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I knew before reading the article this would be a defence of views which hold other lives to be worth less than the author (racism), because they felt the need to be so abstract.

Nobody is going to ostracise you if you hold interesting views on string theory, or economics, or local government ,or free love, or many other controversial topics on which society has a settled opinion.

However if you hold views which require the submission of others to your will or hold other lives to be worth less than yours you can expect to be ostracised from society because those views are inimical to the functioning of the society which lets you express them and simply enforces consequences for doing so. The consequences for such behaviour are neither surprising nor unjust.

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It should be noted that the author of this post co-founded Vox (a very left-leaning outlet by any measure) and worked there up until a few months ago. That in itself shouldn't shield him from criticism, but I think the piece is a lot more nuanced than you're giving it credit for.

Yglesias is a center left commentator, with the emphasis on center.

I mean, he supported Bernie in the primaries. He's not David Brooks or whatever, he's pretty firmly on the left hand side of American politics. Like, his last book was essentially an extended argument for throwing away all immigration restrictions.

I think it's an interesting article, but don't agree with the premise that racist views are interesting views, or that rejection of racism leads to other views being suppressed.

That's really not the author's premise. I'm struggling to find a quote that works out of context, but this one might do:

> In the (liberal, coastal, urban, very political) circles that I travel in everyone (especially parents) knows and acknowledges that men and women are, on average, different in ways that end up mattering for the distribution of outcomes. But everyone also believes that sexism and misogyny are significant problems in the world, and that the people struggling against those problems are worthy of admiration and praise. So to leap into a conversation about sexism and misogyny yelling “well actually Giolla and Kajonius find that sex differences in personality are larger in countries with more gender equality” would be considered a rude and undermine-y thing to do. Which is just to say that most people are not rationalists — they believe that statements can be evaluated on grounds beyond truth and falsity. There is suspicion of the guy who is “just asking questions.”

"don't agree ... rejection of racism leads to other views being suppressed"

That's assuming that everything that gets labelled as racist is justly labelled as such.

> I knew before reading the article this would be a defence of views which hold other lives to be worth less than the author (racism), because they felt the need to be so abstract.

Wait, which part of the article is doing this? The excerpt where Alexander argues that it's better to spend energy accumulating resources to donate to malaria prevention efforts than to spend energy going to BLM protests? That doesn't strike me as a view that "hold[s] other lives to be worth less than the author"?

I've heard about SSC's racism for years, but no one has ever been able to pinpoint anything written that's racist.

Instead it's about a feeling. It has to do with with the general gist of what's written and not written.

If you say you support freedom, the radical left says that's a dogwhistle for racism, since you really mean 'freedom to be racist'.

If you advocate or discuss any problem other than racism, the radical left would say that you're really saying that racism is not the foremost issue in the world, and that's racist.

If you appeal to mostly white men, the radical left says you're racist because you do not have outreach, or you don't represent minority voices.

If you support free speech, you're racist since you're just dogwhistling support for racist speech.

They will never say this of course, but it really has a lot more to do with image than concrete words or actions.

Joe Rogan never did anything racist and has even endorsed Sanders--but he seems* like he could be racist at a glance (muscular, interested in hyper masculine activities, probably drives a pick-up truck) so therefore he is.

I'm willing to consider that there is some racism in the blog, but after years of accusations and no proof, I am skeptical.

That sounds like a lot of strawmen at once, and hard to directly address.

How about: if they're tone deaf about issues of race, then there's probably a reason. Could be just avoids the issue. Could be any number of other things, some of them pretty awful.

I really don't want to strawman anything. I certainly welcome anyone to explain where the racism is.

Part of the issue is that just asking 'where is the racism?' tends to gets responses that are--in summary--something like 'well if you don't see it, then you're just blind (if they are being charitable) or racist yourself'.

I know what I wrote is going to be very controversial, but you have to remember this is a condensed feeling that took me years to realise. I saw this same conversation play out 100 times:

--Someone post a link to SSC

--someone else says 'oh that guy is so racist'

--Then some poor fool asks 'wait, how is any of that racist?'

That is: there isn't paragraph or argument that is racist per se, but instead a general gist. It's much more about what is not said than what is.

Obviously we have a major communication problem here that I am not sure we can resolve. To some people, the rationalist community is so racist that they feel they shouldn't even have to explain why. If you cannot see it, you're being blind, racist, or as you mention: tone-deaf.

To others, there isn't anything racist about it, and they are left confused about why discussions about Moloch and cost disease are racist.

It's a bit meta, but I think this is a good example of Conflict versus disease https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/

I'm sure all that is true and borne of experience.

Sometimes I'm concerned when a topic is adjacent to serious issues of bias, and nobody is talking about it. We can get very comfortable not talking about issues that don't impact us.

Using the R-word is often unfair, waters down the meaning of the word and provokes feelings of being wrongly viewed. But being the victim of bias can be worse than all that. If we err on the side of being alert to potential bias especially if we are not the victim, then maybe that's not unhealthy.

The money used to feed Alexander would also be better used as donation to malaria funds, but I don't think he would argue that he should starve to death as I am sure he believes he has a right to self-preservation. He's arguing against BLM's right for self-preservation though, clearly because he perceives them to not have the same rights as himself.

And that's the most charitable point of view that I can possibly have on this incredibly racist point of view. I think what he actually meant was something far more racist.

I see. I guess I parse his argument a little differently.

I see the SSC argument as "I would like to spend 100 units of resource (time, money, etc) improving black lives. The line between (donating money to malaria prevention) and (black lives improved in Africa) is much clearer to me than the line between (donating money to/attending events organized by BLM) and (black lives improved in the USA). Therefore, I should spend my 100 units on malaria prevention."

Maybe this is what you mean by "arguing against BLM's right for self-preservation": taken to its extreme, this argument says that all of the effort behind BLM should just pivot to malaria prevention. In that case, the argument does look racist, because it's taken all of the resources devoted to agitating for societal change and re-allocated them to narrower medical assistance that's unlikely to produce the same kind of societal change.

I don't think SSC is arguing for a complete pivot in resource allocation. I think he's arguing that more, but not all, attention should be spent on malaria prevention, and he sees malaria prevention as ultimately contributing to more improvement of black lives. But now I think I understand your response better, because it is in the above sense possible to interpret his argument as saying BLM is not itself a worthy cause. But I don't read it that way.

It doesn't seem to be, though. The article says:

> I find the level of abstraction involved in rationalist discourse a little untenable.

And here's the kind of “interesting writing” it refers to:

> Five million people participated in the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter campaign. Suppose that solely as a result of this campaign, no currently-serving police officer ever harms an unarmed black person ever again. That’s 100 lives saved per year times let’s say twenty years left in the average officer’s career, for a total of 2000 lives saved, or 1/2500th of a life saved per campaign participant. By coincidence, 1/2500th of a life saved happens to be what you get when you donate $1 to the Against Malaria Foundation. The round-trip bus fare people used to make it to their #BlackLivesMatter protests could have saved ten times as many black lives as the protests themselves, even given completely ridiculous overestimates of the protests’ efficacy.

(from https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-ever...)

This is a pretty controversial take (one that I have some pretty major objections to – e.g., BLM isn't about everyone with dark skin, but a specific group of people who are being persecuted in a specific way), but it isn't racist.

^ It should be noted that this isn't an opinion the article author agrees with! Here is how he describes that quote:

> This is an extremely hot take! And while I would not say this paragraph is typical of SSC content, it does a good job of expressing the SSC view of most of what passes for politics in the United States of America — it doesn’t matter at all. [...] I would not endorse the SSC worldview.

To me it's a contrived argument to support racism without looking like it's supporting racism. A veneer of misdirection and logic doesn't make something less racist if the end goal is a more racist society.

I'm not sure I understand how that would be implicitly or explicitly supporting racism. You think the end goal of that proposal is a more racist society? Donating money to the Against Malaria Foundation?

"Supporting Black Lives Matter" is not equivalent to "not being racist".

The argument is an attempt to make you not care about BLM. First it makes an axiomatic assumption about what BLM is about, saving lives and only saving lives. Not long term impact of high incarceration rates, not about the perpetual fear many minorities live in, not about the non lethal abuses by police and so on. Then it tries to use emotional blackmail about dying children in Africa. In reality, people don't value things far away as much as those close by so it's inherently a false equivalence.

It's a hack job of an argument designed to make you not value BLM and I can only presume due to its hack job nature that the end goal is a more racist society.

It sounds like you disagree with their argument, which is fine, but then you go on to harshly criticize an interpretation that you've imposed on it. There are plausible alternative interpretations which are both reasonable and likely, so why not assume best intentions? That's the bedrock of productive debate.

I’m not sure I’m fully on board with GP’s conclusion, but their first paragraph is spot on. SSC’s whole shtick is thinking deeply from first principles, so it is very… let’s say curious, that his assessment of BLM would be so shallow.

Scott Alexander has a known blind spot for convenient examples. When he's found something that seems to perfectly make the point he needs, he often doesn't stop to consider “hang on, does that actually fit the point, or am I blatantly distorting the evidence?”. It's something I do a lot, so I can't really blame him; fortunately, he isn't practised at deliberate deception so it's fairly obvious when he's doing it.

Trying to follow your train of thought here: do you think his first principles are in favor of the subjugation of humans based on immutable characteristics?

And does his support of Malaria prevention based on a utilitarian calculation that it'll help save the most lives (including more black lives) therefore prove he is in favor of subjugating black people based on their race?

You’re riding this train a lot farther than I’m willing to go. All I’m saying is that his myopic description of BLM is very obviously a straw man. It may or may not have been intentional, but it’s certainly worth asking why, since setting up straw men is basically antithetical to quote unquote rationalist precepts.

He sorted BLM into the “trying to save lives”, then observed that it was inefficient at saving lives. I don't think he thought about it hard enough to realise that BLM is not just about saving lives; it's also about improving them, nor that the death toll of the things BLM fights against is higher than just direct police murders.

Judging others' goals by your own heuristics isn't a hard mistake to make, though it creates very flimsy straw arguments.

As someone who wants to maximize their time/money for impact: How should we value the impact of BLM's 'improvement' efforts, compared to the 'improvement' of black lives that stems from Malaria prevention?

Then how should we balance improvement and saving lives?

Thanks for clarifying. So it was myopic of him to assume that the core focus of BLM was to _save_ black lives (particularly from police violence)? And that understanding of BLM is a straw man?

As a minority myself, that was my mental model of BLM as well, as this movement was given fuel by deaths of African-Americans after interactions with police officers. And much of the rhetoric/protests/media coverage was around how the police are racists, and if only we could defund the police, it would save black lives.

It seems like you are poking at the idea that BLM isn't just about _saving_ black lives, but also _improving_ black lives. To be fair to Scott, he doesn't also factor in how Malaria prevention _improves_ black lives either. So it's not like he's not doing an apples-to-apples comparison along a very key factor. I would personally argue that the incremental value of being alive compared to being dead is much greater than any marginal increase in quality of life.

How would you improve and help Scott with his calculation, accounting for the value of BLM's 'improving' black lives efforts? And how would you then weight the improvement of black lives stemming from Malaria prevention?

He’s right that one core goal is saving Black lives. But there’s also a more primal aspect, whereby many people in the US simply won’t acknowledge that Black lives matter. Which plays out in a lot of ways, but it also defies the sort of utilitarian calculus Scott seems to want to do here.

The reason I’m saying it’s myopic is that yes, it’s also about systemic racism and the prison-industrial complex and a ton of other things that probably even vary person-to-person. And even if Scott doesn’t realize that from the jump, surely he realizes that it deserves more than a single paragraph comparing it to fighting malaria… right?

Anyway, if you’re committed to looking at this through this strictly utilitarian lens, let me save us both some time and say we probably won’t be able to agree.

Thanks for responding in kind. As someone frequently faced with tough trade-off decisions, I tend to try to take a utilitarian view (or simple pros vs cons) of the issues at hand. It feels very natural to me to try to compare the value of each of the choices before me (for decisions that matter), in order to maximize the efficacy of my time/money. So I find the disagreeing on using a utilitarian approach here interesting.

I may be reading into this wrong, so do pushback if I'm off here, but I'm picking up the sense that you feel that whatever value BLM provides to society cannot (and perhaps should not?) be measured/quantified? Since BLM is targeting nebulous goals ('systemic racism') that vary from person-to-person, then any attempts to compare the efficacy of its efforts to other initiatives should be duly questioned?

I accept that some things are hard to quantify. But I'm not sure I fully comprehend why we shouldn't _try_, if that's a held view (if it's not, ignore this sentence).

I also think Scott deserves some grace here. That paragraph in question wasn't meant to be the sole point of his post. It was merely an anecdote to suggest that it's important to think about the impact/efficacy of your actions if you're trying to improve the world. Not all actions have equal impacts. A point I very much agree with.

With the caveat that I am but one very insignificant person with regard to all this, here’s my take:

I broadly agree with the utilitarian goal of maximizing the efficacy of one’s aid. But the reason I can’t fully co-sign is that I feel there are some things that aren’t really quantifiable. Example: a classic response to BLM is that police commit relatively few murders compared to murders overall. My feeling is that the people entrusted to protect and serve have an additional responsibility; that violence + abuse of power is somehow “worse” than violence on its own. But how do you quantify that? How many “normal” murders are equal to one “police” murder? I don’t even know how to begin answering that question.

And I don’t think BLM should be immune from pushback because some of its goals can’t be objectively measured! But I do think a lot, if not most, criticism has been from a place of prejudice. That we’re going to look back on this in 50 years the way we look back on the Civil Rights Movement now, where some of the goals will have been achieved and basically everyone pretends they would have supported it all along (even though they oppose the contemporary version because they’re not protesting nicely or whatever). So when people see shallow dismissals, I think their guards (justifiably!) go up, because they know where it’s coming from more often than not.

I’m not trying to deny Scott the grace you’re talking about. I know it was a mostly throwaway paragraph in a longer essay. I’m just noting that his whole thing is supposed to be about digging into the strongest versions of uncomfortable arguments to get at the truth. Straw manning is supposed to be anathema — so when he does it, I think it’s worth questioning why.

One of Scott Alexander's goals is to end world poverty. He's focusing on international inequality more than national inequality, because he thinks that'll be more effective. If a lot of activists did what he recommends, that would effectively create a more racist society in the US, but it would also reduce the impact of racism (specifically, colonialism) in other countries.

I maintain that this isn't racism; it's just him having different priorities. I'm not even confident enough to say his priorities are wrong; only that I have good reasons to disagree with some of them (e.g. attacking problems that can be solved short-term frees up resources for solving long-term problems later, and your investments into solving a problem go further when there's public support, so BLM advocacy right now might be a time-sensitive problem (above and beyond the deaths it causes; I don't know how to weigh deaths v.s. deaths, and I'm suspicious of people who do)).

What does it mean to 'support racism' to you?

If I'm reading your comments correctly (please do correct me if I'm wrong here), it seems like you are suggesting any commentary that would suggest that the BLM movement isn't most optimally trying to improve black lives, is therefore racist?

Is BLM unquestionable? To question it, or to suggest other pathways to improve black lives would be misdirection from BLM, and therefore is racist?

From a high-level perspective, this style of thinking seems like it's the most racist of all (and a very popular take!). Suggesting that we shouldn't be thinking through how to most optimally improve black lives, and that we should constrain our thinking to whatever the current popular incarnation of a solution is (BLM!), isn't a recipe for progress.

Don’t you see the problem here? Racism is bad and people are right to be frustrated about it, but an increasing number of people have abused this frustration in order to prevent critical analysis of their views. You say nobody will ostracize me for interesting views on local government, but in some circles claims like “Lincoln High is a good school name” or “we should have test-based admissions” are considered racist.

If the zeitgeist has advanced so far that even an abstract defense of free thought is racist, as you seem to be claiming, that’s a pretty big reason for concern.

Frankly I think those are invented problems, invented to defend the status quo. You are also equating someone somewhere saying something is racist with broader censure - nobody us going to be ostracised for saying Lincoln high is a good school name.

I didn't say 'an abstract defense of free thought is racist', I said I knew the article would be defending a racist because of the excessive abstraction in the title to dance around the actual problem, which is not interesting views but racist views, something quite distinct.

It's not an invented problem. Multiple college acquaintances of mine have specifically announced they're ostracizing people for a similar naming dispute at my alma mater. I'm not saying you'll be instantly expelled from polite society for disagreeing with the consensus, but there's an increasing range of topics where you have to seriously weigh whether the benefit of thinking critically about them is worth the risk of losing friends.

"I knew before reading the article this would be a defence of views which hold other lives to be worth less than the author (racism)"

People like Charles Murray have not asserted this, to my knowledge. He supports race-neutral policies, such as a universal basic income. The assumption that all talents or personality traits are equally distributed among all demographic groups is not necessary to support equality under the law.

Murray may not have asserted this, but by the time his ideas make it to the street level you get racist tiki torch marches and cops murdering black people in public.

A thinker cannot simply wash their hands of the manifestation of their ideas, especially once that manifestation becomes stupidly obvious.

Sometimes an unrelated example helps:

Marxists do this all the time when they hand wave away the awful history of Communism. “Marx advocated evolution toward communism, not dictatorship.” Okay, maybe so, but virtually every large scale society to attempt to adopt Marxism ends up as some kind of totalitarian state that oppresses people at huge scale. At some point it’s reasonable to conclude that there is something very wrong with Marxism.

Maybe Murray didn’t intend to help resurrect Naziism, but he played a central role in doing so.

Back to the Rationalists, this is one of my huge problems with them and it’s evident in that paragraph about BLM. They reason in an absolute vacuum. They never seem to look down at the street to see what their ideas are doing down there.

Murray is not merely a racist. He's a white supremacist eugenicist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126606

edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: UBI isn't inherently bad but Murray's version is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127207

If UBI is racist, then it seems to me that literally everything is racist.

You cannot change a government policy without somehow, somewhere affecting some minority. If we are going to going to call that racism, then we really cannot even have policy discussions.

Obviously Murray is a particularly controversial person, but UBI is obtaining small amounts of broad support in general.

I guess it just feels a bit exhausting to me. While I understand the reasoning behind what you wrote (and it's logical and internally consistent), I also feel one could just as reasonably make the case that not supporting UBI is racist.

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