1. It gets kind of clear kind of quickly, hanging out with them, that the 'rationalist' community don't use the term in the way adherents of Cartesian epistemology do, if they're aware of it at all. It's shorthand for 'I think about stuff, and am better than other people who (by dint of their not agreeing with my Bloomberg-Muskish politics, that maths can prove) clearly don't think about stuff'.
2. On reflection, perhaps it's unsurprising that Silicon Valley chaps and everyone in the cultural category of such people would be predisposed to a sort of deep-but-narrow intellectual habit. I'd wager many of the SSC adherents are technically skilled people who are very smart within the ambits of what they do, but there's a phenomenon of people with proven deep-but-narrow intellectual capacity thinking that the sort of capacity they have is the only sort of capacity needed to save the world. The effect of bubbles, I wager. When you're hailed as messianic in your realm of human endeavour, without ever having been exposed to the multipolarity of human endeavour and how there are also vastly capable people in other fields where the skills required to do great things are different from the skills you have, you're liable to generalising yourself as a messiah writ large (Sam Harris, Elon Musk, etc.) But people seem guilty of contributing to this problem too: as the Elon Musks are happy to diagnose and prescribe for problems he has no expertise in dealing with, so too are people happy to go to the Elon Musks (/sports stars/celebrity actors/podcasters) for answers.
3. The fact that it was necessary for you to follow up "highly recommend it to you" with an explanation that it did not mean you agreed with everything you said made me a little sad.
"...energetic progressives in rural districts. He sent a bunch of money to a bunch of great candidates who ran really admirable campaigns and then just lost in droves, even in a really solid national political environment.2 The exception that proves the rule here — Jared Golden —represents a Maine district that was Dem-leaning in national politics in the very recent past."
Golden isn't a progressive. He's a Blue Dog and was an infantryman in the Marines. Curious that he was the only one who won...
It seems highly rational to me to be a rationalist. :) Also, I gave 10% of my income away in 2020 to the poorest people in the world (GiveDirectly, please send $). More people should. Religious organizations are going to spend donation money on paying for more preachers. The world doesn't get better through prayer, it gets better through action and donations. All things I believe. Thanks!
A strange, maybe technical point on the post. I started reading it in the email and noticed references to 'Kade.' These are replaced by 'Metz' on the web version.
"It is true that he did that, but if you read the post, he was aligning with Murray’s suggestion that we should have a universal basic income to reduce poverty not with Murray’s ideas about race and IQ. "
You are missing the signaling involved by any reference to Murray - even to reference some incidental thing Murray said that has little to do with primary things Murray have said. Murray's name means something. The something is: prime example of producer of racist crap dressed up to look science - but crap scoffed at by professionals in the field of study. However he is carted out again and again and again and again. Each time he is wheeled out, all the Facts Man 'rationalists' demand everybody engage him and take him seriously..... again and again and again and again.
I wasn’t really offended by the NYTimes article. The Rationalist movement has toxic elements like any group. I don’t understand how we can criticize cancel culture mobs in one breath, then threaten to dox journalists in the next.
The Sam Harris-Ezra Klein debate was pretty close to Annie Lowery’s fact man quote. It seemed clear to me that Sam and Rationalists in general treat themselves as outside of identity politics when it’s clear they have their own identity politics, they just don’t call them that. One of the positions is categorizing all pro-minority policies as identity politics and therefore less valid/more transactional.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading Less Wrong and I don’t know that I’d call most of what is talked about “disruptive”. There is a lot of useful discussion about examining your own biases. On the other side is a boat load of motivated reasoning where the author decides they want to prove that IQ is related to race, then they marshall their resources to make convincing arguments as to why that might be the case and why it’s a completely normal to be interested in the subject for scientific reasons like the phrenologists of the past.
The full context of the McNeil story is both more interesting and actually more mundane in terms of what it reflects (or actually doesn't) of our current culture. He was known for being difficult, Baquet wanted to fire him already in 2019, but the union threatened to fight it. I definitely jumped to conclusions too quickly on this one.
Great posts. Great comments. Can't add anything -- I'm out of my depth once a conversation shifts to the -ists and -isms. But somewhat related ... a friend worked at Bridgewater. He said their Radical Transparency culture stuff worked, somewhat, in theory but there where a lot of assholes who loved it and leaned into it. Getting a similar vibe from those who lean into these third topics (e.g., IQ).
This post articulates exactly why I like Matt's writing and was happy to see him start this Substack. I sometimes disagree with Matt's takes but I always find him worth reading and I would recommend him to anyone. I wish more journalists were as open-minded.
Might one reason to prefer philanthropy on local causes over global causes, however efficient, be that local causes tend to help promote local society and uplift political solutions to local problems? I doubt the rationalists have a quantification of local involvement, but it seems like one could be proposed?
It is a little weird how these self-described rationalists presume to adopt a kind of omniscient, eye-of-god view of what is the best way to help humanity as a whole, instead of focusing on making their little corner of the world the best it can be. As if they have some personal interest in the evolutionary thriving of the species as a whole. It can feel like a psychological trick to justify avoiding the hard problems that are right in front of them in their own community and country, under the guise of being too busy solving bigger problems elsewhere.
I mean, if you draw no distinction between helping those near you and those elsewhere, why draw the line at humanity? Why not focus on chickens, as the post the alludes to, if you can make a bigger improvement to net welfare there.
How do you define "near" vs. "elsewhere", though? If you define "near" as "in your own state", for example, what were the Freedom Riders doing going down to the South? Shouldn't they have focused on their own communities? If "near" is your country, then should you not donate to a developing country hit badly by a tsunami?
I'm not at all trying to do some gotcha here, I'm genuinely unsure about how one would define near/far in this context. Also, if the problems close to home are hard and expensive to solve, and ones far away are cheaper and easier, why *not* focus on those? If the cost of the advocacy to get the policy changes required to keep one person from being wrongly killed by police in the US is, say, $250,000 vs. $2,500 to keep one person in sub-Saharan Africa of dying of malaria... why does it make sense for *one individual* to donate to the first cause rather than the second? Sure, governments, NGOs, etc. should absolutely devote attention and money to both causes as they're both worth pursuing, but I don't see why it's wrong for an individual small-scale donor to donate to the cause that saves the most lives per dollar they have to give.
Yeah I agree that the distinction is arbitrary but maybe it’s related to relationships with folks being possibly more sustainable locally? Although in a totally virtual era maybe that doesn’t mean quite as much either.
I don't know about the rest of the article, but I'd like to push back on Scott's defense of himself on the feminist point. He claims that he was referring to a very specific, small group of feminists with the Voldemort thing. If you read the top of the section the Voldemort claim comes from, there is this paragraph:
"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."
This makes it pretty clear that he doesn't think that the feminists he's calling Voldemort are a tightly circumscribed, non-representative group of feminists. As a spot check on this, you can ctrl-f for 30% in this piece: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/
to find that he thinks 70% of feminists are insane.
I guess I should end this comment by saying that I somewhat liked SlateStarCodex, and I don't think a person should be driven from public life even if they do think (incorrectly!) that feminists are Voldemort. But it bothers me that he's lying about it.
He’s written tons of anti-feminist (and I would argue, misogynist) stuff and it’s incredibly bizarre to me to see almost nobody here acknowledge it. Don’t get me started on how he compared feminism to whale cancer.
In the end, as off-put as I was by the Sandifer quote, I was curious enough to read the rest of Metz' article that I tamped down my nausea with a bit of seltzer and plowed through the piece. It was of course what I expected. A deliberate hit job intended to de-legitimize SSC et al based on the guilt by association that comes from a) citing someone who has expressed other, unrelated ideas unappealing to some e.g. Charles Murray, or b) expressing ideas that might be embraced by a lunatic fringe. I did a quick check of Mr. Metz' oeuvre, and could find no such concern ever expressed by him for the more extreme views of BLM, a movement founded on a statistical fallacy, though we know that periods of increased attention to those views often lead to the assassination of cops. Or of him worrying that the views of high profile members of the Squad regarding Israel, and well let's be honest, Jews, might stoke anti-semitism.
It is also a neat trick that he makes reference to Siskind's own views with a tone of repugnance, without actually saying why those views are so objectionable. Presumably because the basis for Metz' opinion would not withstand the test of reason. Like where he writes: "(Siskind) said that affirmative action was difficult to distinguish from “discriminating against white men.” Res ipsa loquitor, I guess. But course what really pisses Metz off is that Siskind is being rewarded for his ideas, despite his (sniff)"verbosity", in an amount presumably far greater than that earned by poor ink stained wretches at the Times. And that he has sponsors who will ensure his safety. Liberals hate when that happens.
Beyond the merits of rationalism, I find the piece a little weird in that the premise of the piece seems to be these people secretly ascribe to a weird ideology. But to me if we just examine the public record of how tech companies behave it’s a lot more damning than some weird expose about a blog they read... like read Andrew marantz on content moderation and Kevin Roose on engagement algorithms. Looking at the decisions companies make and asking their executives or employees why they make them is far more illustrative and damning in illuminating these companies’ negative impact than trying to figure out which blogs they read
Hi Matthew, I liked your piece so much I just signed up. Then I went to read the Metz article. I was not expecting much, and that is what I got. I made it until this quote: “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.” And right away realized I was now in the land of selective thought suppression. Oh wait, it IS the Times we are talking about so....
So, we now have to think about the consequences of expressing- not necessarily endorsing, but merely expressing - contrarian ideas, though not sure what she posits as the benchmark against which those ideas may be contrarian, but I guess we all know. But I am 100% certain that Ms. Sandifer was not nearly as cautionary about the universal endorsement of Greta Thunberg for example, and the expression of her idea that the world will end in 12 years (10 by now I guess), if we don't do something ridiculous destructive to our way of life RIGHT NOW, sending a generation of children into a 50s-nuclear era level of panic (there may be a silver lining to schools being closed during COVID).
But I too have reached the point where I feel a physical nausea reading the censorious tut-tutting of liberal authoritarians in training. We are in a dangerous place, the flip side I suppose of the HUAC and McCarthy dominated 50s, where people suffered in similar, or frankly worse ways. I am not confident that we will have our Joseph Welch moment, in time to wake us from this bad dream.
This is, I think, a deeply uncharitable take on her quote- I read it as her saying they do not always think about the consequences of enacting those ideas, not of simply having and expressing them
What's the difference? In either case it is HER views about those consequences that she considers alarming. How do you feel about the consequences of arguing in favor of defunding the police? Keen to see her worry about those consequences, either your way or mine.
Well in my view the difference is that one interpretation is that it’s bad to have and share disruptive ideas, while the other interpretation is that some disruptive ideas are also bad ideas, and that the proponents have blind spots. To your point, defund the police is a disruptive idea. It’s not bad that people had or expressed that idea, but it seems like a bad idea... maybe she’d say the same critique holds? Maybe not. We all have blind spots
What drives me absolutely crazy about self-congratulatory blogs like SCC is that the authors and supporters have incredible blind spots. They support “fearless inquiry” yet that fearless inquiry into social issues somehow always supports retrograde positions of maybe 100 years ago. For instance, “fearless inquiry” into whether women are as smart as men (our brains are physically smaller and we have a different mix of grey/white matter).
Somehow there’s never a “fearless inquiry” as to whether, say men shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and perhaps not even allowed to hold political office. If I were myself not into reading the room, I could build an extremely compelling, if unethical, case for it. And a lot of people who enjoy stroking their chins over the Bell Curve would get extremely angry to suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of “maybe people like you are inferior and deserve social status.”
Or this: "One of America's top pro-life groups, Focus on the Family, spends two hundred thousand dead children a year pushing its message of conservatism and opposition to abortion. Take a second to fully appreciate the irony there."
And in the SSC comments I do remember encountering some radical and very controversial faminist-ish ideas, for example, that any sexual act between a man and a woman should be considered rape.
Well, the author is an asexual man who lives in a polyamorous group home, so I don’t find his defense of trans rights particularly heroic. In fact, for me, it cements even more his ability to sympathize with people similar to him, while disdaining people unlike him in race and sex. Which of course is something his entire blog pretends he doesn’t do.
Again, as a libertarian, it’s extremely likely he’s pro choice. So are MRAs, and that is absolutely not driven by their respect for female autonomy.
Scott is a liberal democrat (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article). He voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primaries last year and for Hillary Clinton in the previous elections (I have vague memory that he voted for Clinton in those primaries too, but can't find the link).
I, too, am angry at all the blogs that haven't written all the posts you thought about writing.
More seriously: you should actually write those arguments, or at least not-not write them because you feel like they would make people (who you don't respect and happily call racist) uncomfortable.
There's absolutely a good contrarian case for reducing/restrict male access to various positions of power, and writing it would be a stunning rebuke to all those slatestarcodex posts arguing that women are biologically unable to hold certain roles, which you linked to in your comment.
In all seriousness, I would feel weird putting forth an argument that I really thought was unethical just to see if it pissed of the people I thought it would piss off. I’m just saying people at SSC aren’t that imaginative in their transgressive suggestions. What about moving everyone who isn’t of direct Native American descent into a small reservation, and returning all the remaining land to those with the prior claim? What about raising the voting age to 65, on the basis that only then will you have sufficient wisdom to make decisions for the country?
If you do decide to build that case ... please post it. On the political office front, an argument built around de-risking institutions with male vs. female crime rates, violence, corruption, etc. would be interesting to wrestle with.
Yes! The “fearless inquiry” seems to have strict guard rails. I think many in the community can be aware and critical of this too. Like.. Matt’s post is about a big and sort of diverse community so I’m hesitant to generalize. But reflecting on the conversations I had with folks... they’ll deliver hot takes, but they don’t want to be made uncomfortable. Some want to be soothed that their low/non participation in their own physical community is in no way in conflict with their status as a smart, ethical and good person. That’s why I liked the “who gets to have safe spaces” focus of the NYTs piece.
Sure. I find the tilt in the NYT frustrating as well. Matt has also written about bias in the MSM, and I agree with him. But that doesn’t absolve SA, who is the topic of this post.
Some thoughts from the philosophy salt mines:
1. It gets kind of clear kind of quickly, hanging out with them, that the 'rationalist' community don't use the term in the way adherents of Cartesian epistemology do, if they're aware of it at all. It's shorthand for 'I think about stuff, and am better than other people who (by dint of their not agreeing with my Bloomberg-Muskish politics, that maths can prove) clearly don't think about stuff'.
2. On reflection, perhaps it's unsurprising that Silicon Valley chaps and everyone in the cultural category of such people would be predisposed to a sort of deep-but-narrow intellectual habit. I'd wager many of the SSC adherents are technically skilled people who are very smart within the ambits of what they do, but there's a phenomenon of people with proven deep-but-narrow intellectual capacity thinking that the sort of capacity they have is the only sort of capacity needed to save the world. The effect of bubbles, I wager. When you're hailed as messianic in your realm of human endeavour, without ever having been exposed to the multipolarity of human endeavour and how there are also vastly capable people in other fields where the skills required to do great things are different from the skills you have, you're liable to generalising yourself as a messiah writ large (Sam Harris, Elon Musk, etc.) But people seem guilty of contributing to this problem too: as the Elon Musks are happy to diagnose and prescribe for problems he has no expertise in dealing with, so too are people happy to go to the Elon Musks (/sports stars/celebrity actors/podcasters) for answers.
3. The fact that it was necessary for you to follow up "highly recommend it to you" with an explanation that it did not mean you agreed with everything you said made me a little sad.
"...energetic progressives in rural districts. He sent a bunch of money to a bunch of great candidates who ran really admirable campaigns and then just lost in droves, even in a really solid national political environment.2 The exception that proves the rule here — Jared Golden —represents a Maine district that was Dem-leaning in national politics in the very recent past."
Golden isn't a progressive. He's a Blue Dog and was an infantryman in the Marines. Curious that he was the only one who won...
It seems highly rational to me to be a rationalist. :) Also, I gave 10% of my income away in 2020 to the poorest people in the world (GiveDirectly, please send $). More people should. Religious organizations are going to spend donation money on paying for more preachers. The world doesn't get better through prayer, it gets better through action and donations. All things I believe. Thanks!
Wow! That's a hell of a conversation. Well done. On another note--Matt, that was a crusher of piece. Bravo.
A strange, maybe technical point on the post. I started reading it in the email and noticed references to 'Kade.' These are replaced by 'Metz' on the web version.
"It is true that he did that, but if you read the post, he was aligning with Murray’s suggestion that we should have a universal basic income to reduce poverty not with Murray’s ideas about race and IQ. "
You are missing the signaling involved by any reference to Murray - even to reference some incidental thing Murray said that has little to do with primary things Murray have said. Murray's name means something. The something is: prime example of producer of racist crap dressed up to look science - but crap scoffed at by professionals in the field of study. However he is carted out again and again and again and again. Each time he is wheeled out, all the Facts Man 'rationalists' demand everybody engage him and take him seriously..... again and again and again and again.
I wasn’t really offended by the NYTimes article. The Rationalist movement has toxic elements like any group. I don’t understand how we can criticize cancel culture mobs in one breath, then threaten to dox journalists in the next.
The Sam Harris-Ezra Klein debate was pretty close to Annie Lowery’s fact man quote. It seemed clear to me that Sam and Rationalists in general treat themselves as outside of identity politics when it’s clear they have their own identity politics, they just don’t call them that. One of the positions is categorizing all pro-minority policies as identity politics and therefore less valid/more transactional.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading Less Wrong and I don’t know that I’d call most of what is talked about “disruptive”. There is a lot of useful discussion about examining your own biases. On the other side is a boat load of motivated reasoning where the author decides they want to prove that IQ is related to race, then they marshall their resources to make convincing arguments as to why that might be the case and why it’s a completely normal to be interested in the subject for scientific reasons like the phrenologists of the past.
The full context of the McNeil story is both more interesting and actually more mundane in terms of what it reflects (or actually doesn't) of our current culture. He was known for being difficult, Baquet wanted to fire him already in 2019, but the union threatened to fight it. I definitely jumped to conclusions too quickly on this one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/business/media/new-york-times-donald-mcneil.html
Great posts. Great comments. Can't add anything -- I'm out of my depth once a conversation shifts to the -ists and -isms. But somewhat related ... a friend worked at Bridgewater. He said their Radical Transparency culture stuff worked, somewhat, in theory but there where a lot of assholes who loved it and leaned into it. Getting a similar vibe from those who lean into these third topics (e.g., IQ).
This post articulates exactly why I like Matt's writing and was happy to see him start this Substack. I sometimes disagree with Matt's takes but I always find him worth reading and I would recommend him to anyone. I wish more journalists were as open-minded.
Might one reason to prefer philanthropy on local causes over global causes, however efficient, be that local causes tend to help promote local society and uplift political solutions to local problems? I doubt the rationalists have a quantification of local involvement, but it seems like one could be proposed?
It is a little weird how these self-described rationalists presume to adopt a kind of omniscient, eye-of-god view of what is the best way to help humanity as a whole, instead of focusing on making their little corner of the world the best it can be. As if they have some personal interest in the evolutionary thriving of the species as a whole. It can feel like a psychological trick to justify avoiding the hard problems that are right in front of them in their own community and country, under the guise of being too busy solving bigger problems elsewhere.
I mean, if you draw no distinction between helping those near you and those elsewhere, why draw the line at humanity? Why not focus on chickens, as the post the alludes to, if you can make a bigger improvement to net welfare there.
How do you define "near" vs. "elsewhere", though? If you define "near" as "in your own state", for example, what were the Freedom Riders doing going down to the South? Shouldn't they have focused on their own communities? If "near" is your country, then should you not donate to a developing country hit badly by a tsunami?
I'm not at all trying to do some gotcha here, I'm genuinely unsure about how one would define near/far in this context. Also, if the problems close to home are hard and expensive to solve, and ones far away are cheaper and easier, why *not* focus on those? If the cost of the advocacy to get the policy changes required to keep one person from being wrongly killed by police in the US is, say, $250,000 vs. $2,500 to keep one person in sub-Saharan Africa of dying of malaria... why does it make sense for *one individual* to donate to the first cause rather than the second? Sure, governments, NGOs, etc. should absolutely devote attention and money to both causes as they're both worth pursuing, but I don't see why it's wrong for an individual small-scale donor to donate to the cause that saves the most lives per dollar they have to give.
Yeah I agree that the distinction is arbitrary but maybe it’s related to relationships with folks being possibly more sustainable locally? Although in a totally virtual era maybe that doesn’t mean quite as much either.
I don't know about the rest of the article, but I'd like to push back on Scott's defense of himself on the feminist point. He claims that he was referring to a very specific, small group of feminists with the Voldemort thing. If you read the top of the section the Voldemort claim comes from, there is this paragraph:
"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."
This makes it pretty clear that he doesn't think that the feminists he's calling Voldemort are a tightly circumscribed, non-representative group of feminists. As a spot check on this, you can ctrl-f for 30% in this piece: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/
to find that he thinks 70% of feminists are insane.
I guess I should end this comment by saying that I somewhat liked SlateStarCodex, and I don't think a person should be driven from public life even if they do think (incorrectly!) that feminists are Voldemort. But it bothers me that he's lying about it.
He’s written tons of anti-feminist (and I would argue, misogynist) stuff and it’s incredibly bizarre to me to see almost nobody here acknowledge it. Don’t get me started on how he compared feminism to whale cancer.
In the end, as off-put as I was by the Sandifer quote, I was curious enough to read the rest of Metz' article that I tamped down my nausea with a bit of seltzer and plowed through the piece. It was of course what I expected. A deliberate hit job intended to de-legitimize SSC et al based on the guilt by association that comes from a) citing someone who has expressed other, unrelated ideas unappealing to some e.g. Charles Murray, or b) expressing ideas that might be embraced by a lunatic fringe. I did a quick check of Mr. Metz' oeuvre, and could find no such concern ever expressed by him for the more extreme views of BLM, a movement founded on a statistical fallacy, though we know that periods of increased attention to those views often lead to the assassination of cops. Or of him worrying that the views of high profile members of the Squad regarding Israel, and well let's be honest, Jews, might stoke anti-semitism.
It is also a neat trick that he makes reference to Siskind's own views with a tone of repugnance, without actually saying why those views are so objectionable. Presumably because the basis for Metz' opinion would not withstand the test of reason. Like where he writes: "(Siskind) said that affirmative action was difficult to distinguish from “discriminating against white men.” Res ipsa loquitor, I guess. But course what really pisses Metz off is that Siskind is being rewarded for his ideas, despite his (sniff)"verbosity", in an amount presumably far greater than that earned by poor ink stained wretches at the Times. And that he has sponsors who will ensure his safety. Liberals hate when that happens.
Beyond the merits of rationalism, I find the piece a little weird in that the premise of the piece seems to be these people secretly ascribe to a weird ideology. But to me if we just examine the public record of how tech companies behave it’s a lot more damning than some weird expose about a blog they read... like read Andrew marantz on content moderation and Kevin Roose on engagement algorithms. Looking at the decisions companies make and asking their executives or employees why they make them is far more illustrative and damning in illuminating these companies’ negative impact than trying to figure out which blogs they read
Hi Matthew, I liked your piece so much I just signed up. Then I went to read the Metz article. I was not expecting much, and that is what I got. I made it until this quote: “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.” And right away realized I was now in the land of selective thought suppression. Oh wait, it IS the Times we are talking about so....
So, we now have to think about the consequences of expressing- not necessarily endorsing, but merely expressing - contrarian ideas, though not sure what she posits as the benchmark against which those ideas may be contrarian, but I guess we all know. But I am 100% certain that Ms. Sandifer was not nearly as cautionary about the universal endorsement of Greta Thunberg for example, and the expression of her idea that the world will end in 12 years (10 by now I guess), if we don't do something ridiculous destructive to our way of life RIGHT NOW, sending a generation of children into a 50s-nuclear era level of panic (there may be a silver lining to schools being closed during COVID).
But I too have reached the point where I feel a physical nausea reading the censorious tut-tutting of liberal authoritarians in training. We are in a dangerous place, the flip side I suppose of the HUAC and McCarthy dominated 50s, where people suffered in similar, or frankly worse ways. I am not confident that we will have our Joseph Welch moment, in time to wake us from this bad dream.
This is, I think, a deeply uncharitable take on her quote- I read it as her saying they do not always think about the consequences of enacting those ideas, not of simply having and expressing them
What's the difference? In either case it is HER views about those consequences that she considers alarming. How do you feel about the consequences of arguing in favor of defunding the police? Keen to see her worry about those consequences, either your way or mine.
Well in my view the difference is that one interpretation is that it’s bad to have and share disruptive ideas, while the other interpretation is that some disruptive ideas are also bad ideas, and that the proponents have blind spots. To your point, defund the police is a disruptive idea. It’s not bad that people had or expressed that idea, but it seems like a bad idea... maybe she’d say the same critique holds? Maybe not. We all have blind spots
What drives me absolutely crazy about self-congratulatory blogs like SCC is that the authors and supporters have incredible blind spots. They support “fearless inquiry” yet that fearless inquiry into social issues somehow always supports retrograde positions of maybe 100 years ago. For instance, “fearless inquiry” into whether women are as smart as men (our brains are physically smaller and we have a different mix of grey/white matter).
Somehow there’s never a “fearless inquiry” as to whether, say men shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and perhaps not even allowed to hold political office. If I were myself not into reading the room, I could build an extremely compelling, if unethical, case for it. And a lot of people who enjoy stroking their chins over the Bell Curve would get extremely angry to suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of “maybe people like you are inferior and deserve social status.”
Although this is spot on about many people and bloggers, I feel it isn't quite fair to say about Slate Star Codex.
It's true that he wrote some very critical things about some feminists, like Amanda Marcotte, in some very specific context. But he also wrote many things that aren't "from 100 years ago", like a passionate defense of transgender people's right to transition (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), or a post on how ordinary polyamory is (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/06/polyamory-is-boring/).
Or this: "One of America's top pro-life groups, Focus on the Family, spends two hundred thousand dead children a year pushing its message of conservatism and opposition to abortion. Take a second to fully appreciate the irony there."
(https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/efh270/a_modest_proposal_by_scott_alexander_2008_i_think/).
And in the SSC comments I do remember encountering some radical and very controversial faminist-ish ideas, for example, that any sexual act between a man and a woman should be considered rape.
Well, the author is an asexual man who lives in a polyamorous group home, so I don’t find his defense of trans rights particularly heroic. In fact, for me, it cements even more his ability to sympathize with people similar to him, while disdaining people unlike him in race and sex. Which of course is something his entire blog pretends he doesn’t do.
Again, as a libertarian, it’s extremely likely he’s pro choice. So are MRAs, and that is absolutely not driven by their respect for female autonomy.
>as a libertarian...
Scott is a liberal democrat (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article). He voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primaries last year and for Hillary Clinton in the previous elections (I have vague memory that he voted for Clinton in those primaries too, but can't find the link).
I, too, am angry at all the blogs that haven't written all the posts you thought about writing.
More seriously: you should actually write those arguments, or at least not-not write them because you feel like they would make people (who you don't respect and happily call racist) uncomfortable.
There's absolutely a good contrarian case for reducing/restrict male access to various positions of power, and writing it would be a stunning rebuke to all those slatestarcodex posts arguing that women are biologically unable to hold certain roles, which you linked to in your comment.
I’m angry that you’re angry!
In all seriousness, I would feel weird putting forth an argument that I really thought was unethical just to see if it pissed of the people I thought it would piss off. I’m just saying people at SSC aren’t that imaginative in their transgressive suggestions. What about moving everyone who isn’t of direct Native American descent into a small reservation, and returning all the remaining land to those with the prior claim? What about raising the voting age to 65, on the basis that only then will you have sufficient wisdom to make decisions for the country?
If you do decide to build that case ... please post it. On the political office front, an argument built around de-risking institutions with male vs. female crime rates, violence, corruption, etc. would be interesting to wrestle with.
Yes! The “fearless inquiry” seems to have strict guard rails. I think many in the community can be aware and critical of this too. Like.. Matt’s post is about a big and sort of diverse community so I’m hesitant to generalize. But reflecting on the conversations I had with folks... they’ll deliver hot takes, but they don’t want to be made uncomfortable. Some want to be soothed that their low/non participation in their own physical community is in no way in conflict with their status as a smart, ethical and good person. That’s why I liked the “who gets to have safe spaces” focus of the NYTs piece.
Deserve lower* social status.
Sure. I find the tilt in the NYT frustrating as well. Matt has also written about bias in the MSM, and I agree with him. But that doesn’t absolve SA, who is the topic of this post.