it is noteworthy, also, that this has been going on for over a decade now. this is not a difficult to spot pattern. basically some views (ie, Scott's) get a lot more leeway and shielding than other views (ie, anyone who disagrees with Scott's view too much) bsky.app/profile/valk...
eg, " in conclusion, this is obviously pseudocientific propaganda, and it is so bad that nobody should respect you or anything you say ever again. you demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of statistics or even the concept of empiricism." almost certainly over the line
you have to admire the level of art that went into saying it indirectly, though. it's an art form. he is very good at it bsky.app/profile/sent...
posting absolute pseudoscientific trash repeatedly: not bannable saying "this is absolute trash": probably bannable
some emails from 2014 which really raise the question: is it really a coincidence that you're super cozy with various neoreactionaries on your blog
necroing thread to attach this part. i guess this is now a "why i see scott primarily as a neoreactionary ideologue with a progressive aesthetic" megathread bsky.app/profile/mutu...
my "reading scott's leaked emails closely" thread bsky.app/profile/segy...
rationalwiki archive in case it changes or goes away later. archive.is/202506121945...
"jewish racial superiority" blog posts one: slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/t... two: slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/29/f... three: slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/30/h... four: www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-smi...
1) yes, i do think that he is into eugenics specifically because he has a narrative that flatters him specifically. in another post about IQ he notes how obviously inadequate he was as a child compared to his brother, a musical prodigy. i imagine he's thought about his own IQ a lot.
2) noah smith fucking bodies him in the set of posts that "four" is part of, which is amazing. what the fuck has gone wrong with noah
I used to be into SSC in high school from posts like Toxoplasma and Categories Made for Man, which I still think are fantastically lucid. And then I read these race science IQ posts and had a huge cognitive dissonance. Still not sure how someone so lucid on some topics could be so foggy on others
some topics are about his identity and insecurities, and others aren't, imho. but yeah it's a massive cognitive blind spot. earlier post on that one: bsky.app/profile/segy...
How has rationalwiki avoided going off summer ideological deep end for so long?
Not everyone in movement atheism or skepticism is racist. Most New Atheists became conventional liberals.
basically people who identified as any of those things have tended to churn out as movements become more toxic
Posting this just in case you haven't seen it, I think it's a pretty good analysis of Alexander's rhetorical strategies.
def belongs in the thread in its entirety, thx
I wonder how many people who read him like reading those long winded cooking blogs before you get to the recipe. There’s a small recipe of something (might not be tasty) inside a massive amount of tangentially related nonsense.
the digressions are kind of the point, they're all interesting things when he's not being too defensive. and he can hide the main point anywhere in there
I mean this is the pretty straightforward implication of the leaked emails + that whole cohort's obsession with Leo Strauss right?
yes. i mostly like aggregating examples because it demonstrates that it's a sort of systemic problem and not a slant he sometimes injects, tbh. it is absolutely pervasive in his writing
I have read all of this, but also all you need is the last sentence “the garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.” Scott Alexander, and a lot of people who remain on x dot com the social networking service, believe this (incorrectly, in my opinion) to be true of themselves.
Yes but also the NRxers taught him lots of interesting world war 2 facts, he just tuned out the bad ones
the main fact was apparently "churchhill should have allied with hitler" after you follow the sourcing
That's a little unfair. You're allowed to very bloodlessly provide extensive citations as to why it's trash while carefully tiptoeing around implying any bad faith on the part of the trash poster, after which you will be shouted down by people engaging in unambiguously non-bannable behavior.
yeah, i am forbidden from having long-term memory or from drawing conclusions about the person themselves or their process for choosing information to post
I remain embarrassed that it took me as long as it did to notice, but the "as long as it did" I'm embarrassed by is like three or four months and meanwhile some of these clowns are a decade into performing the same ritual argument verbatim every week or two.
look can you really adjust your credence for A given B? who's to say
All words are exclusively in a vacuum
damn it you beat me to it
It's a bog standard (if characteristically verbose) restatement of the paradox of tolerance. Absolutely unimpeachable progressive logic, so long as you're not allowed to interrogate too deeply into which politely stated views are and aren't antisocial crank bullshit.
"I think flinging insults at interlocutors is a different kind of violation than positing ethnic genetic differences" counts as "indirect"??? That was the point I went
they're just positing it. it's a totally harmless postulate. etc. yes, this is relatively indirect
it’s interesting, this was in 2018 so maybe they’ve since fallen out but this person at least at one point was heavily socially connected with a certain former vox writer who now works at the argument
no she was still defending him early this year. other than being nice to him specifically she seems fine to me.
I cannot imagine willingly interacting with those tedious racist dorks.
I would rather attack my own knees with a hammer than navigate Siskand's ranking of what kinds of rank bigotry are and are not subjects for civil debate.
and this too filters who is there
"The left makes bad counterarguments" also gets *way* too much evidentiary weight in those circles; they've been citing that Richard Lynn "national IQ" meta-analysis for years and feeling shored up by seeing ...
see also nathan robinson's response to scott from back in the day and him being incredibly selective about which voices on the left he chooses to engage with www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/03...
Peak Nathan Robinson moment tbh
A fun project that I don’t have time for would be to read like 100% of Classic Scott (probably what, 2014-2020?) count all of the figures he cites, quotes, names, and then figure out if any of them are anything other than white.
things that an llm can plausibly automate much or all of the work of for 200 alex
Titotal did something like this for his book reviews. titotal.substack.com/p/the-walled...
Welp
Shoutout to Titotal
when hes good hes good
...weak-sauce counters along the lines of "there's no such thing as intelligence" or "all tests are culture-biased" without ever digging in and noticing stuff like "clinical sample with malaria"
there are some actually-good refutations of it floating around now, but I don't recall seeing anything that really dug in until the last few years - the nazis have had a long time to propagandize in those circles
scott managed to refrain from outright endorsing lynn until this year i think. his people love lynn but he personally knew to keep his hands clean. i assume he's totally audience captured now tbh
i also really like the more general arguments because they are, well, more general. if someone cites lynn they're a crank idiot, period. if someone goes digging through The Bell Curve and decides to defend literally every thing said in that book, the general principles are required
him making that endorsement post directly caused my break with rationalism lmao
i remember this and it left a strong impression on me
yeah - the whole atittude toward it is weirdly anti-scientific and incurious; "this entire nation is, on average, clinically mentally retarded" is an outrageous claim which you should be seeking much more data to either refute or investigate the cause of, and instead they lean on crap studies with..
...obvious problems and tiny sample sizes to support it and continue on their merry way acting like they treat it as a dogmatically established fact that they know and the terrible liberals are ignorant of
it's such incredibly obviously motivated reasoning, man
the Stat piece from last year was fantastic Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles | STAT share.google/lfbUBaPqc1nn...
Yeah, that's one of the ones I was thinking of. Non-surveilled link: www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/r...
