-
Um, unless you think Scott lied about what the reporter said, this is not a very sensible take. The blog takedown page reads like a factual account of what happened, and a request to direct any criticism towards the NYT's editors through the proper channels. He has never called for a mad frenzy or anything like that.
I find this an interesting reaction. Could you defend "clearly intended"? I feel familiar with Scott's writing, and familiar with his audience, and I think his clear intention was exactly what he said --- "please be polite" and "I will be very sad if you are a jerk".
I could understand if you said "I took it to mean" or "He should have been aware that some people would take it to mean", but what gives you the confidence to say "clearly intended"? Are you sure you're familiar enough with his writing and his audience to make this claim?
If he did not intend his followers to attack anyone then he should not have named anyone or put any kind of contact information in his post. Only someone that deliberately wants people to contact and pressure the editor would have used the language that he did. He created plausible deniability by saying "he doesn't want anyone to be harmed" and then in the next sentence listed contact information with "suggestions".
If you really wanted a civil discussion, would you have used the type of language that he did?
This reads to me like "his words were perfectly polite but I've decided that he must have intended a certain subtext and the subtext I believe that he intended is evil". Which ... I mean, you can certainly claim that, but when you're talking about the writings of somebody who used a lot of words to do his best to make his meaning clear in the text, accusation-via-subtext at least needs some sort of evidence to be a reasonable thing to do.
> If he did not intend his followers to attack anyone then he should not have named anyone or put any kind of contact information in his post.
The complaints form and the relevant editor are precisely how feedback is supposed to be given to news organisations. Some publications have a "Public Editor" position to handle such things, in which case they should have been contacted instead, but the NYT axed that position a while back.
I'm also unsure why you believe that providing the contact information of the correct person to contact given an issue with a potential article to be published by their department is a bad thing.
Are you sure you're not just starting with a belief that Scott is malicious and then reasoning backwards to find a way that his actions in this case could have been malicious? I'm quite probably missing something, but I find myself unable to follow your logic any other way.
I already stated several times that if my intent was for civil discourse then I would not have used the language that was used in the letter because it is full of contradictions. It outlines victimhood and becomes a rallying cry for those that identify with Scott and that's exactly what has happened. Everyone discussing the post assumes the position of a victim. I think this is odd because if Scott is so smart then why is everyone making him out to be the victim? Even the logic used to justify Scott as a persona is contradictory, he's a victim and yet he's not a victim.
The letter is deceptive and that's why I attribute malice to it. It's intention and the words used are misaligned.
The point I'm trying to make here is that "It's hard to explain but his intention in much of his writing was coded. He would consistently use certain keywords and phrases to make certain associations and when you follow through the logic it becomes very sinister" does not, in fact, outline an argument. It merely asserts that "much of his writing" is "sinister" without making any argument for why - and you've now once again claimed "his writing is full of associations" ... without ever having named such an association.
There's no requirement to make such an argument, of course, but if you're simply going to state your beliefs with zero explanation then it would be preferable if you were up front about having chosen to do so rather than claim to have made an argument where none exists.
I stopped reading SSC after I noticed certain patterns and decided I did not want those ideas rattling around in my head. So I gave you a high level impression / outline of what conclusions I reached without providing the actual trail of evidence that lead to it. If you want more precision then you will need to point me to specific posts of his so we can argue about them because even the people defending him are not providing any actual arguments for why his writing was good. They're providing very high level impressions shaped by an echo chamber.
But let's go with this one:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200202214359/https://slatestar...
since I suspect that will comfortably draw out our underlying disagreements (and if you don't know who Phedre no Delauney is, the Kushiel's Dart novels are fantastic and you've missed out).
It's terrible and dreadful writing (it elicits terror and dread in the reader).
Should people ask taboo questions? Yes, they should ask such questions in private conversations with people they trust. When the interpretation is out of your hands then you need to be really careful what information you are making available to the public / audience. It's clear he doesn't think through the logic and wants to come across as smart. It's juvenile. Adults speak with intent and they address people directly and respectfully. I have never seen any adult conversations on SSC, I've only ever seen people that are peacocking their intelligence.
-- begin quote
When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really, really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or something along those lines.
Luckily, since I was a classical liberal, my reaction to this mistake was – to not bother them, and to get very very angry at people who did bother them. I got upset with people trying to fire Phil Robertson for being homophobic even though homophobia is stupid. You better bet I also got upset with people trying to fire transgender people back when I thought transgender was stupid.
And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.
But it could have been worse. I didn’t like transgender people, and so I left them alone while still standing up for their rights. My epistemic structure failed gracefully. For anyone who’s not overconfident, and so who expects massive epistemic failure on a variety of important issues all the time, graceful failure modes are a really important feature for an epistemic structure to have.
-- end quote
I read the humility and desire to not to harm even when you're wrong inherent in that passage as the exact opposite of "peacocking intelligence" - and I find your choice to use PUA terminology to describe the behaviour to be either unintentionally gross or deliberately unkind depending on whether or not you were aware that was what you were doing.
Let's rewrite that paragraph and use fewer emotionally charged words.
--
As a younger person I thought transgenderism was about seeking attention. But being trained in the liberal arts I decided to question this assumption and not act antagonistically towards them because of my personal interpretation of their situation.
As I got older I realized my initial assumption about attention seeking was incorrect and I took responsibility for and corrected my beliefs.
I guess it could have turned out differently if I hadn't been trained in the liberal arts. So I'm glad my training included keeping an open mind and accepting people different from me and with different life circumstances.
--
Same exact content, none of the emotional baggage and vainglory.
Notice all the words I took out because I knew they would elicit negative reactions in the reader: stupid, dumb, mistake, very very angry, upset, homophobic. He repeated those words enough times that a perceptive reader would have picked up on the subtext of him trying to distance himself from those negatively valenced words. He's not trying to educate the reader, he's trying to put distance between himself and certain associations. That's why it's not good writing. It's about him, it's not about the reader. And in his attempt to "peacock" he's putting associations into the reader's mind that are detrimental to the reader's thought processes all the while elevating himself as a paragon of goodness. As the term "peacock" suggests, his writing is vainglorious.
The point is not "accepting people different than me", it's "having suitable principles to still fight in favour of people I might otherwise rightly or wrongly dislike".
You completely removed the part where he not only didn't act antagonistically towards them but actively opposed other people doing so as well.
And that part was the single most important part, and the principle he was arguing in favour of.
If you think your rewrite was the same exact content, then I'm afraid I don't think you understood what he was saying at all.
Bingo!
He's obviously not a very good writer. I don't need to argue for freedom of speech and equal rights and justice for all because in my world those are givens. I don't need to justify to myself or others why those truths are self evident. Nor do I need to recount a story about being young and stupid. Everyone used to be young and stupid, that's also a given. There is no need to write it on a blog and show how you're so much better than what you used to be. Let your actions show how you are better. I don't need to be told when I can infer directly from someone's actions whether they're good or not. Words are deceptive, actions are truthful.
I don't put words like "very stupid", "angry", "I'm afraid", "fearful", etc. in my writing because I don't identify with those things and I don't want anyone reading my words to identify with them either. If I intend to say something then I say it without flowery language about my youth or emotionally charged words because I reserve those words for private conversations with people that I trust.
The article was about somebody who was arguing that using falsified numbers about rape statistics was not only acceptable feminism but was actually a good thing and that anybody who disagreed with that deserved to be destroyed.
Speaking as somebody who believes that the truth is quite sufficient justification for feminism to win, and that lying serves only to hand our enemies means to attack us, I believe that sadly we live in a world where that argument does need to be made.
I would prefer to live in a word where these arguments don't need to be made. I would prefer to live in a world where those truths are self evident.
But we don't yet, as both Adria Richards and David Shor have found out to their detriment. So making the argument that we should continues to be valuable.
But I would note that "there are better ways to make those arguments" is quite a distance from your original position.
> When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really, really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or something along those lines.
> And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.
> The point is not "accepting people different than me", it's "having suitable principles to still fight in favour of people I might otherwise rightly or wrongly dislike".
> You completely removed the part where he not only didn't act antagonistically towards them but actively opposed other people doing so as well.
What word other than "sinister" would you use to characterize the cluster of words I quoted which are implicit in the writing I quoted?
But do you have a dispute for the counterpoint from mst? If so, what is it?
I'm not going to quote it here, because it gives you a chance to talk about it at me rather than with the original person who brought up the counterpoint.
If you want me to talk to you then make a direct point instead of confused remarks about what I know and don't know and conversations I had with other people that were unrelated to you.
Yes, I was.
> When I asked you to clarify you dodged the question. I wouldn't ask if I knew, I asked because I didn't know what you were referring to.
If you didn't know what I was referring to, then you didn't know who you were referring to when you said the following: >> andrewprock already found an example and I agree with his assessment.
> If you want me to talk to you
I have no desire for you to talk to me: that was exactly why I asked you to respond to the other person and not me.
"Why not assassinate prominent racist and sexist politicians and intellectuals?"
I would definitely qualify these kind of straw-men as a "certain pattern" of language designed to incite rather than for insight.
This was basically a random selection because I'm curious to hear what your objections actually are:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190102011649/https://slatestar...
He already starts off with antagonism. Where is the data for this? How does he know what the popular consensus is? Why is he drawing such a sharp delineation between "popular" and their association with X and Y?
> A few iconoclasts say that X is definitely right and important, but maybe we should also think about Y sometimes.
Seems like he thinks he's an iconoclast and the people that associate with that will start to act out iconoclastically themselves and if you look at the comments you will notice that. They're modeling what Scott is outlining in the post.
> I can see why this pattern is tempting.
How clever of him to notice this pattern and point out it is tempting.
> If somebody said the US should allocate 50% of its defense budget to the usual global threats, and 50% to the threat of reptilian space invaders, then even though the plan contains the number “50-50” it would not be a “moderate” proposal.
He's making a really weird analogy. This is not what people argue about and he has created an extreme view that does not exist by comparing a position to "space invaders".
Anyway, I'm not reading further. I'm already convinced he's not making any worthwhile point here. He's using emotionally charged language to draw the reader in and make them identify with him. It's a poor tactic. It only works on people that don't notice it. And I think this is the most damning evidence against him, as a psychologist he should know this is what he's doing by making these statements. He doesn't speak / write like someone that has knowledge of human psychology. He speaks / writes like someone that uses knowledge of human psychology to confuse his audience.
The two professions are quite different.
> A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry, the branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, study, and treatment of mental disorders. Psychiatrists are medical doctors, unlike psychologists, and must evaluate patients to determine whether their symptoms are the result of a physical illness, a combination of physical and mental ailments, or strictly psychiatric. A psychiatrist usually works as the clinical leader of the multi-disciplinary team, which may comprise psychologists, social workers, occupational therapists, and nursing staff. Psychiatrists have broad training in a bio-psycho-social approach to assessment and management of mental illness.
> A psychologist is a person who studies normal and abnormal mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior by experimenting with, and observing, interpreting, and recording how individuals relate to one another and to their environments.
I have a doctorate in psychology, which gives me a PhD. It does not qualify me to prescribe drugs and save the lives of people on airplanes, which is something that a psychiatrist could be reasonably asked to do.
While psychiatrists spent time understanding physical and mental disorders, psychologists spend time understanding cognitive and behavioural aspects of humanity and running experiments (most of which are extremely difficult to control).
They are completely different things, like.
I am mentioning my credentials because I have been complaining about people not distinguishing between psychologists and psychiatrists for many, many years. I am a little triggered by such comparisons.
The human psyche (incidentally not a word you ever hear in psychology (and potentially psychiatry) classes) is large, and psychologist and psychiatrists focus on very different things.
Like it's fine if you don't see a difference between the two subjects, but others do as they are very, very different.
I guess the closest analogy would be if I called you (a mathematician by training, i assume) a statistician.
Many people might not see the difference between the two roles, but I am relatively confident that you would.
It would feel, to me, inappropriate to do otherwise while defending him.
More importantly though, I like Scott, but I think he is preposterously naive and friendly to a fault. And I think that has been weaponised against him countless times in the past, and is being weaponised against him now. And nothing makes me angrier than seeing friendly, charitable people being taken down by the vindictive and unscrupulous.
> If you really wanted a civil discussion, would you have used the type of language that he did?
Maybe, it depends on how aware I was of my audience. If my intended audience was the primary public posters on SSC, I can see saying just what he said. If I remembered in my fluster that 98% of the readers who never post might react differently, then probably not. If you picture Scott (as I do) as a really bright semi-autist who communicates online primarily with self-declared "rationalists", it doesn't seem impossible that he might forget in the heat of the moment (this had to be a stressful decision for him) that some percentage of his audience is going to interpret his words counter to his stated intent, even if that intent is real.
(I appreciate your response, by the way. I don't think you needed to delete your earlier comments. Yeah, they'll be flagged and downvoted, then we'll vouch for them to recover them and vote them back up. As long as you try to phrase things politely, there are enough people here who'll stand up for you even if we disagree with your conclusion.)
I think your interpretation is valid but I still think his writing caused harm even if it was inadvertent and someone should have pointed these things out to him much sooner but the SSC echo chamber did not allow for dissenting opinions so it had to be NYT journalist to make these things obvious to him and he did not respond well.
> Then there are better ways to make those arguments.
which, yes, there quite possibly are. There are always better ways to make any given argument.
But memexy's claim that Scott's work was bad because
> I don't need to argue for freedom of speech and equal rights and justice for all because in my world those are givens.
fails, in my opinion, to understand that there are many people for whom, sadly, those things aren't givens and that arguing that they should be is a lot of Scott's thing.
I would love to live in a world where those things are givens.
I appreciate Scott for making principled arguments for why, ideally, we would live in a world where those things are givens, and I appreciate Scott for, however imperfectly, trying to move us towards such a world as best he can.
(note, this is my (opinionated) summary of the thread that ensued from my sibling comment; if unsure whether I've captured things accurately, please read that whole thread and draw your own conclusions)
> I [mst] am entirely fine with you [memexy] believing that there are better ways to make those arguments - in fact, given any specific argument is almost certain to be imperfect, one would assume that there are.
> But I [mst] would note that "there are better ways to make those arguments" is quite a distance from your original position.
You [mst] made that conclusion, I did not. So I would appreciate it if you refined the phrasing to properly reflect the understanding that you are reaching the conclusion, not me.
I will also note the sophistic device being used here by mst of jumping up the thread to shortcircuit the evaluation of the actual evidence. This is quite deceptive.
My actual final response (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23786943) is now hidden away behind "more" button and unlikely to be visible so posting it here for visibility.
--
Yes, and you [mst] provided an example of such associations with "youth", "stupidity", "anger", "fear", "transphobia", "homophobia", "atrocity", "anger at others", "anger with self", "dislike of others", "opposition to others", etc.
> When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really, really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or something along those lines.
> And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.
> The point is not "accepting people different than me", it's "having suitable principles to still fight in favour of people I might otherwise rightly or wrongly dislike".
> You completely removed the part where he not only didn't act antagonistically towards them but actively opposed other people doing so as well.
What word other than "sinister" would you use to characterize the cluster of words I quoted which are implicit in the writing I quoted?
--
I have explicitly encouraged poeple to read the rest of the thread.
Your choice to characterise my doing so as a "sophistic device" and "deceptive" is your own.
I continue to encourage people who are unsure if my attempted summary is appropriate to read the whole of the original thread and draw their own conclusions.
I was civil throughout this discussion and I don't appreciate how you ended it.
And yet, I explicitly said: this is my (opinionated) summary of the thread that ensued from my sibling comment; if unsure whether I've captured things accurately, please read that whole thread and draw your own conclusions.
You are welcome to claim that my explicit invitation to people - in a situation where, as you say, your last comments are 'hidden away behind "more" button' - is deceptive, but given I was actively encouraging people to read things upstream that would otherwise have been, as you said, 'hidden away', I personally do not consider my actions to have been deceptive in the least.
As for 'civil', it seems to me that this conversation has, in and of itself, made very clear to anybody reading it that you and I have significantly different definitions of that concept, and how to interpret this fact can only be left as an exercise to the reader.
I used to just walk away from such conversation but realized I'm letting the bullies win when I do that. By walking away I'm letting sophistry become a viable strategy. We will continue this as long as you want. I am not backing down and will continue to argue my position and provide reasons for what I believe and why.
You have consistently used bad faith and misleading tactics to derail the entire conversation. Every time I have assumed good faith you have thwarted it. Every time I have extended an explanatory provision you have used it against me by quoting me out of context, and then tried to put words in my mouth and pretended to not have done so. Whereas I have taken no such actions and have always quoted you in context.
My actions have been civilized. Yours have been otherwise.
I encourage people to read as well and reach their own conclusions without me putting words in their mouth or biasing their reasoning as you did in your shortcircuit post. Because rational and reasoned argument requires each individual to weigh the evidence and then respond with compelling arguments for refuting or accepting them.
I continue to stand by my choice to invite people to read the entire thread and draw their own conclusions.
You should just stop because you are no longer making any points.
Not everything is a tactic. Sometimes people just mean what they say.
That's called shifting the blame because you're shifting the responsibility and consequences of your actions onto someone else. That is not how one begins an apology. An apology begins as "I am sorry. I will reflect and consider the feedback given and do better next time. Please feel free to give further feedback if you feel like it and I will consider it and improve my behavior".
I accept that my phrasing was not entirely clear but given having made what I meant explicit and still being attacked I'm unsure that my mistakes were the primary problem in this case.
You mean I've been reading SSC wrong all this time and missed out on secret messages encoded in kabbalistic puzzles?
If you were confused then you should have asked clarifying questions instead of arguing with incomplete information.
You have demonstrated several times and very clearly you were not interested in a reasoned argument even though I gave you the benefit of the doubt by outlining what I thought and engaged every one of your examples in good faith. You did no such thing and went out of your way to shape and bias the discourse in your favor. So I'm no longer interested in arguing with you or making any more attempts to clarify my reasoning.
If you want to engage further then you can reach me by email or on keybase. I'm no longer interested in being a prop for your performance in front of a group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
"Critical theory is the reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures. With origins in sociology as well as in literary criticism, it argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors. Maintaining that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation,[1] critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. The latter sociologist described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."[2]
In sociology and political philosophy, the term Critical Theory describes the Western-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s and draws on the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Though a "critical theory" or a "critical social theory" may have similar elements of thought, the capitalization of Critical Theory as if it were a proper noun particularly stresses the intellectual lineage specific to the Frankfurt School"
As for unfalsifiable, you claim there are dog whistles in every second sentence SA writes, and dog whistles are, by definition, unfalsifiable. You can claim anyone can see it if they look critically enough because if someone suggests they have looked critically and found nothing, you can simply claim they didn't do it right and mosey on. Dog whistles are also, by the way, fundamentally incompatible with the principle of good faith you claim to want to prosper. It's an interesting conceit, I'll give you that.
I don't know what a "dog whistle" is or what it's used for. I explained exactly what I meant by "coded" and I made a point about emotionally charged language by rewriting quoted texts to demonstrate good writing vs bad writing.
It's all clearly stated in all my posts. You are welcome to actually quote me and demonstrate directly instead of mis-directing and mis-characterizing what I said / wrote as being a "dog whistle".
And what was your point about emotionally charged language? Aside from that you don't like it?
I wasn't pretending. You said what I described is called a "dog whistle". I have no problem with using that phrase.
Scott Alexander uses the Kolmogorov post to have plausible deniability for his discussion of "race science". There's a reason writing "HBD" was banned in the comments section and it's that it was giving the game away to too many people. (discussion of HBD is not banned, it's simply not permitted for that string to appear - i wonder why that might be)
http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2014-06.html#drury-on-strauss
Have you missed this post?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-a...
The reason is that most people who casually reference "HBD" have no idea what they're talking about, and end up grossly misrepresenting the actual science as cover for unrelated ideas like ethno-nationalism or bigoted views about other groups. Tabooing "HBD" is a legitimate way of forcing everyone to unpack whatever it is that they actually have in mind; in many ways, it is the opposite of playing dog whistle politics.
Yup, pretty much.
> Yup, pretty much.
How do you propose I respond to your answer? I asked for clarification and you replied with a troll response. How would you respond if I did the same?
He didn't even name the reporter in his last post, much less ask people to attack him.
And yet, the original context of you asking what was ugly was
> Your points are valid but what is the point of calling the article ugly?
You somehow managed to forget your own comment in the space of a few minutes.