century. By the end of it, Japan was a much richer society than the USSR. Or take South Korea. Or Taiwan. The USSR's economic accomplishments, in terms of the welfare of its people, were much worse than those of other countries that developed during the century.
It's true that the USSR had a large military and succeeded in launching the first satellite. Similarly, ancient Egypt built very impressive pyramids and absolutist France created Versailles. An authoritarian government can funnel lots of money into particular things it wants to accomplish — at the cost of all the people, mostly poor, that money came from.
Korea is definitely a capitalist success story, that I'll grant.
My understanding is that Japan's rapid progress started 50 years ahead of Russia's (i.e. 1990 Japan was 120 years after the Meiji and 1990 USSR was 70 years after Red October), and that Taiwan didn't perform significantly better than mainland China despite international support (and was a repressive one-party state for ~30 years after the war). If you could elaborate on what you mean, it'd be nice.
I'm sorry, but do you honestly believe that Scott is complaining because the New York Times simply "connected [him] to Charles Murray."?
Their pathetic paragraph was clearly a disingenuous attempt to imply that Scott aligns himself with Charles Murray **beliefs**. They flippantly imply that Scott supports a "link between race and I.Q." and that Scott believes that black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
There are two sentences in that paragraph. Both are blatant attempts to put words in Scott's mouth. It's a paragraph that is perfectly constructed to misdirect a reader that is skimming over the article. IT'S PATHETIC.
I'm not disconnecting Charles Murray's thoughts on race... it's true that his past position on race will cloud any argument he makes on even tangentially related subjects.
That being said, it does not justify the phrasing of that paragraph in the NY Times. If their point, given the context of the article, was to point out that Scott is not afraid to step into murky waters, they could have written something like: "In one post regarding generational poverty, Scott Alexander even aligned himself with the controversial figure Charles Murray..."
They didn't do that. They intentionally misled their readers.
Just to check, marxbro, are you claiming that agreeing with Charles Murray about one part of his political theory necessarily means that one also agrees with all of the other parts of Charles Murray's political theory? To a first approximation?
If the it’s a one sentence anti-semetic graffit on the Wailing Wall, it might be difficult justifying passing agreement. Because it’s one sentence. Someone writes a few books, i mean, sure they might have an acceptable opinion. Hitler doesn’t have the best reputation around here (because he was a genocidal maniac), but who after the last four years can’t agree with his quote, “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”
> A better solution to poverty would be building an economic system that didn't require poverty and unemployment.
Marxism is the same end result as over-deregulated capitalism, except the figureheads at the top of the monopoly power are the ever-revolving product of the same forces that nominated Hillary Clinton and elected Donald Trump.
Of course, we never even get to *that* stage in Marxist experiments, because they always stall out at the "figureheads at the top of the monopoly power are golf buddies of the State" phase.
But the reference point for the word “conservative” typically is not the leftmost position on the political spectrum. By that definition everything which is not on the very left is conservative.
When using this word we typically use the political center of our reference point, such that everything right of center is labeled “conservative”.
What does "aligning yourself with" mean? You and Adolf Hitler both believe that 2+2=4. You probably share quite a lot of of other beliefs as well. Does that mean you are aligning yourself with Adolf Hitler?
Even if Murray in fact holds the position on basic income partly because of his views on race, that doesn't imply that in endorsing what Murray has said about basic income, Scott endorses his views on race. It might IF the reasoning of Murray's that Scott was endorsing (insofar as he was endorsing Murray's reasoning and not just his conclusion) was explicitly race-based. But if not, then it's not clear its relevant whether Murray also has racist reasons for endorsing basic income inside his own head.
(I actually agree with the NYT article that Scott has been overly sympathetic to the racist, sexist far-right and this is bad, whilst also thinking it's not entirely fair, and part of a broad 'tech nerds are Nazis' meme that is not *at all* fair, for the reasons given here: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/silicon-valley-isnt-full-of-fascists)
The whole context of this discussion and the quote I excerpted is about truth and falsehood. Scott backed up his claim with evidence. You have made a completely baseless and tone-deaf accusation. I have no idea who you are or what you have "pressed" on anyone. If you'd like to make a claim, please detail it with evidence.
This is so meta. Do you fail to see the irony of how you're making vague and poorly cited claims about Scott all within the context of the NYT doing the same?
Nevertheless, I will do my best to lead you through the process. I doubt I will have much interest in getting into the minutia of Marx; but, at a process level, the basic point is that when you claim that people should be skeptical of someone, you must provide evidence. To begin, "Scott recently coined" and "never found any primary source" are not very helpful because they don't show Scott's actual words or their context. It would be helpful if you could link to, or quote, the evidence for the points you're trying to make. Linking is better because quoting often leaves out relevant context.
Great! In my opinion, you should apologize to Scott for -- at least, initially -- making a public claim, without evidence, that people should be skeptical of him in the midst of him being attacked by The Great Octopus.
As far as the content of your criticism, let's start with quoting Scott's basic claim:
> What I sometimes call Marx's Fallacy is that if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top.
I went to my bookshelf and found my copy of the Communist Manifesto (ISBN 978-1-85984-898-2) that I haven't looked at for a while. Skimming to section "II. Proletarians and Communists," Marx writes:
"The Communists are distinguished from other working-class parties by this only:
1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.
2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
[...]
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: the formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat."
So here we have direct support of Scott's premise of "if we burnt down the current system" in Marx's quote: "overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy".
I think the beginning of the Marx quote above (the two points defining communism) sufficiently supports Scott's fallacy argument. Marx claims, with profound naïveté, that all the communists are about is representing the interests of the proletariat and Marx doesn't wrestle with the obvious and historically observable problem that those that tend to reach for political power, tend to optimize for it.
Is Marx the first profoundly naïveté political theoretician on this point? No. Is it fair to name the fallacy after him? In my opinion, yes. In my opinion, he was one of the main people directly responsible for the deaths and murder of hundreds of millions of people due, in part, to his profound naïveté about the nature of political power. I fully support Scott's cute summary of this as Marx's Fallacy and I think Marx's own words provide sufficient evidence. I see no reason to be skeptical of Scott based on what you're claiming. I think when it comes to homicidal murderers, it's okay to use summaries and gestalt rather than wading through meandering, original primary sources. I did not enjoy reading The Communist Manifesto's ramblings when I first read it.
The quote is, "What I sometimes call Marx's Fallacy is that if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top."
This is a foundational belief of all Marxists, regardless of whether Marx stated it explicitly. Marxism has never had a plan for achieving "true communism" other than "kill all the bourgeoisie and burn down the system". The fact that we have millions of revolutionaries around the world eager to destroy their civilization, none of whom have any workable plans past the "kill people" step, proves that this is the case.
Marx never stated it explicitly because he was writing at a time when every philosopher knew Hegel and Rousseau, and could see all the places Marx was invoking Hegel and Rousseau. Rousseau and Hegel both asserted this fallacy, Rousseau via his ridiculous doctrine of the "Common Good", and Hegel by positing a "Weltgeist" ("world spirit"; that is, God) who always makes sure that things get better after a revolution.
If you think you /don't/ believe this Marxist fallacy, then please explain what you think the Marxist plan is for building a better, more-just system after destroying the current one.
"Hegel viewed all human history as the World-Spirit trying to recognize and incarnate itself. As it overcomes its various confusions and false dichotomies, it advances into forms that more completely incarnate the World-Spirit and then moves onto the next problem. Finally, it ends with the World-Spirit completely incarnated – possibly in the form of early 19th century Prussia – and everything is great forever.
Marx famously exports Hegel’s mysticism into a materialistic version where the World-Spirit operates upon class relations rather than the interconnectedness of all things, and where you don’t come out and call it the World-Spirit – but he basically keeps the system intact. So once the World-Spirit resolves the dichotomy between Capitalist and Proletariat, then it can more completely incarnate itself and move on to the next problem. Except that this is the final problem (the proof of this is trivial and is left as exercise for the reader) so the World-Spirit becomes fully incarnate and everything is great forever. And you want to plan for how that should happen? Are you saying you know better than the World-Spirit, Comrade?
I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is basically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”"
Since your have 1917 in your alias, I assume you're fluent in Russian: Here is the first stanza of Soviet Russian translation of The International (This is cannon. I was taught to memorize and perform as a schoolchild). Please note the last 4 lines, товарищь.
And sorry I'm being so harsh and blunt, but this goes back to my point about your tone-deafness. If someone is vulnerably writing about a tough and emotional subject -- while they're being attacked -- that's the _worst_ time to attack them with vague and evidence-less claims.
This, specifically "took some of those presuppositions to places that were truly uncomfortable to most economists", was always one of the places where I thought Capital was weakest.
The focus on surplus value and expropriation was written in such a way that I kept feeling like Marx was agreeing that there was a 'natural law' style correct distribution but arguing that the Lockean idea of who owned what simply got this 'natural law' wrong.
This always struck me as a much weaker argument than jumping straight into the immiseration of the working class and other more consequential arguments, and I've never been sure whether Marx actually believed in a 'natural law' of 'proper' distribution, or if it was a rhetorical device used only to address Locke's influence.
I wonder what the median number of blog readers one needs to accumulate is before you end up with someone whose entire purpose in life is to pretend to find misquotings of Marx in your writings and get really angry about them
There was no primary source - read the original comment - he wrote :
" What I sometimes call Marx's Fallacy"
It's his "opinion".
Please, say that you understand this.
You must have read the original comment at one point, and continue to post drivel regarding it - either you don't understand that it's his opinion or you understand and have an agenda to spread lies.
Either way, there appears to be little hope for you. The most we can hope for is that you go away to attack other "anti-marxist" comments somewhere on the internet. You add nothing to any discussion, except for misunderstanding and lies.
As someone who is politically left and who just joined this thread I'm seeing a whole lot of righteous indignation being heaped on marxbro/Marx/communism, which coming from a group who identify as "rationalists" strikes a chord in me. If Scott "sometimes call[s] it the Marx fallacy" maybe he should explain why he calls it that? In doing so maybe he would come to terms with the ignorance of that belief that he's seeing as fact? Maybe he would then realize that he has been operating from an ideological mindset that he maybe didn't even know about?
Maybe 3/4 of the posts ranting against Marx should actually read Marx and not just spout urban legends of Marx?
Sure, it's Scott's "opinion," but isn't opinion the thing that rationalists should be skewering on their sword of rationality?
Please don't assume comments on the blog come from "rationalists".
Also, I never call myself a rationalist and am suspicious of those who do. I *aspire* to be rational. I'm not very good at it, it is merely that I have taken specific steps to improve my skills, and would encourage others to do the same. I am still wrong on a regular basis and I expect to continue being wrong, but crucially, I am open to correction and I am often the first person to mention my mistakes to myself.
As to the issue at hand, I do not rant against Marx (nor generally read Marx, because the day has only 24 hours and there are so many great writers from the 21st century who I already don't have enough time to read). I did mention an alternate interpretation of Marx's fallacy which, while not treating Marx as correct, would make Scott's interpretation of Marx incorrect.
No, dearie, I abhor the autocracies that are the CCP and the russian temporary, Mr Putin. Communism, IMO, is a failed ideology (or is it a policital structure?), and marxism, being the progenitor of both, is suspect.
user marxbros1917 appears to be a communist (and I don't mean that in a demeaning McCarthyist way, but in a 21st century "Communism is the enemy of the West's rationalist and democratic thinking" way.)
"I have no idea who you are or what you have "pressed" on anyone."
Marxbro has, rather infamously, been banned from Slate Star Codex on something like 10+ separate occasions due to creating numerous alts after his initial ban. A few years later, he still regularly complains about this on a certain unfriendly subreddit. I don't think this line of conversation is going to lead anywhere productive.
Thank you for the correction--the alts were actually on the SSC subreddit, and there were actually 26 of them over the course of 3 months if the ban registry is correct.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not sure that you're necessary wrong about Scott misinterpreting Marx. I barely know anything about him myself. However, "I've pressed Scott Alexander many times on his sloppy citations and he rarely fixes his mistakes" is not an entirely accurate summary of the backstory. (Plus, Scott maintained a list of major mistakes* at the top of his old blog, which I think puts him at least a couple of standard deviations above the average blogger in that regard even if he's not perfect.)
It looks like you're getting a second chance on ACX, and I personally wouldn't mind seeing more Marxists on here. That said, I would recommend easing way off on repeatedly bringing up things you think Scott got wrong in the past, because not backing off when you should have was what got you banned in the first place.
As the mod in question, I invite everyone to read this thread decide for themselves whether banning marxbro1917 from an online discussion space is likely to improve the quality of discussion.
You might be inclined to believe that there is something you're not getting, that it must be possible to productively deal with this entirely civil fella. Not so. This is the entirety of the MarxBro act, and after many years it's still exactly the same.
Alternatively, you could ban everyone that counters marxbro1917 in defense of Scott Atlas. Did I get his name right? I didn't read the NYT article. Only his rebuttal on reference from Dave Weigel who applauded the rebuttal. Immediately saw 7 deleted posts. Easily determined both he and his stacks were trash. Remembered I had Mon off and was lucky enough to find a thread attempting to discuss the merits of socio-economic systems.
The end result would still be harmony either way would it not? You could try it as a social experiment in fascism. Either way you get a fascist alt-right insurrection-stan freedomthinker kick out of it. Such joy! You could call it The Path to Joyful Fascism by Scott Atlas.
Or you collectively or Mr. Atlas could attempt to have intellectually honest discussion with non-facsimile receipts about all of the items discussed above and below.
Now, after my first day here, I hate Dave Weigel for dragging me to this costume party without getting my two drink minimum. And also now I just hate Dave Weigel and I can't wait to let him know. Also I don't know what to do with the rest of my Mon off. I also can't wait to renew my subscription to the NYT just to spite Scott Atlas.
On a positive note I hope all you opposers do finally obtain your associate's degrees. Pro-tip: use the cliff notes for your manga stylized textbooks on the histrionics of communism if you want to really impress the professor.
On an even more positive note, please tell the cubano with the abuelo, as I could not locate their reply, that I sincerely apologize for making them relive an appropriated past trauma. No one knows better than them.
So, somebody should knock his and Siskind's heads together like Moe, is what I take from this. The people are all just so goddamned tedious. If the Internet didn't exist, nobody would have ever heard of any of them. And our politics wouldn't be so completely insane.
"Sloppy citations" (not distortions or falsehoods?) on a private person's blog, even an influential one, is a different animal from the world's second-largest print media company being deliberately misleading in an article we know they had months to fact-check.
And that's assuming your accusation is fair. Scott tracked mistakes on his blog and was quite good about flagging them when pointed out to him. (I assume you're referring to the blog since the substack is like 10 posts old, but Google doesn't show any comments from your handle-- did you change it?) No offense, but I trust Scott's conscientiousness much more than I trust "marxbro1917" to actually pick out errors as opposed to ideological disagreements.
I checked and-- yep, it's just you pushing Marxist ideology. Over that lame "RedCoin" joke of all things. It's not clear what correction you even think Scott should make (to a fiction humor post!). Even more ludicrous than I'd expected. Thanks for the entertainment.
I'd like to believe that you're a fair representative of a Marxist viewpoint, but out of charity I'm going to have to assume from here on out that you're a parody account trying to mock and discredit it.
If there's anyone in history who doesn't deserve to have his ideas discussed properly, it's Marx.
Maybe it's not the most rational thing but I reckon anyone whose ideas have already killed more people than the population of most countries (ie Marx and Hitler) is someone that I'm comfortable simply dismissing rather than attempting to take seriously.
Maybe there's some gems in there somewhere, but it's unlikely. Marx gives us three things: (a) motherhood statements about how sad it is that some people are rich and some are poor, (b) predictions about "historical inevitabilities" which didn't happen, and (c) implied policy prescriptions, which have killed millions. Fuck him.
A fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. He made a joke about your hero, get over it. The comment section will instantly improve the moment you are banned. Until then drink a big cup of shut the hell up.
What’s the difference? You can’t be a Marxist with anything approaching a rational viewpoint. Anyone with cursory search space optimization knowledge knows a planned economy is doomed to failure.
The NYT is a media source that aims for neutral truth reporting.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, with one arm being publishing facts.
This blog consists of the thoughts of one man. Though many of us trust him, we understand that he is not infallible. As one person his views will not be "neutral" on all, or necessarily any, topics, just as anyone's views may or may not be.
Your many comments in this topic are almost all centered about your hatred that marxism has been misrepresented by Mr Alexander, as though he owes you, as though he must not write anything regarding marxism that you have not vetted.
He doesn't owe you anything. He is not a universal source of truth on any topic, and the reasonable people who read this blog realise this. You, it appears, don't.
If he wrote something about marxism that you disagree with, he doesn't have to agree with you or renounce his words. You are not a source of truth and neither is this blog.
Do you scour the internet sniffing for blogs and social media posts that offend marxism, to reply in earnestness that THEY ARE WRONG, MARXISM IS FOR THE GREATER GOOD, WITH MARXISM THE WORLD WILL BE A BETTER PLACE (and marxbro1917 will be one of the cornerstones of this change, he will be in the politburo, where he belongs, where he has been destined!)
Your rabid is perpetuating the stereotype of marxists as a bunch of loony sociopaths.
Ironically, out of most of the readers here, you would benefit the most from an intensive course of psychotherapy with Mr Alexander to delve deep into your psyche to determine why you base your character so much around marxism. Are you poor and have identified with marxist philosophy? Did you have a difficult childhood, your father blaming his woes on capitalism? Are you young and unemployed and angry, or older, redundant and bitter?
We don't really care, though if you pay a psychotherapist, at least they might pretend to care and help you, then you can straighten yourself out.
Marxism is not the answer to anything, except as a punchline.
Few people care abut marx here, and your histrionic comments push people further away.
No one "deserves" to be read - there is no deep ethical need for everyone to be "read".
YOUR opinion is that he should be read, and you are pushing this opinion onto Mr Alexander.
This is not the place for this. He can talk about whatever the hell he wants, and he can ignore marx, write posts about marx that you disagree with or make jolly fun of him.
Create your own blog and talk about marx till the peasants come home from the fields. No one here cares. You are very tiring.
Dude, it's not the content of any individual comment, it's the number of comments. The sheer amount of time you've spent responding basically the same thing on almost every branch of this thread is terrifying.
For those who are already familiar with SSC, please continue to take this article as another piece of evidence that by default ALL articles are approximately this distorted/false and not to trust newspaper articles (nor TV news) in general without independent confirmations of the facts.
As a rationalist, wouldn't you want to withhold your judgment until you know why the editors released his name? I think that Jasper Jackson has the right idea.
My comment had nothing to do with them releasing his name. It's about accuracy. In an article with 8-10 major points, four are misleading or wrong, as is the general "narrative" of the piece.
Many people have the experience of reading a news story about their profession, or about a topic they know well, or have direct experience with the events of, and noticing that it's distorted.
The point is that it's not _just_ those news stories which are that way. It's almost all news stories, people just have a tendency to not notice when they're relying on the journalist to be accurate rather than knowing the subject themselves.
> But none of the above means the NYT has any imperative to reveal Alexander’s identity. So why would it?
> One theory is that the publication is simply imposing its rules without much thought to the consequences. Alexander has been deemed not to meet the threshold for anonymous sourcing, and thus a piece about his blog must reveal his identity. The NYT does invest a lot of importance in its procedures and processes, and like any large organisation it can sometimes apply them in ways that ride roughshod over the views of those it deals with.
> There is another possibility, of course, one that many of Slate Star Codex’s most ardent defenders seem to have discounted based entirely on Alexander’s say-so. The NYT could believe that the real identity of the author is too integral to the story it wants to run to leave out, and that the story is important enough to justify the potential damage it might do to him. Alexander has said that he doesn’t believe this to be the case, and there is no indication otherwise from those who the reporter spoke to for the story. But we frankly won’t know until it is published, or indeed dropped entirely.
> Those jumping to Alexander’s defence appear to be doing so based on their long-standing relationship with his work and him. They presumably trust him because they know him, either his real identity or simply through his work. That’s not a luxury the rest of us have.
> At this point in time, with the information we have, it is difficult to see how Scott Alexander’s full name is so integral to the NYT’s story that it justifies the damage it might do to him. But before we make that call, it might be a good idea to have more than his word to go on.
The story has now been published, and as far as I'm aware the possibility discounted on Alexander's say-so was indeed not supported. No new information made his actual surname integral to the story.
I feel like taking the articles which come to my attention *because* they are very distorted and then assuming all articles are that distorted is falling into some form of selection bias.
Surely we should expect the articles that become famous and stir up huge backlash because of how inaccurate and distorted they are, are very likely to be more inaccurate and distorted than the average article?
I don't think this is the same case as Gell-Mann amnesia, which is just about reading a neutral article on a topic you know. This is a case of reading *notorious, famously bad* article on a topic you know, not an average, unremarkable article.
I recognize this article and the process leading up to it has caused you a substantial amount of distress. As someone who was not aware of your original blog (and now wishes I had been) I didn’t take away a negative impression, more that you were open to any viewpoint as a jumping off point for discussion. I’m now a subscriber as a result.
Probably you’re somebody more thoughtful than the median reader. Plenty of others will just code it “oh Scott Alexander; isn’t he problematic? I heard he was a racist. Can’t remember where. Anyway pass the stuffing.”
Or as a plot twist, they'll just remember him as Siskind because of the article's insistence on using his last name, saving his pseudonym from the association.
The insistence on using his until literally just now unknown last name is such a strong signal. That tells you everything you need to know about their motivations. The NYT always wins and they want you to know it.
If it's as true as it seems that the journalist truly didn't want to write a smear article, and that NYT pressured him to do so, could it be possible that he used Siskand on purpose for this very reason?
I'm probably looking to deep into it, but it's worth a thought.
I didn't get the smear otherwise I wouldn't be here; although I am NOT getting the sense that "people [on this site] like to have good faith discussion about ideas" unless there is some unconscious sorting process about which ideas are worth having a good faith conversation about and which are not.
I think you're right, but I'm not sure how much it matters.
People who like to have good-faith discussion about ideas are valuable. If the NYT article brings Scott into contact more of those, at the cost of making people who don't think about stuff feel like he's vaguely problematic, I'd call that a win.
I think the majority will think "what's this boring article about some random website?" and skip to one of the other sections. It's only a fraction that will react positively or negatively to the article.
Scott's objection wasn't simply that people at dinner would hear he was "problematic". It's that his patients might google his real name and find that article rather than something specific to his professional life.
Also now subscribed based on the NYT article. I think most people with functional critical thinking skills could see the piece as more of a beacon to hitherto-unheard of corner of the internet that seems like it has a great community of like minded individuals. Having read a few older blog posts, I'm glad I found it, and looking forward to reading many more.
Hope you forgot a /s, otherwise the comments section doesn't bode well if people such as yourself continue to peddle lies, either consciously as a bad faith actor or because you don't understand. Either way, I hope there's an implied /s.
Agreed. I found this from the NYT article. I think you should have had your name left out of the article just as a freaking courtesy. There was no need to include it. But I am glad I found the blog.
I agree with Chris. I didn’t take a terrible view of the article but could see the slant. I’d never heard of this or the previous site before the NYT article. In fact, the post about COVID today, I forwarded to my text thread with guys we discuss all aspects of life.
As a physician, I agree with his article though humans are terrible about predictions so who knows really. There funny Yogi Berra quotes on this. Either way, a good starting point for open discussion.
Thanks for putting this up, I want to comment near the start and say that racism doesn't belong around Scott. Yes, there are sometimes weird positions brought up here, but arguing with someone who thinks we should have a king is NOT the same as wanting one; it's actually the opposite.
People hear from the NYT should read some old stuff before trying to mess with Scott, he's a really nice guy who is trying to help people through thinking.
I have enormous respect for Scott. I've met him in person and thought he was very kind. I've been to his house and found a lovely community of people I could cozy up with for years. The community around him is 90% the best people I've ever met.
But I can't deny that racism swirls around this community with alarming frequency. Have you *read* this blog's forums? Spent time on the pre-CW-ban subreddit? There is a not-small number of people (some of whom are mods of those spaces and thus carry implicit endorsement) who agree, point blank, with the statement "black people are dumber in a general sense because of genes black people carry". Or "Ashkenazi Jews are smarter in a general sense because of genes Ashkenazi Jews carry".
Scott is, at a minimum, tolerant of that. I'm scared he actually believes it. If he doesn't, he ought to say so, clean up his house, and stop complaining about people who notice the current state of his house and ask how it got here. If he does, then he doesn't have the right to complain when the NYT implies that he's a racist, because he is.
I think people are less saying that it is *untrue* Scott believes those things (even though that is the verbiage they have chosen) but that no one should say it in the New York Times even though it's true
I don't think believing those statements makes someone a racist. Those are just empirical facts. You can believe them and still support equal rights and opportunity and judging people as individuals no matter their race.
The article doesn't even say believing those thing is racist! The characterization is as controversial and potentially dangerous - both surely true whatever else you think about these ideas. People don't like the article but it's not because it is inaccurate or even misleading, more the opposite - it reveals accurate and important information about a public figure in a way that may change overall opinion of him in a net negative direction
> I don't think believing those statements makes someone a racist.
The fact that "I don't think believing black people are inherently genetically inferior makes someone a racist" is a statement anyone here takes seriously is a better proof of my point than anything I could say.
Even if it weren't: "black people are inferior" + "meritocracy" = "we should treat black people worse".
If it helps you understand my view better, I also believe that height is positively correlated with IQ and that this link is likely somewhat genetic in origin (for example lower mutations load increases both). Does this make me a heightest? I don't think so. I don't support judging someone's intelligence based upon their height and I recognize that there are smart and dumb people of all different heights. My thoughts and race and intelligence are the same.
> I don't think so. I don't support judging someone's intelligence based upon their height
Then you're not much of a Bayesian, are you? Or do you, nominal defender of the Grand Search for Truth with a capital T, balk at incorporating that Truth-with-a-capital-T into the way you look at the world?
Suppose you knew, without any doubt, that the racial IQ difference were true and responsible for all the inequality we see. Would you have a black surgeon operate on your kid, recognizing that even if both distributions are truncated by some sort of certification, the means of the people who meet the given standard will still be different? Would you let them be what stands between you and X-risk? Let them tell you what charity to donate to?
Speaking of, if you truncate the two distributions where you think A had a lower mean than B, the means are actually reversed post-truncation! Plot it on paper if it’s not clear, but A has a skinnier but longer tail at the point of truncation. Intuitively this means that someone from population B has to be only sort of unusual to clear the filter, while someone from population A has to be very unusual (and there’s more variance, so they’re more likely to be very very unusual). So yeah, in your example if these are the things you believe you should go with the surgeon!
> Would you have a black surgeon operate on your kid
It would depend on his record as a surgeon.
I'll take the bait here for a little bit and say that in a hypothetical scenario where the only piece of information I have about the doctor is his race I would prefer the non black doctor.
But that's not how the world works. In the real world I have access to information like their track record as a surgeon and their graduation rank in med school and this information makes race irrelevant.
To point to another example we can observe that blacks are on average worse than whites at math and thus they have lower average math SAT scores. However blacks with a math SAT score of 700 are exactly as good at math as whites with a math SAT of 700 (this is likely true for every score except 800) and so even though race and math ability correlate once I know someone's math SAT score observing their race gives me exactly zero new information about their math ability. I like to say that the evidence from the SAT scores dominates the evidence from race.
Race is a dominated predictor of almost everything we might truly care about and thus even though it correlates with many things it is not a good basis upon which to discriminate.
Suppose there were 2 surgeons, one Black and one White. You have reason to believe the White surgeon is better but you'll be accused of racism if you select them. Your kid's life is at stake. Who do you select?
Equal treatment, racial harmony, etc. are worthwhile goals. But they aren't the *only* worthwhile goals, and it's always possible to concoct some scenario where some other goal becomes more important. It's like the trolley problem--it is generally good to avoid being responsible for someone else's death, but if being responsible for someone else's death allows you to save 4 lives, it can be a worthwhile tradeoff.
IMO this is what separates extremists from everyone else. If you're willing to sacrifice everything else in favor of your One True Moral Principle, you might be an extremist. (Unless your One True Moral Principle is something very generic like "minimize suffering". Then you might have a case to make for yourself.)
On your black surgeon question, that depends what other evidence I had. If all I knew about two surgeons was that one was black and one white and both had passed whatever the relevant certifying requirements are, and if I believed that the certifying requirements were applied equally to blacks and whites (neither affirmative action nor discrimination against blacks), and if I believed that the average intelligence of blacks was lower and there were no other relevant characteristics (dexterity, say) that went the other way, I would prefer the white surgeon.
You apparently agree with the logic of that, by what you said. Do you regard doing that as racist? Do you object to it, and if so why?
This argument proves too much; you're now actively arguing in favor of racism! By the same logic,
a) heightism would be justified. Do you personally make sure to always choose the tallest doctor?
b) racism would be justified IRL; not because of genetic differences, but because black people have poorer childhood nutrition, education etc.
In reality, the signal of group-based differences (genetic or not) is generally swamped by the noise, especially in cases such as race where there are long-standing tribal prejudices.
Noise like: what if the black doctor has a slightly better record? What if he needed a slightly higher innate IQ score to overcome the disadvantage of being surrounded by "inferior" blacks? What if the white doctor is really short, and therefore a subhuman dullard?
>"even if both distributions are truncated by some sort of certification"
If someone has passed a fair certification then there's no problem.
there was a somewhat famous study that's a case study in how to do bad stats: they showed that height was uncorrelated with basketball ability.
The problem was that they did this by looking only at people who were in the NBA.
For those people who actually make it into the NBA height is uncorrelated with basketball ability, that kind of cutoff means you're selecting for people who are able to make it above the cutoff line.
So even if such an IQ difference was real, (I have by doubts but this is a hypothetical) for people who made it past the selection process for surgeons it's irrelevant so long as the selection process if fair.
> Would you have a black surgeon operate on your kid
That has pretty much nothing to do with the average IQ of black people, but is all about the standards that medical schools uphold.
If they have high and equal standards at admission and graduation, then there is no reason to believe that a black doctor is worse. If they practice affirmative action, where they lower the barriers for less talented black people, then it would be logical to be wary of black surgeons.
I would argue that a medical system run by the average SSC reader is going to result in far less discrimination of black surgeons than one run by the average NYT reader.
But what is IQ? It's a concept that spurred some tests that more or less "worked" for the situation they were created for. We all know that humans are intelligent, but how we choose to measure that intelligence is a story all by itself. And, what IQ tests are we talking about here because they all come in different shapes and sizes and measure different aspects of this thing that we call intelligence. There's also the fact that no one IQ test can capture the full measure of this complex thing called human intelligence. To take such a muddied concept and then add height into the mix seems naïve
TL;DR : People are bad at statistics, so IQ is mostly a fraud. It might still be helpful to measure *low* intelligence. (Which IIRC it was actually created for by USA's military ?)
No, because you're neglecting the extremely important difference between statistical distributions and individuals.
For a simple example, let's say that blue-eyed people roll two standard dice and take the higher result, while green-eyed people roll two dice and take the lower result, and that those results will have some measurable impact on their lives. Obviously, you should expect blue-eyed people to do better on average - almost a third of them are 6's, after all, while very few green-eyed people are.
But if you look at a random person of each eye colour, there's about one chance in eight that the green-eyed person rolled higher. That's still a pretty large number. If you're hiring for employees where die rolls matter, you'd expect to see a lot of good blue-eyed applicants, but you'd also expect to see a proportion of green eyes as well. Simply ignoring the green-eyed would be foolish, because you'd be giving up a substantial chance at the best candidate. You judge the individual, not the eye colour.
Now, humans can be biased. Perhaps in this world we'd want to encourage sunglasses at interviews, to make sure that the interviewer wasn't paying too much attention to their eyes. That'd be a reasonable bias-reducing step. But we shouldn't expect that it'd get the workforce up to 50/50. It just means that any individual green-eyed person can go as far as their die roll will take them. It doesn't achieve equal outcomes for groups, but it does achieve fairness on an individual level.
I work in the hiring industry. In fact, I work on mathematical models in the hiring industry. We rely on signals far weaker than your example all the time.
Hiring is very error prone. You can't practically gather enough data to actually know what each person rolled. So you are incentivized to - and therefore all sufficiently competitive organizations WILL - set a prior based on your best beliefs about the population.
If you gather the same evidence from an interview for a blue-eyed person and a green-eyed person, and if you do not think you gathered infinite evidence, you will therefore (rationally!) conclude that your best estimate is that the blue-eyed person is better. On an *individual* level, the green-eyed person has lost out on a job to an equally-skilled blue-eyed person.
I can't speak to real-world hiring practices in as much detail as you can, so I'll defer on that point.
I guess I'll express my actual thesis more directly, then - even if race/gender/etc. provides some Bayesian evidence of fitness for a given task, we should ignore it as a matter of policy. The evidence is too weak, and the failure modes too unjust, for it to be a plan we encourage.
But you can't simply declare math or data to be anathema in order to make that happen. That isn't sane or sustainable. You need to actually make a policy case. The libertarian theorists who seem vaguely disgusted by the idea that you'd ever consider a collective like race in an individual-level decision are a far better model than that. So is King's famous "content of their character" quote, and so is blinded hiring (when practical), and a bunch of others.
This is a policy case that can be made very successfully. Looking at race is immoral, so even if the data implies a population-level difference, we should ignore that and consider the individual. You don't need to crucify people for testing the populations.
Hold on, I think you may be committing a fallacy here.
In the hypothetical A that the prior is true (i.e. that blue-eyed people are in general more skilled than green-eyed people) and the hypothetical B that this prior is relevant (i.e. that blue-eyed people are in general more skilled than green-eyed people *even matching for* the various more direct evidence you have), then... the prior is true and relevant i.e. when comparing a blue-eyed person and a green-eyed person with the same direct evidence of skill, the blue-eyed person is *more likely than not* to have a higher *true* skill level than the green-eyed person.
This means that the green-eyed person has *not* lost out on a job to an equally-skilled blue-eyed person, but to a blue-eyed person with equal *evidence of skill* who probably (by hypothetical assumption B) has higher skill. This is not an injustice.
(By inverting the statistics, you could show that when comparing *equally-skilled* green-eyed and blue-eyed people, the blue-eyed people usually have lower *evidence* of that skill, and assuming a Moloch-optimised algorithm that plus the eye-color evidence would reduce to a coin flip.)
While I disagree with the specific assertion, I agree with the general argument, which is that your belief of what is morally right is separable from your belief in the objective truth of a matter.
To use a less offensive example: it is, I think, not in question that things like heritable disorders, including especially terrible ones that effectively guarantee unhappiness for sufferers, are in fact heritable. But I don't think that there is serious moral or political support to be found even for very restricted forms of eugenics such as forcibly forbidding carriers of especially terrible heritable disorders from having biological children on humanitarian grounds. (And to be clear, I also do not support such a measure.) Are those who believe in the actual heritability of heritable disorders but do not support forced sterilization/etc. eugenicists too? (There's a counter-argument in here regarding _why_ such a person wouldn't support forced sterilization, and I hope for someone better-read than me to find a better example.)
I have a fuzzy memory of reading a passage where Bertrand Russell made the exact same argument regarding either gender differences or sexuality (I forget which). It was something along the lines of "even in the imaginary case where someone proves conclusively that X are smarter or more capable than Y, it still would be morally repugnant to support policies that formally elevate X over Y".
Why should the objective truth, one way or the other, dictate whether you believe that people of all races deserve equal opportunity and treatment? Would you give in if someone proved against all odds thirty years from now that black people are genetically predisposed to have lower IQ? "Well, it can't be helped that it would be morally repugnant to support treating blacks as inferior in society - the facts go this way, so I suppose this way it is." Many aspects of our morality are aspirational ideas that uphold what ought to be true, not what is true, because it would be wrong to use even objective truths to justify moral evil.
I'd still have less of a problem with it even if they weren't, but most racists are also basically pro-the-economic-system-we-have. Our current economic system says that if you're less capable, you deserve to suffer and die in a despairing hell you have no meaningful hope of escaping. If we then say black people are less capable...
Basically, I think you can believe any two of "we should treat black people equally", "black people are less capable", and "we should treat people according to their capability". But you can't believe all three - and most racists claim they believe the second and third.
I don't dispute that most racists believe the second and third beliefs you cited, and I think you know I wouldn't as well, because they are stated in a way that is overly convenient for your position and not accurate to what my counter-position is trying to argue. I haven't called it a humanoid figure made from the dried stalks of cereal plants, but it really is.
The statements closest to yours that are accurate to what my counter-position is trying to argue are: "we should treat black people equally", "black people may be less capable, equally capable, or more capable", and "we should treat people according to their capability, if there existed a generally applicable method to measure capability that is sufficiently hardened (i.e. difficult to exploit) to use as formal policy", plus an implied fourth, "no such method exists".
I don't think it's really in question that everyone involved in this conversation (the poster you were originally responding to, you, me) at least professes to believe in #1, so that leaves the others.
My previous post provides an argument about why I think it is possible to believe #2, #3, and #4 simultaneously. If I understand correctly, you are asserting that it is impossible to believe #2 while also believing in #3 + #4. I don't agree, and I don't feel that you have provided any argument or evidence to support your position.
>>>Our current economic system says that if you're less capable, you deserve to suffer and die in a despairing hell you have no meaningful hope of escaping.
A bit melodramatic, isn't this? Also not accurate - the concepts of "deserved outcomes" and that of "predictable outcomes" are similar but not the same.
By your phrasing, you seem to imply that people who are less capable *should not* be at a disadvantage to those more capable when in competition for jobs. Is that right or do you mean something else?
If you mean "when in competition for social standing" rather than jobs...could you expand on what that looks like?
Actually, I think this might not be quite true. You might believe all three if you interpret "treat people equally" as meaning "equality of opportunity" (probably in one of its more extreme forms), not "equality of outcome".
Out of your three statements, two are prescriptive (saying how we ought to behave) and one is a factual claim about the nature of reality.
Surely you're not arguing that we ought to pick a side on the factual claim based on what we think of the prescriptive claims?
If you remove the politically-changed context and just say "here's three statements, one is factual and two are prescriptive, and there's a contradiction if you believe all three", then it seems obvious to me that the intellectually honest procedure would be to decide the factual claim based on evidence and then pick your stance on the prescriptions in light of that conclusion.
Your comment conflates intelligence with inherent moral worth. It both completely destroys the distinction your interlocutor was making, and is functionally racist in a world where he's right. I do not know if we live in that world, but either way I'd prefer if you didn't put words in people's mouths.
Firstly, no one equated "less intelligent" with "inferior". That was your strawman.
Secondly, empirical facts about populations don't entail facts about a specific individual from that population. Acting as if the latter were true would be racism, but the former is not. The fact that people still confuse this basic point is frankly depressing.
He didn't say "I don't think believing black people are inherently genetically inferior makes someone a racist". Nevertheless, I find his comment and its popularity to be quite disturbing, and he didn't even disagree with how you framed it!
I disagree that "black people are inferior" + "meritocracy" = "we should treat black people worse". Obviously I reject the first statement ("black people are inferior"), but also you misunderstand "meritocracy". Meritocracy ends in "ocracy", so it is a word about who makes decisions, not about how people are treated. The local school janitor deserves our respect and we should treat him well, but that doesn't mean he should be a principal or CEO or governor.
Stating the fact that “Blacks on average score lower on IQ tests and part of the difference seems genetic in origin” isn’t racist. But only racist beliefs can turn that into a statement like “black people are dumber [..] because of genes". The word ‘dumber’ has broader connotations and I doubt swiping culture and history under the rug is accidental either.
Word choices and sentence construction tell you things people try to hide.
Ugh. Holy crap guys, this is the kind of thing that might have made the NYT publish their hit piece in the first place.
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a million people of two races A and B take an IQ test. Suppose the average IQ of A is different from the average IQ of B.
First of all, you can't just SAY the averages are different without any evidence. I have not personally seen that data, most people have not seen that data, it's highly controversial and therefore you have to cite evidence - scientific papers and such - if you want anyone to believe you. If people believe you without any evidence, it's not a good sign.
Second, "black people are dumber in a general sense" is a VERY different statement than "the average IQ of black people was measured in several studies to be lower than the average IQ of white people."
The first statement sounds like straight-up racism, as if you're saying "a given person of race Black is dumber in a variety of different ways than a given person of race White". You should know perfectly well that (1) this is untrue (because bell curves) and (2) some people would interpret your statement this way because you worded it so carelessly.
The worst part about this is that there are 56 Likes on a comment saying "Those are just empirical facts." No, they are carelessly-worded remarks that can easily be interpreted as white supremacy.
I do hope most of those 56 likes were people who have seen studies and interpreted the phrases in a charitable non-white-supremacist way, but even in that case, their carelessness on this topic is disturbing.
“who agree, point blank, with the statement "black people are dumber in a general sense because of genes black people carry". Or "Ashkenazi Jews are smarter in a general sense because of genes Ashkenazi Jews carry".”
I believe that black people have darker skin because of genes they carry. I believe that they are more likely to suffer from sickle cell anemia. Is that racist?
I believe that IQ may be, at least in significant part, moderated by genetics.
Is it impossible to comprehend that there might be reasons beyond racism to consider that genetically distinguishable populations may measurably differ in general intelligence?
That’s the thing about rationalism and “believing in science”. You aren’t allowed to dismiss possibly factual things just because the implications of them being true would be uncomfortable. And that’s what you do when you dismiss Charles Murray types as merely “racist”.
Exactly. Racism isn't about there being differences between races - obviously, there's a few(at minimum, in appearance). Yeah, it's a spectrum, and no sharp dividing lines, but there's clearly a range.
Racism is what happens when you start giving a shit about those differences, when there's no good reason to give a shit. Racism is a choice people make in terms of how they act. The real world is not itself racist, nor are measurements of it. People's beliefs and actions are where racism lives.
Here's an explanation that I always wanted to try to see if that works for somebody.
So there is a minimal median difference in some value, such as IQ, among different races or ethnic groups. It causes the tails of the distribution above some extreme value to be much bigger in one group than in the other. That's why there are so many famous Ashkenazi scientists.
But the thing is, this has no importance whatsoever for any half-way realistic situation, for any situation that's likely to come up in practice! The fact that there is a minimal median difference in the population does absolutely nothing for you when looking at two job applicants - in fact, if you don't know that there's such a difference, you'll never get enough data to notice it, because you'll never see enough applicants, and because the other factors will completely overwhelm it.
Now, if you are an alien star force that has an hour to take from Earth, which is about to get destroyed, a million of the best residents optimized by some preferred parameter that you cannot measure or predict individually, that's a completely different story, and you'll have to optimize by race...
The difference in outcomes right now is far from minimal, even far from the tails.
A median black SAT math score is approximately 15th percentile for white test-takers. A black median income family makes $41,511 a year, a white one makes $65,902. Taken at face value, this implies that being black imposes a penalty of about 1 standard deviation on your life outcomes.
If that's genetic, it's relevant at all levels, from Congress to Billy Bob's Brake Repair Shop.
Except that there are so many environmental factors at work here that it's really strange to assume that this would be genetic. I can't produce the links now, but I think there's been plenty of attempts to quantify how the environmental factors influence outcomes.
Nobody said that everything was right with the world. The claim was that minimal median racial IQ differences exist and are not important.
“ The fact that there is a minimal median difference in the population does absolutely nothing for you when looking at two job applicants”
Which is why you should not do that! (of course, that logic would equally apply to median racial differences in “privilege” and yet race is quite often used to select one individual over another in the form of affirmative action)
But the population wide values are relevant in terms of policy. (Spitballing here - I don’t fully endorse this but it’s a reason IQ population differences might matter): One thing IQ does seem to map quite well to is academic achievement. So a society wide push to increase the importance of traditional academic achievement (i.e. making every student believe college is the only path to success, making every job require a college degree) is going to disproportionately hurt those in the lower IQ population. And a policy to artificially award the markers of academic success to a few isn’t going to close the actual achievement gap, or help those left behind. An alternative approach would be needed.
More simply, you note that long tails exist. Well, that means that populations with lower median IQ are going to be very underrepresented among the top academic performers (such as PhDs in the hard sciences). This is a natural consequence of the underlying distribution, and not necessarily indicative of any discrimination (or again, any “inferiority” when comparing random members of each population). So if you try to modify these results based on an assumption of discrimination, you are probably going to fail.
Yep, this is why racism is stupid. But somehow people think that by screaming at and hounding people that discuss population genetics and inheritability of certain traits, they actually are helping people that are poor. Even though there's neither theoretical nor empirical causal link between those, and I see no reasonable way why banning certain genetical research and even discussion about it would do anything to help those people.
Wait. What? The "real world is not itself racist"?
Not to be pedantic, but define real and world.
While I agree that racism is rooted in beliefs, it's not just about individual actors here. It's also not just about negative beliefs. If I and my group do not think about group X in our planning then group X will not benefit directly from whatever our planning produces. If, on the other hand, I am subconsciously primed to consider group Y as my ingroup...
My point is that the average hypothetical person doesn't go around thinking who they give or don't give a shit about--they act on autopilot.
Do you consider it racist to even ask the question of whether differences in IQ between groups has a genetic component, or is it only racist to consider the matter settled in the affirmative?
Is it about asking the question at all, or just being confident that the answer comes out a certain way?
(A priori it seems like a reasonable question. Almost everything in life is influenced by genes. Distributions of genes differ between groups. I've seen people claim that due to certain kinds of evolutionary pressure, general cognitive function should end up being equal across groups, but I don't think there's consensus that this argument is correct. So, given our current state of knowledge, I don't see how someone could be absolutely certain that genes play no role in group cognitive differences. Unless you just take it as an axiomatic article of faith.)
He didn't give a definition of religion, but I suspect the one he had in mind, was something like sense 2 at https://www.dictionary.com/browse/religion?s=t: "a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects", with the added stipulation that these fundamental beliefs or practices are expected to be accepted on faith, and the corollary that questioning them constitutes heresy and is considered sinful in and of itself.
By such a definition, it would not be simply *agreeing* with a given set of beliefs, but rather considering it morally wrong to disagree with them, that constituted religious behaviour. Without going into whether that's a legitimate way to construe the word "religion" or what commonly-held beliefsets might be described this way, I'll say I think it's a coherent concept which is clearly distinct from simply having beliefs of whatever kind.
> I've seen people claim that due to certain kinds of evolutionary pressure, general cognitive function should end up being equal across groups, but I don't think there's consensus that this argument is correct.
It isn't correct, because of the separation of populations by the Sahara Desert, the Pacific Ocean in the case of Australia, and so on, meant that different population groups such as Australian Aborigines and white people weren't competing directly for anything until very recently in evolutionary terms.
ASking questions isn't inherently racist. But what questions you ask, and what you think deserve debate, is not value neutral.
E.g. If I host a debate on the topic "Is Hillary Clinton a pedophile?" I can maintain neutrality and calmly discuss the arguments for each side and their merits. But by having that discussion at all I'm giving credibility and attention to the question.
Likewise there are a lot of people in rationalist adjacent online spaces who, purely in the spirit of intellectual inquiry of course, want to have debates about whether certain races are genetically inferior, whether women are dumber than men, whether 'sexual degeneracy' is leading to the downfall of western civilisation, etc.
It is not conspiratorial to notice people employing very basic rhetorical techniques
*Do* people debate whether women are smarter than men? I mean, I'm sure this has happened once in SSC's nine-year history, but I can't say I remember ever seeing it, so it hardly seems common enough to be worth mentioning.
I don't remember anyone ever arguing that women are less smart, but just people (including Scott) arguing that women are not less smart, to no opposition.
People do regularly argue that men and women have a different distribution and that there are thus more very dumb and very smart men.
It's pretty clear to me that there are a lot of people who only or disproportionately care about the top tier of society. So for these people, arguing that there are fewer very smart women is presumably the same as arguing that women are less smart.
Insinuating that the relevant sum of activity concerning the race/gender questions is a spat over supremacism is a great example of the exact rhetorical technique you're trying to accuse the hbders of. And honestly, what's anyone supposed to say to that? It's not as if "a lot" or "rationalist adjacent" makes so concrete the accusation such that someone could defend against it.
There many imminent non-"supremacist" reasons to care about the race/gender/whatever questions which have been spelled out countless times (which is enough to dismiss the whole suggestion that this must be hbders' seekrit dishonest plot). There are many well-known friends of the blog who have good discussions without doing anything like what you're insinuating (like Hsu). None of that's addressed because it wasn't really the point of your post (use of weaselly language like "a lot" and "rat-adj" at conveniently crucial points gives it away) and going into further length just gives this angle more attention than it deserves.
There are a lot of anti-hereditarians who want to talk about -- and only talk about -- dogwhistles for "inferiority," vaguely scary rhetoric, whatever. That this happens to pattern-match the same "fill-in-the-lines" hackery that comprises most of the NYT's opinion pieces is just a coincidence, of course, and not its own, much more cynical game.
It is quite scary that people seriously argue that "didn't immediately ban everybody on the forum on a different platform that also discusses Scott's work and which Scott doesn't even moderate, who ever agreed with a statement I consider racist" and "is a racist". So much fallacy in this one. And the entitlement of the idea that Scott owes you an explanation and "house cleaning" just because you have a completely baseless and irrational suspicion... smh
Right!! I can't defend either of those statements about race because I think a lot of people who make them probably are racist on some level, or may not have the best intentions re: "intellectual honesty" like they often claim, but it's ludicrous to hold Scott responsible for the fact that people who hold those views have been allowed to comment on an entirely different platform that happens to host discussion of his blog. What does this person expect public intellectuals to do, spend all their free time scouring the internet for any questionable content posted by people claiming to be their fans and then go on a crusade to remove such people from the internet? If they did that they'd have no time to write anything of value.
Isn't your second statement, about Ashkenazim, pretty mainstream? It doesn't imply any sort of racist values, it's a question of fact that needs to be examined on the merits.
Well we can take the same thing discussed elsewhere in this thread about employer discrimination against black people and refashion it slightly to apply it to Ashkenazi Jews and gentile whites. Suppose you have three applicants for the same position. Two happen to be Ashkenazi Jews (and you know this) and one appears to be a white gentile. The position requires a very high level of intelligence. The white gentile's resume is similar to the other two's, but slightly less impressive on its face, but it is still theoretically possible that he could be the most intelligent and most suitable candidate. But you apply Bayesian reasoning and decide that mostly likely the two Jews are going to be the smartest, and you decide to interview those two and keep the gentile in reserve. You are particularly impressed by the vocabulary and rhetorical skills of one of them, and you decide to hire him without even interviewing the gentile. Was this wrong? I would say it was a practical mistake - the Bayesian justification is very weak, and the verbal fluency is also weak evidence of intelligence. This is especially so given that the applicant is Ashkenazi Jewish and Ashkenazi Jews tend to be above average in verbal intelligence, but not always exceptional in other dimensions of intelligence. But it was also a moral mistake and (in most countries in the West) would have been a legal mistake as well. It is wrong to discriminate against applicants on the grounds of race, because people of all races should be given a fair shake. And maybe it's easier for members of a particular racial group (white gentiles, in this case) to see this when racial discrimination is turned against them, instead of in favour of them as has historically been the case.
He already *did* shut down the forums where that stuff was happening ask that it be actively modded out of the official forum. I think you're asking for things that already happened years ago.
He didn't do that because he had a problem with the ideas. He did it because the CW was overtaking everything else. Which if anything makes me think less of him: he cares more about people not shouting than about not being bigoted against tens of millions of people.
> "Ashkenazi Jews are smarter in a general sense because of genes Ashkenazi Jews carry."
The issue is that this statement is actually, self-evidently *true* -- no comment on the first statement) -- and *your* issue is that you're too smart for your own good (like Syme from 1984), and can't help apophatically referring to thoughtcrime even when you ostensibly don't believe it. Be careful out there, seriously.
As far as I'm aware noone has given any convincing evidence that the effect is genetic not environmental. The observation that a subsection of the population who do a disproportionate amount of formal education do better on standardised tests is banal, and exactly what you would expect without a genetic component.
You can observe that the group is ethnically related, and so probably shares a disproportionate amount of genes, but that doesn't really prove anything. And given that intelligence to the extent its genetic is likely a complex polygenic phenomenon, and the historical admixture of populations, the justifications for it being genetically linked to a particular group seem like just so stories that rely on simplified historical narratives, rather than anything rigorous.
There've been tons of twin studies and orphan studies to show that intelligence seems to be far more hereditary than environmental. Twins separated at birth and raised differently, orphans raised by their non-biological parents, both end up very closely correlating the IQs of their blood relatives (the twins with each other, or the orphans with their blood parents).
There's mountains of evidence that most of intelligence is genetic, assuming you aren't poisoning or malnourishing one group outright and literally physically damaging their brain. Go look up some papers or google some summaries, it's not hard.
by "dumber in a general sense" do you mean all black people are dumber than all white people or that the average intelligence of black people is lower, and of Ashkenazi higher, than of whites in general? I don't think I have seen anyone argue the former. Lots of people believe the latter, and some here are willing to say so.
Do you disagree? If so, why? What is the evidence that all such groups have the same average IQ, or the reason why, without evidence, you would expect it?
I meant that the people I am complaining about make that claim on a distributional level, i.e., for any fixed level of intelligence x, that P[X_ashkenazim > x] is >> P[X_black > x], and that this would remain the case even if all socioeconomic differences between the two were erased.
I don't reach the question. I think everyone who has made a confident claim in favor of racism has ended up looking like a fucking idiot at best and a genocidal monster at worst in the eyes of history, which is enough for me to start from a very strong assumption that it isn't true. Racism is to social theory what naive communism is to economics: everyone who promotes it argues no, really, it'll work this time as long because no one would ever be a jerk, and they just keep being wrong and producing Jim Crow and concentration camps and redlining.
What isn't true? That people don't differ, one from the other and groups from groups, on very real measures on multiple parts of our biology that inherited from our ancestors? Or is the "not true" that you are reaching for something else?
Or are you fixed on the idea that there are some variable things that we inherit from our ancestors - like skin color and the shape of our teeth - and other characteristics that we are granted, whole and unchanged - from God? Because I'll go with that, sure - its part of my faith that we are all equally prized and beloved children of the Creator. However, with God as my witness, I'm here to tell you that intelligence - along with cowardice, patience, and all the other virtues and vices - is not something that we all get the same dose of.
This person isn't saying that it isn't true. He or she is sticking their fingers in their ears and literally refusing to engage with the question, because muh consequences.
If only it were possible to give IQ tests to representative samples of both groups so you could just find out the answer, rather than reasoning about what answers you must never allow yourself to get on moral grounds....
If your interpretation of being non-racist requires you to believe certain factual statements about the world regardless of whether they're true or not, you're doing it wrong.
I legit found the "It's a religion" framework helpful here, although I suppose at this point it's common enough that bringing it up risks introducing more heat than light.
I used to assume I was misunderstanding these people somehow. The reminder that, yeah, people have historically regarded certain beliefs as mandatory regardless of evidence closes the gap. And I think it's running on the same basic software.
Whether or not black Africans are on average dumber than white Europeans is simply an measurable fact, like whether or not they are taller on average, or run faster, or live longer, or have larger or smaller spleens. So there's no "believe" involved -- it's not a creed or faith or political philosophy to which one can swear allegiance or condemn.
And one can be persuaded by what evidence there is on the point one way or the other, and whichever way you go does not make you a racist *unless* (1) you refuse to consider powerful evidence against your point of view, or (2) you allow your conclusions about intellectual ability to create moral conclusions of social worth, which would be the same as concluding that beautiful women are inherently more honest than their homelier sisters, or that taller men are more virtuous, or fat people are evil, and so on.
Although parenthetically it's a mystery why anyone would even be tempted that way. We do not generally think smarter people *of the same race as ourselves* are morally superior, right? Nobody thinks Einstein was necessarily a more noble and upright character than some much less intelligent Jewish German guy who happened to empty the wastebaskets at Princeton -- we would have to talk to both people to find out. So why anyone thinks *even if* black people are a smidge less intelligent on average than white people (and Jews or Asians a smidge more intelligent) this leads to *any* consideration of moral or social worth for anyone is beyond me.
There are some discussions where intelligence matters to a much higher degree than in most other discussions. Rationalist circles will treat intelligence as more important than many other groups, as intelligence correlates very strongly with ability to think rationally.
I think we also see these discussions a lot in regards to politics, because of the Affirmative Action (fix the effects of previous racism) stance verses the Color Blind (create a world without racism, even if it doesn't directly fix previous wrongs) approach. This is a very quick and dirty breakdown, but I think conveys my point.
Racism exists in our world, including in the democratic world. In fact, it is quite common. As long as it's common, and as long as democracy is something we value, racists must be allowed to make their arguments openly. A dictatorship can declare certain ideas off-limits, but a democracy just isn't capable of that. Voters can be silenced on the Internet or TV, but they can't be silenced in the privacy of a voting booth. If we decide reducing racism is a social good, the only option in a democratic society is to engage with and convince racists to change their mind. That's not compatible with forcing them underground so that nobody knows who they are, let alone what they believe and how they came to believe such nonsense. For my part, I'm glad that Scott's forum is one of the few places in the world where racists and anti-racists can still freely engage in respectful conversation.
' A dictatorship can declare certain ideas off-limits, but a democracy just isn't capable of that'
This is conflating two different things: 1) Can *the government* restrict free speech in a democracy (answer, yes: Germany is a liberal democracy and bans the display of Nazi symbols) and 2) Can a private blog restrict free speech in a democracy (answer: much more obviously yes, and indeed, Scott does, since he bans people for posting garbage that just insults people and doesn't even try to advance a rational argument, and once banned temp-banned Steve Sailer for sealioning about immigration where it wasn't relevant.)
Now, this is not the *end* of a discussion about what views should and shouldn't get banned, but it is the beginning of it. I.e. Some woke people just say 'free speech just means the government can't ban your views, therefore its fine for any private actor to restrict speech anyway they like' and that is very implausible. But there's no quick route to the conclusion that private actors (or even the state) should never be censors either. These are complicated issues.
Governments and private blogs can both restrict free speech. What they can't restrict, unless someone invents a mind-reading device, is free thought. Racism doesn't go away just because governments or private blogs refuse to engage with it, any more than capitalism or socialism do.
I mean, yes, it's definitely true to say that Scott tolerates that claim.
As for whether he believes it, I'd say no. He explicitly said in "Reactionary Philosophy..." that "it sort of creeps me out even in a “let me clearly explain a hypothesis I disagree with” way", and what anti-oppression-narrative arguments he did put forward (which can only dubiously be attributed to him given the post's nature) were all in the "black culture might value academic success less causing less academic success" bin or in one case the "people living in actual Africa have lower outcomes because they are starving and/or literally suffering from tropical diseases" bin.
As for whether he should "clean up his house"... well, that comes down to the ethical question of "should we let people evangelise for ideologies we disagree with". Scott says yes, as long as they're polite about it. You don't. That seems to be an actual disagreement on the quantitative value of free speech, not a mistake.
Could you define "decency" to me? Because my personal experience is that someone can be harmless and charitable in daily life and also anti-miscegenation.
Also, I'm interested in your ethical reasoning (utilitarian, Kantian, whatever). Could you explain to me why Scott's approach is bad?
First and last day here. It is astonishing that a marxist is repeatedly rebutted with derision while racism grows and thrives here. Only one person is responsible. That person is Scott Atlas.
Marxism presides as a thinly-veiled excuse over many millions of lives lost in inter-class genocide while cultists(I'm sorry for this) like yourself keep prescribing it as the only possible cure to the threat of the modern "systemic racism" windmills purely because it's the one popularly available gap for its ideas to be currently shoved into. I'm saying that as someone from an ex-communist country, which in your eyes probably makes me and my ancestors less than human proving the point.
IMHO The most appropriate social system is whichever one can allow the greatest number of people with various individual outlooks to coexist with one another, yet communism requires perfect, authoritarian one might say, ideological conformity by repression if necessary to remain stable - see what happened to the soviet NEP, while capitalism allows you to partake of its goods without pledging absolute loyalty to the system and go around proselytizing through the very channels it provides. The lack of mutual policing is a feature, not a bug, and in a communist society you don't end up with mere public 'derision' as a consequence of disagreeing with the commonly accepted line be it the economy, politics or even basic facts of nature - recall Lysenkoism and the fate of cybernetics. It couldn't even achieve any sort of racial harmony - antisemitism easily reemerged within the soviet system at the highest levels the very moment it was convenient.
But then again, the only way to rationalize communism that I personally see is to vilify any dissenters a priori so I doubt the read would be persuasive to you, even if stories like that are dime a dozen. In a way, modern marxism appears to me as a sort of a counter-enlightenment reaction, reaching for the supposed glory of its imaginary utopias of the past, all of which failed in practice or turned authoritarian like modern Russia or China. That's all I have to say here.
As a long time SSC reader, I hope this does not violate the "don't want to think about this further" or whether the lack of a "call to action" was intended to be proscriptive, but today I finally got off the fence about whether or not to be a paid subscriber
I'm broadly sympathetic to the press, especially newspapers - I think they have a lot of faults and biases, like every other industry, but that they're indispensable to a free country.
I'm still canceling my NYT subscription over this article. Didn't think I would before it came out, but this was written in jaw-dropping bad faith.
How many people do you know who are really really really good at their jobs? In each profession I know maybe one or two people. The media is no different. Being highly skeptical is of utter importance. The influence of large media entities such as the NYTimes, CNN, Fox, DailyMail, etc. needs to be considered (and no, I'm not claiming they're the same). I think the only issue is - and I do see this a lot - that people tend to be skeptical about one media entity more for what they actually represent than what they write. Hence people saying the NYTimes can't be trusted while they eat up everything written on Breitbart.
In certain professions, such as civil engineering or medicine, if you screw up big enough or often enough, members of your own community revoke your licence to practice. Journalists have been screaming for the past decade about how vital they all are to our continued well-being and I see no such steps to professionalize their practice.
Is "the mainstream media" really a useful category? I mean – is it really better than "the blogosphere"? I've seen some pretty horrible stuff in the latter, but we're still reading it right here...
I wonder why I am such an outlier in this community. But I actually don't read the entire piece in "bad faith". I understand that the article has flaws, flaws that are problematic and I don't like the tone in the last few paragraphs, I think the author should have pointed out that Scott explicitly asked his readers to stop revealing names/phone numbers.
That said, the points that many here would consider in bad faith or even defamatory I can understand being written. Scott's writing on feminism for example - often with conclusions I don't agree with - is written in ways that are often so on the nose that yes, he will unvoluntarily invite people he might not agree with to champion him. Phrases such as the Voldemort one paint a picture that he could have avoided. And reading his Murray piece - and I just did again - I understand where he's coming from in context to his other writing, but really, is it so far fetched to see a link there that could have been more carefully presented given the risks of alignment at hand?
As said above, I don't think this piece was the finest work of the NY Times, I personally don't think it should have been published. Not in this form anyway. But I can't really read it and consider it completely unfair or bad faith in that sense. Of course I am not a writer being written about, so I don't know if my position would be different were I directly affected.
Huh, interesting. I am probably super biased because I love this blog and this community, but I did feel like the Murray paragraph was in bad faith. The way it put a sentence saying that Scott Alexander agreed with Charles Murray without saying what they agreed on, followed by a sentence about Charles Murray's controversial views on race seemed like a rhetorical trick trying to associate Scott with Murray's other views in the minds of uncareful readers.
I think it's both true that there *are* some controversial views on race shared by Charles Murray and Scott, though it's *also* true that there's not as *many* views shared as the NY Times article implies.
I think what the NYT writer did was shady because it appeared to give the reader evidence for Scott sharing Murray's views that wasn't really evidence. But that's a separate issue from whether this was misleading, as supposed to just a bad way of providing support for an actually true claim.
On the flip side, I find it odd that you expect Scott to so carefully tone police his own writing, yet don’t see anything bad faith about the Charles Murray paragraph, which was at best lazily misleading.
I, for one, expect the most from Scott, and hold him to a much higher standard than the NYT. If I only held Scott to the same standards as everyone else, why would I bother reading his writing?
Ok, but don’t you see how that can get a little warped? Like, “Scott usually writes so well, so if he ever acts like a mortal human being I am going to write off any criticism of him as totally deserved no matter how unfair, while ignoring how badly his critics would fare if subjected to even one tenth that level of rigor”.
It’s one thing to compare Scott to some platonic ideal of rational writing as constructive criticism - it’s another to excuse Cade Metz and the NYT just because Scott wasn’t perfect.
Sure, I certainly wouldn't hold Scott to an infinitely high standard! Just a higher one than everyone else.
I do wish the NYT wouldn't make weak, uncharitable criticisms of Scott. That'd be nice. But it doesn't matter much to me personally, because I don't read the NYT anyway.
When Scott makes the same kind of weak, uncharitable criticism of the outgroup—and the Voldemort comparison is, in my mind, rather uncharitable—I am much more deeply concerned. I will endeavor to doubt his other opinions on the same topic—which might not be easy, because I trust him a lot and sometimes find it hard to disbelieve him. Less trust in his opinion is a big loss for me.
Of course I can forgive Scott for being, like the rest of us, only human—but it is especially important to me that he be better!
Also the line between "bad faith" and "sloppy" is really really hard. I think a lot of people overperceive "bad faith" , as tied back to the Fundamental Attribution Error.
So, the author sloppily conveyed ideas he wasn't necessarily sympathetic to, but did an alright job in other places. This seems par for the course for the industry (& humanity in general). The author is a generalist, and the paper is balancing it's biases. In most of these cases, the paper is hyperlinking references.
I'm very sympathetic to the idea that this was a badly written paper. Honestly, I don't think the story, as-is, flows very well at all. The author wanted to really tell a story about "rationaism" but really focuses on "Scott", and as a result it feels disjointed in really dumb ways. I don't know if that's the editor, or what. But it could have flowed a lot better.
I'm relatively new to the blog (and especially the community), and while I found many statements in the article at least unconvincing (I won't judge the goodness of faith), I found it surprising that the one about feminism seems to be quite correct. In this post, Scott says:
"I applied this comparison to a specific group of feminists who I accused of bullying and taunting people in a way that made them traumatized and suicidal."
I don't think that's true - the post talks about "are blurring the *already rather thin* line between 'feminism' and 'literally Voldemort'". Without the "already rather thin" part, I'd have agreed with Scott's interpretation; the phrase would have meant "people like these make feminism horrible". As it is, it seems to say "feminism is already pretty horrible, and now there's this".
Neither do I understand the bit about the edit. The way I understand it, Scott wrote something, and got criticized a lot for it, so he added a bit saying "don't criticize me for that"?
I'd like to state for the record that the reason I bring this up is that I've admired the thoroughness of Scott's arguments in most of the things I've read, and this item seems to stick out. Am I missing something?
I read it as "feminists are here, Voldemort is there, but some fringe feminists are so close to Voldemort they're hard to distingwish". In no way does it imply "all feminists are close to Voldemort", or "(all) feminism is horrible". Classic non-central fallacy.
Thanks for the non-central fallacy reference, I didn't know about that one. However, I'm not sure how it applies here – I haven't made any claim about feminists, just tried to understand what Scott meant.
As for your reading - OK, now I see this interpretation. However, I have to strain to reach it, since, with the "already thin part", it would say "feminists are here, Voldemort is there, but some fringe feminists are so close to Voldemort they're hard to distinguish, and here are some fringe feminists that are make them even harder to distinguish." Perhaps I'm just too spoiled by Scott's usual clear style.
I guess the proper name for it would be something like "noncentral fallacy by proxy" (Scott is saying some members of X belong to category A, therefore he means that all of X belongs to A).
It sticks out to me too - the rest of the response feels very reasonable to me, and this part doesn't. I first read the quote in the context of the post rather than being quoted, and I don't think the quote reads very differently in context than outside it. The edit feels jokey/defensive rather than a good faith claim that he didn't mean feminism in general is close to Voldemort. I think it's unreasonable to expect that an all-caps disclaimer will actually stop people from quoting him on what was pretty clearly meant in the original.
But he didn't mean that! I guess he underestimated how touching such a sensitive topic would affect reading comprehension of some readers (including, but not limited to, progressive journalists), but it's just that - a reading comprehension error. Let me me try to rephrase that passage in neutral wording:
1. Some recent adorable posts pointed out that not all <members of a group> are <doing bad things>. Some are <doing these, and these, and these good things>
2. But some are <doing very bad things>!
3. And the people who <are doing some specific very bad things that he talked about previously in that post> are blurring the thin line between <the group in question> and "literally Voldemort"
So (3) is a continuation of (2), and Scott clearly acknowledges that people from (2) are a fringe of <the group in question> (because (1)), not the whole group!
That's true, of course. But the point is that (3) also means that the line between <the group in question> (the whole group!) and "literally Voldemort" is already thin, even before the <subgroup> doing this <very bad thing>.
If you say, for example, "There is already a thin line between genius and madness, and this person blurs it even more", you seem to say that geniuses are generally close to madness. Perhaps not all of them, perhaps not completely, but more likely than not, and certainly more likely than the average population.
But... but... what you're saying is literally noncentral fallacy! Pointing out that <some members of group A> are close to <group B> does not say anything at all about the median of the group A whatsoever!
At the top of the Voldemort section of that essay, he writes:
"We will now perform an ancient and traditional Slate Star Codex ritual, where I point out something I don’t like about feminism, then everyone tells me in the comments that no feminist would ever do that and it’s a dirty rotten straw man. And then I link to two thousand five hundred examples of feminists doing exactly that, and then everyone in the comments No-True-Scotsmans me by saying that that doesn’t count and those people aren’t representative of feminists. And then I find two thousand five hundred more examples of the most prominent and well-respected feminists around saying exactly the same thing, and then my commenters tell me that they don’t count either and the only true feminist lives in the Platonic Realm and expresses herself through patterns of dewdrops on the leaves in autumn and everything she says is unspeakably kind and beautiful and any time I try to make a point about feminism using examples from anyone other than her I am a dirty rotten motivated-arguer trying to weak-man the movement for my personal gain."
So no, he does not think the Voldemort feminists are the exception. He's quite clear that he thinks he's criticizing the central example of feminism. Do a ctrl-f for "30%" in https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ to find that he also thinks that 70% of feminists are insane.
I guess I should have re-read the whole thing before posting here. Now that I did, I think you've got it right, especially if you agree that feminists mocking "Nice Guys" are (or were as of 2014) a central example of feminism (which I sure hope is not true).
I'm a longish-time reader of the SSC and I share your confusion. It's just that my (unlike the NYT writer's) prior for Scott/SSC is overwhelmingly "intelligent, insightful and kind" and also "sometimes it takes me multiple readings to understand." Thus if something appears unkind or perpetuating categorical thinking, I assume "I haven't understood." But casual readers (especially if fueled by motivated reasoning, but regardless) won't have that prior. Nor, to some extent, should they - to say "I trust that he doesn't think feminists are nearly Voldemort, to the point that I won't spend too much time trying to resolve my confusion" is a very trusting position and would certainly reduce the likelihood that I would ever discover Scott's evil should it come to exist.
My first exposure to SSC was this post - https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/ - and upon a quick/skim reading, it struck me as racism apologetics. Upon a careful read, it was anything but. At that time, my prior must have been "people who question 'Is X really racism?' are most likely racist" along with the related priors "long posts about politics or social issues are almost definitely *advocacy* not *analysis*." It's funny looking back, because know I am amongst those who sincerely believe Scott to be a "national treasure" and something of a bodhisattva ("a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings").
Anyway, I agree with your point, but I am actively bothered by the NYT article (not merely unconvinced). Most frustrating is the faint praise combined with the character slander, as if the "faint praise" made it fair. It makes me wonder (self-righteously and probably unkindly) if the NYT writer even freakin' understood what he was reading, or did the articles and remarkably insightful comments just fly right over his head?? A fair article might speculate on what Scott was thinking re: feminists/Voldemort just as you have, but along side recognition that SSC is thoughtful, nuanced, kind and not readily characterized (much less as a "safe space" for white rationalist dudes, which is a trite and lazy mockery).
See, the thing is, epistemically, I'm not even speculating on what Scott might have meant, I'm just trying to convey my straightforward reading of what he wrote, which internally seems (or at least seemed initially) like the most natural, perhaps even the only, way to read it. However, especially after discussing it here, I can certainly see how a well-meaning reader with some biases radically different from mine (and perhaps Scott's) could read in another way, especially at a glance.
My wording wasn't too good, I'm afraid (or I was trying too hard to ignore the article and focus on the feminism phrase). I didn't mean the article just didn't manage to convince me of SSC's faults or vices; many posts here are some of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking (not to mention well-written) pieces I've read. And I agree that the journalist is nowhere close to doing it justice (I can't say anything about the community - this is the first time I have actually actively participated).
Also, thanks for the Against Murderism pointer, it's going to my to-read list.
It's worth reading the post the quote comes from. I think you are right that it was more of an attack on feminism as a whole than Scott is portraying it as now, and Scott (at least as of 2015) is a bit less charitable towards feminism than other ideologies (the ideas in I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup might be relevant here). But going off the quotes alone will cause you to overestimate his antagonism towards feminism, so you should read the whole post. And furthermore, going off that post and his other well-known feminism-critical one (Untitled) will probably still give you a skewed view of his opinions, you should read more of the backlog for context and some of Ozy's posts (thingofthings.wordpress.com) for an idea of feminist takes he is more likely to be a fan of (they are one of they very few people with guest posts on SSC).
Scott does makes it clear that the subject of that Feminism/Voldemort post hits very close to home to him. Given that Scott puts that Voldemort line in the context of showing some examples of feminists condoning the bullying of people until being traumatized and suicidal, I imagine his anger at what he was writing about got the better off him and prompted an exaggerated bit that can (has been) taken out of context, maliciously or otherwise, like the NYT article does.
I respect anyone's right to cancel any subscription for any reason they want to, and I get that we all have different breaking points that way, so this question isn't intended to challenge your decision in any way, but more to inquire about the broader dynamic of protest cancelling (or boycotting when it comes to written content).
One of the things I find appealing about this blog and its commenters specifically is the wide range of viewpoints represented. I often disagree with Scott and with some of his ways of characterizing things. I often disagree with many of the commenters as well as the way many people characterize things. That echoes my wider experience in the world sitting with any group of people. I enjoy that experience.
I agree with melee_warhead above saying, "the line between "bad faith" and "sloppy" is really really hard" and "This seems par for the course for the industry (& humanity in general)."
I guess mainly I'm responding to the sense that one might (or should?) feel embarrassed over having chosen to read some content at an outlet that maybe crossed the line for them from sloppy into bad faith. But on the other hand, wouldn't it be nice in a way to unapologetically consume all kinds of content we disagree with without feeling like it means we endorse it? And more broadly, would we like the kind of world where people did that more? (maybe not, which is what I'm asking to you or anyone else here who wants to respond)
I think it's more that people regret having paid money to establishments with such poor integrity. I still like to read my free NYT articles to keep up with their viewpoints because I enjoy being exposed to a wide range of content I disagree with but I'm very glad I'm no longer supporting them financially. I cancelled ages ago over their constant hatchet jobs on Bernie Sanders, though.
I consumed NYT content unapologetically and may continue to do so; I just wanted to be sure they knew why I stopped paying them.
Perhaps what DDunbar means by "embarrassing" is that he trusted the NYT, and the dishonest way they covered SSC implies that their reporting of everything else is now suspect. I for one used to have a higher opinion of the NYT.
The middle way is to praise you for your foresight- you *already* updated on other available evidence, even before this! I think that's a legitimate view of the matter.
I am a newbie to this blog. I absolutely love the top-notch quality of writing here - it is very hard to find an expert in medicine who also understands data. This is a huge gift to people who want to understand a medical expert's honest take on cost vs benefit on various health choices. I have pointed two friends wrestling with an ADHD diagnosis for their children, to your blog. You owe no one any explanations. The NYT has only revealed something about itself with what it did here. Thank you for all the work you put into your writing! What a wonderful sense of humor and way with words.
reading "Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable" ~1 year ago led directly to me deciding to give more to charity. in 2020, i gave 30% of my income to charity (up from ~2% the previous few years).
when swapping "EA origin stories" with people in the EA community, i've found this particular post comes up pretty frequently (also "Fear And Loathing at EA Global" :)
so, thanks for your writing, Scott. it really does matter.
The same for me, ~3 years ago. Whatever good I can do by giving is largely thanks to Scott. This is one way his writing literally changed my life (for the better).
Yes, that piece brought me into the EA movement, too. I'm still a student so I haven't had much impact yet. But I've been donating 10% from my summer jobs and leading my college's EA club. Wholeheartedly seconded that Scott's writing really matters.
Scott and the SSC crowd just wanted to cultivate their garden; to catalogue and know the world; to say true things, wisely and carefully and at length. Then the NYT came from its ivory tower, with words of honey on a forked tongue. At first it professed respect, but it soon became clear that it only wanted to kill SSC and burn it for fuel-- in the end it was all a hatchet job. The time for endurance is past. Our enemy is making war on all the free peoples of the world. Soon the nerds are going to wake up and discover that they are strong, and then--
-- wait, sorry, that's the Ents and Saruman.
Anyway, just remember: our business is with Isengard tonight, with rock and stone. Not with the Orcs. Best way to make the NYT regret this is to subscribe today-- and remind all your friends that the Times is now a left-wing party organ, not a trustworthy paper of record. The White Wizard's staff is forfeit!
Sanders is not part of the progressive wing of the Democratic party, as Sanders is not a member of the Democratic party.
Klob and the snake-charmer, on the other hand, are much more representative of the progressive wing of the Democratic party, so the Times' endorsements of both are an odd weapon with which to attempt to attack hnau's comment.
The NYTimes that just fired Lauren Wolfe for a pro-Biden tweet, the paper that posted Comey'y finding a week before the election as a headline, the Iraq war supporting NYTimes .. is representing the progressive wing? Really?
This is a word salad, so I'm probably missing something, just as you intended, but the battle of Isengard was against ... Orcs. Dude was making Orcs in the basement!
I do think it’s clear from his discussion that Scott is a realist regarding racial intelligence differences. Quite correctly, of course. Most Rationalists who look at the evidence with clear eyes reach a similar conclusion as Scott and Charles.
I can understand why you think that's the reason you're banned, but as an observer to that entire exchange, I really don't think that is the reason you were banned, at least in the mind of Scott or whoever else was involved in banning you. You make it sound like you called something into question and were immediately banned, when instead there was a lengthy exchange about your claims including many posts by the original author of the book. I think you were banned for the aggressive way that you were asserting your claims, rather than the claims themselves.
For what it's worth, I'm glad you comment on this blog. You have an extremely unusual and minority view, and allowing those sorts of views is exactly what makes this comments section interesting. However, I found your arguments that David's book manipulated quotes pretty unconvincing, and I suspect that most people who don't share your views of Marx felt the same way.
Providing a safe space (irony!) for race science is promoting race science. Giving "basically any idea a hearing" is the the opposite of rationality, if not of "Rationalitiy." It's outright idiotic. The guy is an unsocialized dweeb.
See, I agree that Scott shouldn't have platformed a lot of the bad racist far-right people he has platformed, but as an autistic person, this kind of language really makes me wince *hard*. Obviously, all things being equal, it is good if people have good social skills. But it's really not on to conflate having power social skills with being bad at thinking about politics, let alone with being reactionary. A stereotype of 'evil reactionary nerds' is harmful to autistics as a vulnerable minority group. (And also inaccurate if you think that the evil nerds are tech people, who are overwhelmingly more socially liberal than the US average: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/silicon-valley-isnt-full-of-fascists)
I'm aware there's a problem a 60% chance that you're the kind of person who finds this comment totally pathetic, but a) I just had to get it off my chest, and b) there is some chance you are the kind of identity pol liberal who might care about this, rather than say, an angry socialist.
You're right, Scott hasn't explicitly endorsed race science. However, he does believe that black people are dumber than white people for partially genetic reasons. So do many people among his readership. This is what many people, among them many actual qualified geneticists, object to.
My emotional response to this reminds me of "Radicalizing the Romanceless." I agree with most of what the NYT and the liberal zeitgeist _say_, but not how they act; it seems like they're forcing me to take a side, and I'm not going to take the side that lies through its teeth about a harmless blogger.
Unfortunately, in the minds of most, there seems to be only one category for everyone who opposes Cancelling. I guess I'm on Moldbug's team now? I don't want to be!
That's quite a wall of text. If you don't really care for most of it, take a look at the section called "A chat with State Security" a the very bottom. It is about NYT contacting him before publishing the article about Slate Star Codex. It's interesting. It shows how they work.
This is the same guy who said that black people were uniquely suited for slavery. I can never regard him as a gentleman after that. That was beyond the pale.
In https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/07/why-carlyle-matters/ Moldbug states that the Spanish and English found that Africans made good slaves, and goes on to say he thinks this is due to genetic differences. That is, he is implying that he thinks that black people are genetically suited to be slaves. This was, at best, an offensive thing to write, and at worst, monstrous.
"There is no question that biological differences made Africans better slaves than indigenous Americans in at least one respect: due to superior genetic resistance, Africans were much less likely to die of introduced tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria"
This is a fact, no? - that you are colouring with your own biases and agenda to use as a weapon, it appears.
Moldbug is desperate to cling to any shred of credibility that association with Scott would give him, and use this as fodder for his larger culture war narrative. Of course he's going to be polite.
The article hints at him being a source (it divulges the contents from a private mail sent to Moldbug, where the contents is damning to the person who sent the mail, who is said to have refused to comment).
You can be on team Voltaire - "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." (Yes, I know he probably did not actually say it.) There, is this any better?
NYT is a Schelling point, unfortunately. Reading it signals something about you that you want others to know, and you can have reasonable confidence that a certain type of person in the world will also be reading it and you'll then share some background knowledge and talking points with them which will help with networking.
Unfortunately, the role it plays as a type of social currency has little to do with its quality or accuracy. Being sufficiently disgraced could shake it loose from that position, but it'll take more than this.
There’s plenty of opposition to Cancellation all over the political spectrum; associating it with a few irrelevant blowhards like Moldbug is how they get you. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have good substacks. Chapo is still funny, or at least I think they are. Anybody with a blog or a Patreon is likely still just saying what they want to say; it’s particular kinds of media that have declined precipitously in quality, namely anything where something can be shared context-free rapidly.
(I mean, Moldbug isn’t even against cancellation! In his I-don’t-even-know-how-tongue-in-cheek plan for remaking America, he endorses as Guillaime Faye-esque plan to segregate people into ethnic microcommunities and farm out censorship authority to local quislings that will prop up the Emperor. Like a tankie, he’s just opposed to his personally getting cancelled.)
Glenn Greenwald is good on anything that's not US politics. On US politics, he is a nightmare of bad faith and injured pride and his own role as the "one true leftist"
Most people support some cancelling, the problem is figuring out the rules behind it in a way that are safe for discourse.
I think the NYTimes revealing Scott's identity was the most pointless side of this. However, I don't think the NYT will be perceived as cancelling for the actual article. In fact, the biggest threat was the name reveal.
There's a huge space available for people who oppose some of the things that get called 'cancelling' and approve of other things that get called 'cancelling,' based on the individual details, context, and merits of each situation.
It's mostly the people who take an extreme stance on either side, or frame the issue in totalizing and polarized terms, who can't find a home in the mainstream.
I'm a lifelong Times reader, and that article — an obvious hatchet job — really offended me. Did you notice that it was not only deceptive and slanderous, but they were too cowardly to allow comments from readers? Very disappointing behavior from the supposed “Paper of Record” and a betrayal of its proud motto.
Then read the article where it explains that it's important to understant the SCC rationalist culture's commitment to free speech, a "window into the psyche," which explains why big tech doesn't censor dangerous, sexist, and racist speech with sufficient zeal.
Could you maybe pull up a direct line or two in the article that really give you that impression? I get what you're saying I just don't read it that way and really wonder if I'm missing something here.
I'll post now that I have a proper machine. Additionally, equivalent material is in the subtitling, other sections of the text, and even in the metas when shared on social media. It's not been remarked on enough, I don't think, but this is the explicit purpose of attacking SSC and its audience.
<NYT>
Slate Star Codex was a window into the Silicon Valley psyche. There are good reasons to try and understand that psyche, because the decisions made by tech companies and the people who run them eventually affect millions.
And Silicon Valley, a community of iconoclasts, is struggling to decide what’s off limits for all of us.
At Twitter and Facebook, leaders were reluctant to remove words from their platforms — even when those words were untrue or could lead to violence. At some A.I. labs, they release products — including facial recognition systems, digital assistants and chatbots — even while knowing they can be biased against women and people of color, and sometimes spew hateful speech.
Why hold anything back? That was often the answer a Rationalist would arrive at.
And perhaps the clearest and most influential place to watch that thinking unfold was on Mr. Alexander’s blog.
“It is no surprise that this has caught on among the tech industry. The tech industry loves disrupters and disruptive thought,” said Elizabeth Sandifer, a scholar who closely follows and documents the Rationalists. “But this can lead to real problems. The contrarian nature of these ideas makes them appealing to people who maybe don’t think enough about the consequences.”
The allure of the ideas within Silicon Valley is what made Mr. Alexander, who had also written under his given name, Scott Siskind, and his blog essential reading.
To be fair, it's not like Cade Metz gets up in the morning and consciously thinks "today I will write an article that supports the interests of the power structure of which I am part in its conflict with a rival power structure", any more than a coral polyp wakes up and considers how to best play its part in the construction of an enormous coral reef. A power structure that relies upon its footsoldiers to actually be consciously aware of the role that they're playing would be a much weaker power structure than the one which the New York Times is part of.
Instead Cade Metz wakes up in the morning, thinks really hard, comes up with a dozen ideas for articles, and whiz bang, it turns out every one of them is a little salvo that supports the power structure that he is some tiny part of. He has been selectively grown, bred, socialised, until the confines of his mind can only think thoughts in that general vein.
At this particular moment in history the agenda is that the power structure of which the New York Times is an important part wishes to ensure that the Silicon Valley oligopolies are co-opted into part of itself, but in order for this to happen smoothly it needs to ensure that Silicon Valley is reading in unison from the right hymn book. Scott just happens to be a weird node that connects potentially powerful people to people with forbidden opinions; it's necessary to isolate and punish him at this point as an example to anyone else who might be considering straying too far outside the lines.
Suppose one year ago, Scott made a post on SSC telling us his plans for the following year:
1. He's going to quit his job and start up his own psychiatric practice—and he's going to take all of his favorite clients with him.
2. He's going to shut down SSC and move to Substack, which will pay him a quarter million to write. Plus he'll get a huge bunch of subscribers.
3. He's going to gain a shit-ton of street cred with an inept NYT promo piece, showing how "dangerous" he is to the Blue Team. He'll turn that attention into $$$ on Substack.
If Scott had told us that, we'd think he was—in fact—brilliant. What a plan!
Are you implying that the whole of NYT conspired with Scott to produce a year-long covert PR campaign for the launch of his new blog, while simultaneously destroying (whatever is left of) their professional reputation?
It's fascinating idea, but... I don't think I can buy that, no.
Thanks for the plug. The thing to keep in mind about Metz is that his big thing is writing puff pieces on AI. Which means that he approaches various people, they take him by the hand and feed him what he needs. He rarely writes anything controversial or negative. In this instance he blundered into an article requiring nuance and intelligence, which are qualities that he does not possess. I assume that someone who doesn't like SSC took him by the hand and walked him through his piece.
Why does he get stuff wrong? Because he is not a good reporter. There's no ideological issue here in my view, except for the Times's corporate predisposition on tech companies and tech people, about which you guys know a lot more than I do. As a careerist (as opposed to an ideologue) he was careful to phrase his story in a way that would be acceptable to his editors. Hence the "white supremacist" smear.
>To be fair, it's not like Cade Metz gets up in the morning and consciously thinks "today I will write an article that supports the interests of the power structure of which I am part in its conflict with a rival power structure",
I mean, how sure are you of that?
I've worked with corporate pr/marketing teams, there's a very conscious awareness that your company has competitors and you have a duty to hurt their brand while uplifting yours whenever the opportunity presents itself. I think this type of 'corporate loyalty' is driven into most upper-level/creative/white-collar employees in big companies.
I don't think there's any reaosn he *wouldn't* have that thought, it's not like he's too dumb to recognize the environment he's working in and the incentives acting on him.
Nah. "The rationalist community is a safe space for people who obsessively focus on reason and argument even when it is socially unacceptable to do so." There's some wrinkles in extending that to SSC, but safe spaces are on a continuum anyway. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-on-triggers/
But my darling, you don't write about left-wing political philosophy, you just write "read it in Marx". That's very boring, it'd be much more fun if you *did* write about left-wing political philosophy of your own opinion. What do *you* (not dear departed Karl) think about how many beans make nine? Have you a favourite flower? Bread and roses - yes, no, chuck the roses keep the bread, chuck the bread keep the roses? Have you ever belted out a chorus of The Red Flag? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5z-ds-bkhg
I feel there's a person behind the parrot constantly touting the one-line refrain "Read it in Marx! Read it in Marx!" so come on out and contribute to our little wretched hive of scum and villainy.
>>>I'm under no obligation to make my posts interesting
Like hell you're not. You want to be pedantic *and* verbose, write Scott a private email. Until substack upgrades its comments software to allowing readers to auto-hide specific commenters, you can damn well put in the effort to be *interesting*.
I get that "marxbro1917" is a bit repetitive but I feel like no one actually engages with the actual point this person is bringing up. You just told them they're not entertaining enough. The fact is that most Marxist scholars would similarly object to Scott's phrasing there. And mind you, the vast majority of these scholars aren't marxist, leninist, communist or even socialist.
All I've seen you do is criticize and delegate your counterarguments to other lengthy posts or books, sometimes unspecified, or insist that others owe you citations.
You are right in that my statement is untrue under the definition of Safe Space as used by Scott Alexander in that article. The definition I'm used to and was using in this case has less to do with providing an area for open discussion and more to do with providing an area free from certain offensive or triggering viewpoints. Unsurprisingly, I personally prefer my definition, but our disagreement is probably just semantics
I don't think so. SSC definitely put bounds on conversation, but that's not a bad thing. Unbounded discourse tends to be really, really shitty. Witches and witchunts, and all that. Or for a slightly different angle, here's a perspective on pluralist rules of discourse I've found really valuable: https://gemcode.dreamwidth.org/2157.html
There are also a few topic bans deriving more obliquely from Scott's moderation-in-practice (e.g. advocating white supremacy gets one a ban), but they aren't as cleanly collated.
And one of the reasons I'm here is that the commenters on SSC/ACT have a way of policing 'themselves.' It's rare that Scott intervenes because the comments are usually already 'bounded' by the community. It is part of what makes this blog the place that it is.
It's my belief that the only place arguing is unacceptable at is battlefield. When you hear your comrade shouts "Left, armor!", you don't argue - you aim left, see the tank, squeeze the trigger, watch the fireworks.
Arguing may be inappropriate, nonconstructive, useless, etc, but unacceptable? Nah.
I expressed some thoughts over on the open thread, but while I don't think I entirely agree with your assessment of the article I think most of the complaints here are right and proper. Two quibbles though:
> Also, this became a weird go-to thing for people who wanted to do hatchet jobs to hit me with, so much so that sometime before 2017 I edited the post involved telling people not to do that.
I'm kind of surprised that *you're* surprised that this didn't work. I mean, I'll be the first to tell you "don't apologize to systems incapable of accepting an apology", but this isn't even that (or any other sort of retraction), it's just an expressed desire to avoid notoriety. Which is understandable and completely fair, but leaving it up while highlighting it as a pain point seems thoroughly counterproductive. I mean, if any other blogger included an inflammatory line in a piece then asked that not be the part people quoted, would you be surprised if people disregarded them? Would they even necessarily be wrong to do so?
> I believe they misrepresented me as retaliation for my publicly objecting to their policy of doxxing bloggers in a way that threatens their livelihood and safety. Because they are much more powerful than I am and have a much wider reach, far more people will read their article than will read my response, so probably their plan will work.
There is a miniscule chance that the story wouldn't have started pivoting organically the moment people started reacting to your blog's deletion. As you noted it made significant waves, and most journalists will predictably fail to resist the temptation to make themselves part of the story. Given that and consequences the author faced as a result of their efforts, I don't know that there's enough evidence to ascribe the negativity to any particular theory of retribution.
I think the strikethrough was probably meant to indicate that that sentence was no longer endorsed by the author (although this could have been made clearer).
Criticizing someone based on a statement that you know they have since recanted (without at least mentioning the recanting) DOES strike me as necessarily wrong.
I didn't read it as him actually dis-endorsing the statement. He left it up, he just emphasized that people shouldn't quote it out of context (the text directly after it reads as sarcastic).
Taking it down could've been interpreted as an attempt to memory-hole it; I usually interpret strikethrough as responsible retraction. But like I said, the intent could have been made clearer.
I agree that's how I'd USUALLY view strikethrough + replacement text, but in that case the replacement text is sarcastically saying the opposite of what he'd said (without changing the rest of the blog post to fit that change), and a complaint about people quoting the old line out of context.
He's asking people of good faith to not quote him out-of-context. For the sneering people, this doesn't change anything, but it would be something you would expect a major newspaper to be able to handle.
And I say this as an autistic 33-year old virgin who finds many of the attacks on 'evil nerds' he was complaining about viscerally emotionally repellent and upsetting. But I think he went beyond simply expressing that to a) generalizing about a vast, diverse ideological movement, and b) not even really considering where the anger behind that kind of nastiness might be coming from. And in the earlier Radicalizing the Romanceless post he basically demanded that kind of charity in the other direction from feminists dealing with radicalized "nice guys".
It's not that he doesn't have to answer for it. It's that he has added context that is being ignored, and it has to be purposefully ignored (unless Metz never checked the primary source).
I'm pretty sure that the Voldemort thing (including the striking out part) was meant as a joke (with some truth to it). Very much in line with the good old:
- How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Would you accept this sort of excuse in other circumstances? People constantly claim that their nasty remarks about ideological enemies are made in jest, and there is usually *some* truth to the claim, but usually the remark is excessively nasty even with that taken into account. Or at least, that's my vague sense of how things are, I guess I don't have hard evidence.
In fact, I think you can find well-known writers making similar levels of nasty comments about their outgroup every single day, with about the same mix of serious and joking.
I may or may not accept it in other circumstances, but in this case it's not an excuse since Scott is not making it, perhaps all too aware of the trope you're referring to. He was not making a claim that it was a joke, but I was, because that's how I read it (which may have been wrong, by the way).
Seems like you're just continuing to throw your old friends under the bus even after the bus ran over you. That's some slavish dedication to your tribe.
Well m'dears, 'tis often true the simplest explanation is the real one. Our boy Cade is bigging up his forthcoming book (it will be out on 16th March if you want to mark that date on your calendars!) which is all about "Genius Makers: THE MAVERICKS WHO BROUGHT AI TO GOOGLE, FACEBOOK, AND THE WORLD".
There's no such thing as bad publicity, and having a story about Silicon Valley and AI researchers and Rationalists (oh my!) in the NYT is nicely ploughing and harrowing the ground before his BIG IMPORTANT BOOK (you too could win a free one by entering a draw! or something https://twitter.com/DuttonBooks/status/1354822023634018308) is released for the tens of people who will want to buy it.
Reserve your copy now! (Or don't, whatever you like):
"Artificial intelligence is changing the world, for better or for worse. But you don’t know half the story. For the tale behind all the hype and the hand-wringing, I suggest my book, "Genius Makers," due from @duttonbooks on March 16. Pre-order here: http://bit.ly/GeniusMakers"
St Francis de Sales is the patron saint of writers, but I'm unsure of the theological position on "praying for someone's book to fail". I think I'll stick with the cursing psalms, I'm on less shaky ground there 😁
Deiseach -- when I first started reading your comments on SSC some years ago they usually made me talk at the screen in frustration. But over time I learned better and now when I see "Deiseach" at the top of a comment I smile in delighted anticipation, in a way I don't for other usernames. Just wanted to tell you that!
I think the way to do that is to get a bunch of people to buy a set of different books on its release date so it gets bumped off any bestseller list it would otherwise have qualified for.
If his research on AI is like the research he did on Scott, I'm expecting that book to be 50% quotes about HAL9000 from movie reviews, and 50% like those youtubers that pretend they had sex with Siri or Alexa.
Well, now this would explain some things isn't it?
Also, gotta love how the best blurb they could get for an endorsement was from some guy who has written about Elon Musk. To me it screams of "we gotta get Elon Musk's name on the cover somehow so people think that he actually endorsed the book, so long as they don't pay to much attention".
Thanks for all your writing, and for keeping going even when facing blowback. You've done a lot for a lot of us - and for me personally - over the years, both directly in your writing and indirectly by helping us find fair-minded decent friends and community. And it's shitty that they did this to you.
This isn't pleasant, but the article (while distorting) isn't that much worse than I'd expect. On net, the impacts are likely going to be mildly positive. I wouldn't expect the NYTimes to put a non-normy group in glowing terms, so this is probably as glowing as is likely.
The NYTimes did garble certain views & nuances (which is incredibly common for non-friendly interlocuters), however, they also did successfully link this blog to the larger movements, with crude summaries. The "Silicon Valley" link is a little bit weaker, but likely done so for clicks. (Not that there are NO connections, but pretending SSC was the mouth or happy place for Silicon Valley is absurd)
I'm actually curious whether Manoel Horta Ribeiro is correctly cited, because if anything his practice gets larger questions than the reporter's. (I expect a lower accuracy bar from reporters than academics)
The thing that actually feels weird is how much this article is fixated on this blog, because this blog really WASN'T the story the NYTimes was trying to tell, and if anything, was a bit tangential. The "right to privacy" argument also feels a bit tacked on. (& to be honest, if Cade is right on how easy this was to look up, I'm unsure why directly revealing the name was so critical)
Lastly (to this article), I didn't get much value from the Rob Rhinehart article. I'd be happy to see a more serious bit of media criticism, because I haven't really seen any media source I would suspect wouldn't make errors on the same level or degree as the NYTimes. I think there are bloggers, but that gets back to earlier conversations about how "media" is a system for aggregating, vetting, and promoting content, and that this will always recreate as people are unlikely to scour all sources, and rely on reputations, & references.
If there's some serious analysis on the matter, then great. Most of the time, I see blatantly unhelpful invective on certain media groups, and then the substitution of completely absurd media sources as a replacement. Or even proposals to institute massive legal changes that will almost certainly make the world a worse place to live in.
The Rhinehart article seemed incredibly hyperbolic to me. More like an inconsistent rant than anything. I really don't think linking to it and essentially saying "make up your own mind" is all that helpful.
It really undermined the entire article by Scott imo. Rhinehart talks about the NYT almost exactly like Yarvin and the NRx types talk about “the Cathedral” and it’s about as off-base. It read like a nearly delusional rant. I like blogs and have lost some respect for the NYT lately (I dropped my subscription last fall over the original kerfuffle) but even moderately favorably linking to Rhinehart’s ravjng post really just seems to imply an anger and conspiracy thinking that is not justified.
The Rhinehart essay -- https://www.robrhinehart.com/the-new-york-times/ -- was to me a piece of woke writing, in the best sense of the word. The author has come to see the NY Times as an impediment to constructive thought and discourse, and writes from this perspective which is totally foreign to most people. Anyway, it made a favorable impression on me by showing the logical consequence of the NY Times recent behavior. My mental model now has the NYT as a pernicious and unhealthy operator in an age of opportunity -- where thinking for oneself is a possibility and the Internet is there for the taking.
> (& to be honest, if Cade is right on how easy this was to look up, I'm unsure why directly revealing the name was so critical)
Scale matters. If somebody thought to look up Scott's real name, they could. That's different than an NYT journalist publishing it and thereby focusing the attention and ire of potentially millions of readers.
The rationale is weak. The NYTimes doesn't really know Scott, and right now the only thing they really do know (besides what he's written down) is that Scott is a bit neurotic.
As far as vendettas go, this is less likely strategic, and more likely petty, or click-based.
Ok, but the question is really about the intent of a policy. Or to put it another way: the NYT doesn't actually know the consequences, only the reasonable expectations and their own motives. And because they don't know & we don't know consequences, we can only evaluate on reasonable expectations and off of our model of the motives.
Also to put it another way: if Cade Metz wanted to propel Scott to internet super-stardom and the role of a public intellectual, he may actually write the EXACT SAME PIECE. (think of the clicks!) But because we don't think his motive, so he gets no credit for having that motive.
And if Scott is hunted down and killed by a schizophrenic who thought that Cade's piece was sent by God, then we still wouldn't blame Cade.
In any case, I suspect this wasn't done with good intentions.
I have a very low expectation of good intentions from someone who decides to propel a person to "stardom" *against his will*. (Consent matters... unless you're a journalist, apparently.)
> to be honest, if Cade is right on how easy this was to look up, I'm unsure why directly revealing the name was so critical
It has always been relatively easy to figure out Scott Alexander was Scott Siskind. Going the other way was much more difficult. And it was this other direction that mattered. Scott never cared if his readers knew who he was. Scott cared if his patients would be reading his writing. He didn't want people to google "Scott Siskind" and easily find SSC. The NYT article would have changed this and made it vastly easier for patients and readers to make the connection in either direction.
It is possible I misinterpreted your original post. I read it as saying "I'm unsure why Scott thinks having his name revealed is such a big deal." Hence my comment explaining why it was a big deal to him.
Upon seeing your response and rereading, I now think you were instead saying that the NYT had no good reason to publicize Scott's name based on the article, that doing so wasn't critical.
Am I understanding you now or am I still confused?
Yes, I am saying that NYT had no good reason to publicize Scott's name. I understand why this is critical for Scott, but Cade is making the case that Scott's name is really public knowledge. If it's public knowledge, why reveal it? If it isn't public knowledge, then there is a point to be critical about it.
Scott made the “mistake” of becoming successful. He became a public figure. Public figures *are* subject to more comment and criticism, because their influence is broader. That’s why, for instance, defamation law treats public figures differently. However it came to be in this instance, Scott can’t reasonably expect to have a public influence, but remain anonymous. It’s just the way it is.
Still, I don't understand NYT's motivation for (a) revealing the name and (b) publishing this recent article. I mean, is there anything to win for NYT? In terms of money, say?
The name thing was important because it wasn't easy to look up in reverse. If you looked up Scott Alexander it was pretty easy to get to Siskind, but if you looked up Scott Siskind (like you might if you were his patient), you didn't get to Scott Alexander. It was that direction of anonymity that Scott was trying to protect, and it remains to be seen if he'll be able to function as a psychiatrist without it.
I largely didn't take the article to be "very negative", just sceptical, but I greatly appreciate the rebuttals, regardless! Especially the Murray paragraph of the NYT article left a sour taste in my mouth - it wasn't exactly false, but the subtext it was deliberately spinning (with the second unconnected sentence, which by merit of its placement implied it *was* connected to the first, and the author will definitely have been aware of this) was implying way, way more than was true.
Here's why I am skeptical of the idea it was "deliberately spinning." Years ago, I represented a professional services firm that helped many different types of companies with corporate compliance. There was an article in a respectable trade outlet that had one sentence that the client flipped out about, because they claimed it implied something bad, and they reached out to my boss as a result. I just didn't see what they were referring to, and I had knowledge about all of this. I can't imagine it made much of an impression on a reader who didn't have this knowledge.
The English language leaves a lot of room for interpretation, in other words.
It's a good reason to be sceptical and that phenomenon is basically why I read most of the article as neutral (significant chunks of it even register to me as positive); I just have a very hard time interpreting the Murray paragraph in particular as anything other than loaded. If I try *very* hard I can sort of picture it as a juxtaposition on basis of "in one post" versus "in another", but since the Murray beliefs mentioned in both sentences are so similar even this juxtaposition reads as, at best, "Scott is inconsistent."
But I appreciate your call for charity; there's a lot in this article that benefits from charitable reading. The mentioned paragraph might even be one of them! I just can't.
Here's a more direct reason why I think it's not meant to be what everyone intended: he links to the post. Forgive me for being blunt, but you have to have quite the big set to do that and to try to lie. Some people are like that, but most people aren't.
Should it edited again? Yes, definitely. Even if it wasn't written with bad aims, it isn't clear and does come across as loaded.
Unfortunately, most people are never going to click through the link, and even fewer are going to read it carefully enough to see through the Metz’s characterization of it (people are lazy, and Scott is... not exactly laconic). I think Metz knew this, and I might even say counted on this.
More charitably, perhaps Metz actually believes his characterization is accurate, but that doesn’t make it so.
Perhaps you could provide a less clumsily stated version of what you think the point was? The problem isn’t the grammar, it’s the leap of acting like “one time Scott wrote about one particular opinion of Murray’s in an approving way” with “Scott not only agrees with my lazy characterization of Murray as a racist but is totally on board with racism”
i read the NYT story, the authors reply and one of the links to the authors work in the Times piece. They are all good, i would consider subscription to SS because the writing is so good. Alot of good story's come out of SV as any read of Anna Weiner in the New Yorker makes clear and i simply thought editors at the times pursued an off beat interest story. I did not see it as a hit piece. The long SSC piece that i read was on "out-groups" and it was exceptionally thoughtful, insightful, filled with examples of a writer who thinks alot about his subject. Big media is trying to do its job, substack is a great platform for creative writers.
The hit piece seems to me like part of the death throes of legacy journalism. Reading it was a reminder of how bad and intellectually dishonest the old corporate media is, and how much better blogs, podcasts, substack, etc are by comparison.
It was a reminder of why I don't know anyone under 40 who has a subscription to the New York Times.
'The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were “social justice warriors.” They were considered a threat to one of the core beliefs driving the discussion: free speech.'
That's strange. I remember the comment sections having feminists, trans activists, far leftists, and so on. They weren't a dominant faction like on some blogs, but they were there, and their arguments were taken seriously.
Scott used to keep a register of bans. Slightly more than half the bans for political topics went to right-wing posters.
Can Dr Friedman confirm that this is what he said? The fact that it's a paraphrase and not a direct quote makes me wonder.
The David Friedman I've read would never have made a comment like that, I'm not even talking about content; that's just not his writing style. Probably the standard journalistic "liberties" being taken.
I was gonna say! He has a very distinctive cadence.
When I'm reading DSL on my phone, I often zoom the screen way in on the text, so I can see the comments clearer at the cost of obscuring the usernames- I can check who's saying what if I *need* to, but I don't see it by default. I always immediately recognize his voice, then wonder if I could really tell just from the cadence, then check and see that, yes, I could.
The only part of that in quotation marks is "social justice warriors," words I expect I said. While it makes it sound as though the "white supremacists and neo-fascists" are something I said it doesn't actual claim that, and of course I didn't say it. I probably did say something to the effect that most people on the blog were opposed to social justice warriors. Whether they "struggled to be heard" depends on whether that means "struggled to get people to agree with them," which would be true, or "struggled to be able to post," which would be false..
Thanks for putting that into perspective! (When I read that part, I wasn't sure what 'struggled' was supposed to mean, but 'struggled to get people to agree with them' was an option I hadn't even considered.)
It's not entirely dishonest, since he doesn't actually say that I said the stuff about neo-fascists, but it appears written to make a careless reader think I did. On the other hand, he did quote what I said about the range of views on the blog, which I think is important and may be one reason that some people reacted to the article by reading the blog.
There were a small number of very loud and frequent right wing posters who tended to dominate discussion at the old blog, and would disagree with even the most banal left wing statements. So I think that gave the impression that the community was more right wing than it actually was.
The comments on substack seem a bit better for that so far, but remains to be seen if that continues over time
> only Duranty being very specific about his definition of 'famine'.
Kinda like what the Turkish government does about the Armenian genocide and their definition of genocide, isn't it?
"Oh, sorry. What you call famine I have taken to calling Government-Enforced-Mass-Dieting. What I call famine is something else entirely and definitely not what happened in the Ukraine."
I honestly can't think of a more dishonest and infuriating way to justify genocide denial.
Dude, I'm speechless... this is by far the lamest trolling I've ever seen. I was actually starting to think you were a bot given the sheer amount of responses you have on this thread, but asinine trolling of this caliber can only have been typed by human hands.
Checking the Wikipedia article on Duranty, since you didn't provide any links, I find:
He published reports stating "there is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be" and "any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda".
Are those adequate to support the charges against him? I also find:
It was clear, meanwhile, from Duranty's comments to others that he was fully aware of the scale of the calamity. In 1934 he privately reported to the British embassy in Moscow that as many as 10 million people may have died, directly or indirectly, from famine in the Soviet Union in the previous year.
Would you like to point us at support for your view of the subject?
Since June I've been sad not to have a NYT subscription to cancel. I just used this to convince a family member to cancel theirs, so hopefully a tiny good to come out of this shitshow...
I just found out about this blog thanks to the NYT article and must say that I'm confused about the alleged negativity of it. The way I read the article I got the impression that the blog insists on freedom of thought, showcased by: rejecting extreme feminists, accepting valid opinions even from racists etc.
The association of the blog with influential figures, served more to show that your kind of thinking resonates with various people than to condemn you of "conspiring with Trump supporters" or whatever it is that you saw in it.
I'm sorry to say that your reaction to the article seems infused with way more negativity than the article itself, though I understand that probably has something to do with you feeling exposed where you once felt safe.
Though I can't say that I understand why NYT needed to expose your name when that has obvious implications for your practice and patients.
In the end, "I'm a Democrat, I voted Biden" was this really needed?
I didn't think it was as negative as Scott thought it was, but it was a great deal more negative than it should have been. Despite that, as your comment shows, it did convey some of the attraction of the blog. I don't know if that means that the author was trying to be balanced and had his perception distorted by his own biases or that he was trying to write a hit piece and didn't realize that, to people who didn't share his biases, some of what he thought was negative would come across as positive.
In terms of reactions to the article by readers of the blog, you have to allow for the fact that to many of us it wasn't just a pretty good thing, it was one of the most attractive features of the modern world, the one place where you could have civil conversation with lots of intelligent people with a wide variety of views. Imagine your reaction to something like that article written about your favorite book in all the world, the one you reread every year and got the name of one of your children from.
Marilyn Manson recounts that, when he was in Catholic school as a boy, whatever music the nuns vocally excoriated as the work of Satan was what he'd spend his money on- they wouldn't bother if it wasn't good. I don't know how dar this generalizes, though.
Yudkowsky's slogan that "reversed stupidity is not intelligence" is the correct response to this heuristic. <em>Marilyn Manson's music itself</em> is a case study - optimized for provoking a response rather than some more lasting value (although if someone does get more lasting value out of Marilyn Manson, <em>de gustibus</em> and more power to them.)
Something can be loudly condemned by the Times and also be quite bad, even bad in a relatively uninteresting way. Trump is the perfect example here.
Yes, the biden bit was needed. On the old SSC blog... Scott Alexander was clearly left wing, but his comment section had a lot of hard core right wingers. Also, he would occasionally talk about something he didn't like in left wing politics... And that would become a cause celebre for those same commenters. Also, the article posited Scott's blue, grey, red tribe typology. Someone reading that may think that Scott is so grey tribe that he's a techno libertarian who is above two party politics. Scott is saying here, "No, I vote Democratic"
Agreed. Multiple conservative sorts, of various kinds. And as much as it urked me to read the witness of his voting record, it is helpful to remember that Scott's *not* a centralist and def not a conservative, no matter how sensible he sounds most days. (Helpful because 1) it's who he is and 2) one should remember not all the sensible people are conservative.)
Really? You don;t think the guys who took any excuse to reply to comments with long rants about the SJWs destroying western civilisation were a teeny bit right wing? Or the culture war thread people in r/themotte
I disagree that there were ZERO hard-core right wingers (or zero of almost any political group). But I wanted to point out that there's no need to be right wing to think the SJWs are causing important damage.
The idea of "SJW" is right-wing because it's founded on a right-wing double standard. Right-wingers are not called SJWs when they do the same things they accuse SJWs of doing, like getting people fired for expressing their opinions (such as Colin Kaepernick) or harassing people for speaking out (such as Christine Blasey Ford) or boycotting brands whose endorsements they disagree with (such as Black Rifle coffee, or such as the NYT if you look at the comments on this blog) or endorsing violent retribution on people for their opinions (such as the many protestors who were victims of vehicular assaults).
Can you define "hard core right winger?" What characteristics would earn that label?
Also, what qualifies as "a lot." If your normal environment has none, then three or four may feel like a lot, and I wouldn't be astonished if there were three or four commenters for whom the label is appropriate. But I think Trump supporters, who I would consider a superset of hard core right wingers, were always a small minority of commenters on the blog.
I think the reason there is confusion and disagreement about this is the following:
1) Whilst his stated views about how you should vote, and on a variety of topics-tax on the rich, gay marriage, trans rights, are left, in practice Scott spends more time attacking the left than the right by a long shot (not either condemning or praising the latter),
2) Scott is very willing to seriously entertain certain *empirical* ideas-rather than ideological positions-that are *utterly* taboo on even the mild centre-left in the United States, but very much beloved of the right, including sometimes the radical fascist right: Race/IQ stuff for example.
SSC is about as far the opposite of a safe space as you can get (not that there is anything wrong with safe spaces). Metz even mentions in his article how people all over the spectrum were welcome, which isn't exactly a safe space. I know writers typically do not write headlines but this is egregious. Did the editor even read the article before fixing the headline?
I know what you mean, but that phrasing immediately reminded of Kelsey Piper's taxonomy of how different sorts of people need different sorts of safe spaces, and some people (like her) need spaces that're safe for all sorts of rational debate.
This was a good and reasonable response until the last paragraph. You would never write the article you linked to about the New York Times, because it doesn't do any of the things that an SSC/ACT article would do, like marshaling evidence for its position or putting forward some theory of cause-and-effect.
Why/how/since when is the New York Times the root and embodiment of all evil in the universe? Was it when Ezra Klein joined? You just said Ezra was okay! (Admittedly, while attacking Vox, which is merely Ezra Klein internet-incarnate.)
I think Cade was the guy who wrote a not-very-good article. It happens: Not every Times columnist is Ezra Klein. And I suspect the article reflects Cade's view of SSC – also less than ideal, but not all that abnormal. (Even people who trust and love your blogs think you have an exaggerated view of the evils of extreme feminists.) But it's okay: A lot of people like your blog and I expect more will as you continue to put out great content. (A lot of the response to the NYT article was "go read SSC!" (eg. by Scott Aaronson and a blog called How the Hell.)
If this was a hit piece it was a really crummy hit piece (they should have hired Nate Robinson or the ghost of Chris Hitchens). Ultimately, it will just get you readers.
I liked the Rob Rhinehart piece - I thought it was well-written and earnest, more in the genre of poetry than knockdown argument but successful at its own literary goals. But many people have made the same complaint you did, so I've taken it down.
I did really like some bits and pieces in there, for what it's worth, though I didn't invest the time into reading the whole thing since it wasn't quite my style. But "See if you can offend yourself" is one nugget I'm going to hold onto. :)
No worries! It's been linked a little further upthread so I'll refrain from doing it again, but FYI, reloading the page and ctrl+f for robrhinehart.com will turn it up.
Even as poetry, I couldn't help but read it as a wink-and-nod call for action. "I have no particular call for action, please don't cause any trouble, buuuut here's an article about how you should metaphorically kill and literally burn down the NYT."
Can someone link to it again, or maybe just tell me the name of the blog? Googling "Rob Rhinehart nyt" doesn't seem to work. I get you may not want to endorse this, but I'd like to read for myself what it is you aren't endorsing.
Thanks a lot! I tried using the Wayback machine on the post, then googling different things, but no luck. I'd at least like to make up my own mind about whether it's any good or not.
Thanks for helping Jack out, which allowed me to satisfy my own curiosity too. What a strange screed!
The opening paean to the value of writing was excellent. Then it turns into a firehose of delusional paranoia propelled by full-blown mania. It’s so over the top that I kept wondering if it was intended as satire and expecting the pretense to drop with a big punchline.
But no, it's apparently completely sincere. It’s vivid, I'll give it that. The guy can write, but I'm left wondering if he's a danger to himself or others.
I suppose it would be unethical for Scott to evaluate it from a psychiatric perspective for us. Speaking as a humble layman, if I were a friend or relation of Rinehart, I’d be worried about him.
Yeah, a worrying amount of the response to all this has gone into "mainstream media is an evil conspiracy" territory. Rather than the more banal answer that large institutions have imperfect incentives
For what it's worth, I really, really liked the Rhinehart piece as well, and found it a very refreshing and necessary counterpoint to the somewhat despairing hopeless taste your post leaves in the mind's mouth.
Criticisms like "you would never write the article you linked to about the New York Times, because it doesn't do any of the things that an SSC/ACT article would do, like marshaling evidence for its position or putting forward some theory of cause-and-effect" are... vociferously weak at best. Like... no shit you wouldn't, that's why you linked to his post, written by him, in the style he writes in, rather than writing more yourself, in the style you write in.
It's like a techno artist piping mellow cocktail jazz music over the PA after a show, and someone coming up and saying "you would never play that song, because it doesn't do any of the things that a Skrillex song would do, like building to a sick drop or overloading the subwoofers with a distorted resonant filter".
Anyway, not trying to yank you around, just feeling a little bit frustrated and foolish for taking a "silently disagree and move on" approach to the earlier criticisms, as that seems to have contributed to a rather distorted perception of how valued the link was.
I don't see how you could possibly take not "marshaling evidence for its position or putting forward some theory of cause-and-effect" as a stylistic criticism. I'm being pretty explicit: It's not a well-reasoned piece, it doesn't make any good arguments. Scott recommending to it is no less strange than him recommending a Slavoj Zizek video: At minimum, I'd expect an explanation why, and what he sees in it.
That Scott defends it as "more in the genre of poetry" reinforces this. It's at minimum worth bracketing in "this doesn't make its case well but feels cathartic", though to be honest, I think it's trash.
Also, saying "I enjoyed that article, but agree that it is below the standards of my blog and seems to have undercut this piece" is not out of character for Scott. It's something I appreciate.
You're judging slam poetry by the standards of a research paper. If you don't get it, that's fine, but expecting an explanation for why he linked it is a little bit "beep beep boop" even for the rationalist community, imo.
I'm a leftist and I like some NYT writers, like Cohn and Kristof, but I just feel that overall the NYT does not relate to me anymore. I can only handle so much woke outrage.
And for all their dislike of Thiel, it was the NYT that decisively tilted the 2016 election for Trump, with their careless, excessive reporting about Comey and "The emails" a week before that election. They've never really owned up to this.
Threatening to dox Scott was just another loser move that would have made me cancel my NYT sub had I not already done so months before.
Their reporting on the Iraq war was also completely irresponsible. Again, they did not own up to it all. Then a week ago they fired Lauren Wolfe over a pro-Biden tweet. The NY Times is not pure evil nor the pinnacle of journalism. It's just another paper that sometimes gets it really right and sometimes really messes up.
“This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.” Succumbing to Gell-mann amnesia? No this is their standard modus operandi on most topics: race, gender, crime, riots, policing, Russia, Syria, heredity...
> For the sake of my own peace of mind, I am hoping to stop thinking about it the moment I hit “publish” on this post.
For what it's worth, I think this is exactly the right thing to do, and I hope it works out and this article --- and really the whole saga --- fades away as quickly as possible.
Thank you for returning to writing. We're all glad you're back.
People who read this should cancel their subscriptions to the NYT and use the money to subscribe to Astral Codex Ten instead. The prices are similar but it it would be a massive improvement for the world to have the money sent to Scott instead of them.
(Actually it would still be an improvement if you burned the money you saved from cancelling your NYT subscription but I digress.)
Hi. I'm a regular NY Times reader who had never heard of this blog before. But after reading about it as a place where rational people can have intelligent, informed and civil discourse on a range of subjects, I knew I wanted to check it out. It sounded like the kind of place where I could learn a thing or two, even if I wasn't going to agree with all ideas or contributors. Any virtual community is a microcosm of ideas, and even though I get the impression this one leans left (or, fine, gray), it was immediately clear to me that I would probably encounter some ideas here that I might find deeply offensive. But I'm an adult. I can handle it, as long as it's not a place that's overrun by trolls and edge lords.
Strong virtual communities seem to develop a distinct tribal identity, so I'm also not surprised to read that what I thought was a fairly balanced and interesting article is perceived to be a hit piece here. Maybe it is. Again, I'm coming at this with no prior knowledge. But consider that I am probably not the only somewhat rationally-thinking adult reader of the NYT who was intrigued by the possibilities of this community which the very same article described. It'll blow over soon enough.
This is an interesting observation, because before I read this comment, I would have claimed the opposite - I've even had a small internet mob harass me because I'd ascribed logical thinking to one group and empathic thinking to another and they were convinced I was attacking the latter. (They didn't realise I consider empathy, emotion and intuition rather important and oft-neglected.)
But what you said is definitely true in some scenarios - taking a rational approach to sociopolitical issues does often attract ire, for example.
I don't think negative reactions to having empathic thinking identified as such and believing it is the correct way to think are incompatible beliefs. Analysis of thinking styles is a rationalist thing, so when someone uses analytical language to describe your thought patterns, it is easy to assume that person is in the rationalist in-group. As such, if you ascribe to emotional thinking, you might see it as an insult, that you are basically being accused of being a member of that person's outgroup.
Welcome! The things Scott points out in the article probably don’t (and shouldn’t!) turn off people looking for an interesting, striving for rational, and yes, sometimes contrarian community.
Unfortunately, they are catnip to a certain subset of the “very online” - Scott has been the (social) victim of these folks, both online and in meatspace, for his “connection” to Charles Murray, his criticism of certain actions by feminist bloggers/journalist etc.
It is unfortunately likely that Mr. Metz intended these unfair characterizations to trigger a negative response. Otherwise, why mention them in that way at all?
You might enjoy reading some of Scott Alexander's older posts. I've been reading him for two years and i started to notice that I would mention an idea I learnt from him in almost every discussion with friends, be that about mood swings, covid, a math problem, our weird new acquaintance or artificial intelligence. It's kind of hard to grasp how many things he has written about.
One of my favorites is this one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/. Even though I thought I understood Prisoner Dilemma Paradox from game theory I never fully appreciated its importance and ubiquity until reading this essay.
As someone who knew nothing about you or your blog before reading the NYT article, I didn't read it as overtly negative about you, or wildly biased. To the contrary, it piqued my interest and provided plenty links for me to judge your writing for myself. And indeed, your blog speaks for itself. I wouldn't worry about it, if I were you. You've gained at least one new viewer as a result of the NYT piece, and I'm grateful.
My biggest complaint about the article was that it mis-described what I think of as Scott's most significant article and observation, and then didn't link to that one. It's referred to as though it's a hit piece on the "Blue Tribe" - but I think it's really an equal opportunity hit piece on all tribes, including Scott's own.
Welcome to SSC / ACT! I hope you find something you like (or at least that feels like a good way to spend time). Highly recommend checking out some old posts (he should have archives on the old slate star codex website, including a list of top posts).
A lot of people are in this comment section writing essentially "as someone who's never heard of this thing, I didn't think it was a hit piece". On the other hand, of the people who are acquainted with the blog, there's general consensus that the piece renders an unfair and disjointed depiction. Crucially this consensus appears to extend to critics of the blog/community, such as for example Sneer Club. I think it makes a meaningful difference to one's perception of the piece if you already understand the prior context; NYT's reporting in the lead-up to the Iraq War lands differently when you know that there was no yellowcake uranium being sold by Niger to Iraq.
I wonder if this piece was the product of a hostile yet well-acquainted author working with an apathetic and uninformed editor. Or perhaps the opposite. Viewed as the product of a coherent, agentic mind it's hard to divine what the piece's purpose would have been.
I feel that the NYTimes piece treated you fairly. Plus, it didn't help your case that your name is easily searchable, despite your attempts at being anonymous.
The concern Scott had was that while it was possible for someone to link Slate Star Codex to him, it was harder to link his real name to Slate Star Codex. The author could get from "Scott Alexander" to "Scott Siskind", as he mentioned in his article, but the reverse--finding Scott's blog from his psychiatry practice--was more difficult, and it was what Scott was worried about.
Because of the aftermath of Scott deleting his blog, the reverse is now easy, but it wasn't always that way.
This was also true for the people behind Chapo Trap House, and yet...
Seriously though, there was never a particularly newsworthy reason to reveal Scott’s real name. Scott Alexander was a perfectly legible persona, and that persona was the newsworthy one. The only people who give a crap that Scott Siskind writes as Scott Alexander are his close friends - and people who want to hurt Scott Alexander. Seriously, who benefits from denying Scott the dignity of a nom de plume?
fwiw I tried to find google his name right when this thing started and it wasn't easy for me to find. This was maybe stupid of me, but I spent a embarrassing amount of time looking through lists of psychiatrists named Scott in the Bay Area. It's shocking how many there are.
In the end, all it took was trying a few different queries and maybe checking out the second page on Google. Even then, I only found out through someone spreading the it in an effort to dox him.
I have my own experiences with "guilt by association" and with the negative spin the press can put on things - and not just the NYT. In fact, my own experiences are similar to yours; some people seem to be looking for a way to misinterpret anything you say in a most negative way.
I'm happy I signed up here, this seems to be the real "No-Spin Zone!" (No apologies to Bill O'Really are given or deserved.)
I honestly don’t get the soft pedaling of any criticism of Cade Metz, Scott. He lied to you, refused to respect your pseudonymity, and then wrote a piece libeling you.
You’re an honest man, and there’s nothing honest about making excuses for Cade. Forgive him if you can, that’s an act of virtue. But pretending you have not been attacked by someone who obviously did it and meant it, and went against much of what you stand for to do it... I don’t get it. Remember, turning the other cheek is an act of defiance.
He lied, or at least was misleading, about the intent of the article. “Oh, I’m just interested in how you were ahead of the curve on COVID”, while he was apparently gathering material to paint Scott as some sort of problematic IDWer.
It seems implausible that Scott, or several of the long time commenters that responded to Metz for the article, would have cooperated had Metz come out and said “hey SSC seems like a place for Scott to talk about his support for scientific racism and anti feminism”.
If Scott had talked to Metz about his opinions re: Charles Murray, it seems even less likely that Metz could have printed what he did in good faith.
I am willing to believe the original intent of the article was as stated. I don't think any of what's in it now would have functioned without the blog deletion as its anchor (heck, it's barely functional as is)
I’d be more willing to believe it if the original as stated intent had been included at all. Perhaps I am being too cynical, but I suspect the dark hints about ideas Scott was connected to were always going to be there (e.g. I’m almost certain the exchange with Friedman, which Metz to presented as “Scott tolerates white supremacists but not social justice” happened before Scott deleted the blog).
While I agree with your general opinions about Scott, the NYT, and Metz, and I share your suspicions about what the original piece was going to be... I think there's been enough going on since last year, with the response to the possibility of the original article, the deletion, the signed letter of protest, the cancelled subscriptions, and so forth, that it's quite possible that Metz was pushed from "neutral" to "somewhat hostile".
If a hypothetical would make it more concrete, neither of us saw Metz' message inbox. I wouldn't bet even 1 penny against him having received some truly nasty comments. That's just the way the Internet works. The nuttiest 1% of any group will be the ones that stand out and shape the opinions of outsiders.
Why? I am, admittedly, taking Scott’s word (and the word of commenters who were interviewed) for how the article was originally presented to him, but I’ve seen no evidence to disprove this either. Metz’s multiple mischaracterizations in the article, and the way he dismisses Scott de-anonymizing himself at the end as if Scott just did it to spite Cade, makes it sadly plausible to me that Metz was willing to misrepresent himself in pursuit of the article.
I think you're missing that the Murray issue turns on how bad you consider him to be. If his views on race were ten times worse, you might still agree about poverty reduction, and you could still say the two are unconnected, but you might not do so.
The nytimes is a normie mainstream publication that understandably reflects middle of the road morality. It's not bad, it's just limited. The assumption is that if a person is very bad, you don't "align" yourself with them. And from their point if view, or their presumed point of view of their readership, Murray is that bad. You disagree, so you think the matter of agreement is relevant.
Sorry Dude. At least unlike Donald McNeil you did not get fired and have to apologize for being a old white man.
I would cancel my subscription as a protest but I did that 15 years ago because I couldn't stand it anymore.
BTW: It is stylistically incorrect to call the NYTimes, "The Times". The Times is a newspaper published at London England under that name since 1788. All other newspapers that use the word Times in their names should have a geographic or other delimiter: e.g., New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Straights Times, Times of India, Air Force Times, etc. see Wikipedia: The_Times_(disambiguation) for a listing.
Trade names and common nouns are different classes of words. The hat on the table in front of you is "the hat on the table in front of me" to call it "the hat" without further specification is ambiguous as the world has very many hats in it.
Which one is correct for "The Chronicle" - is it the San Francisco Chronicle, The Houston Chronicle, The Chronicle of Higher Education, or something else?
"Please don’t cause any trouble for the journalist involved, both because that would be wrong, and because I suspect he did not personally want to write this and was pressured into it as part of the Times’ retaliatory measures against me."
You have the right to forgive him yourself. You don't have the right to tell us to forgive him.
He's an enemy of free speech, and a threat to us all whether he was pressured or not. It would be wrong, for a consequentialist, to play "always cooperate" instead of "tit-for-tat". This sort of attempt by the good people to hold a bogus moral high ground is why the neo-Nazis are winning.
It might be accurate in the most irrelevant sense, namely in that it does contain no statements that are strictly *lies*.
Where it is inaccurate is in the images of the blog's community and Scott himself, which it invokes in people's minds when they read that article, and this is deliberate.
Imagine a lazy student, who went into the library and played video games there.
His professor asks him: "And, have you been doing anything useful today?", and the student responds with "I was just in the library".
Strictly speaking, this statement is true. However, the Prof. will be imagining this meaning "I was in the library *studying*", and the lazy student made his statement that way because he *knew* that would happen.
Much of the reason online culture sucks so much now, for instance for people like Scott but not only, is because of the widespread appeal of “we can’t allow these bad words to stand, we must retaliate; anything else would be irresponsible.”
We have long since arrived at the “...makes the world blind” end of that sequence. Only winning move is not to play. Go do something productive or frivolously fun with your time, or if you feel the need to find and punish evil, make it an evil to which physical harms can be more immediately traced.
I want the reaction to bad speech to be efforts to get the truth out there via presenting evidence. Keep a collection of bookmarks of evidence you've seen, and bring it out when the bullshitters arrive. So many people don't believe journalists these days due to—among other things—poor journalistic standards. Random internet commenters deserves even less credence, unless they bring evidence to back up their claims.
I doubt the neo-Nazis are winning, at least in the long term, but I'd bet any ground they've gained has more to do with the NYT and co. being insufficiently Scott-like than the reverse.
Cancel culture! Surely the principle with newspapers, as with people, should be to subscribe to them because of the good that they do, not to cancel them for the bad.
A lot of the value of an information source is connected to being able to trust that the things it tells you are true.
If you think this article (or any other NYT article) contains brazen inaccuracies, that makes it less valuable as a newspaper, quite apart from any moral feelings.
I sometimes summarize this distinction as the difference between
1. "Susie is a neo-nazi, and so we should fire her from her job as a math teacher"
and
2. "Susie refuses to discuss math in class- she just reads aloud from Mein Kampf all day, which is not about math. Thus we should fire her from her job as a math teacher."
Even if I suspect the person saying the second thing *does* want to punish Susie for her political beliefs, Susie has to go if we want the children to actually learn any math, and this seems like an important distinction.
Is this article enough reason to mistrust articles written by entirely different writers and edited by entirely different editors? If you judge a paper to be generally informative for years, and then they publish something misleading, do you really need to reconsider everything you've ever learned from them? Surely there are other ways we test whether the nytimes is reliable than catching them in some unrelated error or lie.
Papers have always and everywhere needed to be read skeptically. They're more reliable on some topics, less on others. They might be biased or uninformed, or even doing favors or pandering to their audience. But they're rarely so rotten as to be completely untrustworthy. Anyway, you can learn something from misinformation, too.
"Canceling" a person is an attempt to silence them completely, destroy their reputation, and make it impossible for them to earn a living or engage with the rest of society. It is a shunning.
Canceling a newspaper subscription means I am no longer paying $8.00 every four weeks in exchange for access to that newspaper's articles.
The two are not equivalent. Saying "I will no longer pay for the privilege of listening to you" is not the same as saying "you should not be allowed to speak."
In general, applying a politically charged label like "cancel culture" to something is a counterproductive way of discussing that thing. We just end up arguing about the category instead of talking about whatever you don't like about the thing I did.
In this case, my familiarity with Scott's blog allowed me to recognize the extent to which the Times's article was deceptive. This deepened my existing concerns regarding the honesty of the Times regarding things that I am not familiar with and cannot easily verify. Given that my financial relationship with the Times revolves entirely around them providing accurate information about topics I am unfamiliar with, I feel justified in ending that financial relationship.
Of course they're very different, but I think there are enough similarities that the joke holds up. It's not about you in particular, who may be judicious and reasonable. It's about the stereotypical guy who declares he's canceling his subscription when he's angry about something that's just been published.
There's the urge to draw a bright line separating yourself from the thing. There's the desire for consequences, for justice or punishment. There's the aspect of it being an emotional reaction. And there's the desire to say it publicly, simply to be seen, and also to perhaps become part of something bigger than yourself by saying it.
But I think the most interesting similarity is how easily we fixate on the bad and forget the good.
The Peter Thiel thing is really annoying. Peter insists on doing and saying embarrassing political stuff while being so awesome that I still do have to resist the urge to "do something awkward like starting a cult".
Peter Thiel seems to be like Glenn Greenwald, except with a more few skills and accomplishments. He's not evil, just incredibly unpleasant and arrogant.
I don't really have too many gripes with his personality, it's the Trump support and openly musing about anti-democracy that makes it awkward that he's one of the largest funders of projects I admire like the Thiel Fellowship, MIRI, SENS, etc.
The anti-democracy musings reflect his arrogance and are a good reflection of what is unappealing about people like him. I don't think he's a bad person for feeling like this. However, I do think it's the sort of mentality that could get us into trouble, and there seems to be a lot of that with people like him.
We don't use democracy for coke vs pepsi. No vote, people just drink what they like. The assumption that voting on policies where the majority impose on minorities is obviously correct seems more arrogant to me.
For lots of decisions markets work. Instead of voting on what products or services to use and what standards should regulate those products and services, just let individuals make their own decisions based on their preferences. E.g., instead of imposing one Social Security system on all, let people opt in (or out) to their preferred old age insurance system. Move as many decisions as possible out of politics and into the market.
When it comes to rule-making for criminal and civil law, various alternatives can work, but I have a strong preference for localism with easy exit. Decision-making made at small scale makes it so if people don't like the rules they can move easily to competing jurisdictions with relative ease. A return to City-States (or HOA-states :) ).
At the small scale various decision-making strategies can be tried, with different strategies working in various contexts. Direct democracy, representative republic, unanimous consent, monarchy, and corporate structure with a CEO are some examples.
All I know about him is, he’s a billionaire, he supports trump, he uses his money to destroy his enemies. I’m no fan of gawker and that style of intrusive gossip “journalism”, so I don’t weep for their demise, but having such power in a man who apparently couldn’t see trump for who and what he is, is deeply unsettling.
I can see Trump for who and what he is, but still think he's a lot better than Clinton or Biden (or Cruz or Jeb for that matter). What does that make me?
Let me add to your amazement, then. I voted for Trump over Clinton, voted for him over Biden, and I am female. I feel that the platform of the Democrat party - especially under the nepotism of the Clintons - is far more toxic to the future of America than Trump could ever have been. And I am deeply saddened to know that people are as ignorant of enlightenment values as to think supporting Trump over Biden is uncalled for.
We old stagers knew, or at least strongly suspected, that Substack wasn't really ready to handle the sort, quantity, and depth of comments that SSC and its scions generates. That we're back to the dear old days of comment threads disappearing stage right into infinity due to how many responded evokes a nostalgic sigh 😀
they need Disqus
We need that report button.
Oh I dunno, should I ever find myself in Tamil Nadu and in need of getting uPVC windows installed, I'll know where to look! 😀 Our first spam advertisement, is this some kind of achievement?
Do you know, I actually *would* be fascinated to hear about the mould-busting properties of shellac? Post away and educate, enlighten, and thrill us all!
Please do, it brings me back to my 70s childhood and the many wonders of the world that would be brought to us in documentaries and travelogues, like "Balham, Gateway to the South": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ewUOSlRDkk
Because Marxbro brings up the subject of Marx (not Marxism) ad nauseam. +1 for nonoverconfidence!
I'd bet $500 you it was vague or you were reading it poorly. I read a lot of media criticism, and I'd guess at least 50% of it comes down to stuff like this.
Do journalists at the NYT monitor the comment sections on their articles directly? I'd assume it was done centrally or algorithmically as its done for most large news sites. So your comments being caught may be coincidental.
This is ridiculous. Simply look up the company, and you can see it was started in 1895 in Italy. The article in question says it was a heritage Italian brand owned by LVMH. Given that it was started by over 100 years ago in Italy and then purchased by a French company, the reporter's description is entirely fair.
I can't say why your comment was blocked, but you were offering a correction to something that wasn't wrong.
https://www.berluti.com/en-it/savoir-faire-page/
I'll respond to both of your comments here.
First, yes, I was wrong, and it was established in Paris, not somewhere in Italy. That's my goof entirely. The link I meant to include was something else, but it didn't prove the specific claim I was trying to make, either. Another goof by me.
So I'll revise my comments. There are plenty of indications it's considered an Italian brand (as well as French one), and not simply where the shoes are manufactured. If nothing else, the default language for the site is Italian, not French or English.
I'm sorry if I'm coming across like an a-hole. I shouldn't have been aggressive with you. I just don't think the example you highlighted is really damning.
For some reason I was curious about this but the top hit for the relevant search terms led me to a _different_ article with the same mistake:
> It is also LVMH’s first minority stake in a jewelry brand, as well as its first investment in a jewelry brand since the acquisition of Bulgari in 2011 (and its sixth in an Italian family-owned brand after Pucci, Fendi, Loro Piana, Berluti and Bulgari).
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/fashion/lvmh-move-on-repossi-reveals-influence-of-delphine-arnault.html
Maybe they are branding themselves as Italian, like pizza ?
Maybe, but it's also fairly unsurprising that a New York Times journalist would simply be ignorant of a fact within their supposed field of expertise. I've never heard of Berlutti but it certainly sounds Italian, it would be an easy mistake to make.
I'd have to read it to be sure. I've seen so many assertions like this that are really the result of something more basic that I a question the author's claim.
The nytimes reporting on India is full of errors, big and small. It is a complicated country, and they clearly cannot be bothered to get it right. And they get really crazy extremists to write opinion pieces on India, consistently. They definitely have an India problem.
I stopped taking their news reporting seriously because I understand India pretty well, and this made me wonder if they're too ideological.
I like A.O. Scott (movie reviews), Jane Brody (wellness), Bari Weiss (who left) and the past year's articles on covid, specially the data visualisation. They seem to have a really good data dept.
What are the errors?
This is an example of an important more general point. All of us depend largely on second hand information. One way of deciding what sources to trust is to find some overlap between what the source covers and what you already know and judge it by that.
Who are the extremists and why do you consider them extreme?
You can get a lot of it by going through the archive.org, if you don't wanna feed them the pageviews. It's slow to load and mildly inconvenient, but it lets you check if that article is really as bad as all your friends are saying without rewarding the people who wrote it.
I, too, sometimes wish the Presidency would be abolished if there's no other way to choke off our Imperial Presidency.
The article was an obvious gag piece
I’m confused on your goal regarding all these comments. What do you care about? How do you think these comments will achieve that?
You must be a lot of fun at parties.
Yes, i generally hold Dave Chapelle accountable for his bits. “Enough with the humor, Dave. Cite your sources or get off the stage, you son of bitch.”
I can’t tell if your many comments on this are serious. Many people, including Marxists and probably Marx himself couldn’t explain Marx’s political positions because they changed, were contradictory, and his theories were heavily dependent on now obscure 19th century philosophy. His writing is virtually incomprehensible and not worth studying in any event. I’m really surprised that anyone who has [tried] reading and understanding Das Kapital could believe there is anything worthwhile in Marx. Is this is your thing more power to you but at the same time the effort might be better spent on other things.
How much time do you spend bravely defending Marx in the ACT comments section ever day, on average?
It being interesting to hear your thoughts for a change, instead of just remarks how other people get it wrong. I'm probably not the only one who's struggled to figure out what's really Marxism and what's just strawman or tropes (and lack the will to actually read the texts myself). Maybe you're in a position to correct some myths and provide some insight.
People have been asking him for an effort post for years, still we wait.
I'm actually quite curious: how do you see Marxism applying to the modern society? Like, in a paragraph or two: how would the US be different if Marx (or maybe better: you) had your way?
Don't feed the trolls
I don't know much about Marxism, so i'm gonna try to get some answers by employing Cunningham's law, and posting my thoughts which are quite likely misguided, so someone can correct me :)
Maybe there are some policies that could be interesting to explore for modern USA:
* housing: It seems like a lot of areas that housing stock has turned into a market for speculators that are driving prices into the millions and simultaneously homelessness is rampant. I would say something is not working well here.
Maybe exploring ideas could be interesting such as :
- Community driven housing groups - Building and managing housing stock in their own area. I heard about the idea in this video recently and am intrigued to learn more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vfx1kQlmOk&ab_channel=UnlearningEconomics.
- Land value tax (as far as I know Marx advocated for one)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
American corporations currently do some things that aren't always a good idea for the company and its workers, such as stock buybacks.
* workers owning (or participating in) the means of production
In some countries if a company is big enough, the workers automatically get to elect a few worker representatives to the board of the company. I think the worker representitives will tend to give a more healthy direction to the company, and avoid taking unnecessary risks that benefit only stock holders.
I'm not the OP, but I feel in general that when people are thinking about communism often compare modern american society to the agrarian society of russia 100 years ago with its famines. They never imagine that capitalistic societies could and have been responsible for famines as well, and other suffering in the world. Also I get the impression that they feel that if we had a comminist country now, it would somehow revert to using donkey powered agriculture and forego any technology. And often people seem to think that communism and totalitarianism are one and the same or always go together.
I think it would be great to look at history and learn from things different societies have tried rather than villifying other ideas or systems. Is any country ever a pure example of capitalism, communism or any other system?
Is america capitalist even though tesla and spacex received so much government funding? even though the banks were bailed out by public funds back in 2009? A lot of what USA does doesn't feel very capitalistic and free market but rather socialism for rich bankers and capitalism for the poor.
The deluge of comments he has posted on marxism makes me think he has a mental health issue.
As of my writing this (admittedly a few days later), your comments on this post contain 6,710 words. I didn't count your blockquotes of other people, and I didn't count URLs - those are not your words.
Not saying this is good or bad - just updating you on the number.
Ah, marxbro. For you it is forever 1867. As a fan of Sherlock Holmes, I empathise; are we too not forever 1895 as Starrett says? (Though to my personal tastes in the Canon, it is always 1880s):
221B
By Vincent Starrett
Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears–
Only those things the heart believes are true.
A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.
I didn't realize Mao was such a good poet. Wish he'd stuck to that. Long as we're copy-pasting poetry, I'll put in an entry too. The whole thing's too large to quote, but here's a fragment:
I would that I might with the minstrels sing
and stir the unseen with a throbbing string.
I would be with the mariners of the deep
that cut their slender planks on mountains steep
and voyage upon a vague and wandering quest,
for some have passed beyond the fabled West.
I would with the beleaguered fools be told,
that keep an inner fastness where their gold,
impure and scanty, yet they loyally bring
to mint in image blurred of distant king,
or in fantastic banners weave the sheen
heraldic emblems of a lord unseen.
I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends
if by God's mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and that,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker's art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.
i love this. i wish all flame wars were poetry readings
Ah sir! A poetry exchange! You leave me starry-eyed with wonderment and pleasure! Let me try and find something good in exchange - from the Metrical Dindshenchas, which is a collection of poems explaining place names:
Port Láirge [Lárac is an Irish word meaning "limb or thigh", hence the derivation from the thighbone washed up here; also the moral of the story - don't get involved with mermaids, it'll only end badly]
There is here a limb from the body of a king:
over the streaming currents the sea bore him
towards the noble love, long-limbed, winsome,
of hundred-wounding Cithang's only son.
From Inis Aine of the heroes
Rot ever-fierce, won his goal,
the chieftain renowned in every land:
he was a gentle border-champion.
By land and massive sea
fared the faultless prince's son;
his left hand to the pure Ictian Sea
his right to the country of enduring Britons.
And there he heard the sound,
it was a lure of baleful might,
the chant of the mermaids of the sea
over the pure-sided waves.
The loveliness of the sea-maids equalled any wealth
fairer than any human shape were
their bodies above the waves of the tide,
with their tresses yellow as gold.
The hosts of the world would fall asleep
listening to their voice and their clear notes;
Rot would not give up for woman's troth
union with their bodies, with their pleasant bosoms.
As much of them as was under water —
it was a secret with no kindly power —
was big as a broad bright hill
of shell-fish and heaps of weed.
The son of Cithaing gave strong fervent love:
no love was got in return;
Rot found, without persistence in beseeching them,
the evil fate that was the custom of the women-folk.
Choked and killed was Rot
and his noble body overcome,
until he would have been thankful, as ye may guess,
to be dead and torn piecemeal.
There came from the east across the narrow sea,
till it found a level shore of Erin,
a thigh-bone, from the sole upward, as thou mayest guess,
so that here rests his noble limb.
Therefore to be told of in every land
is Port Lairge of the broad shields;
men that are swift in the field if there be strife,
it is likely that they are generous folk.
This whole thread makes me feel like the band is finally back together.
Because a whining marxist who is lying about Mr Alexanders psosts starts quoting Chariman Mao?
I'm very skeptical of Marxist thought, but learning of Mao's background in poetry was pretty cool.
Few questions for you.
1. Do you think there's a modern school of Marxist thought, or is the best source still Marx himself?
2. What do think are the best short/medium/long form introductions to Marxism?
There can be beauty in the nefarious. Doesn't mean that the nefarious should be applauded, or even accepted. I'm sure the CCP pour money into the arts.
Depends on who you tax to pay for it, and who wants to see it. Private charity or patronage, sure.
You just quoted mao zedong?
I thought you were a whining theoretical marxist, however it now appears that you are something much more dangerous - an excuse for communism.
Communism is a failed theory and has only brought misery into the world. And, you, are propagating this.
Ah, touche.
Well, in the same vein, in response to your 50 spamming comments whining that marxism hadn't been taken seriously here-
"It's just a blog, calm down."
Chairman Mao and Winnie would be proud of you, comrade.
I'm not really sure it can be said that "communism is a failed theory" (even assuming you're referring to socialism, which is what the USSR and PRC used to practice).
Stalin was a monster, and Mao was a well-intentioned lunatic, but ultimately the USSR went from feudalism to Sputnik in 40 years and the USSR had lower homelessness than Russia's had since. That's... not exactly what I'd call "only bringing misery into the world". (The PRC is more complicated; its current ascendance can't fairly be attributed to socialism since it's been closer to fascist since Deng, but saying it made everything worse is also kind of dodgy given that pre-Mao China had warlords everywhere.)
Yes, my comment was more of a broadside rather than a rapier's cut.
"feudalism to Sputnik in 40 years and the USSR had lower homelessness than Russia's had since. "
I am not historian or political scientist, though to reach sputnik, the road was littered with millions of corpses through farm collectivization/famines/etc. Can one call "prime time USSR" (let's say the 1960s or 1970s) true "communism"?
A definition is : "Communism, political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society."
However, private property still existed, and the differences between the peassant class and the politburo is, in my eye, laughable and disqualifies the USSR (or China) as being "communist" (except, perhaps, in the short aftermath of the creation of the USSR, before the politburo became corrupt fat cats, worse than their capitalist equals?), unless one defines communism as "a society that initially aimed for the lofty ideals of pure socialism, however due to the human foibles of it's ruling class morphed into a surveillance state where the majority of citizens had little, colelctivization occured to an extent, and where corruption was endemic, especially within the ruling class."
IMHO as you can't take a theoretical political system and create it in reality true to it's word (as human desire will stuff it up unless you have a system that takes that into account), communism may seem to have it's positives, however, as it has been shown multiple times, people aren't all "equal" (as you have the corrupt fatcats at the top), it doesn't last (all communist regimes morphed into pseudo- or total-capitalist economies eventually), and thus it is a failure. That's my laymans take. Unless there's a kibbutz out there that works in a communist fashion (do they all do?) though, of course, that's on a much smaller scale so is incomparable.
1) I mean, I think we both agree that kibbutzim are not the same sort of thing as the USSR (do we?). I refer to the latter as "socialist" rather than "communist" because they called themselves socialist (the PRC still claims to be socialist, but they're lying). I think the USSR's atrocities/successes and the pre-Deng PRC's atrocities/successes are evidence regarding socialism, and the benefits of kibbutzim vs. their downsides are evidence regarding communism.
2) The debate regarding communism is pretty easy; communes are actually pretty nice at sub-Dunbar scales, but disintegrate immediately when scaled up past that, so despite not being responsible for the USSR's and PRC's various atrocities communism (in this strict sense) is totally nonviable as an organisational structure for millions (absent radical change to human nature). Would you agree with this?
3) Socialism is more complicated; you had a significantly above-average level of atrocities*, and a significantly above-average rate of progress, so overall it comes down to how much you value atrocities vs. progress and what amount of each you could expect from any future socialist country. Would you agree with this overall assessment?
*To fairly compare atrocities between the socialist countries and the West you have to include corporate atrocities like Minamata Disease and the Sampoong Department Store on the Western side, as otherwise you're counting industrial atrocities like Chernobyl on one side but not the other. I agree that the USSR and PRC *still* had more of them than the West - the Holodomor and Great Leap Forward aren't that easily outweighed.
Compare the USSR to Japan. Both were very poor societies at the beginning of the 20th century. By the end of it, Japan was a much richer society than the USSR. Or take South Korea. Or Taiwan. The USSR's economic accomplishments, in terms of the welfare of its people, were much worse than those of other countries that developed during the century.
It's true that the USSR had a large military and succeeded in launching the first satellite. Similarly, ancient Egypt built very impressive pyramids and absolutist France created Versailles. An authoritarian government can funnel lots of money into particular things it wants to accomplish — at the cost of all the people, mostly poor, that money came from.
Korea is definitely a capitalist success story, that I'll grant.
My understanding is that Japan's rapid progress started 50 years ahead of Russia's (i.e. 1990 Japan was 120 years after the Meiji and 1990 USSR was 70 years after Red October), and that Taiwan didn't perform significantly better than mainland China despite international support (and was a repressive one-party state for ~30 years after the war). If you could elaborate on what you mean, it'd be nice.
I'm sorry, but do you honestly believe that Scott is complaining because the New York Times simply "connected [him] to Charles Murray."?
Their pathetic paragraph was clearly a disingenuous attempt to imply that Scott aligns himself with Charles Murray **beliefs**. They flippantly imply that Scott supports a "link between race and I.Q." and that Scott believes that black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
There are two sentences in that paragraph. Both are blatant attempts to put words in Scott's mouth. It's a paragraph that is perfectly constructed to misdirect a reader that is skimming over the article. IT'S PATHETIC.
I'm not disconnecting Charles Murray's thoughts on race... it's true that his past position on race will cloud any argument he makes on even tangentially related subjects.
That being said, it does not justify the phrasing of that paragraph in the NY Times. If their point, given the context of the article, was to point out that Scott is not afraid to step into murky waters, they could have written something like: "In one post regarding generational poverty, Scott Alexander even aligned himself with the controversial figure Charles Murray..."
They didn't do that. They intentionally misled their readers.
Just to check, marxbro, are you claiming that agreeing with Charles Murray about one part of his political theory necessarily means that one also agrees with all of the other parts of Charles Murray's political theory? To a first approximation?
If the it’s a one sentence anti-semetic graffit on the Wailing Wall, it might be difficult justifying passing agreement. Because it’s one sentence. Someone writes a few books, i mean, sure they might have an acceptable opinion. Hitler doesn’t have the best reputation around here (because he was a genocidal maniac), but who after the last four years can’t agree with his quote, “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”
Mr Alexander wrote regarding the NYT stating that Mr Alexander blieves the race issues:
"This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper."
Mr Alexander flat out denies it.
Yet, you don't believe him and continue to peddle lies.
This blog is not for you.
One must ask what your agenda is - other than bore everyone with cries that marx isn't getting the attention that you think he deserves.
> A better solution to poverty would be building an economic system that didn't require poverty and unemployment.
Marxism is the same end result as over-deregulated capitalism, except the figureheads at the top of the monopoly power are the ever-revolving product of the same forces that nominated Hillary Clinton and elected Donald Trump.
Of course, we never even get to *that* stage in Marxist experiments, because they always stall out at the "figureheads at the top of the monopoly power are golf buddies of the State" phase.
Calling a basic income "conservative"? Man, that is a bold rhetorical move. We'll have to see how that one plays out
But the reference point for the word “conservative” typically is not the leftmost position on the political spectrum. By that definition everything which is not on the very left is conservative.
When using this word we typically use the political center of our reference point, such that everything right of center is labeled “conservative”.
Oh god stop bringing marxism into every bloody discussion.
What does "aligning yourself with" mean? You and Adolf Hitler both believe that 2+2=4. You probably share quite a lot of of other beliefs as well. Does that mean you are aligning yourself with Adolf Hitler?
Even if Murray in fact holds the position on basic income partly because of his views on race, that doesn't imply that in endorsing what Murray has said about basic income, Scott endorses his views on race. It might IF the reasoning of Murray's that Scott was endorsing (insofar as he was endorsing Murray's reasoning and not just his conclusion) was explicitly race-based. But if not, then it's not clear its relevant whether Murray also has racist reasons for endorsing basic income inside his own head.
(I actually agree with the NYT article that Scott has been overly sympathetic to the racist, sexist far-right and this is bad, whilst also thinking it's not entirely fair, and part of a broad 'tech nerds are Nazis' meme that is not *at all* fair, for the reasons given here: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/silicon-valley-isnt-full-of-fascists)
> This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.
This seems like a validation of your skepticism about the NYT.
The whole context of this discussion and the quote I excerpted is about truth and falsehood. Scott backed up his claim with evidence. You have made a completely baseless and tone-deaf accusation. I have no idea who you are or what you have "pressed" on anyone. If you'd like to make a claim, please detail it with evidence.
This is so meta. Do you fail to see the irony of how you're making vague and poorly cited claims about Scott all within the context of the NYT doing the same?
Nevertheless, I will do my best to lead you through the process. I doubt I will have much interest in getting into the minutia of Marx; but, at a process level, the basic point is that when you claim that people should be skeptical of someone, you must provide evidence. To begin, "Scott recently coined" and "never found any primary source" are not very helpful because they don't show Scott's actual words or their context. It would be helpful if you could link to, or quote, the evidence for the points you're trying to make. Linking is better because quoting often leaves out relevant context.
Great! In my opinion, you should apologize to Scott for -- at least, initially -- making a public claim, without evidence, that people should be skeptical of him in the midst of him being attacked by The Great Octopus.
As far as the content of your criticism, let's start with quoting Scott's basic claim:
> What I sometimes call Marx's Fallacy is that if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top.
I went to my bookshelf and found my copy of the Communist Manifesto (ISBN 978-1-85984-898-2) that I haven't looked at for a while. Skimming to section "II. Proletarians and Communists," Marx writes:
"The Communists are distinguished from other working-class parties by this only:
1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.
2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
[...]
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: the formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat."
So here we have direct support of Scott's premise of "if we burnt down the current system" in Marx's quote: "overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy".
I think the beginning of the Marx quote above (the two points defining communism) sufficiently supports Scott's fallacy argument. Marx claims, with profound naïveté, that all the communists are about is representing the interests of the proletariat and Marx doesn't wrestle with the obvious and historically observable problem that those that tend to reach for political power, tend to optimize for it.
Is Marx the first profoundly naïveté political theoretician on this point? No. Is it fair to name the fallacy after him? In my opinion, yes. In my opinion, he was one of the main people directly responsible for the deaths and murder of hundreds of millions of people due, in part, to his profound naïveté about the nature of political power. I fully support Scott's cute summary of this as Marx's Fallacy and I think Marx's own words provide sufficient evidence. I see no reason to be skeptical of Scott based on what you're claiming. I think when it comes to homicidal murderers, it's okay to use summaries and gestalt rather than wading through meandering, original primary sources. I did not enjoy reading The Communist Manifesto's ramblings when I first read it.
The quote is, "What I sometimes call Marx's Fallacy is that if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top."
This is a foundational belief of all Marxists, regardless of whether Marx stated it explicitly. Marxism has never had a plan for achieving "true communism" other than "kill all the bourgeoisie and burn down the system". The fact that we have millions of revolutionaries around the world eager to destroy their civilization, none of whom have any workable plans past the "kill people" step, proves that this is the case.
Marx never stated it explicitly because he was writing at a time when every philosopher knew Hegel and Rousseau, and could see all the places Marx was invoking Hegel and Rousseau. Rousseau and Hegel both asserted this fallacy, Rousseau via his ridiculous doctrine of the "Common Good", and Hegel by positing a "Weltgeist" ("world spirit"; that is, God) who always makes sure that things get better after a revolution.
If you think you /don't/ believe this Marxist fallacy, then please explain what you think the Marxist plan is for building a better, more-just system after destroying the current one.
Maybe I’m missing something, a blog is generally someones opinion. News is factual reporting. Scott is a blogger the NYT is supposed to be news.
True Marx's Fallacy has never been tried.
Google harder.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/13/book-review-singer-on-marx/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/
"Hegel viewed all human history as the World-Spirit trying to recognize and incarnate itself. As it overcomes its various confusions and false dichotomies, it advances into forms that more completely incarnate the World-Spirit and then moves onto the next problem. Finally, it ends with the World-Spirit completely incarnated – possibly in the form of early 19th century Prussia – and everything is great forever.
Marx famously exports Hegel’s mysticism into a materialistic version where the World-Spirit operates upon class relations rather than the interconnectedness of all things, and where you don’t come out and call it the World-Spirit – but he basically keeps the system intact. So once the World-Spirit resolves the dichotomy between Capitalist and Proletariat, then it can more completely incarnate itself and move on to the next problem. Except that this is the final problem (the proof of this is trivial and is left as exercise for the reader) so the World-Spirit becomes fully incarnate and everything is great forever. And you want to plan for how that should happen? Are you saying you know better than the World-Spirit, Comrade?
I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is basically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”"
Since your have 1917 in your alias, I assume you're fluent in Russian: Here is the first stanza of Soviet Russian translation of The International (This is cannon. I was taught to memorize and perform as a schoolchild). Please note the last 4 lines, товарищь.
Вставай проклятьем заклейменный ,
Весь мир голодных и рабов !
Кипит наш разум возмущённый
И в смертный бой вести готов.
Весь мир насилья мы разрушим
До основанья , а затем
Мы наш мы новый мир построим,
Кто был никем тот станет всем!
https://pesni.guru
And sorry I'm being so harsh and blunt, but this goes back to my point about your tone-deafness. If someone is vulnerably writing about a tough and emotional subject -- while they're being attacked -- that's the _worst_ time to attack them with vague and evidence-less claims.
Gah...this again?
MarxBro's been doing this for years on SSC diaspora sites until his inevitable ban. His output is astonishing.
I'd suggest reading this to understand the objection being made: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/13/book-review-singer-on-marx/
(Yes, I know this isn't a primary source.)
This, specifically "took some of those presuppositions to places that were truly uncomfortable to most economists", was always one of the places where I thought Capital was weakest.
The focus on surplus value and expropriation was written in such a way that I kept feeling like Marx was agreeing that there was a 'natural law' style correct distribution but arguing that the Lockean idea of who owned what simply got this 'natural law' wrong.
This always struck me as a much weaker argument than jumping straight into the immiseration of the working class and other more consequential arguments, and I've never been sure whether Marx actually believed in a 'natural law' of 'proper' distribution, or if it was a rhetorical device used only to address Locke's influence.
I wonder what the median number of blog readers one needs to accumulate is before you end up with someone whose entire purpose in life is to pretend to find misquotings of Marx in your writings and get really angry about them
Marx believed that once you got the capitalists out of the way the world would magically snap into a more optimal pattern.
Surprise surprise in the real world this did not work out well. Just because you don't like it you throw a fit when its pointed out.
Not everyone has your same hero-worship for marx.
There was no primary source - read the original comment - he wrote :
" What I sometimes call Marx's Fallacy"
It's his "opinion".
Please, say that you understand this.
You must have read the original comment at one point, and continue to post drivel regarding it - either you don't understand that it's his opinion or you understand and have an agenda to spread lies.
Either way, there appears to be little hope for you. The most we can hope for is that you go away to attack other "anti-marxist" comments somewhere on the internet. You add nothing to any discussion, except for misunderstanding and lies.
I'm sorry, we can't be here to explain everything that you're offended to.
I'm going to create a cocktail called "Marx's twist", and I will never explain why I named it such, and I owe no one an explanation.
You don't deserve an explanation either, but you're free to be offended by it if it doesn't reach your high, marxist standards.
Again, no one care.
As someone who is politically left and who just joined this thread I'm seeing a whole lot of righteous indignation being heaped on marxbro/Marx/communism, which coming from a group who identify as "rationalists" strikes a chord in me. If Scott "sometimes call[s] it the Marx fallacy" maybe he should explain why he calls it that? In doing so maybe he would come to terms with the ignorance of that belief that he's seeing as fact? Maybe he would then realize that he has been operating from an ideological mindset that he maybe didn't even know about?
Maybe 3/4 of the posts ranting against Marx should actually read Marx and not just spout urban legends of Marx?
Sure, it's Scott's "opinion," but isn't opinion the thing that rationalists should be skewering on their sword of rationality?
Please don't assume comments on the blog come from "rationalists".
Also, I never call myself a rationalist and am suspicious of those who do. I *aspire* to be rational. I'm not very good at it, it is merely that I have taken specific steps to improve my skills, and would encourage others to do the same. I am still wrong on a regular basis and I expect to continue being wrong, but crucially, I am open to correction and I am often the first person to mention my mistakes to myself.
As to the issue at hand, I do not rant against Marx (nor generally read Marx, because the day has only 24 hours and there are so many great writers from the 21st century who I already don't have enough time to read). I did mention an alternate interpretation of Marx's fallacy which, while not treating Marx as correct, would make Scott's interpretation of Marx incorrect.
Oh I see. You're a communist. Bye.
No, dearie, I abhor the autocracies that are the CCP and the russian temporary, Mr Putin. Communism, IMO, is a failed ideology (or is it a policital structure?), and marxism, being the progenitor of both, is suspect.
user marxbros1917 appears to be a communist (and I don't mean that in a demeaning McCarthyist way, but in a 21st century "Communism is the enemy of the West's rationalist and democratic thinking" way.)
Oh boy. I get it you're a Marx stan and all, but chill out a bit.
"I have no idea who you are or what you have "pressed" on anyone."
Marxbro has, rather infamously, been banned from Slate Star Codex on something like 10+ separate occasions due to creating numerous alts after his initial ban. A few years later, he still regularly complains about this on a certain unfriendly subreddit. I don't think this line of conversation is going to lead anywhere productive.
Thank you for the correction--the alts were actually on the SSC subreddit, and there were actually 26 of them over the course of 3 months if the ban registry is correct.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not sure that you're necessary wrong about Scott misinterpreting Marx. I barely know anything about him myself. However, "I've pressed Scott Alexander many times on his sloppy citations and he rarely fixes his mistakes" is not an entirely accurate summary of the backstory. (Plus, Scott maintained a list of major mistakes* at the top of his old blog, which I think puts him at least a couple of standard deviations above the average blogger in that regard even if he's not perfect.)
It looks like you're getting a second chance on ACX, and I personally wouldn't mind seeing more Marxists on here. That said, I would recommend easing way off on repeatedly bringing up things you think Scott got wrong in the past, because not backing off when you should have was what got you banned in the first place.
*https://web.archive.org/web/20200204213326/https://slatestarcodex.com/mistakes/
You're a member of the sneerclub hate-group?
There is no point in anyone trying to get through to you.
As the mod in question, I invite everyone to read this thread decide for themselves whether banning marxbro1917 from an online discussion space is likely to improve the quality of discussion.
You might be inclined to believe that there is something you're not getting, that it must be possible to productively deal with this entirely civil fella. Not so. This is the entirety of the MarxBro act, and after many years it's still exactly the same.
Alternatively, you could ban everyone that counters marxbro1917 in defense of Scott Atlas. Did I get his name right? I didn't read the NYT article. Only his rebuttal on reference from Dave Weigel who applauded the rebuttal. Immediately saw 7 deleted posts. Easily determined both he and his stacks were trash. Remembered I had Mon off and was lucky enough to find a thread attempting to discuss the merits of socio-economic systems.
The end result would still be harmony either way would it not? You could try it as a social experiment in fascism. Either way you get a fascist alt-right insurrection-stan freedomthinker kick out of it. Such joy! You could call it The Path to Joyful Fascism by Scott Atlas.
Or you collectively or Mr. Atlas could attempt to have intellectually honest discussion with non-facsimile receipts about all of the items discussed above and below.
Now, after my first day here, I hate Dave Weigel for dragging me to this costume party without getting my two drink minimum. And also now I just hate Dave Weigel and I can't wait to let him know. Also I don't know what to do with the rest of my Mon off. I also can't wait to renew my subscription to the NYT just to spite Scott Atlas.
On a positive note I hope all you opposers do finally obtain your associate's degrees. Pro-tip: use the cliff notes for your manga stylized textbooks on the histrionics of communism if you want to really impress the professor.
On an even more positive note, please tell the cubano with the abuelo, as I could not locate their reply, that I sincerely apologize for making them relive an appropriated past trauma. No one knows better than them.
Did you try having everyone just ignore it?
That's useful to know, thanks.
So, somebody should knock his and Siskind's heads together like Moe, is what I take from this. The people are all just so goddamned tedious. If the Internet didn't exist, nobody would have ever heard of any of them. And our politics wouldn't be so completely insane.
Marxbro is the ur-sealion.
Do not feed the troll.
"Sloppy citations" (not distortions or falsehoods?) on a private person's blog, even an influential one, is a different animal from the world's second-largest print media company being deliberately misleading in an article we know they had months to fact-check.
And that's assuming your accusation is fair. Scott tracked mistakes on his blog and was quite good about flagging them when pointed out to him. (I assume you're referring to the blog since the substack is like 10 posts old, but Google doesn't show any comments from your handle-- did you change it?) No offense, but I trust Scott's conscientiousness much more than I trust "marxbro1917" to actually pick out errors as opposed to ideological disagreements.
I checked and-- yep, it's just you pushing Marxist ideology. Over that lame "RedCoin" joke of all things. It's not clear what correction you even think Scott should make (to a fiction humor post!). Even more ludicrous than I'd expected. Thanks for the entertainment.
I'd like to believe that you're a fair representative of a Marxist viewpoint, but out of charity I'm going to have to assume from here on out that you're a parody account trying to mock and discredit it.
If there's anyone in history who doesn't deserve to have his ideas discussed properly, it's Marx.
Maybe it's not the most rational thing but I reckon anyone whose ideas have already killed more people than the population of most countries (ie Marx and Hitler) is someone that I'm comfortable simply dismissing rather than attempting to take seriously.
Maybe there's some gems in there somewhere, but it's unlikely. Marx gives us three things: (a) motherhood statements about how sad it is that some people are rich and some are poor, (b) predictions about "historical inevitabilities" which didn't happen, and (c) implied policy prescriptions, which have killed millions. Fuck him.
A fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. He made a joke about your hero, get over it. The comment section will instantly improve the moment you are banned. Until then drink a big cup of shut the hell up.
What’s the difference? You can’t be a Marxist with anything approaching a rational viewpoint. Anyone with cursory search space optimization knowledge knows a planned economy is doomed to failure.
"You can’t be a Marxist with anything approaching a rational viewpoint."
O.M.G. Did you really just write this?
remember that i've pressed a sloppy citation on your mama many times too
based and grey tribed
The NYT is a media source that aims for neutral truth reporting.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, with one arm being publishing facts.
This blog consists of the thoughts of one man. Though many of us trust him, we understand that he is not infallible. As one person his views will not be "neutral" on all, or necessarily any, topics, just as anyone's views may or may not be.
Your many comments in this topic are almost all centered about your hatred that marxism has been misrepresented by Mr Alexander, as though he owes you, as though he must not write anything regarding marxism that you have not vetted.
He doesn't owe you anything. He is not a universal source of truth on any topic, and the reasonable people who read this blog realise this. You, it appears, don't.
If he wrote something about marxism that you disagree with, he doesn't have to agree with you or renounce his words. You are not a source of truth and neither is this blog.
Do you scour the internet sniffing for blogs and social media posts that offend marxism, to reply in earnestness that THEY ARE WRONG, MARXISM IS FOR THE GREATER GOOD, WITH MARXISM THE WORLD WILL BE A BETTER PLACE (and marxbro1917 will be one of the cornerstones of this change, he will be in the politburo, where he belongs, where he has been destined!)
Your rabid is perpetuating the stereotype of marxists as a bunch of loony sociopaths.
Ironically, out of most of the readers here, you would benefit the most from an intensive course of psychotherapy with Mr Alexander to delve deep into your psyche to determine why you base your character so much around marxism. Are you poor and have identified with marxist philosophy? Did you have a difficult childhood, your father blaming his woes on capitalism? Are you young and unemployed and angry, or older, redundant and bitter?
We don't really care, though if you pay a psychotherapist, at least they might pretend to care and help you, then you can straighten yourself out.
Marxism is not the answer to anything, except as a punchline.
Good luck.
Few people care abut marx here, and your histrionic comments push people further away.
No one "deserves" to be read - there is no deep ethical need for everyone to be "read".
YOUR opinion is that he should be read, and you are pushing this opinion onto Mr Alexander.
This is not the place for this. He can talk about whatever the hell he wants, and he can ignore marx, write posts about marx that you disagree with or make jolly fun of him.
Create your own blog and talk about marx till the peasants come home from the fields. No one here cares. You are very tiring.
> I think there's something of a climate of fear where people don't want to contradict Scott Alexander on things like citations.
Press X to doubt. Pressed X so hard it broke the controller.
Dude, it's not the content of any individual comment, it's the number of comments. The sheer amount of time you've spent responding basically the same thing on almost every branch of this thread is terrifying.
For those who are already familiar with SSC, please continue to take this article as another piece of evidence that by default ALL articles are approximately this distorted/false and not to trust newspaper articles (nor TV news) in general without independent confirmations of the facts.
As a rationalist, wouldn't you want to withhold your judgment until you know why the editors released his name? I think that Jasper Jackson has the right idea.
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2020/06/why-new-york-times-threatening-reveal-blogger-scott-alexander-s-true-identity
My comment had nothing to do with them releasing his name. It's about accuracy. In an article with 8-10 major points, four are misleading or wrong, as is the general "narrative" of the piece.
Many people have the experience of reading a news story about their profession, or about a topic they know well, or have direct experience with the events of, and noticing that it's distorted.
The point is that it's not _just_ those news stories which are that way. It's almost all news stories, people just have a tendency to not notice when they're relying on the journalist to be accurate rather than knowing the subject themselves.
Why did they release his name? The paywall blocked me from seeing beyond the headline.
The relevant passages:
> But none of the above means the NYT has any imperative to reveal Alexander’s identity. So why would it?
> One theory is that the publication is simply imposing its rules without much thought to the consequences. Alexander has been deemed not to meet the threshold for anonymous sourcing, and thus a piece about his blog must reveal his identity. The NYT does invest a lot of importance in its procedures and processes, and like any large organisation it can sometimes apply them in ways that ride roughshod over the views of those it deals with.
> There is another possibility, of course, one that many of Slate Star Codex’s most ardent defenders seem to have discounted based entirely on Alexander’s say-so. The NYT could believe that the real identity of the author is too integral to the story it wants to run to leave out, and that the story is important enough to justify the potential damage it might do to him. Alexander has said that he doesn’t believe this to be the case, and there is no indication otherwise from those who the reporter spoke to for the story. But we frankly won’t know until it is published, or indeed dropped entirely.
> Those jumping to Alexander’s defence appear to be doing so based on their long-standing relationship with his work and him. They presumably trust him because they know him, either his real identity or simply through his work. That’s not a luxury the rest of us have.
> At this point in time, with the information we have, it is difficult to see how Scott Alexander’s full name is so integral to the NYT’s story that it justifies the damage it might do to him. But before we make that call, it might be a good idea to have more than his word to go on.
The story has now been published, and as far as I'm aware the possibility discounted on Alexander's say-so was indeed not supported. No new information made his actual surname integral to the story.
Beware Gell-Mann Amnesia!
I feel like taking the articles which come to my attention *because* they are very distorted and then assuming all articles are that distorted is falling into some form of selection bias.
Surely we should expect the articles that become famous and stir up huge backlash because of how inaccurate and distorted they are, are very likely to be more inaccurate and distorted than the average article?
I don't think this is the same case as Gell-Mann amnesia, which is just about reading a neutral article on a topic you know. This is a case of reading *notorious, famously bad* article on a topic you know, not an average, unremarkable article.
Q is the way!
I recognize this article and the process leading up to it has caused you a substantial amount of distress. As someone who was not aware of your original blog (and now wishes I had been) I didn’t take away a negative impression, more that you were open to any viewpoint as a jumping off point for discussion. I’m now a subscriber as a result.
Glad you're here!
Did you join over the last few weeks, or did you actually come here from the NYT article?
I’m here as a direct result of the NYT article being published. So perhaps “there is no such thing as bad publicity” is a truism after all.
Probably you’re somebody more thoughtful than the median reader. Plenty of others will just code it “oh Scott Alexander; isn’t he problematic? I heard he was a racist. Can’t remember where. Anyway pass the stuffing.”
Or as a plot twist, they'll just remember him as Siskind because of the article's insistence on using his last name, saving his pseudonym from the association.
The insistence on using his until literally just now unknown last name is such a strong signal. That tells you everything you need to know about their motivations. The NYT always wins and they want you to know it.
Or some editor's really, really out of touch with the internet.
If it's as true as it seems that the journalist truly didn't want to write a smear article, and that NYT pressured him to do so, could it be possible that he used Siskand on purpose for this very reason?
I'm probably looking to deep into it, but it's worth a thought.
I didn't get the smear otherwise I wouldn't be here; although I am NOT getting the sense that "people [on this site] like to have good faith discussion about ideas" unless there is some unconscious sorting process about which ideas are worth having a good faith conversation about and which are not.
I think you're right, but I'm not sure how much it matters.
People who like to have good-faith discussion about ideas are valuable. If the NYT article brings Scott into contact more of those, at the cost of making people who don't think about stuff feel like he's vaguely problematic, I'd call that a win.
I think the majority will think "what's this boring article about some random website?" and skip to one of the other sections. It's only a fraction that will react positively or negatively to the article.
That's probably a good thing, selecting for more thoughtful than average readers
Scott's objection wasn't simply that people at dinner would hear he was "problematic". It's that his patients might google his real name and find that article rather than something specific to his professional life.
I’m also a new subscriber, but that’s because I’m racist. Hey!
Everyone's a little bit racist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Az4UuTW0Pw
Also now subscribed based on the NYT article. I think most people with functional critical thinking skills could see the piece as more of a beacon to hitherto-unheard of corner of the internet that seems like it has a great community of like minded individuals. Having read a few older blog posts, I'm glad I found it, and looking forward to reading many more.
I'm not sure if that was really bad sarcasm, or even worse seriousness.
It wasn’t funny, so it’s not exempt from being charitable.
I don't mind salty humor, I just request that it actually be humorous.
There's nothing immoral in what he said, I just think it was bad as a joke (assuming he was joking).
Judging from their other comments, seriousness.
Hope you forgot a /s, otherwise the comments section doesn't bode well if people such as yourself continue to peddle lies, either consciously as a bad faith actor or because you don't understand. Either way, I hope there's an implied /s.
Agreed. I found this from the NYT article. I think you should have had your name left out of the article just as a freaking courtesy. There was no need to include it. But I am glad I found the blog.
The old blog has years and years of thoughtful analysis.
Same. Hopefully you got a nice bump in subscriptions.
As another positive, the NYT story reminded me I hadn't yet pulled out my credit card to support Scott.
That has now been remedied.
I agree with Chris. I didn’t take a terrible view of the article but could see the slant. I’d never heard of this or the previous site before the NYT article. In fact, the post about COVID today, I forwarded to my text thread with guys we discuss all aspects of life.
As a physician, I agree with his article though humans are terrible about predictions so who knows really. There funny Yogi Berra quotes on this. Either way, a good starting point for open discussion.
Thanks for putting this up, I want to comment near the start and say that racism doesn't belong around Scott. Yes, there are sometimes weird positions brought up here, but arguing with someone who thinks we should have a king is NOT the same as wanting one; it's actually the opposite.
People hear from the NYT should read some old stuff before trying to mess with Scott, he's a really nice guy who is trying to help people through thinking.
I have enormous respect for Scott. I've met him in person and thought he was very kind. I've been to his house and found a lovely community of people I could cozy up with for years. The community around him is 90% the best people I've ever met.
But I can't deny that racism swirls around this community with alarming frequency. Have you *read* this blog's forums? Spent time on the pre-CW-ban subreddit? There is a not-small number of people (some of whom are mods of those spaces and thus carry implicit endorsement) who agree, point blank, with the statement "black people are dumber in a general sense because of genes black people carry". Or "Ashkenazi Jews are smarter in a general sense because of genes Ashkenazi Jews carry".
Scott is, at a minimum, tolerant of that. I'm scared he actually believes it. If he doesn't, he ought to say so, clean up his house, and stop complaining about people who notice the current state of his house and ask how it got here. If he does, then he doesn't have the right to complain when the NYT implies that he's a racist, because he is.
I think people are less saying that it is *untrue* Scott believes those things (even though that is the verbiage they have chosen) but that no one should say it in the New York Times even though it's true
No one who thinks that has any right to accuse people who don't want to be racist of being afraid of the facts.
I don't think believing those statements makes someone a racist. Those are just empirical facts. You can believe them and still support equal rights and opportunity and judging people as individuals no matter their race.
The article doesn't even say believing those thing is racist! The characterization is as controversial and potentially dangerous - both surely true whatever else you think about these ideas. People don't like the article but it's not because it is inaccurate or even misleading, more the opposite - it reveals accurate and important information about a public figure in a way that may change overall opinion of him in a net negative direction
I was responding to the person I replied to not to the article. He used the word racism.
> I don't think believing those statements makes someone a racist.
The fact that "I don't think believing black people are inherently genetically inferior makes someone a racist" is a statement anyone here takes seriously is a better proof of my point than anything I could say.
Even if it weren't: "black people are inferior" + "meritocracy" = "we should treat black people worse".
If it helps you understand my view better, I also believe that height is positively correlated with IQ and that this link is likely somewhat genetic in origin (for example lower mutations load increases both). Does this make me a heightest? I don't think so. I don't support judging someone's intelligence based upon their height and I recognize that there are smart and dumb people of all different heights. My thoughts and race and intelligence are the same.
> I don't think so. I don't support judging someone's intelligence based upon their height
Then you're not much of a Bayesian, are you? Or do you, nominal defender of the Grand Search for Truth with a capital T, balk at incorporating that Truth-with-a-capital-T into the way you look at the world?
Suppose you knew, without any doubt, that the racial IQ difference were true and responsible for all the inequality we see. Would you have a black surgeon operate on your kid, recognizing that even if both distributions are truncated by some sort of certification, the means of the people who meet the given standard will still be different? Would you let them be what stands between you and X-risk? Let them tell you what charity to donate to?
Speaking of, if you truncate the two distributions where you think A had a lower mean than B, the means are actually reversed post-truncation! Plot it on paper if it’s not clear, but A has a skinnier but longer tail at the point of truncation. Intuitively this means that someone from population B has to be only sort of unusual to clear the filter, while someone from population A has to be very unusual (and there’s more variance, so they’re more likely to be very very unusual). So yeah, in your example if these are the things you believe you should go with the surgeon!
> Would you have a black surgeon operate on your kid
It would depend on his record as a surgeon.
I'll take the bait here for a little bit and say that in a hypothetical scenario where the only piece of information I have about the doctor is his race I would prefer the non black doctor.
But that's not how the world works. In the real world I have access to information like their track record as a surgeon and their graduation rank in med school and this information makes race irrelevant.
To point to another example we can observe that blacks are on average worse than whites at math and thus they have lower average math SAT scores. However blacks with a math SAT score of 700 are exactly as good at math as whites with a math SAT of 700 (this is likely true for every score except 800) and so even though race and math ability correlate once I know someone's math SAT score observing their race gives me exactly zero new information about their math ability. I like to say that the evidence from the SAT scores dominates the evidence from race.
Race is a dominated predictor of almost everything we might truly care about and thus even though it correlates with many things it is not a good basis upon which to discriminate.
Suppose there were 2 surgeons, one Black and one White. You have reason to believe the White surgeon is better but you'll be accused of racism if you select them. Your kid's life is at stake. Who do you select?
Equal treatment, racial harmony, etc. are worthwhile goals. But they aren't the *only* worthwhile goals, and it's always possible to concoct some scenario where some other goal becomes more important. It's like the trolley problem--it is generally good to avoid being responsible for someone else's death, but if being responsible for someone else's death allows you to save 4 lives, it can be a worthwhile tradeoff.
IMO this is what separates extremists from everyone else. If you're willing to sacrifice everything else in favor of your One True Moral Principle, you might be an extremist. (Unless your One True Moral Principle is something very generic like "minimize suffering". Then you might have a case to make for yourself.)
On your black surgeon question, that depends what other evidence I had. If all I knew about two surgeons was that one was black and one white and both had passed whatever the relevant certifying requirements are, and if I believed that the certifying requirements were applied equally to blacks and whites (neither affirmative action nor discrimination against blacks), and if I believed that the average intelligence of blacks was lower and there were no other relevant characteristics (dexterity, say) that went the other way, I would prefer the white surgeon.
You apparently agree with the logic of that, by what you said. Do you regard doing that as racist? Do you object to it, and if so why?
This argument proves too much; you're now actively arguing in favor of racism! By the same logic,
a) heightism would be justified. Do you personally make sure to always choose the tallest doctor?
b) racism would be justified IRL; not because of genetic differences, but because black people have poorer childhood nutrition, education etc.
In reality, the signal of group-based differences (genetic or not) is generally swamped by the noise, especially in cases such as race where there are long-standing tribal prejudices.
Noise like: what if the black doctor has a slightly better record? What if he needed a slightly higher innate IQ score to overcome the disadvantage of being surrounded by "inferior" blacks? What if the white doctor is really short, and therefore a subhuman dullard?
>"even if both distributions are truncated by some sort of certification"
If someone has passed a fair certification then there's no problem.
there was a somewhat famous study that's a case study in how to do bad stats: they showed that height was uncorrelated with basketball ability.
The problem was that they did this by looking only at people who were in the NBA.
For those people who actually make it into the NBA height is uncorrelated with basketball ability, that kind of cutoff means you're selecting for people who are able to make it above the cutoff line.
So even if such an IQ difference was real, (I have by doubts but this is a hypothetical) for people who made it past the selection process for surgeons it's irrelevant so long as the selection process if fair.
> Would you have a black surgeon operate on your kid
That has pretty much nothing to do with the average IQ of black people, but is all about the standards that medical schools uphold.
If they have high and equal standards at admission and graduation, then there is no reason to believe that a black doctor is worse. If they practice affirmative action, where they lower the barriers for less talented black people, then it would be logical to be wary of black surgeons.
I would argue that a medical system run by the average SSC reader is going to result in far less discrimination of black surgeons than one run by the average NYT reader.
But what is IQ? It's a concept that spurred some tests that more or less "worked" for the situation they were created for. We all know that humans are intelligent, but how we choose to measure that intelligence is a story all by itself. And, what IQ tests are we talking about here because they all come in different shapes and sizes and measure different aspects of this thing that we call intelligence. There's also the fact that no one IQ test can capture the full measure of this complex thing called human intelligence. To take such a muddied concept and then add height into the mix seems naïve
Yeah, it's a shame that rationalists aren't more critical about IQ and meritocracy itself, those should be questioned too :
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39
TL;DR : People are bad at statistics, so IQ is mostly a fraud. It might still be helpful to measure *low* intelligence. (Which IIRC it was actually created for by USA's military ?)
No, because you're neglecting the extremely important difference between statistical distributions and individuals.
For a simple example, let's say that blue-eyed people roll two standard dice and take the higher result, while green-eyed people roll two dice and take the lower result, and that those results will have some measurable impact on their lives. Obviously, you should expect blue-eyed people to do better on average - almost a third of them are 6's, after all, while very few green-eyed people are.
But if you look at a random person of each eye colour, there's about one chance in eight that the green-eyed person rolled higher. That's still a pretty large number. If you're hiring for employees where die rolls matter, you'd expect to see a lot of good blue-eyed applicants, but you'd also expect to see a proportion of green eyes as well. Simply ignoring the green-eyed would be foolish, because you'd be giving up a substantial chance at the best candidate. You judge the individual, not the eye colour.
Now, humans can be biased. Perhaps in this world we'd want to encourage sunglasses at interviews, to make sure that the interviewer wasn't paying too much attention to their eyes. That'd be a reasonable bias-reducing step. But we shouldn't expect that it'd get the workforce up to 50/50. It just means that any individual green-eyed person can go as far as their die roll will take them. It doesn't achieve equal outcomes for groups, but it does achieve fairness on an individual level.
I work in the hiring industry. In fact, I work on mathematical models in the hiring industry. We rely on signals far weaker than your example all the time.
Hiring is very error prone. You can't practically gather enough data to actually know what each person rolled. So you are incentivized to - and therefore all sufficiently competitive organizations WILL - set a prior based on your best beliefs about the population.
If you gather the same evidence from an interview for a blue-eyed person and a green-eyed person, and if you do not think you gathered infinite evidence, you will therefore (rationally!) conclude that your best estimate is that the blue-eyed person is better. On an *individual* level, the green-eyed person has lost out on a job to an equally-skilled blue-eyed person.
I can't speak to real-world hiring practices in as much detail as you can, so I'll defer on that point.
I guess I'll express my actual thesis more directly, then - even if race/gender/etc. provides some Bayesian evidence of fitness for a given task, we should ignore it as a matter of policy. The evidence is too weak, and the failure modes too unjust, for it to be a plan we encourage.
But you can't simply declare math or data to be anathema in order to make that happen. That isn't sane or sustainable. You need to actually make a policy case. The libertarian theorists who seem vaguely disgusted by the idea that you'd ever consider a collective like race in an individual-level decision are a far better model than that. So is King's famous "content of their character" quote, and so is blinded hiring (when practical), and a bunch of others.
This is a policy case that can be made very successfully. Looking at race is immoral, so even if the data implies a population-level difference, we should ignore that and consider the individual. You don't need to crucify people for testing the populations.
Hold on, I think you may be committing a fallacy here.
In the hypothetical A that the prior is true (i.e. that blue-eyed people are in general more skilled than green-eyed people) and the hypothetical B that this prior is relevant (i.e. that blue-eyed people are in general more skilled than green-eyed people *even matching for* the various more direct evidence you have), then... the prior is true and relevant i.e. when comparing a blue-eyed person and a green-eyed person with the same direct evidence of skill, the blue-eyed person is *more likely than not* to have a higher *true* skill level than the green-eyed person.
This means that the green-eyed person has *not* lost out on a job to an equally-skilled blue-eyed person, but to a blue-eyed person with equal *evidence of skill* who probably (by hypothetical assumption B) has higher skill. This is not an injustice.
(By inverting the statistics, you could show that when comparing *equally-skilled* green-eyed and blue-eyed people, the blue-eyed people usually have lower *evidence* of that skill, and assuming a Moloch-optimised algorithm that plus the eye-color evidence would reduce to a coin flip.)
While I disagree with the specific assertion, I agree with the general argument, which is that your belief of what is morally right is separable from your belief in the objective truth of a matter.
To use a less offensive example: it is, I think, not in question that things like heritable disorders, including especially terrible ones that effectively guarantee unhappiness for sufferers, are in fact heritable. But I don't think that there is serious moral or political support to be found even for very restricted forms of eugenics such as forcibly forbidding carriers of especially terrible heritable disorders from having biological children on humanitarian grounds. (And to be clear, I also do not support such a measure.) Are those who believe in the actual heritability of heritable disorders but do not support forced sterilization/etc. eugenicists too? (There's a counter-argument in here regarding _why_ such a person wouldn't support forced sterilization, and I hope for someone better-read than me to find a better example.)
I have a fuzzy memory of reading a passage where Bertrand Russell made the exact same argument regarding either gender differences or sexuality (I forget which). It was something along the lines of "even in the imaginary case where someone proves conclusively that X are smarter or more capable than Y, it still would be morally repugnant to support policies that formally elevate X over Y".
Why should the objective truth, one way or the other, dictate whether you believe that people of all races deserve equal opportunity and treatment? Would you give in if someone proved against all odds thirty years from now that black people are genetically predisposed to have lower IQ? "Well, it can't be helped that it would be morally repugnant to support treating blacks as inferior in society - the facts go this way, so I suppose this way it is." Many aspects of our morality are aspirational ideas that uphold what ought to be true, not what is true, because it would be wrong to use even objective truths to justify moral evil.
I'd still have less of a problem with it even if they weren't, but most racists are also basically pro-the-economic-system-we-have. Our current economic system says that if you're less capable, you deserve to suffer and die in a despairing hell you have no meaningful hope of escaping. If we then say black people are less capable...
Basically, I think you can believe any two of "we should treat black people equally", "black people are less capable", and "we should treat people according to their capability". But you can't believe all three - and most racists claim they believe the second and third.
I don't dispute that most racists believe the second and third beliefs you cited, and I think you know I wouldn't as well, because they are stated in a way that is overly convenient for your position and not accurate to what my counter-position is trying to argue. I haven't called it a humanoid figure made from the dried stalks of cereal plants, but it really is.
The statements closest to yours that are accurate to what my counter-position is trying to argue are: "we should treat black people equally", "black people may be less capable, equally capable, or more capable", and "we should treat people according to their capability, if there existed a generally applicable method to measure capability that is sufficiently hardened (i.e. difficult to exploit) to use as formal policy", plus an implied fourth, "no such method exists".
I don't think it's really in question that everyone involved in this conversation (the poster you were originally responding to, you, me) at least professes to believe in #1, so that leaves the others.
My previous post provides an argument about why I think it is possible to believe #2, #3, and #4 simultaneously. If I understand correctly, you are asserting that it is impossible to believe #2 while also believing in #3 + #4. I don't agree, and I don't feel that you have provided any argument or evidence to support your position.
>>>Our current economic system says that if you're less capable, you deserve to suffer and die in a despairing hell you have no meaningful hope of escaping.
A bit melodramatic, isn't this? Also not accurate - the concepts of "deserved outcomes" and that of "predictable outcomes" are similar but not the same.
By your phrasing, you seem to imply that people who are less capable *should not* be at a disadvantage to those more capable when in competition for jobs. Is that right or do you mean something else?
If you mean "when in competition for social standing" rather than jobs...could you expand on what that looks like?
Actually, I think this might not be quite true. You might believe all three if you interpret "treat people equally" as meaning "equality of opportunity" (probably in one of its more extreme forms), not "equality of outcome".
Out of your three statements, two are prescriptive (saying how we ought to behave) and one is a factual claim about the nature of reality.
Surely you're not arguing that we ought to pick a side on the factual claim based on what we think of the prescriptive claims?
If you remove the politically-changed context and just say "here's three statements, one is factual and two are prescriptive, and there's a contradiction if you believe all three", then it seems obvious to me that the intellectually honest procedure would be to decide the factual claim based on evidence and then pick your stance on the prescriptions in light of that conclusion.
Your comment conflates intelligence with inherent moral worth. It both completely destroys the distinction your interlocutor was making, and is functionally racist in a world where he's right. I do not know if we live in that world, but either way I'd prefer if you didn't put words in people's mouths.
Nothing you've said follows.
Firstly, no one equated "less intelligent" with "inferior". That was your strawman.
Secondly, empirical facts about populations don't entail facts about a specific individual from that population. Acting as if the latter were true would be racism, but the former is not. The fact that people still confuse this basic point is frankly depressing.
He didn't say "I don't think believing black people are inherently genetically inferior makes someone a racist". Nevertheless, I find his comment and its popularity to be quite disturbing, and he didn't even disagree with how you framed it!
I disagree that "black people are inferior" + "meritocracy" = "we should treat black people worse". Obviously I reject the first statement ("black people are inferior"), but also you misunderstand "meritocracy". Meritocracy ends in "ocracy", so it is a word about who makes decisions, not about how people are treated. The local school janitor deserves our respect and we should treat him well, but that doesn't mean he should be a principal or CEO or governor.
Stating the fact that “Blacks on average score lower on IQ tests and part of the difference seems genetic in origin” isn’t racist. But only racist beliefs can turn that into a statement like “black people are dumber [..] because of genes". The word ‘dumber’ has broader connotations and I doubt swiping culture and history under the rug is accidental either.
Word choices and sentence construction tell you things people try to hide.
> "Those are just empirical facts. "
Ugh. Holy crap guys, this is the kind of thing that might have made the NYT publish their hit piece in the first place.
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a million people of two races A and B take an IQ test. Suppose the average IQ of A is different from the average IQ of B.
First of all, you can't just SAY the averages are different without any evidence. I have not personally seen that data, most people have not seen that data, it's highly controversial and therefore you have to cite evidence - scientific papers and such - if you want anyone to believe you. If people believe you without any evidence, it's not a good sign.
Second, "black people are dumber in a general sense" is a VERY different statement than "the average IQ of black people was measured in several studies to be lower than the average IQ of white people."
The first statement sounds like straight-up racism, as if you're saying "a given person of race Black is dumber in a variety of different ways than a given person of race White". You should know perfectly well that (1) this is untrue (because bell curves) and (2) some people would interpret your statement this way because you worded it so carelessly.
The worst part about this is that there are 56 Likes on a comment saying "Those are just empirical facts." No, they are carelessly-worded remarks that can easily be interpreted as white supremacy.
I do hope most of those 56 likes were people who have seen studies and interpreted the phrases in a charitable non-white-supremacist way, but even in that case, their carelessness on this topic is disturbing.
“who agree, point blank, with the statement "black people are dumber in a general sense because of genes black people carry". Or "Ashkenazi Jews are smarter in a general sense because of genes Ashkenazi Jews carry".”
I believe that black people have darker skin because of genes they carry. I believe that they are more likely to suffer from sickle cell anemia. Is that racist?
I believe that IQ may be, at least in significant part, moderated by genetics.
Is it impossible to comprehend that there might be reasons beyond racism to consider that genetically distinguishable populations may measurably differ in general intelligence?
That’s the thing about rationalism and “believing in science”. You aren’t allowed to dismiss possibly factual things just because the implications of them being true would be uncomfortable. And that’s what you do when you dismiss Charles Murray types as merely “racist”.
Exactly. Racism isn't about there being differences between races - obviously, there's a few(at minimum, in appearance). Yeah, it's a spectrum, and no sharp dividing lines, but there's clearly a range.
Racism is what happens when you start giving a shit about those differences, when there's no good reason to give a shit. Racism is a choice people make in terms of how they act. The real world is not itself racist, nor are measurements of it. People's beliefs and actions are where racism lives.
Here's an explanation that I always wanted to try to see if that works for somebody.
So there is a minimal median difference in some value, such as IQ, among different races or ethnic groups. It causes the tails of the distribution above some extreme value to be much bigger in one group than in the other. That's why there are so many famous Ashkenazi scientists.
But the thing is, this has no importance whatsoever for any half-way realistic situation, for any situation that's likely to come up in practice! The fact that there is a minimal median difference in the population does absolutely nothing for you when looking at two job applicants - in fact, if you don't know that there's such a difference, you'll never get enough data to notice it, because you'll never see enough applicants, and because the other factors will completely overwhelm it.
Now, if you are an alien star force that has an hour to take from Earth, which is about to get destroyed, a million of the best residents optimized by some preferred parameter that you cannot measure or predict individually, that's a completely different story, and you'll have to optimize by race...
The difference in outcomes right now is far from minimal, even far from the tails.
A median black SAT math score is approximately 15th percentile for white test-takers. A black median income family makes $41,511 a year, a white one makes $65,902. Taken at face value, this implies that being black imposes a penalty of about 1 standard deviation on your life outcomes.
If that's genetic, it's relevant at all levels, from Congress to Billy Bob's Brake Repair Shop.
Except that there are so many environmental factors at work here that it's really strange to assume that this would be genetic. I can't produce the links now, but I think there's been plenty of attempts to quantify how the environmental factors influence outcomes.
Nobody said that everything was right with the world. The claim was that minimal median racial IQ differences exist and are not important.
“ The fact that there is a minimal median difference in the population does absolutely nothing for you when looking at two job applicants”
Which is why you should not do that! (of course, that logic would equally apply to median racial differences in “privilege” and yet race is quite often used to select one individual over another in the form of affirmative action)
But the population wide values are relevant in terms of policy. (Spitballing here - I don’t fully endorse this but it’s a reason IQ population differences might matter): One thing IQ does seem to map quite well to is academic achievement. So a society wide push to increase the importance of traditional academic achievement (i.e. making every student believe college is the only path to success, making every job require a college degree) is going to disproportionately hurt those in the lower IQ population. And a policy to artificially award the markers of academic success to a few isn’t going to close the actual achievement gap, or help those left behind. An alternative approach would be needed.
More simply, you note that long tails exist. Well, that means that populations with lower median IQ are going to be very underrepresented among the top academic performers (such as PhDs in the hard sciences). This is a natural consequence of the underlying distribution, and not necessarily indicative of any discrimination (or again, any “inferiority” when comparing random members of each population). So if you try to modify these results based on an assumption of discrimination, you are probably going to fail.
Yep, this is why racism is stupid. But somehow people think that by screaming at and hounding people that discuss population genetics and inheritability of certain traits, they actually are helping people that are poor. Even though there's neither theoretical nor empirical causal link between those, and I see no reasonable way why banning certain genetical research and even discussion about it would do anything to help those people.
Wait. What? The "real world is not itself racist"?
Not to be pedantic, but define real and world.
While I agree that racism is rooted in beliefs, it's not just about individual actors here. It's also not just about negative beliefs. If I and my group do not think about group X in our planning then group X will not benefit directly from whatever our planning produces. If, on the other hand, I am subconsciously primed to consider group Y as my ingroup...
My point is that the average hypothetical person doesn't go around thinking who they give or don't give a shit about--they act on autopilot.
Being compared to Charles Murray is a compliment.
Of course you would say that.
This article from Yale explains how people with high IQ (like George W Bush) have other kinds of intellectual deficiencies - https://som.yale.edu/news/2009/11/why-high-iq-doesnt-mean-youre-smart
Do you consider it racist to even ask the question of whether differences in IQ between groups has a genetic component, or is it only racist to consider the matter settled in the affirmative?
Is it about asking the question at all, or just being confident that the answer comes out a certain way?
(A priori it seems like a reasonable question. Almost everything in life is influenced by genes. Distributions of genes differ between groups. I've seen people claim that due to certain kinds of evolutionary pressure, general cognitive function should end up being equal across groups, but I don't think there's consensus that this argument is correct. So, given our current state of knowledge, I don't see how someone could be absolutely certain that genes play no role in group cognitive differences. Unless you just take it as an axiomatic article of faith.)
Leftism is a religion, after all.
By your definition agreeing with anything is a "religion", including bashing "leftism"
He didn't give a definition of religion, but I suspect the one he had in mind, was something like sense 2 at https://www.dictionary.com/browse/religion?s=t: "a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects", with the added stipulation that these fundamental beliefs or practices are expected to be accepted on faith, and the corollary that questioning them constitutes heresy and is considered sinful in and of itself.
By such a definition, it would not be simply *agreeing* with a given set of beliefs, but rather considering it morally wrong to disagree with them, that constituted religious behaviour. Without going into whether that's a legitimate way to construe the word "religion" or what commonly-held beliefsets might be described this way, I'll say I think it's a coherent concept which is clearly distinct from simply having beliefs of whatever kind.
> I've seen people claim that due to certain kinds of evolutionary pressure, general cognitive function should end up being equal across groups, but I don't think there's consensus that this argument is correct.
It isn't correct, because of the separation of populations by the Sahara Desert, the Pacific Ocean in the case of Australia, and so on, meant that different population groups such as Australian Aborigines and white people weren't competing directly for anything until very recently in evolutionary terms.
ASking questions isn't inherently racist. But what questions you ask, and what you think deserve debate, is not value neutral.
E.g. If I host a debate on the topic "Is Hillary Clinton a pedophile?" I can maintain neutrality and calmly discuss the arguments for each side and their merits. But by having that discussion at all I'm giving credibility and attention to the question.
Likewise there are a lot of people in rationalist adjacent online spaces who, purely in the spirit of intellectual inquiry of course, want to have debates about whether certain races are genetically inferior, whether women are dumber than men, whether 'sexual degeneracy' is leading to the downfall of western civilisation, etc.
It is not conspiratorial to notice people employing very basic rhetorical techniques
Rather significant theories and policies are based on certain premises. Debating the validity of those premises seems like the right thing to do.
And I'm not sure what rhetorical techniques you are referring to. You seem to object to considering those questions at all.
*Do* people debate whether women are smarter than men? I mean, I'm sure this has happened once in SSC's nine-year history, but I can't say I remember ever seeing it, so it hardly seems common enough to be worth mentioning.
I don't remember anyone ever arguing that women are less smart, but just people (including Scott) arguing that women are not less smart, to no opposition.
People do regularly argue that men and women have a different distribution and that there are thus more very dumb and very smart men.
It's pretty clear to me that there are a lot of people who only or disproportionately care about the top tier of society. So for these people, arguing that there are fewer very smart women is presumably the same as arguing that women are less smart.
Insinuating that the relevant sum of activity concerning the race/gender questions is a spat over supremacism is a great example of the exact rhetorical technique you're trying to accuse the hbders of. And honestly, what's anyone supposed to say to that? It's not as if "a lot" or "rationalist adjacent" makes so concrete the accusation such that someone could defend against it.
There many imminent non-"supremacist" reasons to care about the race/gender/whatever questions which have been spelled out countless times (which is enough to dismiss the whole suggestion that this must be hbders' seekrit dishonest plot). There are many well-known friends of the blog who have good discussions without doing anything like what you're insinuating (like Hsu). None of that's addressed because it wasn't really the point of your post (use of weaselly language like "a lot" and "rat-adj" at conveniently crucial points gives it away) and going into further length just gives this angle more attention than it deserves.
There are a lot of anti-hereditarians who want to talk about -- and only talk about -- dogwhistles for "inferiority," vaguely scary rhetoric, whatever. That this happens to pattern-match the same "fill-in-the-lines" hackery that comprises most of the NYT's opinion pieces is just a coincidence, of course, and not its own, much more cynical game.
It is quite scary that people seriously argue that "didn't immediately ban everybody on the forum on a different platform that also discusses Scott's work and which Scott doesn't even moderate, who ever agreed with a statement I consider racist" and "is a racist". So much fallacy in this one. And the entitlement of the idea that Scott owes you an explanation and "house cleaning" just because you have a completely baseless and irrational suspicion... smh
Right!! I can't defend either of those statements about race because I think a lot of people who make them probably are racist on some level, or may not have the best intentions re: "intellectual honesty" like they often claim, but it's ludicrous to hold Scott responsible for the fact that people who hold those views have been allowed to comment on an entirely different platform that happens to host discussion of his blog. What does this person expect public intellectuals to do, spend all their free time scouring the internet for any questionable content posted by people claiming to be their fans and then go on a crusade to remove such people from the internet? If they did that they'd have no time to write anything of value.
Isn't your second statement, about Ashkenazim, pretty mainstream? It doesn't imply any sort of racist values, it's a question of fact that needs to be examined on the merits.
Well we can take the same thing discussed elsewhere in this thread about employer discrimination against black people and refashion it slightly to apply it to Ashkenazi Jews and gentile whites. Suppose you have three applicants for the same position. Two happen to be Ashkenazi Jews (and you know this) and one appears to be a white gentile. The position requires a very high level of intelligence. The white gentile's resume is similar to the other two's, but slightly less impressive on its face, but it is still theoretically possible that he could be the most intelligent and most suitable candidate. But you apply Bayesian reasoning and decide that mostly likely the two Jews are going to be the smartest, and you decide to interview those two and keep the gentile in reserve. You are particularly impressed by the vocabulary and rhetorical skills of one of them, and you decide to hire him without even interviewing the gentile. Was this wrong? I would say it was a practical mistake - the Bayesian justification is very weak, and the verbal fluency is also weak evidence of intelligence. This is especially so given that the applicant is Ashkenazi Jewish and Ashkenazi Jews tend to be above average in verbal intelligence, but not always exceptional in other dimensions of intelligence. But it was also a moral mistake and (in most countries in the West) would have been a legal mistake as well. It is wrong to discriminate against applicants on the grounds of race, because people of all races should be given a fair shake. And maybe it's easier for members of a particular racial group (white gentiles, in this case) to see this when racial discrimination is turned against them, instead of in favour of them as has historically been the case.
He ought to nothing
That would be an ought, so you are not agreeing.
Most often, I move because I can and want to, not because I ought to.
He already *did* shut down the forums where that stuff was happening ask that it be actively modded out of the official forum. I think you're asking for things that already happened years ago.
He didn't do that because he had a problem with the ideas. He did it because the CW was overtaking everything else. Which if anything makes me think less of him: he cares more about people not shouting than about not being bigoted against tens of millions of people.
> "Ashkenazi Jews are smarter in a general sense because of genes Ashkenazi Jews carry."
The issue is that this statement is actually, self-evidently *true* -- no comment on the first statement) -- and *your* issue is that you're too smart for your own good (like Syme from 1984), and can't help apophatically referring to thoughtcrime even when you ostensibly don't believe it. Be careful out there, seriously.
As far as I'm aware noone has given any convincing evidence that the effect is genetic not environmental. The observation that a subsection of the population who do a disproportionate amount of formal education do better on standardised tests is banal, and exactly what you would expect without a genetic component.
You can observe that the group is ethnically related, and so probably shares a disproportionate amount of genes, but that doesn't really prove anything. And given that intelligence to the extent its genetic is likely a complex polygenic phenomenon, and the historical admixture of populations, the justifications for it being genetically linked to a particular group seem like just so stories that rely on simplified historical narratives, rather than anything rigorous.
So scepticism is warranted
Yeah, people tend to forget that it's hard to cleanly separate genetics and memetics.
There've been tons of twin studies and orphan studies to show that intelligence seems to be far more hereditary than environmental. Twins separated at birth and raised differently, orphans raised by their non-biological parents, both end up very closely correlating the IQs of their blood relatives (the twins with each other, or the orphans with their blood parents).
There's mountains of evidence that most of intelligence is genetic, assuming you aren't poisoning or malnourishing one group outright and literally physically damaging their brain. Go look up some papers or google some summaries, it's not hard.
by "dumber in a general sense" do you mean all black people are dumber than all white people or that the average intelligence of black people is lower, and of Ashkenazi higher, than of whites in general? I don't think I have seen anyone argue the former. Lots of people believe the latter, and some here are willing to say so.
Do you disagree? If so, why? What is the evidence that all such groups have the same average IQ, or the reason why, without evidence, you would expect it?
I meant that the people I am complaining about make that claim on a distributional level, i.e., for any fixed level of intelligence x, that P[X_ashkenazim > x] is >> P[X_black > x], and that this would remain the case even if all socioeconomic differences between the two were erased.
I don't reach the question. I think everyone who has made a confident claim in favor of racism has ended up looking like a fucking idiot at best and a genocidal monster at worst in the eyes of history, which is enough for me to start from a very strong assumption that it isn't true. Racism is to social theory what naive communism is to economics: everyone who promotes it argues no, really, it'll work this time as long because no one would ever be a jerk, and they just keep being wrong and producing Jim Crow and concentration camps and redlining.
What isn't true? That people don't differ, one from the other and groups from groups, on very real measures on multiple parts of our biology that inherited from our ancestors? Or is the "not true" that you are reaching for something else?
Or are you fixed on the idea that there are some variable things that we inherit from our ancestors - like skin color and the shape of our teeth - and other characteristics that we are granted, whole and unchanged - from God? Because I'll go with that, sure - its part of my faith that we are all equally prized and beloved children of the Creator. However, with God as my witness, I'm here to tell you that intelligence - along with cowardice, patience, and all the other virtues and vices - is not something that we all get the same dose of.
This person isn't saying that it isn't true. He or she is sticking their fingers in their ears and literally refusing to engage with the question, because muh consequences.
If only it were possible to give IQ tests to representative samples of both groups so you could just find out the answer, rather than reasoning about what answers you must never allow yourself to get on moral grounds....
If your interpretation of being non-racist requires you to believe certain factual statements about the world regardless of whether they're true or not, you're doing it wrong.
I legit found the "It's a religion" framework helpful here, although I suppose at this point it's common enough that bringing it up risks introducing more heat than light.
I used to assume I was misunderstanding these people somehow. The reminder that, yeah, people have historically regarded certain beliefs as mandatory regardless of evidence closes the gap. And I think it's running on the same basic software.
Empty words without evidence. Personally, I've had enough empty, baseless words over the past 4 years.
Whether or not black Africans are on average dumber than white Europeans is simply an measurable fact, like whether or not they are taller on average, or run faster, or live longer, or have larger or smaller spleens. So there's no "believe" involved -- it's not a creed or faith or political philosophy to which one can swear allegiance or condemn.
And one can be persuaded by what evidence there is on the point one way or the other, and whichever way you go does not make you a racist *unless* (1) you refuse to consider powerful evidence against your point of view, or (2) you allow your conclusions about intellectual ability to create moral conclusions of social worth, which would be the same as concluding that beautiful women are inherently more honest than their homelier sisters, or that taller men are more virtuous, or fat people are evil, and so on.
Although parenthetically it's a mystery why anyone would even be tempted that way. We do not generally think smarter people *of the same race as ourselves* are morally superior, right? Nobody thinks Einstein was necessarily a more noble and upright character than some much less intelligent Jewish German guy who happened to empty the wastebaskets at Princeton -- we would have to talk to both people to find out. So why anyone thinks *even if* black people are a smidge less intelligent on average than white people (and Jews or Asians a smidge more intelligent) this leads to *any* consideration of moral or social worth for anyone is beyond me.
There are some discussions where intelligence matters to a much higher degree than in most other discussions. Rationalist circles will treat intelligence as more important than many other groups, as intelligence correlates very strongly with ability to think rationally.
I think we also see these discussions a lot in regards to politics, because of the Affirmative Action (fix the effects of previous racism) stance verses the Color Blind (create a world without racism, even if it doesn't directly fix previous wrongs) approach. This is a very quick and dirty breakdown, but I think conveys my point.
Racism exists in our world, including in the democratic world. In fact, it is quite common. As long as it's common, and as long as democracy is something we value, racists must be allowed to make their arguments openly. A dictatorship can declare certain ideas off-limits, but a democracy just isn't capable of that. Voters can be silenced on the Internet or TV, but they can't be silenced in the privacy of a voting booth. If we decide reducing racism is a social good, the only option in a democratic society is to engage with and convince racists to change their mind. That's not compatible with forcing them underground so that nobody knows who they are, let alone what they believe and how they came to believe such nonsense. For my part, I'm glad that Scott's forum is one of the few places in the world where racists and anti-racists can still freely engage in respectful conversation.
' A dictatorship can declare certain ideas off-limits, but a democracy just isn't capable of that'
This is conflating two different things: 1) Can *the government* restrict free speech in a democracy (answer, yes: Germany is a liberal democracy and bans the display of Nazi symbols) and 2) Can a private blog restrict free speech in a democracy (answer: much more obviously yes, and indeed, Scott does, since he bans people for posting garbage that just insults people and doesn't even try to advance a rational argument, and once banned temp-banned Steve Sailer for sealioning about immigration where it wasn't relevant.)
Now, this is not the *end* of a discussion about what views should and shouldn't get banned, but it is the beginning of it. I.e. Some woke people just say 'free speech just means the government can't ban your views, therefore its fine for any private actor to restrict speech anyway they like' and that is very implausible. But there's no quick route to the conclusion that private actors (or even the state) should never be censors either. These are complicated issues.
Governments and private blogs can both restrict free speech. What they can't restrict, unless someone invents a mind-reading device, is free thought. Racism doesn't go away just because governments or private blogs refuse to engage with it, any more than capitalism or socialism do.
I mean, yes, it's definitely true to say that Scott tolerates that claim.
As for whether he believes it, I'd say no. He explicitly said in "Reactionary Philosophy..." that "it sort of creeps me out even in a “let me clearly explain a hypothesis I disagree with” way", and what anti-oppression-narrative arguments he did put forward (which can only dubiously be attributed to him given the post's nature) were all in the "black culture might value academic success less causing less academic success" bin or in one case the "people living in actual Africa have lower outcomes because they are starving and/or literally suffering from tropical diseases" bin.
As for whether he should "clean up his house"... well, that comes down to the ethical question of "should we let people evangelise for ideologies we disagree with". Scott says yes, as long as they're polite about it. You don't. That seems to be an actual disagreement on the quantitative value of free speech, not a mistake.
I don't think it is a mistake. But I think it's terrible ethics to value politeness over decency.
Could you define "decency" to me? Because my personal experience is that someone can be harmless and charitable in daily life and also anti-miscegenation.
Also, I'm interested in your ethical reasoning (utilitarian, Kantian, whatever). Could you explain to me why Scott's approach is bad?
First and last day here. It is astonishing that a marxist is repeatedly rebutted with derision while racism grows and thrives here. Only one person is responsible. That person is Scott Atlas.
Marxism presides as a thinly-veiled excuse over many millions of lives lost in inter-class genocide while cultists(I'm sorry for this) like yourself keep prescribing it as the only possible cure to the threat of the modern "systemic racism" windmills purely because it's the one popularly available gap for its ideas to be currently shoved into. I'm saying that as someone from an ex-communist country, which in your eyes probably makes me and my ancestors less than human proving the point.
IMHO The most appropriate social system is whichever one can allow the greatest number of people with various individual outlooks to coexist with one another, yet communism requires perfect, authoritarian one might say, ideological conformity by repression if necessary to remain stable - see what happened to the soviet NEP, while capitalism allows you to partake of its goods without pledging absolute loyalty to the system and go around proselytizing through the very channels it provides. The lack of mutual policing is a feature, not a bug, and in a communist society you don't end up with mere public 'derision' as a consequence of disagreeing with the commonly accepted line be it the economy, politics or even basic facts of nature - recall Lysenkoism and the fate of cybernetics. It couldn't even achieve any sort of racial harmony - antisemitism easily reemerged within the soviet system at the highest levels the very moment it was convenient.
And as far as art and literature goes...a good piece to read on the topic would be https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/natan-sharansky-doublethink
But then again, the only way to rationalize communism that I personally see is to vilify any dissenters a priori so I doubt the read would be persuasive to you, even if stories like that are dime a dozen. In a way, modern marxism appears to me as a sort of a counter-enlightenment reaction, reaching for the supposed glory of its imaginary utopias of the past, all of which failed in practice or turned authoritarian like modern Russia or China. That's all I have to say here.
Similar situation occurred when Sam Harris was discussing race/IQ.
As a long time SSC reader, I hope this does not violate the "don't want to think about this further" or whether the lack of a "call to action" was intended to be proscriptive, but today I finally got off the fence about whether or not to be a paid subscriber
I'm broadly sympathetic to the press, especially newspapers - I think they have a lot of faults and biases, like every other industry, but that they're indispensable to a free country.
I'm still canceling my NYT subscription over this article. Didn't think I would before it came out, but this was written in jaw-dropping bad faith.
(And I'm subscribing to ACT instead.)
I agree. I don't _want_ to dislike or distrust the mainstream media, but they aren't giving me another choice.
p.just now
How many people do you know who are really really really good at their jobs? In each profession I know maybe one or two people. The media is no different. Being highly skeptical is of utter importance. The influence of large media entities such as the NYTimes, CNN, Fox, DailyMail, etc. needs to be considered (and no, I'm not claiming they're the same). I think the only issue is - and I do see this a lot - that people tend to be skeptical about one media entity more for what they actually represent than what they write. Hence people saying the NYTimes can't be trusted while they eat up everything written on Breitbart.
If it's a hard job, then you be more careful.
No, if it's a job with *high accountability*, you be more careful.
Apparently, this is not.
In certain professions, such as civil engineering or medicine, if you screw up big enough or often enough, members of your own community revoke your licence to practice. Journalists have been screaming for the past decade about how vital they all are to our continued well-being and I see no such steps to professionalize their practice.
And yes, this applies to Breitbart as well.
Is "the mainstream media" really a useful category? I mean – is it really better than "the blogosphere"? I've seen some pretty horrible stuff in the latter, but we're still reading it right here...
If nothing else, the MSM draws from a more homogeneous talent pool than, e.g., the blogosphere.
Maybe. However, this doesn't seem to be directly related to the article at hand, or to be enough to dislike or distrust all of it.
I wonder why I am such an outlier in this community. But I actually don't read the entire piece in "bad faith". I understand that the article has flaws, flaws that are problematic and I don't like the tone in the last few paragraphs, I think the author should have pointed out that Scott explicitly asked his readers to stop revealing names/phone numbers.
That said, the points that many here would consider in bad faith or even defamatory I can understand being written. Scott's writing on feminism for example - often with conclusions I don't agree with - is written in ways that are often so on the nose that yes, he will unvoluntarily invite people he might not agree with to champion him. Phrases such as the Voldemort one paint a picture that he could have avoided. And reading his Murray piece - and I just did again - I understand where he's coming from in context to his other writing, but really, is it so far fetched to see a link there that could have been more carefully presented given the risks of alignment at hand?
As said above, I don't think this piece was the finest work of the NY Times, I personally don't think it should have been published. Not in this form anyway. But I can't really read it and consider it completely unfair or bad faith in that sense. Of course I am not a writer being written about, so I don't know if my position would be different were I directly affected.
Huh, interesting. I am probably super biased because I love this blog and this community, but I did feel like the Murray paragraph was in bad faith. The way it put a sentence saying that Scott Alexander agreed with Charles Murray without saying what they agreed on, followed by a sentence about Charles Murray's controversial views on race seemed like a rhetorical trick trying to associate Scott with Murray's other views in the minds of uncareful readers.
I think it's both true that there *are* some controversial views on race shared by Charles Murray and Scott, though it's *also* true that there's not as *many* views shared as the NY Times article implies.
I think what the NYT writer did was shady because it appeared to give the reader evidence for Scott sharing Murray's views that wasn't really evidence. But that's a separate issue from whether this was misleading, as supposed to just a bad way of providing support for an actually true claim.
On the flip side, I find it odd that you expect Scott to so carefully tone police his own writing, yet don’t see anything bad faith about the Charles Murray paragraph, which was at best lazily misleading.
I, for one, expect the most from Scott, and hold him to a much higher standard than the NYT. If I only held Scott to the same standards as everyone else, why would I bother reading his writing?
Ok, but don’t you see how that can get a little warped? Like, “Scott usually writes so well, so if he ever acts like a mortal human being I am going to write off any criticism of him as totally deserved no matter how unfair, while ignoring how badly his critics would fare if subjected to even one tenth that level of rigor”.
It’s one thing to compare Scott to some platonic ideal of rational writing as constructive criticism - it’s another to excuse Cade Metz and the NYT just because Scott wasn’t perfect.
Sure, I certainly wouldn't hold Scott to an infinitely high standard! Just a higher one than everyone else.
I do wish the NYT wouldn't make weak, uncharitable criticisms of Scott. That'd be nice. But it doesn't matter much to me personally, because I don't read the NYT anyway.
When Scott makes the same kind of weak, uncharitable criticism of the outgroup—and the Voldemort comparison is, in my mind, rather uncharitable—I am much more deeply concerned. I will endeavor to doubt his other opinions on the same topic—which might not be easy, because I trust him a lot and sometimes find it hard to disbelieve him. Less trust in his opinion is a big loss for me.
Of course I can forgive Scott for being, like the rest of us, only human—but it is especially important to me that he be better!
Scott also takes this negatively is part of it.
Also the line between "bad faith" and "sloppy" is really really hard. I think a lot of people overperceive "bad faith" , as tied back to the Fundamental Attribution Error.
So, the author sloppily conveyed ideas he wasn't necessarily sympathetic to, but did an alright job in other places. This seems par for the course for the industry (& humanity in general). The author is a generalist, and the paper is balancing it's biases. In most of these cases, the paper is hyperlinking references.
I'm very sympathetic to the idea that this was a badly written paper. Honestly, I don't think the story, as-is, flows very well at all. The author wanted to really tell a story about "rationaism" but really focuses on "Scott", and as a result it feels disjointed in really dumb ways. I don't know if that's the editor, or what. But it could have flowed a lot better.
The author also tried to tell a story about Silicon Valley and about the doxing controversy. So that's at least 4 topics, none of which are told well.
I'm relatively new to the blog (and especially the community), and while I found many statements in the article at least unconvincing (I won't judge the goodness of faith), I found it surprising that the one about feminism seems to be quite correct. In this post, Scott says:
"I applied this comparison to a specific group of feminists who I accused of bullying and taunting people in a way that made them traumatized and suicidal."
I don't think that's true - the post talks about "are blurring the *already rather thin* line between 'feminism' and 'literally Voldemort'". Without the "already rather thin" part, I'd have agreed with Scott's interpretation; the phrase would have meant "people like these make feminism horrible". As it is, it seems to say "feminism is already pretty horrible, and now there's this".
Neither do I understand the bit about the edit. The way I understand it, Scott wrote something, and got criticized a lot for it, so he added a bit saying "don't criticize me for that"?
I'd like to state for the record that the reason I bring this up is that I've admired the thoroughness of Scott's arguments in most of the things I've read, and this item seems to stick out. Am I missing something?
I read it as "feminists are here, Voldemort is there, but some fringe feminists are so close to Voldemort they're hard to distingwish". In no way does it imply "all feminists are close to Voldemort", or "(all) feminism is horrible". Classic non-central fallacy.
Thanks for the non-central fallacy reference, I didn't know about that one. However, I'm not sure how it applies here – I haven't made any claim about feminists, just tried to understand what Scott meant.
As for your reading - OK, now I see this interpretation. However, I have to strain to reach it, since, with the "already thin part", it would say "feminists are here, Voldemort is there, but some fringe feminists are so close to Voldemort they're hard to distinguish, and here are some fringe feminists that are make them even harder to distinguish." Perhaps I'm just too spoiled by Scott's usual clear style.
I guess the proper name for it would be something like "noncentral fallacy by proxy" (Scott is saying some members of X belong to category A, therefore he means that all of X belongs to A).
It sticks out to me too - the rest of the response feels very reasonable to me, and this part doesn't. I first read the quote in the context of the post rather than being quoted, and I don't think the quote reads very differently in context than outside it. The edit feels jokey/defensive rather than a good faith claim that he didn't mean feminism in general is close to Voldemort. I think it's unreasonable to expect that an all-caps disclaimer will actually stop people from quoting him on what was pretty clearly meant in the original.
But he didn't mean that! I guess he underestimated how touching such a sensitive topic would affect reading comprehension of some readers (including, but not limited to, progressive journalists), but it's just that - a reading comprehension error. Let me me try to rephrase that passage in neutral wording:
1. Some recent adorable posts pointed out that not all <members of a group> are <doing bad things>. Some are <doing these, and these, and these good things>
2. But some are <doing very bad things>!
3. And the people who <are doing some specific very bad things that he talked about previously in that post> are blurring the thin line between <the group in question> and "literally Voldemort"
So (3) is a continuation of (2), and Scott clearly acknowledges that people from (2) are a fringe of <the group in question> (because (1)), not the whole group!
That's true, of course. But the point is that (3) also means that the line between <the group in question> (the whole group!) and "literally Voldemort" is already thin, even before the <subgroup> doing this <very bad thing>.
If you say, for example, "There is already a thin line between genius and madness, and this person blurs it even more", you seem to say that geniuses are generally close to madness. Perhaps not all of them, perhaps not completely, but more likely than not, and certainly more likely than the average population.
But... but... what you're saying is literally noncentral fallacy! Pointing out that <some members of group A> are close to <group B> does not say anything at all about the median of the group A whatsoever!
At the top of the Voldemort section of that essay, he writes:
"We will now perform an ancient and traditional Slate Star Codex ritual, where I point out something I don’t like about feminism, then everyone tells me in the comments that no feminist would ever do that and it’s a dirty rotten straw man. And then I link to two thousand five hundred examples of feminists doing exactly that, and then everyone in the comments No-True-Scotsmans me by saying that that doesn’t count and those people aren’t representative of feminists. And then I find two thousand five hundred more examples of the most prominent and well-respected feminists around saying exactly the same thing, and then my commenters tell me that they don’t count either and the only true feminist lives in the Platonic Realm and expresses herself through patterns of dewdrops on the leaves in autumn and everything she says is unspeakably kind and beautiful and any time I try to make a point about feminism using examples from anyone other than her I am a dirty rotten motivated-arguer trying to weak-man the movement for my personal gain."
So no, he does not think the Voldemort feminists are the exception. He's quite clear that he thinks he's criticizing the central example of feminism. Do a ctrl-f for "30%" in https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ to find that he also thinks that 70% of feminists are insane.
I guess I should have re-read the whole thing before posting here. Now that I did, I think you've got it right, especially if you agree that feminists mocking "Nice Guys" are (or were as of 2014) a central example of feminism (which I sure hope is not true).
I'm a longish-time reader of the SSC and I share your confusion. It's just that my (unlike the NYT writer's) prior for Scott/SSC is overwhelmingly "intelligent, insightful and kind" and also "sometimes it takes me multiple readings to understand." Thus if something appears unkind or perpetuating categorical thinking, I assume "I haven't understood." But casual readers (especially if fueled by motivated reasoning, but regardless) won't have that prior. Nor, to some extent, should they - to say "I trust that he doesn't think feminists are nearly Voldemort, to the point that I won't spend too much time trying to resolve my confusion" is a very trusting position and would certainly reduce the likelihood that I would ever discover Scott's evil should it come to exist.
My first exposure to SSC was this post - https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/ - and upon a quick/skim reading, it struck me as racism apologetics. Upon a careful read, it was anything but. At that time, my prior must have been "people who question 'Is X really racism?' are most likely racist" along with the related priors "long posts about politics or social issues are almost definitely *advocacy* not *analysis*." It's funny looking back, because know I am amongst those who sincerely believe Scott to be a "national treasure" and something of a bodhisattva ("a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings").
Anyway, I agree with your point, but I am actively bothered by the NYT article (not merely unconvinced). Most frustrating is the faint praise combined with the character slander, as if the "faint praise" made it fair. It makes me wonder (self-righteously and probably unkindly) if the NYT writer even freakin' understood what he was reading, or did the articles and remarkably insightful comments just fly right over his head?? A fair article might speculate on what Scott was thinking re: feminists/Voldemort just as you have, but along side recognition that SSC is thoughtful, nuanced, kind and not readily characterized (much less as a "safe space" for white rationalist dudes, which is a trite and lazy mockery).
See, the thing is, epistemically, I'm not even speculating on what Scott might have meant, I'm just trying to convey my straightforward reading of what he wrote, which internally seems (or at least seemed initially) like the most natural, perhaps even the only, way to read it. However, especially after discussing it here, I can certainly see how a well-meaning reader with some biases radically different from mine (and perhaps Scott's) could read in another way, especially at a glance.
My wording wasn't too good, I'm afraid (or I was trying too hard to ignore the article and focus on the feminism phrase). I didn't mean the article just didn't manage to convince me of SSC's faults or vices; many posts here are some of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking (not to mention well-written) pieces I've read. And I agree that the journalist is nowhere close to doing it justice (I can't say anything about the community - this is the first time I have actually actively participated).
Also, thanks for the Against Murderism pointer, it's going to my to-read list.
It's worth reading the post the quote comes from. I think you are right that it was more of an attack on feminism as a whole than Scott is portraying it as now, and Scott (at least as of 2015) is a bit less charitable towards feminism than other ideologies (the ideas in I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup might be relevant here). But going off the quotes alone will cause you to overestimate his antagonism towards feminism, so you should read the whole post. And furthermore, going off that post and his other well-known feminism-critical one (Untitled) will probably still give you a skewed view of his opinions, you should read more of the backlog for context and some of Ozy's posts (thingofthings.wordpress.com) for an idea of feminist takes he is more likely to be a fan of (they are one of they very few people with guest posts on SSC).
Scott does makes it clear that the subject of that Feminism/Voldemort post hits very close to home to him. Given that Scott puts that Voldemort line in the context of showing some examples of feminists condoning the bullying of people until being traumatized and suicidal, I imagine his anger at what he was writing about got the better off him and prompted an exaggerated bit that can (has been) taken out of context, maliciously or otherwise, like the NYT article does.
I'm annoyed that I cancelled the NYT over Don McNeil last week. Actually it's embarrassing that I had a subscription in the first place.
I respect anyone's right to cancel any subscription for any reason they want to, and I get that we all have different breaking points that way, so this question isn't intended to challenge your decision in any way, but more to inquire about the broader dynamic of protest cancelling (or boycotting when it comes to written content).
One of the things I find appealing about this blog and its commenters specifically is the wide range of viewpoints represented. I often disagree with Scott and with some of his ways of characterizing things. I often disagree with many of the commenters as well as the way many people characterize things. That echoes my wider experience in the world sitting with any group of people. I enjoy that experience.
I agree with melee_warhead above saying, "the line between "bad faith" and "sloppy" is really really hard" and "This seems par for the course for the industry (& humanity in general)."
I guess mainly I'm responding to the sense that one might (or should?) feel embarrassed over having chosen to read some content at an outlet that maybe crossed the line for them from sloppy into bad faith. But on the other hand, wouldn't it be nice in a way to unapologetically consume all kinds of content we disagree with without feeling like it means we endorse it? And more broadly, would we like the kind of world where people did that more? (maybe not, which is what I'm asking to you or anyone else here who wants to respond)
I think it's more that people regret having paid money to establishments with such poor integrity. I still like to read my free NYT articles to keep up with their viewpoints because I enjoy being exposed to a wide range of content I disagree with but I'm very glad I'm no longer supporting them financially. I cancelled ages ago over their constant hatchet jobs on Bernie Sanders, though.
I consumed NYT content unapologetically and may continue to do so; I just wanted to be sure they knew why I stopped paying them.
Perhaps what DDunbar means by "embarrassing" is that he trusted the NYT, and the dishonest way they covered SSC implies that their reporting of everything else is now suspect. I for one used to have a higher opinion of the NYT.
The middle way is to praise you for your foresight- you *already* updated on other available evidence, even before this! I think that's a legitimate view of the matter.
I also cancelled my NYT subscription today over this.
They've been subverted. The only way to get information now is to follow individuals, rather than letterheads
I am a newbie to this blog. I absolutely love the top-notch quality of writing here - it is very hard to find an expert in medicine who also understands data. This is a huge gift to people who want to understand a medical expert's honest take on cost vs benefit on various health choices. I have pointed two friends wrestling with an ADHD diagnosis for their children, to your blog. You owe no one any explanations. The NYT has only revealed something about itself with what it did here. Thank you for all the work you put into your writing! What a wonderful sense of humor and way with words.
Have you/they read his Adderall piece on the old blog? Very relevant to your friends' line of interest.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
reading "Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable" ~1 year ago led directly to me deciding to give more to charity. in 2020, i gave 30% of my income to charity (up from ~2% the previous few years).
when swapping "EA origin stories" with people in the EA community, i've found this particular post comes up pretty frequently (also "Fear And Loathing at EA Global" :)
so, thanks for your writing, Scott. it really does matter.
+1 for "started giving a percentage of my income to charity after reading that post."
+2 for "started giving a percentage of my income to charity after reading that post."
+3 for upped it substantially
Thanks for your generosity!
The same for me, ~3 years ago. Whatever good I can do by giving is largely thanks to Scott. This is one way his writing literally changed my life (for the better).
https://www.metalevelup.com/post/some-blogs-that-changed-my-life
Yes, that piece brought me into the EA movement, too. I'm still a student so I haven't had much impact yet. But I've been donating 10% from my summer jobs and leading my college's EA club. Wholeheartedly seconded that Scott's writing really matters.
Me too! I started giving >10% in 2017 and haven't looked back! I really believe this blog has a net positive impact!
Scott and the SSC crowd just wanted to cultivate their garden; to catalogue and know the world; to say true things, wisely and carefully and at length. Then the NYT came from its ivory tower, with words of honey on a forked tongue. At first it professed respect, but it soon became clear that it only wanted to kill SSC and burn it for fuel-- in the end it was all a hatchet job. The time for endurance is past. Our enemy is making war on all the free peoples of the world. Soon the nerds are going to wake up and discover that they are strong, and then--
-- wait, sorry, that's the Ents and Saruman.
Anyway, just remember: our business is with Isengard tonight, with rock and stone. Not with the Orcs. Best way to make the NYT regret this is to subscribe today-- and remind all your friends that the Times is now a left-wing party organ, not a trustworthy paper of record. The White Wizard's staff is forfeit!
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party. I meant this mostly as a figure of speech, not as a reference to any actual party organization.
Yeah, neither of you has any goddamned idea what you're talking about.
Sanders is not part of the progressive wing of the Democratic party, as Sanders is not a member of the Democratic party.
Klob and the snake-charmer, on the other hand, are much more representative of the progressive wing of the Democratic party, so the Times' endorsements of both are an odd weapon with which to attempt to attack hnau's comment.
The NYTimes that just fired Lauren Wolfe for a pro-Biden tweet, the paper that posted Comey'y finding a week before the election as a headline, the Iraq war supporting NYTimes .. is representing the progressive wing? Really?
Wolfe doesn't seem to have been fired for a single tweet, nor for left-wing bias.
This is a word salad, so I'm probably missing something, just as you intended, but the battle of Isengard was against ... Orcs. Dude was making Orcs in the basement!
"I was worried that if my psychiatry patients knew about my theories on race science and my use of brainpan calipers, they might trust me less."
Who said anything about trust?
That you brushed right past "race science" and "brainpan calipers," and went for that says it all, really.
He characterizes explicitly genetic racial explanations for Ashkenazi intelligence as “pretty reasonable” here - https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
I do think it’s clear from his discussion that Scott is a realist regarding racial intelligence differences. Quite correctly, of course. Most Rationalists who look at the evidence with clear eyes reach a similar conclusion as Scott and Charles.
“I was banned once for providing evidence” I very much doubt that this is the reason you would have been banned, if you were.
Wouldn't they still be archived? I don't imagine Scott has the power to remove pages from the Internet Archive.
I can understand why you think that's the reason you're banned, but as an observer to that entire exchange, I really don't think that is the reason you were banned, at least in the mind of Scott or whoever else was involved in banning you. You make it sound like you called something into question and were immediately banned, when instead there was a lengthy exchange about your claims including many posts by the original author of the book. I think you were banned for the aggressive way that you were asserting your claims, rather than the claims themselves.
For what it's worth, I'm glad you comment on this blog. You have an extremely unusual and minority view, and allowing those sorts of views is exactly what makes this comments section interesting. However, I found your arguments that David's book manipulated quotes pretty unconvincing, and I suspect that most people who don't share your views of Marx felt the same way.
Providing a safe space (irony!) for race science is promoting race science. Giving "basically any idea a hearing" is the the opposite of rationality, if not of "Rationalitiy." It's outright idiotic. The guy is an unsocialized dweeb.
My god, you people are tedious, and so incredibly tin-eared about it.
Never mind “endorsing race science”, biff is accusing him of using phrenology on his patients. Show your work, or retract your libel biff.
The real irony is that you claim that allowing an opinion to be posted here implies tacit endorsement... and then you post it here
This is a rationalist blog.
Back up your claims with evidence.
Otherwise, you are merely more forgettable noise that we have learnt to ignore over the last 4 years.
Show us the facts or we assume that you lie.
I think you're right, but calling someone "forgettable noise" seems harsh if we intend to change minds.
I thought you said they were his theories. It's actually bad because he listens to other people?
'unsocialized dweeb'
See, I agree that Scott shouldn't have platformed a lot of the bad racist far-right people he has platformed, but as an autistic person, this kind of language really makes me wince *hard*. Obviously, all things being equal, it is good if people have good social skills. But it's really not on to conflate having power social skills with being bad at thinking about politics, let alone with being reactionary. A stereotype of 'evil reactionary nerds' is harmful to autistics as a vulnerable minority group. (And also inaccurate if you think that the evil nerds are tech people, who are overwhelmingly more socially liberal than the US average: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/silicon-valley-isnt-full-of-fascists)
I'm aware there's a problem a 60% chance that you're the kind of person who finds this comment totally pathetic, but a) I just had to get it off my chest, and b) there is some chance you are the kind of identity pol liberal who might care about this, rather than say, an angry socialist.
You're right, Scott hasn't explicitly endorsed race science. However, he does believe that black people are dumber than white people for partially genetic reasons. So do many people among his readership. This is what many people, among them many actual qualified geneticists, object to.
Can you point to the place where Scott has said that? Because otherwise, it looks like you're just making stuff up.
I thought that was a silly misrepresentation of Scott's writing, but I didn't really have a pithy response to it.
My emotional response to this reminds me of "Radicalizing the Romanceless." I agree with most of what the NYT and the liberal zeitgeist _say_, but not how they act; it seems like they're forcing me to take a side, and I'm not going to take the side that lies through its teeth about a harmless blogger.
Unfortunately, in the minds of most, there seems to be only one category for everyone who opposes Cancelling. I guess I'm on Moldbug's team now? I don't want to be!
I feel the same way...essentially intellectually homeless.
Moldbug has been a gentleman through all of this and more. Read his latest on Scott and the NYT.
where?
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/scott-alexander-the-disappointed
That's quite a wall of text. If you don't really care for most of it, take a look at the section called "A chat with State Security" a the very bottom. It is about NYT contacting him before publishing the article about Slate Star Codex. It's interesting. It shows how they work.
<i> That's quite a wall of text</i>
Welcome to Moldbug.
Oh, it's not my first encounter. The previous was a technical piece that I also could not get through.
But credit where credit is due, I'm glad he posted that last section. It makes an informative addition to Scott's post.
This is the same guy who said that black people were uniquely suited for slavery. I can never regard him as a gentleman after that. That was beyond the pale.
Please provide the source when making an accusation of this magnitude.
In https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/07/why-carlyle-matters/ Moldbug states that the Spanish and English found that Africans made good slaves, and goes on to say he thinks this is due to genetic differences. That is, he is implying that he thinks that black people are genetically suited to be slaves. This was, at best, an offensive thing to write, and at worst, monstrous.
There is one use of the word "genetic":
"There is no question that biological differences made Africans better slaves than indigenous Americans in at least one respect: due to superior genetic resistance, Africans were much less likely to die of introduced tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria"
This is a fact, no? - that you are colouring with your own biases and agenda to use as a weapon, it appears.
Ugh I'm sick of people doing this.
But this is not the worst of it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11823022
Moldbug is desperate to cling to any shred of credibility that association with Scott would give him, and use this as fodder for his larger culture war narrative. Of course he's going to be polite.
The article hints at him being a source (it divulges the contents from a private mail sent to Moldbug, where the contents is damning to the person who sent the mail, who is said to have refused to comment).
You can be on team Voltaire - "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." (Yes, I know he probably did not actually say it.) There, is this any better?
(I've always been surprised how many people have felt aligned with NYT. There is no shortage of examples of genuinely evil things NYT had done - see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor%23Walter_Duranty
and, more recently, https://www.salon.com/2000/09/21/nyt_6 .)
The NYT is aligned with power. People like to be aligned with power; it makes them feel powerful themselves. QED.
NYT is a Schelling point, unfortunately. Reading it signals something about you that you want others to know, and you can have reasonable confidence that a certain type of person in the world will also be reading it and you'll then share some background knowledge and talking points with them which will help with networking.
Unfortunately, the role it plays as a type of social currency has little to do with its quality or accuracy. Being sufficiently disgraced could shake it loose from that position, but it'll take more than this.
There’s plenty of opposition to Cancellation all over the political spectrum; associating it with a few irrelevant blowhards like Moldbug is how they get you. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have good substacks. Chapo is still funny, or at least I think they are. Anybody with a blog or a Patreon is likely still just saying what they want to say; it’s particular kinds of media that have declined precipitously in quality, namely anything where something can be shared context-free rapidly.
(I mean, Moldbug isn’t even against cancellation! In his I-don’t-even-know-how-tongue-in-cheek plan for remaking America, he endorses as Guillaime Faye-esque plan to segregate people into ethnic microcommunities and farm out censorship authority to local quislings that will prop up the Emperor. Like a tankie, he’s just opposed to his personally getting cancelled.)
Glenn Greenwald is good on anything that's not US politics. On US politics, he is a nightmare of bad faith and injured pride and his own role as the "one true leftist"
Most people support some cancelling, the problem is figuring out the rules behind it in a way that are safe for discourse.
I think the NYTimes revealing Scott's identity was the most pointless side of this. However, I don't think the NYT will be perceived as cancelling for the actual article. In fact, the biggest threat was the name reveal.
There's a huge space available for people who oppose some of the things that get called 'cancelling' and approve of other things that get called 'cancelling,' based on the individual details, context, and merits of each situation.
It's mostly the people who take an extreme stance on either side, or frame the issue in totalizing and polarized terms, who can't find a home in the mainstream.
Cade Metz is a troll, and the NYT has stooped to trolling
I'm a lifelong Times reader, and that article — an obvious hatchet job — really offended me. Did you notice that it was not only deceptive and slanderous, but they were too cowardly to allow comments from readers? Very disappointing behavior from the supposed “Paper of Record” and a betrayal of its proud motto.
The piece is dishonest, I agree, but I'm not sure what you mean by trolling.
Trolling means writing something obnoxious in order to get attention
The purpose was not merely retaliation. It was also to use you to increase pressure on tech oligopolies to expand censorship.
That seems like a huge accusation.
Seems pretty on the money to me
That's the rationale given in the article for the significance of SSC in the first place. Not an accusation.
The accusation is the part where you say they want to use him to pressure tech and expand censorship. That part isn't the rationale I'm reading.
Then read the article where it explains that it's important to understant the SCC rationalist culture's commitment to free speech, a "window into the psyche," which explains why big tech doesn't censor dangerous, sexist, and racist speech with sufficient zeal.
Could you maybe pull up a direct line or two in the article that really give you that impression? I get what you're saying I just don't read it that way and really wonder if I'm missing something here.
See paragraphs following phrase "window into the Silicon Valley psyche." On mobile atm.
I'll post now that I have a proper machine. Additionally, equivalent material is in the subtitling, other sections of the text, and even in the metas when shared on social media. It's not been remarked on enough, I don't think, but this is the explicit purpose of attacking SSC and its audience.
<NYT>
Slate Star Codex was a window into the Silicon Valley psyche. There are good reasons to try and understand that psyche, because the decisions made by tech companies and the people who run them eventually affect millions.
And Silicon Valley, a community of iconoclasts, is struggling to decide what’s off limits for all of us.
At Twitter and Facebook, leaders were reluctant to remove words from their platforms — even when those words were untrue or could lead to violence. At some A.I. labs, they release products — including facial recognition systems, digital assistants and chatbots — even while knowing they can be biased against women and people of color, and sometimes spew hateful speech.
Why hold anything back? That was often the answer a Rationalist would arrive at.
And perhaps the clearest and most influential place to watch that thinking unfold was on Mr. Alexander’s blog.
“It is no surprise that this has caught on among the tech industry. The tech industry loves disrupters and disruptive thought,” said Elizabeth Sandifer, a scholar who closely follows and documents the Rationalists. “But this can lead to real problems. The contrarian nature of these ideas makes them appealing to people who maybe don’t think enough about the consequences.”
The allure of the ideas within Silicon Valley is what made Mr. Alexander, who had also written under his given name, Scott Siskind, and his blog essential reading.
</NYT>
To be fair, it's not like Cade Metz gets up in the morning and consciously thinks "today I will write an article that supports the interests of the power structure of which I am part in its conflict with a rival power structure", any more than a coral polyp wakes up and considers how to best play its part in the construction of an enormous coral reef. A power structure that relies upon its footsoldiers to actually be consciously aware of the role that they're playing would be a much weaker power structure than the one which the New York Times is part of.
Instead Cade Metz wakes up in the morning, thinks really hard, comes up with a dozen ideas for articles, and whiz bang, it turns out every one of them is a little salvo that supports the power structure that he is some tiny part of. He has been selectively grown, bred, socialised, until the confines of his mind can only think thoughts in that general vein.
At this particular moment in history the agenda is that the power structure of which the New York Times is an important part wishes to ensure that the Silicon Valley oligopolies are co-opted into part of itself, but in order for this to happen smoothly it needs to ensure that Silicon Valley is reading in unison from the right hymn book. Scott just happens to be a weird node that connects potentially powerful people to people with forbidden opinions; it's necessary to isolate and punish him at this point as an example to anyone else who might be considering straying too far outside the lines.
Very well put.
What makes you think Scott is being punished?
Suppose one year ago, Scott made a post on SSC telling us his plans for the following year:
1. He's going to quit his job and start up his own psychiatric practice—and he's going to take all of his favorite clients with him.
2. He's going to shut down SSC and move to Substack, which will pay him a quarter million to write. Plus he'll get a huge bunch of subscribers.
3. He's going to gain a shit-ton of street cred with an inept NYT promo piece, showing how "dangerous" he is to the Blue Team. He'll turn that attention into $$$ on Substack.
If Scott had told us that, we'd think he was—in fact—brilliant. What a plan!
Too bad it didn't happ-
Hey, wait a minute!
Just because one side is ostensibly winning a battle does not mean the other side was not trying to kill them.
Surely kayfabe is a thing.
Are you implying that the whole of NYT conspired with Scott to produce a year-long covert PR campaign for the launch of his new blog, while simultaneously destroying (whatever is left of) their professional reputation?
It's fascinating idea, but... I don't think I can buy that, no.
Well, when Scott shut down SSC last year, Gary Weiss wrote a piece on Medium (here https://medium.com/@garyweiss_86200/cade-metz-pulls-a-deep-capture-on-slate-star-codex-da649e8efe7) showing how Cade Metz has a history of mercenary doxxing for pretty unsavory clients before working for the NYT. I wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt, personally.
Thanks for the plug. The thing to keep in mind about Metz is that his big thing is writing puff pieces on AI. Which means that he approaches various people, they take him by the hand and feed him what he needs. He rarely writes anything controversial or negative. In this instance he blundered into an article requiring nuance and intelligence, which are qualities that he does not possess. I assume that someone who doesn't like SSC took him by the hand and walked him through his piece.
Why does he get stuff wrong? Because he is not a good reporter. There's no ideological issue here in my view, except for the Times's corporate predisposition on tech companies and tech people, about which you guys know a lot more than I do. As a careerist (as opposed to an ideologue) he was careful to phrase his story in a way that would be acceptable to his editors. Hence the "white supremacist" smear.
>To be fair, it's not like Cade Metz gets up in the morning and consciously thinks "today I will write an article that supports the interests of the power structure of which I am part in its conflict with a rival power structure",
I mean, how sure are you of that?
I've worked with corporate pr/marketing teams, there's a very conscious awareness that your company has competitors and you have a duty to hurt their brand while uplifting yours whenever the opportunity presents itself. I think this type of 'corporate loyalty' is driven into most upper-level/creative/white-collar employees in big companies.
I don't think there's any reaosn he *wouldn't* have that thought, it's not like he's too dumb to recognize the environment he's working in and the incentives acting on him.
Calling SSC a safe space is like calling atheism a religion.
Nah. "The rationalist community is a safe space for people who obsessively focus on reason and argument even when it is socially unacceptable to do so." There's some wrinkles in extending that to SSC, but safe spaces are on a continuum anyway. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-on-triggers/
Surely all these people telling you there's another reason are just all in on it together.
How dare he
When you're in a hole, digging is unproductive labour.
But my darling, you don't write about left-wing political philosophy, you just write "read it in Marx". That's very boring, it'd be much more fun if you *did* write about left-wing political philosophy of your own opinion. What do *you* (not dear departed Karl) think about how many beans make nine? Have you a favourite flower? Bread and roses - yes, no, chuck the roses keep the bread, chuck the bread keep the roses? Have you ever belted out a chorus of The Red Flag? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5z-ds-bkhg
I feel there's a person behind the parrot constantly touting the one-line refrain "Read it in Marx! Read it in Marx!" so come on out and contribute to our little wretched hive of scum and villainy.
>>>I'm under no obligation to make my posts interesting
Like hell you're not. You want to be pedantic *and* verbose, write Scott a private email. Until substack upgrades its comments software to allowing readers to auto-hide specific commenters, you can damn well put in the effort to be *interesting*.
I get that "marxbro1917" is a bit repetitive but I feel like no one actually engages with the actual point this person is bringing up. You just told them they're not entertaining enough. The fact is that most Marxist scholars would similarly object to Scott's phrasing there. And mind you, the vast majority of these scholars aren't marxist, leninist, communist or even socialist.
By the same token, no one here is under any obligation to take you seriously.
All I've seen you do is criticize and delegate your counterarguments to other lengthy posts or books, sometimes unspecified, or insist that others owe you citations.
'Just' is the weasel word in that sentence.
You are right in that my statement is untrue under the definition of Safe Space as used by Scott Alexander in that article. The definition I'm used to and was using in this case has less to do with providing an area for open discussion and more to do with providing an area free from certain offensive or triggering viewpoints. Unsurprisingly, I personally prefer my definition, but our disagreement is probably just semantics
I don't think so. SSC definitely put bounds on conversation, but that's not a bad thing. Unbounded discourse tends to be really, really shitty. Witches and witchunts, and all that. Or for a slightly different angle, here's a perspective on pluralist rules of discourse I've found really valuable: https://gemcode.dreamwidth.org/2157.html
Can you point me to where those SCC bounds on discourse are stated? I'm curious
The old Comments page had the general guidelines: https://web.archive.org/web/20190909060747/https://slatestarcodex.com/comments/
There are also a few topic bans deriving more obliquely from Scott's moderation-in-practice (e.g. advocating white supremacy gets one a ban), but they aren't as cleanly collated.
And one of the reasons I'm here is that the commenters on SSC/ACT have a way of policing 'themselves.' It's rare that Scott intervenes because the comments are usually already 'bounded' by the community. It is part of what makes this blog the place that it is.
It's my belief that the only place arguing is unacceptable at is battlefield. When you hear your comrade shouts "Left, armor!", you don't argue - you aim left, see the tank, squeeze the trigger, watch the fireworks.
Arguing may be inappropriate, nonconstructive, useless, etc, but unacceptable? Nah.
I expressed some thoughts over on the open thread, but while I don't think I entirely agree with your assessment of the article I think most of the complaints here are right and proper. Two quibbles though:
> Also, this became a weird go-to thing for people who wanted to do hatchet jobs to hit me with, so much so that sometime before 2017 I edited the post involved telling people not to do that.
I'm kind of surprised that *you're* surprised that this didn't work. I mean, I'll be the first to tell you "don't apologize to systems incapable of accepting an apology", but this isn't even that (or any other sort of retraction), it's just an expressed desire to avoid notoriety. Which is understandable and completely fair, but leaving it up while highlighting it as a pain point seems thoroughly counterproductive. I mean, if any other blogger included an inflammatory line in a piece then asked that not be the part people quoted, would you be surprised if people disregarded them? Would they even necessarily be wrong to do so?
> I believe they misrepresented me as retaliation for my publicly objecting to their policy of doxxing bloggers in a way that threatens their livelihood and safety. Because they are much more powerful than I am and have a much wider reach, far more people will read their article than will read my response, so probably their plan will work.
There is a miniscule chance that the story wouldn't have started pivoting organically the moment people started reacting to your blog's deletion. As you noted it made significant waves, and most journalists will predictably fail to resist the temptation to make themselves part of the story. Given that and consequences the author faced as a result of their efforts, I don't know that there's enough evidence to ascribe the negativity to any particular theory of retribution.
I think the strikethrough was probably meant to indicate that that sentence was no longer endorsed by the author (although this could have been made clearer).
Criticizing someone based on a statement that you know they have since recanted (without at least mentioning the recanting) DOES strike me as necessarily wrong.
I didn't read it as him actually dis-endorsing the statement. He left it up, he just emphasized that people shouldn't quote it out of context (the text directly after it reads as sarcastic).
Taking it down could've been interpreted as an attempt to memory-hole it; I usually interpret strikethrough as responsible retraction. But like I said, the intent could have been made clearer.
I agree that's how I'd USUALLY view strikethrough + replacement text, but in that case the replacement text is sarcastically saying the opposite of what he'd said (without changing the rest of the blog post to fit that change), and a complaint about people quoting the old line out of context.
He's asking people of good faith to not quote him out-of-context. For the sneering people, this doesn't change anything, but it would be something you would expect a major newspaper to be able to handle.
And I say this as an autistic 33-year old virgin who finds many of the attacks on 'evil nerds' he was complaining about viscerally emotionally repellent and upsetting. But I think he went beyond simply expressing that to a) generalizing about a vast, diverse ideological movement, and b) not even really considering where the anger behind that kind of nastiness might be coming from. And in the earlier Radicalizing the Romanceless post he basically demanded that kind of charity in the other direction from feminists dealing with radicalized "nice guys".
It's not that he doesn't have to answer for it. It's that he has added context that is being ignored, and it has to be purposefully ignored (unless Metz never checked the primary source).
I'm pretty sure that the Voldemort thing (including the striking out part) was meant as a joke (with some truth to it). Very much in line with the good old:
- How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
- THIS IS NOT FUNNY!!!
Would you accept this sort of excuse in other circumstances? People constantly claim that their nasty remarks about ideological enemies are made in jest, and there is usually *some* truth to the claim, but usually the remark is excessively nasty even with that taken into account. Or at least, that's my vague sense of how things are, I guess I don't have hard evidence.
In fact, I think you can find well-known writers making similar levels of nasty comments about their outgroup every single day, with about the same mix of serious and joking.
I may or may not accept it in other circumstances, but in this case it's not an excuse since Scott is not making it, perhaps all too aware of the trope you're referring to. He was not making a claim that it was a joke, but I was, because that's how I read it (which may have been wrong, by the way).
Seems like you're just continuing to throw your old friends under the bus even after the bus ran over you. That's some slavish dedication to your tribe.
Who is he throwing under the bus and how?
Well m'dears, 'tis often true the simplest explanation is the real one. Our boy Cade is bigging up his forthcoming book (it will be out on 16th March if you want to mark that date on your calendars!) which is all about "Genius Makers: THE MAVERICKS WHO BROUGHT AI TO GOOGLE, FACEBOOK, AND THE WORLD".
There's no such thing as bad publicity, and having a story about Silicon Valley and AI researchers and Rationalists (oh my!) in the NYT is nicely ploughing and harrowing the ground before his BIG IMPORTANT BOOK (you too could win a free one by entering a draw! or something https://twitter.com/DuttonBooks/status/1354822023634018308) is released for the tens of people who will want to buy it.
Reserve your copy now! (Or don't, whatever you like):
"Artificial intelligence is changing the world, for better or for worse. But you don’t know half the story. For the tale behind all the hype and the hand-wringing, I suggest my book, "Genius Makers," due from @duttonbooks on March 16. Pre-order here: http://bit.ly/GeniusMakers"
Is there a way to short-sell a book? Because I want to do whatever the opposite of buying that book is.
St Francis de Sales is the patron saint of writers, but I'm unsure of the theological position on "praying for someone's book to fail". I think I'll stick with the cursing psalms, I'm on less shaky ground there 😁
Deiseach -- when I first started reading your comments on SSC some years ago they usually made me talk at the screen in frustration. But over time I learned better and now when I see "Deiseach" at the top of a comment I smile in delighted anticipation, in a way I don't for other usernames. Just wanted to tell you that!
I think the way to do that is to get a bunch of people to buy a set of different books on its release date so it gets bumped off any bestseller list it would otherwise have qualified for.
I was actually wondering about the motivation of NYT and the author of that article.
If his research on AI is like the research he did on Scott, I'm expecting that book to be 50% quotes about HAL9000 from movie reviews, and 50% like those youtubers that pretend they had sex with Siri or Alexa.
This interpretation is high probability.
Well, now this would explain some things isn't it?
Also, gotta love how the best blurb they could get for an endorsement was from some guy who has written about Elon Musk. To me it screams of "we gotta get Elon Musk's name on the cover somehow so people think that he actually endorsed the book, so long as they don't pay to much attention".
Thanks for all your writing, and for keeping going even when facing blowback. You've done a lot for a lot of us - and for me personally - over the years, both directly in your writing and indirectly by helping us find fair-minded decent friends and community. And it's shitty that they did this to you.
This isn't pleasant, but the article (while distorting) isn't that much worse than I'd expect. On net, the impacts are likely going to be mildly positive. I wouldn't expect the NYTimes to put a non-normy group in glowing terms, so this is probably as glowing as is likely.
The NYTimes did garble certain views & nuances (which is incredibly common for non-friendly interlocuters), however, they also did successfully link this blog to the larger movements, with crude summaries. The "Silicon Valley" link is a little bit weaker, but likely done so for clicks. (Not that there are NO connections, but pretending SSC was the mouth or happy place for Silicon Valley is absurd)
I'm actually curious whether Manoel Horta Ribeiro is correctly cited, because if anything his practice gets larger questions than the reporter's. (I expect a lower accuracy bar from reporters than academics)
The thing that actually feels weird is how much this article is fixated on this blog, because this blog really WASN'T the story the NYTimes was trying to tell, and if anything, was a bit tangential. The "right to privacy" argument also feels a bit tacked on. (& to be honest, if Cade is right on how easy this was to look up, I'm unsure why directly revealing the name was so critical)
Lastly (to this article), I didn't get much value from the Rob Rhinehart article. I'd be happy to see a more serious bit of media criticism, because I haven't really seen any media source I would suspect wouldn't make errors on the same level or degree as the NYTimes. I think there are bloggers, but that gets back to earlier conversations about how "media" is a system for aggregating, vetting, and promoting content, and that this will always recreate as people are unlikely to scour all sources, and rely on reputations, & references.
If there's some serious analysis on the matter, then great. Most of the time, I see blatantly unhelpful invective on certain media groups, and then the substitution of completely absurd media sources as a replacement. Or even proposals to institute massive legal changes that will almost certainly make the world a worse place to live in.
The Rhinehart article seemed incredibly hyperbolic to me. More like an inconsistent rant than anything. I really don't think linking to it and essentially saying "make up your own mind" is all that helpful.
I had a similar experience
There was no point to it. It reads like a screed of someone on drugs.
That is an insult to my friends who take drugs and write screeds.
Heh, fair enough.
But seriously, it was junk, and it really makes you wonder what the author thought when writing it.
It really undermined the entire article by Scott imo. Rhinehart talks about the NYT almost exactly like Yarvin and the NRx types talk about “the Cathedral” and it’s about as off-base. It read like a nearly delusional rant. I like blogs and have lost some respect for the NYT lately (I dropped my subscription last fall over the original kerfuffle) but even moderately favorably linking to Rhinehart’s ravjng post really just seems to imply an anger and conspiracy thinking that is not justified.
The Rhinehart essay -- https://www.robrhinehart.com/the-new-york-times/ -- was to me a piece of woke writing, in the best sense of the word. The author has come to see the NY Times as an impediment to constructive thought and discourse, and writes from this perspective which is totally foreign to most people. Anyway, it made a favorable impression on me by showing the logical consequence of the NY Times recent behavior. My mental model now has the NYT as a pernicious and unhealthy operator in an age of opportunity -- where thinking for oneself is a possibility and the Internet is there for the taking.
> (& to be honest, if Cade is right on how easy this was to look up, I'm unsure why directly revealing the name was so critical)
Scale matters. If somebody thought to look up Scott's real name, they could. That's different than an NYT journalist publishing it and thereby focusing the attention and ire of potentially millions of readers.
The rationale is weak. The NYTimes doesn't really know Scott, and right now the only thing they really do know (besides what he's written down) is that Scott is a bit neurotic.
As far as vendettas go, this is less likely strategic, and more likely petty, or click-based.
Consequences matter more than intentions. (Not that I'm accepting the premise that NYT had anything in the neighborhood of good intentions.)
Ok, but the question is really about the intent of a policy. Or to put it another way: the NYT doesn't actually know the consequences, only the reasonable expectations and their own motives. And because they don't know & we don't know consequences, we can only evaluate on reasonable expectations and off of our model of the motives.
Also to put it another way: if Cade Metz wanted to propel Scott to internet super-stardom and the role of a public intellectual, he may actually write the EXACT SAME PIECE. (think of the clicks!) But because we don't think his motive, so he gets no credit for having that motive.
And if Scott is hunted down and killed by a schizophrenic who thought that Cade's piece was sent by God, then we still wouldn't blame Cade.
In any case, I suspect this wasn't done with good intentions.
I have a very low expectation of good intentions from someone who decides to propel a person to "stardom" *against his will*. (Consent matters... unless you're a journalist, apparently.)
> to be honest, if Cade is right on how easy this was to look up, I'm unsure why directly revealing the name was so critical
It has always been relatively easy to figure out Scott Alexander was Scott Siskind. Going the other way was much more difficult. And it was this other direction that mattered. Scott never cared if his readers knew who he was. Scott cared if his patients would be reading his writing. He didn't want people to google "Scott Siskind" and easily find SSC. The NYT article would have changed this and made it vastly easier for patients and readers to make the connection in either direction.
Right, but this isn't a particularly valuable direction for the NYTimes. It could be a petty vengeance? Otherwise, it isn't newsworthy.
It is possible I misinterpreted your original post. I read it as saying "I'm unsure why Scott thinks having his name revealed is such a big deal." Hence my comment explaining why it was a big deal to him.
Upon seeing your response and rereading, I now think you were instead saying that the NYT had no good reason to publicize Scott's name based on the article, that doing so wasn't critical.
Am I understanding you now or am I still confused?
Yes, I am saying that NYT had no good reason to publicize Scott's name. I understand why this is critical for Scott, but Cade is making the case that Scott's name is really public knowledge. If it's public knowledge, why reveal it? If it isn't public knowledge, then there is a point to be critical about it.
Scott made the “mistake” of becoming successful. He became a public figure. Public figures *are* subject to more comment and criticism, because their influence is broader. That’s why, for instance, defamation law treats public figures differently. However it came to be in this instance, Scott can’t reasonably expect to have a public influence, but remain anonymous. It’s just the way it is.
Still, I don't understand NYT's motivation for (a) revealing the name and (b) publishing this recent article. I mean, is there anything to win for NYT? In terms of money, say?
> Scott can’t reasonably expect to have a public influence, but remain anonymous. It’s just the way it is.
Not really, just ask Satoshi Nakamoto. The only mistake Scott made in this regard was having bad OPSEC.
The name thing was important because it wasn't easy to look up in reverse. If you looked up Scott Alexander it was pretty easy to get to Siskind, but if you looked up Scott Siskind (like you might if you were his patient), you didn't get to Scott Alexander. It was that direction of anonymity that Scott was trying to protect, and it remains to be seen if he'll be able to function as a psychiatrist without it.
I largely didn't take the article to be "very negative", just sceptical, but I greatly appreciate the rebuttals, regardless! Especially the Murray paragraph of the NYT article left a sour taste in my mouth - it wasn't exactly false, but the subtext it was deliberately spinning (with the second unconnected sentence, which by merit of its placement implied it *was* connected to the first, and the author will definitely have been aware of this) was implying way, way more than was true.
Here's why I am skeptical of the idea it was "deliberately spinning." Years ago, I represented a professional services firm that helped many different types of companies with corporate compliance. There was an article in a respectable trade outlet that had one sentence that the client flipped out about, because they claimed it implied something bad, and they reached out to my boss as a result. I just didn't see what they were referring to, and I had knowledge about all of this. I can't imagine it made much of an impression on a reader who didn't have this knowledge.
The English language leaves a lot of room for interpretation, in other words.
It's a good reason to be sceptical and that phenomenon is basically why I read most of the article as neutral (significant chunks of it even register to me as positive); I just have a very hard time interpreting the Murray paragraph in particular as anything other than loaded. If I try *very* hard I can sort of picture it as a juxtaposition on basis of "in one post" versus "in another", but since the Murray beliefs mentioned in both sentences are so similar even this juxtaposition reads as, at best, "Scott is inconsistent."
But I appreciate your call for charity; there's a lot in this article that benefits from charitable reading. The mentioned paragraph might even be one of them! I just can't.
Here's a more direct reason why I think it's not meant to be what everyone intended: he links to the post. Forgive me for being blunt, but you have to have quite the big set to do that and to try to lie. Some people are like that, but most people aren't.
Should it edited again? Yes, definitely. Even if it wasn't written with bad aims, it isn't clear and does come across as loaded.
Unfortunately, most people are never going to click through the link, and even fewer are going to read it carefully enough to see through the Metz’s characterization of it (people are lazy, and Scott is... not exactly laconic). I think Metz knew this, and I might even say counted on this.
More charitably, perhaps Metz actually believes his characterization is accurate, but that doesn’t make it so.
I keep seeing this assertion that people don't click through, and perhaps it's true, but it's just an assertion nonetheless.
In any event, as far as Metz goes, I'm not sure it's really a characterization, but rather a clumsily stated point.
Perhaps you could provide a less clumsily stated version of what you think the point was? The problem isn’t the grammar, it’s the leap of acting like “one time Scott wrote about one particular opinion of Murray’s in an approving way” with “Scott not only agrees with my lazy characterization of Murray as a racist but is totally on board with racism”
i read the NYT story, the authors reply and one of the links to the authors work in the Times piece. They are all good, i would consider subscription to SS because the writing is so good. Alot of good story's come out of SV as any read of Anna Weiner in the New Yorker makes clear and i simply thought editors at the times pursued an off beat interest story. I did not see it as a hit piece. The long SSC piece that i read was on "out-groups" and it was exceptionally thoughtful, insightful, filled with examples of a writer who thinks alot about his subject. Big media is trying to do its job, substack is a great platform for creative writers.
The hit piece seems to me like part of the death throes of legacy journalism. Reading it was a reminder of how bad and intellectually dishonest the old corporate media is, and how much better blogs, podcasts, substack, etc are by comparison.
It was a reminder of why I don't know anyone under 40 who has a subscription to the New York Times.
Here's a quote from the article that confused me:
'The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were “social justice warriors.” They were considered a threat to one of the core beliefs driving the discussion: free speech.'
That's strange. I remember the comment sections having feminists, trans activists, far leftists, and so on. They weren't a dominant faction like on some blogs, but they were there, and their arguments were taken seriously.
Scott used to keep a register of bans. Slightly more than half the bans for political topics went to right-wing posters.
Can Dr Friedman confirm that this is what he said? The fact that it's a paraphrase and not a direct quote makes me wonder.
The David Friedman I've read would never have made a comment like that, I'm not even talking about content; that's just not his writing style. Probably the standard journalistic "liberties" being taken.
I was gonna say! He has a very distinctive cadence.
When I'm reading DSL on my phone, I often zoom the screen way in on the text, so I can see the comments clearer at the cost of obscuring the usernames- I can check who's saying what if I *need* to, but I don't see it by default. I always immediately recognize his voice, then wonder if I could really tell just from the cadence, then check and see that, yes, I could.
This isn't him.
The only part of that in quotation marks is "social justice warriors," words I expect I said. While it makes it sound as though the "white supremacists and neo-fascists" are something I said it doesn't actual claim that, and of course I didn't say it. I probably did say something to the effect that most people on the blog were opposed to social justice warriors. Whether they "struggled to be heard" depends on whether that means "struggled to get people to agree with them," which would be true, or "struggled to be able to post," which would be false..
Thanks for putting that into perspective! (When I read that part, I wasn't sure what 'struggled' was supposed to mean, but 'struggled to get people to agree with them' was an option I hadn't even considered.)
Out of curiosity, are you happy with the overall way that the New York Times edited down your interview for this article?
No.
It's not entirely dishonest, since he doesn't actually say that I said the stuff about neo-fascists, but it appears written to make a careless reader think I did. On the other hand, he did quote what I said about the range of views on the blog, which I think is important and may be one reason that some people reacted to the article by reading the blog.
Scott himself (unsurprisingly) actually wrote some very thoughtful things on the dynamics and complications of comments, when they decided to remove the CW thread from reddit: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
There were a small number of very loud and frequent right wing posters who tended to dominate discussion at the old blog, and would disagree with even the most banal left wing statements. So I think that gave the impression that the community was more right wing than it actually was.
The comments on substack seem a bit better for that so far, but remains to be seen if that continues over time
To save others a reverse image search: the preview picture is of Walter Duranty, a disgraced reporter who wrote for the New York Times in the 1930s.
I already posted this link above, but here you go again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor%23Walter_Duranty
Are you quite sure you're not a troll?
Do you have a link to the articles so that we can easily check that claim?
> only Duranty being very specific about his definition of 'famine'.
Kinda like what the Turkish government does about the Armenian genocide and their definition of genocide, isn't it?
"Oh, sorry. What you call famine I have taken to calling Government-Enforced-Mass-Dieting. What I call famine is something else entirely and definitely not what happened in the Ukraine."
I honestly can't think of a more dishonest and infuriating way to justify genocide denial.
Dude, I'm speechless... this is by far the lamest trolling I've ever seen. I was actually starting to think you were a bot given the sheer amount of responses you have on this thread, but asinine trolling of this caliber can only have been typed by human hands.
Checking the Wikipedia article on Duranty, since you didn't provide any links, I find:
He published reports stating "there is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be" and "any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda".
Are those adequate to support the charges against him? I also find:
It was clear, meanwhile, from Duranty's comments to others that he was fully aware of the scale of the calamity. In 1934 he privately reported to the British embassy in Moscow that as many as 10 million people may have died, directly or indirectly, from famine in the Soviet Union in the previous year.
Would you like to point us at support for your view of the subject?
"Duranty was a victim of right-wing cancel culture"
Left-wing cancel culture: Destroy everyday people's livelihoods for saying feeling-hurty-things on social media
Right-wing cancel culture: Call out a lying scumbag engaging in apologetics and propaganda for an horrendous totalitarian dictatorship
Thanks!
Thanks for pointing out the Rob Rhinehart article. After a while it becomes pure Abbie Hoffman, Alan Ginsberg. 👍.
Just canceled our subscription, which had been maintained for the puzzle section. Straws on the dorsal part of a camel, etc.
Since June I've been sad not to have a NYT subscription to cancel. I just used this to convince a family member to cancel theirs, so hopefully a tiny good to come out of this shitshow...
The Rhinehart post was long, meandering, and pointless.
I just found out about this blog thanks to the NYT article and must say that I'm confused about the alleged negativity of it. The way I read the article I got the impression that the blog insists on freedom of thought, showcased by: rejecting extreme feminists, accepting valid opinions even from racists etc.
The association of the blog with influential figures, served more to show that your kind of thinking resonates with various people than to condemn you of "conspiring with Trump supporters" or whatever it is that you saw in it.
I'm sorry to say that your reaction to the article seems infused with way more negativity than the article itself, though I understand that probably has something to do with you feeling exposed where you once felt safe.
Though I can't say that I understand why NYT needed to expose your name when that has obvious implications for your practice and patients.
In the end, "I'm a Democrat, I voted Biden" was this really needed?
I didn't think it was as negative as Scott thought it was, but it was a great deal more negative than it should have been. Despite that, as your comment shows, it did convey some of the attraction of the blog. I don't know if that means that the author was trying to be balanced and had his perception distorted by his own biases or that he was trying to write a hit piece and didn't realize that, to people who didn't share his biases, some of what he thought was negative would come across as positive.
In terms of reactions to the article by readers of the blog, you have to allow for the fact that to many of us it wasn't just a pretty good thing, it was one of the most attractive features of the modern world, the one place where you could have civil conversation with lots of intelligent people with a wide variety of views. Imagine your reaction to something like that article written about your favorite book in all the world, the one you reread every year and got the name of one of your children from.
Marilyn Manson recounts that, when he was in Catholic school as a boy, whatever music the nuns vocally excoriated as the work of Satan was what he'd spend his money on- they wouldn't bother if it wasn't good. I don't know how dar this generalizes, though.
Yudkowsky's slogan that "reversed stupidity is not intelligence" is the correct response to this heuristic. <em>Marilyn Manson's music itself</em> is a case study - optimized for provoking a response rather than some more lasting value (although if someone does get more lasting value out of Marilyn Manson, <em>de gustibus</em> and more power to them.)
Something can be loudly condemned by the Times and also be quite bad, even bad in a relatively uninteresting way. Trump is the perfect example here.
Yes, the biden bit was needed. On the old SSC blog... Scott Alexander was clearly left wing, but his comment section had a lot of hard core right wingers. Also, he would occasionally talk about something he didn't like in left wing politics... And that would become a cause celebre for those same commenters. Also, the article posited Scott's blue, grey, red tribe typology. Someone reading that may think that Scott is so grey tribe that he's a techno libertarian who is above two party politics. Scott is saying here, "No, I vote Democratic"
> his comment section had a lot of hard core right wingers
This is laughable, he had ZERO hard core right wingers.
Source: Myself, six year regular reader.
You could also sort of source Scott section III in "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup", when he talks about his bubble.
Agreed. Multiple conservative sorts, of various kinds. And as much as it urked me to read the witness of his voting record, it is helpful to remember that Scott's *not* a centralist and def not a conservative, no matter how sensible he sounds most days. (Helpful because 1) it's who he is and 2) one should remember not all the sensible people are conservative.)
“Hard core” makes the definition inherently elastic, but Jim was posting more recently than six years ago and surely counts by any definition.
Really? You don;t think the guys who took any excuse to reply to comments with long rants about the SJWs destroying western civilisation were a teeny bit right wing? Or the culture war thread people in r/themotte
I disagree that there were ZERO hard-core right wingers (or zero of almost any political group). But I wanted to point out that there's no need to be right wing to think the SJWs are causing important damage.
The idea of "SJW" is right-wing because it's founded on a right-wing double standard. Right-wingers are not called SJWs when they do the same things they accuse SJWs of doing, like getting people fired for expressing their opinions (such as Colin Kaepernick) or harassing people for speaking out (such as Christine Blasey Ford) or boycotting brands whose endorsements they disagree with (such as Black Rifle coffee, or such as the NYT if you look at the comments on this blog) or endorsing violent retribution on people for their opinions (such as the many protestors who were victims of vehicular assaults).
Can you define "hard core right winger?" What characteristics would earn that label?
Also, what qualifies as "a lot." If your normal environment has none, then three or four may feel like a lot, and I wouldn't be astonished if there were three or four commenters for whom the label is appropriate. But I think Trump supporters, who I would consider a superset of hard core right wingers, were always a small minority of commenters on the blog.
'Scott Alexander was clearly left wing'
I think the reason there is confusion and disagreement about this is the following:
1) Whilst his stated views about how you should vote, and on a variety of topics-tax on the rich, gay marriage, trans rights, are left, in practice Scott spends more time attacking the left than the right by a long shot (not either condemning or praising the latter),
2) Scott is very willing to seriously entertain certain *empirical* ideas-rather than ideological positions-that are *utterly* taboo on even the mild centre-left in the United States, but very much beloved of the right, including sometimes the radical fascist right: Race/IQ stuff for example.
I think the NY Times article radically mischaracterizes a significant article from the blog as anti-blue or anti-left, when it really isn't.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
SSC is about as far the opposite of a safe space as you can get (not that there is anything wrong with safe spaces). Metz even mentions in his article how people all over the spectrum were welcome, which isn't exactly a safe space. I know writers typically do not write headlines but this is egregious. Did the editor even read the article before fixing the headline?
"Metz even mentions in his article how people all over the spectrum were welcome, which isn't exactly a safe space."
I understand exactly what you mean, but on the face of it this is such a weird sentence.
My colourless green ideas are sleeping furiously.
I know what you mean, but that phrasing immediately reminded of Kelsey Piper's taxonomy of how different sorts of people need different sorts of safe spaces, and some people (like her) need spaces that're safe for all sorts of rational debate.
Not sure how to post a link here, but:
theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/100561778176
A very reasonable and measured response, unlike what the NY times did. Please keep blogging and stay sensible and sane. We need more people like you..
This was a good and reasonable response until the last paragraph. You would never write the article you linked to about the New York Times, because it doesn't do any of the things that an SSC/ACT article would do, like marshaling evidence for its position or putting forward some theory of cause-and-effect.
Why/how/since when is the New York Times the root and embodiment of all evil in the universe? Was it when Ezra Klein joined? You just said Ezra was okay! (Admittedly, while attacking Vox, which is merely Ezra Klein internet-incarnate.)
I think Cade was the guy who wrote a not-very-good article. It happens: Not every Times columnist is Ezra Klein. And I suspect the article reflects Cade's view of SSC – also less than ideal, but not all that abnormal. (Even people who trust and love your blogs think you have an exaggerated view of the evils of extreme feminists.) But it's okay: A lot of people like your blog and I expect more will as you continue to put out great content. (A lot of the response to the NYT article was "go read SSC!" (eg. by Scott Aaronson and a blog called How the Hell.)
If this was a hit piece it was a really crummy hit piece (they should have hired Nate Robinson or the ghost of Chris Hitchens). Ultimately, it will just get you readers.
I liked the Rob Rhinehart piece - I thought it was well-written and earnest, more in the genre of poetry than knockdown argument but successful at its own literary goals. But many people have made the same complaint you did, so I've taken it down.
[Rips off mask, revealing cackling Ezra Klein]
I did really like some bits and pieces in there, for what it's worth, though I didn't invest the time into reading the whole thing since it wasn't quite my style. But "See if you can offend yourself" is one nugget I'm going to hold onto. :)
Can you tell me where to find it? I asked upthread, and I don't wanna pester people, but google's failing me.
No worries! It's been linked a little further upthread so I'll refrain from doing it again, but FYI, reloading the page and ctrl+f for robrhinehart.com will turn it up.
It's been edited out of this article but it was also mentioned in the Still Alive post; just ctrl+F for "minor complaints"
Even as poetry, I couldn't help but read it as a wink-and-nod call for action. "I have no particular call for action, please don't cause any trouble, buuuut here's an article about how you should metaphorically kill and literally burn down the NYT."
Can someone link to it again, or maybe just tell me the name of the blog? Googling "Rob Rhinehart nyt" doesn't seem to work. I get you may not want to endorse this, but I'd like to read for myself what it is you aren't endorsing.
Here you go: https://www.robrhinehart.com/the-new-york-times/
Thanks a lot! I tried using the Wayback machine on the post, then googling different things, but no luck. I'd at least like to make up my own mind about whether it's any good or not.
Thanks for helping Jack out, which allowed me to satisfy my own curiosity too. What a strange screed!
The opening paean to the value of writing was excellent. Then it turns into a firehose of delusional paranoia propelled by full-blown mania. It’s so over the top that I kept wondering if it was intended as satire and expecting the pretense to drop with a big punchline.
But no, it's apparently completely sincere. It’s vivid, I'll give it that. The guy can write, but I'm left wondering if he's a danger to himself or others.
I suppose it would be unethical for Scott to evaluate it from a psychiatric perspective for us. Speaking as a humble layman, if I were a friend or relation of Rinehart, I’d be worried about him.
Yeah, a worrying amount of the response to all this has gone into "mainstream media is an evil conspiracy" territory. Rather than the more banal answer that large institutions have imperfect incentives
For what it's worth, I really, really liked the Rhinehart piece as well, and found it a very refreshing and necessary counterpoint to the somewhat despairing hopeless taste your post leaves in the mind's mouth.
Criticisms like "you would never write the article you linked to about the New York Times, because it doesn't do any of the things that an SSC/ACT article would do, like marshaling evidence for its position or putting forward some theory of cause-and-effect" are... vociferously weak at best. Like... no shit you wouldn't, that's why you linked to his post, written by him, in the style he writes in, rather than writing more yourself, in the style you write in.
It's like a techno artist piping mellow cocktail jazz music over the PA after a show, and someone coming up and saying "you would never play that song, because it doesn't do any of the things that a Skrillex song would do, like building to a sick drop or overloading the subwoofers with a distorted resonant filter".
Anyway, not trying to yank you around, just feeling a little bit frustrated and foolish for taking a "silently disagree and move on" approach to the earlier criticisms, as that seems to have contributed to a rather distorted perception of how valued the link was.
I don't see how you could possibly take not "marshaling evidence for its position or putting forward some theory of cause-and-effect" as a stylistic criticism. I'm being pretty explicit: It's not a well-reasoned piece, it doesn't make any good arguments. Scott recommending to it is no less strange than him recommending a Slavoj Zizek video: At minimum, I'd expect an explanation why, and what he sees in it.
That Scott defends it as "more in the genre of poetry" reinforces this. It's at minimum worth bracketing in "this doesn't make its case well but feels cathartic", though to be honest, I think it's trash.
Also, saying "I enjoyed that article, but agree that it is below the standards of my blog and seems to have undercut this piece" is not out of character for Scott. It's something I appreciate.
You're judging slam poetry by the standards of a research paper. If you don't get it, that's fine, but expecting an explanation for why he linked it is a little bit "beep beep boop" even for the rationalist community, imo.
I was glad you linked to it, myself. I suspect it's probably the right idea to take it down. But it was both impressive and inspiring.
Well said sir.
I'm a leftist and I like some NYT writers, like Cohn and Kristof, but I just feel that overall the NYT does not relate to me anymore. I can only handle so much woke outrage.
And for all their dislike of Thiel, it was the NYT that decisively tilted the 2016 election for Trump, with their careless, excessive reporting about Comey and "The emails" a week before that election. They've never really owned up to this.
Threatening to dox Scott was just another loser move that would have made me cancel my NYT sub had I not already done so months before.
Their reporting on the Iraq war was also completely irresponsible. Again, they did not own up to it all. Then a week ago they fired Lauren Wolfe over a pro-Biden tweet. The NY Times is not pure evil nor the pinnacle of journalism. It's just another paper that sometimes gets it really right and sometimes really messes up.
“This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.” Succumbing to Gell-mann amnesia? No this is their standard modus operandi on most topics: race, gender, crime, riots, policing, Russia, Syria, heredity...
> For the sake of my own peace of mind, I am hoping to stop thinking about it the moment I hit “publish” on this post.
For what it's worth, I think this is exactly the right thing to do, and I hope it works out and this article --- and really the whole saga --- fades away as quickly as possible.
Thank you for returning to writing. We're all glad you're back.
People who read this should cancel their subscriptions to the NYT and use the money to subscribe to Astral Codex Ten instead. The prices are similar but it it would be a massive improvement for the world to have the money sent to Scott instead of them.
(Actually it would still be an improvement if you burned the money you saved from cancelling your NYT subscription but I digress.)
Hi. I'm a regular NY Times reader who had never heard of this blog before. But after reading about it as a place where rational people can have intelligent, informed and civil discourse on a range of subjects, I knew I wanted to check it out. It sounded like the kind of place where I could learn a thing or two, even if I wasn't going to agree with all ideas or contributors. Any virtual community is a microcosm of ideas, and even though I get the impression this one leans left (or, fine, gray), it was immediately clear to me that I would probably encounter some ideas here that I might find deeply offensive. But I'm an adult. I can handle it, as long as it's not a place that's overrun by trolls and edge lords.
Strong virtual communities seem to develop a distinct tribal identity, so I'm also not surprised to read that what I thought was a fairly balanced and interesting article is perceived to be a hit piece here. Maybe it is. Again, I'm coming at this with no prior knowledge. But consider that I am probably not the only somewhat rationally-thinking adult reader of the NYT who was intrigued by the possibilities of this community which the very same article described. It'll blow over soon enough.
Welcome! I find this place to be very engaging, enlightening and friendly and I hope you'll find it the same. :) Make yourself at home.
Unfortunately, rational thinking is perceived by the majority in a negative way, while extreme passion/emotion is seen as admirable.
This is an interesting observation, because before I read this comment, I would have claimed the opposite - I've even had a small internet mob harass me because I'd ascribed logical thinking to one group and empathic thinking to another and they were convinced I was attacking the latter. (They didn't realise I consider empathy, emotion and intuition rather important and oft-neglected.)
But what you said is definitely true in some scenarios - taking a rational approach to sociopolitical issues does often attract ire, for example.
Thanks for making me think about it!
I don't think negative reactions to having empathic thinking identified as such and believing it is the correct way to think are incompatible beliefs. Analysis of thinking styles is a rationalist thing, so when someone uses analytical language to describe your thought patterns, it is easy to assume that person is in the rationalist in-group. As such, if you ascribe to emotional thinking, you might see it as an insult, that you are basically being accused of being a member of that person's outgroup.
Welcome! The things Scott points out in the article probably don’t (and shouldn’t!) turn off people looking for an interesting, striving for rational, and yes, sometimes contrarian community.
Unfortunately, they are catnip to a certain subset of the “very online” - Scott has been the (social) victim of these folks, both online and in meatspace, for his “connection” to Charles Murray, his criticism of certain actions by feminist bloggers/journalist etc.
It is unfortunately likely that Mr. Metz intended these unfair characterizations to trigger a negative response. Otherwise, why mention them in that way at all?
Welcome!
You might enjoy reading some of Scott Alexander's older posts. I've been reading him for two years and i started to notice that I would mention an idea I learnt from him in almost every discussion with friends, be that about mood swings, covid, a math problem, our weird new acquaintance or artificial intelligence. It's kind of hard to grasp how many things he has written about.
There is a nice collection of links here: https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate-star-codex, but one could easily come with another set of equally great posts.
One of my favorites is this one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/. Even though I thought I understood Prisoner Dilemma Paradox from game theory I never fully appreciated its importance and ubiquity until reading this essay.
Thank you, I look forward to diving into some of Scott's writing!
Welcome! I hope you find something fun and or fascinating here. Or that you meet good people (which one can!).
As someone who knew nothing about you or your blog before reading the NYT article, I didn't read it as overtly negative about you, or wildly biased. To the contrary, it piqued my interest and provided plenty links for me to judge your writing for myself. And indeed, your blog speaks for itself. I wouldn't worry about it, if I were you. You've gained at least one new viewer as a result of the NYT piece, and I'm grateful.
Make that two.
My biggest complaint about the article was that it mis-described what I think of as Scott's most significant article and observation, and then didn't link to that one. It's referred to as though it's a hit piece on the "Blue Tribe" - but I think it's really an equal opportunity hit piece on all tribes, including Scott's own.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Welcome to SSC / ACT! I hope you find something you like (or at least that feels like a good way to spend time). Highly recommend checking out some old posts (he should have archives on the old slate star codex website, including a list of top posts).
A lot of people are in this comment section writing essentially "as someone who's never heard of this thing, I didn't think it was a hit piece". On the other hand, of the people who are acquainted with the blog, there's general consensus that the piece renders an unfair and disjointed depiction. Crucially this consensus appears to extend to critics of the blog/community, such as for example Sneer Club. I think it makes a meaningful difference to one's perception of the piece if you already understand the prior context; NYT's reporting in the lead-up to the Iraq War lands differently when you know that there was no yellowcake uranium being sold by Niger to Iraq.
I wonder if this piece was the product of a hostile yet well-acquainted author working with an apathetic and uninformed editor. Or perhaps the opposite. Viewed as the product of a coherent, agentic mind it's hard to divine what the piece's purpose would have been.
I feel that the NYTimes piece treated you fairly. Plus, it didn't help your case that your name is easily searchable, despite your attempts at being anonymous.
The concern Scott had was that while it was possible for someone to link Slate Star Codex to him, it was harder to link his real name to Slate Star Codex. The author could get from "Scott Alexander" to "Scott Siskind", as he mentioned in his article, but the reverse--finding Scott's blog from his psychiatry practice--was more difficult, and it was what Scott was worried about.
Because of the aftermath of Scott deleting his blog, the reverse is now easy, but it wasn't always that way.
This was also true for the people behind Chapo Trap House, and yet...
Seriously though, there was never a particularly newsworthy reason to reveal Scott’s real name. Scott Alexander was a perfectly legible persona, and that persona was the newsworthy one. The only people who give a crap that Scott Siskind writes as Scott Alexander are his close friends - and people who want to hurt Scott Alexander. Seriously, who benefits from denying Scott the dignity of a nom de plume?
fwiw I tried to find google his name right when this thing started and it wasn't easy for me to find. This was maybe stupid of me, but I spent a embarrassing amount of time looking through lists of psychiatrists named Scott in the Bay Area. It's shocking how many there are.
In the end, all it took was trying a few different queries and maybe checking out the second page on Google. Even then, I only found out through someone spreading the it in an effort to dox him.
What part of the Murray "aligned" thing was fair, exactly?
I have my own experiences with "guilt by association" and with the negative spin the press can put on things - and not just the NYT. In fact, my own experiences are similar to yours; some people seem to be looking for a way to misinterpret anything you say in a most negative way.
I'm happy I signed up here, this seems to be the real "No-Spin Zone!" (No apologies to Bill O'Really are given or deserved.)
Read NYT article today. Have little respect for them. Article linked to this blog. Subscribed. You seemed quite interesting, take care of yourself.
I honestly don’t get the soft pedaling of any criticism of Cade Metz, Scott. He lied to you, refused to respect your pseudonymity, and then wrote a piece libeling you.
You’re an honest man, and there’s nothing honest about making excuses for Cade. Forgive him if you can, that’s an act of virtue. But pretending you have not been attacked by someone who obviously did it and meant it, and went against much of what you stand for to do it... I don’t get it. Remember, turning the other cheek is an act of defiance.
How did he lie to Scott?
He lied, or at least was misleading, about the intent of the article. “Oh, I’m just interested in how you were ahead of the curve on COVID”, while he was apparently gathering material to paint Scott as some sort of problematic IDWer.
Is that full conversation or just what was shared?
It seems implausible that Scott, or several of the long time commenters that responded to Metz for the article, would have cooperated had Metz come out and said “hey SSC seems like a place for Scott to talk about his support for scientific racism and anti feminism”.
If Scott had talked to Metz about his opinions re: Charles Murray, it seems even less likely that Metz could have printed what he did in good faith.
I am willing to believe the original intent of the article was as stated. I don't think any of what's in it now would have functioned without the blog deletion as its anchor (heck, it's barely functional as is)
I’d be more willing to believe it if the original as stated intent had been included at all. Perhaps I am being too cynical, but I suspect the dark hints about ideas Scott was connected to were always going to be there (e.g. I’m almost certain the exchange with Friedman, which Metz to presented as “Scott tolerates white supremacists but not social justice” happened before Scott deleted the blog).
While I agree with your general opinions about Scott, the NYT, and Metz, and I share your suspicions about what the original piece was going to be... I think there's been enough going on since last year, with the response to the possibility of the original article, the deletion, the signed letter of protest, the cancelled subscriptions, and so forth, that it's quite possible that Metz was pushed from "neutral" to "somewhat hostile".
If a hypothetical would make it more concrete, neither of us saw Metz' message inbox. I wouldn't bet even 1 penny against him having received some truly nasty comments. That's just the way the Internet works. The nuttiest 1% of any group will be the ones that stand out and shape the opinions of outsiders.
What's your proof for this claim?
No mention of COVID-19 in the NYT article.
Anything more than that?
What more would you think sufficient for the claim? (No, but having noted that glaring omission, I haven't gone looking.)
Too much of a leap on your part.
Why? I am, admittedly, taking Scott’s word (and the word of commenters who were interviewed) for how the article was originally presented to him, but I’ve seen no evidence to disprove this either. Metz’s multiple mischaracterizations in the article, and the way he dismisses Scott de-anonymizing himself at the end as if Scott just did it to spite Cade, makes it sadly plausible to me that Metz was willing to misrepresent himself in pursuit of the article.
I think you're missing that the Murray issue turns on how bad you consider him to be. If his views on race were ten times worse, you might still agree about poverty reduction, and you could still say the two are unconnected, but you might not do so.
The nytimes is a normie mainstream publication that understandably reflects middle of the road morality. It's not bad, it's just limited. The assumption is that if a person is very bad, you don't "align" yourself with them. And from their point if view, or their presumed point of view of their readership, Murray is that bad. You disagree, so you think the matter of agreement is relevant.
Summary of the Wizard of Oz is funny. Also the Sound of Music: an ex-nun disrupts both a planned wedding and a distinguished military career.
Misery: Intimate personal relationship develops between traumatized author and his nurse after car accident.
Sorry Dude. At least unlike Donald McNeil you did not get fired and have to apologize for being a old white man.
I would cancel my subscription as a protest but I did that 15 years ago because I couldn't stand it anymore.
BTW: It is stylistically incorrect to call the NYTimes, "The Times". The Times is a newspaper published at London England under that name since 1788. All other newspapers that use the word Times in their names should have a geographic or other delimiter: e.g., New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Straights Times, Times of India, Air Force Times, etc. see Wikipedia: The_Times_(disambiguation) for a listing.
Similarly, if there's a hat on a table in front of you, you should never simply call it "the hat" because that refers to a hat in London.
Trade names and common nouns are different classes of words. The hat on the table in front of you is "the hat on the table in front of me" to call it "the hat" without further specification is ambiguous as the world has very many hats in it.
Actually the Hat was recently relocated to Amsterdam because of Brexit.
Which one is correct for "The Chronicle" - is it the San Francisco Chronicle, The Houston Chronicle, The Chronicle of Higher Education, or something else?
I googled "The Chronicle" and the first one to come up was the Toowoomba Chronicle, so it must be that one.
None of the above, it's the Duke University student newspaper ;-)
"Please don’t cause any trouble for the journalist involved, both because that would be wrong, and because I suspect he did not personally want to write this and was pressured into it as part of the Times’ retaliatory measures against me."
You have the right to forgive him yourself. You don't have the right to tell us to forgive him.
He's an enemy of free speech, and a threat to us all whether he was pressured or not. It would be wrong, for a consequentialist, to play "always cooperate" instead of "tit-for-tat". This sort of attempt by the good people to hold a bogus moral high ground is why the neo-Nazis are winning.
The offense here being that he published an accurate article about a public figure you personally like?
An inaccurate article, as Scott clearly pointed out here.
It might be accurate in the most irrelevant sense, namely in that it does contain no statements that are strictly *lies*.
Where it is inaccurate is in the images of the blog's community and Scott himself, which it invokes in people's minds when they read that article, and this is deliberate.
Imagine a lazy student, who went into the library and played video games there.
His professor asks him: "And, have you been doing anything useful today?", and the student responds with "I was just in the library".
Strictly speaking, this statement is true. However, the Prof. will be imagining this meaning "I was in the library *studying*", and the lazy student made his statement that way because he *knew* that would happen.
That is what the NYT has done here.
Much of the reason online culture sucks so much now, for instance for people like Scott but not only, is because of the widespread appeal of “we can’t allow these bad words to stand, we must retaliate; anything else would be irresponsible.”
We have long since arrived at the “...makes the world blind” end of that sequence. Only winning move is not to play. Go do something productive or frivolously fun with your time, or if you feel the need to find and punish evil, make it an evil to which physical harms can be more immediately traced.
Yes, please. I want to the reaction to bad speech to be more speech, not "how do we punish the bad speaker?"
I want the reaction to bad speech to be efforts to get the truth out there via presenting evidence. Keep a collection of bookmarks of evidence you've seen, and bring it out when the bullshitters arrive. So many people don't believe journalists these days due to—among other things—poor journalistic standards. Random internet commenters deserves even less credence, unless they bring evidence to back up their claims.
I think Scott has the right to *ask* us not to retaliate, and to say that he thinks retaliating would have bad consequences.
Also, if I thought I was retaliating on Scott's behalf, it's legitimate for him to specify that this doesn't serve his interests.
I don't think he has the right to issue orders and have them obeyed , but I don't see him as trying to do that.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
I doubt the neo-Nazis are winning, at least in the long term, but I'd bet any ground they've gained has more to do with the NYT and co. being insufficiently Scott-like than the reverse.
What version of game theory makes "lets turn this into a massive culture war not a debate about a specific blog" a good strategy?
It certainly isn't a good one for Scott, who would like to improve the world by writing and encouraging charity and running his psychiatry practice.
Scott's rejoinder to your sentiment was this classic written 7 years ago: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
I’ve canceled my subscription to the New York Times.
Cancel culture! Surely the principle with newspapers, as with people, should be to subscribe to them because of the good that they do, not to cancel them for the bad.
A lot of the value of an information source is connected to being able to trust that the things it tells you are true.
If you think this article (or any other NYT article) contains brazen inaccuracies, that makes it less valuable as a newspaper, quite apart from any moral feelings.
I sometimes summarize this distinction as the difference between
1. "Susie is a neo-nazi, and so we should fire her from her job as a math teacher"
and
2. "Susie refuses to discuss math in class- she just reads aloud from Mein Kampf all day, which is not about math. Thus we should fire her from her job as a math teacher."
Even if I suspect the person saying the second thing *does* want to punish Susie for her political beliefs, Susie has to go if we want the children to actually learn any math, and this seems like an important distinction.
Is this article enough reason to mistrust articles written by entirely different writers and edited by entirely different editors? If you judge a paper to be generally informative for years, and then they publish something misleading, do you really need to reconsider everything you've ever learned from them? Surely there are other ways we test whether the nytimes is reliable than catching them in some unrelated error or lie.
Papers have always and everywhere needed to be read skeptically. They're more reliable on some topics, less on others. They might be biased or uninformed, or even doing favors or pandering to their audience. But they're rarely so rotten as to be completely untrustworthy. Anyway, you can learn something from misinformation, too.
"Canceling" a person is an attempt to silence them completely, destroy their reputation, and make it impossible for them to earn a living or engage with the rest of society. It is a shunning.
Canceling a newspaper subscription means I am no longer paying $8.00 every four weeks in exchange for access to that newspaper's articles.
The two are not equivalent. Saying "I will no longer pay for the privilege of listening to you" is not the same as saying "you should not be allowed to speak."
In general, applying a politically charged label like "cancel culture" to something is a counterproductive way of discussing that thing. We just end up arguing about the category instead of talking about whatever you don't like about the thing I did.
In this case, my familiarity with Scott's blog allowed me to recognize the extent to which the Times's article was deceptive. This deepened my existing concerns regarding the honesty of the Times regarding things that I am not familiar with and cannot easily verify. Given that my financial relationship with the Times revolves entirely around them providing accurate information about topics I am unfamiliar with, I feel justified in ending that financial relationship.
Of course they're very different, but I think there are enough similarities that the joke holds up. It's not about you in particular, who may be judicious and reasonable. It's about the stereotypical guy who declares he's canceling his subscription when he's angry about something that's just been published.
There's the urge to draw a bright line separating yourself from the thing. There's the desire for consequences, for justice or punishment. There's the aspect of it being an emotional reaction. And there's the desire to say it publicly, simply to be seen, and also to perhaps become part of something bigger than yourself by saying it.
But I think the most interesting similarity is how easily we fixate on the bad and forget the good.
The Peter Thiel thing is really annoying. Peter insists on doing and saying embarrassing political stuff while being so awesome that I still do have to resist the urge to "do something awkward like starting a cult".
Peter Thiel seems to be like Glenn Greenwald, except with a more few skills and accomplishments. He's not evil, just incredibly unpleasant and arrogant.
I don't really have too many gripes with his personality, it's the Trump support and openly musing about anti-democracy that makes it awkward that he's one of the largest funders of projects I admire like the Thiel Fellowship, MIRI, SENS, etc.
The anti-democracy musings reflect his arrogance and are a good reflection of what is unappealing about people like him. I don't think he's a bad person for feeling like this. However, I do think it's the sort of mentality that could get us into trouble, and there seems to be a lot of that with people like him.
We don't use democracy for coke vs pepsi. No vote, people just drink what they like. The assumption that voting on policies where the majority impose on minorities is obviously correct seems more arrogant to me.
Weird comparisons aside, what's your alternative?
For lots of decisions markets work. Instead of voting on what products or services to use and what standards should regulate those products and services, just let individuals make their own decisions based on their preferences. E.g., instead of imposing one Social Security system on all, let people opt in (or out) to their preferred old age insurance system. Move as many decisions as possible out of politics and into the market.
When it comes to rule-making for criminal and civil law, various alternatives can work, but I have a strong preference for localism with easy exit. Decision-making made at small scale makes it so if people don't like the rules they can move easily to competing jurisdictions with relative ease. A return to City-States (or HOA-states :) ).
At the small scale various decision-making strategies can be tried, with different strategies working in various contexts. Direct democracy, representative republic, unanimous consent, monarchy, and corporate structure with a CEO are some examples.
And for non geographic based policy making, you can have markets in private rights enforcement agencies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PnkC7CNvyI
All I know about him is, he’s a billionaire, he supports trump, he uses his money to destroy his enemies. I’m no fan of gawker and that style of intrusive gossip “journalism”, so I don’t weep for their demise, but having such power in a man who apparently couldn’t see trump for who and what he is, is deeply unsettling.
I can see Trump for who and what he is, but still think he's a lot better than Clinton or Biden (or Cruz or Jeb for that matter). What does that make me?
(NB I'm also not a billionaire, if that helps.)
Let me add to your amazement, then. I voted for Trump over Clinton, voted for him over Biden, and I am female. I feel that the platform of the Democrat party - especially under the nepotism of the Clintons - is far more toxic to the future of America than Trump could ever have been. And I am deeply saddened to know that people are as ignorant of enlightenment values as to think supporting Trump over Biden is uncalled for.
Her statement doesn't imply that, since there are a variety of reasons someone might support Trump over his opponents without admiring him.
An idiot.
Manners, boys. Manners.