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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

Steven Pinker maybe says it best, in a thread where he links to some notable SSC posts:

A typical essay by Scott Alexander is deeper, better reasoned, better referenced, more original, and wittier than 99% of the opinion pieces in MSM. It's sad that the NYT can see him only through the lens of their standard political & cultural obsessions.

Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience. We should all live by such standards.

https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1360787817459253251

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The MSM is so obsessed with becoming the ultimate authority of what is true that I hardly find it surprising they’d have this reaction to somebody who’s such an effective ambassador for reasonableness.

Jealousy is a dreadful and bitter motivator.

> Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience.

This is good, but the way he does it in respond to actual criticism[1] can be annoying. It reminds me of a squid spraying ink everywhere before escaping.

[1] mostly that they like to make fun of progressives/feminists, but tolerate people doing eugenics in the comment section because the commenters are nicer to them personally

Can you point to any examples that you found particularly annoying?

"Against murderism" was the last time it came up, I think? In context I believe it was supposed to be anti-anti-Trumpism, or at least that you should talk to Trumpists more rather than deplatform them.

The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.

>The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.

Honest question: how do you read books if a 10k word article is too long?

I read many books but skip many long blog entries. Blogs tend to be in sore need of editing, and most the books that make it to print are in general far higher quality. The main strength blogs have to me are time to print, which makes them more “real time” than books.

I'm not OP, but I find it easier to read a 50k word book than 10k blog article. The latter had better be really good (and many of Scott's are) if I'm going to make it to the end.

It's probably something about the nature of reading on a screen, on a device that's capable of fifty zillion other things at the press of a button. When I'm reading a book, there's only the book. Less willpower is required to maintain my focus.

Long blog posts are much easier to read if I send them to my Kindle, but I rarely bother.

Edit: a word

Reading them feels different, right? Books have pages so you can go back and forth, they have editors, and so on.

More importantly, dense literary works exist but usually pop essay books are trying to prove a point. SSC essays usually try to make you forget you had a point, and instead go up a meta level in service of his extremely evenhanded let's-all-be-friends persona.

Which conflicts with the pretty bad comment section that always wants to sit around discussing culture war. (Which exists but is not worth quite as much time as they want to put into it.)

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