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Comment by bongripper | Hacker News Reader

>I don’t think I’m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Like I mean that on most topics, I could demolish their position and make them look like an idiot. Reduce them to some form of “Look, everything you say fits together and I can’t explain why you’re wrong, I just know you are!” Or, more plausibly, “Shut up I don’t want to talk about this!”

> And there are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not on every topic, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments.

He is admitting he might lose an argument against experts with decades worth of experience in their topic (most humble rationalist.)

View on HN

If anything, Scott is underselling himself, and could probably argue circles against the average educated person.

Debates are the rationalists bread and butter, and you should expect them to be better at you the same way you would expect a trained boxer to beat you in a fistfight.

lmao

I've been to dozens of rationalist meetups (I don't know why), people are constantly talking out of their ass while constantly referencing contrived rhetorical devices. A lot of "just asking questions", confidently asserting solutions to e.g. palestine, cartels, etc. and contending with things TV pundits say.

I like some of Scott Alexander's writing, but "rationalists" in general online or IRL have not been very impressive to me.

Haha yeah, I've been to rationalist meetups too, and have come to the same conclusion that I don't like them very much. Too much IQ stroking for my tastes.

Scott specifically though, has an established history of thinking through arguments that I find much better than most, and I still think someone who trains at this stuff will do better.

To extend my analogy a little further from before, if you go to a boxing gym or boxing enthusiast meetup, there will be plenty of people there who like the idea of fighting, but don't know how to fight. That doesn't mean that a trained boxer still won't be tough in the ring though.

With boxing you know who won because the judges say so. If Scott argues something at a party, and the other person says "I don't know why you are wrong but you are." Who is to say who "won"? Scott comes away thinking he's an amazing thinker. The other person comes away thinking he is a contrarian good at inventing plausible sounding nonsense. Who won here?

I think part of the trouble many here are having is that they don't even understand why Scott goes to the party, or argues, or wants to convince people of his arguments.

Surely, if no one reading my comment here ever agrees with me, my life doesn't change for the worse at all. And if people do agree with me, again, my life doesn't change for the better. I'm mostly here to learn from you people, you sometimes say interesting things I am unaware of, or introduce interesting perspectives I might not have seen for myself.

I have noticed among humans though, that you argue and debate like this, because you're basically monkeys and monkeys do the social monkey thing. You're trying to achieve higher status by climbing above the other monkeys, whose status will lower (if only a little). This is not as entertaining as violent fights, but much less risky (at least in some cultures). You're posturing.

It has little appeal to me. I am unable to determine if it holds appeal for the rest of you, or if you just can't help yourselves.

Consider the idea that some people feel that they benefit internally from having the experience of becoming less wrong than they were at some earlier time.

There are many ways of attempting to become less wrong, and without doubt many of those who follow those ways have other motives. But I do think that there is room for people for whom there is an intrinsic motivation in seeking out the experience of discovering that what they used to think is less correct than something they've just been introduced to.

> Consider the idea that some people feel that they benefit internally from having the experience of becoming less wrong than they were at some earlier time.

And helping others become less wrong by sharing one's perspective that was shaped by experience and accumulated knowledge.

> Scott specifically though, has an established history of thinking through arguments that I find much better than most

He has an established history of writing down detailed articles about arguments, yes.

Unfortunately, a significant number of his articles contain schoolboy errors that anyone who wants to claim they are better at thinking through arguments than the average person should never have made.

I'll mention just one such article:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/01/empireforest-fire/

Scott says:

"...democratic nations, like the US and UK, which have gone three hundred or so years with only the tiniest traces of state-sponsored violence (and those traces, like the camps for the Japanese during WWII, have not come from the Left)."

The two obvious, egregious schoolboy errors here are:

(1) Don't wars count as "state-sponsored violence"? The US and UK certainly haven't gone three hundred years without wars. And some of those wars were civil wars, so even the lame excuse of "well, wars are violence, but not against the state's own people" doesn't count.

And even if we let that pass, what about the US's treatment of Native Americans? What about the UK's treatment of Ireland? And so on. To say that the US and UK have gone three hundred years with "only the tiniest traces of state-sponsored violence" shows a level of historical ignorance that is just staggering.

(2) But even if we let all of the above pass: doesn't Scott know that the President who interned Japanese citizens in WWII was from the Left?

While Scott does make errors, I've found he works hard to avoid making them and forthright when he does (e.g., not everyone has a Mistakes page in the main navigation bar of their site[1])

What you're missing in your example is that, in context, the state-sponsored violence he's talking about is "against one's own people" (e.g., he also refers to it as a "reign of terror" a few times, like those of Robespierre, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc). I think there's a difference of kind between say the 19th century US's (awful) treatment of Native Americans (who were explicitly treated as "other" very consistently) and Stalin's (also awful) dekulakization (in which one-time typical members of Russian society were declared enemies of the state and purged).

So his point isn't that the UK and US have done no wrong, it's that despite having democratic systems for centuries that haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mistakes

> he works hard to avoid making them

He does so when he sees that there is a potential mistake to be made, yes. But he doesn't seem to me to work hard at all at questioning things that he appears to think are too obvious to need questioning. And yet those things are where he makes the egregious mistakes.

> forthright when he does

Yes, I agree with this: once he recognizes he's made a mistake, he's much better than most at acknowledging it.

> What you're missing in your example is that, in context, the state-sponsored violence he's talking about is "against one's own people"

I don't buy the hairsplitting distinction he's making there, but even leaving that aside, I already addressed this point in my post. The UK fought a war against its own people in the American Revolution. The US fought a war against its own people in the US Civil War. The US fought against Native Americans. The UK fought against Ireland. And so on.

> I think there's a difference of kind

I think this is even more of a hairsplitting distinction that I don't buy. But again, leaving that aside, if Scott wanted to make an argument for such a difference in kind, he should have made one. Just taking it as so obvious as not to need any argument is not justified. And the need for making such an argument doesn't even seem to be on Scott's radar. I find that either astoundingly obtuse, or astoundingly disingenuous.

I agree with you, and I think this is a recurring flaw you'll see in Rationalist communities: they love smart, Rationalist, Just So stories ("X can be explained by Y", never mind whether that explanation is actually correct...and best not mention it if you want to be an upstanding member of the community).

Btw, I noticed another egregious error: "France, where a reign of terror five years after the Bourbon monarchy is clearly contrasted with a hundred fifty terror-free years since it became democratic in 1870." Um, what? France is now on its Fifth republic, and the transitions haven't always been peaceful. Not to mention Indochina, Algeria (France's own leaders explicitly described what the French did to subdue Algeria as "terrorism"), etc. And many of the people who were terrorized in Algeria were French citizens.

> haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have

I'll comment on this separately because it goes deeper into the central claim of the arrticle. If you're going to make this claim, you need to ask whether the UK and US have actually avoided such things, or merely made sure they happened in other countries instead.

The US under Woodrow Wilson enabled the Soviet Union to exist by failing to support the Kerensky government, even though the US had troops in the area, and by discouraging the other allied powers from helping on the grounds that everybody was already too exhausted after four years of war. (Not to mention that Communism wasn't of Russian origin; it was exported to Russia by American and British intellectuals, such as Jack Reed. And one of their reasons for doing so was that Communism was supposed to be more "democratic".)

The US, UK, and France created the conditions for the Nazis to take power in Germany by imposing such harsh terms in the Treaty of Versailles (terms which were nothing like what the Armistice had implicitly promised).

The UK under Chamberlain, along with France, enabled Hitler's Germany to conquer Eastern Europe by pursuing a policy of appeasement.

The US under FDR allowed Stalin to take over all of Eastern Europe at the end of WW II (which, btw, made WW II a failure in Europe since the stated objective was to free Eastern Europe from tyranny, and Stalin by any measure was a worse tyrant than Hitler) because FDR wanted to suck up to Stalin and be his friend. (For example, read the historical book Stalin's War.) And even before that, FDR and his administration (and the press, such as the New York Times) systematically lied to the American people about the true nature of Stalin's regime, which was well known to the US government (and to reporters who were there) in the 1930s. If the American people had known what was actually happening in Stalin's Russia, they would never have agreed to having the USSR as an ally in WW II or allowing the USSR to take over Eastern Europe.

The US allowed Mao and his Communists to take over China by withdrawing support for Chiang Kai-Shek. If the US had supported Chiang, the entire country of China would have a government that's basically the government Taiwan has now (since Taiwan is where Chiang and his supporters went when Mao drove them out of China). Imagine how much better the geopolitical situation would be if that were the case.

Sure, if you want to make hairsplitting distinctions, none of these counted as "state-sponsored violence" against the people of the US or UK. But Scott's central claim in the article is that it is repressive monarchy, not "democracy", that causes reigns of terror. Before making such a claim and exonerating "democracies", one should at least examine the possibility that the "democracies" actually enabled the reigns of terror. And when you examine that claim historically, you find that, yep, "democracies" were doing exactly that.

I think you'd have to make some outlandish claims if you wanted to connect most of the material you're trying to bring in to the direct topic of this piece. Re-read the pieces Scott is responding to if you want to see what I mean—the topic of this piece is fairly narrow, and most of what you're proposing to bring in is non-sequitur without some pretty wild connective tissue added, which connective tissue I doubt you'd want to try to defend. Stuff like "leftward-trending liberal democracies tend to become more and more permissive of egregious domestic political violence in other countries over time" would be the minimum to make any kind of even oblique sort-of connection to the actual topic of the piece, and... surely not, right?

> I think you'd have to make some outlandish claims if you wanted to connect most of the material you're trying to bring in to the direct topic of this piece.

I disagree. See the other comment I just posted upthread about what happens when you compare the actual historical events in the cases Scott cites to the two models he describes, the "Reactionary model" and his "alternate model". The fact that the particular "liberal democracies" Scott references, the US and UK, do their "state-sponsored violence" by proxy instead of directly is not a coincidence: it is what allows those countries to claim that they are "liberal democracies" and don't have "state-sponsored violence" for the benefit of their voters, while blaming those "repressive regimes" for all of the mayhem in the world--when in fact the "liberal democracies" themselves are just as much to blame.

> Stuff like "leftward-trending liberal democracies tend to become more and more permissive of egregious domestic political violence in other countries over time"

While I think this is actually true (the US has caused far more mischief recently in the name of "spreading democracy" than it did in the 19th century, for example), it is not the argument I was making. The argument I was making is simpler than that, and is summarized above.

But the argument you'd prefer to focus on isn't connected to the topic in Scott's piece, because Scott's writing to address specific claims with predictive power (as in: we can "replay the tapes" of history and see if what we'd expect to see, if they're true, is evident—and they're strong and confident claims, so we'd expect it to be pretty clear if it is) in a couple other pieces, to which pieces the argument you want to make also isn't connected.

> Scott's writing to address specific claims with predictive power

Which his model does not have. That was the point of the post of mine upthread that I referred you to. The actual cases he cites (French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution) are a much better match for the Reactionary model (though with a caveat that I gave in my upthread post--the final "monarchy" step in these cases, e.g., Putin's Russia, is not an improvement) than they are for his alternate model. (His justification for his alternate model matching the Russian Revolution better is that Khruschev and Gorbachev were "more mellow" than Stalin, but step 6 of his alternate model says that the government "does pretty okay", which was not true of Gorbachev's USSR any more than it was of Khruschev's--not to mention Putin's Russia, as I said above.)

So why is Scott so confident of his alternate model, if it actually is worse, on net, than the Reactionary model he criticizes? Because he fails to realize that the US and UK (and other countries in the British Commonwealth like Canada and Australia) are not the historical norm, but are historical outliers. They have managed to settle into "liberal democracy" which might be "mellow" and doing "pretty okay" at home only by exporting all of the "state-sponsored violence" elsewhere, where their voters can ignore it and their politicians can pretend it's the fault of those other "repressive regimes".

In other words, the egregious historical errors Scott makes in this article, which was what I originally called out in my first post in this discussion, are closely connected to the main point of his article: he is only able to even entertain that point, much less write an entire article about it, because of the false historical narrative he has.

Here's another example, where Scott restates the article's central claim (from which its title is taken):

"A monarch who voluntarily relaxes their power before being forced to do so by the situation – like the constitutional monarchs of Europe or the King of Thailand – is performing a controlled burn, destroying the overgrowth that would otherwise cause a fire and skipping directly from 1 to 6."

Tell that to Tsar Nicholas II, who voluntarily abdicated when his high officials convinced him that it was for the good of the country. Russia not only did not "skip directly" from Scott's 1 to 6, it never reached his 6 at all (see above). Since this was one of the examples Scott explicitly chose, you'd expect him to at least check to see whether the actual historical facts matched his narrative.

The claims he's addressing are, boiled down:

1) That leftist movements inevitably become more prone to violence (purges, genocide, violent repression of opponents in general, "reigns of terror") over time, and

2) Democracies have a strong-bordering-on-inescapable tendency to incubate such leftist movements, and to grow more leftist over time.

What we should expect to see, then:

1) Radical, violent leftist movements that gain power get ever-more violent over time.

2) Democracies become more unstable and prone to those specific sorts of violence, over time, and this unabated increase pushes ever closer to crisis points .

What we see instead is:

1) The worst leftist violence tends to be immediately preceded by authoritarian governments (which is what these fringe folks Scott's responding to want more of—this is a very specific and out-there movement making very specific and out-there claims, not the entire field of criticism of leftism or democracy), rather than to be preceded by democracy; to reach their fever-pitch very quickly; and to cool off over time rather than doing what we'd expect based on what was claimed to be true, which would be for them to typically get worse the more time passed.

2) Meanwhile, democracies seem... fairly stable, actually, without a clear, inevitably-trending-upward trend line on leftist-induced violence and chaos, or what have you. Fluctuating, sure, but where's the trend line for specifically that? Where are the ones ending in leftist reigns of terror? All of them are supposed to be heading toward a fever-pitch of leftist purges and genocide. Like, that specific thing is what was claimed. Does it look that way? LOL no.

I think what's key to following this is that the thing he's arguing against is a pretty fringe political view. He's not addressing some more-tame, more-mainstream criticism or model-for-the-development of either the left, or democracies, that might be stronger. He's trying to suss out whether the above, specifically, appears to describe actual, observable tendencies of leftism and democracies in the real world.

> The claims he's addressing are, boiled down

As I said in my post upthread that I referred to, I am not arguing for the claims that Scott is arguing against. (I do say that Scott's "Reactionary model" is a better historical fit to the cases he cites, but only with the key caveat I gave about the final step, and that caveat directly opposes the claims that Scott's "reactionaries" make based on that model.)

I am arguing against the claims that Scott is making about his "alternate model". His article is not just rebutting his version of "Reactionary". He is making claims of his own. Those are what I am addressing. I have already explicitly quoted claims that he makes that are historically false. Those claims are what support his "alternate model", which his article is arguing for.

Your claim 2) does not imply your "expect to see" 2). Why? Because democracies don't have to incubate leftist movements in their own country. They can incubate them elsewhere. Which, indeed, they do, as I have said.

This, in itself, is not an argument for the "reactionary" claims Scott is arguing against, for reasons I have already given. But it is an argument against Scott's "alternate model".

Also, democracies can grow more leftist over time (which, I would argue, they have) without becoming internally unstable, as long as a majority of voters continue to vote for policies that move further and further left. Which I think is a fair description of what has happened in "democracies" over the past century or more. Whether this tendency can continue indefinitely is a different question.

These are interesting claims and points, perhaps, but remain disconnected from the original material. In particular:

> They can incubate them elsewhere. Which, indeed, they do, as I have said.

This needs an immense amount of development to maybe qualify as both connected-enough to this topic to belong in Scott's piece, and a strong enough claim to be worth either explaining and refuting, or adopting and defending. You're claiming that things like declining to prosecute a war against the USSR after WWII is an example of an action that acted as an outlet for what would otherwise have become domestic US leftist political violence in the US. There are, like, several things about that, and your other examples, that need to be filled in before it might be clear that makes any sense at all, plus some kind of pattern of this kind of thing increasing over time needs to be established that can't easily be explained by other, more-straightforward factors. Notably an awful lot of these examples are failures to act—what's that about? How's that an outlet for a kind of "energy" that would otherwise push the US closer to a reign of terror? Why should we think that sort of thing can act as such an outlet? What's the connection between those things? I see none whatsoever—it is not obvious this should be entertained as a relevant and strong line of inquiry.

> Also, democracies can grow more leftist over time (which, I would argue, they have) without becoming internally unstable, as long as a majority of voters continue to vote for policies that move further and further left.

Maybe! But it doesn't appear to make them ever-more violent in the specific way in question. The real events and trends we have before us really don't appear to fit—not to fail to fit your claims, but by the claims made by the folks Scott wrote the piece to address. (This isn't me arguing against you—I follow that you do get that what you're aiming at is Scott's alternative model, not that you're arguing in support of the Reactionaries)

You have proposed some reasons different from Scott's that this may be the case, and fault him for not addressing your proposed reasons, but it remains unclear to me that there's a strong line of argument there, specifically as it relates to the topic at hand. It's not clear to me that he should have brought it up, or that it makes his argument weaker that he did not, let alone that it's part of some set of "schoolboy mistakes" to have not done so.

What I don't find any of this back-and-forth convincing about, is that this piece of Scott's is in error for failing to address this stuff. I definitely am not convinced that failing to entertain (or even mention) some kind of, "the 'temperature' of US leftist domestic political violence has, perhaps, remained cool only because we did stuff like not do much to help Chiang Kai-shek" explanation, constitutes an elementary error.

> What I don't find any of this back-and-forth convincing about, is that this piece of Scott's is in error for failing to address this stuff.

Scott's argument--not his anti-Reactionary argument, but his argument in favor of his alternate model--depends on particular historical claims. Those claims are false, and they're false because of the historical errors he makes. Those historical errors are not about small or peripheral points. They are about points that are central to his argument. I have already explicitly quoted and discussed them and I won't repeat them here. I just find it difficult to see how Scott is not in error for failing to spot these historical mistakes that he makes, particularly in view of his reputation for supposedly being much better than average at making valid arguments. Making valid arguments is not just a matter of using reason correctly. It's a matter of reasoning from correct premises, and making sure that you are in fact doing so.

> You're claiming that things like declining to prosecute a war against the USSR after WWII is an example of an action that acted as an outlet for what would otherwise have become domestic US leftist political violence in the US.

I am making no such claim. My claim is simpler: Scott's argument is that "liberal democracies" are the best way to prevent "state-sponsored violence". But that argument can't possibly be valid if "liberal democracies" in fact cause violence in other countries.

Scott's rebuttal to that claim is to gerrymander the definition of "state-sponsored violence" so that it only counts if it's against the citizens of the "liberal democracies" themselves. But that is exactly the problem: people like Scott can pat themselves on the back about how great "liberal democracies" are only by ignoring the historical record of "liberal democracies" sponsoring all kinds of violence in other states besides their own.

If Scott were to remove the blinders he put on by defining "state-sponsored violence" in such a narrow way and take an honest look at the historical record of "liberal democracies", he would never have even tried to write such an article. Instead he would be directing his intellectual resources towards a much more useful inquiry: why do "liberal democracies" sponsor so much violence in other countries--especially when, in every other country besides their own, sponsoring all that violence never even leads to liberal democracy? Why don't they see the obvious contradiction between their stated principles and the actual results of their actions? But that question isn't even on Scott's radar, because of his ignorance of history.

> haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have

There's another point about this as well. Scott claims in the article that his "alternate model" makes better predictions than his "Reactionary model" (which is something of a straw man, but let that pass). But if we look at the cases he cites, here is how they actually stack up against the models:

French Revolution: Ended up with Napoleon taking power as Emperor, i.e., a monarch. Sure looks more like the Reactionary model to me.

Russian Revolution: While the USSR did end up falling apart of its own weight after decades of terror gradually morphing into somewhat less terrifying bureaucracy, what has happened to Russia since looks more like "repressive monarchy" than "government mellows out and does pretty okay".

Chinese Revolution: I suppose that the fact that the Chinese Communist Party has adopted some features of capitalism in order to allow the country to actually have some economic growth might count as a sort of "mellowing out", but it would still be very hard to make a case that China's government is closer to "doing pretty okay" than it is to "strong repressive monarchy".

In other words, even if we agree that the US and UK have reached Step 6 of Scott's "alternate model", historically, those countries (and other countries in the British Commonwealth, like Canada and Australia) are the only cases where that has happened. Historically, reigns of terror brought on by repressive regimes have in all other cases led to new repressive regimes.

(Btw, this is not to say that the Reactionary model's claim that the new monarchy in its last step is an improvement, is correct. The actual historical facts are that the new repressive regimes are often worse than the old ones.)

> the Left?

You mean the GOPs modern definition of a leftist, or the vast majority of the times definition of a leftist?

https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Norman_Thomas/

The Democratic party in the US, at least since Woodrow Wilson, has been on the Left. I don't think that is a matter of any serious dispute.

It's a matter of very serious dispute if you were to read people who are actually on the left, or who live outside the USA.

The stated policies of the US Democratic Party barely correspond to those of leftist parties worldwide. Their actual policies when in power are even further from those of leftist parties worldwide.

So .. are they left of the US Republican Party? No question. Are they "on the left" in any broader sense? That depends very much on your conception of the nature and scope of the political space. For most people in most parts of the world, the US Democratic Party is a completely centrist party that would never be termed "leftist".

Americans have little knowledge of their history, can't imagine an era when there were actual socialists, marxists, communists, fascists and literal nazis in uniforms holding conventions in NYC.

All choices must be binary.

> It's a matter of very serious dispute if you were to read people who are actually on the left, or who live outside the USA.

Ah, that old standby "No True Scotsman". Sorry, not buying it.

> The stated policies of the US Democratic Party barely correspond to those of leftist parties worldwide.

No political party's stated policies can be taken seriously, since political parties, on immense amounts of historical evidence, will lie about their actual goals as much as they need to to get elected and stay elected.

For example, the Democratic platform that FDR ran on in 1932 did not look very leftist, but the actual things he did once in office were most definitely leftist, and bore no resemblance whatever to the platform he ran on. Did any Democrats object? Hollow laugh.

If you want to argue that the US Democratic party is not as far left as, for example, leftist parties in the UK or Europe, yes, that's probably true. But saying that that means the US Democratic party is not leftist is like saying that the Atlantic Ocean is not an ocean because it doesn't have quite as much water in it as the Pacific.

A party that overtly supports capitalism is not a leftist party.

Its at most (in the direction of leftism) center to center-right.

> A party that overtly supports capitalism is not a leftist party.

I'm not sure how the US Democratic party "overtly supports capitalism", since it is the party of government micromanagement of every aspect of business.

I'm also not sure how leftism is inconsistent with support of capitalism, unless the latter is taken to imply a complete rejection of socialism. Which is certainly not a good description of the US Democratic party. To the extent it does "support" capitalism, it is only as one aspect of a society which the party wants to organize along mostly socialist lines.

No, it's like saying that Walden Pond is not an ocean because it doesn't have quite as much water in it as the Atlantic or Pacific.

If you seriously think that the US Democratic party, as compared to leftist parties in Europe, is closer to Walden Pond than the Atlantic Ocean in terms of leftism, then you and I clearly live on different planets and we don't have enough common ground to have a useful discussion.

In fact, historically speaking, even the US Republican party today is closer to the Atlantic Ocean than Walden Pond in terms of leftism. What today's US Republicans consider "conservative" would have been considered so far left as to be radical to the US Republicans of the late 19th century.

Have you considered that it's possible that both you and Scott are particular good at reasoning, and it's everyone else that is much worse at this stuff?

You're pointing out a bunch of errors, but it's not clear to me that they're schoolboy errors (i.e. errors a schoolboy wouldn't have made). I would also venture to guess that the average educated person would make much more egregious mistakes.

> it's not clear to me that they're schoolboy errors (i.e. errors a schoolboy wouldn't have made)

If this is the case, IMO it's more a reflection of the awfulness of the schooling in our time than anything else. No schoolboy in the US of a century ago would have made such egregious historical errors, because they would have been taught some actual history instead of what students in the US today get taught.

My tongue in cheek response is that you are correct, because a century ago, WWII didn't happen yet.

Can you provably demonstrate that education quality was better a century ago? I'm not outright trying to refute you, so much as I have a belief that people tend to overstate the "good old days", so I usually prefer more concrete data points.

> To say that the US and UK have gone three hundred years with "only the tiniest traces of state-sponsored violence" shows a level of historical ignorance that is just staggering

Scott is not ignorant, therefore it seems more plausible that you should reconsider whether Scott is making the point that you think he's making.

My current hot take, as a longtime casual outside observer of the movement, is that the Rationalism movement is basically just Mensa with no membership requirements.

And if you know Mensa's reputation....

Debates aren't about arriving at the truth. They are rhetorical combat to 'win' an argument. Most people don't understand that.

LLM's have really made me realize that "using language" is a shallow skill, but detecting bullshit is a deep skill.

And anyone who read Velikovsky and thought they had made a good argument, is someone who needs to hone the deeper skillset.

Debate isn't genius. There are famous politicians who were RENOWN in law school for their debate skills, who are clearly idiots. Holding up debate skills as an intellectual achievement is like praising someone for their ability to hold in a fart.

Being an expert doesn't necessarily make you a good debater. Debates aren't about who's "right", they're about who has made a more convincing argument.

The article used alternative history cranks as an example of someone good at conjuring up seemingly convincing arguments, despite being pretty much the opposite of an expert.

This is coming late and you might not read this, but I think you're reading too much into that quote.

Scott has an uncanny ability to cherry-pick facts, usually absurd ones to paint funny narratives. He even wrote a whole fiction book based on the concept, a universe that actually runs on Kabbalah. Here's a short self-contained chapter that showcases this:

https://unsongbook.com/interlude-%D7%AA-trump/

It's totally believable that Scott could use this skill with serious facts in a serious argument, and befuddle almost anyone. Doesn't make him smarter or more right, just very persuasive in this narrow method.

The 10 Principles of Rationality:

1. Your beliefs and assumptions are facts and logic; other people's beliefs and assumptions are emotions and biases

2. If someone describes an experience you can't relate to, it's an anomaly and you should ignore it

3. You know more than other people (except for third-parties who agree with you: they are an unquestionable authorities)

4. Never engage with issues in the context of real events; only examine issues in contrived, hypothetical scenarios

5. Avoid debates with real people; instead, make up imaginary people and argue against the make-believe opinions you give them

6. If you do debate a real person, your primary goal is to make them look foolish (not to change their mind, or yours)

7. Your understanding of other people's feelings and beliefs is more accurate and nuanced than their own

8. Your wild guesses and baseless estimates are valid statistical data

9. It's ok to bend the truth when necessary to prove a point

10. If someone disagrees with you, it's because they're less rational than you

The 10 Decrees of Rationality:

1. A person's wealth is a direct measurement of their contribution to society

2. The best way to help people is by getting rich as fast as possible (it doesn't matter how)

3. When helping people, it's best to ignore their input and feedback (if they had sound judgement then they wouldn't need help)

4. When someone does something good, they're probably secretly doing it for terrible reasons

5. When rich people do something terrible, they're probably secretly doing it for good reasons

6. Believing in your favorite unproven conspiracy doesn't make you a "conspiracy theorist"

7. Stereotypes are based in truth, except for the ones that you find personally offensive

8. When people say your research is bogus, it means your research is really so profound that they're scared of its implications

9. Super-intelligent AI is the greatest threat to humanity

10. Capitalism is a natural, fair, and sustainable system that makes our world a better place

This comment is interesting in that it itself exemplifies principle #5.

(And also principles #6, #7, #9 to some extent.)

Yeah it's kinda contradictory. It's part critique and part self reflection on an ideology that I have mixed feeling towards. In the same vein as the Programming Language Checklist for language designers.

https://www.mcmillen.dev/language_checklist.html

Not sure if your comment is positive or sarcastic. Are you familiar with Scott Alexander's writings?

Yeah, I read some of his essays. I like some of the ones where he stayed in his area of expertise, like "Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics" ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-con...). The other ones I've read are big fancy word salad unfortunately. Can you recommend others like the series I linked above?

The one I enjoy the most is

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

They're dense sometimes but for me the furthest thing from word salad. Every paragraph feels carefully considered and apposite.

It's funny he says circles so much.

What, twice, in an "I can do X to Y, you can do X to me" structure?

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