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
Remember that I've pressed Scott Alexander many times on his sloppy citations and he rarely fixes his mistakes. If we're being sceptical about NYT I think we should also be sceptical about Scott Alexander himself.
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.
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.
You can ctrl+f "fallacy" and find the section I am referring to quite quickly. I did not provide a citation because blogs do not have page numbers and this was a very recent mistake that I assumed everyone would know about by now. I should not have assumed this, you're correct. Often it takes a long time for knowledge of Scott's mistakes to disseminate among his readers.
Now, I have asked Scott Alexander for a citation regarding this supposed "Fallacy". He never replied or cited any place where I could find this fallacy.
In Scott's recent humour article on Cryptocurrencies Scott made a joke that doesn't really make sense if you're familiar with Marx's criticisms of money and the commodity form. In response Scott admitted that his knowledge of Marx was based on "gestalt impressions". I replied asking if he often writes blogs based on things he has only vaguely thought about. I don't know how to link individual comments but you can find it here if you ctrl+f "gestalt":
Certainly, given this exchange I have my doubts that Scott Alexander will even be able to give me a citation regarding "Marx's Fallacy" - I have doubts that Scott Alexander has ever read Marx at all, let alone has any interest in treating his political philosophy charitably. Seems like he's more interested in making poorly-thought-out jokes about the material rather than engaging with the out-group.
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.”"
He is not citing Marx directly, of course, but Marx clearly either didn’t believe that his future society was going to be a tyranny or pretended to not believe it. Either way it was a tyranny everywhere it was tried out. Which wouldn’t have surprised conservatives, moderate socialists or anarchists at the time. Especially the latter.
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.
Singer doesn't do a particularly good job showing the extent of Marx's criticisms of classical political economy.
"Marx does not challenge the classical economists within the presuppositions of their science."
Marx didn't challenge economists on certain presuppositions, but he took some of those presuppositions to places that were truly uncomfortable to most economists, which I think becomes a challenge in and of itself. On other presuppositions he did openly challenge them, first that comes to mind is Jean-Baptise Say
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.
>There was no primary source - read the original comment - he wrote :
>" What I sometimes call Marx's Fallacy"
>It's his "opinion".
Why name it after Marx then? If we're allowed to just list random opinions that we disagree with "Fallacies" and then name them after out political opponents... well... that's a level of pettiness I don't want to associate with Scott Alexander. That's why I'm hoping he will come through and actually list some Marxist citations here.
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.
I have only been banned on Scott's previous blog once, and it was for proving that someone had misquoted Marx in a book they published (!). For this commitment to truth and proper citations I was censored.
I think I was banned from the subreddit by the moderator who posts the Unabomber Manifesto everywhere and calls himself an "ethno-utilitarian". And yes, it was hard to have a productive conversation with that guy moderating the sub, but I tried my best.
>Marx is even denser than Moldbug - it's a big investment of time and mental energy
I'm a big believer in the necessity of hard intellectual work when we're talking about these kinds of political and philosophical issues. When Scott Alexander comes along, makes an extremely obvious mistake, then excuses himself by saying he has a "gestalt impression" of Marx, then never actually quotes Marx or attempts to read him - then let's just say I find that lacking rigor, to say the least. This is just one incident among many where Scott has shown he doesn't want to engage with leftist thought. We've gone from intellectual precepts like reason, charitability, steelmanning and sources to.... making jokes (that don't even make sense) on a blog?
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.
I'm not going to go through that list item by item but I'm familiar with point 25 because I was one of the people who corrected him.
Even here Scott is hedging his bets and unable to fully admit his fault:
"Some people brought up that this phrase may usually be used in a way opposite to the way I was describing it. See the comments for discussion, but given the potential error I excised it from the post."
There was no "may usually" or "potential error" here. He straight up misunderstood an intra-left discussion and ploughed ahead with his article. Then when it was pointed out that this was a mistake he excised it from the post without any consideration to how he was able to make the mistake in the first place and how that extremely basic mistake might change how he approaches the issue in general.
But no, just delete one sentence, say there is a "potential error" and move on, I guess.
This typifies Scott's sloppy thinking in this specific area of study.
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.
>whether banning marxbro1917 from an online discussion space is likely to improve the quality of discussion.
What it will do is make the discussion one where Scott misrepresents his political opponents and then nobody notices (or is too polite to bring it up). I'm basically functioning as the boy who says 'the emperor has no clothes' when it comes to citations.
You may find discussion of citations extremely boring and generally not "fun". But it's a valuable conversation to have if you want your discussion based in reality.
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 asking for citations as simply as "where did Marx say that?" strikes you as a parody, then I think you're simply not treating Marx's politics charitably. Marx is an outgroup thinker and I think he deserves to at least have his ideas discussed properly rather than people just make up positions he didn't actually hold.
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.
>Your rabid is perpetuating the stereotype of marxists as a bunch of loony sociopaths.
The idea that simply asking someone to provide citations is the behaviour of a "sociopath" shows how disconnected from rationality some people have become. Marx is an outgroup thinker and he deserves to have his works read charitably.
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.
>Few people care abut marx here, and your histrionic comments push people further away.
I've had some positive comments and PMs on reddit. People here also push the little 'heart' button beneath my comments. I think there's something of a climate of fear where people don't want to contradict Scott Alexander on things like citations. Hopefully there will be a lot more criticisms and discussion on this important matter going forward.
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.
The humour of jokes is subjective so I think this seems like a rule designed to allow people to arbitrarily enforce things. In practice this will lead to the allowing of jokes that poke fun of outgroups (e.g. Marxists) while censoring jokes that poke fun of the Rationalist ingroup.
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
A better solution to poverty would be building an economic system that didn't require poverty and unemployment. You align yourself with Charles Murray here and strawman the people who thinking planning a better system is possible. This does seem quite conservative, to say the least.
The New York Times is a banal centrist newspaper, but I don't not think that it's unfair that they connected you to Charles Murray. If you wish to make the case that this is "unconnected" then you'll have to show how you can disconnect Charles Murray's opinions on IQ and class from his opinions on IQ and race. As far as I can tell you only did this by using a "55 year old Kentucky trucker" - a job and location that is coded as white. This is a surface-level change using an example smartly chosen to reduce flak, not a deep difference in your actual analysis.
I'm also unsure that Scott Alexander should be complaining so much about "brazen falsehoods" given that you've admitted you've written articles with only a "gestalt impression" of the subject in question, and when pressed for citations you come up empty-handed.
A gag that deliberately misrepresents the outgroup. These kinds of thoughtless jokes just serve flatter the biases that already exist against outgroup thinkers like Marx. Instead of engaging with Marxist thought, Scott instead writes tribal and petty jokes.
I care about the truth and I hope my comments will get SSC (ACT) readers to think more critically about how Scott Alexander has misrepresented Marxist thought.
Surely if we're critical about the NYT we can also be critical of Scott Alexander's blog.
I'm suggesting here that Scott Alexander would not like it if his critics were to dispense with our sourced argumentation and politeness and instead just started raining jokes down on him mercilessly.
I am asking Scott to do the same for thinkers like Marx who are outgroup. The "jokes" Scott wrote show a deep ignorance about the political positions Marx actually held. So much so that it appeared like Scott Alexander would not be able to pass an Ideological Turing Test on the matter.
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.
On average? Not that long, maybe an hour or two. There's the added benefit of re-visiting Marxists texts. It's strange to me that Scott Alexander is quite prolific yet I'm ridiculed for being a prolific writer also. Perhaps I should be writing longer form pieces myself? Really bring together my thoughts into one centralized place.
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.
If you added up all my comments on Marx here I suspect it would only amount to a couple thousands words at most. If you were to compare the amount of words I write to the amount of words Scott Alexander writes I think he would come out on top most days. Have you ever accused Scott Alexander of having a mental health issue based on the "deluge" of writings he posts?
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,
Ho Chi Minh also had some pretty good poetry. Stalin did wrote some but it's less good in my opinion (I think he wrote it when he was young and didn't continue as an adult).
1. I am, personally, a big fan and proponent of 'reading the classics'. That means I generally recommend Marx as a source if only because it's good to work from the source and then read the wider debates around Marx's work afterwards. I think there's also a lot of style and flavour that a person misses out on if you read someone else's summary. I think for a SSC fan, especially, a lot of the fun of reading comes from Marx's weird asides/detours, turns of phrase, sarcastic footnotes, and so on.
2. I can recommend a few things, but one early thing that really helped me were David Harvey's lectures on Capital:
He seems like a generally affable and interesting guy, and I liked his focus on the concrete economic questions rather than the philosophical implications of alienation that some other introductory material seemed to focus on.
I also read Ben Fine & Alfredo Saad-Filho's "Marx's Capital" which you can find as a pdf floating around the internet pretty easy.
It's been many, many years since I have read/listened to these, and I may not find them as edifying as I used to. I've read a few criticisms of David Harvey that I've found useful too, e.g.:
It's easy to get stuck in a never-ending rabbit hole when it comes to this stuff. If you have any more specific interests within Marxism I might be able to recommend other particular texts.
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 guess I don't really understand how you're disconnecting Charles Murray's thoughts on race from his thoughts on class. Or how Scott Alexander would do this.
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.
If you're talking about "generational poverty" in America you're already talking about race issues given the historical (and ongoing) discrimination against and class oppression of people based on their race. Let's look at something as simple as the colonisation of America in the first place. This was both a class issue (creation of capitalism through a "primitive accumulation" and private ownership of the lands, displacement of those already using the lands) and a race issue (killings of Indigenous in taking over their lands, suppression of their culture, etc)
Again, I just don't really see how Scott can disentangle class and race issues in Charles Murray's political thought. Or how he could do it given a wider historical knowledge of how race is produced and experienced in America.
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?
Well, how would Scott separate Murray's writings on race from his writings on class? It seems difficult since they're based on the same underlying genetic arguments, as far as I can tell. This requires a more thorough investigation, not a simple "I agree with one but not the other".
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.”
I suppose I would be interested in Scott Alexander writing a longer piece on how he is approaching Charles Murray's opinions on class, because it's not especially clear from the original piece. Certainly I think treating Charles Murray's analysis of class as somehow inherently separated from his analysis of race is a difficult case to make, and not one that should be assumed by the NYT. But I would love to read Scott Alexander make a more robust argument here.
Scott Alexander never actually explains how this is a falsehood though. Perhaps he needs to write a longer piece about what exactly he agrees with in Charles Murray's writings on class.
> 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.
Compared to some of the approaches Scott Alexander himself listed in the article (communism and anarcho-syndicalism), UBI is undoubtedly conservative. Aligning yourself with Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative thinktank) also seems a bit conservative.
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”.
But was UBI even a left position among the (very centrist) Democratic Party? Seems to be coming from Yang and tech-sector Silicon Valley types. Not Sanders and the 'left wing' of the Democratic Party (such as it is).
This is in addition to Scott boosting conservative think tankers while strawmanning and dismissing left wing ideologies... Definitely seems like a conservative impulse on the part of Scott Alexander.
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?
Well he agreed with Charles Murray on this issue, did he not? This is not something as obvious as 2+2=4, this is a very particular analysis of class dynamics. This deserves a longer treatment by Scott Alexander, if he writes a longer and more specific analysis then people wont be able to misrepresent his views. Since so much of Scott Alexander's argument rests on implying that he agrees with Charles Murray on class (without being specific) then I don't think it should be surprising when people take that implication to places Scott Alexander might not have meant.
Also I'm pretty sure if I said "Adolph Hitler has some views I disagree with but I agree with him about mathematics" most people would probably want some sort of further explanation. Perhaps you should do an experiment with this and you can tell me the results.
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)
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!
I don't think they even represent the "progressive wing" of the Democratic party, from memory they threw their weight behind Klobuchar and Warren. Rather than Sanders. And the Democrats are not a left-wing party anyway.
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.
Sanders may not be technically a member of the Democratic party or whatever but he was planning on running for President as a Democrat so he's clearly aligned with the 'progressive' wing of the Democrats.
NYT's endorsement of Klobuchar and Warren is actually very useful because it shows the limit of their 'progressivism' - basically they have to remain to the right of Sanders.
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!
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.
Scott does delete stuff semi-often, a lot of posts on this particular blog have already disappeared. I was banned once for providing evidence that a certain someone prominent in the Rationalist community (not Scott Alexander) had purposely manipulated quotes in one of their books. There's definitely certain ideas that he doesn't want looked at too closely.
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.
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"
I'm not sure Glenn Greenwald is even much of a leftist (if at all), though. What are his thoughts on central leftist economic questions like Marxism? (surplus value, dictatorship of the proletariat, TRPF, etc).
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/
I'm not sure if this was a lie when he wrote it, but Scott Alexander has clearly changed his mind on this precept. Otherwise I would not be so censured just for writing about left-wing political philosophy.
They are all the people who are reminding me that what I say is "socially unacceptable". Scott Alexander is not obsessively focused on reason or argument; he's recently admitted that much of his representation of leftist politics relies on "gestalt impressions".
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, which is a subjective opinion anyhow. Scott Alexander keeps misinterpreting Marx in the most basic manner possible, so I have no problems repeating "citations, please". After all, we're trying to find the truth, and sometimes the truth is quite boring.
>>>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.
I think I'm pretty interesting. I find political philosophy and proper citations to be an interesting subject; but I am very nerdy compared to most people.
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
Duranty was a victim of right-wing cancel culture and has had his name unceremoniously dragged through the mud a number of times by both Scott Alexander and the New York Times. Kind of ironic that both Scott Alexander and the NYT are now feuding.
Read the Duranty articles in question and you'll see there is no real "denial", only Duranty being very specific about his definition of 'famine'.
>In short, conditions are definitely bad in certain sections- the Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga.
This is from Duranty himself if you actually read his articles in context you'll see he's been unfairly smeared. I mean, he was a fairly standard centrist liberal, not a communist (unfortunate, I wish the NYT would hire a communist to have a wider diversity of views!).
> 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?
Here's a boring summary of my relationship with The NY Times. I was a long term, though not particularly enthusiastic subscriber, and would comment maybe two or three times a year with no ideological axe to grind. Then one day I was just skimming through a very dull story on men's fashion by their fashion editor, Vanessa Friedman. And somewhere in the article she was writing about the men's industry being based in Italy rather than France, and listed Gucci etc. In that list of Italian fashion houses she mentioned Berlutti, which I was 100% sure was a French maker of very expensive shoes. So I thought, gee they're quite famous and the writer is a big deal in fashion, I'm surprised she just looked at the name and figured they were probably Italian? But I didn't write anything like that, I just wrote a one sentence comment, "FYI Berlutti is actually French, not Italian." And bizarrely they held my comment and refused to publish it! There was no hostility, no epithets, no nothing, just a factual correction. I waited a few hours and nothing, and of course I'm stupidly obsessing about something so trivial. So the next day I write another comment saying all I did was correct your article for you, so either publish my comment or, ideally, correct your article, or I'm cancelling my subscription. And again, that comment was held indefinitely and since I stupidly threatened to cancel my subscription over this triviality, I figured I had to go through with it.
That was about five years ago, and I've gone through five years of following various pundits that are. always referencing The NY Times, and I can't access the linked articles due to my feud with Vanessa. Then finally last month I decided I should just grow up and resubscribe a the princely rate of $4 a month, figuring they're not really raking it in over my change of heart. And then this stupid Rationalist hit piece just came out and I just cancelled my subscription again. I don't think we were made for each other.
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.
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 offending paragraph says the following verbatim:
"It’s one of the reasons, during the post-recession wave of consolidation, that there was a lot of soul searching and hand wringing in Italy about heritage brands being bought by the French. (LVMH owns Pucci, Fendi, Berluti, Loro Piana and Bulgari; Kering has Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Brioni.)"
So it was neither vague nor read poorly by me. But you also missed the point of my post.I wasn't complaining that they had made a mistake, I'm sure they do that all the time and this was unimportant. I'm complaining that they refused to print my comment. I thought there comment blocking policy was to block obscene and offensive comments, not comments that just offer a correction and I guess they feel make them look bad.
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.
I definitely was perplexed by this. I also emailed her directly because I assumed it was getting caught in an algorithm, which would make sense. I just don't see what I could have done to trigger the algorithm, when I really just wrote "Berluti is French, not Italian" in my first comment. But I guess it's possible.
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.
No, you're wrong again. It was founded by an Italian person, hence the Italian name, but it was founded in Paris in the late 1800's by Mr. Berluti. It has always been based in Paris, and their label says Berluti Paris since 1885 (or whatever the date). It is run by French people in France and always has been. Your saying it's Italian is like saying Bank of America is Italian instead of American because it was founded by an Italian immigrant. Since you seem to be a sore loser, you might continue your faulty research and come up with the fact that the shoes are made in a factory in Italy, which is true. But the management and design functions have always been in Paris, and the company shows their collections in Paris with the other French fashion houses. If you start attributing a company's nationality with where production is, then most American companies will cease being American. But I assume you're going to go there anyway just because you want to win this one.
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.
OK, thanks. I thought you were pretty aggressive but really it's just doubly aggravating because I knew I was right and it was a difference over fact. So I copped a bit of an attitude as well. Apologies for that, and it's an entirely trivial issue. Having said that I am going to correct you one last time, but hopefully dropping the attitude. First, I think you googled Berluti Italian and that's why you got a site in Italian. Their default site is definitely French, or English if you're coming from the US/UK etc. And the Italian factory is a recent development, I think since they were bought by the LVMH actually. For their first 100 years they only had the one shop in Paris, where all the designers/manufacturers worked and their showroom was. They were getting a special type of leather for their shoes from Venice, and reasonably recently opened a factory near there to be closer to the source. But honestly that is their only Italian connection, which is recent and minimal. It really is and always has been a French company. And now you know infinitely more about a French shoe company than you ever wanted to I'm sure.
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).
Well, at least they're consistent, but unfortunately consistently wrong. I mean their logo for over 100 years has been "Berluti Paris Bottier depuis 1895", and they had only one office until pretty recently. Their owners, managers, workers were all French, their only store was in Paris. Their only connection to Italy is that the founder was born there before moving to Paris in 1895 to start the company. And I particularly don't understand this because the NY Times goes to their fashion shows and covers them regularly. Berluti shows in Paris, while the other brands they mention as Italian show in Milan, because they're actually Italian. Don't they wonder why they're sitting in Paris watching Berluti's fashion shows if they insist they're Italian?
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.
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?
No snark, just the facts: Clearly your statement makes you an admirer of anti-democratic strongmen of the most ignorant and narcissistically malignant variety. This is perhaps a valid, albeit repulsive, political stance. Either that or you are intentionally, woefully, ill-informed. Frankly, I'm amazed to see such an anti-enlightenment opinion expressed in a rationalist forum.
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.
I think it's a mistake to jump from "supported Trump" to "Couldn't see Trump for who and what he is." I can imagine a variety of reasons why someone could see Trump accurately and still support him. For the simplest case, in exchange for Trump favoring him in some context important to him. For a more likely case, because he thought the alternative to Trump was even worse. For one more, because he thought by supporting Trump he could influence Trump in desirable ways.
This response was a big mistake. Given its importance, such a post should be very well-thought and cool-headed. Dry repudiation of misleading claims by NYT with no emotional content was what was needed, not this. Since your goal here is to stop incoming outrage machine, the response should be boring and not inviting further fight. Few people here in comments are calm enough to understand it, but NYT article is a godsend for promoting your/rationalist ideas. So your response should not alienate such possible future readers.
Lets be rational and honest about NYT: they are not an octopus, aiming to destroy everybody who disagrees with them and subvert the truth. They are just a media, which only cares about maximizing clicks and creating social media outrage, since it is what they need to maximize profits.
> Dry repudiation of misleading claims by NYT with no emotional content was what was needed, not this.
Wasn't "dry repudiation of misleading claims by NYT" most of what the post was? You're objecting that there was any emotional content at all? Or that he threw in some jokes?
> your response should not alienate such possible future readers
How would Scott's article alienate readers? It provided factual refutations, while being witty and fun to read. (Much more than could be said of the NYT article!)
Who would like Scott's writing in general, but be turned off by this piece? I guess you. But I don't get why.
1. Rhinehart link was a disaster, thankfully it was removed. The whole piece reads like something written by upset person, who does not exactly understand his priorities. Apparently, Scott's priority is to try to close the whole story, since it has potential to become an outrage. In this case, the response should be very boring and contain no accusation of NYT, just repudiation. Of course, Scott understands this, but it seems this piece was hasted and he would be better of rereading his draft tomorrow couple of times and publishing edited version.
"...I don’t feel like this means I have done anything wrong, and I assume most people are a few degrees of social separation away from a Republican or Trump supporter." -
This sentence it outright stupid. Republican supporters are ~50% of voters. Most people have their social circle consisting of at least dozen people. Who he thinks "most people" are, exactly?
2. "...I myself am a Democrat, voted Warren (IIRC) in the primary, and Biden in the general... " -
First, this sentence was not needed, since it does not help to repudiate any misleading claims of NYT. Second, on Warren I am not sure whether I believe Scott. Expressing support (or even reserved endorsement) for tribalism and irrationality she represents is a good way to alienate people, whom the publicity from NYT article could draw to SSC/Lesswrong.
> I assume most people are a few degrees of social separation away
I think he meant *at most* a few degrees away, right? (It seems obvious in context that the idea is just because you can connect him to a Trump supporter through a few degrees of separation, that doesn't say much about him, because that's true of everyone. No?)
I guess fair point that as written, it sort of excludes Republicans and Trump supporters themselves. He should have had an "at most" in there.
> This sentence it outright stupid. Republican supporters are ~50% of voters. Most people have their social circle consisting of at least dozen people. Who he thinks "most people" are, exactly?
"According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.
"And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth."
Assuming we're operationalizing "most people" to "most NYT readers", the idea that the average NYT reader has no Trump supporters in their immediate social circle is definitely more likely than the naive math would imply. Given the exponential nature of "degrees of separation", I guess "a few" is still an overestimate, but I took the statement as more of a dry joke anyway.
One problem that I am having wrap my head around is why does the nytimes care enough to do a hit piece on an excellent (but not extremely popular) blogger? Surely there are other enemies more deserving of the nytimes wrath. Trump and putin are still running around....
They publish forty articles a day about Trump, this is the first and only one about Scott.
As for why they devote resources to attacking him at all though, it's because he's the only thing worse than an enemy, an unreliable ally.
Think of the New York Times as the guy who beats the drum on the trireme to keep all the oarsmen in time. Outside the ship are guys like Trump or Moldbug in their little rowboats who throw a few rocks at the rapidly advancing trireme and then get crushed between the prow and the waves. But Scott isn't outside the ship, he's on board, chained to his oar, and he's _supposed_ to be rowing in time with the rest but he's not, he's out of time and occasionally seems to be having ideas of his own, and worse still some of the other slaves are starting to have doubts of their own. Bad slave! Getting ideas too big for his boots!
The point of this article is to haul Scott up on deck, dangle him over the edge of the ship, and force him to choose. Either he can stay on board and be a good galley slave, or he can get thrown overboard with Donald Trump and get crushed like the rest of them, but there's no room on this ship for doubters.
It is not just trying to make Scott pick a side, it is trying to eliminate competition. . Someone like Scott who is not only a better thinker than their opinion writers but a better writer than their best writers is a threat to their profession. This hatchet job was a warning that Scott and others who write blogs or newsletters are racist and that all good people should stay away and only read from approved sources.
Maybe it's not a hit piece. Scott's reputation and credibility have been boosted by the NYT article enormously, at almost no cost to themselves. It's almost like they *wanted* to position Scott as a sort of free-thinking maverick on the edge of social acceptability…and it worked.
I think of the article as a 'human interest' angle expounding the idea of 'no platform', and the increasing worry about speech not being restricted enough. The rationalist and rationalist-adjacent communities are all about setting norms that you should be able to engage with people you have profound and deep seated disagreements with. And many of the folks behind large technology companies have similar ideas about the power of free discourse to find and refine the truth originating int he early Internet.
This doesn't really sit well with the claim that, for example, if you listen to someone's ideas and explain why they're wrong, you're ACTUALLY supporting their ideas by acting as if they're worthy to be discussed.
(If you'll pardon the uncharitable paraphrase, I was particularly annoyed by what sounded to me like 'Oh, sure, he wrote a document explaining why the things neoreactionaries think are wrong, but /he let neoreactionaries talk and listened to what they think/.')
The article crystalized for me the idea that 'no platform' comes out of a worldview that accepts truth as existing and important, but rejects that people can investigate and find out and be convinced of it, so instead of engaging to find true ideas and spread them, we have to maintain a cordon to keep all the misfolded ideas away from any chance they might have to contact others and spread.
If you mean, why did Cade Metz and the NYT want to do a story on Scott last year, I dunno, but maybe they thought he was interesting? We don't know that it would have been a hit piece, even if the current piece was one.
But regardless of what we think of him or the NYT, Cade Metz had already put a lot of time and effort into writing a story about Scott, which was then tabled. It seems likely that he'd notice that Scott and the blog popped back up again. And I know it's the sunk cost fallacy, but after going through all that trouble, and after Scott explicitly took steps to minimize the potential harm from an article, why wouldn't Metz use some of his research to write an article now? And given all the negative attention that was focused on Metz and the NYT, why wouldn't the current article be negative? *shrug* That's all post facto rationalization, of course.
I never heard about you or your blog before. But I am a regular reader of NYT. I happened to read NYT article today, and then, out of curiosity, googled Astral Codex Ten, that led me to this. If I were you, I would laugh the whole thing off and not give two hoots. Readers of NYT are smart too. In the first two sentences, a reader could figure out what the journalist was up to: about to write a hagiography or about to do a smear job. Given the prevailing orthodoxy at NYT now, it was obvious that he was about to do a smear, in a sohisticated way. Careers of journalists are melting away at NYT for the slightest deviation from the party line. The latest is Donald McNeil Jr. I don't have a clue what he said back in Peru a few years ago, but they showed him the door. It must be a pressure cooker working at NYT. You got to to be terrified that the Word Police are watching your every utterance. The paper has gotten nutty in its new orthodoxy. I just laugh out loud when I read the articles in the paper, which I am a faithful reader of for thirty years. Ezra Klein wrote the other day that it is "aesthetic" to spout these orthodoxies, writing about failures of liberal government in San Francisco in his column this week, in NYT. I now think that every journalist working at NYT nowadays feels like it is obligatory for professional safety to sport their official social justice credentials in every article. They are making fools of themselves, insulting the intelligence of their readers. If I were you, I would have put a big yawn emoji as a reply to their article. Silly piece of journalism.
I don’t know. Seems like much ado about not much. Not knowing anything about Scott or the blog, I didn’t take the article as very negative. The bit about Murray was more of a slam against him then Scott. Murray was crucified over something he never really said, and this article is a continuation...betrays the NYT author’s ignorance more than anything.
The article focused on so-called Rationalists, with whom Siskind is apparently quite influential. Pointing out Siskind has a popular and influential blog is a an attack?
As for the feminist reference, the article states “He described some feminists as” Voldemort, which according to Siskind’s response is perfectly accurate. The online version contains a link to the full blog post – yes, with the strike-through text and PLEA FOR MERCY. Since when is a link in the NYT to your blog bad for business?
The reason I’m here is that the article piqued my interest in Siskind’s writing. Based on the post linked in the article it’s unlikely I’ll be back. Not for the content, or the impression made by the NYT, but that it’s crazy-f’n LONG. Who’s got the time for that? Apparently a bunch of tech gurus and (based on the comment section) people interested in taking vengeance on journalists.
I can’t comment on the concerns of a psychiatrist vis-a-vis having clients know his views, but I’m not convinced there is a right to blog anonymously. In most cases, if you’re going to publish your views to the world, you should be willing to stand behind them. If your profession precludes that, perhaps give up one or the other.
Maybe I read the article too charitably, but I came away intrigued. It was far from a hit-piece. Siskind’s response would be appropriate if he’d been labeled a Nazi and had his address published, but is overwrought and veers into entitled snoflakery. If the commenters, like “Adrian” (if that’s your real name), who desire retribution or are canceling their subscriptions are typical of Siskind’s readership, perhaps the NYT was too soft on the type of people Siskind influences.
I found your comment pleasantly amusing (e.g. "Who's got the time for that?") and insightful (e.g. your take on whether the article was a hit piece), both, until the final sentence. Please don't cherry-pick responses out of the comments; the whole point of this community is that there's no one single "type of people [Scott] influences" and lumping everyone together is harmful to discourse.
It's undoubtably true that some people here are on a hair-trigger, but this comes after months of the blog being in an uncertain limbo - and this blog was an important place to many of its readers, where they could discuss things without it immediately devolving into trench wars, so some have formed a much deeper connection with this blog than one might expect people to have with the average website. That's made emotions run a bit high; ironically much higher than on just about any other topic ever discussed in the comment section. I hope this can help you understand where some of it's coming from. :)
I appreciate the feedback. As I stated, this is my only contact with the blog and community. I did find Adrian’s post to be offensive, and not the reflection of a positive community (more Parler than Mom365). I take your point and retract my final sentence.
Please feel free to stick around. You'll find many people you agree with about something (and probably very few you agree with completely.) It's never dull.
One of the things to love about Scott's writing is that he'll write an essay-length post about something you didn't know you cared about. And then you discover it's part 1 of 5 where he analyses really strange aspects which in retrospect seem obvious. Most people are verbose because they have little to say. Scott is verbose because he has much to say.
The blog is long, but so is a book. Ideally, they are long because they have a lot to say and cannot easily say it much more briefly. Certainly if Scott talks about anything political, his words are likely to be misunderstood even by his own readership if he doesn't take the time to clarify what he is, and is not, saying.
Plus, in a world where so many people believe that they can choose what to believe on a whim, and political groups fight over basic facts, evidence is crucial when making a claim to a skeptical audience (and Scott's audience is always skeptical!). So generally he makes the effort to track it down and present that evidence. And when he doesn't make that effort to gather evidence and present it, well, look how mercilessly he's being taunted by Marxbro, who surely left over a hundred comments on this page alone.
Anyway, I credit Scott for introducing me to my main moral philosophy (consequentialism) and most intelligent people will find something valuable among his top 3 posts: https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
Bravo! So glad to see SlateStar>Astral Codex back and even better; so sorry you had to face trashing; so disappointed in NYT... But mostly, so glad to see SlateStar>Astral Codex back and even better. Thanks!
I didn't think it was a negative article. If it had been posted on someone's blog, well, maybe it's a bit of an essay that uses someone as an example for developments that they are maybe connected to in some way but doesn't define them. and ok, maybe there are some nitpicks. the real issue people have is the impact of the NYT and how central the NYT is to the social construction of reality. and what happens when the mainstream discovers niche stuff. but anyway, sometimes a bit of shared reality can be a good thing to have. The NYT is never going to be very congruent with iconoclasm. For mass media we could do much worse (and do to disastrous results).
I'm bothered, however, by the author's running away from Murray, whose work has been validated by years of improvement in psychometrics and research. Charles Murray does not have offensive views on race. The running away from scholarship when it reveals a truth that is uncomfortable, is what has set the table for today's Medieval culture. "Intellectualism" is now based on "feelings," not on the constant subjecting of ideas to rigorous testing.
Murray has been repeatedly and comprehensively shown to be not only wrong, but actively misrepresenting the science he discusses. His ideas certainly aren't based on "rigorous testing." His data is very bad, and he actively misrepresents it. Shaun's quite careful dismantling of The Bell Curve is a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
That's not a takedown and it's not a fair discussion of the work, nor the science of intelligence. For starters, even bringing up Gould and not investigating that person's scientific errors in Mismeasure is a sign of large blind spots. This video is a slanted and mildly ridiculous take on intelligence as overwhelmingly an excuse for racist actions instead of being an investigation of human excellence.
It's not a takedown? Well, it's easy to skip over a nearly 3-hour video and take your word for it, but I think it's worthwhile to quote a small excerpt to help others decide whether the content is "not a takedown". I don't remember anything about Gould, but the video does spend a full half hour talking about a source named Lynn:
1:07:45
Keeping in mind all the various possible problems with IQ testing that we've just discussed, let's take a look at a few of the IQ tests Herrnstein and Murray cite as evidence for claims in The Bell Curve. Surely they will be properly administered, right?
After all Herrnstein and Murray themselves discuss many of the same issues that we just have. It would follow that given their familiarity with these potential problems, they would of course endeavor to avoid them, so let's see how they do on that front. We'll take a look at a particular section of The Bell Curve, see what the claims are, and then have a bit of a dig into the sources backing up those claims.
This is from a section titled "How Do African-Americans Compare with Blacks in Africa on Cognitive Tests?" and I quote, "This question often arises in the context of black/white comparisons in America, the thought being that the African black population has not been subjected to the historical legacy of American black slavery and discrimination, and might therefore have higher scores. [...] Richard Lynn was able to assemble 11 studies in his 1991 review of the literature. He estimated the median black African IQ to be 75, approximately 1.7 standard deviations below the U.S. overall population average, about 10 points lower than the current figure for American blacks."
"In summary, African blacks are on average substantially below African Americans in intelligence test scores. Psychometrically there is little reason to think that these results mean anything different about cognitive functioning than they mean in non-African populations. For our purposes, the main point is that the hypothesis about the special circumstances of American blacks depressing their test scores is not substantiated by the African data."
[...] This is Herrnstein & Murray's answer [....] they point to black people in Africa and say hey, well, they also got lower scores, black African people haven't been subject to discrimination in America after all, so doesn't this prove that discrimination in America, can't be depressing black IQ scores? Well [...] Murray's decision to limit their concern here to American black slavery on discrimination is a huge oversight because there could also be discrimination in whichever parts of Africa they are talking about.
Herrnstein & Murray claimed in the acknowledgments at the start of The Bell Curve to have benefited especially from the advice of this Richard Lynn, who they elsewhere call a "leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences" and they cite his work several times throughout the book [picture shown of 12+ citations of Lynn]. So let's take a look at Richard Lynn's 1991 review of the literature entitled "Race Differences in Intelligence: a Global Perspective", which was published in Mankind Quarterly.
[Shaun reviews Lynn's data sources for 20 minutes, noting that Lynn's primary source of African data was South Africa under Apartheid. Jumping ahead to 1:28:47:]
...if you think what Lynn did to those last two studies was bad, strap in, because this next one is of real bastard: South Africa IQ of 69 [for blacks], attributed to Owen 1989, which Lynn calls the "best single study of the Negroid intelligence". So this [study is called] Test and Item Bias: the suitability of the Junior Aptitude Tests as a common test battery for White Indian and Black Pupils in standard 7 ...
This study starts out: "this study was undertaken to shed light on problems concerning the construction and use of a common test battery for various South African population groups". You see this study is testing a test: the Junior Aptitude Test or JAT, which was standardized for white pupils in South Africa, and determining whether it's also a good test to give to non-white groups. The study selected various schools in South Africa for white Indian and black students, although it should be mentioned it was not able to use the majority of the selected black schools "owing to the unrest situation" and thus they had to test black schools in the KwaZulu region, one of the areas designated for black inhabitants of South Africa under Apartheid. I mentioned the unrest situation here as a reminder that yes, these tests are being carried out under apartheid and protests and demonstrations against the segregated school system were ongoing.
So anyway, the study examined pupils' performances on the various sub tests comprising the JAT, and what were the findings? Well the thing I think we should mention first here is that the tests were given to the black students in KwaZulu in English only, and several test sections of the JATs relied very heavily upon language ability. Now Owen expected language ability not to matter in the tests because the black students in the KwaZulu region had ostensibly been learning English in their schools, and Owen apparently either doesn't know or disregards that these schools often didn't have necessary teaching equipments only a small amounts of their teachers were certified and that pupil-teacher ratios were more than double that of the white schools.
To quote the study, "language was not expected to play a significant role in test performance in this investigation. However, the results showed that this assumption was completely wrong. In fact, language played such an important role, and the knowledge of English of the majority of black testees was so poor, that certain tests, for example the JAT 4 (synonyms) and the JAT 8 (Memory: Paragraph) proved to be virtually unusable."
And let me just quote that again: "certain tests proved to be virtually unusable."
Owen also writes elsewhere, "the results of the current investigation clearly showed that language played a prominent role in all the tests containing language items", which is a wonderful "multiple stab wounds shown to shorten life expectancy" bit of academic obviousness there. Language ability was not the only way in which the Junior Aptitude Test was biased, however. In a section entitled "item bias in the tests of the JAT", Owen note several ways in which the tests were culturally and economically biased. For example, he here lists several test items on the first test in the JAT and states "a common element in most of these items was that they presupposed knowledge, or a degree of knowledge on the part of the testee", and mentioned such things as electrical appliances, microscopes, and western types of ladies' accessories, going on to write "thus in the case of both the Indian and black testees it seems that the single largest cause of bias lay in the fact that the pupils were not familiar with the objects represented by the pictures. Cultural and socioeconomic status factors probably also played a role in this regard."
So this test is biased, then. The study examining it SAYS it is biased. But according to Richard Lynn "this is the single best study of the Negroid intelligence". This is the best one! The one that tests segregated school children in a non-native language and calls its own results "virtually unusable". In Lynn's review this is the most important study for his estimates of black African IQ. Writing about it, he says "the mean IQ of the sample, in comparison with Caucasoid South African, norms is 69. It is also around the median of the studies listed in table 3. It is proposed therefore to round this figure up to 70 [why?] and take this as the approximate mean for pure Negroids" [god damn.]
What Lynn has done here is ridiculous. He has taken 11 studies from a period between 1929 and 1991 with vastly different sample sizes reporting day from different tests, most of which didn't even report IQ scores, transform the data into what he reckons the equivalent IQ scores were using some unknown standardization, picked one that was sort of near the middle and said that's the average black African IQ. This is outrageous. It is a crime. It might actually be a crime, and if it's not, it should be.
Now I am far from the first person to criticize The Bell Curve's reliance upon Richard Lynn as a source. Various academics were already well aware of Lynn and his dodgy data, so when Herrnstein & Murray cited him they were immediately attacked with accusations of bias and racism. Charles Maurey responds to these attacks in the afterword to The Bell Curve and his defense is laughable.
His first defense is to say that the topic of African IQ was a "tiny piece of The Bell Curve, three paragraphs on pages 288-289" and in regards to this, two responses jump to mind immediately. The first is to say well, maybe you should have spent longer on it then, Charles! "We were wrong very quickly" isn't a defense against being wrong, is it? Maybe if you put a little more effort in you would have seen that Lynn's paper was a load of rubbish. Secondly, this part of The Bell Curve is far more important than Murray makes out. He uses Lynn's paper to dismiss the arguments that black-white differences in IQ are caused by environmental factors such as a history of oppression which is the single most common counter-argument to one of the principal claims in the entire book. At no point does Murray actually address any specific criticisms of Lynn's work or any of its various errors, he mainly just seems outraged that anyone dares to have criticized him at all, to be honest. And it's exactly this sort of academic laziness that fed much of the angry response to The Bell Curve. Murray refuses to admit that citing Lynn was a mistake, and simply froze out some newer studies that supposedly show he was right anyway, so there.
This speaks to a couple of things. Firstly, it is a fatal underestimation of exactly how badly this damages the faith that a reader of The Bell Curve can have in its authors. After all this is not the only time they cite Richard Lynn. He has more than 20 citations in their bibliography, and they thank him specifically in the acknowledgments.
If this is the sort of data that Charles Murray is willing to accept as legitimate, how can we trust anything he says anywhere in the book? How can we trust the new studies he brings up to defend Richard Lynn? Personally, I think it will be a mistake to even look at these new studies. Murray's response to having his previous sources called into question is to simply throw out new sources. His response to having these called into question would no doubt be to throw out more. The responsibility for checking whether his sources are trustworthy or accurate has been moved FROM Murray TO his critics: they're the ones doing the reading and the fact-checking, whereas he never gets held to account.
So long as we all understand that, however, I suppose we can take a brief peek...
I do recommend watching the entire video because the level of care, and level of detail, demonstrated therein is at least as high as the writing of Scott Alexander.
You are simply wrong. I suggest you read a lot of evolutionary biology. Our ancestral past is responsible for genetic composition. That's certainly NOT controversial. What seems to be missing from the education of so-called "intellectuals" is that the environment of that ancestral past is key. Whether it's a discussion of why it is that blood pressure drugs that work for whites didn't work well at all for black Americans or whether it's a discussion of why certain genes selected for in sub-Saharan African populations and those selected for in what were today's Scandinavian populations would have to be different shouldn't surprise you. The physiological systems that resulted in survival, that is, those that resulted in "fitness" differ due to environment.
A reality is that some systems got more calories/energy for optimum functioning than others. The emotion has to be taken out of such discussions. In other words, because of selection, you must not be shocked that the brain and the genes that control its development, like all other organs, evolved differently because of environmental pressures that differ from place to place. Sub-Saharan Africa placed extreme demands for survival on certain systems.
I think terms like "optimum functioning" are a primary reason people are turned off by the ideas and find them offensive. They're easy to read as "better at life" even though what you really mean is "evolved to thrive in a unique environment".
Focusing on a specific aspect of fitness such as getting more/less calories as a measure of "optimum functioning" is dumb and people are right to be offended when you single out particular traits like that. Blue whales and fire ants get different amounts of calories both in absolute and relative senses but it would be insane to put any significance toward ranking them on that measure alone as a measure of "functioning".
People are really really bad at communicating on these topics, and given obvious historical connections between study of genetic differences and Really Bad Things™, it is reasonable to expect social backlash against any discussion at all. Unless it is your primary area of research it is absolutely the right thing to do to distance yourself from people for whom it is, if you want to be taken seriously on any other matter.
I don't see Scott's response of "running away" from Murray as some statement on validity of his research. He's distancing himself from the claims people attribute to Murray because whether or not they are based in concrete science, the way they are posed, or interpreted by the public, does not reflect Scott's beliefs, or the viewpoints he intends to communicate to his audience. Publicly aligning himself one way or another to the scientist or even to the science itself detracts from the value of the contributions he makes to public discourse on every other matter.
>>> it is reasonable to expect social backlash against any discussion at all.
No. No, it is NOT "reasonable" to expect social backlash against discussion of this topic. It is demonstrable that backlash occurs - generally amplified by activists with a cause - but this backlash is not based on reason and should not be assumed to be the default state of discussion.
It is not at all appropriate nor healthy to insist that people denounce, or distance themselves from, or otherwise reject other people based on subjects of inquiry and research - or job, or political leanings, or religion. This is inhumane and wrong. You should not suggest that it is acceptable and you should speak out against it whenever you see it happening.
Not saying the backlash is reasonable. I'm saying it's reasonable to expect backlash. As you say, it is demonstrable that backlash occurs. It is reasonable to accept demonstrable facts and respond accordingly.
Whether and how you respond to unreasonable backlash is up to your personal philosophy. I would say that it is reasonable to expect continued backlash from personally associating with controversial figures, and acknowledge that, as evidenced by demonstrable facts, the impact you might have vis-à-vis swaying unreasonable voices toward your side of an issue by reasoned argument is negligible. Choosing not to take sides or to disengage or to distance oneself from the source of the backlash in the interest of being more effective in influencing other important matters is a reasonable response to that expected backlash.
Scott can do more good discussing the things he's more interested in discussing than engaging in some argument over something that is not his area or expertise, or not his primary area of interest. Even if the subject were his area of expertise or interest, choosing the battlefield in order to maximize potential influence is also a reasonable thing to do. If he can't do that without distancing himself from controversy, and distancing himself from controversy causes less harm than the benefit of being able to act freely, then distancing himself from controversy is (in my philosophy) the right thing to do.
I think the harm of allowing a handful of unreasonable people to believe, via evidence, argument, action, or inaction, that there is one fewer person in the world who 100% believes in perceived racist theories is negligible compared to the good Scott does even from writing a single fictional short story, let alone all the much more informative and influential stuff he posts on his blog on a regular basis.
I suggest that you read a lot of evolutionary biology and quantitative genetics.
The mere facts that there exists a difference between two groups, and that you can speculate about a possible adaptive reason why that difference might have been fit, do not suffice to prove that your speculative adaptive hypothesis is true, nor that the difference is genetic.
(Heritability of a trait within groups also doesn't prove between-group differences are hereditary; failure to understand this is failure to understand heritability. For intuition see https://www.quora.com/What-is-heritability/answer/David-Bahry)
The reality is that the environments in which people of different races statistically grow up, including e.g. class and nutrition but also even the social environment of how people treat you based on your race even if you're adopted, vary. This environmental variation can easily produce group differences that have nothing to do with differences in ancestral selection pressures. You've given no reason afaik for privileging genetic hypotheses of racial differences over environmental ones.
I had a similar prior to yours until I read Cofnas' *Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry*. He makes the case that anti-hereditarian researchers have been motivated by political concerns completely disconnected from the scientific quest for truth, and that they themselves usually recognize this in private. The article is thorough, approachable, and well-cited. It completely changed my mind on the topic.
What are your thoughts on the ideoloigical motivations of hereditarian researchers? I realize you are an ethno-utilitarian, as helpfully pointed out by Marxbro over the years, but it seems to me there may be a bit of ideological motivation behind the Lynn data Murray proudly cites or the rigorous method of counting encyclopedia entries written by white people to conclude the superiority of white people in Human Achievement. Could you possibly connect choices such as those to the "scientific quest for truth?"
I've regretted the "ethno-utilitarian" comment ever since about fifteen minutes after I made it. It did not accurately describe my thinking at the time, and it does not accurately describe my thinking now.
From what little I've heard of it, Murray's Human Accomplishment doesn't sound like it would be intellectually rigorous or interesting. I'm not particularly interested in researching it further. Murray's other works such as Coming Apart seem like they could be marginally more insightful, at least in their premises.
Your comment about "the scientific quest for truth" mischaracterizes my reading of Cofnas. In this debate I am not interested about who's good and who's evil, I am interested in who's correct, and who's trying to be correct and failing, and why they're failing. If Nisbett and friends are not trying to produce correct research, to me that flags them as not worth paying attention to.
You know that thing openly admitted that the video you are linking was naked, dishonest propaganda, right? He gloated about how many people he fooled with it.
Murray's inference from within-race heritability of IQ to claims that between-race differences in IQ must be at least partly hereditary are, and have always been, fallacious. This is not "feelings", this is correct understanding of the concepts in quantitative genetics. [see e.g. https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html]
Except the bell curve doesn't claim the differences are genetic, they claim, RIGHTLY, that they're heritable. And the heritability is what is politically salient.
I've heard people make "New York Slimes" jokes for close to twenty years now. (I don't tend to agree with the right-wing fever swamps, but I run into them from time to time.)
I don't think I've ever seen it be quite this literal, though.
Also, one other point that I think is worth mentioning (though perhaps awkward for you to do yourself, or implied by your intro): his article's ending, where he makes it look like your request for anonymity was irrational, and you just dropped it when you weren't trying to spite him. Which completely neglects the fact that you could do so specifically because you'd spent those months completely uprooting your life in order to deal with Cade Metz holding a (proverbial) gun to your head.
> 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.
I don't intend to cause the sort of trouble for him that'd be morally wrong - no death threats, no protests at his house, nothing like that. But if he gets Twitter replies on every article he posts talking about how he's a lying muckraker who should be taken as seriously as the National Enquirer, well, that's the cost of doing business. Even if you're right about him being pressured into it (and that is a *spectacularly* generous steelmanning), these are the costs you pay for letting someone else use you like a sledgehammer to get their petty vengeance.
I'm seeking some advice on how to replace the NYT in my life.
I've been a subscriber since they put up the paywall, and NYT has been a go-to pinned tab on my browser since long before that. I believe in supporting investigative journalism and quality explanatory reporting. I like having a page of timely, mostly trustworthy world and national news. I think the NYT still gets the most important things right about as often as anyone else.
But, like many, over the years, I've noticed a steady reduction in objective reporting in favor of ideological agenda pushing, to they point where I began to feel like the NYT was actually *creating* the sorts of "movements" they most like to report on. This has made me uncomfortable, even when I agree with at least the core objective, as was the case with #metoo. More recently, they seem to have decided a "backlash" against big tech is underway -- though as has been noted by others (including Scott, iirc), this "backlash" seems practically nonexistent outside of the media.
There is a sort of game I play now where I scan the headlines of the NYT homepage and count how many seem to be about "intersectionalist" issues or will be discussed through an intersectionalist lens. I'm much less likely to read those. I'm all for everyone treating everyone the best way we can figure out how, but I feel like the NYT is gradually becoming less of a newspaper and more of an issues magazine. But I am the proverbial frog in the warming pot of water, and I don't know where else to go.
So, how might I replace this browser tab?
I want my subscription money to be directed to careful, objective journalism -- or at least opinion writers who do some homework and think deeply before writing (another percentage in decline at the NYT).
Can anyone suggest where to find an informative, timely dashboard of trustworthy major headlines and other stories? One that links directly to quality articles instead of to paywalled other sites or ad-spammed & ad-block prohibited pages? I have some subscription money waiting to be freed up to this end. (And yes, I'm already subscribed to Scott.)
Do not read opinion pieces from major media. Read media only for pure news, like Reuters or Wall Street Journal (of course, not WSJ opinion). If you want opinion pieces, read blogs. There are plenty of people, related to Scott, who write excellent blogs. Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan to name a few. Every day Cowen posts "daily assorted links" to major media, often including NYT.
Valid points, though I'm less annoyed than disappointed when newspaper opinion writers don't measure up. It's labelled as opinion, and I can keep track of who is and isn't worth reading at one paper. It's when the non-opinion stuff has a strong and often lazy bias that I get annoyed, as I don't try to track all of those other writers.
That's why when reading news, I try to stick with high quality media, not associated with any ideologies. Basically pick only "Highly factual" and "the least biased" from https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/. As other people mentioned, this means usually reading business-oriented media like WSJ or FT.
On opinions, it is a valid point. The problem is that it is going to take a lot of trial and error. And you will have to keep subscriptions to multiple websites.
I've been trying to cut news out of my life as much as possible; I haven't managed to go cold turkey but my nicotine patch is the financial newspapers (Wall Street Journal etc). These tend to be written with the underlying set of assumptions "our readers are just a bunch of rich cigar-chomping tycoons who want to make money, let's give them the basic important facts that will help them make as much money as possible". The cigar-chomping tycoons are probably a fantasy that exists only in the journalists' heads, but the resulting newspaper tends to work out pretty straight-down-the-middle and uninterested in fripperies.
The other advantage is that the WSJ requires a subscription to read, so if you don't buy the subscription then you only get the headlines, which saves a lot of time.
I've considered the cut-it-out route, but it's not really in my nature, and could be dangerous for my career. It's expected that I know what's going on. In fact, I need to at least be aware of the shifting liberal orthodoxy fashions to avoid dangerous missteps.
It's no joke! I spent a few minutes considering some of the updates I might give a white male who just woke up from a 10 or 15-year coma and doesn't know about the new minefields. There's no shortage of material:
• We capitalize Black now. This term is now more accepted than "African Amercian".
• There's a Q+ at the end of LGBT now, to include "queer" and various other gender/sexual identities.
• "Latinx" is a way to avert gender assumptions from a discussion of that ethnic group.
• Speaking of which, stop assuming genders.
• Elliot Page is the actor you knew as Ellen Page, but don't tell anyone we said that, as it's Wrong to speak a Dead Name. (I was actually confused by the stories at the time, because they all said "Elliot Page comes out as trans" but refused to say who this had been, and many sites had retconned all prior uses. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.) [Please forgive me, Elliot and the trans community. I'm trying to educate, here.]
• Aunt Jemima is cancelled, as are [names long list]... ...It's not yet lethal to openly enjoy Harry Potter, but be careful about where you praise J.K. Rowling.
• 'cis' just means you associate yourself as having the gender your anatomy seemed to indicate at birth.
• Here's what a "trigger warning" is, and when you might want to use one...
• Here's what it means if someone puts "he/his" in their bio, or something more exotic.
• Don't dress up for Halloween, as current or future culture fashions may turn against your choice.
• No, you can't use "this was normal back then" as an excuse.
• Breaking news: Intent may not matter anymore. Do not speak the "n-word" in ANY context, even to refer to it or to how someone else had used it.
"I've been trying to cut news out of my life as much as possible"
The fact that news sources are problematic does not make this position an ethical option -- not if you're going to vote and attempt to sway social opinion in political directions.
The comment does help explain how someone who is apparently not deficient intellectually could possibly still believe that the former president remains one of our best options for leading our country.
I have nothing against people who want to tune out. But please don't then go around flippantly declaring what's best for our country and the world, particularly by elevating profoundly anti-democratic demagogues. Yes, of course, you have free speech. I'm just saying it's immoral to deploy it in this manner. And please stop voting until you resolve to be better informed.
I never said that Trump was one of the best options for leading the country, only that he was better than Biden, Clinton, Cruz or Jeb. There are undoubtedly millions of people who who would be better than any of those, but none of them is a member of the political class.
The Financial Times seems pretty good. You'll notice that their articles usually don't go viral. I think that is because they are optimizing for accuracy not virality.
In general, publications written for investors like FT, Economist, WSJ, Bloomberg seem good--investors value accuracy over entertainment since they're betting their beliefs. (Obvious caveat that publications written for investors will also flatter the sociopolitical views of that class to some degree.)
Back when I had more spare attention, I liked the Economist. They've got their own biases, and they're moving leftward, and their coverage is more superficial than they make it sound. But at least they're not *American* biases. And it's nice to see coverage of the rest of the world on a regular basis. For example, there's always a section on non-China Asia. Every week, rain or shine, no matter what craziness is afoot on the other continents, there are always several pages about what's going on in non-China Asia.
In my experience, the problem with Economist is that if you read an article from there on a topic that you are well familiar with, you find that it's not particularly clueful. Imagine what this means about the rest of their content.
Yeah, but I haven't found a general global news source where that's not the case. Do you know of any? For serious clue on areas I'm interested in but am not intimately aware of, focused bloggers have seemed to be the way to go.
I still liked the Economist, though, because I developed a general sense of how many grains of salt to take with what they said, in a way that's harder with US-focused media. Part of it was their journalistic model (using lots of bright-but-inexperienced youngsters), and part of it was an awareness of the target audience, if that makes sense? Overall, it made me aware of things I was interested in and gave me enough context to do a bit of independent research, and that was nice.
It's kind of like a much less extreme case of the voting recommendations from my local alternative newspaper. They're quite open about their far-left bias, they briefly describe their reasoning, they often link to sources, and they provide a relatively open comment section where people can disagree and post contradictory information. It's great for helping me make up my mind, even when I hardly follow any of their recommendations.
The simplest approach to know what media wants you to know, but in a bland, objective way with as little spin as possible, is to go here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events) and read the listings on whatever day you missed, diving deeper if you want to know more. It's free, fast, and comprehensive with very minimal spin.
(It is, however, selected by power for whatever topics it believes are important or wants you to be thinking about. So there's "selection bias" spin involved. Hard to get rid of that though.)
It's an aggressively non-partisan news aggregator that tracks current events according to the bias of the outlets covering them. Outlets are categorized on a spectrum of extreme left to center to extreme right, and for every story, you can click on any of the outlets covering it, especially if you want to to compare and contrast.
I'll be honest; I've mostly found it useful as shortcut to finding centrist reporting on a current story, but the "Blindspot" section, which highlights stories that are only being covered by one group, is popcorn reading.
If you have questions about how this all works, here's the FAQ.
I'm not looking for an aggregator as my main news page, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, but I find this site interesting and worthwhile in its own right. I do like to occasionally check on how something is being reported on (or ignored) by outlets with different leanings. Thanks!
Was intrigued as someone who uses Google News mostly as an excuse to find new depths of loathing for Google News, which has slowly devolved over the years from "basically good once you remove the Entertainment section" to "usable if you remove the Entertainment section and spend twenty minutes blocking five zillion different MMA-only sites from the Sports section" to "you can now click Fewer Stories Like This to get the same amount of Stories Like That, blocking a source just finds an even shittier source for the same nothingburger MMA gossip, there's a giant Recommended For You section that's generally a weather story, a local crime blotter, another local crime blotter from a city/county with a name similar to the one you actually reside in but located hundreds of miles away, and a clickbait garbage story, and you can no longer remove the Entertainment section".
Clicked over, and the main headline was... Prince Merkin and Madame Harry Expecting Another Royal Baby.
A month later, I just thought I would comment that I've been visiting Ground News more and more. The "Blindspot" section is, indeed, illuminating, even if the summaries are about all I care to read. It's kind of refreshing for me to be able to mentally file away some stories as "partisan rabble rousing" so I can be aware of their headline-level existence without feeling obligated to read up on the details.
Until you find a good source for non-ad-walled content, may I recommend the Chrome extension Behind the Overlay? Many (but not all) ad-walled wobsites simply put up an overlay that prevents you from seeing content that has already loaded. Remove the overlay, and you can browse the site just fine.
Some of them are trickier sites put in some CSS that hides everything after the first paragraph or blocks you from scrolling, which can often be circumvented by deleting a "display:none" or an "overflow:hidden", but I haven't found a good extension for doing that automagically.
No. Those are examples of things that he'd rather not have taken entirely out of context in attempts to defame him. More likely fears of being doxxed and beaten are for other, often more personal, things such as banning vindictive trolls from comment sections, or making statements (sometimes in jest) that run afoul someone's very specific pet peeve which they will defend militantly to the bitter end.
And that's just considering people who already read his blog. A larger danger is being doxxed to his patients, not all of whom may respect the boundaries between personal and professional lives, and some of whom may have negative or unhealthy feelings toward him. Being stalked by people statistically more likely to be mentally unstable than the general population is nothing to scoff at.
Even if the potential physical danger to himself is small, he has loved ones who may be more vulnerable to the social danger and abuse that he risks by being doxxed.
I'm sorry this happened to you, but this is what the New York Times has become. Earlier this week, NYT's staffer Nikole Hannah Jones doxxed a reporter from the Free Beacon. That is who they are.
> This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.
That's, like, what they do. This sounds like an example of Gell-Mann amnesia. There are a myriad of cases where major newspapers presented extremely tenuous multi-stage links as proof of tight cooperation and forever agreement on all subjects, guilt by association as fact, replaced "once criticized a person who happens to be of Jewish origin" with "rabid anti-semite", "argued that open borders policy has its dangers" as "xenophobe and white supremacist", of immigration laws, "doubted that allowing male-bodied people compete in feats of strength with female-bodied ones would be fair to the latter" as "transphobe", etc. This happens so much it turns from separate cases to constant low-level hum of deception and misinterpretation. So it is not strange at all to expect this done to you - even if they don't do it to everybody all the time, they certainly know how to do it, and certainly wouldn't hesitate to do it when they're writing a hit job article.
"I suspect he did not personally want to write this and was pressured into it as part of the Times’ retaliatory measures against me": Even if that were true, he was perfectly willing to smear someone and get paid to do it. He should be held accountable for it.
"I continue to believe these studies are true, I’ve spoken with some of the researchers who have performed them, and the New York Times itself has previously written about and praised these same studies."
Charles Murray's views on race and IQ are logical and measured (eg, overlapping distributions). Your decision to not affirm or reject them via logical argument highlights an understandable tactic of avoiding censure without rejecting the obvious. Alas, rejecting/avoiding profound truths to placate the mob only works for plutocrats and demagogues, not intellectuals.
it's like the girl-power STEM thing. The toxic progressive mind thinks that girl scientists would be neat but doesn't really consider the obverse like why don't hot chicks date nerds or why don't dudes design dresses. We're required to nod along.
That there are overlapping distributions is not controversial nor specific to Murray; e.g. even Murray's vocal scientific critics, like Gould, did not dispute the observed distributions.
The dispute was about causality, and here, Murray's views were widely criticized. Murray thought that within-race heritability of IQ implied between-race IQ differences are probably at least partly genetic; but that doesn't follow and is not a measured middle-ground [e.g. https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html].
It seems like an awful lot of the controversy and tension in all of this - going right back to its start - could have been avoided if you and Metz had talked on the phone or met for a single coffee/beer. It appears that you two only communicated via e-mail, and the most basic form of human interaction could have been employed to find a much more civil and productive way forward.
They could have talked off the record. It looks like they did have some kind of e-mail back and forth and that Metz honored any off the record requests on that, otherwise Scott would have for sure been quoted in the piece. Think the likelihood of positive outcomes far outweigh the negatives, especially given how things did play out.
I put out a blog post on this hitjob, partly because I feel like given the close association between my blog and SSC it's important to be clear on what I think. Long story short, the article stinks.
It was a bummer to find out today that while I was having a wonderful time rebuilding my life as a result of Scott's psychiatry work, he was busy dealing with all of this garbage. At the very least, this (not so) confused former patient is quite happy to have found this bright new evolution of Slate Star Codex.
I have never heard about Alex's blog nor did I read the NYTimes hit piece on him. That being said I think this post did have 4 good points where the NYTimes deliberately taken his quotes out of context in order to make a him out to be a monster who hits all the points in the current group think fear matrix. Racist, misogynistic and worse of all Pro-Trump.
It was by all accounts the NYTimes attempt to cancel him.
I fear that he is only wrong in his his explination as to why he became a target. It was not because he refused to be doxxed by the NYTimes, but because he was presenting arguments as to why certain things are the way they are that are. Arguments that were not the same as the NYTimes' reasons that things are as they are.
FWIW, I did subscribe to ASX, but it was a tough call for me, since $100 is not cheap. I ultimately chose to subscribe anyway, just to send a signal to Scott that I respect his willingness to stand against NYT -- but I could've gone either way. Now, I'm very happy I made that call; if I was not subscribed yet, I surely would've done it after reading this post.
Also, if Scott wanted to start some sort of a legal fund for victims of modern journalism, I'd happily donate.
I was thinking of something more... punitive. Something that will allow the next Joe Random Blogger to say, "Ok NYT, go ahead and doxx me, but be aware that the Slate Star Codex Communal Journalism Defence Fund currently stands at $1.5M, and I fully intend to apply for their assistance as soon as your hit piece comes out". However, in light of what you said, I realize that Scott's contract with SubStack might preclude such ventures.
Scott, first of all, let me express my sincere thanks for your writing over the years. You are an excellent writer and I sincerely believe you've made a positive contribution to the world through it. You've also built a successful enterprise through your avocation and you're surely one of the top 50 voices in the country in terms of your influence on elite opinion.
Clearly you experienced a lot of anguish over this whole saga, and you seem to be especially sensitive to the natural feeling of distress we all share when we learn someone out there thinks we are a Bad Person. But let me urge you to take a deep breath and look at it from a more detached point of view.
You were subject to a tendentious and intellectually dishonest piece from an ideological adversary. As you know, your ideological adversaries do not prize intellectually honest debate as highly as you do, indeed part of the whole beef is they think other values like social responsibility are more important. Also lets remember that Substack, and the tech platforms like google and facebook, and by extension you, in your small way, are competitors to NYT!
I don't blame you for being upset about the article, it's a shoddy hit job. But you aren't the first to be the subject of the Why My Ideological Adversary Sucks piece. Having people who love to hate you is part and parcel of being a public intellectual. The existence of this piece is both a sign of your success as a writer thus far, and something that will totally help you rather than hurt you in objective terms.
So please continue to skewer your ideological adversaries with your wit, but go easy on the personal grievance side of it going forward (which I fully expect you will do given what you say here). Just keep being awesome and let your success be the best revenge. For my part, I hope this whole saga inspires you to lean into this avocation of yours all the more, and to see how far and how high your talent can take you.
I am sorry you feel my comment is rather unhelpful to you. The savage reality isn't interest in how one feels - cultural conflict is omnipresent and growing. Be prepared is a state of mind.
I love that bit about the Wizard of Oz. Cracks me up every time. Sorry to hear you had to go through all this trouble. You sounds amazingly adaptable to have gotten to this point.
Honestly the thing that really got me about the article was the way the entire thing was in past tense, like the continuing lives of the people it mentions aren't even worth acknowledging. I don't know if that's part of their style guide, but it just felt completely dehumanizing.
"The Rationalists held regular meet-ups around the world, from Silicon Valley to Amsterdam to Australia. Some lived in group houses. Some practiced polyamory. “They are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson, a University of Texas professor who has stayed in one of the group houses."
In an academic environment, research is advanced by arguments based on evidence. That research won't get published unless you identify yourself and take responsibility for what you have written. Every aspect of your argument and every shred of your evidence is out there for others to dispute. This is a generally a good thing and usually done in the spirit of advancing the research. Sometimes unfair attacks are made, sometimes egos are bruised and it is no doubt a demanding job with a lot of stress because everyone knows whether or not you are succeeding. I'm not sure that anonymous blog posts, however brilliant, can really compare to the risks you take when you have to stand by your words (and back down if you are wrong).
I checked out this blog based on the NYT article and thought it might be interesting. I am surprised at the indignation. Seriously, the NYT like most journalism has journalists writing on timelines with small budgets. They never expect to be the last word on something nor the definitive version. Even someone writing a 1000 page book would never expect this. Anyone can write rebuttals and they have huge numbers of people writing comments on their opinion pieces. I can understand the policy of requiring stories to identify real people. How would any newspaper work if stories always let their subjects have anonymity? I may be persuaded by the argument that patients of a doctor would be concerned if their cases were directly discussed. But maybe such identifiable discussion is not a good idea anyway.
On the topic of genetics which I see is popular here, why not just read about genetic research instead of indulging in hypothetical speculation? Maybe one day the shape of your big toe will be correlated with intelligence, or maybe the arch of your foot or how tall you are. Anything is possible I guess--hypothetically. But to date the overwhelming consensus among geneticists is that the so called human "races" are the same, and individuals differ within these "races" far more than between them. The physical traits we happen to notice most are actually trivial and have no bearing on our brains or on "intelligence" which by the way is a very complex and by no means straightforward or "testible trait". Moreover, anyone looking at genetics, can't ignore epigenetics which highlights the effects of environment on how genes are turned on or off. So the real question is why is there always so much interest in speculating on when we will find a genetic marker for "racial" differences in intelligence? It was no coincidence that this field flourished in the 19th century when the need to justify colonialism and slavery was at its height. But why now? I think it would be better to focus on the big toe idea. Perhaps someone could write a book exploring this theory-at least hypothetically...
Scott was a practicicing psychiatrist. He wanted to remain anonymous to keep his job. If you actually read this post, you'd realize he had to quit this job and do an entire career shift becuase of the fallout from this pointless article. News papers are not entitled to any particular story, certainly not the story of a person who would *prefer* to remain anonymous. They don't have a special right to our personal lives, nor should they be presumed to be on neutral territory, observing life, but not altering it.
And as for the genetics line, "genetics" are not particularly "popular" on this blog. I'm not a huge reader, but this is by NO means a significant subject in Scott's writing and he certainly does not possess the perspective that you seem to think he does. Try reading this blog and forget whatever you "learned" in the NYT article.
That may be, but the commenter I was responding to was replying directly to the post. It seems to me that he is making fairly unfounded assumptions about Scott, the author.
He even says, "why not just read about genetic research instead of indulging in hypothetical speculation"
What is he even referring to here? I can't see any basis for why he would assume Scott would be guilty of this, outside of a biased opinion of Scott from an external source like the NYT article. And I don't see a point in ceding any ground to this guy, based on the fact that the voluminous and varied blog readership occasionally touch on opinons and views that this one guy doesn't like.
> So the real question is why is there always so much interest in speculating on when we will find a genetic marker for "racial" differences in intelligence?
This is obvious: if you take as a *fait accompli* that there are no racial differences in intelligence and every race is identical, you basically have to conclude that black people and hispanics are systematically discriminated against (in college admissions, job opportunities, etc.) This is often used to justify affirmative action policies which obviously very few white or asian people like. Thus, there is a lot of motivation (or being uncharitable, "motivated reasoning") to find racial differences in intelligence.
And a lot of motivation, from the other side, to avoid evidence of such differences. One side to this argument attempts to prevent discussion of the issue, one doesn't. What does that suggest about which side believes that the position it wants to hold is more defensible?
Incidentally, I have never seen arguments that hispanics have racial difference in intelligence. The usual story is that East Asians have a somewhat higher average IQ than whites. Hispanics are in part Amerind, and Amerind's are ultimately East Asian, so if anything that would suggest a slightly higher average IQ, although I haven't seen evidence for or arguments on the point.
The "Hispanic" identity actually is social constructed, to an extent that you rarely see. Pretty much anyone from a Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking country, sometimes even from Spain and Portugal themselves, qualifies. So you end up with an extremely heterogenous mix of people with different degrees of European, African or Amerindian heritage depending on their location and their position in the local colonial racial hierarchy.
Treating them as a homogenous racial group is common in political discourse on both sides but also extremely dishonest. You're not going to find any insightful information from that generalization.
Left-wing zealots don't think their position is less defensible, they think they have The Facts and therefore the other side should be censored for lying. In my view it is not that much different than they way the Right behaves, since right-wing zealots also think they have The Facts and cannot be persuaded by evidence and argument. The difference is tactics: right-wing zealots are more accustomed to opposition in the media, so they rely a lot on gish gallops in comment sections, and ignoring opposing arguments, whereas left-wing zealots engage less in argument, favoring censorship and "cancelling".
If you want truth, ignore both groups and focus on science.
While I think it's pretty obvious in principle that there could be genetic differences that generate a race-IQ correlation, I do think this is very hard to prove, and many reasons for this are explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
I haven't seen anywhere near enough evidence to make up my mind, but it seems like a kind of pointless debate. Why? Because SOME differences in performance (whether on IQ tests or in other settings) have clearly been shown to be environmental, e.g. reminding people how poorly they are performing, or showing that you expect them to underperform, tends to *cause* underperformance. Thus, I would predict that *reminding* blacks of their race's historic underperformance should tend to directly *cause* underperformance, and why would you want to do that?
You do not "have" to conclude that systemic discrimination exists or especially that it is the only explanation for different levels of achievement if intelligence were perfectly evenly distributed across racial groups. There are still differences in culture, temperament, access to resources (based on historical circumstance that is not necessarily caused by "systematic discrimination"), psychology, personal preference, or just randomness that *could* meaningfully contribute to gaps in achievement between groups. IQ does not perfectly correlate with either academic or economic success. Therefore, it would not explain *all* differnces in those areas between racial groups. But that doesn't imply that "systemic" discrimination explains the rest. Do you believe that some form of systemic/systematic discrimination fully explains the different levels of achievement of everyone with an IQ of 130? Or do you think there might be other contributing factors at play?
Scott is well acquainted with academia - apparently one of the reasons his real name was easily identifiable by detractors was because he had published papers under it. He's also written many many blog posts about the replication crisis in the sciences and pushed hard for higher standards of transparency and rigor. When he ran surveys on his old blog to do independent research, he published the raw data (or as much of it as the users consented to, anyway) so that others could double-check his work. Both his old blog and this one have a page where he publicly keeps track of his mistakes and retractions, as well. And he definitely does not hold the awful views on race you're arguing against here.
I think you would actually agree with Scott a lot more than you think if you took a tour through his archives, especially the science-related tags.
(PS: On the subject of tags, Scott, now that you're back I'd love it if you could restore the old, more navigable formatting of SSC.)
It doesn't help with tags, but there is a web browser exteision ( https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks ) which provides many improvements and SSC-like formatting for this blog.
There's a critical point that's missed in this argument against anonymity: academia has tenure specifically to allow academic freedom.
People in industry don't have this luxury. They can lose their jobs if something they write happens to offend the wrong person. It's one thing to lose your reputation, it's another thing to lose your house.
>> In an academic environment, research is advanced by arguments based on evidence. That research won't get published unless you identify yourself and take responsibility for what you have written.
This is not true. As one famous example, try looking for the paper titled "The probable error of a mean" by a chap called "Student."
> So the real question is why is there always so much interest in speculating on when we will find a genetic marker for "racial" differences in intelligence?
Mostly because in the present day there's so very much emphasis put on the question of racial disparities in outcomes -- why are certain races underrepresented in certain fields of endeavour, and also disproportionately overrepresented among the poor and criminal classes? The question is asked over and over again, but the answer (or at least a significant possible part of the answer) is forbidden.
Now I'd much prefer that it wasn't the case, and that average racial disparities in both outcomes and intrinsic characteristics were something that we all politely refused to talk about, and we could instead judge people as individuals and give up on the whole "race" thing. But if we're going to have the question, we have to be willing to have the answer.
> But to date the overwhelming consensus among geneticists is that the so called human "races" are the same, and individuals differ within these "races" far more than between them.
Certain races are over represented among the poor and criminal classes because race (not ethnicity) is a social construct cooked up by 15th century slave traders to morally justify the mass exploitation of labor. It's a capitalist invention meant to get around the pesky problem of having to reduce your profits by paying your workers. There are clear historical reasons why some groups have been poor for hundreds of years in America. I don't find the idea that race causes differences in intelligence compelling because I don't even believe that race is real (in a biological sense, obviously we have made it real in a social sense). I do find it extremely plausible that generations of poverty have had epigenetic effects on those groups that led to the disparities we see today, not to mention the fact that many of them remain impoverished. It's funny to me how all of these rationalist discussions on race and intelligence seem to gloss over this angle. I don't think this topic should be haram like it is right now but I do find that many people who like to discuss it on the internet come suspiciously close to resurrecting 19th century race science, which in my opinion is obviously bunk.
I highly recommend the book Racecraft by Barbara and Karen Fields. It was a huge light bulb moment for me.
"P was believed by bad people for bad reasons, therefore P is not true" is not a valid logical inference.
Epigenetics is an interesting possibility but I think it makes it difficult to explain why, for instance, Chinese immigrants to the US tend to do very well despite the centuries of poverty that they're escaping.
Well then it's a good thing "P was believed by bad people for bad reasons, therefore P is not true" isn't actually what I said. My point is to distinguish between ethnicity and race, where one is a group of people with a shared genetic ancestry and the other is a shallow lumping together of ethnic groups by phenotype for economic, political, and social purposes. Race, as a concept, was absolutely created by bad people for bad reasons, but that badness is not what makes it unreal in a biological sense. It's not real in a biological sense because there can be as much difference between two ethnic groups with similar phenotypes as there is between two ethnic groups with wildly different phenotypes. Talking about Chinese immigrants or Ashkenazi Jews is a discussion of ethnic groups (though of course there are multiple ethnic groups in China so we are most likely actually talking about Han Chinese); talking about "black people" or "brown people" or "white people" or "asians" is talking about race, which is not a biologically meaningful concept.
Re: Chinese immigrants to the US, while they may have poverty in common with the American descendants of African slaves it's not really an apples to apples comparison. It's more useful to compare them to Nigerian immigrants, who are similar to Chinese immigrants in that they have very high educational attainment compared to native born Americans of all ethnic groups. If we're speaking of race then Nigerian immigrants are obviously black, but clearly there is something about their situation that's distinct from that of black Americans descended from African slaves. I'm not saying that poverty is a silver bullet that explains all group-level differences in IQ or educational attainment, only that discussing group-level genetic differences by "race" is meaningless because race itself is biologically meaningless and if you push even slightly against the boundaries of modern American racial discourse you can see how easily it breaks down.
> I don't find the idea that race causes differences in intelligence compelling because I don't even believe that race is real (in a biological sense, obviously we have made it real in a social sense).
I'm always confused by this claim that race isn't real in a biological sense. I mean, I sort of get what you're trying to say, but the justifications for this claim always fall apart upon further analysis. You might say that there's no test that can definitively classify your "race", or your mixture of "races".
But, there's also no test that can definitively classify your species. Last I checked, there are at least 24 different species concepts, none of them equivalent.
So if the lack of test for species doesn't preclude you from considering "species" as some biological reality, why should the absence of a race test preclude its biological reality?
Likely part of the problem is that "race" has too many overlapping meanings and is too politically charged to ever get some kind of rigourous treatment, and ethnicity is probably more useful anyway.
>But to date the overwhelming consensus among geneticists is that the so called human "races" are the same, and individuals differ within these "races" far more than between them.
I would be careful relying on the "overwhelming consensus among geneticists" part of this sentence. I was educated (BS & Ph.D.) at one of the best schools in the world, I've known several Nobel Laureates and countless members of various National Academies (Science, Engineering, Medicine). When my Ph.D advisor wanted to apply for a huge grant, he would first "go talk to Francis (Collins, head of the NIH)". My only point here is that I've seen, up close, how Science is done at the very highest levels. There's a lot more politics to it than anyone would admit to, especially when it comes to political hot buttons like "Race" or "Intelligence". I knew a distinguished professor at a top university who studied genetic factors of behaviour in certain animals. In private he was quite clear that he would never even think about applying for a grant, public or private, to extend his work to humans. He knew the fallout of being accused of being anywhere near even considering the idea that
human intelligence might have a genetic component would be professional death as would never get another Federal grant.
Larry Summers had to resign the Presidency of Harvard due, in part, to a speech he gave merely putting forth the idea that statistical differences in the aptitudes of men and women, at the tails of the distribution, should be studied in the context how to approach bringing more women into academia. That the President of Harvard would lose his job over such a mild suggestion about innate differences in intelligence between groups of people was a warning, loud and clear, that here was an orthodoxy that was not to be questioned.
Very intelligent people, who certainly know better, will say stupid things like "People are 99.9% genetically identical, we're all the same", just to signal that they subscribe to the orthodoxy. Compared to what most people complain about as "cancel culture", where someone might get dis-invited to speak at Yale, or have a thousand vitriolic Twitter posts aimed at them, the penalty for raising certain biological questions is literally losing the livelihood that you've worked for decades to achieve. The "consensus" is not scientific, it's social, and should not be accorded the respect that one would give to, say, the overwhelming consensus that Helium atoms have two Protons.
The reason "innate differences in intelligence" is a poisonous subject isn't because of orthodoxy, it's for two reasons:
-Most of the science behind 'intelligence' is bunk, because it comes from the field of psychology which is largely a garbage fire whose researchers squirm, disagree among each other and eventually accuse you of 'arguing technicalities' when you ask such basic questions like 'define intelligence', 'what are the intelligence genetic pathways', 'why do you assume IQ to be gaussian by default', or 'how is g a physical brain construct and not just a statistical artifact'. When you apply the standards of genomics (which aren't that high) to the field of psychology, the whole thing implodes.
-Most of the 'intelligence researchers' are shockingly bad faith to the point that if someone cites them in earnest they can't not have an agenda. Burt and Shockley were known for doing outright fraud. Lynn took the average of neighbouring countries' IQs to infer "national IQs" when he couldn't gather data, and did several instances of data manipulation that are sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from fraud. Rushton displayed a shocking ignorance of the basic genetics of human skin (arguing for a pleiotropy model that's only found in some species of lions), and Jensen went so far as to argue that black people were simply *incapable of having grammar*. Not only that, but many such 'researchers' are funded by a literal pro-Nazi (in the 30s) organization whose explicit goal is to promote the use of eugenics.
I know I am supposed to extend the principle of charity to people I disagree with, but at this point it should be clear that the proponents of the 'hereditarian hypothesis' are not dispassionate scholars who are merely curious about human genetics. They, very clearly, have set beliefs from the get go and will go to many lengths to attempt to prove them, which is not how science works.
Meanwhile, in the actual genetics community, no actual evidence of anything like that was found.
(BTW, knowing nobel laureates and national academies members isn't that big a boast you think, as far as science is concerned - genomics as a field moves very fast and most of these people are known for things they did 20-30 years ago. I would be more impressed if you told me you were a working researcher or something)
>-Most of the science behind 'intelligence' is bunk
Agree, but is irrelevant to my point.
>-Most of the 'intelligence researchers' are shockingly bad faith
I won't disagree, but, again, irrelevant to my point.
>Meanwhile, in the actual genetics community, no actual evidence of anything like that was found.
Regardless of the validity of the "hereditary hypothesis", nobody in the "actual genetics community" studies it because to even consider it is professional suicide. Hence no valuable evidence, one way or another, has, or will, surface, for societal, not scientific, reasons. The "consensus" is not scientific, it's social, and shouldn't be used as evidence one way or another. Likewise, the fact that plenty of unsavory characters have (mis)used science to bolster their unsavory ideas is not evidence, one way or another, on the validity of the "hereditary hypothesis".
>BTW, knowing nobel laureates and national academies...
My only point here is that I've seen, up close, how Science is done at the very highest levels. There's no boast here. I don't claim to be part of that research community, or have any scientific expertise worth mentioning, only that I had the vantage point to see how things play out at the highest level.
No, you misunderstand. Few people study this stuff because 'intelligence' does not have a clear definition and the stuff psychologists come up with (g, IQ tests) is laughably flawed. Biologists are rather down-to-earth and they like to measure things *that can be measured*, like expression levels or even good old height. Nothing rigorous or interesting can come from studying the variation of a thingy that's not defined, that has no known or exploitable genetic pathways, that's constrained to a fixed distribution for no apparent reason, that uses ranking instead of raw results (such that 1 IQ point becomes utterly devoid of meaning as a physical measure).
Note that the same could be said for many psychiatric disorders, which (Scott will be the first to admit) are hard to pin down and are probably due for an etiological revamping in the coming decades once people actually figure out what it is. Note that this is different from, say, the genetics of intellectual disability, that people investigate in depth and are starting to identify actual pathways for. Because intellectual disability is an actual *phenotype* that people can readily identify and measure and that's relatively constant over time and isn't subject to dumb effects like the Flynn effect or variation when you take the test a second time.
So no, your argument that everyone is terrified is preposterous. Scientists do investigate things - when there is something worth investigating. The whole 'genetics of intelligence' is repelling by its vagueness in both definition and operational methodology, and scientists (hard scientists, at least) generally steer clear of vague things they cannot get a hold of, unlike a Western blot. You don't need to constrain the signal to a gaussian and use ranked scores to look at a Western blot.
>Few people study this stuff because 'intelligence' does not have a clear definition and the stuff psychologists come up with (g, IQ tests) is laughably flawed. Biologists are rather down-to-earth and they like to measure things *that can be measured*,
1) to quote your own expert, Ewan Birney: " it should be noted that IQ itself is a valid and measurable trait. ". Doesn't sound like he thinks it's "laughably flawed".
2) Serious people (e.g., Francis Crick and Christof Koch) study(ed) "consciousness". Talk about a concept that lacks a way of measuring it!
3) "your argument that everyone is terrified is preposterous". Jim Watson made some comments about race and intelligence and was completely ostracised, despite a long, productive, and remarkable career. What he said may have been wildly wrong, but scientists say wildly wrong things all the time - it's part of the process - and don't become pariahs for it. I don't think it's at all preposterous to posit that people stay away from subjects that can be so dangerous to one's career. There's a hundred lifetimes worth of biology to study without ever coming close to questions of race and intelligence. Why would a rational person think about going there?
Jim Watson made some comments about *people who worked for him* that were wildly out of line. He'd been on about race and intelligence for a while before that.
"Burt and Shockley were known for doing outright fraud."
I can't speak to the case of Shockley. Burt was accused of fraud by people who prudently waited until he was dead to make the accusation, and one of whom advised his housekeeper, after his death, to throw away his papers, thus eliminating a good deal of the relevant evidence. His professional association first endorsed the accusation and then, after two people separately wrote pieces arguing that it was the accusation that was bogus, reversed its position. If you want the whole story, read _Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed_.
One of the ways in which I try to evaluate the reliability of any source of information is by looking at any area where what it says overlaps something I already know about, as in this case. The fact that you take one side of a controversy for gospel without any indication that it is a controversy makes me reluctant to take the rest of what you claim seriously.
Regarding the anonymity, firstly there's a difference between being pseudonymous and anonymous, especially in a community. Second, I have never gotten the impression that Scott is attempting to use this blog as a place to publish scientific research. And third, I think there ought to be room in the world for people to discuss ideas without having to undergo the full rigor involved in submitting articles to a peer-reviewed journal. And that's what this place was, until the threat of a NYT article caused it to be deleted.
Regarding the indignation, this NYT article has been a sword of Damocles, hanging over the community for almost a year. Just the potential of the article has had an enormous negative effect, including the deletion of the blog itself. In that context, the reaction here makes a lot more sense. It may seem strange to someone encountering the blog for the first time via this particular post, but that's sort of inevitable. Maybe go back and look at a few of the most recent posts, instead, if you want a better idea of what it's about?
As for the genetics discussion, I view that as an unfortunate side effect of a few things. One is that this place is a rare forum that allows that discussion topic, so of course there will be more of it than in places that don't. (But not always: if I recall correctly, on the old blog there were temporary bans on discussing it, when the discussions started to annoy too many of the rest of us.) Second is that it was mentioned in the NYT article, at least by implication, with the reference to Charles Murray. So there's going to be people bringing it up to try to clarify Scott's association with it, and once it's mentioned there'll be people arguing the merits, and then people commenting about all the discussion and drawing implications about the rest of the community, and it just spirals into a huge mess. If the NYT article had just skipped that one little bit, none of it would probably be here, at least, not on this post. And third is that one of the values of this community is the pursuit of truth, no matter whether the truth is viscerally repugnant, no matter how disgusting and evil the people who have advocated for it in the past. And the reflex of many people here is to try to debate such claims on their merits, rather than dismissing the claims because we don't like the implications, or like the people making the arguments, or even like thinking about the subject at all. To paraphrase Al Gore, an inconvenient truth is still the truth.
I dunno, you may be greatly underestimating the skepticism of the average reader. I read the article, and when it came to the few guilt-by-association with some inflammatory keywords threw in, I just started skimming. It's always clear to me when that happens that the writer has lost the thread and is groping around, so throws in a few boring cliched keywords to substitute for the actual facts and/or interesting narrative that is part of an <i>interesting</i> story.
So even if I knew nothing at all about you, I would've come away from the article mildly curious and mildly impressed -- the gist of the story is (1) you write a blog that is wide-ranging and does not self-censor, (2) are interested in rational principles of discussion, and (3) have attractive the attention and admiration of quite a number of very accomplished and smart people. That's a very positive impression. The fact that the writer threw in some low-brow sneering <i>your mama wears Army boots!</i> kind of commentary doesn't really change that.
Perhaps the dogs for whom the dogwhistles <i>work</i> are not very important, and to anyone else, the three main facts I stated above are what will stick -- which makes it on balance a positive story about you, whether that was the <i>Times's</i> intention or not.
I just read the NYT piece, which is why I am here. It didn't seem negative to me. It was thoughtful and nuanced. Thanks for the blog. I will enjoy reading it.
A lot of non community members exposed to the article seem to be seeing it as mildly positive about the rationalist community. The particular friend who is a fan of the NYT who I had read this thought that it was praising the community as a place that controversial topics could be discussed calmly. That possibly is even how Cade Metz sees the article.
Note: It still is terribly for Gell Mann Amnesia reasons, ie journalists generally don't have any sort of deep understanding of what they are talking about, and make lots of dumb mistakes. Cade Metz clearly does not have a deep understanding of the rationalist community. It also is still embedded in a narrative that all of the facts have to still be embedded in.
But the way that we want to perceive it as a 'hit piece', ie something designed to make people think worse of Scott, and then by extension us as individuals, is probably due to a well known perceptual bias.
It's a hit piece, but the lies involve a lot of social justice shibboleths. Audience members who aren't into social justice won't understand that the bad things that the article associates Scott with are even supposed to be bad. That's why you get people not thinking it's a hit piece. It is one, but for its intended audience.
It's like a screed complaining about Jewish bankers, being read by someone whose only opinion of bankers is that they provide a safe place for him to store his money,
Maybe some of it is subtle shibboleths, but I think even normies can understand that "Black people are genetically less intelligent than white people" is a boo-hiss opinion, and that "neo-fascists" are bad.
> A lot of non community members exposed to the article seem to be seeing it as mildly positive about the rationalist community.
Let me fix that for you:
> A lot of non community members exposed to the article who were subsequently interested enough to come to the blog and comment, or discuss the matter with a friend who is a member of the community, seem to be seeing it as mildly positive about the rationalist community.
We know very little about the people who read the article that weren't motivated to search out the new blog or click the sole, untitled, link to a specific post, and navigate their way through to his response, scroll through, if not read, the entire post, and post a comment.
This justifies the initial deletion of the blog. While not guaranteed, a piece this negative would have been much more difficult to deal with before you had taken steps to prepare yourself.
However, the article is just so badly written that I think it may generate minimal interest. How many months went into that tedious sloppy mess?
crybaby guy and hides on a blog! funny without thinking twice he accepted NYT toilet paper offer then he realised that he had to show up such a little boy
Scott, your response to that sad, badly written and/or edited NYT article is just the sort of calmly rational statement I expected from you. I hope the new arrivals and old hands who have suggested that the attention could work to your benefit will prove to be right. Poetic justice is still a thing, y'know?
I found the NYT piece to be kind of lame as a hit piece... but I think that's more due to Scott's material than Cade Metz' intentions. He had thousands of pages material to work with, and the worst he could come up with were some half-assed association, out-of-context quotes and tortured innuendo. Could have been worse.
It is another step in the decline of the NYT, though, which seems to be in the process of getting rid of all contributors who are not 100% on board with wokeism. Which is worrying, because reliable mainstream media are necessary for a healthy public discourse.
Cade Metz links "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup", and describes it as a critique of the Blue Tribe. The outgroup for the Blue Tribe is described as "Anyone who did not agree with the Blue Tribe".
This is an incorrect description of an outgroup, which Scott defines as requiring proximity and small differences.
The first 3 references to the blog vanishing/disappearing are written in a jarringly passive voice.
Yeah, that was jarring. "The blog disappeared." Hmmmm, and you have no idea how that could have come about, right? Also, "I could not guarantee his anonymity" is conveniently vague, compared to "I told him I would use his real name, no matter how much he asked me not to."
A misogynist is a man whose general patronising attitude towards normal women, his contempt for her opinions and beliefs, his denunciation of her choices in life, his mockery of her preferred sexual behaviour, and his vicious loathing of her chosen appearance, is almost as bad as that of a radical feminist activist.
Pretending that some feminists are not the moral equivalent of Voldemort is giving intolerant fascistic bigots a free pass.
It's a bit unrelated to the current topic, but in these comments, IQ mentioned quite often, and it appears that there's some controversy on whether people from different ethnic groups differ in their average IQ. I don't follow this discussion. One thing that strikes me a bit is the belief in the construct of IQ among many of you rationalist guys. See e.g., Nassim Talebs critique ("IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle"). Whatever IQ is, it is probably not unidimensional, so it cannot be a single number. It's probably just weakly predictive of meaningful other things - unless you have people with learning disabilities in your sample, I think that's Nassim's main argument. The sentence I like most: "And one has to be a lunatic (or a psychologist) to believe that a standardized test will reveal independent thinking."
Just want to mention this because I think one of the major fallacies of "rationalist" people is their belief in measurement and numbers.
Thank you. The link is a bit in that direction. As I understand it, that text acknowledges measurement error and reliability. I think Nassims point is that reliability is even lower if you omit clinical population. My point is that the concept is for sure not unidimensional, i.e. not a number. 10 kg of mental rotation skills plus 5 m of verbal short term memory isn't "Fifteen". Of course, that doesn't explain anything about the NYT hit piece
>Whatever IQ is, it is probably not unidimensional
It's well-known that intelligence is not unidimensional, and indeed, many IQ tests have sub-tests covering different dimensions. (See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale and how many sub-scores in includes.) The overall IQ score is one particular way of measuring something that seems to resemble intelligence, and is definitely not a complete characterization of intelligence.
> Nassim Talebs critique
Taleb likes to poo-poo a lot of stuff he doesn't know much about. (It is super cringey to read his books' characterizations of quant finance, for example, despite the fact that he should know better as a former trader.) Though he often makes good observations, I've learned to *never* trust the way he represents other fields.
Taleb may very well make a number of true points about IQ in his article, but I wouldn't assume for a second that he's making accurate representations of what psychometricians would state.
> Just want to mention this because I think one of the major fallacies of "rationalist" people is their belief in measurement and numbers.
Yeah, agree, though I wouldn't limit this statement to rationalists. A lot of people are quick to use statistics to justify whatever position they hold. If anything, I'd say rationalists are more wary of the pitfalls in statistics than the general public. Statistics are tricky to interpret, and there's often a lot of important things going on in the unexplained variance.
>"whatever IQ is, it is probably not unidimensional, so it cannot be a single number..."
IQ is by definition a single number. I assume you meant *intelligence* is not unidimensional, and therefore not adequately represented by IQ?
Anyway, whether IQ represents anything "real" or not, it is possible to reliably measure, and so it is possible to argue about those measurements, why they differ, why they correlate with various things, etc. (But also see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/27/against-individual-iq-worries/)
I must admit that initially I just tried to close the case of ethnic differences in intelligence, see above, by arguing that something like IQ doesn't exist anyway (at least it's nothing real-valued). Or, if it exists, it's a weird construct such as 10 kg of verbal learning memory + 5 m of mental rotation skills. Of course, one can always "define things and calculate them thereafter" so there's nothing wrong with this (can anyone help me finding the origin of this quote). The question is whether it's meaningful or not.
I am not skilled enough philosophically or mathematically to write about "meaningfulness" in a meaningful way, sorry, maybe someone can help out here. What I mean with this: Would IQ qualify for a proper unit? Given that IQ is standardized with expectation 100 and variance 15², I doubt it will. Standardization sounds nice and scientific, but it essentially erases any unit, thus to me it appears more as if intelligence researchers didn't know where to put the origin and the unity. Therefore, personally, I am not convinced, even if IQ correlates with other things to some number different from zero.
But even if IQ is meaningless, one could still kinda argue pragmatically that by some luck, it is correlated to some latent, yet-to-be-discovered entitiy that actually does exist (let's call that thing intelligence). Such that IQ measurements are helpful in decisions about, say, a child's need for special training, and so on. It might not exist, but it's useful, so to say, in the clinical population. As far as I remember, that was Binet's initial motivation.
unitlessness doesn't make a quantity not real or unscientific or whatever. E.g. 2D:4D digit ratio (the length of your index finger divided by the length of your ring finger) is unitless but that's doesn't mean it can't be measured, that you can't study things that correlate with it (e.g. prenatal androgen exposure), etc. Or e.g. egg-to-body-weight ratios (a whopping ~15% for kiwis!) are unitless too
The day ACX/SSC came back online was the happiest day of the year (so far) for me. I don't understand much about the NYT situation - probably because the cultural outrage du jour it's based on doesn't translate well to my (non-US) context.
I just want to let you know I appreciate that you've decided to damn the torpedoes and continue doing what makes you (read: me) happy.
A hit piece in the same vein as the NYT's infamous pieces on Wen-Ho Lee.
The NYT vendetta is not with Scott. It is with Tech. Tech must be tarred with the brush of Trumpism if it is to be demonized effectively, thus the construction of a narrative of a secret cabal of tech industry Trumpists nefariously conspiring chez SSC and professing to love free speech only as a cover for their Trumpism.
The real reason Big Media hates Tech is that Tech has eaten its lunch, and career prospects for journalism grads range from poor to dismal, hence the axe to grind. It doesn't require a conspiracy on Big Media's part (although the Murdochs certainly have their knives out for Google, even though it's Facebook they should worry about more).
The fact that the media in general and the NYT in particular have lost credibility because of their boosterism of Gulf War II, and generally acting in connivence with their more successful classmates in the politics establishment instead of afflicting the comfortable, would require a level of introspection and honesty they are simply incapable of evincing.
It's not about fighting Big Tech, it's about co-opting it. The system of which the New York Times is the most prominent mouthpiece (let's just call it Power) observes that Silicon Valley is so rich and so powerful that it must be absorbed into itself; quite easily done with a hit piece here and a Senate inquiry there to make life difficult for anyone who isn't quite on board with the whole agenda.
The rationalist community is, in the scheme of things, a relatively unimportant and loosely-attached barnacle that needs to be scraped off the hull of Big Tech so that it can be swallowed into Power's gaping maw.
I have somewhat recently discovered your writings. So happy you are back from exile. I am a european psych resident. In recent years my confidence in "the psychiatric project" as a whole has been shaken, to say the least. Maybe not so much because of data on the (lacking) efficacy of our treatments, or our bad diagnostic systems. But by the fact that psychiatrists don't seem interested in reflecting about issues like those. At least not here, where I am. So thank you for thinking and writing about the topics you do. It is of more than trivial importance to me, at least right now. Thank you.
My two biggest quibbles with the times article, in reverse order:
-It’s extremely condescending to minorities or other “intersectionally oppressed” categories, by implying that they can’t themselves discover rationalism or things like Bayesian thinking (aka...thinking) and game theory, nor be tech-minded or rationalist. It’s the same fallacy that left the blue team flat footed to all the minorities who saw themselves as greater than their identity and voted for trump. If we had better primary and secondary education in poor neighborhoods we’d have even more minorities interested in stem, systems thinking, EA, AI, and rationalism because - and it’s crazy that this is controversial in 2021 - there’s nothing inherent in skin color, sex, gender identity, etc that precludes somebody with the right opportunities from learning and finding interesting anything they want.
-More fundamentally, and the thing Scott pointed out in his inaugural AC10 article but upon which I haven’t seen many comments since, where does the times get off deciding they can dox somebody just because they find his blog interesting and they think they want to do an article on him. I’d SA had approached the times, and the reporter had told him “we’d love to run the article, but we can’t run it without your real name; your call” that falls within the common-sense realm of consent. But saying “hey we’d like to do an article, btw we’re revealing your identity whether you want us to or not”?!?! Whether or not that’s a breach of journalistic ethics (I’m sure they have some legal fudge factor for “public figures” and that definition is doing a lot of heavy lifting), it sure seems a breach of common sense ethics/keeping it gangster.
Guy has a book coming out soon on the topic of AI research, so this story is laying the foundations for that. Nothing like whipping up interest and getting potential readers curious about "can you tell us more about this secretive Rationalist Silicon Valley group?" "sure thing, here's my new book!"
The irony of Metz complaining in the article that he and his editor had received abusive emails, after dismissing Scott's concerns about death threats with 'oh that happens all the time, I get 'em, everyone gets 'em' was thick.
Can someone clarify why NYT would not honor someone's request to not doxx him/her? It is a very reasonable request and seems to be the starting point before things spiraled out of control
Scott talks about this a bit more in his first post on the new blog, but the basic takeaway seems to be that they have a policy to use real names whenever possible. Though there's some debate about how consistently this policy is enforced.
Their official reason all along was "It's our policy".
The unofficial reason is, I suspect, that the whole point of a hit piece is defeated if you don't even name the target. The piece isn't just about Scott, it's a warning to others who might be considering thinking for themselves that it's not worth it.
Part of me is glad that they posted this article. I've been reading SSC for years. I know what Scott is about. I also know that there are ways to attack people without evidence. What I do not know is how to tell attacks on people for being evil from pro forma attacks that can be aimed at everyone.
This article is an almost perfect example of a pro forma attack, and it helps me know what to look for.
1. Uncharitable portrayal of belief. I reread the blog post on women in tech. Summarizing it as "women are less interested in joining" was about as bad as a misrepresentation could be without outright lying.
2, Extreme cherrypicking. Scott wrote a lot of stuff. That he wrote something that would look bad out of context is inevitable.
3. Guilt by association with minimal evidence. The first attempt to link neoreactionary thought to SSC is very bad (with three links to neoreactionary sources, no links to Scott endorsing neoreactionary thought, and the weak claim that some rationalists are neoreactionary), Later on, it's bad that Scott linked to someone that white nationalists liked. The Charles Murray reference is a work of evil art.
4. Paraphrased quotes. I suspect that David Friedman was treated poorly. There's an exact quote about how open the comment section is. Then a paraphrased portraying SSC as anti SJW. That looks fishy, why not use the full quote?
This provides me with some evidence of what to look for. I hope to get better at identifying pro forma attacks.
Then there's the way NYT conflates rationalism with SlateStarCodex. Some people came here expecting the comment section to represent "rationalists". It doesn't. Those who took the 2020 SlateStarCodex survey were asked 'Do you identify as a Less Wronger or "aspiring rationalist"?', and only 13.2% said "yes" (40.6% said "sorta").
Duh, this isn't Rationalist Central — LessWrong is Rationalist Central — but the NYT/Metz article was too busy talking about neoreactionaries and white supremacists to mention LessWrong in their story about "rationalists" — which of course should be "aspiring rationalists" because any proper aspiring rationalist is aware that, like every human, they are far from rational.
NYT / Metz calls Yudkowsky a "polemecist", rather than "guy who tried his best to teach people about rationality" or something, and it tries to tie him to Peter Thiel. But while Thiel gave Trump money, Trump-haters like myself ate up every post by Yudkowsky — and by Scott, who wrote an article called "Trump: A Setback For Trumpism" and of course backed Clinton and Biden against Trump.
Over and over it links SlateStarCodex with with extreme right, but what does the SlateStarCodex survey reveal? That SSC participants were 65.2% left-wing:
Social democrat (like Scandinavian liberals): 33.4%
Liberal (like U.S. Democrats): 29.7%
Conservative (like U.S. Republicans): 7.5%
Libertarian: 7.5%
Neoreactionary: 5.1%
Alt-right: 2.2%
Marxist: 2.1%
And of course, NYT avoids connecting the dots between "the blog vanished" and NYT's own actions, doesn't mention the main reason Scott didn't want his name revealed, and doesn't mention that Scott not only deleted his blog but quit his job as a direct result of NYT's name-revealing "policy".
It doesn't *sound* like a hit piece, it sounds like just a story about an unusual community, and yet the details are pretty consistently wrong or misleading. Which could mean it's a hit piece.
Consider the possibility that you overestimate by quite a lot damage done to the therapeutic relationship by revealing your name and status. Patients find out things about their psychiatrist Willie Nilly. This kind of knowledge might come up and can be dealt with in the therapeutic arena. If patients develop distortions or emotional reactions, It can be dealt with as transference is always dealt with – clarification, interpretation, etc. Any of your patients to read your blog will be proud and how are you live, not simply preach, about the importance of truth. Keep up the good fight. As they say, bad press is good pr
A recurring idea in the work of Milan Kundera is that the spirit of totalitarianism lives on in our mass media. In a world without privacy, will we all be perpetually on trial?
They mentioned EA and neoreaction in the same paragraph - EA could have linked to 80000 hours, the EA foundation or anything else. No links. But they put in no less than three separate links to neoreactionaries right after their mention of EA. Negative association.
“effective altruism,” an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation
=
"Effective altruism is when a charity helps people, and the more people it helps, the more effectiver it is. And if it helps a real lot of people, then it's longtermism."
Thank you for noting this. This was a horrible mischaracterization of Effective Altruism by the NYT: "an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation". The actual goal of EA is to make charity more impactful by identifying worthy causes in need.
> I am writing this as a necessary ritual to avoid silence being taken as evidence for guilt.
The problem with this approach is that the people you’re responding too very often take defense of oneself as evidence of guilt. Instead, you need to point out that they lack any legitimacy in making accusations in the first place. First, because they don’t have legitimacy and second because it puts them on the back foot where they need to justify their legitimacy (which they can’t because they don’t have it beyond the fallacious argument of appealing to authority of the institution they write for.)
Make no mistake---the furor this article has aroused will not in any way, shape or form hurt Cade Metz's career at the New York Times.
When I wrote this piece last June https://medium.com/@garyweiss_86200/cade-metz-pulls-a-deep-capture-on-slate-star-codex-da649e8efe7 harkening back to my own experiences with Metz, I implied otherwise. But I underestimated Metz. He maliciously framed the piece to make Scott seem as if he gave a forum to "white supremacists." Right now he no doubt is slanting the criticism to make it seem as if he is "under attack from the right." Remember too that the Times published this piece, gave it play on the first page of the business section, and is invested in it. I doubt that they would even run a letter to the editor from Scott on this, though it is worth a try. If the Times behaved correctly, given Metz's ethnical lapses, errors and distortions, they would run not just a letter but an editor's note.
I think the best way to deal with this would be to have an open conversation with Cade Metz. It would certainly be beneficial for this blog, the New York Times and the community at large rather than establish yet another pointless feud.
You may not want to say the truth about the NY Times but I will. They commonly lie to their readers about anything they oppose. They omit critical facts, they commonly manipulate "quotes" and they dox opponents who can't hit back. The current management has ruined the reputation of this once great newspaper and no thinking person, any longer, takes them seriously as a news source.
It's a great example of how the NYTimes likes to make everything about race. It's why I stopped subscribing too. At least with this article more people can see how #FakeNews they really are and stop subscribing too.
Having read you on and off for going on 5 years now, I don't think that NYT article was a hit piece. I think it kinda reflects my own thinking on this blog and the commenters and your own prickly personality.
His first reaction on many SJW posts are things he goes back to backtrack on. Not his intent, but some of the language he uses. The voldemort thing being a good example.
The NYT has the ethical maturity of a zygote. What more can it take to snap subscribers out of their moral slumber? Its hit pieces and distortions and pure propaganda are beyond the pale. They promote falsehoods, and they--to put it simply--do ugly things to people, uncalled for things. Just in the last few days, Scott Alexander and Donald McNeil. Bret Stephens has to have his say at the Post. Bari Weiss is long gone. Whatever you might think about Jordan Peterson, the NYT hit piece on him was simply disgusting in its supposed humor. He cannot be a person, after all. Now they have been ridiculing his daughter. The Times is an ugly and hurtful wrecking ball. I cancelled my subscription some time ago now. I can still read in the chunks they permit, but it is a miserable read, still. I unsubscribed at about the time Bill Cunningham died. He was so joyful, such a light! Not coincidentally, that was about the same time Jim Rutenberg wrote his letter justifying the jettisoning of traditional journalistic standards--because Trump. Then came the "moral clarity" slogan, folowed by the overt attacks on objective reporting.
If I recall correctly, the New York Times at the time said that it used the title Doctor for someone if their academic title was relevant to their current profession. So Jill Biden who has an Ed.D. and works at a community college gets to be Dr Biden, while Rand Paul who has an M.D. and works as a Senator gets to be Mr Paul.
Alright, fair enough, but is Scott's medical doctorate not relevant to his current profession of practicing medicine? Or has the New York Times decreed that Scott's actual profession is "blogger"?
They also referred to Scott Aaronson this way. You'd think that having a months to work on a piece and an editor would have lead them to notice this...
I did not know about Slate Star Codex or Astral Codex 10 till today’s NYT article. It got me intrigued and I’m going to subscribe today. Hope it brings lots of people to the discussions.
I think that what a lot of gray-tribe folk fail to understand is just how damaging this article is from a blue-tribe perspective. The New York Times wrote an article calling Scott a racist and a sexist. Of course, they didn't *say* those things, but they heavily implied it. And they did so by using guilt-by-association. They established for the blue-tribe that Scott once said something kind about Charles Murray, and so he endorses Murray's beliefs. In the blue-tribe, this guilt-by-association forms a chain that never ends. I am an academic, trying to make a career in academia. I thought about posting a defense of Scott somewhere, but ultimately that would be too risky to my career. It opens me up to become a link in the guilt-chain. "Professor [me] supports Scott Alexander, who is known to support Charles Murray and who thinks feminists are Death Eaters [ergo I am both racist and sexist]". Then they will cite a NYT article "proving" their claims. This is the kind of thing that harms careers and friendships.
To a certain sector of society (which btw has large intersections with the Bay/academia that Scott calls home), Scott has now become toxic. Of course, it made me go pay $100 to support Scott and read his content, so in some ways he won. But it made me far less likely to openly defend him. If certain coworkers of mine came to work one day and talked about how they read a NYT article about the white supremacist tech bro culture that claims to be "rationalist" and how racist and sexist it is - well, my choices are now "agree with the NYT article" or "be seen as racist and sexist".
Probably true, but deeply depressing. What we need is a national seminar on free speech and courage--and we need for some people who are not so vulnerable to speak up clearly and reasonably. For the seminar, I would choose Natan Sharansky's "The Doublethinkers," published a few days ago at Tablet Magazine. It describes life in the Soviet Union as the CP took power over eveything--speech, literature, cinema, education, employment, of course the press, history, one's own mind--and how one had to adapt to survive, how one had to learn to doublethink. And it describes how people coped in those conditions. No one here is being shot. But people are losing livelihoods, reputations.
At the end of his history of the times he lived through, he proposes a test: "In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated or cancelled? Ultimately, whether you will live as a democratic doublethinker doesn't depend on the authorities or on the corporations that run social media platforms: it depends on you. Each of us individually decides whether we want to submit to the crippling indignity of doublethink, or break the chains that keep us from expressing our own thoughts, and becoming whole."
Yes it does. The idea that academics are all into "identity politics" (God I wish there was a word for it that was neutral rather than subtly positive or negative in connotation) is a mistaken inference from the fact that such views are way more common in academia than elsewhere. But most people don't have such views, so that is compatible with lots of academics not having them. (There are not many *conservative* academics, though there are some, but that's not quite the same thing.)
Having said that, whilst I think this blogs readers frequently express an excessive degree of paranoia about the ability of such identity pol people to actually get you in trouble for your views (just because you see lots of media stories about this doesn't mean the individual risk is high!) it's not great to take a stand that some potential employers will agree with whilst others will be put of hiring you because of it. Because very few people who are pro-Scott will be significantly more likely to hire you *because* you are pro-Scott, being publicly pro-Scott is likely net negative for your academic employments prospects in theory. (Though in practice I think the chance of anyone noticing AND caring is pretty small.)
I agree. Also, to be honest, I am a bit ashamed of how I phrased the comment above; tribalism dynamic is a useful thing to keep in mind, but we shouldn't get carried away. Pinker, Yglesias or Freddie de Boer are disgusted by Metz's article not because they are "from the Grey tribe", but simply because they are decent people that know something about its subject.
However, I absolutely agree that any active public/social media activity not _very_ directly related to your field of work is probably harmful to one's career in academia. From my (limited) experience (in STEM) in order to get hired at tenure track or tenure level you have to be a consensus candidate. If there are two members of the committee with a negative opinion the chances of the candidate are slim even if the others are super enthusiastic. And one opinion I heard was "why is this guy blogging instead of writing papers?" This won't hurt brilliant people like Scott Aaronson, but in borderline cases it plays a role.
Sure, not poking at taboos is the right call in the vast majority of cases, but I don't think this one of them.
Our continual acquiesce to fear is a the force which gives these people power. Every inch of ground you give is taken joyously. You don't have to win back ground that's already been lost. But at least hold the line.
The blog is a big enough force for good that I'm happy to bear the risk.
Conservatives have been trying to warn everyone for years about THIS EXACT THING, but instead of being supported by upstanding Democrats like yourself we have been villainized, fired, threatened, physically assaulted, called racists, extremists, and even insurrectionists. While I feel bad for you, I'm hoping this is an overall learning lesson for what almost half the country has been dealing with for years. The only difference is you'll get your life back.
Half the country has not been fired from their jobs because of cancel mobs. We'd be facing a total economic collapse if that were true.
Everyone is aware of this, everyone condemns the cases that are bad when they're made aware of them, we just don't think it's bad when the accusations are correct and the response is proportional, and we're not suckered into hysteria on the topic.
Hello Scott, I'm not calling you a fascist or a nazi or anything like that. I'd just like to know your answer to this question:
Yes or no, do you believe that the current social inequalities between black and white people (whether they be in the US or between say Africa and Europe) are partially due to black people being genetically dumber?
Hi Scott, yes or no, have you stopped beating your wife? (rest assured that I won't personally call you a wifebeater, I'll just leave that up to my hive of cronies)
"Have you stopped beating your wife" carries a hidden assumption (that the person you're talking to was in fact beating his wife). What is the assumption hidden in the question I put forward?
If a question has to be prefaced with a demand for a "yes or no" answer, it is never, ever, ever being asked in good faith by a reasonable person in a calm state of mind.
On the contrary, I believe it is a very clear question and I also believe the vast majority of people have their mind made up on the question. It is not loaded, or passionate, or imprecise. If I replaced the word "dumber" (which I treat interchangeably with "lower IQ", not pejoratively) with "taller" I wouldn't be accused of having bad faith.
Again, most people would answer this question without hesitation, be they Richard Spencer or MLK. Refusing to answer the question is telling whether you want it or not.
My answer, as is that of the overwhelming majority of geneticists I happen to work with for a living, is 'no' (or in probability terms, the outcome space of the proposition being true has measure zero). Now what is yours?
I don't see how it is loaded. It is extremely factual, actually. Darwin presented some objections on it being not precise enough, so here I go again:
What is your prior (as a number between 0 and 1) on the likelihood that the current social inequalities between black and white people (whether they be in the US or between say Africa and Europe) are partially due to black people having on average lower IQ than whites for genetic reasons?
"Again, most people would answer this question without hesitation, be they Richard Spencer or MLK."
Okay, let's have at it.
Are black people stupider than white people? No.
What are the distribution tails? That is, if we took a sample of the African-American population of the USA, and we took a sample of the White (Non-Hispanic) population of the USA, what are the extremes for low IQ and high IQ? Is there a difference? Is it similar to the male/female graph or otherwise?
Here's a horribly sloppy graph but it gives the general idea:
Now, when YOU put up something solid along the lines of research into population genetics and IQ scores then we can discuss this question reasonably. Until then, you're just trying to bait racists.
The question is very clear, and so is your agenda.
Asking whether a continuous variable is non-zero loses a ton of information. The difference between explaining 1e-100 of variance and explaining 0 variance is insignificant, but one is a "yes" and the other is a "no".
If you are asking the question because you want useful information, you'd never phrase it as a yes/no. If you're asking because you're looking for a soundbite to use against someone, then it makes sense to phrase it as yes/no.
This is a community based on Bayesian reasoning, so there are going to be *priors*. Typically when you ask someone "do you believe X" you are not demanding that they answer with 100% or even 99.9% certainty, you just want to know their prior on the matter. So, let me reformulate this question:
What is your prior on the likelihood that the current social inequalities between black and white people (whether they be in the US or between say Africa and Europe) are partially due to black people having a low IQ for genetic reasons?
Nice try, but you've still got 'partially' in there, which of course covers '99% responsible' and '.000000000001% responsible', letting you misinterpret the response in whichever direction you'd like.
Also, obviously black people don't all share on IQ, and you give no operational definition for 'low'.
If you want to ask a precise question, you'll have to try a lot harder. But since you added at least 4 ways to make your question ambiguous such that you could interpret the answer to mean anything you want, people are going to be rightly suspicious that you actually *wanted* a precise exchange of information in the first place.
I take it you're refusing to answer the question then? Bayesian theory says you *have* a prior on the likelihood, however imprecise, even if you do not want to admit (or reveal) it.
No it doesn't, not to an improperly formed question.
Do you believe that IQ has a non-zero impact on life outcomes? Do you believe that IQ varies between individuals?
If so, you should answer the question-as-stated '50% likely to be true', since random variance means any randomly chosen population is 50% likely to have higher average IQ than any other randomly chosen population.
>Nice try, but you've still got 'partially' in there, which of course covers '99% responsible' and '.000000000001% responsible', letting you misinterpret the response in whichever direction you'd like.
It makes no sense to say 'differences in intelligence are 80% due to genetics', that's not what heritability means. You can say it is purely genetic like a Mendelian disorder, environmental like one's primary language, or a mix of the two.
Replace 'low' with 'lower than whites on average'.
No, actually it makes perfect sense to say something like that. E.g. phenylketonuria is a recessive mendelian disorder...mediated through the environment, a low-phenylalanine diet(since it's caused by a lack of a functional enzyme that decomposes it) is what helps to contain the symptoms leading to a healthy life.
The absolute majority of traits are some combination of genetics AND the environment the phenotype happens to develop in. Repeated generational exposure to an environment in which a costly trait can't fully develop anyway can mean it's being selected against.
The point being that it's very difficult to disentangle those two causes from one another, so why are you pretending that piling the responsibility for any differences purely onto the environment is any more tenable than declaring that genes are the sole culprit? The likeliest to be true answer is "both are, to different degrees, like with practically every trait", any other kinds of claims is just wishful thinking.
Agreed, asking about his prior is much more reasonable than asking "yes or no".
But of course it's still a question that anyone would be foolish to answer using their real identity -- you either give the intellectually dishonest answer or you give the one that blows up what's left of your career and identity.
Since I'm not posting under my true identity I'm happy to tell you that my current prior on the matter is on the high side of 0.5 but still meaningfully less than 1. I don't claim much expertise on the matter, though I claim more expertise than most people who have never bothered to look into it at all.
Let's talk about Bayes' Theorem for a moment, though (even though I think it tends to be vastly overrated by the Rationalist community). If "A" is the probability that certain genetically semi-isolated human subpopulations have meaningful differences in intelligence, and "B" is the dozens of studies which suggest that such a difference exists, then the only way your P(A|B) is going to be zero is if your P(A) was zero to begin with, which seems unreasonable based on what we see in other species.
Thank you for replying in good faith. However, I think you are wrong, and I am not alone with this opinion: if you don't believe me when I claim to work in genetics, maybe you will believe Ewan Birney*, the head of the most prestigious genomics institution in Europe?
I also think you are wrong when people who answer with the negative (respectively a set of negligible measure regarding probabilities) are being intellectually dishonest. The objections to the HBD crowd are well known and their 'hypotheses' have been overwhelmingly dismissed in the genomics community. You may retort that everyone is secretly terrified of saying the truth but 'everyone is in on a giant conspiracy to prove me wrong' only gets you so far, epistemologically. Just because you pretend to be Galileo doesn't mean you are in any way like him.
But, for all your wrongness, I at least respect you more than I do people who squirm their way out of this after all very simple and precise question and won't answer it, as though the very same question weren't openly discussed barely a few threads above mine.
"The objections to the HBD crowd are well known and their 'hypotheses' have been overwhelmingly dismissed in the genomics community"
I keep hearing that, but then the source given is invariably one or two people. While not recent, this is better than anything I've seen cited for the supposed "genomics consensus."
There are some questions that people object to being asked because they are loaded or otherwise dishonest. There are others that are quite simple and precise, for instance, "how many sexual partners have you had," that people will nevertheless squirm their way out of answering. There's a social norm that you don't get to just demand people answer questions, even if simple and precise.
>I keep hearing that, but then the source given is invariably one or two people. While not recent, this is better than anything I've seen cited for the supposed "genomics consensus."
The linked post contains more than one person - scientists rarely write articles alone. Regardless, science is not a democracy - if a few experts chime on a subject they know they are more likely to be right than the editors of a wikipedia article, and relying on a wiki article instead of the word of experts isn't doing any favor.
>There are others that are quite simple and precise, for instance, "how many sexual partners have you had," that people will nevertheless squirm their way out of answering. There's a social norm that you don't get to just demand people answer questions, even if simple and precise.
And yet, isn't that marvelous, despite your protests that such a question would be crass to ask, you are discussing it at the same time! You object to my linking of an expert opinion despite not being one yourself, surely you're aware this says quite a bit about your prior even if you're not willing to state it explicitly?
Please don't respect me more than the people who squirm their way out of this question; if you asked me in a place where I could be linked to my actual identity then I'd squirm my way out too. It's unfair to go around asking people this question because it puts them in a difficult position, much as it's unfair to go around sidling up to random North Koreans and saying "Soooo, what's your honest opinion on Kim Jong Un? Perfect or not?"
I did read the article and it's one of the better ones I've read on the subject, although it's frustrating that it couldn't avoid the temptation to work some moralizing into its scientific discussion (disagreement is "darker currents").
The first point, "Human population structure is not race" is perfectly fine; racial categories especially in the United States are messy and sometimes nonsensical (e.g. describing Barack Obama as "black" when he's clearly no more black than white) and don't represent a clean division of reality at the joints. The concept of "race" isn't really necessary for the discussion though.
The second part is more interesting. The author correctly points out that we don't have a simple genetic explanation for intelligence in the way that we do for melanin or sickle-cell anemia. There's no simple set of "genes for intelligence" which we can say are more present in certain ethnic groups rather than others; variation in human intelligence is presumably caused by vast numbers of genes interacting in ways that we do not understand, or to put it in the article's words, "since it is a complex trait, the genetic variation related to IQ is broadly distributed across the genome, rather than being clustered around a few spots, as is the nature of the variation responsible for skin pigmentation".
Again, this is all fair enough and makes perfect sense, and so does this: "Consequently, anyone who tells you that there’s good evidence on how much genetics explain group differences (rather than individual differences) is fooling you – or fooling themselves"
But the inferential leap that I'm failing to understand is this: it's the one from "We don't have a good understanding of how intra- or inter-group variations in the genome relate to intelligence" to "Therefore it's very unlikely that there are inter-group variations in intelligence". Either I've missed this important point, or it's been hand-waved over.
Also, the "social inequalities" are doing work here as well. I have no idea if there is a particular tribal grouping within the continent of Africa that is provably lower-scoring on IQ tests, but say there is: how much of that is down to genetics? and how much of the genetics is down to being survivors of war, famine, enslavement by other tribal groups, etc. etc. etc. over centuries?
It's chicken-and-egg question here, and any "so are you a racist who believes black people are genetically inferior?" questions are not going to get a good answer because that question is not being asked in good faith, it's being asked to witch-hunt.
I think the argument that it's unlikely that the inter-group variations are genetic in origin is partly contained in this bit:
'For traits caused by regional adaptation, contemporary genetic techniques now allow us to see clear evidence for recent selection on new genetic variants or patterns at particular locations in the genome. However, such cases are atypical: most traits have no obvious or localised signal of recent selection'
That is: 'for most traits there hasn't been the kind of recent natural selection that would lead to group differences along roughly US folk racial category lines, so probably intelligence is like that too.'
partly in this:
'However, there are some strong hints towards the answer. The genetic variants that are most strongly associated with IQ in Europeans are no more population-specific than any other trait. To put it bluntly, the same genetic variants associated with purportedly higher IQ in Europeans are also present in Africans, and have not emerged, or been obviously selected for, in recent evolutionary history outside Africa.' Confess I lack the biological knowledge to quite follow what is being said here. (Which given that I am a PhD, albeit in the humanities, I and this is written for laypeople, is not great.) I *think* what is being said is: 'Well, none of the genes associated with intelligence in Europeans first appeared after the ancestors of Europeans left Africa'. But I don't know enough to know how bad this is for the view that IQ differences between US whites and blacks are racial in origin. (Couldn't a gene become more common a subgroup through selection pressures even if it was *present* in all groups?)
Perhaps the most key bit appears to be:
'For traits caused by regional adaptation, contemporary genetic techniques now allow us to see clear evidence for recent selection on new genetic variants or patterns at particular locations in the genome' I take it the argument here is meant to be: We already know what the signs of a trait being the product of recent selection are, they aren't present for intelligence, so probably Europeans weren't subject to selection for intelligence (more than anyone else) once they left Africa. If there wasn't selection, it's very unlikely that Europeans would end up with genetically higher intelligence by chance, so almost certainly they didn't.
It seems like this is very difficult technical territory where despite their best efforts to write something clear for laypeople, it's very hard for a layperson to actually assess their arguments, but the first point at least seems sound. And I'd take the fact that the authors of the article are genuine experts at least somewhat seriously. (Though obviously expert *consensus*, which there may be of course, would be much stronger evidence.)
So to sum up, when you are asking your "just yes or no" question, what you want is "no, it's not true that the current wotsit is down to whozis". If they give any other answer, you launch into your little sermon and then say it's "after all (a) very simple and precise question".
I am forced to conclude from the interaction above that you are not asking a question about genetics, you are trying to sniff out witches.
Birney et al.'s "explainer" has been thoroughly demolished when it came out. https://noahcarl.medium.com/response-to-birney-raff-rutherford-scally-bf70f763efc6 is one work that lists links and presents counter-arguments to points given in the "explainer" drawn from published science, including such people as David Reich who is without doubt a much better human geneticist than the (frankly speaking) low-wattage team that penned the "explainer".
That link straightforwardly refers to the Flynn effect as an explanation while it's not obvious that it's not merely an artifact of measurement inflation, ironic to be taking that seriously and be decrying the accuracy of psych at the same time.
The truth you want is highlighted to some degree by adoption studies which there are aplenty of and practically all of them show the same gaps remaining despite the environment. Meanwhile intelligence research has shown some of the highest replication rates in various psych fields as the measurements are relatively cheap and simple to do and we've had enough time redoing them that novel results are unlikely to manifest. And the one remaining explanation - epigenetics is a fancy buzzword as far as human genetics is concerned, any epigenetic mechanisms have to first be selected for through normal evo means, so they're applicable mainly to fruit flies and nematodes rather than the higher "costs-per-unit" forms of life. The fact of the matter is that it's unlikely that there are ~absolutely no~ genetic effects in play given that even a paper by such individuals as Kevin Bird(doesn't get more of a "lefty activist going into science for agenda reasons" than him) was bound to find a genetics-explained gap of 5 points IIRC.
What is your prior (as a number between 0 and 1) on the likelihood that the current social inequalities between black and white people (whether they be in the US or between say Africa and Europe) are partially due to black people having a low IQ for genetic reasons?
Are you asking if the portion of the gap in average IQ between races that is of genetic origin contributes *at all* to social inequality? Because answering anything but .9 i.e within epsilon of certainty would be irrational, everything is contributing *to some extent*. But maybe I don’t understand what you are asking?
It's only irrational to have a low prior if you believe that it's likely that some of the gap is genetic. If you can rationally assign low credence to the gap being at all genetic, you can rationally assign low credence to it contributing at all to social inequality, since if there's no genetic component to the gap the genetic component to the gap contributes nothing to anything.
first you have to establish what you mean by "dumber" (scores on IQ tests?) and secondly what you mean by "genetically dumber" and thirdly you would then have to prove that all black people are "genetically dumber".
Come back when you've refined your terms and are not dangling bait in the water.
Hey, just wanted to say I find it interesting how hard some people here seem to be trying to justify avoiding to answer the question. I think it is a perfectly reasonable question. However, I think it is not a reasonable question to ask someone who is not anonymous, as I do not see how there could possibly be a reasonable expectation of an honest answer. It's basically equivalent to asking "do you think the Earth revolves around the Sun" in the 1600s.
Trump had the greatest response ever to accusations of sexism: "only Rosie O'donnell." That should be the stock answer for everyone, no matter what the context. lol
I had never heard of Scott Alexander. I came here after reading the NYT article, very much ready to pay for this blog! The first article I read was the one about Ezra Klein's book and the second one is this one. I honestly did not think the NYT article was "negative", especially in the way Scott described it. My first impression was "wow here is an interesting corner of internet that I was not aware of and I should be part of it!" But then again I was never a "loud" person on the interwebs so if I say relax I am being flippant I guess. Best of luck from a chronically depressed PhD statistician & left leaning gay economist.
I hope that you can move past this and continue blogging, Scott. Though your discussions are often beyond my poor comprehension abilities, I appreciate them.
I have decided to treat the NYT in casual conversation as it treats others. So I will append a true fact that is irrelevant except to imply guilt by association whenever I mention it. For example, "in an article in the NYT, which has the same business model as Pornhub, ..."
Why did the NYT article imply that Scott is a member of the "Grey Tribe"? In that "I can Tolerate Anyone Except the Outgroup" post from SSC, he actually had an interesting meta section near the end where he admitted he is part of the blue tribe.
I think you've switched "grey" and "blue" in your recollection. He starts "I can Tolerate Anyone Except the Outgroup" talking if he is blue tribe criticizing itself, and then the meta-section is about him realizing, that no, he likes criticizing blue tribe too much to actually be blue tribe, and he is probably grey tribe.
Unpleasantness aside, am I the only person who found the NYT article... weird? In the following senses:
1. It's existence is weird. People either know what SSC was or they don't. People who do will see through this. People who don't will wonder why they're reading about "some guy has a blog that's maybe problematic but not in an interesting or outrage-inducing way." Including Scott Aaronson's quote looked a bit like a shoe-horn that doesn't add anything for non-SSC people who've presumably never heard of him.
2. It's waaay too obvious: in basic reading comprehension terms a sentence like the Charles Murray one just looks like it's grasping at straws.
3. Part of it comes across as a having been a much better hit-piece that's been neutered. I love(d) SSC, but anyone who's read all of it knows that with a proper argument in there it could be crucified (for obvious reasons, this should be left as an exercise for the reader). This article could have been, "rich tech people read evil blog" as both a more readable/relevant article and kicking Scott harder. This looks like it's trying to be a hit piece without being one, when you'd assume the intention would be the opposite.
4. "Mostly, but not all, white men." That phrase is bizarre in context. "Mostly white men" has much more sting in SJW terms, and means the same thing so is still accurate. It's pulling a punch it didn't have to throw.
5. The last line almost has a double meaning - it sounds begrudgingly respectful to anyone who's read the first post here, but
Overall, this looks like the NYT decided they had to write an article and name Scott (although missing out the "Dr"), but didn't really have a hook to hang it on (hence the non-hitting hit-piece). Either that or Cade Metz couldn't be bothered to re-write parts of it and knocked this out quickly, or his editor wanted a hit-piece but he didn't want to write it. Not worth worrying about though; no-one who's never heard of SSC will ever remember they read it.
On your point 1, lots of people know what the Tech Industry is and have a vague sense that the leaders of Big Tech are conspiring against them. If that's the target audience, Metz and NYT are selling them a dose of "Hey, we found one of the smoke-filled rooms where the Elders of Tech hang out, and it's full of nerds and racists and weirdos and they have a secret thought leader who doesn't want anyone to know his name".
"The New York Times published a grotesque report this weekend cheering an 18-year-old named Jimmy Galligan, a biracial Virginia resident who targeted a white girl for destruction after he obtained a years-old video of her using the N-word.
"The white girl, Mimi Groves, used the racial slur jokingly in 2016 in reference to having just acquired her learner's permit. Groves, who was a freshman in high school at the time, said specifically in a Snapchat video, "I can drive, n-------." ...
"The New York Times reports, “Mr. Galligan, who had waited until Ms. Groves had chosen a college, had publicly posted the video that afternoon. Within hours, it had been shared to Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, where furious calls mounted for the University of Tennessee to revoke its admission offer."
"The University of Tennessee bowed to the mob, first by removing Groves from its cheer squad and then by pressuring her into rescinding her application for enrollment. Groves, who is both contrite and embarrassed for what she said as a freshman in high school, took the hint. She withdrew her acceptance and ended up attending community college online. ...
"Galligan is outrageously misguided. That much is clear. But he is not even the most disturbing thing about this wretched story. That dubious distinction goes to both the New York Times and the University of Tennessee.
"It is one thing if Galligan is a bitter, vindictive young man suffering from personal hang-ups, but what good reason does the New York Times have to run his story? What public interest is served? Are we to believe now that the private remarks of children, remarks, by the way, for which they have apologized, merit attention from the most powerful media organizations in the United States? Surely, the New York Times is not serious when it says of this incident that it paints a "complex portrait of behavior that for generations had gone unchecked in schools in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties, where Black students said they had long been subjected to ridicule." Next up, I suppose the paper will dispatch a team of reporters to investigate the mean-girl table. ...
The NYTimes stoops to conquer. No one is too small to evade its relentless search for social justice. Compared to Mimi Groves, Scott Alexander is Alexander the Great.
If anyone can think of a condign punishment for the NYTimes, please let me know. A truck full of ANFO seems to be a bit crude.
I didn't think much of the article, but it seems entirely plausible to me that the NYT [mistakenly] thought it was being fair, and I think this is a good lesson in the perils of "both sides" journalism.
I'm imagining a thought process along the lines of 'ok, this rationality thing, some people like it and some people don't, so let's get some material from both sides!' along with some pretty sloppy fact checking. The rat community, like any large and weird enough subculture, has generated people who dislike and are weirdly obsessed with it, and if you make half the story about what they have to say your readers are usually going to get the wrong idea.
One problem with this is that Scott Aaronson, by his account, spent a lot of time talking with the author and felt the article omitted or reversed a bunch of relevant points that he had made.
After reading the NYTimes article, I decided to subscribe. Scott needs our support to keep alive one of the last bastions of free and respectful debate on the Internet.
I read the New York times article and it wasn't bad publicity! Brought me here. The article didn't seem that unjust. Despite the fact you take umbrage with some of what they wrote, they also sung your praises. Don't sweat it.
I continue to wonder as the Times & progressive media continue to "eat" their own why rational liberals continue to to support it. Perhaps you should come to the actually tolerant right. Good day sir.
The vague associating with Silicon Valley and offensive ideas might be annoying, BUT the fact that the article provides so many links to your articles, and that by now you’ve arranged things so that your real name being out there doesn’t hurt you that much, definitely will make this exposure add up to a net positive here in the long run.
I also back in the day initially found you through a link of somebody misrepresenting you, read the article and was hooked. Same will happen here to many people. The content will speak for itself.
Feels like a missed opportunity, tbh. And I know for a fact that one of the people who consulted on the article was well-aware of this incident, so maybe, *just maybe*, you're throwing a massive hissyfit over an article that was both extremely charitable to you and your writing and which also refused to talk about the stuff that really makes you look awful. Maybe, *just maybe*, responding to that with hostility and conspiracy theories about the media is not a good look. Personally, I'm looking forward to the article about you that talks about this incident, and about how Steve Sailer is a member in good standing, and how that subreddit you publicly endorsed is full of weird, creepy reactionaries.
Also nice new website. It runs really badly and the comments are full of HBDers. The old site ran well and had comments full of HBDers; personally I would have changed the latter rather than the former when moving to a new platform, but I'm not the innovative thinker you are. Have fun!
I'll stop mentioning the scientific racists and white supremacists in the SSC community when there stops being scientific racists and white supremacists in the SSC community. Alas, that has yet to happen for some reason. Weird how this community and its spinoffs keep attracting all these witches that Scott promised he wouldn't hunt.
There's a lot of bad people in the world. But we all have to live together because the happy day when there stop being bad people in the community is a long way off. If you wish to drive the bad people off with a stick so only good people can be here and you can have a happy place, well good luck with the endeavour but there will always be tares in the wheat.
Ultimately it's either about tolerating the witches and carrying on as usual or granting ultimate moral authority to the witch-hunters, whose demand for hunting ~something~ will never be sated since they'll be left without a job otherwise. I think I know which of the options is better to root for in the long-term plus we already have one NYT as is.
What do you (or Metz, but you can't speak for him) mean by "white supremacist"? Is it literally someone who says that whites should rule the country or the world, with the implication that other races should be disenfranchised, or banned from positions of power, or something similar? I can't remember seeing anyone making that claim, on SSC or elsewhere.
If you are using it in a weaker sense, it would help to tell us what it is so the rest of us could decide if it's really a terrible thing or just a terrible label.
It's pretty gross that your taking such obvious delight in using such a horrible incident involving a suicide to score a political point. (I agree he should boot Sailer for well, being Steve Sailer.)
It's especially gross given that (1) this is clearly written for a restricted in-person community; (2) it obviously requires much more context to understand what's going on; (3) it's not at all clear how this is supposed to reflect badly on Scott.
My guess is they think that publicly attacking a woman (alive or recently) dead on the grounds that they made false harassment allegations is always wrong.
I’m one of the (probably innumerable) people who were brought to this blog by the Times article expecting to find fascinating discussions “ re-examin[ing] the world through cold and careful thought,“ as the times put it. Opening the comment section with “If there's anyone in history who doesn't deserve to have his ideas discussed properly, it's Marx,” “The comment section will instantly improve the moment you are banned,” and “You can’t be a Marxist with anything approaching a rational viewpoint” (from someone who calls themself “Reality,” no less), is not an auspicious beginning.
I think you will find fascinating discussions here. You will also find plenty of cranks, zealots, and generally annoying people. If you know of any online forum that has the former without the latter, please supply a link. One of the advantages of an online forum is that you can chose who you engage with and who you ignore, unlike IRL where someone shouting at you is impossible to completely ignore. Chose wisely and your time here will be well spent.
You could get a more normal picture of the discussion by looking at the old SSC posts and discussions, which are still webbed. https://slatestarcodex.com/archives/
As far as Marxbro is concerned, the problem isn't that he's a Marxist but that he is a crank. He wants everybody to talk about his favorite subject on his terms all the time. If a Christian fundamentalist or an atheist showed up with the same attitude he would get the same sort of response.
Scott has had some really fascinating posts engaging with far-left thought in the past, and has been open to corrections from and dialogue with Marxists (and every other manner of fringe-but-interesting political ideology). The poster in question is annoying not because he's a Communist but because he comments the same thing about misquoting Marx over and over again in unrelated discussions, for literal hours every day. Related: http://wondermark.com/1k62/
I've corrected Scott Alexander multiple times on the basics of Marxist thought and he has never updated his priors. I'm very open to dialogue with Scott Alexander.
To quote Terry Prachett from one of the Watch novels: "We're like one big family here and you'll see the resemblance for yourself when you're called out to your first domestic dispute". You happened to come in when the grumpy uncles and weird cousins and leopard-print wearing aunts were having at it in a long-running dispute.
I'm new to Scott's work, having recently discovered it due to the NY Times controversy. I thought this was a good response, but this part kind of weirded me out: "Again, it would not surprise me if I was a few degrees of social separation from some of these people. I don’t feel like this means I have done anything wrong, and I assume most people are a few degrees of social separation away from a Republican or Trump supporter. I myself am a Democrat, voted Warren (IIRC) in the primary, and Biden in the general."
Just feels a little spooky that the "newspaper of record" can publish a hit piece on someone and then that person feels compelled to publicly beg "Please don't blame me for knowing a few Republicans. Everybody does! I'm a member of The Party, honest I am!!" I don't know that you can definitively say at this point that we are living in a one-party state, but seems like we're getting closer and closer.
People should read the book and give him honest reviews. What is wrong with that? He got a "blurb" from an old colleague named Ashlee Vance, without disclosing that they are old friends who worked with him at The Register. Now that is unethical. Reading his book and reviewing it on Amazon is not.
I agree we shouldn't all bustle off to bash the book without reading it, but if anyone or several someones wants to read it and give a review about "so is it good, bad or indifferent?" I'd be interested to see that. You could even enter it for Scott's March book review contest!
You provide so much entertainment, intellectual stimulation, and sense of community for so many people. Which is a net GOOD. I'm sorry that your reward for this net GOOD behavior is this.
Why is Charles Murray so demonized? I've read a few of this books, "Coming Apart", "In Our Hands" and I've listened to a few talks. (Sam Harris comes to mind first.. though also AEI stuff.) From what little I can tell, Charles is a good person. You don't have to agree with him on everything to acknowledge he is worth reading.
No, but I am relying simply on the famous quote from The Bell Curve where and Herrenstein say that it's likely genetics plays a role in race/IQ disparities: 'If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.'
Since the *only* opinion I expressed about Murray is that he said it's likely that blacks are genetically less intelligent, and the quote shows that he did say that, I'm not ashamed of not having read more. I didn't express a general opinion of my own on Charles Murray as a person or the merits of his work.
What he said was that it is likely that genetics plays some role but he had no idea how large. What is your basis for disagreeing? Is there any evidence for, or any good a priori reason to believe, the claim that the genetic effect is zero, which is what you seem to be assuming?
I'm not assuming anything about whether Murray was right or wrong! Someone asked why he was demonized and I gave an example of a taboo belief that he held that explained the demonization. I didn't say anything about how likely the belief is to be true, one way or the other.
There's obviously no *purely* a priori reason to think it must be zero, i.e. something conceptually impossible about the idea of a genetic cause for part or all of the gap. The question is how likely it is given our empirical knowledge about genetics, and the genetics of IQ in particular. And my view on that is 'I have no clue because I'm a (failed) analytic philosopher not a geneticist, and when I've had a quick look for the expert consensus on this, I haven't found much that's useful, just moral outrage on one side and 'we should be allowed to ask the question' on the other. (I'm not saying nothing is out there, just that this can't be quickly checked from wiki). There are obvious reasons to be suspicion that those pursuing the hypothesis will be disproportionately those who are biased against or dislike blacks; this was essentially Ezra Klein's argument in his debate over Murray with Sam Harris, that Murray has a long history of advocating for policies that benefit whites at the expense of blacks, which should cast doubt on his motives. (Not endorsing or condemning the particular arguments Ezra gave for this.) That's almost certainly true even if the hypothesis is true. So it's rational for blacks (and others) to suspect people who pursue the link of racist animus against blacks at least a little bit. But that doesn't tell us whether it's true obviously!
Ughh, OK race is a loaded question in the US, our original sin is slavery, (I feel like I'm stating the obvious). I think a lot of us would have been happier if African Americans had a bit higher IQ than 'white' Americans. At this point I can only encourage you to listen to the podcast between Harris and Murray. Murray seems unfairly demonized to me. Are you of European stock like me? Does it bother you that Asians are slightly smarter than Europeans? Where do Indians (from Asia) fit on the intelligence scale? My hypothesis (I assume not original to me) is that civilization selects for intelligence, so I'd guess slightly smarter than Europe.
Yeah, that seems as well written as it could be. I think it refers to intelligence as a function of genetics and nurture. Race is an accident of the past. (Race is a breeding population, it will disappear in the US as we keep inter-breeding.) I've ordered a copy of "The Bell Curve" so I'll read it, and let you know. If you pick any metric, shoe size maybe, and any variable: zip code, occupation, race. You'll get a difference. The difference may smaller than a standard deviation, but no matter we can measure it. And because the variation is much larger than any difference it's silly to judge anyone by their race or other variable. Everyone needs to be judged as an individual. Asians and Ashkenazi's are on average smarter than my European stock. Does that bother me. Hell no. It's a very good thing that there are plenty of people smarter than me.
I imagine he tends to be demonized by the left because of his strongly right-wing politics, regardless of merit. I wouldn't say he deserves to be demonized for that. But near the end of this nearly 3-hour video about Murray's famous book, the critique finally explains something really insidious about his writing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
TL;DR: Murray uses language deftly in a way that makes him *appear* careful and scientific, and indeed he appears to agree with mainstream scientists most of the time. But in a sleight of hand, all that carefulness subtly disappears in important locations, such as when he links the analysis to his right-wing political conclusions. A look at his main sources of information, and who funds them, isn't flattering either.
So he's bad because he's right wing? I've listened to Murray and read a few of his books. You don't have to agree with his solutions. But it's a fact that part of intelligence is genetic. I understand there are many who don't like this fact....
Our illustrious host for one. :^) I didn't watch your 3 hr video, A few years ago I listened to the Sam Harris podcast with Murray. Is there anyway you might imagine that Murray has been unfairly demonized?
I was surprised by your defensive about the New York Times article because my reaction was wow, how can he write about some many topics.
In anycase, many of the disputes come down to causation vs correlation as well as individuals not understanding the biophysics of the brain and nervous system and the neuroplasticity of neural networks. But this is a larger topic with many dimensions.
Looking for a larger context, the NYTimes published long article with at least a partial replay of the Donald McNeil fiasco: The author, Ben Smith, the NYTimes media correspondent, has some trenchant observations:
Postcard From Peru: Why the Morality Plays Inside The Times Won’t Stop
Other news organizations have their own personnel dramas. But none attract the spotlight the way The Times does.
"The exhaustive coverage led The New Republic last week to ask, “Can We Stop Obsessing Over Every Personnel Decision Made by The New York Times?”
"Not just yet.
"The Times is an object of obsession because of its unusual, perhaps unhealthy, central place in American news, culture and politics. Its actions — and those of its internal factions — carry huge symbolic weight. That’s the thing that struck me most when I got here a year ago, and wrote that “because The Times now overshadows so much of the industry, the cultural and ideological battles that used to break out between news organizations now play out inside The Times.” The Times’s media ambitions have also intensified its status as a cultural lightning rod. It is no longer just a source of information. It seeks to be the voice whispering in your ear in the morning, the curriculum in your child’s history class and the instructions on caramelizing shallots for the pasta you’re making for dinner."
***
"I think it’s a sign that The Times’s unique position in American news may not be tenable. This intense attention, combined with a thriving digital subscription business that makes the company more beholden to the views of left-leaning subscribers, may yet push it into a narrower and more left-wing political lane as a kind of American version of The Guardian — the opposite of its stated, broader strategy."
*****
"The questions about The Times’s identity and political leanings are real; the differences inside the newsroom won’t be easily resolved. But the paper needs to figure out how to resolve these issues more clearly: Is The Times the leading newspaper for like-minded, left-leaning Americans? Or is it trying to hold what seems to be a disappearing center in a deeply divided country? Is it Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden? One thing that’s clear is that these questions probably aren’t best arbitrated through firings or resignations freighted with symbolic meaning, or hashed out inside the human resources department."
I should add that as an outsider and a conservative, I have always found the NYTimes's pretensions to objectivity and middle of the road politics to be risible.
This is the newspaper that made Walter Duranty its Moscow Bureau chief where he spent 14 years covering up Stalin's crimes, and that ran Herbert Mathews's cover ups of Castro's hard core Communism. They were hard left long before all of you were born.
What has changed is not the NYTimes, but the content and structure of the Left. What is has become since the collapse of the Soviet Union is a movement of upper class contempt for the working and middle classes, the bitter clingers, the deplorables. The ideology has used the language of the Frankfurt School and the tactics of Maoism as its tools. Political correctness, wokeism, BLM, antifa, and cancel culture are its manifestations. The NYTimes is just struggling to keep up.
By definition, most left-leaning voters are not elite, seeing as roughly half of voters opted for Biden. Though it is true obviously that *whites* who supported Biden were more likely to have gone to college, got masters degrees etc.. But people of colour count too!
I should clarify that I was writing about the express ideology. Tens of millions of people voted for Biden, but very, very few of them have a well articulated theory of politics.
When I was in graduate school, a very long time ago, I spent some time doing statistical analysis of detailed polling data. The one thing that was clear was that most of the respondents simply did not understand the language the questions were posed in because they had no purchase on the jargon of politics.
I came to the view that almost all voting behavior was driven by group identification. The vast majority of Biden's voters are by no means leftists who buy into the theories of the modern left. They voted for Biden because it expressed their sense of group identity.
Do you mind sharing a few examples of the tactics of Maosim that you think are pretty good? I honestly can't think of any. When I think of Maosim I think of the terror of the Cultural Revolution and of the famines of the Great Leap Forward.
So it sounds like you are saying Mao was tactically very good at guerilla warfare. I suppose if you think guerilla warfare is a good thing, you could argue that Maoism has good tactics. Do you think guerilla warfare is a good thing?
I enjoy studying texts on warfare and strategy such as Von Clauswitz, Sun Tzu, Mao and Vo Nguyen Giap, yea. Warfare seems like its part of our current human nature so it's worth studying just like any other topic.
There is a norm in Rationalist circles of being charitable to people you are discussing issues with. If you ignore that and call people trolls I do not think you will be getting the most out of this community.
"This is true only insofar as I once expressed agreement with an unrelated position of Charles Murray’s... The Times points out that I agreed with Murray that poverty was bad, and that also at some other point in my life noted that Murray had offensive views on race, and heavily implies this means I agree with Murray’s offensive views on race..."
This seems to downplay what you agreed with Murray on. In the linked post, you wrote
"Neither he nor I would dare reduce *all* class differences to heredity, and he in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture. But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either..."
This sounds like you're agreeing with Murray that heredity is part of the reason for class differences, and that you think heredity is part of *why* the Kentucky truckers will be hard to teach code. Is that what you were saying? If so, then that is a contentious position, one that is associated with Murray, and one that is related to his part-heredity opinions about race and IQ.
(I'm not sure if exactly the same measurement issues arise for studying class and heredity vs. race and heredity, since e.g. adopting a baby will more easily change how society perceives their class than how society perceives their race)
> This sounds like you're agreeing with Murray that heredity is part of the reason for class differences, and that you think heredity is part of *why* the Kentucky truckers will be hard to teach code. Is that what you were saying? If so, then that is a contentious position
It's well established that IQ has at least 50% heritability, mostly along the maternal line, so that's not contentious.
Mean IQ of programmers is also considerably higher than that of truckers [1]. Given this, I think it would be more contentious to claim that IQ has no bearing on your success in programming.
So what exactly is contentious with the implication that heredity is part of the reason that truckers might be hard to teach to code?
My point is that he claimed NYT exaggerated his agreement with Murray; I'm claiming that he downplayed his agreement with Murray. He *didn't* just agree with Murray that "poverty was bad"; he also seems to have agreed with Murray about poverty, IQ and genetics. This downplaying seems less honest than what I expect from Scott.
"...Let's first be clear about the conclusion itself. In a recent article on 'The Real Bell Curve,' Charles Murray grumbles about critics, such as Stephen Jay Gould, who read the book as saying that racial differences in IQ are mostly genetic. Murray answers by quoting from the book:
'If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanations have won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate (311).'
In this passage, Herrnstein and Murray are 'resolutely agnostic' about whether bad environment or genetic endowment is more responsible for the lower IQs of Blacks. But they indicate no agnosticism at all about whether part of the IQ difference between Blacks and Whites is genetic; and given their way of thinking about the matter, this means that they are not at all agnostic about some Black genetic inferiority..."
It's not that heritability doesn't have nothing to do with genetics. It's that it doesn't imply the inferences about genetics that Murray makes. But also, Murray is the one fallaciously making those inferences.
Suppose for the sake of argument that Murray really is conflating genetics and heredity, I'm still left wondering how you conclude that Scott agrees with Murray.
I reread your original comment on this and still don't see it. Scott basically asserted that class differences are partly heritable, but you then somehow concluded from this that Scott also agrees that class differences are partly genetic. The only way Scott's words would entail this conclusion is if you yourself had conflated heredity and genetics in the same way that Murray has allegedly done; but this is your projection, not something that can be concluded from Scott's words.
If the mean black/white difference is due to genetic differences, its due to genetic differences. This author uses the bad faith language of "genetically inferior" and thinks this in and of itself disproves the existence of heritable differences.
What on earth are you talking about? The heritability of IQ, income and virtually all aspects of human behavior are replicated research findings. They aren't "Charles Murray's ", this is absolutely mainstream psychological science, denied by know-nothing ideologues like you.
I see a lot of comments saying they came here from the NYT article and don't feel like it was that negative. I think a part of that is that the 'rationalist' community generally has much higher standards for literary honesty. The attempt to link Murray's racial views to Scott's may seem run-of-the-course for the average reader, but to someone who's had the pleasure of reading the painstakingly honest attempts at representation of opposing views within this community for the past few years, it feels much worse.
Another point is that the NYT articles glosses over the fact that Scott was a practicing psychiatrist whose practice was destroyed, and patients hurt, by the NYT's threat of doxxing. Reading about Scott's descriptions of his practice, and what he learns from it, for years likely makes this fact hit much harder than learning about it from the one or two throwaway lines mentioning it in the NYT article.
My totally unsolicited, and no doubt unwelcome, suggestion to Scott Alexander is that he collect his thoughts and calmly set down in writing the ways in which Cade Metz treated him unfairly. Yes, I know the statement does that, but he needs to condense it to email form, or snail mail, and send it to the standards editor, requesting that the Times print an editor's note concerning its violation of standards. The latter point is the key. He needs to be sure to refer to the Times's published list of standards, which are on the Times website.
Having a lawyer do it is preferable, as this article was defamatory. That doesn't mean he should sue. That's a separate issue. But a lawyer letter will get their attention. Take my word for it that this is the ONLY thing that Metz does not want. He doesn't care about what people say here or on Reason or on blogs. I'm sure he has already communicated at length with his editors and falsely characterized the criticism as coming only from "the right." He is very good at working the internal channels at the Times. Scott's statement indicates some blatant violations of journalism standards.
If they won't fix it, then he should then publicize everything he said in the letter. Make it clear that this is not going away, which is what he and they want.
The article is carefully written to not be legally defamatory, by implying things without actually explicitly saying them. It's defamatory in practice, by making people believe slanderous things, but that is legal.
Hi! Came here from the NYT article, did not at all think it was a hatchet job or even really negative. The thesis seemed to be that your blog was the one place on the internet where intelligent people could discuss controversial topics and weigh difficult ideas with some measure of civility—an incredible thing these days. I didn’t read into the article that you were a eugenicist or a right-wing lunatic. I sympathize with you about having your writing now available to patients. That may be hard (or may be a blessing in disguise). But choosing to blog under essentially your legal name—you had to have known you were not truly anonymous, right? Best of luck on your new endeavor.
You are too apologetic. Stand and defend what you believe in. You dont need to fit in zeitgeist. Just follow the Truth. And your heart knows where it is. Your mind can rationalize one thing or another but deep down you know which is right and which is not
>I suspect he did not personally want to write this and was pressured into it
Hm I kinda believed we've stopped accepting "I was just following the orders" as an excuse even for people in military under actual literal orders
Also I'm quite impressed by how he brings up the Scott's point that the Blue Tribe has no tolerance for anyone disagreeing with them, and then soundly refutes it by... saying that Scott is not sufficiently distant from the people who disagree with the Blue Tribe, and therefore he's a bad person? Or in Cade Metz's world crushing anyone who disagrees with you is good a noble so he doesn't perceive it as a critique? I'm a bit confuse on what's happening here.
I think we can safely say at the very least, without arguing over terms like "hit piece" or speculating about the reporter's intentions, that the article uses badly cherry-picked data to give the impression that Scott has endorsed controversial claims that he's never actually endorsed.
The beginning was actually pretty nice, but then they really tried to cast him as someone "an average leftist person wouldn't like". Luckily they had links to their quotes and I was able to read the quote in context and fell in love with this blog.
Hmm. Fun as it is to ascribe malice to a corporate entity, the one thing I've seen no one commenting on this try to do is to provide evidence rather than just assert NYT's motives. No one, for example, has tried to pick apart its leadership structure for clues about why it behaves as it does. It's all just bare assertion. I can't blame anyone, though. Hard work is hard!
From its earliest days, tech has always been orthogonal to conventional political labeling. From old skinny tie IBM, Whole Earth Catalog, Route 128, Xerox Parc and, well, good to see that’s still true.
From Spain, much love, I feel so bad u had to undergo this ideological bind by those false liberals who seek to stablish a Ministry of the Truth by lies and artifice
Well, I'm happy to find your blog because of this article. I followed the links it referenced and couldn't stop reading. It is so refreshing to see someone not following groupthink and being rational yet empathetic at the same time.
"The latest salvo against the enemies of The Narrative is Cade Metz’s essay, “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space” about the Rationalist blogger Scott Alexander. Metz would no doubt bristle at this accusation of antagonism—he told an interviewee that his goal was “to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness.” But he insisted on publishing Alexander’s full name, with little justification and full knowledge that this would hinder his work as a psychiatrist."
The NYT has lost all of their credibility these past few months. There is a rotten core at the center of that newspaper, and luckily for people like me who have lost faith in them even attempting to claim their reporting is honest, this will likely lead to their downfall. And it will be a downfall from within their own newspaper as the Oroborous of Critical Race Theory finds case after case of "racist" reporters within their own ranks. Hopefully it devolves into even more of a tabloid than it already is. TMZ does better reporting.
Does it violate a rule? I don't see a rule list, but if there is one, I hope there is something about writing over 100 comments about X on a page that isn't about X. (X is Marx.)
I am an independent party who didn’t read your blog, but was encouraged to cancel my NY Times subscription by my daughter, who has been a regular reader for years. When I read the Times article, I thought it was poorly written and difficult to follow. Petty vindictiveness was my only takeaway. No worries, Mr. Alexander, you were not the one who should be embarrassed.
1. The NYT claims that SlateStarCodex/ACX is "the epicenter of a community called the Rationalists", completely ignoring the actual epicenter of the rationalist movement, LessWrong, as well as its progenitor OvercomingBias. So some people came expecting the comment section to be made up of rationalists, and instead see hundreds of comments by Marxbro and detractors of Marxbro. But the 2020 annual survey asked 'Do you identify as a Less Wronger or "aspiring rationalist"?', and only 13.2% said "yes" (40.6% said "sorta").
2. It keeps trying to link SlateStarCodex and even Yudkowsky to the right wing, but actually the makeup of SlateStarCodex participants is as follows according to the survey:
Social democrat (like Scandinavian liberals): 33.4%
Liberal (like U.S. Democrats): 29.7%
Conservative (like U.S. Republicans): 7.5%
Libertarian: 7.5%
Neoreactionary: 5.1%
Alt-right: 2.2%
Marxist: 2.1%
I once wrote an article called "America Must Reconnect" about how the Left and Right should learn more about each other and look for points of agreement (https://medium.com/big-picture/america-must-reconnect-8b4d1c8342e3). Little did I suspect that this concept would be offensive to the New York Times / Cade Metz!
I think it's worth quoting Aaronson's post, just so people scrolling through here are more likely to see something that isn't Marx and race-IQ correlation.
> ...here’s a partial list of my issues:
1. The piece includes the following ominous sentence: “But in late June of last year, when I approached Siskind to discuss the blog, it vanished.” This framing, it seems to me, would be appropriate for some conman trying to evade accountability without ever explaining himself. It doesn’t make much sense for a practicing psychiatrist who took the dramatic step of deleting his blog in order to preserve his relationship with his patients—thereby complying with an ethical code that’s universal among psychiatrists, even if slightly strange to the rest of us—and who immediately explained his reasoning to the entire world. In the latter framing, of course, Scott comes across less like a fugitive on the run and more like an innocent victim of a newspaper’s editorial obstinacy.
2. As expected, the piece devotes enormous space to the idea of rationalism as an on-ramp to alt-right extremism. The trouble is, it never presents the idea that rationalism also can be an off-ramp from extremism—i.e., that it can provide a model for how even after you realize that mainstream sources are confidently wrong on some issue, you don’t respond by embracing conspiracy theories and hatreds, you respond by simply thinking carefully about each individual question rather than buying a worldview wholesale from anyone. Nor does the NYT piece mention how Scott, precisely because he gives right-wing views more charity than some of us might feel they deserve, actually succeeded in dissuading some of his readers from voting for Trump—which is more success than I can probably claim in that department! I had many conversations with Cade about these angles that are nowhere reflected in the piece.
3. The piece gets off on a weird foot, by describing the rationalists as “a group that aimed to re-examine the world through cold and careful thought.” Why “cold”? Like, let’s back up a few steps: what is even the connection in the popular imagination between rationality and “coldness”? To me, as to many others, the humor, humanity, and warmth of Scott’s writing were always among its most notable features.
4. The piece makes liberal use of scare quotes. Most amusingly, it puts scare quotes around the phrase “Bayesian reasoning”!
5. The piece never mentions that many rationalists (Zvi Mowshowitz, Jacob Falkovich, Kelsey Piper…) were right about the risk of Covid-19 in early 2020, and then again right about masks, aerosol transmission, faster-spreading variants, the need to get vaccines into arms faster, and many other subsidiary issues, even while public health authorities and the mainstream press struggled for months to reach the same obvious (at least in retrospect) conclusions. This omission is significant because Cade told me, in June, that the rationalist community’s early rightness about covid was part of what led him to want to write the piece in the first place (!). If readers knew about that clear success, would it put a different spin on the rationalists’ weird, cultlike obsession with “Bayesian reasoning” and “consequentialist ethics” (whatever those are), or their nerdy, idiosyncratic worries about the more remote future?
6. The piece contains the following striking sentence: “On the internet, many in Silicon Valley believe, everyone has the right not only to say what they want but to say it anonymously.” Well, yes, except this framing makes it sound like this is a fringe belief of some radical Silicon Valley tribe, rather than just the standard expectation of most of the billions of people who’ve used the Internet for most of its half-century of existence.
7. Despite thousands of words about the content of SSC, the piece never gives Scott a few uninterrupted sentences in his own voice, to convey his style. This is something the New Yorker piece did do, and which would help readers better understand the wit, humor, charity, and self-doubt that made SSC so popular. To see what I mean, read the NYT’s radically-abridged quotations from Scott’s now-classic riff on the Red, Blue, and Gray Tribes and decide for yourself whether they capture the spirit of the original (alright, I’ll quote the relevant passage myself at the bottom of this post). Scott has the property, shared by many of my favorite writers, that if you just properly quote him, the words leap off the page, wriggling free from the grasp of any bracketing explanations and making a direct run for the reader’s brain. All the more reason to quote him!
8. The piece describes SSC as “astoundingly verbose.” A more neutral way to put it would be that Scott has produced a vast quantity of intellectual output. When I finish a Scott Alexander piece, only in a minority of cases do I feel like he spent more words examining a problem than its complexities really warranted. Just as often, I’m left wanting more.
9. The piece says that Scott once “aligned himself” with Charles Murray, then goes on to note Murray’s explosive views about race and IQ. That might be fair enough, were it also mentioned that the positions ascribed to Murray that Scott endorses in the relevant post—namely, “hereditarian leftism” and universal basic income—are not only unrelated to race but are actually progressive positions.
10. The piece says that Scott once had neoreactionary thinker Nick Land on his blogroll. Again, important context is missing: this was back when Land was mainly known for his strange writings on AI and philosophy, before his neoreactionary turn. [DP: Scott even wrote The Anti-Reactionary FAQ!]
11. The piece says that Scott compared “some feminists” to Voldemort. It didn’t explain what it took for certain specific feminists (like Amanda Marcotte) to prompt that comparison, which might have changed the coloration. (Another thing that would’ve complicated the picture: the rationalist community’s legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities, before such openness became mainstream.)
12. Speaking of feminists—yeah, I’m a minor part of the article. One of the few things mentioned about me is that I’ve stayed in a rationalist group house. (If you must know: for like two nights, when I was in Bay Area, with my wife and kids. We appreciated the hospitality!) The piece also says that I was “turned off by the more rigid and contrarian beliefs of the Rationalists.” It’s true that I’ve disagreed with many beliefs espoused by rationalists, but not because they were contrarian, or because I found them noticeably more “rigid” than most beliefs—only because I thought they were mistaken!
13. The piece describes Eliezer Yudkowsky as a “polemicist and self-described AI researcher.” It’s true that Eliezer opines about AI despite a lack of conventional credentials in that field, and it’s also true that the typical NYT reader might find him to be comically self-aggrandizing. But had the piece mentioned the universally recognized AI experts, like Stuart Russell, who credit Yudkowsky for a central role in the AI safety movement, wouldn’t that have changed what readers perceived as the take-home message?
14. The piece says the following about Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis, the founders of DeepMind: “Like the Rationalists, they believed that AI could end up turning against humanity, and because they held this belief, they felt they were among the only ones who were prepared to build it in a safe way.” This strikes me as a brilliant way to reframe a concern around AI safety as something vaguely sinister. Imagine if the following framing had been chosen instead: “Amid Silicon Valley’s mad rush to invest in AI, here are the voices urging that it be done safely and in accord with human welfare…”
Scott, you are a man of integrity and can't hide it. Honesty always wins out, even if in error, because like science it is self-correcting.
It's painful in this modern world, isn't it? We're back to a sort of McCarthyism, but this time from the Left. That's Valdemort and that's what must be resisted at all costs, from any political direction. Strength to you. "Classical liberals" will save us, if we can be saved.
You would have thought the last 4 years would have taught the media something.
To quote Matt Taibbi:
"When so many Trump supporters point to his stomping of the carpetbagging snobs in the national media as the main reason they’re going to vote for him, it should tell us in the press something profound about how much people think we suck."
On the bright side, the article linked a number of your posts, and it's REALLY EASY to see that they're misrepresenting you if you read EVEN ONE of the posts they linked.
No to imply that most people will actually read those, but still.
Likelihood you'll see this is 0.001 but Robert Wright (Non-Zero and other books) is interested in seeing how Rationality might dovetail with his own "make the world better" project.
I have no idea how substack links work, so maybe not at all? Reply if you care and need better info.
I haven't read all the background here but one thing that stands out to me in this is the feminism/Voldemort comparison.
Scott claims he only applied this comparison to a specific group of feminists, and quotes his original post, but if anything the NYT was generous in saying he compared *some* feminists to Voldemort. He described the group of people he's talking about as:
>blurring the already rather thin line between "feminism" and "literally Voldemort"
In doing so, it seems to me that he is specifically comparing feminism *as a whole* to Voldemort, and then going on to say that some feminists are worse than the (already-close-to-literally-Voldemort) collective.
It's a response from Scott that's weirdly lacking in intellectual rigour. He also points out his edit, but all-caps snark is probably not the best way to convey sincerity there.
I hope you've had time to heal, and can now appreciate the idea that “the worst ain’t so bad when it finally happens." There is no bad news; there are only blessings in disguise:
Over half a year in I find it sad that after being mistreated by the NYT for having the gall to publish content outside their approved Overton window, Scott has apparently been cowed into not attempting to publish content outside the NYT-approved Overton window on this new blog.
After the NYT hit piece, nothing has been published that would solicit another NYT hit piece. This has rewarded the NYT's actions, discouraged heterodox content producers and impoverished SSC readers.
I have repeatedly blogged about studies suggesting that women are underrepresented in tech not because of explicit discrimination on the part of tech companies, but because women lose interest in tech very early, at least by high school (high school computer science classes are something like 80% male, the same as big tech companies). The post that most effectively sums up my thoughts on this topic is Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences. I continue to believe these studies are true, I’ve spoken with some of the researchers who have performed them, and the New York Times itself has previously written about and praised these same studies. I think understanding the reasons behind gender imbalances in tech is vital towards figuring out how to address them better than we’re addressing them now. There is no evidence that women are inherently any less intelligent or any worse at math than men, and I have tried to make this very clear in all of my posts on the subject - for example in the Contra Grant post linked above, where I say, quote, “My research suggests no average gender difference in ability”.
I had a thought: if the generalization that males like working with things and women like working with people is somewhat true, might LLMs help women work in tech? If you can code by conversing with ur-somebody, that might be a more social experience than writing code.
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, too, sometimes wish the Presidency would be abolished if there's no other way to choke off our Imperial Presidency.
> This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.
This seems like a validation of your skepticism about the NYT.
Remember that I've pressed Scott Alexander many times on his sloppy citations and he rarely fixes his mistakes. If we're being sceptical about NYT I think we should also be sceptical about Scott Alexander himself.
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.
>Scott backed up his claim with evidence.
Scott recently coined the term "Marx's Fallacy". When pressed he never found any primary source showing that Marx had committed this supposed fallacy.
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.
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.
Here's Scott's claim:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible
You can ctrl+f "fallacy" and find the section I am referring to quite quickly. I did not provide a citation because blogs do not have page numbers and this was a very recent mistake that I assumed everyone would know about by now. I should not have assumed this, you're correct. Often it takes a long time for knowledge of Scott's mistakes to disseminate among his readers.
Now, I have asked Scott Alexander for a citation regarding this supposed "Fallacy". He never replied or cited any place where I could find this fallacy.
In Scott's recent humour article on Cryptocurrencies Scott made a joke that doesn't really make sense if you're familiar with Marx's criticisms of money and the commodity form. In response Scott admitted that his knowledge of Marx was based on "gestalt impressions". I replied asking if he often writes blogs based on things he has only vaguely thought about. I don't know how to link individual comments but you can find it here if you ctrl+f "gestalt":
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/list-of-fictional-cryptocurrencies/comments
Certainly, given this exchange I have my doubts that Scott Alexander will even be able to give me a citation regarding "Marx's Fallacy" - I have doubts that Scott Alexander has ever read Marx at all, let alone has any interest in treating his political philosophy charitably. Seems like he's more interested in making poorly-thought-out jokes about the material rather than engaging with the out-group.
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.”"
He is not citing Marx directly, of course, but Marx clearly either didn’t believe that his future society was going to be a tyranny or pretended to not believe it. Either way it was a tyranny everywhere it was tried out. Which wouldn’t have surprised conservatives, moderate socialists or anarchists at the time. Especially the latter.
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
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.)
Singer doesn't do a particularly good job showing the extent of Marx's criticisms of classical political economy.
"Marx does not challenge the classical economists within the presuppositions of their science."
Marx didn't challenge economists on certain presuppositions, but he took some of those presuppositions to places that were truly uncomfortable to most economists, which I think becomes a challenge in and of itself. On other presuppositions he did openly challenge them, first that comes to mind is Jean-Baptise Say
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch03.htm#s9
Some of my other criticisms of Scott in this article are readable here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/gc27k5/author_reacts_to_ssc_book_review/fpbulfv/
I am thinking of writing a much longer piece that would put these criticisms into a more formal and rigorous manner.
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
I didn't "pretend" to find misrepresentations of Marx, I actually found 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.
>There was no primary source - read the original comment - he wrote :
>" What I sometimes call Marx's Fallacy"
>It's his "opinion".
Why name it after Marx then? If we're allowed to just list random opinions that we disagree with "Fallacies" and then name them after out political opponents... well... that's a level of pettiness I don't want to associate with Scott Alexander. That's why I'm hoping he will come through and actually list some Marxist citations here.
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.
That's useful to know, thanks.
I have only been banned on Scott's previous blog once, and it was for proving that someone had misquoted Marx in a book they published (!). For this commitment to truth and proper citations I was censored.
I think I was banned from the subreddit by the moderator who posts the Unabomber Manifesto everywhere and calls himself an "ethno-utilitarian". And yes, it was hard to have a productive conversation with that guy moderating the sub, but I tried my best.
>Marx is even denser than Moldbug - it's a big investment of time and mental energy
I'm a big believer in the necessity of hard intellectual work when we're talking about these kinds of political and philosophical issues. When Scott Alexander comes along, makes an extremely obvious mistake, then excuses himself by saying he has a "gestalt impression" of Marx, then never actually quotes Marx or attempts to read him - then let's just say I find that lacking rigor, to say the least. This is just one incident among many where Scott has shown he doesn't want to engage with leftist thought. We've gone from intellectual precepts like reason, charitability, steelmanning and sources to.... making jokes (that don't even make sense) on a blog?
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/
I'm not going to go through that list item by item but I'm familiar with point 25 because I was one of the people who corrected him.
Even here Scott is hedging his bets and unable to fully admit his fault:
"Some people brought up that this phrase may usually be used in a way opposite to the way I was describing it. See the comments for discussion, but given the potential error I excised it from the post."
There was no "may usually" or "potential error" here. He straight up misunderstood an intra-left discussion and ploughed ahead with his article. Then when it was pointed out that this was a mistake he excised it from the post without any consideration to how he was able to make the mistake in the first place and how that extremely basic mistake might change how he approaches the issue in general.
But no, just delete one sentence, say there is a "potential error" and move on, I guess.
This typifies Scott's sloppy thinking in this specific area of study.
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.
>whether banning marxbro1917 from an online discussion space is likely to improve the quality of discussion.
What it will do is make the discussion one where Scott misrepresents his political opponents and then nobody notices (or is too polite to bring it up). I'm basically functioning as the boy who says 'the emperor has no clothes' when it comes to citations.
You may find discussion of citations extremely boring and generally not "fun". But it's a valuable conversation to have if you want your discussion based in reality.
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?
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 pointed out an error on this blog as recently as yesterday and Scott Alexander has not given any sort of retraction or even admitted his mistake.
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 asking for citations as simply as "where did Marx say that?" strikes you as a parody, then I think you're simply not treating Marx's politics charitably. Marx is an outgroup thinker and I think he deserves to at least have his ideas discussed properly rather than people just make up positions he didn't actually hold.
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.
>Your rabid is perpetuating the stereotype of marxists as a bunch of loony sociopaths.
The idea that simply asking someone to provide citations is the behaviour of a "sociopath" shows how disconnected from rationality some people have become. Marx is an outgroup thinker and he deserves to have his works read charitably.
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.
>Few people care abut marx here, and your histrionic comments push people further away.
I've had some positive comments and PMs on reddit. People here also push the little 'heart' button beneath my comments. I think there's something of a climate of fear where people don't want to contradict Scott Alexander on things like citations. Hopefully there will be a lot more criticisms and discussion on this important matter going forward.
> 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.
How is it terrifying you?
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 looks like a joke to me, and you've already set the precedent that uncharitable jokes are ok if they're funny. I warned you about this at the time.
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).
The humour of jokes is subjective so I think this seems like a rule designed to allow people to arbitrarily enforce things. In practice this will lead to the allowing of jokes that poke fun of outgroups (e.g. Marxists) while censoring jokes that poke fun of the Rationalist ingroup.
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
Agreed. Keep the comments open and the free speech flowing.
That would be an ought, so you are not agreeing.
Ok then... Scott Alexander ought to do nothing and stand perfectly still.
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
A better solution to poverty would be building an economic system that didn't require poverty and unemployment. You align yourself with Charles Murray here and strawman the people who thinking planning a better system is possible. This does seem quite conservative, to say the least.
The New York Times is a banal centrist newspaper, but I don't not think that it's unfair that they connected you to Charles Murray. If you wish to make the case that this is "unconnected" then you'll have to show how you can disconnect Charles Murray's opinions on IQ and class from his opinions on IQ and race. As far as I can tell you only did this by using a "55 year old Kentucky trucker" - a job and location that is coded as white. This is a surface-level change using an example smartly chosen to reduce flak, not a deep difference in your actual analysis.
I'm also unsure that Scott Alexander should be complaining so much about "brazen falsehoods" given that you've admitted you've written articles with only a "gestalt impression" of the subject in question, and when pressed for citations you come up empty-handed.
The article was an obvious gag piece
A gag that deliberately misrepresents the outgroup. These kinds of thoughtless jokes just serve flatter the biases that already exist against outgroup thinkers like Marx. Instead of engaging with Marxist thought, Scott instead writes tribal and petty jokes.
I’m confused on your goal regarding all these comments. What do you care about? How do you think these comments will achieve that?
I care about the truth and I hope my comments will get SSC (ACT) readers to think more critically about how Scott Alexander has misrepresented Marxist thought.
Surely if we're critical about the NYT we can also be critical of Scott Alexander's blog.
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'm suggesting here that Scott Alexander would not like it if his critics were to dispense with our sourced argumentation and politeness and instead just started raining jokes down on him mercilessly.
I am asking Scott to do the same for thinkers like Marx who are outgroup. The "jokes" Scott wrote show a deep ignorance about the political positions Marx actually held. So much so that it appeared like Scott Alexander would not be able to pass an Ideological Turing Test on the matter.
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?
On average? Not that long, maybe an hour or two. There's the added benefit of re-visiting Marxists texts. It's strange to me that Scott Alexander is quite prolific yet I'm ridiculed for being a prolific writer also. Perhaps I should be writing longer form pieces myself? Really bring together my thoughts into one centralized place.
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.
dispe21852.fitnell.com/50455448/indicators-on-most-trusted-online-dispensary-ship-all-50-states-you-should-know
https://beauznzjs.snack-blog.com/11337433/5-
The deluge of comments he has posted on marxism makes me think he has a mental health issue.
If you added up all my comments on Marx here I suspect it would only amount to a couple thousands words at most. If you were to compare the amount of words I write to the amount of words Scott Alexander writes I think he would come out on top most days. Have you ever accused Scott Alexander of having a mental health issue based on the "deluge" of writings he posts?
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.
Are we just copy/pasting literature now? Here's a poem I enjoy
Alone I stand in the autumn cold
On the tip of Orange Island,
The Xiang flowing northward;
I see a thousand hills crimsoned through
By their serried woods deep-dyed,
And a hundred barges vying
Over crystal blue waters.
Eagles cleave the air,
Fish glide under the shallow water;
Under freezing skies a million creatures contend in freedom.
Brooding over this immensity,
I ask, on this bondless land
Who rules over man's destiny?
I was here with a throng of companions,
Vivid yet those crowded months and years.
Young we were, schoolmates,
At life's full flowering;
Filled with student enthusiasm
Boldly we cast all restraints aside.
Pointing to our mountains and rivers,
Setting people afire with our words,
We counted the mighty no more than muck.
Remember still
How, venturing midstream, we struck the waters
And the waves stayed the speeding boats?
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.
He did stick to it. Here's one from 1961, 36 years after Changsha
Wind and rain escorted Spring's departure,
Flying snow welcomes Spring's return.
On the ice-clad rock rising high and sheer
A flower blooms sweet and fair.
Sweet and fair, she craves not Spring for herself alone,
To be the harbinger of Spring she is content.
When the mountain flowers are in full bloom
She will smile mingling in their midst.
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.
Ho Chi Minh also had some pretty good poetry. Stalin did wrote some but it's less good in my opinion (I think he wrote it when he was young and didn't continue as an adult).
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?
1. I am, personally, a big fan and proponent of 'reading the classics'. That means I generally recommend Marx as a source if only because it's good to work from the source and then read the wider debates around Marx's work afterwards. I think there's also a lot of style and flavour that a person misses out on if you read someone else's summary. I think for a SSC fan, especially, a lot of the fun of reading comes from Marx's weird asides/detours, turns of phrase, sarcastic footnotes, and so on.
2. I can recommend a few things, but one early thing that really helped me were David Harvey's lectures on Capital:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBazR59SZXk
He seems like a generally affable and interesting guy, and I liked his focus on the concrete economic questions rather than the philosophical implications of alienation that some other introductory material seemed to focus on.
I also read Ben Fine & Alfredo Saad-Filho's "Marx's Capital" which you can find as a pdf floating around the internet pretty easy.
It's been many, many years since I have read/listened to these, and I may not find them as edifying as I used to. I've read a few criticisms of David Harvey that I've found useful too, e.g.:
https://mronline.org/2017/08/26/a-critique-of-david-harveys-analysis-of-imperialism/
It's easy to get stuck in a never-ending rabbit hole when it comes to this stuff. If you have any more specific interests within Marxism I might be able to recommend other particular texts.
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.
Funding art seems like a positive to me.
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.
It's just some poetry, calm down.
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 guess I don't really understand how you're disconnecting Charles Murray's thoughts on race from his thoughts on class. Or how Scott Alexander would do this.
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.
If you're talking about "generational poverty" in America you're already talking about race issues given the historical (and ongoing) discrimination against and class oppression of people based on their race. Let's look at something as simple as the colonisation of America in the first place. This was both a class issue (creation of capitalism through a "primitive accumulation" and private ownership of the lands, displacement of those already using the lands) and a race issue (killings of Indigenous in taking over their lands, suppression of their culture, etc)
Again, I just don't really see how Scott can disentangle class and race issues in Charles Murray's political thought. Or how he could do it given a wider historical knowledge of how race is produced and experienced in America.
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?
Well, how would Scott separate Murray's writings on race from his writings on class? It seems difficult since they're based on the same underlying genetic arguments, as far as I can tell. This requires a more thorough investigation, not a simple "I agree with one but not the other".
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.”
I suppose I would be interested in Scott Alexander writing a longer piece on how he is approaching Charles Murray's opinions on class, because it's not especially clear from the original piece. Certainly I think treating Charles Murray's analysis of class as somehow inherently separated from his analysis of race is a difficult case to make, and not one that should be assumed by the NYT. But I would love to read Scott Alexander make a more robust argument here.
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.
Scott Alexander never actually explains how this is a falsehood though. Perhaps he needs to write a longer piece about what exactly he agrees with in Charles Murray's writings on class.
> 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
Compared to some of the approaches Scott Alexander himself listed in the article (communism and anarcho-syndicalism), UBI is undoubtedly conservative. Aligning yourself with Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative thinktank) also seems a bit conservative.
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”.
But was UBI even a left position among the (very centrist) Democratic Party? Seems to be coming from Yang and tech-sector Silicon Valley types. Not Sanders and the 'left wing' of the Democratic Party (such as it is).
This is in addition to Scott boosting conservative think tankers while strawmanning and dismissing left wing ideologies... Definitely seems like a conservative impulse on the part of Scott Alexander.
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?
Well he agreed with Charles Murray on this issue, did he not? This is not something as obvious as 2+2=4, this is a very particular analysis of class dynamics. This deserves a longer treatment by Scott Alexander, if he writes a longer and more specific analysis then people wont be able to misrepresent his views. Since so much of Scott Alexander's argument rests on implying that he agrees with Charles Murray on class (without being specific) then I don't think it should be surprising when people take that implication to places Scott Alexander might not have meant.
Also I'm pretty sure if I said "Adolph Hitler has some views I disagree with but I agree with him about mathematics" most people would probably want some sort of further explanation. Perhaps you should do an experiment with this and you can tell me the results.
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)
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!
Which left-wing party does the NYT represent?
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.
I don't think they even represent the "progressive wing" of the Democratic party, from memory they threw their weight behind Klobuchar and Warren. Rather than Sanders. And the Democrats are not a left-wing party anyway.
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.
Sanders may not be technically a member of the Democratic party or whatever but he was planning on running for President as a Democrat so he's clearly aligned with the 'progressive' wing of the Democrats.
NYT's endorsement of Klobuchar and Warren is actually very useful because it shows the limit of their 'progressivism' - basically they have to remain to the right of Sanders.
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.
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.
Scott does delete stuff semi-often, a lot of posts on this particular blog have already disappeared. I was banned once for providing evidence that a certain someone prominent in the Rationalist community (not Scott Alexander) had purposely manipulated quotes in one of their books. There's definitely certain ideas that he doesn't want looked at too closely.
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.
>pretty unconvincing
How was it unconvincing?
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"
I'm not sure Glenn Greenwald is even much of a leftist (if at all), though. What are his thoughts on central leftist economic questions like Marxism? (surplus value, dictatorship of the proletariat, TRPF, etc).
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/
I'm not sure if this was a lie when he wrote it, but Scott Alexander has clearly changed his mind on this precept. Otherwise I would not be so censured just for writing about left-wing political philosophy.
Surely all these people telling you there's another reason are just all in on it together.
They are all the people who are reminding me that what I say is "socially unacceptable". Scott Alexander is not obsessively focused on reason or argument; he's recently admitted that much of his representation of leftist politics relies on "gestalt impressions".
How dare he
If Scott Alexander will admit that he is not obsessively focused on truth or reason then I will retract my criticism.
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.
>That's very boring
I'm under no obligation to make my posts interesting, which is a subjective opinion anyhow. Scott Alexander keeps misinterpreting Marx in the most basic manner possible, so I have no problems repeating "citations, please". After all, we're trying to find the truth, and sometimes the truth is quite boring.
>>>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.
I think I'm pretty interesting. I find political philosophy and proper citations to be an interesting subject; but I am very nerdy compared to most people.
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.
Thanks!
Duranty was a victim of right-wing cancel culture and has had his name unceremoniously dragged through the mud a number of times by both Scott Alexander and the New York Times. Kind of ironic that both Scott Alexander and the NYT are now feuding.
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?
Read the Duranty articles in question and you'll see there is no real "denial", only Duranty being very specific about his definition of 'famine'.
>In short, conditions are definitely bad in certain sections- the Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga.
This is from Duranty himself if you actually read his articles in context you'll see he's been unfairly smeared. I mean, he was a fairly standard centrist liberal, not a communist (unfortunate, I wish the NYT would hire a communist to have a wider diversity of views!).
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.
So you just made up a quote and then called Duranty the dishonest one? Ironic.
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 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.
Here's a boring summary of my relationship with The NY Times. I was a long term, though not particularly enthusiastic subscriber, and would comment maybe two or three times a year with no ideological axe to grind. Then one day I was just skimming through a very dull story on men's fashion by their fashion editor, Vanessa Friedman. And somewhere in the article she was writing about the men's industry being based in Italy rather than France, and listed Gucci etc. In that list of Italian fashion houses she mentioned Berlutti, which I was 100% sure was a French maker of very expensive shoes. So I thought, gee they're quite famous and the writer is a big deal in fashion, I'm surprised she just looked at the name and figured they were probably Italian? But I didn't write anything like that, I just wrote a one sentence comment, "FYI Berlutti is actually French, not Italian." And bizarrely they held my comment and refused to publish it! There was no hostility, no epithets, no nothing, just a factual correction. I waited a few hours and nothing, and of course I'm stupidly obsessing about something so trivial. So the next day I write another comment saying all I did was correct your article for you, so either publish my comment or, ideally, correct your article, or I'm cancelling my subscription. And again, that comment was held indefinitely and since I stupidly threatened to cancel my subscription over this triviality, I figured I had to go through with it.
That was about five years ago, and I've gone through five years of following various pundits that are. always referencing The NY Times, and I can't access the linked articles due to my feud with Vanessa. Then finally last month I decided I should just grow up and resubscribe a the princely rate of $4 a month, figuring they're not really raking it in over my change of heart. And then this stupid Rationalist hit piece just came out and I just cancelled my subscription again. I don't think we were made for each other.
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.
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.
Well, through the magic of google, I wasted a couple of hours and was able to locate the article in question, (still uncorrected!)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/25/fashion/michael-kors-versace-implications.html?searchResultPosition=3
The offending paragraph says the following verbatim:
"It’s one of the reasons, during the post-recession wave of consolidation, that there was a lot of soul searching and hand wringing in Italy about heritage brands being bought by the French. (LVMH owns Pucci, Fendi, Berluti, Loro Piana and Bulgari; Kering has Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Brioni.)"
So it was neither vague nor read poorly by me. But you also missed the point of my post.I wasn't complaining that they had made a mistake, I'm sure they do that all the time and this was unimportant. I'm complaining that they refused to print my comment. I thought there comment blocking policy was to block obscene and offensive comments, not comments that just offer a correction and I guess they feel make them look bad.
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.
I definitely was perplexed by this. I also emailed her directly because I assumed it was getting caught in an algorithm, which would make sense. I just don't see what I could have done to trigger the algorithm, when I really just wrote "Berluti is French, not Italian" in my first comment. But I guess it's possible.
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/
No, you're wrong again. It was founded by an Italian person, hence the Italian name, but it was founded in Paris in the late 1800's by Mr. Berluti. It has always been based in Paris, and their label says Berluti Paris since 1885 (or whatever the date). It is run by French people in France and always has been. Your saying it's Italian is like saying Bank of America is Italian instead of American because it was founded by an Italian immigrant. Since you seem to be a sore loser, you might continue your faulty research and come up with the fact that the shoes are made in a factory in Italy, which is true. But the management and design functions have always been in Paris, and the company shows their collections in Paris with the other French fashion houses. If you start attributing a company's nationality with where production is, then most American companies will cease being American. But I assume you're going to go there anyway just because you want to win this one.
Also the site you link to just shows 100 years of French design and production for Berluti, it's an odd thing to put up in your defense.
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.
OK, thanks. I thought you were pretty aggressive but really it's just doubly aggravating because I knew I was right and it was a difference over fact. So I copped a bit of an attitude as well. Apologies for that, and it's an entirely trivial issue. Having said that I am going to correct you one last time, but hopefully dropping the attitude. First, I think you googled Berluti Italian and that's why you got a site in Italian. Their default site is definitely French, or English if you're coming from the US/UK etc. And the Italian factory is a recent development, I think since they were bought by the LVMH actually. For their first 100 years they only had the one shop in Paris, where all the designers/manufacturers worked and their showroom was. They were getting a special type of leather for their shoes from Venice, and reasonably recently opened a factory near there to be closer to the source. But honestly that is their only Italian connection, which is recent and minimal. It really is and always has been a French company. And now you know infinitely more about a French shoe company than you ever wanted to I'm sure.
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
Well, at least they're consistent, but unfortunately consistently wrong. I mean their logo for over 100 years has been "Berluti Paris Bottier depuis 1895", and they had only one office until pretty recently. Their owners, managers, workers were all French, their only store was in Paris. Their only connection to Italy is that the founder was born there before moving to Paris in 1895 to start the company. And I particularly don't understand this because the NY Times goes to their fashion shows and covers them regularly. Berluti shows in Paris, while the other brands they mention as Italian show in Milan, because they're actually Italian. Don't they wonder why they're sitting in Paris watching Berluti's fashion shows if they insist they're Italian?
Maybe they are branding themselves as Italian, like pizza ?
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.
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.)
An idiot.
Manners, boys. Manners.
Less of this please.
No snark, just the facts: Clearly your statement makes you an admirer of anti-democratic strongmen of the most ignorant and narcissistically malignant variety. This is perhaps a valid, albeit repulsive, political stance. Either that or you are intentionally, woefully, ill-informed. Frankly, I'm amazed to see such an anti-enlightenment opinion expressed in a rationalist forum.
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.
I think it's a mistake to jump from "supported Trump" to "Couldn't see Trump for who and what he is." I can imagine a variety of reasons why someone could see Trump accurately and still support him. For the simplest case, in exchange for Trump favoring him in some context important to him. For a more likely case, because he thought the alternative to Trump was even worse. For one more, because he thought by supporting Trump he could influence Trump in desirable ways.
I don't know Thiel's political views, nor whether they are correct, but "embarrassing" is not the right criterion to use to evaluate political views.
This response was a big mistake. Given its importance, such a post should be very well-thought and cool-headed. Dry repudiation of misleading claims by NYT with no emotional content was what was needed, not this. Since your goal here is to stop incoming outrage machine, the response should be boring and not inviting further fight. Few people here in comments are calm enough to understand it, but NYT article is a godsend for promoting your/rationalist ideas. So your response should not alienate such possible future readers.
Lets be rational and honest about NYT: they are not an octopus, aiming to destroy everybody who disagrees with them and subvert the truth. They are just a media, which only cares about maximizing clicks and creating social media outrage, since it is what they need to maximize profits.
> Dry repudiation of misleading claims by NYT with no emotional content was what was needed, not this.
Wasn't "dry repudiation of misleading claims by NYT" most of what the post was? You're objecting that there was any emotional content at all? Or that he threw in some jokes?
> your response should not alienate such possible future readers
How would Scott's article alienate readers? It provided factual refutations, while being witty and fun to read. (Much more than could be said of the NYT article!)
Who would like Scott's writing in general, but be turned off by this piece? I guess you. But I don't get why.
1. Rhinehart link was a disaster, thankfully it was removed. The whole piece reads like something written by upset person, who does not exactly understand his priorities. Apparently, Scott's priority is to try to close the whole story, since it has potential to become an outrage. In this case, the response should be very boring and contain no accusation of NYT, just repudiation. Of course, Scott understands this, but it seems this piece was hasted and he would be better of rereading his draft tomorrow couple of times and publishing edited version.
"...I don’t feel like this means I have done anything wrong, and I assume most people are a few degrees of social separation away from a Republican or Trump supporter." -
This sentence it outright stupid. Republican supporters are ~50% of voters. Most people have their social circle consisting of at least dozen people. Who he thinks "most people" are, exactly?
2. "...I myself am a Democrat, voted Warren (IIRC) in the primary, and Biden in the general... " -
First, this sentence was not needed, since it does not help to repudiate any misleading claims of NYT. Second, on Warren I am not sure whether I believe Scott. Expressing support (or even reserved endorsement) for tribalism and irrationality she represents is a good way to alienate people, whom the publicity from NYT article could draw to SSC/Lesswrong.
> I assume most people are a few degrees of social separation away
I think he meant *at most* a few degrees away, right? (It seems obvious in context that the idea is just because you can connect him to a Trump supporter through a few degrees of separation, that doesn't say much about him, because that's true of everyone. No?)
I guess fair point that as written, it sort of excludes Republicans and Trump supporters themselves. He should have had an "at most" in there.
Yes, probably it was a typo. Funny how a small typo can completely reverse the meaning...
> This sentence it outright stupid. Republican supporters are ~50% of voters. Most people have their social circle consisting of at least dozen people. Who he thinks "most people" are, exactly?
"According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.
"And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth."
(from https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/)
Assuming we're operationalizing "most people" to "most NYT readers", the idea that the average NYT reader has no Trump supporters in their immediate social circle is definitely more likely than the naive math would imply. Given the exponential nature of "degrees of separation", I guess "a few" is still an overestimate, but I took the statement as more of a dry joke anyway.
One problem that I am having wrap my head around is why does the nytimes care enough to do a hit piece on an excellent (but not extremely popular) blogger? Surely there are other enemies more deserving of the nytimes wrath. Trump and putin are still running around....
Scott is influential. Important people care what he writes. Including journalists. Why should expect SSC to be ignored, given that?
They publish forty articles a day about Trump, this is the first and only one about Scott.
As for why they devote resources to attacking him at all though, it's because he's the only thing worse than an enemy, an unreliable ally.
Think of the New York Times as the guy who beats the drum on the trireme to keep all the oarsmen in time. Outside the ship are guys like Trump or Moldbug in their little rowboats who throw a few rocks at the rapidly advancing trireme and then get crushed between the prow and the waves. But Scott isn't outside the ship, he's on board, chained to his oar, and he's _supposed_ to be rowing in time with the rest but he's not, he's out of time and occasionally seems to be having ideas of his own, and worse still some of the other slaves are starting to have doubts of their own. Bad slave! Getting ideas too big for his boots!
The point of this article is to haul Scott up on deck, dangle him over the edge of the ship, and force him to choose. Either he can stay on board and be a good galley slave, or he can get thrown overboard with Donald Trump and get crushed like the rest of them, but there's no room on this ship for doubters.
It is not just trying to make Scott pick a side, it is trying to eliminate competition. . Someone like Scott who is not only a better thinker than their opinion writers but a better writer than their best writers is a threat to their profession. This hatchet job was a warning that Scott and others who write blogs or newsletters are racist and that all good people should stay away and only read from approved sources.
Maybe it's not a hit piece. Scott's reputation and credibility have been boosted by the NYT article enormously, at almost no cost to themselves. It's almost like they *wanted* to position Scott as a sort of free-thinking maverick on the edge of social acceptability…and it worked.
I think of the article as a 'human interest' angle expounding the idea of 'no platform', and the increasing worry about speech not being restricted enough. The rationalist and rationalist-adjacent communities are all about setting norms that you should be able to engage with people you have profound and deep seated disagreements with. And many of the folks behind large technology companies have similar ideas about the power of free discourse to find and refine the truth originating int he early Internet.
This doesn't really sit well with the claim that, for example, if you listen to someone's ideas and explain why they're wrong, you're ACTUALLY supporting their ideas by acting as if they're worthy to be discussed.
(If you'll pardon the uncharitable paraphrase, I was particularly annoyed by what sounded to me like 'Oh, sure, he wrote a document explaining why the things neoreactionaries think are wrong, but /he let neoreactionaries talk and listened to what they think/.')
The article crystalized for me the idea that 'no platform' comes out of a worldview that accepts truth as existing and important, but rejects that people can investigate and find out and be convinced of it, so instead of engaging to find true ideas and spread them, we have to maintain a cordon to keep all the misfolded ideas away from any chance they might have to contact others and spread.
I love the idea of "wrongthink" as a prion disease. Describes the current mainstream media consensus quite well.
If you mean, why did Cade Metz and the NYT want to do a story on Scott last year, I dunno, but maybe they thought he was interesting? We don't know that it would have been a hit piece, even if the current piece was one.
But regardless of what we think of him or the NYT, Cade Metz had already put a lot of time and effort into writing a story about Scott, which was then tabled. It seems likely that he'd notice that Scott and the blog popped back up again. And I know it's the sunk cost fallacy, but after going through all that trouble, and after Scott explicitly took steps to minimize the potential harm from an article, why wouldn't Metz use some of his research to write an article now? And given all the negative attention that was focused on Metz and the NYT, why wouldn't the current article be negative? *shrug* That's all post facto rationalization, of course.
I never heard about you or your blog before. But I am a regular reader of NYT. I happened to read NYT article today, and then, out of curiosity, googled Astral Codex Ten, that led me to this. If I were you, I would laugh the whole thing off and not give two hoots. Readers of NYT are smart too. In the first two sentences, a reader could figure out what the journalist was up to: about to write a hagiography or about to do a smear job. Given the prevailing orthodoxy at NYT now, it was obvious that he was about to do a smear, in a sohisticated way. Careers of journalists are melting away at NYT for the slightest deviation from the party line. The latest is Donald McNeil Jr. I don't have a clue what he said back in Peru a few years ago, but they showed him the door. It must be a pressure cooker working at NYT. You got to to be terrified that the Word Police are watching your every utterance. The paper has gotten nutty in its new orthodoxy. I just laugh out loud when I read the articles in the paper, which I am a faithful reader of for thirty years. Ezra Klein wrote the other day that it is "aesthetic" to spout these orthodoxies, writing about failures of liberal government in San Francisco in his column this week, in NYT. I now think that every journalist working at NYT nowadays feels like it is obligatory for professional safety to sport their official social justice credentials in every article. They are making fools of themselves, insulting the intelligence of their readers. If I were you, I would have put a big yawn emoji as a reply to their article. Silly piece of journalism.
I don’t know. Seems like much ado about not much. Not knowing anything about Scott or the blog, I didn’t take the article as very negative. The bit about Murray was more of a slam against him then Scott. Murray was crucified over something he never really said, and this article is a continuation...betrays the NYT author’s ignorance more than anything.
The article focused on so-called Rationalists, with whom Siskind is apparently quite influential. Pointing out Siskind has a popular and influential blog is a an attack?
As for the feminist reference, the article states “He described some feminists as” Voldemort, which according to Siskind’s response is perfectly accurate. The online version contains a link to the full blog post – yes, with the strike-through text and PLEA FOR MERCY. Since when is a link in the NYT to your blog bad for business?
The reason I’m here is that the article piqued my interest in Siskind’s writing. Based on the post linked in the article it’s unlikely I’ll be back. Not for the content, or the impression made by the NYT, but that it’s crazy-f’n LONG. Who’s got the time for that? Apparently a bunch of tech gurus and (based on the comment section) people interested in taking vengeance on journalists.
I can’t comment on the concerns of a psychiatrist vis-a-vis having clients know his views, but I’m not convinced there is a right to blog anonymously. In most cases, if you’re going to publish your views to the world, you should be willing to stand behind them. If your profession precludes that, perhaps give up one or the other.
Maybe I read the article too charitably, but I came away intrigued. It was far from a hit-piece. Siskind’s response would be appropriate if he’d been labeled a Nazi and had his address published, but is overwrought and veers into entitled snoflakery. If the commenters, like “Adrian” (if that’s your real name), who desire retribution or are canceling their subscriptions are typical of Siskind’s readership, perhaps the NYT was too soft on the type of people Siskind influences.
I found your comment pleasantly amusing (e.g. "Who's got the time for that?") and insightful (e.g. your take on whether the article was a hit piece), both, until the final sentence. Please don't cherry-pick responses out of the comments; the whole point of this community is that there's no one single "type of people [Scott] influences" and lumping everyone together is harmful to discourse.
It's undoubtably true that some people here are on a hair-trigger, but this comes after months of the blog being in an uncertain limbo - and this blog was an important place to many of its readers, where they could discuss things without it immediately devolving into trench wars, so some have formed a much deeper connection with this blog than one might expect people to have with the average website. That's made emotions run a bit high; ironically much higher than on just about any other topic ever discussed in the comment section. I hope this can help you understand where some of it's coming from. :)
I appreciate the feedback. As I stated, this is my only contact with the blog and community. I did find Adrian’s post to be offensive, and not the reflection of a positive community (more Parler than Mom365). I take your point and retract my final sentence.
Please feel free to stick around. You'll find many people you agree with about something (and probably very few you agree with completely.) It's never dull.
This Substack is very new. It hasn't had time to really form a community yet.
The article didn't *say* that Scott is a Nazi. It used guilt by association.
If you're looking only at literal words, it might not seem so bad to you. But most people will don't just look at literal worlds. It's a hit piece.
One of the things to love about Scott's writing is that he'll write an essay-length post about something you didn't know you cared about. And then you discover it's part 1 of 5 where he analyses really strange aspects which in retrospect seem obvious. Most people are verbose because they have little to say. Scott is verbose because he has much to say.
The blog is long, but so is a book. Ideally, they are long because they have a lot to say and cannot easily say it much more briefly. Certainly if Scott talks about anything political, his words are likely to be misunderstood even by his own readership if he doesn't take the time to clarify what he is, and is not, saying.
Plus, in a world where so many people believe that they can choose what to believe on a whim, and political groups fight over basic facts, evidence is crucial when making a claim to a skeptical audience (and Scott's audience is always skeptical!). So generally he makes the effort to track it down and present that evidence. And when he doesn't make that effort to gather evidence and present it, well, look how mercilessly he's being taunted by Marxbro, who surely left over a hundred comments on this page alone.
Anyway, I credit Scott for introducing me to my main moral philosophy (consequentialism) and most intelligent people will find something valuable among his top 3 posts: https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
Bravo! So glad to see SlateStar>Astral Codex back and even better; so sorry you had to face trashing; so disappointed in NYT... But mostly, so glad to see SlateStar>Astral Codex back and even better. Thanks!
I didn't think it was a negative article. If it had been posted on someone's blog, well, maybe it's a bit of an essay that uses someone as an example for developments that they are maybe connected to in some way but doesn't define them. and ok, maybe there are some nitpicks. the real issue people have is the impact of the NYT and how central the NYT is to the social construction of reality. and what happens when the mainstream discovers niche stuff. but anyway, sometimes a bit of shared reality can be a good thing to have. The NYT is never going to be very congruent with iconoclasm. For mass media we could do much worse (and do to disastrous results).
What the Times did was absolutely wrong.
I'm bothered, however, by the author's running away from Murray, whose work has been validated by years of improvement in psychometrics and research. Charles Murray does not have offensive views on race. The running away from scholarship when it reveals a truth that is uncomfortable, is what has set the table for today's Medieval culture. "Intellectualism" is now based on "feelings," not on the constant subjecting of ideas to rigorous testing.
Murray has been repeatedly and comprehensively shown to be not only wrong, but actively misrepresenting the science he discusses. His ideas certainly aren't based on "rigorous testing." His data is very bad, and he actively misrepresents it. Shaun's quite careful dismantling of The Bell Curve is a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
That's not a takedown and it's not a fair discussion of the work, nor the science of intelligence. For starters, even bringing up Gould and not investigating that person's scientific errors in Mismeasure is a sign of large blind spots. This video is a slanted and mildly ridiculous take on intelligence as overwhelmingly an excuse for racist actions instead of being an investigation of human excellence.
It's not a takedown? Well, it's easy to skip over a nearly 3-hour video and take your word for it, but I think it's worthwhile to quote a small excerpt to help others decide whether the content is "not a takedown". I don't remember anything about Gould, but the video does spend a full half hour talking about a source named Lynn:
1:07:45
Keeping in mind all the various possible problems with IQ testing that we've just discussed, let's take a look at a few of the IQ tests Herrnstein and Murray cite as evidence for claims in The Bell Curve. Surely they will be properly administered, right?
After all Herrnstein and Murray themselves discuss many of the same issues that we just have. It would follow that given their familiarity with these potential problems, they would of course endeavor to avoid them, so let's see how they do on that front. We'll take a look at a particular section of The Bell Curve, see what the claims are, and then have a bit of a dig into the sources backing up those claims.
This is from a section titled "How Do African-Americans Compare with Blacks in Africa on Cognitive Tests?" and I quote, "This question often arises in the context of black/white comparisons in America, the thought being that the African black population has not been subjected to the historical legacy of American black slavery and discrimination, and might therefore have higher scores. [...] Richard Lynn was able to assemble 11 studies in his 1991 review of the literature. He estimated the median black African IQ to be 75, approximately 1.7 standard deviations below the U.S. overall population average, about 10 points lower than the current figure for American blacks."
"In summary, African blacks are on average substantially below African Americans in intelligence test scores. Psychometrically there is little reason to think that these results mean anything different about cognitive functioning than they mean in non-African populations. For our purposes, the main point is that the hypothesis about the special circumstances of American blacks depressing their test scores is not substantiated by the African data."
[...] This is Herrnstein & Murray's answer [....] they point to black people in Africa and say hey, well, they also got lower scores, black African people haven't been subject to discrimination in America after all, so doesn't this prove that discrimination in America, can't be depressing black IQ scores? Well [...] Murray's decision to limit their concern here to American black slavery on discrimination is a huge oversight because there could also be discrimination in whichever parts of Africa they are talking about.
Herrnstein & Murray claimed in the acknowledgments at the start of The Bell Curve to have benefited especially from the advice of this Richard Lynn, who they elsewhere call a "leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences" and they cite his work several times throughout the book [picture shown of 12+ citations of Lynn]. So let's take a look at Richard Lynn's 1991 review of the literature entitled "Race Differences in Intelligence: a Global Perspective", which was published in Mankind Quarterly.
[Shaun reviews Lynn's data sources for 20 minutes, noting that Lynn's primary source of African data was South Africa under Apartheid. Jumping ahead to 1:28:47:]
...if you think what Lynn did to those last two studies was bad, strap in, because this next one is of real bastard: South Africa IQ of 69 [for blacks], attributed to Owen 1989, which Lynn calls the "best single study of the Negroid intelligence". So this [study is called] Test and Item Bias: the suitability of the Junior Aptitude Tests as a common test battery for White Indian and Black Pupils in standard 7 ...
This study starts out: "this study was undertaken to shed light on problems concerning the construction and use of a common test battery for various South African population groups". You see this study is testing a test: the Junior Aptitude Test or JAT, which was standardized for white pupils in South Africa, and determining whether it's also a good test to give to non-white groups. The study selected various schools in South Africa for white Indian and black students, although it should be mentioned it was not able to use the majority of the selected black schools "owing to the unrest situation" and thus they had to test black schools in the KwaZulu region, one of the areas designated for black inhabitants of South Africa under Apartheid. I mentioned the unrest situation here as a reminder that yes, these tests are being carried out under apartheid and protests and demonstrations against the segregated school system were ongoing.
So anyway, the study examined pupils' performances on the various sub tests comprising the JAT, and what were the findings? Well the thing I think we should mention first here is that the tests were given to the black students in KwaZulu in English only, and several test sections of the JATs relied very heavily upon language ability. Now Owen expected language ability not to matter in the tests because the black students in the KwaZulu region had ostensibly been learning English in their schools, and Owen apparently either doesn't know or disregards that these schools often didn't have necessary teaching equipments only a small amounts of their teachers were certified and that pupil-teacher ratios were more than double that of the white schools.
To quote the study, "language was not expected to play a significant role in test performance in this investigation. However, the results showed that this assumption was completely wrong. In fact, language played such an important role, and the knowledge of English of the majority of black testees was so poor, that certain tests, for example the JAT 4 (synonyms) and the JAT 8 (Memory: Paragraph) proved to be virtually unusable."
And let me just quote that again: "certain tests proved to be virtually unusable."
Owen also writes elsewhere, "the results of the current investigation clearly showed that language played a prominent role in all the tests containing language items", which is a wonderful "multiple stab wounds shown to shorten life expectancy" bit of academic obviousness there. Language ability was not the only way in which the Junior Aptitude Test was biased, however. In a section entitled "item bias in the tests of the JAT", Owen note several ways in which the tests were culturally and economically biased. For example, he here lists several test items on the first test in the JAT and states "a common element in most of these items was that they presupposed knowledge, or a degree of knowledge on the part of the testee", and mentioned such things as electrical appliances, microscopes, and western types of ladies' accessories, going on to write "thus in the case of both the Indian and black testees it seems that the single largest cause of bias lay in the fact that the pupils were not familiar with the objects represented by the pictures. Cultural and socioeconomic status factors probably also played a role in this regard."
So this test is biased, then. The study examining it SAYS it is biased. But according to Richard Lynn "this is the single best study of the Negroid intelligence". This is the best one! The one that tests segregated school children in a non-native language and calls its own results "virtually unusable". In Lynn's review this is the most important study for his estimates of black African IQ. Writing about it, he says "the mean IQ of the sample, in comparison with Caucasoid South African, norms is 69. It is also around the median of the studies listed in table 3. It is proposed therefore to round this figure up to 70 [why?] and take this as the approximate mean for pure Negroids" [god damn.]
What Lynn has done here is ridiculous. He has taken 11 studies from a period between 1929 and 1991 with vastly different sample sizes reporting day from different tests, most of which didn't even report IQ scores, transform the data into what he reckons the equivalent IQ scores were using some unknown standardization, picked one that was sort of near the middle and said that's the average black African IQ. This is outrageous. It is a crime. It might actually be a crime, and if it's not, it should be.
[length limit reached, starting new comment]
Now I am far from the first person to criticize The Bell Curve's reliance upon Richard Lynn as a source. Various academics were already well aware of Lynn and his dodgy data, so when Herrnstein & Murray cited him they were immediately attacked with accusations of bias and racism. Charles Maurey responds to these attacks in the afterword to The Bell Curve and his defense is laughable.
His first defense is to say that the topic of African IQ was a "tiny piece of The Bell Curve, three paragraphs on pages 288-289" and in regards to this, two responses jump to mind immediately. The first is to say well, maybe you should have spent longer on it then, Charles! "We were wrong very quickly" isn't a defense against being wrong, is it? Maybe if you put a little more effort in you would have seen that Lynn's paper was a load of rubbish. Secondly, this part of The Bell Curve is far more important than Murray makes out. He uses Lynn's paper to dismiss the arguments that black-white differences in IQ are caused by environmental factors such as a history of oppression which is the single most common counter-argument to one of the principal claims in the entire book. At no point does Murray actually address any specific criticisms of Lynn's work or any of its various errors, he mainly just seems outraged that anyone dares to have criticized him at all, to be honest. And it's exactly this sort of academic laziness that fed much of the angry response to The Bell Curve. Murray refuses to admit that citing Lynn was a mistake, and simply froze out some newer studies that supposedly show he was right anyway, so there.
This speaks to a couple of things. Firstly, it is a fatal underestimation of exactly how badly this damages the faith that a reader of The Bell Curve can have in its authors. After all this is not the only time they cite Richard Lynn. He has more than 20 citations in their bibliography, and they thank him specifically in the acknowledgments.
If this is the sort of data that Charles Murray is willing to accept as legitimate, how can we trust anything he says anywhere in the book? How can we trust the new studies he brings up to defend Richard Lynn? Personally, I think it will be a mistake to even look at these new studies. Murray's response to having his previous sources called into question is to simply throw out new sources. His response to having these called into question would no doubt be to throw out more. The responsibility for checking whether his sources are trustworthy or accurate has been moved FROM Murray TO his critics: they're the ones doing the reading and the fact-checking, whereas he never gets held to account.
So long as we all understand that, however, I suppose we can take a brief peek...
[and so the non-takedown continues.]
I do recommend watching the entire video because the level of care, and level of detail, demonstrated therein is at least as high as the writing of Scott Alexander.
You are simply wrong. I suggest you read a lot of evolutionary biology. Our ancestral past is responsible for genetic composition. That's certainly NOT controversial. What seems to be missing from the education of so-called "intellectuals" is that the environment of that ancestral past is key. Whether it's a discussion of why it is that blood pressure drugs that work for whites didn't work well at all for black Americans or whether it's a discussion of why certain genes selected for in sub-Saharan African populations and those selected for in what were today's Scandinavian populations would have to be different shouldn't surprise you. The physiological systems that resulted in survival, that is, those that resulted in "fitness" differ due to environment.
A reality is that some systems got more calories/energy for optimum functioning than others. The emotion has to be taken out of such discussions. In other words, because of selection, you must not be shocked that the brain and the genes that control its development, like all other organs, evolved differently because of environmental pressures that differ from place to place. Sub-Saharan Africa placed extreme demands for survival on certain systems.
I think terms like "optimum functioning" are a primary reason people are turned off by the ideas and find them offensive. They're easy to read as "better at life" even though what you really mean is "evolved to thrive in a unique environment".
Focusing on a specific aspect of fitness such as getting more/less calories as a measure of "optimum functioning" is dumb and people are right to be offended when you single out particular traits like that. Blue whales and fire ants get different amounts of calories both in absolute and relative senses but it would be insane to put any significance toward ranking them on that measure alone as a measure of "functioning".
People are really really bad at communicating on these topics, and given obvious historical connections between study of genetic differences and Really Bad Things™, it is reasonable to expect social backlash against any discussion at all. Unless it is your primary area of research it is absolutely the right thing to do to distance yourself from people for whom it is, if you want to be taken seriously on any other matter.
I don't see Scott's response of "running away" from Murray as some statement on validity of his research. He's distancing himself from the claims people attribute to Murray because whether or not they are based in concrete science, the way they are posed, or interpreted by the public, does not reflect Scott's beliefs, or the viewpoints he intends to communicate to his audience. Publicly aligning himself one way or another to the scientist or even to the science itself detracts from the value of the contributions he makes to public discourse on every other matter.
>>> it is reasonable to expect social backlash against any discussion at all.
No. No, it is NOT "reasonable" to expect social backlash against discussion of this topic. It is demonstrable that backlash occurs - generally amplified by activists with a cause - but this backlash is not based on reason and should not be assumed to be the default state of discussion.
It is not at all appropriate nor healthy to insist that people denounce, or distance themselves from, or otherwise reject other people based on subjects of inquiry and research - or job, or political leanings, or religion. This is inhumane and wrong. You should not suggest that it is acceptable and you should speak out against it whenever you see it happening.
Not saying the backlash is reasonable. I'm saying it's reasonable to expect backlash. As you say, it is demonstrable that backlash occurs. It is reasonable to accept demonstrable facts and respond accordingly.
Whether and how you respond to unreasonable backlash is up to your personal philosophy. I would say that it is reasonable to expect continued backlash from personally associating with controversial figures, and acknowledge that, as evidenced by demonstrable facts, the impact you might have vis-à-vis swaying unreasonable voices toward your side of an issue by reasoned argument is negligible. Choosing not to take sides or to disengage or to distance oneself from the source of the backlash in the interest of being more effective in influencing other important matters is a reasonable response to that expected backlash.
Scott can do more good discussing the things he's more interested in discussing than engaging in some argument over something that is not his area or expertise, or not his primary area of interest. Even if the subject were his area of expertise or interest, choosing the battlefield in order to maximize potential influence is also a reasonable thing to do. If he can't do that without distancing himself from controversy, and distancing himself from controversy causes less harm than the benefit of being able to act freely, then distancing himself from controversy is (in my philosophy) the right thing to do.
I think the harm of allowing a handful of unreasonable people to believe, via evidence, argument, action, or inaction, that there is one fewer person in the world who 100% believes in perceived racist theories is negligible compared to the good Scott does even from writing a single fictional short story, let alone all the much more informative and influential stuff he posts on his blog on a regular basis.
I suggest that you read a lot of evolutionary biology and quantitative genetics.
The mere facts that there exists a difference between two groups, and that you can speculate about a possible adaptive reason why that difference might have been fit, do not suffice to prove that your speculative adaptive hypothesis is true, nor that the difference is genetic.
(Heritability of a trait within groups also doesn't prove between-group differences are hereditary; failure to understand this is failure to understand heritability. For intuition see https://www.quora.com/What-is-heritability/answer/David-Bahry)
The reality is that the environments in which people of different races statistically grow up, including e.g. class and nutrition but also even the social environment of how people treat you based on your race even if you're adopted, vary. This environmental variation can easily produce group differences that have nothing to do with differences in ancestral selection pressures. You've given no reason afaik for privileging genetic hypotheses of racial differences over environmental ones.
Can you give a central claim of Murray's you find to misrepresent the science?
I had a similar prior to yours until I read Cofnas' *Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry*. He makes the case that anti-hereditarian researchers have been motivated by political concerns completely disconnected from the scientific quest for truth, and that they themselves usually recognize this in private. The article is thorough, approachable, and well-cited. It completely changed my mind on the topic.
What are your thoughts on the ideoloigical motivations of hereditarian researchers? I realize you are an ethno-utilitarian, as helpfully pointed out by Marxbro over the years, but it seems to me there may be a bit of ideological motivation behind the Lynn data Murray proudly cites or the rigorous method of counting encyclopedia entries written by white people to conclude the superiority of white people in Human Achievement. Could you possibly connect choices such as those to the "scientific quest for truth?"
I've regretted the "ethno-utilitarian" comment ever since about fifteen minutes after I made it. It did not accurately describe my thinking at the time, and it does not accurately describe my thinking now.
From what little I've heard of it, Murray's Human Accomplishment doesn't sound like it would be intellectually rigorous or interesting. I'm not particularly interested in researching it further. Murray's other works such as Coming Apart seem like they could be marginally more insightful, at least in their premises.
Your comment about "the scientific quest for truth" mischaracterizes my reading of Cofnas. In this debate I am not interested about who's good and who's evil, I am interested in who's correct, and who's trying to be correct and failing, and why they're failing. If Nisbett and friends are not trying to produce correct research, to me that flags them as not worth paying attention to.
You know that thing openly admitted that the video you are linking was naked, dishonest propaganda, right? He gloated about how many people he fooled with it.
Murray's inference from within-race heritability of IQ to claims that between-race differences in IQ must be at least partly hereditary are, and have always been, fallacious. This is not "feelings", this is correct understanding of the concepts in quantitative genetics. [see e.g. https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html]
Murray also recently made a fool of himself in WSJ with claims that polygenic scores provide "a secure place to stand in assessing what is innate and what is added by the environment" [see rebuttal here https://www.wsj.com/articles/genetic-scoring-presents-opportunity-peril-11580762369].
Murray is not a reliable source on quantitative genetics.
Except the bell curve doesn't claim the differences are genetic, they claim, RIGHTLY, that they're heritable. And the heritability is what is politically salient.
I've heard people make "New York Slimes" jokes for close to twenty years now. (I don't tend to agree with the right-wing fever swamps, but I run into them from time to time.)
I don't think I've ever seen it be quite this literal, though.
Also, one other point that I think is worth mentioning (though perhaps awkward for you to do yourself, or implied by your intro): his article's ending, where he makes it look like your request for anonymity was irrational, and you just dropped it when you weren't trying to spite him. Which completely neglects the fact that you could do so specifically because you'd spent those months completely uprooting your life in order to deal with Cade Metz holding a (proverbial) gun to your head.
Also, I just caught this bit.
> 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.
I don't intend to cause the sort of trouble for him that'd be morally wrong - no death threats, no protests at his house, nothing like that. But if he gets Twitter replies on every article he posts talking about how he's a lying muckraker who should be taken as seriously as the National Enquirer, well, that's the cost of doing business. Even if you're right about him being pressured into it (and that is a *spectacularly* generous steelmanning), these are the costs you pay for letting someone else use you like a sledgehammer to get their petty vengeance.
Now, now. The National Enquirer probably does higher-quality reporting.
Scott should take a few deep breaths, and laugh a bit.
I'm seeking some advice on how to replace the NYT in my life.
I've been a subscriber since they put up the paywall, and NYT has been a go-to pinned tab on my browser since long before that. I believe in supporting investigative journalism and quality explanatory reporting. I like having a page of timely, mostly trustworthy world and national news. I think the NYT still gets the most important things right about as often as anyone else.
But, like many, over the years, I've noticed a steady reduction in objective reporting in favor of ideological agenda pushing, to they point where I began to feel like the NYT was actually *creating* the sorts of "movements" they most like to report on. This has made me uncomfortable, even when I agree with at least the core objective, as was the case with #metoo. More recently, they seem to have decided a "backlash" against big tech is underway -- though as has been noted by others (including Scott, iirc), this "backlash" seems practically nonexistent outside of the media.
There is a sort of game I play now where I scan the headlines of the NYT homepage and count how many seem to be about "intersectionalist" issues or will be discussed through an intersectionalist lens. I'm much less likely to read those. I'm all for everyone treating everyone the best way we can figure out how, but I feel like the NYT is gradually becoming less of a newspaper and more of an issues magazine. But I am the proverbial frog in the warming pot of water, and I don't know where else to go.
So, how might I replace this browser tab?
I want my subscription money to be directed to careful, objective journalism -- or at least opinion writers who do some homework and think deeply before writing (another percentage in decline at the NYT).
Can anyone suggest where to find an informative, timely dashboard of trustworthy major headlines and other stories? One that links directly to quality articles instead of to paywalled other sites or ad-spammed & ad-block prohibited pages? I have some subscription money waiting to be freed up to this end. (And yes, I'm already subscribed to Scott.)
Do not read opinion pieces from major media. Read media only for pure news, like Reuters or Wall Street Journal (of course, not WSJ opinion). If you want opinion pieces, read blogs. There are plenty of people, related to Scott, who write excellent blogs. Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan to name a few. Every day Cowen posts "daily assorted links" to major media, often including NYT.
Valid points, though I'm less annoyed than disappointed when newspaper opinion writers don't measure up. It's labelled as opinion, and I can keep track of who is and isn't worth reading at one paper. It's when the non-opinion stuff has a strong and often lazy bias that I get annoyed, as I don't try to track all of those other writers.
That's why when reading news, I try to stick with high quality media, not associated with any ideologies. Basically pick only "Highly factual" and "the least biased" from https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/. As other people mentioned, this means usually reading business-oriented media like WSJ or FT.
On opinions, it is a valid point. The problem is that it is going to take a lot of trial and error. And you will have to keep subscriptions to multiple websites.
I've been trying to cut news out of my life as much as possible; I haven't managed to go cold turkey but my nicotine patch is the financial newspapers (Wall Street Journal etc). These tend to be written with the underlying set of assumptions "our readers are just a bunch of rich cigar-chomping tycoons who want to make money, let's give them the basic important facts that will help them make as much money as possible". The cigar-chomping tycoons are probably a fantasy that exists only in the journalists' heads, but the resulting newspaper tends to work out pretty straight-down-the-middle and uninterested in fripperies.
The other advantage is that the WSJ requires a subscription to read, so if you don't buy the subscription then you only get the headlines, which saves a lot of time.
I've considered the cut-it-out route, but it's not really in my nature, and could be dangerous for my career. It's expected that I know what's going on. In fact, I need to at least be aware of the shifting liberal orthodoxy fashions to avoid dangerous missteps.
That's a fascinating point. I wonder if there is room in the market for a minimalist newsletter called something like "How Not to Get Cancelled".
Give me some bullet points with the "correct" opinions on every topic and let me move on with my day!
It's no joke! I spent a few minutes considering some of the updates I might give a white male who just woke up from a 10 or 15-year coma and doesn't know about the new minefields. There's no shortage of material:
• We capitalize Black now. This term is now more accepted than "African Amercian".
• There's a Q+ at the end of LGBT now, to include "queer" and various other gender/sexual identities.
• "Latinx" is a way to avert gender assumptions from a discussion of that ethnic group.
• Speaking of which, stop assuming genders.
• Elliot Page is the actor you knew as Ellen Page, but don't tell anyone we said that, as it's Wrong to speak a Dead Name. (I was actually confused by the stories at the time, because they all said "Elliot Page comes out as trans" but refused to say who this had been, and many sites had retconned all prior uses. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.) [Please forgive me, Elliot and the trans community. I'm trying to educate, here.]
• Aunt Jemima is cancelled, as are [names long list]... ...It's not yet lethal to openly enjoy Harry Potter, but be careful about where you praise J.K. Rowling.
• 'cis' just means you associate yourself as having the gender your anatomy seemed to indicate at birth.
• Here's what a "trigger warning" is, and when you might want to use one...
• Here's what it means if someone puts "he/his" in their bio, or something more exotic.
• Don't dress up for Halloween, as current or future culture fashions may turn against your choice.
• No, you can't use "this was normal back then" as an excuse.
• Breaking news: Intent may not matter anymore. Do not speak the "n-word" in ANY context, even to refer to it or to how someone else had used it.
"I've been trying to cut news out of my life as much as possible"
The fact that news sources are problematic does not make this position an ethical option -- not if you're going to vote and attempt to sway social opinion in political directions.
The comment does help explain how someone who is apparently not deficient intellectually could possibly still believe that the former president remains one of our best options for leading our country.
I have nothing against people who want to tune out. But please don't then go around flippantly declaring what's best for our country and the world, particularly by elevating profoundly anti-democratic demagogues. Yes, of course, you have free speech. I'm just saying it's immoral to deploy it in this manner. And please stop voting until you resolve to be better informed.
I never said that Trump was one of the best options for leading the country, only that he was better than Biden, Clinton, Cruz or Jeb. There are undoubtedly millions of people who who would be better than any of those, but none of them is a member of the political class.
The Financial Times seems pretty good. You'll notice that their articles usually don't go viral. I think that is because they are optimizing for accuracy not virality.
In general, publications written for investors like FT, Economist, WSJ, Bloomberg seem good--investors value accuracy over entertainment since they're betting their beliefs. (Obvious caveat that publications written for investors will also flatter the sociopolitical views of that class to some degree.)
Hmm. Yeah, I'll take a closer look at those. I've liked some of the Bloomberg I've run into.
Back when I had more spare attention, I liked the Economist. They've got their own biases, and they're moving leftward, and their coverage is more superficial than they make it sound. But at least they're not *American* biases. And it's nice to see coverage of the rest of the world on a regular basis. For example, there's always a section on non-China Asia. Every week, rain or shine, no matter what craziness is afoot on the other continents, there are always several pages about what's going on in non-China Asia.
In my experience, the problem with Economist is that if you read an article from there on a topic that you are well familiar with, you find that it's not particularly clueful. Imagine what this means about the rest of their content.
Yeah, but I haven't found a general global news source where that's not the case. Do you know of any? For serious clue on areas I'm interested in but am not intimately aware of, focused bloggers have seemed to be the way to go.
I still liked the Economist, though, because I developed a general sense of how many grains of salt to take with what they said, in a way that's harder with US-focused media. Part of it was their journalistic model (using lots of bright-but-inexperienced youngsters), and part of it was an awareness of the target audience, if that makes sense? Overall, it made me aware of things I was interested in and gave me enough context to do a bit of independent research, and that was nice.
It's kind of like a much less extreme case of the voting recommendations from my local alternative newspaper. They're quite open about their far-left bias, they briefly describe their reasoning, they often link to sources, and they provide a relatively open comment section where people can disagree and post contradictory information. It's great for helping me make up my mind, even when I hardly follow any of their recommendations.
The simplest approach to know what media wants you to know, but in a bland, objective way with as little spin as possible, is to go here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events) and read the listings on whatever day you missed, diving deeper if you want to know more. It's free, fast, and comprehensive with very minimal spin.
(It is, however, selected by power for whatever topics it believes are important or wants you to be thinking about. So there's "selection bias" spin involved. Hard to get rid of that though.)
Hi there! Are you familiar with https://ground.news/?
It's an aggressively non-partisan news aggregator that tracks current events according to the bias of the outlets covering them. Outlets are categorized on a spectrum of extreme left to center to extreme right, and for every story, you can click on any of the outlets covering it, especially if you want to to compare and contrast.
I'll be honest; I've mostly found it useful as shortcut to finding centrist reporting on a current story, but the "Blindspot" section, which highlights stories that are only being covered by one group, is popcorn reading.
If you have questions about how this all works, here's the FAQ.
https://about.ground.news/frequently-asked-questions
I'm not looking for an aggregator as my main news page, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, but I find this site interesting and worthwhile in its own right. I do like to occasionally check on how something is being reported on (or ignored) by outlets with different leanings. Thanks!
Was intrigued as someone who uses Google News mostly as an excuse to find new depths of loathing for Google News, which has slowly devolved over the years from "basically good once you remove the Entertainment section" to "usable if you remove the Entertainment section and spend twenty minutes blocking five zillion different MMA-only sites from the Sports section" to "you can now click Fewer Stories Like This to get the same amount of Stories Like That, blocking a source just finds an even shittier source for the same nothingburger MMA gossip, there's a giant Recommended For You section that's generally a weather story, a local crime blotter, another local crime blotter from a city/county with a name similar to the one you actually reside in but located hundreds of miles away, and a clickbait garbage story, and you can no longer remove the Entertainment section".
Clicked over, and the main headline was... Prince Merkin and Madame Harry Expecting Another Royal Baby.
Sigh.
A month later, I just thought I would comment that I've been visiting Ground News more and more. The "Blindspot" section is, indeed, illuminating, even if the summaries are about all I care to read. It's kind of refreshing for me to be able to mentally file away some stories as "partisan rabble rousing" so I can be aware of their headline-level existence without feeling obligated to read up on the details.
Until you find a good source for non-ad-walled content, may I recommend the Chrome extension Behind the Overlay? Many (but not all) ad-walled wobsites simply put up an overlay that prevents you from seeing content that has already loaded. Remove the overlay, and you can browse the site just fine.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behind-the-overlay/ljipkdpcjbmhkdjjmbbaggebcednbbme
Some of them are trickier sites put in some CSS that hides everything after the first paragraph or blocks you from scrolling, which can often be circumvented by deleting a "display:none" or an "overflow:hidden", but I haven't found a good extension for doing that automagically.
so we're scared of being doxxed and beaten for having met someone who knows trump.
so we're scared of being doxxed and beaten for noticing girls don't do tech.
so we're scared of being doxxed and beaten for noticing IQ test results.
so we're scared of being doxxed and beaten for ... the voldemort thing is particularly weak.
No. Those are examples of things that he'd rather not have taken entirely out of context in attempts to defame him. More likely fears of being doxxed and beaten are for other, often more personal, things such as banning vindictive trolls from comment sections, or making statements (sometimes in jest) that run afoul someone's very specific pet peeve which they will defend militantly to the bitter end.
And that's just considering people who already read his blog. A larger danger is being doxxed to his patients, not all of whom may respect the boundaries between personal and professional lives, and some of whom may have negative or unhealthy feelings toward him. Being stalked by people statistically more likely to be mentally unstable than the general population is nothing to scoff at.
Even if the potential physical danger to himself is small, he has loved ones who may be more vulnerable to the social danger and abuse that he risks by being doxxed.
I'm sorry this happened to you, but this is what the New York Times has become. Earlier this week, NYT's staffer Nikole Hannah Jones doxxed a reporter from the Free Beacon. That is who they are.
> This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.
That's, like, what they do. This sounds like an example of Gell-Mann amnesia. There are a myriad of cases where major newspapers presented extremely tenuous multi-stage links as proof of tight cooperation and forever agreement on all subjects, guilt by association as fact, replaced "once criticized a person who happens to be of Jewish origin" with "rabid anti-semite", "argued that open borders policy has its dangers" as "xenophobe and white supremacist", of immigration laws, "doubted that allowing male-bodied people compete in feats of strength with female-bodied ones would be fair to the latter" as "transphobe", etc. This happens so much it turns from separate cases to constant low-level hum of deception and misinterpretation. So it is not strange at all to expect this done to you - even if they don't do it to everybody all the time, they certainly know how to do it, and certainly wouldn't hesitate to do it when they're writing a hit job article.
"I suspect he did not personally want to write this and was pressured into it as part of the Times’ retaliatory measures against me": Even if that were true, he was perfectly willing to smear someone and get paid to do it. He should be held accountable for it.
"I continue to believe these studies are true, I’ve spoken with some of the researchers who have performed them, and the New York Times itself has previously written about and praised these same studies."
Hilarious
Charles Murray's views on race and IQ are logical and measured (eg, overlapping distributions). Your decision to not affirm or reject them via logical argument highlights an understandable tactic of avoiding censure without rejecting the obvious. Alas, rejecting/avoiding profound truths to placate the mob only works for plutocrats and demagogues, not intellectuals.
it's like the girl-power STEM thing. The toxic progressive mind thinks that girl scientists would be neat but doesn't really consider the obverse like why don't hot chicks date nerds or why don't dudes design dresses. We're required to nod along.
http://danluu.com/images/tech-discrimination/cs_enrollment.png
That there are overlapping distributions is not controversial nor specific to Murray; e.g. even Murray's vocal scientific critics, like Gould, did not dispute the observed distributions.
The dispute was about causality, and here, Murray's views were widely criticized. Murray thought that within-race heritability of IQ implied between-race IQ differences are probably at least partly genetic; but that doesn't follow and is not a measured middle-ground [e.g. https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html].
It seems like an awful lot of the controversy and tension in all of this - going right back to its start - could have been avoided if you and Metz had talked on the phone or met for a single coffee/beer. It appears that you two only communicated via e-mail, and the most basic form of human interaction could have been employed to find a much more civil and productive way forward.
They could have talked off the record. It looks like they did have some kind of e-mail back and forth and that Metz honored any off the record requests on that, otherwise Scott would have for sure been quoted in the piece. Think the likelihood of positive outcomes far outweigh the negatives, especially given how things did play out.
I wonder if it was always going to be a hit piece all along.
Since the end result was a typically banal "Subject says X, critics say Y" product with no specific factual errors that seems unlikely to me
I put out a blog post on this hitjob, partly because I feel like given the close association between my blog and SSC it's important to be clear on what I think. Long story short, the article stinks.
https://deponysum.com/2021/02/14/of-guilt-by-association/
It was a bummer to find out today that while I was having a wonderful time rebuilding my life as a result of Scott's psychiatry work, he was busy dealing with all of this garbage. At the very least, this (not so) confused former patient is quite happy to have found this bright new evolution of Slate Star Codex.
In the words of one of those murdered people from that Oz movie, "What a world, what a world!"
@nfergus brought me here.
I have never heard about Alex's blog nor did I read the NYTimes hit piece on him. That being said I think this post did have 4 good points where the NYTimes deliberately taken his quotes out of context in order to make a him out to be a monster who hits all the points in the current group think fear matrix. Racist, misogynistic and worse of all Pro-Trump.
It was by all accounts the NYTimes attempt to cancel him.
I fear that he is only wrong in his his explination as to why he became a target. It was not because he refused to be doxxed by the NYTimes, but because he was presenting arguments as to why certain things are the way they are that are. Arguments that were not the same as the NYTimes' reasons that things are as they are.
FWIW, I did subscribe to ASX, but it was a tough call for me, since $100 is not cheap. I ultimately chose to subscribe anyway, just to send a signal to Scott that I respect his willingness to stand against NYT -- but I could've gone either way. Now, I'm very happy I made that call; if I was not subscribed yet, I surely would've done it after reading this post.
Also, if Scott wanted to start some sort of a legal fund for victims of modern journalism, I'd happily donate.
I was thinking of something more... punitive. Something that will allow the next Joe Random Blogger to say, "Ok NYT, go ahead and doxx me, but be aware that the Slate Star Codex Communal Journalism Defence Fund currently stands at $1.5M, and I fully intend to apply for their assistance as soon as your hit piece comes out". However, in light of what you said, I realize that Scott's contract with SubStack might preclude such ventures.
Excellent complaint about the article itself, without worrying about the negatives or the shaded mistakes:
You are writing about one of the most prolific and talented writers of our generation. How the hell do you not actually quote them? - https://howthehell.substack.com/p/nyt-ssc-quoting
Including a few of the quotes he lists would've made the article about 100x better, while giving a much more accurate impression of what SSC was.
"Including a few of the quotes he lists would've made the article about 100x better, while giving a much more accurate impression of what SSC was."
You seem to have answered your own question.
Well the one thing the article *did* do was redirect me back to this blog. And now there's a picture available! So hurrah?
Scott, first of all, let me express my sincere thanks for your writing over the years. You are an excellent writer and I sincerely believe you've made a positive contribution to the world through it. You've also built a successful enterprise through your avocation and you're surely one of the top 50 voices in the country in terms of your influence on elite opinion.
Clearly you experienced a lot of anguish over this whole saga, and you seem to be especially sensitive to the natural feeling of distress we all share when we learn someone out there thinks we are a Bad Person. But let me urge you to take a deep breath and look at it from a more detached point of view.
You were subject to a tendentious and intellectually dishonest piece from an ideological adversary. As you know, your ideological adversaries do not prize intellectually honest debate as highly as you do, indeed part of the whole beef is they think other values like social responsibility are more important. Also lets remember that Substack, and the tech platforms like google and facebook, and by extension you, in your small way, are competitors to NYT!
I don't blame you for being upset about the article, it's a shoddy hit job. But you aren't the first to be the subject of the Why My Ideological Adversary Sucks piece. Having people who love to hate you is part and parcel of being a public intellectual. The existence of this piece is both a sign of your success as a writer thus far, and something that will totally help you rather than hurt you in objective terms.
So please continue to skewer your ideological adversaries with your wit, but go easy on the personal grievance side of it going forward (which I fully expect you will do given what you say here). Just keep being awesome and let your success be the best revenge. For my part, I hope this whole saga inspires you to lean into this avocation of yours all the more, and to see how far and how high your talent can take you.
Its coming faster than you realize -- war.
All due respect, but this seems rather unhelpful.
I am sorry you feel my comment is rather unhelpful to you. The savage reality isn't interest in how one feels - cultural conflict is omnipresent and growing. Be prepared is a state of mind.
I love that bit about the Wizard of Oz. Cracks me up every time. Sorry to hear you had to go through all this trouble. You sounds amazingly adaptable to have gotten to this point.
Honestly the thing that really got me about the article was the way the entire thing was in past tense, like the continuing lives of the people it mentions aren't even worth acknowledging. I don't know if that's part of their style guide, but it just felt completely dehumanizing.
"The Rationalists held regular meet-ups around the world, from Silicon Valley to Amsterdam to Australia. Some lived in group houses. Some practiced polyamory. “They are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson, a University of Texas professor who has stayed in one of the group houses."
Oh noez peoples with aLtErNaTiVe LiFeStyLeS.
In an academic environment, research is advanced by arguments based on evidence. That research won't get published unless you identify yourself and take responsibility for what you have written. Every aspect of your argument and every shred of your evidence is out there for others to dispute. This is a generally a good thing and usually done in the spirit of advancing the research. Sometimes unfair attacks are made, sometimes egos are bruised and it is no doubt a demanding job with a lot of stress because everyone knows whether or not you are succeeding. I'm not sure that anonymous blog posts, however brilliant, can really compare to the risks you take when you have to stand by your words (and back down if you are wrong).
I checked out this blog based on the NYT article and thought it might be interesting. I am surprised at the indignation. Seriously, the NYT like most journalism has journalists writing on timelines with small budgets. They never expect to be the last word on something nor the definitive version. Even someone writing a 1000 page book would never expect this. Anyone can write rebuttals and they have huge numbers of people writing comments on their opinion pieces. I can understand the policy of requiring stories to identify real people. How would any newspaper work if stories always let their subjects have anonymity? I may be persuaded by the argument that patients of a doctor would be concerned if their cases were directly discussed. But maybe such identifiable discussion is not a good idea anyway.
On the topic of genetics which I see is popular here, why not just read about genetic research instead of indulging in hypothetical speculation? Maybe one day the shape of your big toe will be correlated with intelligence, or maybe the arch of your foot or how tall you are. Anything is possible I guess--hypothetically. But to date the overwhelming consensus among geneticists is that the so called human "races" are the same, and individuals differ within these "races" far more than between them. The physical traits we happen to notice most are actually trivial and have no bearing on our brains or on "intelligence" which by the way is a very complex and by no means straightforward or "testible trait". Moreover, anyone looking at genetics, can't ignore epigenetics which highlights the effects of environment on how genes are turned on or off. So the real question is why is there always so much interest in speculating on when we will find a genetic marker for "racial" differences in intelligence? It was no coincidence that this field flourished in the 19th century when the need to justify colonialism and slavery was at its height. But why now? I think it would be better to focus on the big toe idea. Perhaps someone could write a book exploring this theory-at least hypothetically...
Scott was a practicicing psychiatrist. He wanted to remain anonymous to keep his job. If you actually read this post, you'd realize he had to quit this job and do an entire career shift becuase of the fallout from this pointless article. News papers are not entitled to any particular story, certainly not the story of a person who would *prefer* to remain anonymous. They don't have a special right to our personal lives, nor should they be presumed to be on neutral territory, observing life, but not altering it.
And as for the genetics line, "genetics" are not particularly "popular" on this blog. I'm not a huge reader, but this is by NO means a significant subject in Scott's writing and he certainly does not possess the perspective that you seem to think he does. Try reading this blog and forget whatever you "learned" in the NYT article.
It's pretty popular among the commenters, where, at least on the old blog, the subject was ever-green. Worst thing about the commenting community.
That may be, but the commenter I was responding to was replying directly to the post. It seems to me that he is making fairly unfounded assumptions about Scott, the author.
He even says, "why not just read about genetic research instead of indulging in hypothetical speculation"
What is he even referring to here? I can't see any basis for why he would assume Scott would be guilty of this, outside of a biased opinion of Scott from an external source like the NYT article. And I don't see a point in ceding any ground to this guy, based on the fact that the voluminous and varied blog readership occasionally touch on opinons and views that this one guy doesn't like.
> So the real question is why is there always so much interest in speculating on when we will find a genetic marker for "racial" differences in intelligence?
This is obvious: if you take as a *fait accompli* that there are no racial differences in intelligence and every race is identical, you basically have to conclude that black people and hispanics are systematically discriminated against (in college admissions, job opportunities, etc.) This is often used to justify affirmative action policies which obviously very few white or asian people like. Thus, there is a lot of motivation (or being uncharitable, "motivated reasoning") to find racial differences in intelligence.
And a lot of motivation, from the other side, to avoid evidence of such differences. One side to this argument attempts to prevent discussion of the issue, one doesn't. What does that suggest about which side believes that the position it wants to hold is more defensible?
Incidentally, I have never seen arguments that hispanics have racial difference in intelligence. The usual story is that East Asians have a somewhat higher average IQ than whites. Hispanics are in part Amerind, and Amerind's are ultimately East Asian, so if anything that would suggest a slightly higher average IQ, although I haven't seen evidence for or arguments on the point.
The "Hispanic" identity actually is social constructed, to an extent that you rarely see. Pretty much anyone from a Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking country, sometimes even from Spain and Portugal themselves, qualifies. So you end up with an extremely heterogenous mix of people with different degrees of European, African or Amerindian heritage depending on their location and their position in the local colonial racial hierarchy.
Treating them as a homogenous racial group is common in political discourse on both sides but also extremely dishonest. You're not going to find any insightful information from that generalization.
Left-wing zealots don't think their position is less defensible, they think they have The Facts and therefore the other side should be censored for lying. In my view it is not that much different than they way the Right behaves, since right-wing zealots also think they have The Facts and cannot be persuaded by evidence and argument. The difference is tactics: right-wing zealots are more accustomed to opposition in the media, so they rely a lot on gish gallops in comment sections, and ignoring opposing arguments, whereas left-wing zealots engage less in argument, favoring censorship and "cancelling".
If you want truth, ignore both groups and focus on science.
While I think it's pretty obvious in principle that there could be genetic differences that generate a race-IQ correlation, I do think this is very hard to prove, and many reasons for this are explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
I haven't seen anywhere near enough evidence to make up my mind, but it seems like a kind of pointless debate. Why? Because SOME differences in performance (whether on IQ tests or in other settings) have clearly been shown to be environmental, e.g. reminding people how poorly they are performing, or showing that you expect them to underperform, tends to *cause* underperformance. Thus, I would predict that *reminding* blacks of their race's historic underperformance should tend to directly *cause* underperformance, and why would you want to do that?
You do not "have" to conclude that systemic discrimination exists or especially that it is the only explanation for different levels of achievement if intelligence were perfectly evenly distributed across racial groups. There are still differences in culture, temperament, access to resources (based on historical circumstance that is not necessarily caused by "systematic discrimination"), psychology, personal preference, or just randomness that *could* meaningfully contribute to gaps in achievement between groups. IQ does not perfectly correlate with either academic or economic success. Therefore, it would not explain *all* differnces in those areas between racial groups. But that doesn't imply that "systemic" discrimination explains the rest. Do you believe that some form of systemic/systematic discrimination fully explains the different levels of achievement of everyone with an IQ of 130? Or do you think there might be other contributing factors at play?
Scott is well acquainted with academia - apparently one of the reasons his real name was easily identifiable by detractors was because he had published papers under it. He's also written many many blog posts about the replication crisis in the sciences and pushed hard for higher standards of transparency and rigor. When he ran surveys on his old blog to do independent research, he published the raw data (or as much of it as the users consented to, anyway) so that others could double-check his work. Both his old blog and this one have a page where he publicly keeps track of his mistakes and retractions, as well. And he definitely does not hold the awful views on race you're arguing against here.
I think you would actually agree with Scott a lot more than you think if you took a tour through his archives, especially the science-related tags.
(PS: On the subject of tags, Scott, now that you're back I'd love it if you could restore the old, more navigable formatting of SSC.)
It doesn't help with tags, but there is a web browser exteision ( https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks ) which provides many improvements and SSC-like formatting for this blog.
There's a critical point that's missed in this argument against anonymity: academia has tenure specifically to allow academic freedom.
People in industry don't have this luxury. They can lose their jobs if something they write happens to offend the wrong person. It's one thing to lose your reputation, it's another thing to lose your house.
>> In an academic environment, research is advanced by arguments based on evidence. That research won't get published unless you identify yourself and take responsibility for what you have written.
This is not true. As one famous example, try looking for the paper titled "The probable error of a mean" by a chap called "Student."
> So the real question is why is there always so much interest in speculating on when we will find a genetic marker for "racial" differences in intelligence?
Mostly because in the present day there's so very much emphasis put on the question of racial disparities in outcomes -- why are certain races underrepresented in certain fields of endeavour, and also disproportionately overrepresented among the poor and criminal classes? The question is asked over and over again, but the answer (or at least a significant possible part of the answer) is forbidden.
Now I'd much prefer that it wasn't the case, and that average racial disparities in both outcomes and intrinsic characteristics were something that we all politely refused to talk about, and we could instead judge people as individuals and give up on the whole "race" thing. But if we're going to have the question, we have to be willing to have the answer.
> But to date the overwhelming consensus among geneticists is that the so called human "races" are the same, and individuals differ within these "races" far more than between them.
Certainly, nobody at all disagrees with this.
Certain races are over represented among the poor and criminal classes because race (not ethnicity) is a social construct cooked up by 15th century slave traders to morally justify the mass exploitation of labor. It's a capitalist invention meant to get around the pesky problem of having to reduce your profits by paying your workers. There are clear historical reasons why some groups have been poor for hundreds of years in America. I don't find the idea that race causes differences in intelligence compelling because I don't even believe that race is real (in a biological sense, obviously we have made it real in a social sense). I do find it extremely plausible that generations of poverty have had epigenetic effects on those groups that led to the disparities we see today, not to mention the fact that many of them remain impoverished. It's funny to me how all of these rationalist discussions on race and intelligence seem to gloss over this angle. I don't think this topic should be haram like it is right now but I do find that many people who like to discuss it on the internet come suspiciously close to resurrecting 19th century race science, which in my opinion is obviously bunk.
I highly recommend the book Racecraft by Barbara and Karen Fields. It was a huge light bulb moment for me.
"P was believed by bad people for bad reasons, therefore P is not true" is not a valid logical inference.
Epigenetics is an interesting possibility but I think it makes it difficult to explain why, for instance, Chinese immigrants to the US tend to do very well despite the centuries of poverty that they're escaping.
Well then it's a good thing "P was believed by bad people for bad reasons, therefore P is not true" isn't actually what I said. My point is to distinguish between ethnicity and race, where one is a group of people with a shared genetic ancestry and the other is a shallow lumping together of ethnic groups by phenotype for economic, political, and social purposes. Race, as a concept, was absolutely created by bad people for bad reasons, but that badness is not what makes it unreal in a biological sense. It's not real in a biological sense because there can be as much difference between two ethnic groups with similar phenotypes as there is between two ethnic groups with wildly different phenotypes. Talking about Chinese immigrants or Ashkenazi Jews is a discussion of ethnic groups (though of course there are multiple ethnic groups in China so we are most likely actually talking about Han Chinese); talking about "black people" or "brown people" or "white people" or "asians" is talking about race, which is not a biologically meaningful concept.
Re: Chinese immigrants to the US, while they may have poverty in common with the American descendants of African slaves it's not really an apples to apples comparison. It's more useful to compare them to Nigerian immigrants, who are similar to Chinese immigrants in that they have very high educational attainment compared to native born Americans of all ethnic groups. If we're speaking of race then Nigerian immigrants are obviously black, but clearly there is something about their situation that's distinct from that of black Americans descended from African slaves. I'm not saying that poverty is a silver bullet that explains all group-level differences in IQ or educational attainment, only that discussing group-level genetic differences by "race" is meaningless because race itself is biologically meaningless and if you push even slightly against the boundaries of modern American racial discourse you can see how easily it breaks down.
> I don't find the idea that race causes differences in intelligence compelling because I don't even believe that race is real (in a biological sense, obviously we have made it real in a social sense).
I'm always confused by this claim that race isn't real in a biological sense. I mean, I sort of get what you're trying to say, but the justifications for this claim always fall apart upon further analysis. You might say that there's no test that can definitively classify your "race", or your mixture of "races".
But, there's also no test that can definitively classify your species. Last I checked, there are at least 24 different species concepts, none of them equivalent.
So if the lack of test for species doesn't preclude you from considering "species" as some biological reality, why should the absence of a race test preclude its biological reality?
Likely part of the problem is that "race" has too many overlapping meanings and is too politically charged to ever get some kind of rigourous treatment, and ethnicity is probably more useful anyway.
It would be reasonable to respect pseudonymity when the only newsworthy activities of the subject have been done online, under a pseudonym.
>But to date the overwhelming consensus among geneticists is that the so called human "races" are the same, and individuals differ within these "races" far more than between them.
I would be careful relying on the "overwhelming consensus among geneticists" part of this sentence. I was educated (BS & Ph.D.) at one of the best schools in the world, I've known several Nobel Laureates and countless members of various National Academies (Science, Engineering, Medicine). When my Ph.D advisor wanted to apply for a huge grant, he would first "go talk to Francis (Collins, head of the NIH)". My only point here is that I've seen, up close, how Science is done at the very highest levels. There's a lot more politics to it than anyone would admit to, especially when it comes to political hot buttons like "Race" or "Intelligence". I knew a distinguished professor at a top university who studied genetic factors of behaviour in certain animals. In private he was quite clear that he would never even think about applying for a grant, public or private, to extend his work to humans. He knew the fallout of being accused of being anywhere near even considering the idea that
human intelligence might have a genetic component would be professional death as would never get another Federal grant.
Larry Summers had to resign the Presidency of Harvard due, in part, to a speech he gave merely putting forth the idea that statistical differences in the aptitudes of men and women, at the tails of the distribution, should be studied in the context how to approach bringing more women into academia. That the President of Harvard would lose his job over such a mild suggestion about innate differences in intelligence between groups of people was a warning, loud and clear, that here was an orthodoxy that was not to be questioned.
Very intelligent people, who certainly know better, will say stupid things like "People are 99.9% genetically identical, we're all the same", just to signal that they subscribe to the orthodoxy. Compared to what most people complain about as "cancel culture", where someone might get dis-invited to speak at Yale, or have a thousand vitriolic Twitter posts aimed at them, the penalty for raising certain biological questions is literally losing the livelihood that you've worked for decades to achieve. The "consensus" is not scientific, it's social, and should not be accorded the respect that one would give to, say, the overwhelming consensus that Helium atoms have two Protons.
The reason "innate differences in intelligence" is a poisonous subject isn't because of orthodoxy, it's for two reasons:
-Most of the science behind 'intelligence' is bunk, because it comes from the field of psychology which is largely a garbage fire whose researchers squirm, disagree among each other and eventually accuse you of 'arguing technicalities' when you ask such basic questions like 'define intelligence', 'what are the intelligence genetic pathways', 'why do you assume IQ to be gaussian by default', or 'how is g a physical brain construct and not just a statistical artifact'. When you apply the standards of genomics (which aren't that high) to the field of psychology, the whole thing implodes.
-Most of the 'intelligence researchers' are shockingly bad faith to the point that if someone cites them in earnest they can't not have an agenda. Burt and Shockley were known for doing outright fraud. Lynn took the average of neighbouring countries' IQs to infer "national IQs" when he couldn't gather data, and did several instances of data manipulation that are sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from fraud. Rushton displayed a shocking ignorance of the basic genetics of human skin (arguing for a pleiotropy model that's only found in some species of lions), and Jensen went so far as to argue that black people were simply *incapable of having grammar*. Not only that, but many such 'researchers' are funded by a literal pro-Nazi (in the 30s) organization whose explicit goal is to promote the use of eugenics.
I know I am supposed to extend the principle of charity to people I disagree with, but at this point it should be clear that the proponents of the 'hereditarian hypothesis' are not dispassionate scholars who are merely curious about human genetics. They, very clearly, have set beliefs from the get go and will go to many lengths to attempt to prove them, which is not how science works.
Meanwhile, in the actual genetics community, no actual evidence of anything like that was found.
(BTW, knowing nobel laureates and national academies members isn't that big a boast you think, as far as science is concerned - genomics as a field moves very fast and most of these people are known for things they did 20-30 years ago. I would be more impressed if you told me you were a working researcher or something)
>-Most of the science behind 'intelligence' is bunk
Agree, but is irrelevant to my point.
>-Most of the 'intelligence researchers' are shockingly bad faith
I won't disagree, but, again, irrelevant to my point.
>Meanwhile, in the actual genetics community, no actual evidence of anything like that was found.
Regardless of the validity of the "hereditary hypothesis", nobody in the "actual genetics community" studies it because to even consider it is professional suicide. Hence no valuable evidence, one way or another, has, or will, surface, for societal, not scientific, reasons. The "consensus" is not scientific, it's social, and shouldn't be used as evidence one way or another. Likewise, the fact that plenty of unsavory characters have (mis)used science to bolster their unsavory ideas is not evidence, one way or another, on the validity of the "hereditary hypothesis".
>BTW, knowing nobel laureates and national academies...
My only point here is that I've seen, up close, how Science is done at the very highest levels. There's no boast here. I don't claim to be part of that research community, or have any scientific expertise worth mentioning, only that I had the vantage point to see how things play out at the highest level.
No, you misunderstand. Few people study this stuff because 'intelligence' does not have a clear definition and the stuff psychologists come up with (g, IQ tests) is laughably flawed. Biologists are rather down-to-earth and they like to measure things *that can be measured*, like expression levels or even good old height. Nothing rigorous or interesting can come from studying the variation of a thingy that's not defined, that has no known or exploitable genetic pathways, that's constrained to a fixed distribution for no apparent reason, that uses ranking instead of raw results (such that 1 IQ point becomes utterly devoid of meaning as a physical measure).
Note that the same could be said for many psychiatric disorders, which (Scott will be the first to admit) are hard to pin down and are probably due for an etiological revamping in the coming decades once people actually figure out what it is. Note that this is different from, say, the genetics of intellectual disability, that people investigate in depth and are starting to identify actual pathways for. Because intellectual disability is an actual *phenotype* that people can readily identify and measure and that's relatively constant over time and isn't subject to dumb effects like the Flynn effect or variation when you take the test a second time.
So no, your argument that everyone is terrified is preposterous. Scientists do investigate things - when there is something worth investigating. The whole 'genetics of intelligence' is repelling by its vagueness in both definition and operational methodology, and scientists (hard scientists, at least) generally steer clear of vague things they cannot get a hold of, unlike a Western blot. You don't need to constrain the signal to a gaussian and use ranked scores to look at a Western blot.
>Few people study this stuff because 'intelligence' does not have a clear definition and the stuff psychologists come up with (g, IQ tests) is laughably flawed. Biologists are rather down-to-earth and they like to measure things *that can be measured*,
1) to quote your own expert, Ewan Birney: " it should be noted that IQ itself is a valid and measurable trait. ". Doesn't sound like he thinks it's "laughably flawed".
2) Serious people (e.g., Francis Crick and Christof Koch) study(ed) "consciousness". Talk about a concept that lacks a way of measuring it!
3) "your argument that everyone is terrified is preposterous". Jim Watson made some comments about race and intelligence and was completely ostracised, despite a long, productive, and remarkable career. What he said may have been wildly wrong, but scientists say wildly wrong things all the time - it's part of the process - and don't become pariahs for it. I don't think it's at all preposterous to posit that people stay away from subjects that can be so dangerous to one's career. There's a hundred lifetimes worth of biology to study without ever coming close to questions of race and intelligence. Why would a rational person think about going there?
Jim Watson made some comments about *people who worked for him* that were wildly out of line. He'd been on about race and intelligence for a while before that.
"Burt and Shockley were known for doing outright fraud."
I can't speak to the case of Shockley. Burt was accused of fraud by people who prudently waited until he was dead to make the accusation, and one of whom advised his housekeeper, after his death, to throw away his papers, thus eliminating a good deal of the relevant evidence. His professional association first endorsed the accusation and then, after two people separately wrote pieces arguing that it was the accusation that was bogus, reversed its position. If you want the whole story, read _Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed_.
One of the ways in which I try to evaluate the reliability of any source of information is by looking at any area where what it says overlaps something I already know about, as in this case. The fact that you take one side of a controversy for gospel without any indication that it is a controversy makes me reluctant to take the rest of what you claim seriously.
> Anyone can write rebuttals and they have huge numbers of people writing comments on their opinion pieces.
This was page 1 of the Business section and comments on the web version are disabled.
Regarding the anonymity, firstly there's a difference between being pseudonymous and anonymous, especially in a community. Second, I have never gotten the impression that Scott is attempting to use this blog as a place to publish scientific research. And third, I think there ought to be room in the world for people to discuss ideas without having to undergo the full rigor involved in submitting articles to a peer-reviewed journal. And that's what this place was, until the threat of a NYT article caused it to be deleted.
Regarding the indignation, this NYT article has been a sword of Damocles, hanging over the community for almost a year. Just the potential of the article has had an enormous negative effect, including the deletion of the blog itself. In that context, the reaction here makes a lot more sense. It may seem strange to someone encountering the blog for the first time via this particular post, but that's sort of inevitable. Maybe go back and look at a few of the most recent posts, instead, if you want a better idea of what it's about?
As for the genetics discussion, I view that as an unfortunate side effect of a few things. One is that this place is a rare forum that allows that discussion topic, so of course there will be more of it than in places that don't. (But not always: if I recall correctly, on the old blog there were temporary bans on discussing it, when the discussions started to annoy too many of the rest of us.) Second is that it was mentioned in the NYT article, at least by implication, with the reference to Charles Murray. So there's going to be people bringing it up to try to clarify Scott's association with it, and once it's mentioned there'll be people arguing the merits, and then people commenting about all the discussion and drawing implications about the rest of the community, and it just spirals into a huge mess. If the NYT article had just skipped that one little bit, none of it would probably be here, at least, not on this post. And third is that one of the values of this community is the pursuit of truth, no matter whether the truth is viscerally repugnant, no matter how disgusting and evil the people who have advocated for it in the past. And the reflex of many people here is to try to debate such claims on their merits, rather than dismissing the claims because we don't like the implications, or like the people making the arguments, or even like thinking about the subject at all. To paraphrase Al Gore, an inconvenient truth is still the truth.
<3
I dunno, you may be greatly underestimating the skepticism of the average reader. I read the article, and when it came to the few guilt-by-association with some inflammatory keywords threw in, I just started skimming. It's always clear to me when that happens that the writer has lost the thread and is groping around, so throws in a few boring cliched keywords to substitute for the actual facts and/or interesting narrative that is part of an <i>interesting</i> story.
So even if I knew nothing at all about you, I would've come away from the article mildly curious and mildly impressed -- the gist of the story is (1) you write a blog that is wide-ranging and does not self-censor, (2) are interested in rational principles of discussion, and (3) have attractive the attention and admiration of quite a number of very accomplished and smart people. That's a very positive impression. The fact that the writer threw in some low-brow sneering <i>your mama wears Army boots!</i> kind of commentary doesn't really change that.
Perhaps the dogs for whom the dogwhistles <i>work</i> are not very important, and to anyone else, the three main facts I stated above are what will stick -- which makes it on balance a positive story about you, whether that was the <i>Times's</i> intention or not.
I just read the NYT piece, which is why I am here. It didn't seem negative to me. It was thoughtful and nuanced. Thanks for the blog. I will enjoy reading it.
You think like a nice guy....
Not a fan of today’s NYT article, but glad Scott’s link to the unhinged and underinformed Rhinehart post about the NYT was apparently deleted.
Omg, this balanced and reasonable response! C-can we have.... You.... instead of the NYT?
Hostile Media Effect.
Hostile Media Effect. Hostile Media Effect.
A lot of non community members exposed to the article seem to be seeing it as mildly positive about the rationalist community. The particular friend who is a fan of the NYT who I had read this thought that it was praising the community as a place that controversial topics could be discussed calmly. That possibly is even how Cade Metz sees the article.
Note: It still is terribly for Gell Mann Amnesia reasons, ie journalists generally don't have any sort of deep understanding of what they are talking about, and make lots of dumb mistakes. Cade Metz clearly does not have a deep understanding of the rationalist community. It also is still embedded in a narrative that all of the facts have to still be embedded in.
But the way that we want to perceive it as a 'hit piece', ie something designed to make people think worse of Scott, and then by extension us as individuals, is probably due to a well known perceptual bias.
It's a hit piece, but the lies involve a lot of social justice shibboleths. Audience members who aren't into social justice won't understand that the bad things that the article associates Scott with are even supposed to be bad. That's why you get people not thinking it's a hit piece. It is one, but for its intended audience.
It's like a screed complaining about Jewish bankers, being read by someone whose only opinion of bankers is that they provide a safe place for him to store his money,
Maybe some of it is subtle shibboleths, but I think even normies can understand that "Black people are genetically less intelligent than white people" is a boo-hiss opinion, and that "neo-fascists" are bad.
Speaking of perceptual bias:
> A lot of non community members exposed to the article seem to be seeing it as mildly positive about the rationalist community.
Let me fix that for you:
> A lot of non community members exposed to the article who were subsequently interested enough to come to the blog and comment, or discuss the matter with a friend who is a member of the community, seem to be seeing it as mildly positive about the rationalist community.
We know very little about the people who read the article that weren't motivated to search out the new blog or click the sole, untitled, link to a specific post, and navigate their way through to his response, scroll through, if not read, the entire post, and post a comment.
I hate the NYT. I just wanted to say that.
This justifies the initial deletion of the blog. While not guaranteed, a piece this negative would have been much more difficult to deal with before you had taken steps to prepare yourself.
However, the article is just so badly written that I think it may generate minimal interest. How many months went into that tedious sloppy mess?
crybaby guy and hides on a blog! funny without thinking twice he accepted NYT toilet paper offer then he realised that he had to show up such a little boy
It's a shame that 4chan teenagers feel they have to grace this blog with their faceal presence.
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Scott, your response to that sad, badly written and/or edited NYT article is just the sort of calmly rational statement I expected from you. I hope the new arrivals and old hands who have suggested that the attention could work to your benefit will prove to be right. Poetic justice is still a thing, y'know?
I found the NYT piece to be kind of lame as a hit piece... but I think that's more due to Scott's material than Cade Metz' intentions. He had thousands of pages material to work with, and the worst he could come up with were some half-assed association, out-of-context quotes and tortured innuendo. Could have been worse.
It is another step in the decline of the NYT, though, which seems to be in the process of getting rid of all contributors who are not 100% on board with wokeism. Which is worrying, because reliable mainstream media are necessary for a healthy public discourse.
Cade Metz links "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup", and describes it as a critique of the Blue Tribe. The outgroup for the Blue Tribe is described as "Anyone who did not agree with the Blue Tribe".
This is an incorrect description of an outgroup, which Scott defines as requiring proximity and small differences.
The first 3 references to the blog vanishing/disappearing are written in a jarringly passive voice.
Yeah, that was jarring. "The blog disappeared." Hmmmm, and you have no idea how that could have come about, right? Also, "I could not guarantee his anonymity" is conveniently vague, compared to "I told him I would use his real name, no matter how much he asked me not to."
A misogynist is a man whose general patronising attitude towards normal women, his contempt for her opinions and beliefs, his denunciation of her choices in life, his mockery of her preferred sexual behaviour, and his vicious loathing of her chosen appearance, is almost as bad as that of a radical feminist activist.
Pretending that some feminists are not the moral equivalent of Voldemort is giving intolerant fascistic bigots a free pass.
It's a bit unrelated to the current topic, but in these comments, IQ mentioned quite often, and it appears that there's some controversy on whether people from different ethnic groups differ in their average IQ. I don't follow this discussion. One thing that strikes me a bit is the belief in the construct of IQ among many of you rationalist guys. See e.g., Nassim Talebs critique ("IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle"). Whatever IQ is, it is probably not unidimensional, so it cannot be a single number. It's probably just weakly predictive of meaningful other things - unless you have people with learning disabilities in your sample, I think that's Nassim's main argument. The sentence I like most: "And one has to be a lunatic (or a psychologist) to believe that a standardized test will reveal independent thinking."
Just want to mention this because I think one of the major fallacies of "rationalist" people is their belief in measurement and numbers.
Some considerations:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/27/against-individual-iq-worries/
Thank you. The link is a bit in that direction. As I understand it, that text acknowledges measurement error and reliability. I think Nassims point is that reliability is even lower if you omit clinical population. My point is that the concept is for sure not unidimensional, i.e. not a number. 10 kg of mental rotation skills plus 5 m of verbal short term memory isn't "Fifteen". Of course, that doesn't explain anything about the NYT hit piece
This is more about non-IQ application of intelligence, but doesn't cover the rationalist's sphere:
https://som.yale.edu/news/2009/11/why-high-iq-doesnt-mean-youre-smart
Haha, thanks again, love that one. Wonderful quotes: "Intelligent people perform better only when you tell them what to do."
>Whatever IQ is, it is probably not unidimensional
It's well-known that intelligence is not unidimensional, and indeed, many IQ tests have sub-tests covering different dimensions. (See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale and how many sub-scores in includes.) The overall IQ score is one particular way of measuring something that seems to resemble intelligence, and is definitely not a complete characterization of intelligence.
> Nassim Talebs critique
Taleb likes to poo-poo a lot of stuff he doesn't know much about. (It is super cringey to read his books' characterizations of quant finance, for example, despite the fact that he should know better as a former trader.) Though he often makes good observations, I've learned to *never* trust the way he represents other fields.
Taleb may very well make a number of true points about IQ in his article, but I wouldn't assume for a second that he's making accurate representations of what psychometricians would state.
> Just want to mention this because I think one of the major fallacies of "rationalist" people is their belief in measurement and numbers.
Yeah, agree, though I wouldn't limit this statement to rationalists. A lot of people are quick to use statistics to justify whatever position they hold. If anything, I'd say rationalists are more wary of the pitfalls in statistics than the general public. Statistics are tricky to interpret, and there's often a lot of important things going on in the unexplained variance.
>"whatever IQ is, it is probably not unidimensional, so it cannot be a single number..."
IQ is by definition a single number. I assume you meant *intelligence* is not unidimensional, and therefore not adequately represented by IQ?
Anyway, whether IQ represents anything "real" or not, it is possible to reliably measure, and so it is possible to argue about those measurements, why they differ, why they correlate with various things, etc. (But also see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/27/against-individual-iq-worries/)
I must admit that initially I just tried to close the case of ethnic differences in intelligence, see above, by arguing that something like IQ doesn't exist anyway (at least it's nothing real-valued). Or, if it exists, it's a weird construct such as 10 kg of verbal learning memory + 5 m of mental rotation skills. Of course, one can always "define things and calculate them thereafter" so there's nothing wrong with this (can anyone help me finding the origin of this quote). The question is whether it's meaningful or not.
I am not skilled enough philosophically or mathematically to write about "meaningfulness" in a meaningful way, sorry, maybe someone can help out here. What I mean with this: Would IQ qualify for a proper unit? Given that IQ is standardized with expectation 100 and variance 15², I doubt it will. Standardization sounds nice and scientific, but it essentially erases any unit, thus to me it appears more as if intelligence researchers didn't know where to put the origin and the unity. Therefore, personally, I am not convinced, even if IQ correlates with other things to some number different from zero.
But even if IQ is meaningless, one could still kinda argue pragmatically that by some luck, it is correlated to some latent, yet-to-be-discovered entitiy that actually does exist (let's call that thing intelligence). Such that IQ measurements are helpful in decisions about, say, a child's need for special training, and so on. It might not exist, but it's useful, so to say, in the clinical population. As far as I remember, that was Binet's initial motivation.
Part of the point of _The Bell Curve_ was that IQ, whatever it is, correlates pretty strongly with a wide variety of outcome measures.
unitlessness doesn't make a quantity not real or unscientific or whatever. E.g. 2D:4D digit ratio (the length of your index finger divided by the length of your ring finger) is unitless but that's doesn't mean it can't be measured, that you can't study things that correlate with it (e.g. prenatal androgen exposure), etc. Or e.g. egg-to-body-weight ratios (a whopping ~15% for kiwis!) are unitless too
see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondimensionalization
Hi, Scott
The day ACX/SSC came back online was the happiest day of the year (so far) for me. I don't understand much about the NYT situation - probably because the cultural outrage du jour it's based on doesn't translate well to my (non-US) context.
I just want to let you know I appreciate that you've decided to damn the torpedoes and continue doing what makes you (read: me) happy.
A hit piece in the same vein as the NYT's infamous pieces on Wen-Ho Lee.
The NYT vendetta is not with Scott. It is with Tech. Tech must be tarred with the brush of Trumpism if it is to be demonized effectively, thus the construction of a narrative of a secret cabal of tech industry Trumpists nefariously conspiring chez SSC and professing to love free speech only as a cover for their Trumpism.
The real reason Big Media hates Tech is that Tech has eaten its lunch, and career prospects for journalism grads range from poor to dismal, hence the axe to grind. It doesn't require a conspiracy on Big Media's part (although the Murdochs certainly have their knives out for Google, even though it's Facebook they should worry about more).
The fact that the media in general and the NYT in particular have lost credibility because of their boosterism of Gulf War II, and generally acting in connivence with their more successful classmates in the politics establishment instead of afflicting the comfortable, would require a level of introspection and honesty they are simply incapable of evincing.
It's not about fighting Big Tech, it's about co-opting it. The system of which the New York Times is the most prominent mouthpiece (let's just call it Power) observes that Silicon Valley is so rich and so powerful that it must be absorbed into itself; quite easily done with a hit piece here and a Senate inquiry there to make life difficult for anyone who isn't quite on board with the whole agenda.
The rationalist community is, in the scheme of things, a relatively unimportant and loosely-attached barnacle that needs to be scraped off the hull of Big Tech so that it can be swallowed into Power's gaping maw.
I have somewhat recently discovered your writings. So happy you are back from exile. I am a european psych resident. In recent years my confidence in "the psychiatric project" as a whole has been shaken, to say the least. Maybe not so much because of data on the (lacking) efficacy of our treatments, or our bad diagnostic systems. But by the fact that psychiatrists don't seem interested in reflecting about issues like those. At least not here, where I am. So thank you for thinking and writing about the topics you do. It is of more than trivial importance to me, at least right now. Thank you.
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My two biggest quibbles with the times article, in reverse order:
-It’s extremely condescending to minorities or other “intersectionally oppressed” categories, by implying that they can’t themselves discover rationalism or things like Bayesian thinking (aka...thinking) and game theory, nor be tech-minded or rationalist. It’s the same fallacy that left the blue team flat footed to all the minorities who saw themselves as greater than their identity and voted for trump. If we had better primary and secondary education in poor neighborhoods we’d have even more minorities interested in stem, systems thinking, EA, AI, and rationalism because - and it’s crazy that this is controversial in 2021 - there’s nothing inherent in skin color, sex, gender identity, etc that precludes somebody with the right opportunities from learning and finding interesting anything they want.
-More fundamentally, and the thing Scott pointed out in his inaugural AC10 article but upon which I haven’t seen many comments since, where does the times get off deciding they can dox somebody just because they find his blog interesting and they think they want to do an article on him. I’d SA had approached the times, and the reporter had told him “we’d love to run the article, but we can’t run it without your real name; your call” that falls within the common-sense realm of consent. But saying “hey we’d like to do an article, btw we’re revealing your identity whether you want us to or not”?!?! Whether or not that’s a breach of journalistic ethics (I’m sure they have some legal fudge factor for “public figures” and that definition is doing a lot of heavy lifting), it sure seems a breach of common sense ethics/keeping it gangster.
Guy has a book coming out soon on the topic of AI research, so this story is laying the foundations for that. Nothing like whipping up interest and getting potential readers curious about "can you tell us more about this secretive Rationalist Silicon Valley group?" "sure thing, here's my new book!"
The irony of Metz complaining in the article that he and his editor had received abusive emails, after dismissing Scott's concerns about death threats with 'oh that happens all the time, I get 'em, everyone gets 'em' was thick.
I just read the summary blogpost.
Can someone clarify why NYT would not honor someone's request to not doxx him/her? It is a very reasonable request and seems to be the starting point before things spiraled out of control
Scott talks about this a bit more in his first post on the new blog, but the basic takeaway seems to be that they have a policy to use real names whenever possible. Though there's some debate about how consistently this policy is enforced.
Their official reason all along was "It's our policy".
The unofficial reason is, I suspect, that the whole point of a hit piece is defeated if you don't even name the target. The piece isn't just about Scott, it's a warning to others who might be considering thinking for themselves that it's not worth it.
Stubbornness, maybe?
Part of me is glad that they posted this article. I've been reading SSC for years. I know what Scott is about. I also know that there are ways to attack people without evidence. What I do not know is how to tell attacks on people for being evil from pro forma attacks that can be aimed at everyone.
This article is an almost perfect example of a pro forma attack, and it helps me know what to look for.
1. Uncharitable portrayal of belief. I reread the blog post on women in tech. Summarizing it as "women are less interested in joining" was about as bad as a misrepresentation could be without outright lying.
2, Extreme cherrypicking. Scott wrote a lot of stuff. That he wrote something that would look bad out of context is inevitable.
3. Guilt by association with minimal evidence. The first attempt to link neoreactionary thought to SSC is very bad (with three links to neoreactionary sources, no links to Scott endorsing neoreactionary thought, and the weak claim that some rationalists are neoreactionary), Later on, it's bad that Scott linked to someone that white nationalists liked. The Charles Murray reference is a work of evil art.
4. Paraphrased quotes. I suspect that David Friedman was treated poorly. There's an exact quote about how open the comment section is. Then a paraphrased portraying SSC as anti SJW. That looks fishy, why not use the full quote?
This provides me with some evidence of what to look for. I hope to get better at identifying pro forma attacks.
Then there's the way NYT conflates rationalism with SlateStarCodex. Some people came here expecting the comment section to represent "rationalists". It doesn't. Those who took the 2020 SlateStarCodex survey were asked 'Do you identify as a Less Wronger or "aspiring rationalist"?', and only 13.2% said "yes" (40.6% said "sorta").
Duh, this isn't Rationalist Central — LessWrong is Rationalist Central — but the NYT/Metz article was too busy talking about neoreactionaries and white supremacists to mention LessWrong in their story about "rationalists" — which of course should be "aspiring rationalists" because any proper aspiring rationalist is aware that, like every human, they are far from rational.
NYT / Metz calls Yudkowsky a "polemecist", rather than "guy who tried his best to teach people about rationality" or something, and it tries to tie him to Peter Thiel. But while Thiel gave Trump money, Trump-haters like myself ate up every post by Yudkowsky — and by Scott, who wrote an article called "Trump: A Setback For Trumpism" and of course backed Clinton and Biden against Trump.
Over and over it links SlateStarCodex with with extreme right, but what does the SlateStarCodex survey reveal? That SSC participants were 65.2% left-wing:
Social democrat (like Scandinavian liberals): 33.4%
Liberal (like U.S. Democrats): 29.7%
Conservative (like U.S. Republicans): 7.5%
Libertarian: 7.5%
Neoreactionary: 5.1%
Alt-right: 2.2%
Marxist: 2.1%
And of course, NYT avoids connecting the dots between "the blog vanished" and NYT's own actions, doesn't mention the main reason Scott didn't want his name revealed, and doesn't mention that Scott not only deleted his blog but quit his job as a direct result of NYT's name-revealing "policy".
It doesn't *sound* like a hit piece, it sounds like just a story about an unusual community, and yet the details are pretty consistently wrong or misleading. Which could mean it's a hit piece.
You made a typo in the "Libertarian" number; it's not 7.5% but 20.0%. You also made this error in another post below on this page.
I'm guessing you accidentally copypasted the "Conservative" number.
Quite right! Sorry.
Consider the possibility that you overestimate by quite a lot damage done to the therapeutic relationship by revealing your name and status. Patients find out things about their psychiatrist Willie Nilly. This kind of knowledge might come up and can be dealt with in the therapeutic arena. If patients develop distortions or emotional reactions, It can be dealt with as transference is always dealt with – clarification, interpretation, etc. Any of your patients to read your blog will be proud and how are you live, not simply preach, about the importance of truth. Keep up the good fight. As they say, bad press is good pr
Carry on.
Minor member of the media on here who thinks what has happened to you in this case is garbage.
A recurring idea in the work of Milan Kundera is that the spirit of totalitarianism lives on in our mass media. In a world without privacy, will we all be perpetually on trial?
James Warner
They mentioned EA and neoreaction in the same paragraph - EA could have linked to 80000 hours, the EA foundation or anything else. No links. But they put in no less than three separate links to neoreactionaries right after their mention of EA. Negative association.
Also,
“effective altruism,” an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation
=
"Effective altruism is when a charity helps people, and the more people it helps, the more effectiver it is. And if it helps a real lot of people, then it's longtermism."
Thank you for noting this. This was a horrible mischaracterization of Effective Altruism by the NYT: "an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation". The actual goal of EA is to make charity more impactful by identifying worthy causes in need.
When the orange Man called them the enemy of the people, he wasn't far off
> I am writing this as a necessary ritual to avoid silence being taken as evidence for guilt.
The problem with this approach is that the people you’re responding too very often take defense of oneself as evidence of guilt. Instead, you need to point out that they lack any legitimacy in making accusations in the first place. First, because they don’t have legitimacy and second because it puts them on the back foot where they need to justify their legitimacy (which they can’t because they don’t have it beyond the fallacious argument of appealing to authority of the institution they write for.)
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122
Nicely written Sir. Stay strong & God Bless you.
Make no mistake---the furor this article has aroused will not in any way, shape or form hurt Cade Metz's career at the New York Times.
When I wrote this piece last June https://medium.com/@garyweiss_86200/cade-metz-pulls-a-deep-capture-on-slate-star-codex-da649e8efe7 harkening back to my own experiences with Metz, I implied otherwise. But I underestimated Metz. He maliciously framed the piece to make Scott seem as if he gave a forum to "white supremacists." Right now he no doubt is slanting the criticism to make it seem as if he is "under attack from the right." Remember too that the Times published this piece, gave it play on the first page of the business section, and is invested in it. I doubt that they would even run a letter to the editor from Scott on this, though it is worth a try. If the Times behaved correctly, given Metz's ethnical lapses, errors and distortions, they would run not just a letter but an editor's note.
I think the best way to deal with this would be to have an open conversation with Cade Metz. It would certainly be beneficial for this blog, the New York Times and the community at large rather than establish yet another pointless feud.
You may not want to say the truth about the NY Times but I will. They commonly lie to their readers about anything they oppose. They omit critical facts, they commonly manipulate "quotes" and they dox opponents who can't hit back. The current management has ruined the reputation of this once great newspaper and no thinking person, any longer, takes them seriously as a news source.
PayPal link please! So readers can donate.
You can subscribe for a month or a year and immediately cancel.
It's a great example of how the NYTimes likes to make everything about race. It's why I stopped subscribing too. At least with this article more people can see how #FakeNews they really are and stop subscribing too.
And so, I´ve just cancelled my subscription to NYT
truth is, the NYT has never been a very good paper and it never will be.
Sorry this happened to you. Hoping this aides in the growing trend towards general awareness that the NYT is biased ideological drivel (:
I am just here because of Streisand effect
Having read you on and off for going on 5 years now, I don't think that NYT article was a hit piece. I think it kinda reflects my own thinking on this blog and the commenters and your own prickly personality.
I'm curious where you get prickly from. I've also been reading Scott for about five years and I've never gotten that impression.
His first reaction on many SJW posts are things he goes back to backtrack on. Not his intent, but some of the language he uses. The voldemort thing being a good example.
Hmm. I guess I just don't see that as prickly. Prickly to me means easily offended.
For me a prickly person is someone who angers easily, not just easily offended.
Obfuscate much? Really, if you want to say something and have me respond thoughtfully then please do actually say something!
My favorite line in the article:
"(Rationalists) deeply distrusted the mainstream media"
Gee, I wonder why...
This is a necessary article that correctly points out that whatever the new York Times are optimising for, it sure ain't truth.
The NYT has the ethical maturity of a zygote. What more can it take to snap subscribers out of their moral slumber? Its hit pieces and distortions and pure propaganda are beyond the pale. They promote falsehoods, and they--to put it simply--do ugly things to people, uncalled for things. Just in the last few days, Scott Alexander and Donald McNeil. Bret Stephens has to have his say at the Post. Bari Weiss is long gone. Whatever you might think about Jordan Peterson, the NYT hit piece on him was simply disgusting in its supposed humor. He cannot be a person, after all. Now they have been ridiculing his daughter. The Times is an ugly and hurtful wrecking ball. I cancelled my subscription some time ago now. I can still read in the chunks they permit, but it is a miserable read, still. I unsubscribed at about the time Bill Cunningham died. He was so joyful, such a light! Not coincidentally, that was about the same time Jim Rutenberg wrote his letter justifying the jettisoning of traditional journalistic standards--because Trump. Then came the "moral clarity" slogan, folowed by the overt attacks on objective reporting.
Enough is enough.
BTW, Martin Gurri has a great piece on the forces that corrupted the Times. It's called "Slouching Toward Post-Journalism."
What is eminently strange is how the NYT refers to Scott as "Mr. [last name]" in lieu of "Dr. [last name]."
Indeed, especially in the context of the recent kerfuffle about the correct title for Jill Biden, Ed. D -- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/12/us/jill-biden-doctor-wsj.html
If I recall correctly, the New York Times at the time said that it used the title Doctor for someone if their academic title was relevant to their current profession. So Jill Biden who has an Ed.D. and works at a community college gets to be Dr Biden, while Rand Paul who has an M.D. and works as a Senator gets to be Mr Paul.
Alright, fair enough, but is Scott's medical doctorate not relevant to his current profession of practicing medicine? Or has the New York Times decreed that Scott's actual profession is "blogger"?
Actual Profession: True Caliph. Doctorate preferred but not essential 😁
Scott is a professional doctor as well as, now, a professional blogger.
The article used "Doctor" for me. My PhD is in theoretical physics, a field I left nearly fifty years ago to make a career in economics.
They also referred to Scott Aaronson this way. You'd think that having a months to work on a piece and an editor would have lead them to notice this...
I did not know about Slate Star Codex or Astral Codex 10 till today’s NYT article. It got me intrigued and I’m going to subscribe today. Hope it brings lots of people to the discussions.
Idiot.
Welcome, and ignore the troll. :) Make sure to check out Scott's greatest old writing. "Who by very slow decay" changed my life. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
I think that what a lot of gray-tribe folk fail to understand is just how damaging this article is from a blue-tribe perspective. The New York Times wrote an article calling Scott a racist and a sexist. Of course, they didn't *say* those things, but they heavily implied it. And they did so by using guilt-by-association. They established for the blue-tribe that Scott once said something kind about Charles Murray, and so he endorses Murray's beliefs. In the blue-tribe, this guilt-by-association forms a chain that never ends. I am an academic, trying to make a career in academia. I thought about posting a defense of Scott somewhere, but ultimately that would be too risky to my career. It opens me up to become a link in the guilt-chain. "Professor [me] supports Scott Alexander, who is known to support Charles Murray and who thinks feminists are Death Eaters [ergo I am both racist and sexist]". Then they will cite a NYT article "proving" their claims. This is the kind of thing that harms careers and friendships.
To a certain sector of society (which btw has large intersections with the Bay/academia that Scott calls home), Scott has now become toxic. Of course, it made me go pay $100 to support Scott and read his content, so in some ways he won. But it made me far less likely to openly defend him. If certain coworkers of mine came to work one day and talked about how they read a NYT article about the white supremacist tech bro culture that claims to be "rationalist" and how racist and sexist it is - well, my choices are now "agree with the NYT article" or "be seen as racist and sexist".
Probably true, but deeply depressing. What we need is a national seminar on free speech and courage--and we need for some people who are not so vulnerable to speak up clearly and reasonably. For the seminar, I would choose Natan Sharansky's "The Doublethinkers," published a few days ago at Tablet Magazine. It describes life in the Soviet Union as the CP took power over eveything--speech, literature, cinema, education, employment, of course the press, history, one's own mind--and how one had to adapt to survive, how one had to learn to doublethink. And it describes how people coped in those conditions. No one here is being shot. But people are losing livelihoods, reputations.
At the end of his history of the times he lived through, he proposes a test: "In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated or cancelled? Ultimately, whether you will live as a democratic doublethinker doesn't depend on the authorities or on the corporations that run social media platforms: it depends on you. Each of us individually decides whether we want to submit to the crippling indignity of doublethink, or break the chains that keep us from expressing our own thoughts, and becoming whole."
Nothing here is easy.
But doesn't Gray tribe also hold some power in the academic world? By which I mean reactions of Steven Pinker (https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1360787817459253251), Scott Aaronson (https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310), Matthew Yglesias (https://www.slowboring.com/p/slate-star-codex/), an article titled "Scott Alexander, Philosopher King of the Weird People" in Quillette by an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Law (https://quillette.com/2021/02/14/scott-alexander-philosopher-king-of-the-weird-people/).
I'm really grateful to these people. Not only they defend Scott from slander, they make it safer for us to discuss his writing in academic circles.
Also, https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1360783450031153152
Yes it does. The idea that academics are all into "identity politics" (God I wish there was a word for it that was neutral rather than subtly positive or negative in connotation) is a mistaken inference from the fact that such views are way more common in academia than elsewhere. But most people don't have such views, so that is compatible with lots of academics not having them. (There are not many *conservative* academics, though there are some, but that's not quite the same thing.)
Having said that, whilst I think this blogs readers frequently express an excessive degree of paranoia about the ability of such identity pol people to actually get you in trouble for your views (just because you see lots of media stories about this doesn't mean the individual risk is high!) it's not great to take a stand that some potential employers will agree with whilst others will be put of hiring you because of it. Because very few people who are pro-Scott will be significantly more likely to hire you *because* you are pro-Scott, being publicly pro-Scott is likely net negative for your academic employments prospects in theory. (Though in practice I think the chance of anyone noticing AND caring is pretty small.)
I agree. Also, to be honest, I am a bit ashamed of how I phrased the comment above; tribalism dynamic is a useful thing to keep in mind, but we shouldn't get carried away. Pinker, Yglesias or Freddie de Boer are disgusted by Metz's article not because they are "from the Grey tribe", but simply because they are decent people that know something about its subject.
However, I absolutely agree that any active public/social media activity not _very_ directly related to your field of work is probably harmful to one's career in academia. From my (limited) experience (in STEM) in order to get hired at tenure track or tenure level you have to be a consensus candidate. If there are two members of the committee with a negative opinion the chances of the candidate are slim even if the others are super enthusiastic. And one opinion I heard was "why is this guy blogging instead of writing papers?" This won't hurt brilliant people like Scott Aaronson, but in borderline cases it plays a role.
Sure, not poking at taboos is the right call in the vast majority of cases, but I don't think this one of them.
Our continual acquiesce to fear is a the force which gives these people power. Every inch of ground you give is taken joyously. You don't have to win back ground that's already been lost. But at least hold the line.
The blog is a big enough force for good that I'm happy to bear the risk.
Conservatives have been trying to warn everyone for years about THIS EXACT THING, but instead of being supported by upstanding Democrats like yourself we have been villainized, fired, threatened, physically assaulted, called racists, extremists, and even insurrectionists. While I feel bad for you, I'm hoping this is an overall learning lesson for what almost half the country has been dealing with for years. The only difference is you'll get your life back.
You're preaching to the choir. Scott has been consistently against this type of thing happening to conservatives and has talked about it many times, often catching backlash from other Democrats. See his article here, for instance: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/.
Half the country has not been fired from their jobs because of cancel mobs. We'd be facing a total economic collapse if that were true.
Everyone is aware of this, everyone condemns the cases that are bad when they're made aware of them, we just don't think it's bad when the accusations are correct and the response is proportional, and we're not suckered into hysteria on the topic.
Hello Scott, I'm not calling you a fascist or a nazi or anything like that. I'd just like to know your answer to this question:
Yes or no, do you believe that the current social inequalities between black and white people (whether they be in the US or between say Africa and Europe) are partially due to black people being genetically dumber?
Hi Scott, yes or no, have you stopped beating your wife? (rest assured that I won't personally call you a wifebeater, I'll just leave that up to my hive of cronies)
"Have you stopped beating your wife" carries a hidden assumption (that the person you're talking to was in fact beating his wife). What is the assumption hidden in the question I put forward?
Why would you want a "Yes or no" answer to a question like that?
The only intellectually honest answer is one that starts "We don't know for sure, but...."
If a question has to be prefaced with a demand for a "yes or no" answer, it is never, ever, ever being asked in good faith by a reasonable person in a calm state of mind.
On the contrary, I believe it is a very clear question and I also believe the vast majority of people have their mind made up on the question. It is not loaded, or passionate, or imprecise. If I replaced the word "dumber" (which I treat interchangeably with "lower IQ", not pejoratively) with "taller" I wouldn't be accused of having bad faith.
Again, most people would answer this question without hesitation, be they Richard Spencer or MLK. Refusing to answer the question is telling whether you want it or not.
My answer, as is that of the overwhelming majority of geneticists I happen to work with for a living, is 'no' (or in probability terms, the outcome space of the proposition being true has measure zero). Now what is yours?
> It is not loaded
> Yes or no
> Refusing to answer the question is telling whether you want it or not.
o_O
I don't see how it is loaded. It is extremely factual, actually. Darwin presented some objections on it being not precise enough, so here I go again:
What is your prior (as a number between 0 and 1) on the likelihood that the current social inequalities between black and white people (whether they be in the US or between say Africa and Europe) are partially due to black people having on average lower IQ than whites for genetic reasons?
"Again, most people would answer this question without hesitation, be they Richard Spencer or MLK."
Okay, let's have at it.
Are black people stupider than white people? No.
What are the distribution tails? That is, if we took a sample of the African-American population of the USA, and we took a sample of the White (Non-Hispanic) population of the USA, what are the extremes for low IQ and high IQ? Is there a difference? Is it similar to the male/female graph or otherwise?
Here's a horribly sloppy graph but it gives the general idea:
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-929b67e5b164c180d10d9ece5773f03f.webp
Now, when YOU put up something solid along the lines of research into population genetics and IQ scores then we can discuss this question reasonably. Until then, you're just trying to bait racists.
The question is very clear, and so is your agenda.
Asking whether a continuous variable is non-zero loses a ton of information. The difference between explaining 1e-100 of variance and explaining 0 variance is insignificant, but one is a "yes" and the other is a "no".
If you are asking the question because you want useful information, you'd never phrase it as a yes/no. If you're asking because you're looking for a soundbite to use against someone, then it makes sense to phrase it as yes/no.
This is a community based on Bayesian reasoning, so there are going to be *priors*. Typically when you ask someone "do you believe X" you are not demanding that they answer with 100% or even 99.9% certainty, you just want to know their prior on the matter. So, let me reformulate this question:
What is your prior on the likelihood that the current social inequalities between black and white people (whether they be in the US or between say Africa and Europe) are partially due to black people having a low IQ for genetic reasons?
Nice try, but you've still got 'partially' in there, which of course covers '99% responsible' and '.000000000001% responsible', letting you misinterpret the response in whichever direction you'd like.
Also, obviously black people don't all share on IQ, and you give no operational definition for 'low'.
If you want to ask a precise question, you'll have to try a lot harder. But since you added at least 4 ways to make your question ambiguous such that you could interpret the answer to mean anything you want, people are going to be rightly suspicious that you actually *wanted* a precise exchange of information in the first place.
<sputtering angrily in confusion> b-but this works so well on twitter....!
I take it you're refusing to answer the question then? Bayesian theory says you *have* a prior on the likelihood, however imprecise, even if you do not want to admit (or reveal) it.
I'm not Scott, to whom you directed the question.
No it doesn't, not to an improperly formed question.
Do you believe that IQ has a non-zero impact on life outcomes? Do you believe that IQ varies between individuals?
If so, you should answer the question-as-stated '50% likely to be true', since random variance means any randomly chosen population is 50% likely to have higher average IQ than any other randomly chosen population.
Is that your answer?
>Nice try, but you've still got 'partially' in there, which of course covers '99% responsible' and '.000000000001% responsible', letting you misinterpret the response in whichever direction you'd like.
It makes no sense to say 'differences in intelligence are 80% due to genetics', that's not what heritability means. You can say it is purely genetic like a Mendelian disorder, environmental like one's primary language, or a mix of the two.
Replace 'low' with 'lower than whites on average'.
>It makes no sense to say 'differences in intelligence are 80% due to genetics',
If that's shorthand for "80% of the variance in intelligence in this population is explained by this set of polymorphisms", it makes perfect sense.
No, actually it makes perfect sense to say something like that. E.g. phenylketonuria is a recessive mendelian disorder...mediated through the environment, a low-phenylalanine diet(since it's caused by a lack of a functional enzyme that decomposes it) is what helps to contain the symptoms leading to a healthy life.
The absolute majority of traits are some combination of genetics AND the environment the phenotype happens to develop in. Repeated generational exposure to an environment in which a costly trait can't fully develop anyway can mean it's being selected against.
The point being that it's very difficult to disentangle those two causes from one another, so why are you pretending that piling the responsibility for any differences purely onto the environment is any more tenable than declaring that genes are the sole culprit? The likeliest to be true answer is "both are, to different degrees, like with practically every trait", any other kinds of claims is just wishful thinking.
Agreed, asking about his prior is much more reasonable than asking "yes or no".
But of course it's still a question that anyone would be foolish to answer using their real identity -- you either give the intellectually dishonest answer or you give the one that blows up what's left of your career and identity.
Since I'm not posting under my true identity I'm happy to tell you that my current prior on the matter is on the high side of 0.5 but still meaningfully less than 1. I don't claim much expertise on the matter, though I claim more expertise than most people who have never bothered to look into it at all.
Let's talk about Bayes' Theorem for a moment, though (even though I think it tends to be vastly overrated by the Rationalist community). If "A" is the probability that certain genetically semi-isolated human subpopulations have meaningful differences in intelligence, and "B" is the dozens of studies which suggest that such a difference exists, then the only way your P(A|B) is going to be zero is if your P(A) was zero to begin with, which seems unreasonable based on what we see in other species.
Thank you for replying in good faith. However, I think you are wrong, and I am not alone with this opinion: if you don't believe me when I claim to work in genetics, maybe you will believe Ewan Birney*, the head of the most prestigious genomics institution in Europe?
I also think you are wrong when people who answer with the negative (respectively a set of negligible measure regarding probabilities) are being intellectually dishonest. The objections to the HBD crowd are well known and their 'hypotheses' have been overwhelmingly dismissed in the genomics community. You may retort that everyone is secretly terrified of saying the truth but 'everyone is in on a giant conspiracy to prove me wrong' only gets you so far, epistemologically. Just because you pretend to be Galileo doesn't mean you are in any way like him.
But, for all your wrongness, I at least respect you more than I do people who squirm their way out of this after all very simple and precise question and won't answer it, as though the very same question weren't openly discussed barely a few threads above mine.
*http://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscience-an-explainer.html
"The objections to the HBD crowd are well known and their 'hypotheses' have been overwhelmingly dismissed in the genomics community"
I keep hearing that, but then the source given is invariably one or two people. While not recent, this is better than anything I've seen cited for the supposed "genomics consensus."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IQ_Controversy,_the_Media_and_Public_Policy
There are some questions that people object to being asked because they are loaded or otherwise dishonest. There are others that are quite simple and precise, for instance, "how many sexual partners have you had," that people will nevertheless squirm their way out of answering. There's a social norm that you don't get to just demand people answer questions, even if simple and precise.
>I keep hearing that, but then the source given is invariably one or two people. While not recent, this is better than anything I've seen cited for the supposed "genomics consensus."
The linked post contains more than one person - scientists rarely write articles alone. Regardless, science is not a democracy - if a few experts chime on a subject they know they are more likely to be right than the editors of a wikipedia article, and relying on a wiki article instead of the word of experts isn't doing any favor.
>There are others that are quite simple and precise, for instance, "how many sexual partners have you had," that people will nevertheless squirm their way out of answering. There's a social norm that you don't get to just demand people answer questions, even if simple and precise.
And yet, isn't that marvelous, despite your protests that such a question would be crass to ask, you are discussing it at the same time! You object to my linking of an expert opinion despite not being one yourself, surely you're aware this says quite a bit about your prior even if you're not willing to state it explicitly?
Please don't respect me more than the people who squirm their way out of this question; if you asked me in a place where I could be linked to my actual identity then I'd squirm my way out too. It's unfair to go around asking people this question because it puts them in a difficult position, much as it's unfair to go around sidling up to random North Koreans and saying "Soooo, what's your honest opinion on Kim Jong Un? Perfect or not?"
I did read the article and it's one of the better ones I've read on the subject, although it's frustrating that it couldn't avoid the temptation to work some moralizing into its scientific discussion (disagreement is "darker currents").
The first point, "Human population structure is not race" is perfectly fine; racial categories especially in the United States are messy and sometimes nonsensical (e.g. describing Barack Obama as "black" when he's clearly no more black than white) and don't represent a clean division of reality at the joints. The concept of "race" isn't really necessary for the discussion though.
The second part is more interesting. The author correctly points out that we don't have a simple genetic explanation for intelligence in the way that we do for melanin or sickle-cell anemia. There's no simple set of "genes for intelligence" which we can say are more present in certain ethnic groups rather than others; variation in human intelligence is presumably caused by vast numbers of genes interacting in ways that we do not understand, or to put it in the article's words, "since it is a complex trait, the genetic variation related to IQ is broadly distributed across the genome, rather than being clustered around a few spots, as is the nature of the variation responsible for skin pigmentation".
Again, this is all fair enough and makes perfect sense, and so does this: "Consequently, anyone who tells you that there’s good evidence on how much genetics explain group differences (rather than individual differences) is fooling you – or fooling themselves"
But the inferential leap that I'm failing to understand is this: it's the one from "We don't have a good understanding of how intra- or inter-group variations in the genome relate to intelligence" to "Therefore it's very unlikely that there are inter-group variations in intelligence". Either I've missed this important point, or it's been hand-waved over.
Also, the "social inequalities" are doing work here as well. I have no idea if there is a particular tribal grouping within the continent of Africa that is provably lower-scoring on IQ tests, but say there is: how much of that is down to genetics? and how much of the genetics is down to being survivors of war, famine, enslavement by other tribal groups, etc. etc. etc. over centuries?
It's chicken-and-egg question here, and any "so are you a racist who believes black people are genetically inferior?" questions are not going to get a good answer because that question is not being asked in good faith, it's being asked to witch-hunt.
I think the argument that it's unlikely that the inter-group variations are genetic in origin is partly contained in this bit:
'For traits caused by regional adaptation, contemporary genetic techniques now allow us to see clear evidence for recent selection on new genetic variants or patterns at particular locations in the genome. However, such cases are atypical: most traits have no obvious or localised signal of recent selection'
That is: 'for most traits there hasn't been the kind of recent natural selection that would lead to group differences along roughly US folk racial category lines, so probably intelligence is like that too.'
partly in this:
'However, there are some strong hints towards the answer. The genetic variants that are most strongly associated with IQ in Europeans are no more population-specific than any other trait. To put it bluntly, the same genetic variants associated with purportedly higher IQ in Europeans are also present in Africans, and have not emerged, or been obviously selected for, in recent evolutionary history outside Africa.' Confess I lack the biological knowledge to quite follow what is being said here. (Which given that I am a PhD, albeit in the humanities, I and this is written for laypeople, is not great.) I *think* what is being said is: 'Well, none of the genes associated with intelligence in Europeans first appeared after the ancestors of Europeans left Africa'. But I don't know enough to know how bad this is for the view that IQ differences between US whites and blacks are racial in origin. (Couldn't a gene become more common a subgroup through selection pressures even if it was *present* in all groups?)
Perhaps the most key bit appears to be:
'For traits caused by regional adaptation, contemporary genetic techniques now allow us to see clear evidence for recent selection on new genetic variants or patterns at particular locations in the genome' I take it the argument here is meant to be: We already know what the signs of a trait being the product of recent selection are, they aren't present for intelligence, so probably Europeans weren't subject to selection for intelligence (more than anyone else) once they left Africa. If there wasn't selection, it's very unlikely that Europeans would end up with genetically higher intelligence by chance, so almost certainly they didn't.
It seems like this is very difficult technical territory where despite their best efforts to write something clear for laypeople, it's very hard for a layperson to actually assess their arguments, but the first point at least seems sound. And I'd take the fact that the authors of the article are genuine experts at least somewhat seriously. (Though obviously expert *consensus*, which there may be of course, would be much stronger evidence.)
'
>maybe you will believe Ewan Birney*, the head of the most prestigious genomics institution in Europe?
Scott has a nice explanation of why the public pronouncements of "experts" in high places can't be trusted, especially on controversial subjects.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible
His specific example is Anthony Fauci, but the argument carries over to "the head of the most prestigious genomics institution in Europe".
Alright, so if an expert delving into a subject *at length* and using recent results from the literature isn't enough to convince you, what will?
So to sum up, when you are asking your "just yes or no" question, what you want is "no, it's not true that the current wotsit is down to whozis". If they give any other answer, you launch into your little sermon and then say it's "after all (a) very simple and precise question".
I am forced to conclude from the interaction above that you are not asking a question about genetics, you are trying to sniff out witches.
Birney et al.'s "explainer" has been thoroughly demolished when it came out. https://noahcarl.medium.com/response-to-birney-raff-rutherford-scally-bf70f763efc6 is one work that lists links and presents counter-arguments to points given in the "explainer" drawn from published science, including such people as David Reich who is without doubt a much better human geneticist than the (frankly speaking) low-wattage team that penned the "explainer".
That link straightforwardly refers to the Flynn effect as an explanation while it's not obvious that it's not merely an artifact of measurement inflation, ironic to be taking that seriously and be decrying the accuracy of psych at the same time.
The truth you want is highlighted to some degree by adoption studies which there are aplenty of and practically all of them show the same gaps remaining despite the environment. Meanwhile intelligence research has shown some of the highest replication rates in various psych fields as the measurements are relatively cheap and simple to do and we've had enough time redoing them that novel results are unlikely to manifest. And the one remaining explanation - epigenetics is a fancy buzzword as far as human genetics is concerned, any epigenetic mechanisms have to first be selected for through normal evo means, so they're applicable mainly to fruit flies and nematodes rather than the higher "costs-per-unit" forms of life. The fact of the matter is that it's unlikely that there are ~absolutely no~ genetic effects in play given that even a paper by such individuals as Kevin Bird(doesn't get more of a "lefty activist going into science for agenda reasons" than him) was bound to find a genetics-explained gap of 5 points IIRC.
Baye's Theorem is *literally* the tagline for this entire blog.
You should think about what that means before 'just' asking 'Yes or no' questions.
Alright, then, here is a reformulation:
What is your prior (as a number between 0 and 1) on the likelihood that the current social inequalities between black and white people (whether they be in the US or between say Africa and Europe) are partially due to black people having a low IQ for genetic reasons?
Are you asking if the portion of the gap in average IQ between races that is of genetic origin contributes *at all* to social inequality? Because answering anything but .9 i.e within epsilon of certainty would be irrational, everything is contributing *to some extent*. But maybe I don’t understand what you are asking?
It's only irrational to have a low prior if you believe that it's likely that some of the gap is genetic. If you can rationally assign low credence to the gap being at all genetic, you can rationally assign low credence to it contributing at all to social inequality, since if there's no genetic component to the gap the genetic component to the gap contributes nothing to anything.
Why do you care so much about this question?
This will perhaps be helpful: https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/171718347231/are-there-significant-gender-differences-in
first you have to establish what you mean by "dumber" (scores on IQ tests?) and secondly what you mean by "genetically dumber" and thirdly you would then have to prove that all black people are "genetically dumber".
Come back when you've refined your terms and are not dangling bait in the water.
Hey, just wanted to say I find it interesting how hard some people here seem to be trying to justify avoiding to answer the question. I think it is a perfectly reasonable question. However, I think it is not a reasonable question to ask someone who is not anonymous, as I do not see how there could possibly be a reasonable expectation of an honest answer. It's basically equivalent to asking "do you think the Earth revolves around the Sun" in the 1600s.
Almost Famous:
"Scott Alexander, Philosopher King of the Weird People" written by Kenneth R. Pike
https://quillette.com/2021/02/14/scott-alexander-philosopher-king-of-the-weird-people/
I don't know about anyone else, but I'd rather not be "one of the weird people". I am in fact aggressively normie.
Whatever, I'm just happy that Scott's hiatus is over.
Trump had the greatest response ever to accusations of sexism: "only Rosie O'donnell." That should be the stock answer for everyone, no matter what the context. lol
I had never heard of Scott Alexander. I came here after reading the NYT article, very much ready to pay for this blog! The first article I read was the one about Ezra Klein's book and the second one is this one. I honestly did not think the NYT article was "negative", especially in the way Scott described it. My first impression was "wow here is an interesting corner of internet that I was not aware of and I should be part of it!" But then again I was never a "loud" person on the interwebs so if I say relax I am being flippant I guess. Best of luck from a chronically depressed PhD statistician & left leaning gay economist.
If you haven't seen them yet, Scott's recent post on depression https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-precision-of-sensory-evidence and this section on light therapy https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/19/light-therapy/ may be of interest to you.
Would love to know the subscriber bump this week
I hope that you can move past this and continue blogging, Scott. Though your discussions are often beyond my poor comprehension abilities, I appreciate them.
I have decided to treat the NYT in casual conversation as it treats others. So I will append a true fact that is irrelevant except to imply guilt by association whenever I mention it. For example, "in an article in the NYT, which has the same business model as Pornhub, ..."
"...which has links to white supremacists..."
Why did the NYT article imply that Scott is a member of the "Grey Tribe"? In that "I can Tolerate Anyone Except the Outgroup" post from SSC, he actually had an interesting meta section near the end where he admitted he is part of the blue tribe.
I think you've switched "grey" and "blue" in your recollection. He starts "I can Tolerate Anyone Except the Outgroup" talking if he is blue tribe criticizing itself, and then the meta-section is about him realizing, that no, he likes criticizing blue tribe too much to actually be blue tribe, and he is probably grey tribe.
Thanks!
Unpleasantness aside, am I the only person who found the NYT article... weird? In the following senses:
1. It's existence is weird. People either know what SSC was or they don't. People who do will see through this. People who don't will wonder why they're reading about "some guy has a blog that's maybe problematic but not in an interesting or outrage-inducing way." Including Scott Aaronson's quote looked a bit like a shoe-horn that doesn't add anything for non-SSC people who've presumably never heard of him.
2. It's waaay too obvious: in basic reading comprehension terms a sentence like the Charles Murray one just looks like it's grasping at straws.
3. Part of it comes across as a having been a much better hit-piece that's been neutered. I love(d) SSC, but anyone who's read all of it knows that with a proper argument in there it could be crucified (for obvious reasons, this should be left as an exercise for the reader). This article could have been, "rich tech people read evil blog" as both a more readable/relevant article and kicking Scott harder. This looks like it's trying to be a hit piece without being one, when you'd assume the intention would be the opposite.
4. "Mostly, but not all, white men." That phrase is bizarre in context. "Mostly white men" has much more sting in SJW terms, and means the same thing so is still accurate. It's pulling a punch it didn't have to throw.
5. The last line almost has a double meaning - it sounds begrudgingly respectful to anyone who's read the first post here, but
Overall, this looks like the NYT decided they had to write an article and name Scott (although missing out the "Dr"), but didn't really have a hook to hang it on (hence the non-hitting hit-piece). Either that or Cade Metz couldn't be bothered to re-write parts of it and knocked this out quickly, or his editor wanted a hit-piece but he didn't want to write it. Not worth worrying about though; no-one who's never heard of SSC will ever remember they read it.
On your point 1, lots of people know what the Tech Industry is and have a vague sense that the leaders of Big Tech are conspiring against them. If that's the target audience, Metz and NYT are selling them a dose of "Hey, we found one of the smoke-filled rooms where the Elders of Tech hang out, and it's full of nerds and racists and weirdos and they have a secret thought leader who doesn't want anyone to know his name".
New York Times? What's that? A font? I never heard of it until Scott mentioned it.
I remembered that our Fearless Leader is not the only person the NYTimes has seen fit to cancel. Try this one on for size:
"In Virginia teenager N-word story, where are the adults?" by Becket Adams, Commentary Writer | December 28, 2020
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/in-virginia-teenager-n-word-story-where-are-the-adults
"The New York Times published a grotesque report this weekend cheering an 18-year-old named Jimmy Galligan, a biracial Virginia resident who targeted a white girl for destruction after he obtained a years-old video of her using the N-word.
"The white girl, Mimi Groves, used the racial slur jokingly in 2016 in reference to having just acquired her learner's permit. Groves, who was a freshman in high school at the time, said specifically in a Snapchat video, "I can drive, n-------." ...
"The New York Times reports, “Mr. Galligan, who had waited until Ms. Groves had chosen a college, had publicly posted the video that afternoon. Within hours, it had been shared to Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, where furious calls mounted for the University of Tennessee to revoke its admission offer."
"The University of Tennessee bowed to the mob, first by removing Groves from its cheer squad and then by pressuring her into rescinding her application for enrollment. Groves, who is both contrite and embarrassed for what she said as a freshman in high school, took the hint. She withdrew her acceptance and ended up attending community college online. ...
"Galligan is outrageously misguided. That much is clear. But he is not even the most disturbing thing about this wretched story. That dubious distinction goes to both the New York Times and the University of Tennessee.
"It is one thing if Galligan is a bitter, vindictive young man suffering from personal hang-ups, but what good reason does the New York Times have to run his story? What public interest is served? Are we to believe now that the private remarks of children, remarks, by the way, for which they have apologized, merit attention from the most powerful media organizations in the United States? Surely, the New York Times is not serious when it says of this incident that it paints a "complex portrait of behavior that for generations had gone unchecked in schools in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties, where Black students said they had long been subjected to ridicule." Next up, I suppose the paper will dispatch a team of reporters to investigate the mean-girl table. ...
The NYTimes stoops to conquer. No one is too small to evade its relentless search for social justice. Compared to Mimi Groves, Scott Alexander is Alexander the Great.
If anyone can think of a condign punishment for the NYTimes, please let me know. A truck full of ANFO seems to be a bit crude.
I didn't think much of the article, but it seems entirely plausible to me that the NYT [mistakenly] thought it was being fair, and I think this is a good lesson in the perils of "both sides" journalism.
I'm imagining a thought process along the lines of 'ok, this rationality thing, some people like it and some people don't, so let's get some material from both sides!' along with some pretty sloppy fact checking. The rat community, like any large and weird enough subculture, has generated people who dislike and are weirdly obsessed with it, and if you make half the story about what they have to say your readers are usually going to get the wrong idea.
[aiui both David Gerard and Elizabeth Sandifer made contributions]
also not to get political on main, but this is how i feel about a lot about the Trans Discourse
One problem with this is that Scott Aaronson, by his account, spent a lot of time talking with the author and felt the article omitted or reversed a bunch of relevant points that he had made.
After reading the NYTimes article, I decided to subscribe. Scott needs our support to keep alive one of the last bastions of free and respectful debate on the Internet.
It looks like a thousand other comments have already said everything I could possibly think of, so… *hug?*
I read the New York times article and it wasn't bad publicity! Brought me here. The article didn't seem that unjust. Despite the fact you take umbrage with some of what they wrote, they also sung your praises. Don't sweat it.
I continue to wonder as the Times & progressive media continue to "eat" their own why rational liberals continue to to support it. Perhaps you should come to the actually tolerant right. Good day sir.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/195/646/1320529223886.jpg
You have a new reader!! I am SO disappointed with the way the Times treated you and your blog.
The vague associating with Silicon Valley and offensive ideas might be annoying, BUT the fact that the article provides so many links to your articles, and that by now you’ve arranged things so that your real name being out there doesn’t hurt you that much, definitely will make this exposure add up to a net positive here in the long run.
I also back in the day initially found you through a link of somebody misrepresenting you, read the article and was hooked. Same will happen here to many people. The content will speak for itself.
Honestly, I'm astounded that the New York Times would write a hit piece and not bring up this blog post on Tumblr.
https://archive.is/I85mC
Feels like a missed opportunity, tbh. And I know for a fact that one of the people who consulted on the article was well-aware of this incident, so maybe, *just maybe*, you're throwing a massive hissyfit over an article that was both extremely charitable to you and your writing and which also refused to talk about the stuff that really makes you look awful. Maybe, *just maybe*, responding to that with hostility and conspiracy theories about the media is not a good look. Personally, I'm looking forward to the article about you that talks about this incident, and about how Steve Sailer is a member in good standing, and how that subreddit you publicly endorsed is full of weird, creepy reactionaries.
Also nice new website. It runs really badly and the comments are full of HBDers. The old site ran well and had comments full of HBDers; personally I would have changed the latter rather than the former when moving to a new platform, but I'm not the innovative thinker you are. Have fun!
"Also nice new website. It runs really badly and the comments are full of HBDers."
Ah, the sweet lingering strains of the old refrain! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n8jqR6VzUY
"I'm never sad and alone while on my way
As long as I can sing Dee-ol-ee-ay"
Or as long as you can sing "H-B-D-ay"?
I'll stop mentioning the scientific racists and white supremacists in the SSC community when there stops being scientific racists and white supremacists in the SSC community. Alas, that has yet to happen for some reason. Weird how this community and its spinoffs keep attracting all these witches that Scott promised he wouldn't hunt.
There's a lot of bad people in the world. But we all have to live together because the happy day when there stop being bad people in the community is a long way off. If you wish to drive the bad people off with a stick so only good people can be here and you can have a happy place, well good luck with the endeavour but there will always be tares in the wheat.
Ultimately it's either about tolerating the witches and carrying on as usual or granting ultimate moral authority to the witch-hunters, whose demand for hunting ~something~ will never be sated since they'll be left without a job otherwise. I think I know which of the options is better to root for in the long-term plus we already have one NYT as is.
What do you (or Metz, but you can't speak for him) mean by "white supremacist"? Is it literally someone who says that whites should rule the country or the world, with the implication that other races should be disenfranchised, or banned from positions of power, or something similar? I can't remember seeing anyone making that claim, on SSC or elsewhere.
If you are using it in a weaker sense, it would help to tell us what it is so the rest of us could decide if it's really a terrible thing or just a terrible label.
It's pretty gross that your taking such obvious delight in using such a horrible incident involving a suicide to score a political point. (I agree he should boot Sailer for well, being Steve Sailer.)
It's especially gross given that (1) this is clearly written for a restricted in-person community; (2) it obviously requires much more context to understand what's going on; (3) it's not at all clear how this is supposed to reflect badly on Scott.
My guess is they think that publicly attacking a woman (alive or recently) dead on the grounds that they made false harassment allegations is always wrong.
I’m one of the (probably innumerable) people who were brought to this blog by the Times article expecting to find fascinating discussions “ re-examin[ing] the world through cold and careful thought,“ as the times put it. Opening the comment section with “If there's anyone in history who doesn't deserve to have his ideas discussed properly, it's Marx,” “The comment section will instantly improve the moment you are banned,” and “You can’t be a Marxist with anything approaching a rational viewpoint” (from someone who calls themself “Reality,” no less), is not an auspicious beginning.
I think you will find fascinating discussions here. You will also find plenty of cranks, zealots, and generally annoying people. If you know of any online forum that has the former without the latter, please supply a link. One of the advantages of an online forum is that you can chose who you engage with and who you ignore, unlike IRL where someone shouting at you is impossible to completely ignore. Chose wisely and your time here will be well spent.
You could get a more normal picture of the discussion by looking at the old SSC posts and discussions, which are still webbed. https://slatestarcodex.com/archives/
As far as Marxbro is concerned, the problem isn't that he's a Marxist but that he is a crank. He wants everybody to talk about his favorite subject on his terms all the time. If a Christian fundamentalist or an atheist showed up with the same attitude he would get the same sort of response.
"My terms" is basic honesty and willingness to cite sources. This is why I am pressing Scott Alexander on his poorly-sourced writing.
Scott has had some really fascinating posts engaging with far-left thought in the past, and has been open to corrections from and dialogue with Marxists (and every other manner of fringe-but-interesting political ideology). The poster in question is annoying not because he's a Communist but because he comments the same thing about misquoting Marx over and over again in unrelated discussions, for literal hours every day. Related: http://wondermark.com/1k62/
I've corrected Scott Alexander multiple times on the basics of Marxist thought and he has never updated his priors. I'm very open to dialogue with Scott Alexander.
To quote Terry Prachett from one of the Watch novels: "We're like one big family here and you'll see the resemblance for yourself when you're called out to your first domestic dispute". You happened to come in when the grumpy uncles and weird cousins and leopard-print wearing aunts were having at it in a long-running dispute.
I appreciate your work here. I hope this evaporates and leaves you with fresh, spring air.
I'm new to Scott's work, having recently discovered it due to the NY Times controversy. I thought this was a good response, but this part kind of weirded me out: "Again, it would not surprise me if I was a few degrees of social separation from some of these people. I don’t feel like this means I have done anything wrong, and I assume most people are a few degrees of social separation away from a Republican or Trump supporter. I myself am a Democrat, voted Warren (IIRC) in the primary, and Biden in the general."
Just feels a little spooky that the "newspaper of record" can publish a hit piece on someone and then that person feels compelled to publicly beg "Please don't blame me for knowing a few Republicans. Everybody does! I'm a member of The Party, honest I am!!" I don't know that you can definitively say at this point that we are living in a one-party state, but seems like we're getting closer and closer.
All I can suggest is that people read Metz's book The Genius Makers when it comes out in a few weeks, and offer an honest, substantive review. https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Makers-Mavericks-Brought-Facebook/dp/1524742678
I know this is a "ha ha I'm not really saying to review bomb it" but review-bombing a book you haven't read sucks.
People should read the book and give him honest reviews. What is wrong with that? He got a "blurb" from an old colleague named Ashlee Vance, without disclosing that they are old friends who worked with him at The Register. Now that is unethical. Reading his book and reviewing it on Amazon is not.
I agree we shouldn't all bustle off to bash the book without reading it, but if anyone or several someones wants to read it and give a review about "so is it good, bad or indifferent?" I'd be interested to see that. You could even enter it for Scott's March book review contest!
You provide so much entertainment, intellectual stimulation, and sense of community for so many people. Which is a net GOOD. I'm sorry that your reward for this net GOOD behavior is this.
Why is Charles Murray so demonized? I've read a few of this books, "Coming Apart", "In Our Hands" and I've listened to a few talks. (Sam Harris comes to mind first.. though also AEI stuff.) From what little I can tell, Charles is a good person. You don't have to agree with him on everything to acknowledge he is worth reading.
Short version is that he's suggested it's likely that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites. For a long, interesting fight about whether and to what degree he deserves to be demonized, you can read Ezra Klein and Sam Harris going at it here: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve
Right I've listened to that. Have you read anything Charles wrote? Did you listen to the podcast where Sam talked with Charles?
No, but I am relying simply on the famous quote from The Bell Curve where and Herrenstein say that it's likely genetics plays a role in race/IQ disparities: 'If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.'
Since the *only* opinion I expressed about Murray is that he said it's likely that blacks are genetically less intelligent, and the quote shows that he did say that, I'm not ashamed of not having read more. I didn't express a general opinion of my own on Charles Murray as a person or the merits of his work.
What he said was that it is likely that genetics plays some role but he had no idea how large. What is your basis for disagreeing? Is there any evidence for, or any good a priori reason to believe, the claim that the genetic effect is zero, which is what you seem to be assuming?
I'm not assuming anything about whether Murray was right or wrong! Someone asked why he was demonized and I gave an example of a taboo belief that he held that explained the demonization. I didn't say anything about how likely the belief is to be true, one way or the other.
There's obviously no *purely* a priori reason to think it must be zero, i.e. something conceptually impossible about the idea of a genetic cause for part or all of the gap. The question is how likely it is given our empirical knowledge about genetics, and the genetics of IQ in particular. And my view on that is 'I have no clue because I'm a (failed) analytic philosopher not a geneticist, and when I've had a quick look for the expert consensus on this, I haven't found much that's useful, just moral outrage on one side and 'we should be allowed to ask the question' on the other. (I'm not saying nothing is out there, just that this can't be quickly checked from wiki). There are obvious reasons to be suspicion that those pursuing the hypothesis will be disproportionately those who are biased against or dislike blacks; this was essentially Ezra Klein's argument in his debate over Murray with Sam Harris, that Murray has a long history of advocating for policies that benefit whites at the expense of blacks, which should cast doubt on his motives. (Not endorsing or condemning the particular arguments Ezra gave for this.) That's almost certainly true even if the hypothesis is true. So it's rational for blacks (and others) to suspect people who pursue the link of racist animus against blacks at least a little bit. But that doesn't tell us whether it's true obviously!
Ughh, OK race is a loaded question in the US, our original sin is slavery, (I feel like I'm stating the obvious). I think a lot of us would have been happier if African Americans had a bit higher IQ than 'white' Americans. At this point I can only encourage you to listen to the podcast between Harris and Murray. Murray seems unfairly demonized to me. Are you of European stock like me? Does it bother you that Asians are slightly smarter than Europeans? Where do Indians (from Asia) fit on the intelligence scale? My hypothesis (I assume not original to me) is that civilization selects for intelligence, so I'd guess slightly smarter than Europe.
Yeah, that seems as well written as it could be. I think it refers to intelligence as a function of genetics and nurture. Race is an accident of the past. (Race is a breeding population, it will disappear in the US as we keep inter-breeding.) I've ordered a copy of "The Bell Curve" so I'll read it, and let you know. If you pick any metric, shoe size maybe, and any variable: zip code, occupation, race. You'll get a difference. The difference may smaller than a standard deviation, but no matter we can measure it. And because the variation is much larger than any difference it's silly to judge anyone by their race or other variable. Everyone needs to be judged as an individual. Asians and Ashkenazi's are on average smarter than my European stock. Does that bother me. Hell no. It's a very good thing that there are plenty of people smarter than me.
I imagine he tends to be demonized by the left because of his strongly right-wing politics, regardless of merit. I wouldn't say he deserves to be demonized for that. But near the end of this nearly 3-hour video about Murray's famous book, the critique finally explains something really insidious about his writing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
TL;DR: Murray uses language deftly in a way that makes him *appear* careful and scientific, and indeed he appears to agree with mainstream scientists most of the time. But in a sleight of hand, all that carefulness subtly disappears in important locations, such as when he links the analysis to his right-wing political conclusions. A look at his main sources of information, and who funds them, isn't flattering either.
So he's bad because he's right wing? I've listened to Murray and read a few of his books. You don't have to agree with his solutions. But it's a fact that part of intelligence is genetic. I understand there are many who don't like this fact....
Our illustrious host for one. :^) I didn't watch your 3 hr video, A few years ago I listened to the Sam Harris podcast with Murray. Is there anyway you might imagine that Murray has been unfairly demonized?
No, he's not bad because he's right wing, and it's not "my" video.
The founder of Gawker wrote a piece defending Metz...
I'll look forward to reading some of Scott's old posts.
Really? Thanks for the nice thought.
I was surprised by your defensive about the New York Times article because my reaction was wow, how can he write about some many topics.
In anycase, many of the disputes come down to causation vs correlation as well as individuals not understanding the biophysics of the brain and nervous system and the neuroplasticity of neural networks. But this is a larger topic with many dimensions.
Looking for a larger context, the NYTimes published long article with at least a partial replay of the Donald McNeil fiasco: The author, Ben Smith, the NYTimes media correspondent, has some trenchant observations:
Postcard From Peru: Why the Morality Plays Inside The Times Won’t Stop
Other news organizations have their own personnel dramas. But none attract the spotlight the way The Times does.
By Ben Smith
Published Feb. 14, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/business/media/new-york-times-donald-mcneil.html
"The exhaustive coverage led The New Republic last week to ask, “Can We Stop Obsessing Over Every Personnel Decision Made by The New York Times?”
"Not just yet.
"The Times is an object of obsession because of its unusual, perhaps unhealthy, central place in American news, culture and politics. Its actions — and those of its internal factions — carry huge symbolic weight. That’s the thing that struck me most when I got here a year ago, and wrote that “because The Times now overshadows so much of the industry, the cultural and ideological battles that used to break out between news organizations now play out inside The Times.” The Times’s media ambitions have also intensified its status as a cultural lightning rod. It is no longer just a source of information. It seeks to be the voice whispering in your ear in the morning, the curriculum in your child’s history class and the instructions on caramelizing shallots for the pasta you’re making for dinner."
***
"I think it’s a sign that The Times’s unique position in American news may not be tenable. This intense attention, combined with a thriving digital subscription business that makes the company more beholden to the views of left-leaning subscribers, may yet push it into a narrower and more left-wing political lane as a kind of American version of The Guardian — the opposite of its stated, broader strategy."
*****
"The questions about The Times’s identity and political leanings are real; the differences inside the newsroom won’t be easily resolved. But the paper needs to figure out how to resolve these issues more clearly: Is The Times the leading newspaper for like-minded, left-leaning Americans? Or is it trying to hold what seems to be a disappearing center in a deeply divided country? Is it Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden? One thing that’s clear is that these questions probably aren’t best arbitrated through firings or resignations freighted with symbolic meaning, or hashed out inside the human resources department."
I should add that as an outsider and a conservative, I have always found the NYTimes's pretensions to objectivity and middle of the road politics to be risible.
This is the newspaper that made Walter Duranty its Moscow Bureau chief where he spent 14 years covering up Stalin's crimes, and that ran Herbert Mathews's cover ups of Castro's hard core Communism. They were hard left long before all of you were born.
What has changed is not the NYTimes, but the content and structure of the Left. What is has become since the collapse of the Soviet Union is a movement of upper class contempt for the working and middle classes, the bitter clingers, the deplorables. The ideology has used the language of the Frankfurt School and the tactics of Maoism as its tools. Political correctness, wokeism, BLM, antifa, and cancel culture are its manifestations. The NYTimes is just struggling to keep up.
By definition, most left-leaning voters are not elite, seeing as roughly half of voters opted for Biden. Though it is true obviously that *whites* who supported Biden were more likely to have gone to college, got masters degrees etc.. But people of colour count too!
I should clarify that I was writing about the express ideology. Tens of millions of people voted for Biden, but very, very few of them have a well articulated theory of politics.
When I was in graduate school, a very long time ago, I spent some time doing statistical analysis of detailed polling data. The one thing that was clear was that most of the respondents simply did not understand the language the questions were posed in because they had no purchase on the jargon of politics.
I came to the view that almost all voting behavior was driven by group identification. The vast majority of Biden's voters are by no means leftists who buy into the theories of the modern left. They voted for Biden because it expressed their sense of group identity.
What don't you like about the tactics of Maoism? A lot of their tactics seem pretty good to me.
Do you mind sharing a few examples of the tactics of Maosim that you think are pretty good? I honestly can't think of any. When I think of Maosim I think of the terror of the Cultural Revolution and of the famines of the Great Leap Forward.
This text is a classic:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1937/guerrilla-warfare/
So it sounds like you are saying Mao was tactically very good at guerilla warfare. I suppose if you think guerilla warfare is a good thing, you could argue that Maoism has good tactics. Do you think guerilla warfare is a good thing?
I enjoy studying texts on warfare and strategy such as Von Clauswitz, Sun Tzu, Mao and Vo Nguyen Giap, yea. Warfare seems like its part of our current human nature so it's worth studying just like any other topic.
I do not respond to trolls.
Ok, but I'm not a troll, so you can still respond to me.
I'll be the judge of that.
There is a norm in Rationalist circles of being charitable to people you are discussing issues with. If you ignore that and call people trolls I do not think you will be getting the most out of this community.
"This is true only insofar as I once expressed agreement with an unrelated position of Charles Murray’s... The Times points out that I agreed with Murray that poverty was bad, and that also at some other point in my life noted that Murray had offensive views on race, and heavily implies this means I agree with Murray’s offensive views on race..."
This seems to downplay what you agreed with Murray on. In the linked post, you wrote
"Neither he nor I would dare reduce *all* class differences to heredity, and he in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture. But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either..."
This sounds like you're agreeing with Murray that heredity is part of the reason for class differences, and that you think heredity is part of *why* the Kentucky truckers will be hard to teach code. Is that what you were saying? If so, then that is a contentious position, one that is associated with Murray, and one that is related to his part-heredity opinions about race and IQ.
(tangentially related: why "it's only partly heredity" isn't the middle-ground opinion Murray thinks it is: https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html; the context is race but the same point is general.)
(I'm not sure if exactly the same measurement issues arise for studying class and heredity vs. race and heredity, since e.g. adopting a baby will more easily change how society perceives their class than how society perceives their race)
Claiming that poor white people have bad genes doesn't get you cancelled (yet) though.
> This sounds like you're agreeing with Murray that heredity is part of the reason for class differences, and that you think heredity is part of *why* the Kentucky truckers will be hard to teach code. Is that what you were saying? If so, then that is a contentious position
It's well established that IQ has at least 50% heritability, mostly along the maternal line, so that's not contentious.
Mean IQ of programmers is also considerably higher than that of truckers [1]. Given this, I think it would be more contentious to claim that IQ has no bearing on your success in programming.
So what exactly is contentious with the implication that heredity is part of the reason that truckers might be hard to teach to code?
[1] https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx
He (or you) can offer an argument that it's true, and I won't bother getting too involved [but see https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html].
My point is that he claimed NYT exaggerated his agreement with Murray; I'm claiming that he downplayed his agreement with Murray. He *didn't* just agree with Murray that "poverty was bad"; he also seems to have agreed with Murray about poverty, IQ and genetics. This downplaying seems less honest than what I expect from Scott.
Your own link explains why "heritability" is not about genetics, so I don't see how Scott is agreeing with Murray about poverty, IQ and genetics.
Read it again. From the intro:
"...Let's first be clear about the conclusion itself. In a recent article on 'The Real Bell Curve,' Charles Murray grumbles about critics, such as Stephen Jay Gould, who read the book as saying that racial differences in IQ are mostly genetic. Murray answers by quoting from the book:
'If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanations have won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate (311).'
In this passage, Herrnstein and Murray are 'resolutely agnostic' about whether bad environment or genetic endowment is more responsible for the lower IQs of Blacks. But they indicate no agnosticism at all about whether part of the IQ difference between Blacks and Whites is genetic; and given their way of thinking about the matter, this means that they are not at all agnostic about some Black genetic inferiority..."
It's not that heritability doesn't have nothing to do with genetics. It's that it doesn't imply the inferences about genetics that Murray makes. But also, Murray is the one fallaciously making those inferences.
Suppose for the sake of argument that Murray really is conflating genetics and heredity, I'm still left wondering how you conclude that Scott agrees with Murray.
I reread your original comment on this and still don't see it. Scott basically asserted that class differences are partly heritable, but you then somehow concluded from this that Scott also agrees that class differences are partly genetic. The only way Scott's words would entail this conclusion is if you yourself had conflated heredity and genetics in the same way that Murray has allegedly done; but this is your projection, not something that can be concluded from Scott's words.
If the mean black/white difference is due to genetic differences, its due to genetic differences. This author uses the bad faith language of "genetically inferior" and thinks this in and of itself disproves the existence of heritable differences.
"he also seems to have agreed with Murray about poverty, IQ and genetics"
He agrees with the science that murray agrees with. There's aren't Murray's theories.
What on earth are you talking about? The heritability of IQ, income and virtually all aspects of human behavior are replicated research findings. They aren't "Charles Murray's ", this is absolutely mainstream psychological science, denied by know-nothing ideologues like you.
I see a lot of comments saying they came here from the NYT article and don't feel like it was that negative. I think a part of that is that the 'rationalist' community generally has much higher standards for literary honesty. The attempt to link Murray's racial views to Scott's may seem run-of-the-course for the average reader, but to someone who's had the pleasure of reading the painstakingly honest attempts at representation of opposing views within this community for the past few years, it feels much worse.
Another point is that the NYT articles glosses over the fact that Scott was a practicing psychiatrist whose practice was destroyed, and patients hurt, by the NYT's threat of doxxing. Reading about Scott's descriptions of his practice, and what he learns from it, for years likely makes this fact hit much harder than learning about it from the one or two throwaway lines mentioning it in the NYT article.
My totally unsolicited, and no doubt unwelcome, suggestion to Scott Alexander is that he collect his thoughts and calmly set down in writing the ways in which Cade Metz treated him unfairly. Yes, I know the statement does that, but he needs to condense it to email form, or snail mail, and send it to the standards editor, requesting that the Times print an editor's note concerning its violation of standards. The latter point is the key. He needs to be sure to refer to the Times's published list of standards, which are on the Times website.
Having a lawyer do it is preferable, as this article was defamatory. That doesn't mean he should sue. That's a separate issue. But a lawyer letter will get their attention. Take my word for it that this is the ONLY thing that Metz does not want. He doesn't care about what people say here or on Reason or on blogs. I'm sure he has already communicated at length with his editors and falsely characterized the criticism as coming only from "the right." He is very good at working the internal channels at the Times. Scott's statement indicates some blatant violations of journalism standards.
If they won't fix it, then he should then publicize everything he said in the letter. Make it clear that this is not going away, which is what he and they want.
The article is carefully written to not be legally defamatory, by implying things without actually explicitly saying them. It's defamatory in practice, by making people believe slanderous things, but that is legal.
Hi! Came here from the NYT article, did not at all think it was a hatchet job or even really negative. The thesis seemed to be that your blog was the one place on the internet where intelligent people could discuss controversial topics and weigh difficult ideas with some measure of civility—an incredible thing these days. I didn’t read into the article that you were a eugenicist or a right-wing lunatic. I sympathize with you about having your writing now available to patients. That may be hard (or may be a blessing in disguise). But choosing to blog under essentially your legal name—you had to have known you were not truly anonymous, right? Best of luck on your new endeavor.
You are too apologetic. Stand and defend what you believe in. You dont need to fit in zeitgeist. Just follow the Truth. And your heart knows where it is. Your mind can rationalize one thing or another but deep down you know which is right and which is not
>I suspect he did not personally want to write this and was pressured into it
Hm I kinda believed we've stopped accepting "I was just following the orders" as an excuse even for people in military under actual literal orders
Also I'm quite impressed by how he brings up the Scott's point that the Blue Tribe has no tolerance for anyone disagreeing with them, and then soundly refutes it by... saying that Scott is not sufficiently distant from the people who disagree with the Blue Tribe, and therefore he's a bad person? Or in Cade Metz's world crushing anyone who disagrees with you is good a noble so he doesn't perceive it as a critique? I'm a bit confuse on what's happening here.
Perhaps Dr Siskind should seek therapy for his paranoid tendencies. The NYT article was pretty benign
I think we can safely say at the very least, without arguing over terms like "hit piece" or speculating about the reporter's intentions, that the article uses badly cherry-picked data to give the impression that Scott has endorsed controversial claims that he's never actually endorsed.
...some of which, it should be said, Scott rejected at length, e.g. The Anti-Reactionary FAQ.
The beginning was actually pretty nice, but then they really tried to cast him as someone "an average leftist person wouldn't like". Luckily they had links to their quotes and I was able to read the quote in context and fell in love with this blog.
Fredrik deBoer just wrote a great take down of the Times article. I love his blunt honesty: https://fredrikdeboer.com/blog/
One thing that's great about Freddie is that I cannot predict his response ahead of time. It's always fresh reading.
Hmm. Fun as it is to ascribe malice to a corporate entity, the one thing I've seen no one commenting on this try to do is to provide evidence rather than just assert NYT's motives. No one, for example, has tried to pick apart its leadership structure for clues about why it behaves as it does. It's all just bare assertion. I can't blame anyone, though. Hard work is hard!
From its earliest days, tech has always been orthogonal to conventional political labeling. From old skinny tie IBM, Whole Earth Catalog, Route 128, Xerox Parc and, well, good to see that’s still true.
From Spain, much love, I feel so bad u had to undergo this ideological bind by those false liberals who seek to stablish a Ministry of the Truth by lies and artifice
Well, I'm happy to find your blog because of this article. I followed the links it referenced and couldn't stop reading. It is so refreshing to see someone not following groupthink and being rational yet empathetic at the same time.
If you want to step out of the cave, this response is worth the price of admission and then some:
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown
meh, NYT is trash, why give 'em any more publicity than their trash paper deserves
also very clever w/the Voldemort line ... instead of just deleting it you used strikethru so it could still be read
Another day, another dollar, and another Quillette article:
"The Narrative and Its Discontents" written by Jacob Falkovich | Published on February 16, 2021
https://quillette.com/2021/02/16/the-narrative-and-its-discontents/
"The latest salvo against the enemies of The Narrative is Cade Metz’s essay, “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space” about the Rationalist blogger Scott Alexander. Metz would no doubt bristle at this accusation of antagonism—he told an interviewee that his goal was “to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness.” But he insisted on publishing Alexander’s full name, with little justification and full knowledge that this would hinder his work as a psychiatrist."
Scott, don't be afraid of these people. Fear is what gives them their power.
Don't try to grovel and defend yourself. Just ignore them.
He shouldn't ignore them, though. He should debate them.
"I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review"
It's someone else's joke, but it's a goody:
Current NYTimes, on July 21, 1969 "White Cishet Men Colonize Moon"
The NYT has lost all of their credibility these past few months. There is a rotten core at the center of that newspaper, and luckily for people like me who have lost faith in them even attempting to claim their reporting is honest, this will likely lead to their downfall. And it will be a downfall from within their own newspaper as the Oroborous of Critical Race Theory finds case after case of "racist" reporters within their own ranks. Hopefully it devolves into even more of a tabloid than it already is. TMZ does better reporting.
It would be wrong to mention that Cade's personal email and his publishers email is on his website... so I won't
This is another comment I would report if I had the button.
Does it violate a rule? I don't see a rule list, but if there is one, I hope there is something about writing over 100 comments about X on a page that isn't about X. (X is Marx.)
I am an independent party who didn’t read your blog, but was encouraged to cancel my NY Times subscription by my daughter, who has been a regular reader for years. When I read the Times article, I thought it was poorly written and difficult to follow. Petty vindictiveness was my only takeaway. No worries, Mr. Alexander, you were not the one who should be embarrassed.
Another fair and polite, but devastating response to the NYT piece:
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310
To Aaronson's list I would add:
1. The NYT claims that SlateStarCodex/ACX is "the epicenter of a community called the Rationalists", completely ignoring the actual epicenter of the rationalist movement, LessWrong, as well as its progenitor OvercomingBias. So some people came expecting the comment section to be made up of rationalists, and instead see hundreds of comments by Marxbro and detractors of Marxbro. But the 2020 annual survey asked 'Do you identify as a Less Wronger or "aspiring rationalist"?', and only 13.2% said "yes" (40.6% said "sorta").
2. It keeps trying to link SlateStarCodex and even Yudkowsky to the right wing, but actually the makeup of SlateStarCodex participants is as follows according to the survey:
Social democrat (like Scandinavian liberals): 33.4%
Liberal (like U.S. Democrats): 29.7%
Conservative (like U.S. Republicans): 7.5%
Libertarian: 7.5%
Neoreactionary: 5.1%
Alt-right: 2.2%
Marxist: 2.1%
I once wrote an article called "America Must Reconnect" about how the Left and Right should learn more about each other and look for points of agreement (https://medium.com/big-picture/america-must-reconnect-8b4d1c8342e3). Little did I suspect that this concept would be offensive to the New York Times / Cade Metz!
I think it's worth quoting Aaronson's post, just so people scrolling through here are more likely to see something that isn't Marx and race-IQ correlation.
> ...here’s a partial list of my issues:
1. The piece includes the following ominous sentence: “But in late June of last year, when I approached Siskind to discuss the blog, it vanished.” This framing, it seems to me, would be appropriate for some conman trying to evade accountability without ever explaining himself. It doesn’t make much sense for a practicing psychiatrist who took the dramatic step of deleting his blog in order to preserve his relationship with his patients—thereby complying with an ethical code that’s universal among psychiatrists, even if slightly strange to the rest of us—and who immediately explained his reasoning to the entire world. In the latter framing, of course, Scott comes across less like a fugitive on the run and more like an innocent victim of a newspaper’s editorial obstinacy.
2. As expected, the piece devotes enormous space to the idea of rationalism as an on-ramp to alt-right extremism. The trouble is, it never presents the idea that rationalism also can be an off-ramp from extremism—i.e., that it can provide a model for how even after you realize that mainstream sources are confidently wrong on some issue, you don’t respond by embracing conspiracy theories and hatreds, you respond by simply thinking carefully about each individual question rather than buying a worldview wholesale from anyone. Nor does the NYT piece mention how Scott, precisely because he gives right-wing views more charity than some of us might feel they deserve, actually succeeded in dissuading some of his readers from voting for Trump—which is more success than I can probably claim in that department! I had many conversations with Cade about these angles that are nowhere reflected in the piece.
3. The piece gets off on a weird foot, by describing the rationalists as “a group that aimed to re-examine the world through cold and careful thought.” Why “cold”? Like, let’s back up a few steps: what is even the connection in the popular imagination between rationality and “coldness”? To me, as to many others, the humor, humanity, and warmth of Scott’s writing were always among its most notable features.
4. The piece makes liberal use of scare quotes. Most amusingly, it puts scare quotes around the phrase “Bayesian reasoning”!
5. The piece never mentions that many rationalists (Zvi Mowshowitz, Jacob Falkovich, Kelsey Piper…) were right about the risk of Covid-19 in early 2020, and then again right about masks, aerosol transmission, faster-spreading variants, the need to get vaccines into arms faster, and many other subsidiary issues, even while public health authorities and the mainstream press struggled for months to reach the same obvious (at least in retrospect) conclusions. This omission is significant because Cade told me, in June, that the rationalist community’s early rightness about covid was part of what led him to want to write the piece in the first place (!). If readers knew about that clear success, would it put a different spin on the rationalists’ weird, cultlike obsession with “Bayesian reasoning” and “consequentialist ethics” (whatever those are), or their nerdy, idiosyncratic worries about the more remote future?
6. The piece contains the following striking sentence: “On the internet, many in Silicon Valley believe, everyone has the right not only to say what they want but to say it anonymously.” Well, yes, except this framing makes it sound like this is a fringe belief of some radical Silicon Valley tribe, rather than just the standard expectation of most of the billions of people who’ve used the Internet for most of its half-century of existence.
7. Despite thousands of words about the content of SSC, the piece never gives Scott a few uninterrupted sentences in his own voice, to convey his style. This is something the New Yorker piece did do, and which would help readers better understand the wit, humor, charity, and self-doubt that made SSC so popular. To see what I mean, read the NYT’s radically-abridged quotations from Scott’s now-classic riff on the Red, Blue, and Gray Tribes and decide for yourself whether they capture the spirit of the original (alright, I’ll quote the relevant passage myself at the bottom of this post). Scott has the property, shared by many of my favorite writers, that if you just properly quote him, the words leap off the page, wriggling free from the grasp of any bracketing explanations and making a direct run for the reader’s brain. All the more reason to quote him!
8. The piece describes SSC as “astoundingly verbose.” A more neutral way to put it would be that Scott has produced a vast quantity of intellectual output. When I finish a Scott Alexander piece, only in a minority of cases do I feel like he spent more words examining a problem than its complexities really warranted. Just as often, I’m left wanting more.
9. The piece says that Scott once “aligned himself” with Charles Murray, then goes on to note Murray’s explosive views about race and IQ. That might be fair enough, were it also mentioned that the positions ascribed to Murray that Scott endorses in the relevant post—namely, “hereditarian leftism” and universal basic income—are not only unrelated to race but are actually progressive positions.
10. The piece says that Scott once had neoreactionary thinker Nick Land on his blogroll. Again, important context is missing: this was back when Land was mainly known for his strange writings on AI and philosophy, before his neoreactionary turn. [DP: Scott even wrote The Anti-Reactionary FAQ!]
11. The piece says that Scott compared “some feminists” to Voldemort. It didn’t explain what it took for certain specific feminists (like Amanda Marcotte) to prompt that comparison, which might have changed the coloration. (Another thing that would’ve complicated the picture: the rationalist community’s legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities, before such openness became mainstream.)
12. Speaking of feminists—yeah, I’m a minor part of the article. One of the few things mentioned about me is that I’ve stayed in a rationalist group house. (If you must know: for like two nights, when I was in Bay Area, with my wife and kids. We appreciated the hospitality!) The piece also says that I was “turned off by the more rigid and contrarian beliefs of the Rationalists.” It’s true that I’ve disagreed with many beliefs espoused by rationalists, but not because they were contrarian, or because I found them noticeably more “rigid” than most beliefs—only because I thought they were mistaken!
13. The piece describes Eliezer Yudkowsky as a “polemicist and self-described AI researcher.” It’s true that Eliezer opines about AI despite a lack of conventional credentials in that field, and it’s also true that the typical NYT reader might find him to be comically self-aggrandizing. But had the piece mentioned the universally recognized AI experts, like Stuart Russell, who credit Yudkowsky for a central role in the AI safety movement, wouldn’t that have changed what readers perceived as the take-home message?
14. The piece says the following about Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis, the founders of DeepMind: “Like the Rationalists, they believed that AI could end up turning against humanity, and because they held this belief, they felt they were among the only ones who were prepared to build it in a safe way.” This strikes me as a brilliant way to reframe a concern around AI safety as something vaguely sinister. Imagine if the following framing had been chosen instead: “Amid Silicon Valley’s mad rush to invest in AI, here are the voices urging that it be done safely and in accord with human welfare…”
Edit: libertarians were 20% of SSC readers in the survey.
Scott, you are a man of integrity and can't hide it. Honesty always wins out, even if in error, because like science it is self-correcting.
It's painful in this modern world, isn't it? We're back to a sort of McCarthyism, but this time from the Left. That's Valdemort and that's what must be resisted at all costs, from any political direction. Strength to you. "Classical liberals" will save us, if we can be saved.
You would have thought the last 4 years would have taught the media something.
To quote Matt Taibbi:
"When so many Trump supporters point to his stomping of the carpetbagging snobs in the national media as the main reason they’re going to vote for him, it should tell us in the press something profound about how much people think we suck."
On the bright side, the article linked a number of your posts, and it's REALLY EASY to see that they're misrepresenting you if you read EVEN ONE of the posts they linked.
No to imply that most people will actually read those, but still.
Likelihood you'll see this is 0.001 but Robert Wright (Non-Zero and other books) is interested in seeing how Rationality might dovetail with his own "make the world better" project.
I have no idea how substack links work, so maybe not at all? Reply if you care and need better info.
https://nonzero.substack.com/p/readings?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo4ODYwNjM4LCJwb3N0X2lkIjozMjY2MjIwMCwiXyI6Ijdwc1R1IiwiaWF0IjoxNjEzNjgwNTUwLCJleHAiOjE2MTM2ODQxNTAsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0xNzMwMiIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.-5qf2OqHmtRGhprtooiAdzlUrfo5B0oMOIsFYkYMHAY
Try posting it on reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex, I suppose?
I haven't read all the background here but one thing that stands out to me in this is the feminism/Voldemort comparison.
Scott claims he only applied this comparison to a specific group of feminists, and quotes his original post, but if anything the NYT was generous in saying he compared *some* feminists to Voldemort. He described the group of people he's talking about as:
>blurring the already rather thin line between "feminism" and "literally Voldemort"
In doing so, it seems to me that he is specifically comparing feminism *as a whole* to Voldemort, and then going on to say that some feminists are worse than the (already-close-to-literally-Voldemort) collective.
It's a response from Scott that's weirdly lacking in intellectual rigour. He also points out his edit, but all-caps snark is probably not the best way to convey sincerity there.
I hope you've had time to heal, and can now appreciate the idea that “the worst ain’t so bad when it finally happens." There is no bad news; there are only blessings in disguise:
https://moviewise.substack.com/p/there-is-no-bad-news-there-are-only
"I think everyone should have the media perform a hatchet job on them at least once." April 15, 2013 by Scott Alexander
Over half a year in I find it sad that after being mistreated by the NYT for having the gall to publish content outside their approved Overton window, Scott has apparently been cowed into not attempting to publish content outside the NYT-approved Overton window on this new blog.
After the NYT hit piece, nothing has been published that would solicit another NYT hit piece. This has rewarded the NYT's actions, discouraged heterodox content producers and impoverished SSC readers.
I have repeatedly blogged about studies suggesting that women are underrepresented in tech not because of explicit discrimination on the part of tech companies, but because women lose interest in tech very early, at least by high school (high school computer science classes are something like 80% male, the same as big tech companies). The post that most effectively sums up my thoughts on this topic is Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences. I continue to believe these studies are true, I’ve spoken with some of the researchers who have performed them, and the New York Times itself has previously written about and praised these same studies. I think understanding the reasons behind gender imbalances in tech is vital towards figuring out how to address them better than we’re addressing them now. There is no evidence that women are inherently any less intelligent or any worse at math than men, and I have tried to make this very clear in all of my posts on the subject - for example in the Contra Grant post linked above, where I say, quote, “My research suggests no average gender difference in ability”.
I had a thought: if the generalization that males like working with things and women like working with people is somewhat true, might LLMs help women work in tech? If you can code by conversing with ur-somebody, that might be a more social experience than writing code.