Beigeness, or How to Kill People with Bad Writing: The Scott Alexander Method
eruditorumpress.com
eruditorumpress.com
Scott would summarise David Duke's writing in such a way that David Duke himself would say that's a fair summary, and only then disagree. Maybe that's being "rather more receptive to neo-nazi rhetoric" to quote that eruditorumpress page, and maybe it is. Maybe today's etiquette is best regarded as that which most people to doday. So when Scott doesn't misquote or put strawmen into anyone's mouths, he's just out of touch.
A few lines down from the "rather more" quote is a statement that Scott "is someone who […] openly advocates eugenics." He is? I hadn't noticed. Scott would have inserted quotations to support such statement. Which may be out of touch and may make him seem receptive &c, but I like it.
Could you show me how you would do it? Post something and insert long enough quotations (from the part I partly quoted) that they are fair and representative, and still clearly look like quotations?
I wonder whether the difficulty of quoting extensively contributes to the sometimes too polarised tone on HN. As far as I can tell it's ~impossible to do civilised things like quoting two paragraphs, emphasising the key parts and appending "emphasis mine". Try it, and IME people will be unable to tell the quoted parts from your own. It's a magnet for misunderstandig due to lack of markup.
The best I've been able to do is to keep quotations down to a line or a little more than that, so that both quotation marks are clearly visible at the same time. But that shortness opens the quotation to people saying "taken out of context", no matter how much I try to pick fairly.
"The best that I've been able to do" ≠ "the best that can be done".
That's an interesting choice, given that both Duke and Alexander have a history of obfuscating their real intentions and beliefs. Giving a racist neo-Nazi like Duke a 'fair summary' is not the neutral approach you seem to think it is.
I am trying to make up my mind - OP started with some observations about his style which I found partially relevant, but then derailed into something that seemed motivated more by political disagreement.
The author certainly didn’t owe anyone another article, but it would be nice if there was a point to it beyond pointing out Scott’s obvious and consistent reluctance to reach falsifiable conclusions or express more than weakly held opinions.
Isn’t all philosophical writing, good or bad, vague?
And there's definitely a point beyond what you claim. It's that Siskind is intentionally obscure because he's hiding something: low quality arguments leading to disturbing conclusions. And Siskind is quite aware that's he's intentionally hiding what he's up to. He's even admitted it privately: https://twitter.com/ArsonAtDennys/status/1362153191102677001
I’d love to see a takedown of some of those linked and earnest statements - though I suppose folks can be close-minded about “facts” as well (statistics can’t lie, right? /s)
I don't think that's accurate at all. She explicitly states that she's critiquing his reasoning and spends the vast majority of the essay doing that.
Although it's worth pointing out that a conclusion being incorrect is good evidence for either the reasoning or the premises of an argument being incorrect.
I don’t necessarily agree, but I understand why she’d think so.
A good example comes from Cialdini's "Influence". He describes a study where they had someone come up to somebody using a library copier and ask to use it. Compliance went up significantly if the asker gave a reason, even if that reason was, "because I need to make some copies." That statement obviously ads no new information; the circularity makes it invalid as an argument. But it's effective persuasion. It's not even wrong, because it doesn't rise to the level of trying to make a decent argument.
Another clear example is America's foremost bullshiter, Trump. He clearly doesn't care about being right. His goal is not to make an intellectually coherent argument. He cares about influence. Like Siskind, his goal is manipulation, not the shedding of light.
My critique, in turn, is that this behavior is self-evident to anyone who is willing to recognize it, a legitimate basis for decision making to rationalists, and irrelevant to folks who are only interested in agreeing with whatever conclusions they see in those murky essays.
No, Alexander's point is precisely that tolerance might be more complex then it appears. This is what happens when someone who is used to pieces with ten straightforward examples of the outgroup being bad encounters an actual attempt to understand and think about something.
I mean, the very next sentence after the list of those is "This is an extremely unusual and heterogenous group of texts. This is not, in and of itself, a problem; writing lengthy essays that swerve among heterogenous groups of topics is kind of my jam."
That is a patently obvious claim for which anecdotes appearing to support that conclusion - but implying another - are provided.
Why do you think he chose those examples? How is tolerance more complex? What should be done to change how we approach it, if anything?
Put another way, it’s a valid rational argument against the status quo, but without any alternatives suggested, it is a purposeless one - we all know we could do better at anything.
I read enough of this to see that they're setting up to criticize the way someone is presenting an argument. The few attempts at self awareness to the irony does not fix anything. It just makes it all the more tedious.