scott's a smart guy and some of his work is timeless. he's gotten dumber. he used to be much much more subtle about inserting his more unpleasant opinions

Do you believe his story about being completely unable to understand Calc 2? It’s really incongruous with all the fawning admiration of his genius.

having been on both ends of calc 2, i think it really just means he had a bad math background. if you're good at math and understand you're going to be memorizing chunks of formulas, you're fine. if you're not, you may die. traditional weeder course

tbh i am surprised anyone who struggled for real in calc 2 made it into medical school though

But also it’s a really strong data point that his IQ gang should look at and say: not a genius. (I’m not in the IQ gang.). That’s what I don’t get.

the beauty of iq is that as long as you cling to your iq your actual, proximate failures in the real world aren't real. and if your actual tested iq isn't high maybe it's measurement error because you clearly have the right genes. it's the ultimate cope

i'm sorry if you can't derive that shit on the fly, ngmi :P

that's just memorizing fewer, better formulae imho

(I'm actually kinda surprised scott struggled there; he never struck me as exactly a "good at math" person but certainly as "bright enough in general to handle basic shit")

I wonder if it's related to the mental block you run into with some programmer types on *continuous* math

it could be that but imho if you're tolerably-bright and, like, awake in school, calc 2 may be the first time you actually had to exert any effort in math whatsoever. like. you may technically have been an A math student but have never done anything deliberately before then

This was very much me. I was "good at math" in that I have a good memory and could do mental math kind of fast. Calc 2, and especially linear algebra and dif eq, absolutely murdered me (not least because I was an incredibly lazy college student my first two years as well).

I'm not the person to ask here, I hit it for the first time around age 10 and found it effortless

i had essentially no formal mathematics education until i was an adult, which may explain some things

someone turning out to be a massive asshat does taint the less suspect takes too (common problem for sure)

I somehow think this is worse for online stuff. Might be in part a fallacy but feels like it is easier to separate something published as a book from whatever bad takes the author produces in other media or even later books (for example NN Taleb)

For the record: never about the race science shit! Before noticing that.

He did make some good points! A handful of original ones and a larger set repackaged into a format that was more readily accessible to a certain neurotype. He also used those good points to smuggle white supremacist talking points to an audience that likely wouldn't have otherwise sought them out.

Tbh my original feel on randomly bumbling onto slate star codex was ”there is a weird Smell to all of this but the guy makes some good points and Also he uses too many words so I feel embarrassed sharing it”

The two modal reactions are "everyone here is autistic (derogatory)" and "everyone here is autistic (laudatory), but oh no they're also all nazis".

now getting the idea that it was weaponized packaging, like some curious inverse of web scams tailored to only work on the most credulous people in existence

no you got it. the entire scott- and yud-o-verse both filter people, among other things, for tolerating their writing styles and their high-engagement people have a really particular psychological profile

i think rationalism having so many spinoff cults is multicausal

There are some leaked private emails where he's incredibly explicit about this, at least with regards to the crap Moldbug was writing at the time. That doesn't technically mean he was doing the same thing with race science but, c'mon, yes it does.

if it isn't these ones i'd enjoy seeing them, i have a collection in my brain of this stuff bsky.app/profile/segy...

Yeah, that's the one. Anecdotally the first time I ever heard of NRx was SSC's giant two parter telling me what in retrospect was a carefully chosen subset of the ways in which it was wrong, so it at least worked to disseminate the idea to one extra brain.

you gotta hand him some points for subtlety

in fact: he often specializes in arguing for the exact opposite of the thing he is trying to convince you of.

The most shocking thing, though, is probably that even in informal communications his writing is just Like That.

There are some interesting parallels here to our very own edgy-neurodiverse-bloglord-turned-politician Jussi Halla-Aho. Although his Scripta blog (famously quoted by Breivik) was explicitly open to racist stuff. Wikipedia entry has a whiff of Halla-aho apologism en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jussi_H...

Relatedly: someone could have a day job in cleaning out the traces of ”race realist” guys writing in Finnish and Finnish-adjacent wikipedia

have heard similar things about norway and sweden

Yeah… similar scenes and smaller wikipedias are highly susceptible to the effect of some weird guy caring about a topic and of course the ”race realists” have their Special Interests, it could be edited out with some effort because they aren’t that dominant

Once Georges W Bush said "hey it is raining", and he was entirely correct