Look at climate change, student debt, housing, or basically any other issue on which we’re kicking the can down the road and you can see a certain Molochian bargain: we sacrifice our children for sake of the status quo.
Meditations on Moloch is fantastic for sure. I also really love Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person. Oh, and Idol Words, a more recent one that I really liked.
I like Scott best when he's doing that particular weird brand of fiction he does, where he mixes sci-fi and philosophy and religion and kinda mashes them into a cool new thing. Unsong is the longest example of course but he's released lots of cool little one offs in that vein through the years.
Some links:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-dee...
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/idol-words
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/
https://unsongbook.com/chapter-71-but-for-another-gives-its-...
If you can think of any other examples of this kind of thing from Scott that you like, post a link, I'm sure there's some I haven't found yet.
I was blown away at the time, but I seem to remember didn't get much love when discussed on here. I thought about it a lot during the Covid information wars.
It's about competitive forces forcing individual actions (sacrifices) to gain an advantage that seem rational when viewed in separation, but since everyone will be competing the same way, making same sacroficies, gain no one anything in aggregate.
https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/ArsonAtDennys/status/13621531...
Apparently lots of the blog and his neoreactionary FAQ was set up to get people into some of the ideas if neoreactionaries like eugenics stuff.
There was a whole trove of stuff that released a bit after the NYT article on Slate Star Codex that kind of proved its suspicions right.
The problem is, he seems to believe that if he can't show something to be false then it must be true. That's what those emails are saying, I think: he didn't go in believing the race/iq stuff, but once he researched it and failed to prove it wrong, he had no choice but to accept it. He's too smart/stubborn to consider the obvious third possibility, that he can fail to disprove something despite it being wrong.
“When I was a teenager I believed in a conspiracy theory. It was the one Graham Hancock wrote about in Fingerprints Of The Gods, sort of a modern update on the Atlantis story. It went something like this:
“Did you know that dozens of civilizations around the world have oddly similar legends about a lost continent that sunk under the waves? The Greeks called it Atlantis; the Aztecs, Atzlan; the Indonesians, Atala.
“Various ancient structures and artifacts appear to be older than generally believed. Geologists say that the erosion patterns on the Sphinx prove it must be at least 10,000 years old; some well-known ruins in South America have depictions of animals that have been extinct for at least 10,000 years.
“There are vast underwater ruins, pyramids and stuff. We know where they are! You can just learn to scuba dive and go see them! Historians just ignore them, or say they’re probably natural, but if you look at them, they’re obviously not natural.
“Teenage me was impressed by these arguments. But he also had some good instincts and wanted to check to see what skeptics had to say in response. Here are what the skeptics had to say:
“Haha, can you believe some people still think there was an Atlantis! Imagine how stupid you would have to be to fall for that scam!
“There is literally ZERO evidence for Atlantis. The ONLY reason you could ever believe it is because you’re a racist who thinks brown people couldn’t have built civilizations on their own.
“No mainstream historians believe in any of that. Do you think you’re smarter than all the world’s historians?
“Meanwhile, I learned to scuba dive and checked out a site where Hancock said there were underwater pyramids. They were definitely there!”
And then there is a picture of himself in scuba gear, taken by his scuba instructor, and he is floating underwater next to what appears to be an obviously man-made stepped pyramid underwater - exactly like the conspiracy theorist said, and more importantly, exactly like the anti-conspiracy-theorists mocked you for being so stupid as to expect to see.
Reflect on why that might be convincing for a moment: the conspiracy-theorist camp said “go to coordinates XYZ and you will find an underwater pyramid”, the anti-conspiracy-theorist camp said “you’re stupid”, and when you go to coordinates XYZ you find an underwater pyramid.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fi...
That dynamic is evinced very clearly by this email (“not provably not-correct” and “the public response has been abysmal”). I feel like that is a better explanation than “if he can’t prove them wrong he has to believe them, he’s weird like that”.
Historians: we looked into the Atlantis stuff, and it's not true, see decades of boring science.
Racists: but we'd like it to be true, because it's a bit racist.
Someone on tumbler: only silly racists believe that Atlantis BS
SSC: I don't believe in Atlantis (or support Trump, etc.) but I think the racists who believe in it only do so because liberals are so mean to them, so really it's all their fault.
I think I can sort of see how “I don’t believe in X, but the Xists who believe in it only do so because the anti-Xists are so mean to the Xists, so really it’s all the anti-Xists’ fault” sounds like a parody.
On the other hand, though, I think if you take “only do so because” and replace it with “do so in large part because” it would be basically a correct description and one that SSC might even endorse himself.
https://newrepublic.com/article/169282/right-wing-graham-han...
Is it the fact that he's academically adjacent yet doesn't toe the line?
There are thousands of people with middlebrow blogs out there, why the focus on slatestarcodex?
As the rationalists might say, scientific racism is (seen as) an infohazard that will destroy many useful cultural institutions if it spreads beyond the small community of researchers with sufficient context to understand it, and he's spreading it. The thing about infohazards is that even true information can be hazardous.
Other middlebrow blogs either talk about different things, have less reach, or aren't as vulnerable.
This is a topic where a conscientious person should have an idea of its correctness and should stake that claim firmly. Best of all, doing so eliminates one's part in the harm of its nature as an infohazard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...
This concludes that there is 3-5 point genetic IQ gap between blacks and whites. This study is imperfect in a lot of ways, and fundamentally and irreconcilably confounded by the fact that even though the kids grow up in different environments raised by different families, there is no way to blind their childhood experience from the color of their own skin.
So, in no way do I mean to argue that this study is dispositive in favor of scientific racism. However, I do mean to argue that the existing state of the evidence points in that direction, albeit rather weakly.
>This study is imperfect in a lot of ways, and fundamentally and irreconcilably confounded by the fact that even though the kids grow up in different environments raised by different families, there is no way to blind their childhood experience from the color of their own skin.
That's why. Racism is something that we made up, and then tried to massage circumstances and data to "prove" it. This
>However, I do mean to argue that the existing state of the evidence points in that direction, albeit rather weakly.
is rationalization seeking to uphold that unscientific exercise.
I also put a lie to it with my existence.
Sidenote: "The best study I'm aware of on the topic" is not a convincing argument that it is, in fact, even a serviceable study on the topic. However, it is a study that is often cited as such by the aforementioned bad actors. As with much racist rhetoric (spoken by avowed racists and non-racists alike), it says more about the person who brought it up than anyone else. You seem to be encountering the infohazard I mentioned earlier.
I listed reasons to doubt the conclusions of the study. The study is generally well done and accounts for just about everything you can (practically) account for. However, it is not without flaws. It is not dispositive. But it is evidence in the direction of what's sometimes called "scientific racism".
That doesn't mean it's true. The jury is still very much out on the question. But what I was asking the GP was not "why are you unsure what's true here", but rather, "why are you so confident that one answer is true over the other".
> I also put a lie to it with my existence.
This is a misunderstanding of statistics. What this study appears to show, if you take it at face value, is that the black/white IQ gap is about 1/3 of a standard deviation. That means there are still plenty of very smart black people, and very dumb white people. It's a statement about population level averages, not individuals.
That being said, I don't take the study at face value. I think there are important confounds and the answer as to the direction and magnitude of the "genetic IQ gap" if any, is still unclear. However, what I definitely do not think is warranted by the evidence is the highly confident statement that the gap is 0.
> Sidenote: "The best study I'm aware of on the topic" is not a convincing argument that it is, in fact, even a serviceable study on the topic. However, it is a study that is often cited as such by the aforementioned bad actors. As with much racist rhetoric (spoken by avowed racists and non-racists alike), it says more about the person who brought it up than anyone else. You seem to be encountering the infohazard I mentioned earlier.
I would sincerely love for you to make me aware of more and better studies on the topic. It's something about which I'm curious, and would relish the opportunity to learn more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
The study you linked was interesting but adopted kids are an abnormal case to begin with and the effect indicated was tiny compared to societal things IMO.
However, a ray of hope in the study is that, even if you take its confidence intervals at face value (I don't), then there is quite a bit of room for improvement in the nurture sphere, as the black/white IQ test gap is generally much larger than this when not as carefully controlled as this study.
What his detractors claim is that he secretly believes in some variety of "scientific racism", which makes him a Bad Person. Maybe he does and maybe it does, but believing something secretly isn't spreading it.
I guess it depends on what "it" is. He has (not very often, but more than zero times: see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid..., specifically section III) said positive things about the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are on average unusually smart, perhaps as a result of evolutionary pressure arising from centuries of persecution. This isn't usually what people mean by "scientific racism", and it doesn't seem obviously very infohazardous to me. (Maybe a bit infohazardous. I can see ways in which you could start there and end up being Just Plain Racist. But I haven't seen much evidence that this is in any way common.)
Let me just dig out the exact quote so I'm not paraphrasing:
> True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. “Black people commit more crime” [...] This leads to another sort of vicious cycle: half of people understand it’s a true fact that they’re not supposed to say for signaling reasons, the other half have never heard it before and assume it must be a vicious lie, and you end up with situations where someone notices that some police department arrests more blacks than whites, accuses that specific police department of racism, and everyone is afraid to explain what’s going on.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percen...
It's a classic from the "I'm not racist, black people are just scientifically interior and I can't let that fact go unacknowledged" school of race-"realism".
And how you get people like Steve Sailer to be regular commenters, saying things like:
> It's OK to be white" was created to be a wholly unobjectionable statement that is still widely objected to. The goal is to demonstrate that wokeness is driven by anti-white racist animus. It works.
He didn't say anything about anyone being inferior, you attributed that to him.
It's all very teenage edgelord. He's triggering the libs with "facts" like black people commit more crime and attracting an audience of people who think that "the jews control the media", "being gay is a disease" etc. How smart and intelligent of him.
I'll note, again, the passage you linked wasn't about crime rates or african americans. It was about your reaction you're having here.
He was claming "black people commit more crime" is a valid thing to say, that you can't because woke people can't cope with the truth, though he'd probably be upset if someone said "women get paid less than men".
Oh, you're implying they get paid less for the same work, when really they just choose not to be CEOs because they love babies so much, he'd say, because he knows there's a whole bunch of political baggage that goes along with the "fact" that women are paid less.
He's more than smart enough to know what he's doing when he says these things.
You're not ruminating on the societal factors that give rise to these statistics, you're freaking out at the fact that this guy mentioned them at all. Exactly like he said you would.
It's got to be the distance between the quality/tone of his writing and the quality/tone of his fansplainers on HN, no?
See also:
* Rick and Morty episodes vs. Rick and Morty subreddit posts
* David Foster Wallace's oeuvre vs. Those who emulate his writing on forums
* Dream Theater vs. the Dream Theater fan who just asked me if I've ever heard of Dream Theater
These particular objects of admiration seem to generate fandoms which are a) ready and willing to educate anyone on the relevant subject matter, and c) sure seem like they only know the relevant subject matter-- if at all-- through that particular niche object of admiration.
Personally, I find that a) people don't like having other people's arbitrary hobby horses explained to them, and b) people really don't like it when the figure out that the explainer seems to be living vicariously through a second-hand explanation of the thing they admire.
I mean, I just can't imagine someone saying, "Hey, that's a fun/witty blog. I should deanonymize the author and ruin their practice." However, I can see that happening after the Nth encounter with a slatestarcodex fan.
Not to say it's fair. And personally, I enjoy both Dream Theater and conversations with their fans. But a few sentences in, those fans probably can tell that I've listened to way too much music and they quickly get off their hobby horse. Others who aren't as musically inclined probably get an unsolicited earful of an unhealthy obsession.
Why him? This went on for years and years before culminating in that NYT article.
edit: I think it was for homeless with partially heritable mental illness, not all homeless
That screenshot doesn't actually say what about neo-reactonary stuff he thought was interesting, just that there is some. The rest is left to your imagination, and Scott Alexander's enemies want you to imagine the worst.
Absolutely disgusting. How could he?? But which one? MKULTRA*? Operation Northwoods*? Flat earth? Illegal domestic surveillance by the NSA*? Operation Gladio*? Tell us which one, so that we may denounce him!
* Oops, this one's real lol
There are some suspiciously man made looking natural rock formations underwater that look like part of a pyramid. Scott even scuba dived there to check them out. I'm not sure how much conspiracy is involved.
Dismissing conspiracy theories is the safe thing to do. It also does not require any effort, intelligence or insight on your part. I admire people who are willing to actually engage with ideas like that, even though it does not seem feasible everywhere all the time.
Exactly the same for me.