There might be some truth in there about the personalities of groundbreaking industrialists. But I can’t help feeling uneasy about how it seems to frame some of their problematic behaviors. It...
There might be some truth in there about the personalities of groundbreaking industrialists. But I can’t help feeling uneasy about how it seems to frame some of their problematic behaviors. It almost feels like there’s an implicit argument that being eccentric, or more problematic, even outright unethical is a necessary ingredient for innovation and progress. The article also doesn't really define the difference between eccentric and problematic and lazily lumps them together.
Is it really acceptable to excuse or overlook harmful behaviors just because the end result benefits society? I am not convinced that this needs to be case.
This framing risks romanticizing harmful traits and presenting them as inevitable, which is just plain ridiculous in my opinion.
It also seems outright dishonest as I don't see any attempt to question that narrative. It is more or less presented as a given fact while it very well might just have cherry-picked the individuals.
I think we should question whether innovation really requires this kind of trade-off. Or, if this framing simply and unfairly normalizes a "necessary evil" mindset that doesn’t hold these individuals accountable. I mean, modern governance and ethics standards do exist for a reason, they were not drafted up just because someone felt like it but because they have been necessary.
I really think your analysis understates the bias of this article. It’s a justification of the “great man” framing of history, which is incredibly problematic because it doesn’t give you a full...
I really think your analysis understates the bias of this article. It’s a justification of the “great man” framing of history, which is incredibly problematic because it doesn’t give you a full picture of why things happen and handwaves away the experiences of the near entirety of the planet. It also handwaves away the problems these people present to society. He calls them “a little nuts” when they are delusional psychopaths who are directly responsible for the misery of the masses who live in the same society they are supposedly a part of.
It should also be mentioned that the author appears to be an analyst, which is a job designed to improve things for management and executives. I’m not saying that the arguements are bad faith - on the contrary, the analysts I have known all legitimately believe this kind of thing - just that this kind of thinking is bad for society.
There is a lot of history that proves this kind of mindset is bad. For US history I would read up on the gilded age - a period of then-unprecedented wealth inequality that lead up to worker revolts and most of the major worker’s rights that we appreciate. The author would do well to read more about the history of the labor movement in general.
Oh yeah, there is much more wrong with the framing of the article and the way it approaches history. I honestly went for the thing that to me did seem to the common thread of the article. It...
Oh yeah, there is much more wrong with the framing of the article and the way it approaches history. I honestly went for the thing that to me did seem to the common thread of the article. It clearly is not so much as a history piece as it is more an opinion piece using history to "proof" a point. I did debate pointing that out as well as the last paragraph makes it very clear that this is agenda driven.
As it is, I settled on trying to describe the base problem of the premise.
Edit:
Also to make people aware of issues it sometimes can help to not go full on things like these. While I agree with your assessment of "delusional psychopaths" to some extent, for someone where the great man theory is not a known debunked trope it comes on very strong. By pointing out the overall baseline issues I feel like you can achieve more in changing the way people look at these sort of things.
Just to be clear, I am less trying to say that their history is “wrong” and more saying that there are historical examples that demonstrate the problems with empowering “great men”.
Just to be clear, I am less trying to say that their history is “wrong” and more saying that there are historical examples that demonstrate the problems with empowering “great men”.
It isn't necessarily wrong. But, it is very much cherry-picked and framed in a specific way that suits the agenda of an analyst in a way that I do think is harmful if people take it at face value....
It isn't necessarily wrong. But, it is very much cherry-picked and framed in a specific way that suits the agenda of an analyst in a way that I do think is harmful if people take it at face value. And yeah, one of those things is the fact that empowering "great men" also has lead to outright atrocities and other terrible things.
Also...Edison didn't invent half the things people think he did. He was not unlike Musk in that way, happy to gather the fame and fortune off other people's work.
Also...Edison didn't invent half the things people think he did. He was not unlike Musk in that way, happy to gather the fame and fortune off other people's work.
Edison had much more input and understood the things he did much more than Musk (though to be fair, the technology was much simpler than something like SpaceX or Neuralink back then), and I think...
Edison had much more input and understood the things he did much more than Musk (though to be fair, the technology was much simpler than something like SpaceX or Neuralink back then), and I think you heavily underestimate the effort and skills necessary to convert an invention into something self sustaining that actually gets to the masses. There are numerous examples of seemingly brilliant inventions that laid in an archive for years or decades because someone failed doing that.
I don't have time to go digging, but one example off the top of my head: there's an oral probiotic that, so far conclusively in rodents and preliminary data suggest that it's going to be the same for humans, reduces dental cavities by around 80% because it displaces the bacteria that cause about 80% of cavities. It was engineered in the 90s, but the inventor was unable to get it to proper testing and that was it until someone found a way to do it 25 years later and made a deal with them.
I see at least two distinct skills there, both are underestimated: packaging a technology in a way that's convenient and intuitive enough for the general public to understand its value (Steve...
I see at least two distinct skills there, both are underestimated: packaging a technology in a way that's convenient and intuitive enough for the general public to understand its value (Steve Jobs' emphasis on user experience comes to mind) and then the ability to make a new technology fit a business model that's economically viable long-term.
Unfortunately someone with the power in an organisation to execute their vision in either of these skillsets usually has the power to hog the credit for the technical achievement too.
And that right there is the point of why the Great Man framing is a problem. Almost nobody did all of these things on their own. The smartphone was going to be a thing, regardless of Steve Jobs....
And that right there is the point of why the Great Man framing is a problem. Almost nobody did all of these things on their own.
The smartphone was going to be a thing, regardless of Steve Jobs. Somebody would have probably even gotten the UI and packaging just right, it just might have taken a few more years. Everyone remember that Jobs was as influential on the hockey puck mouse as he was the iPod.
The great man framing is why so many people feel that CEOs deserve 1000x or more pay than other workers...that the CEOs somehow have this magical innate quality that is worth much more than the sum of everyone under them.
That is not to say that the role of good leadership is unimportant, but rather that leadership is merely a different necessary cog in the machine, not the single most important one.
Edit: IIRC that's actually the situation Edison was in. He had a lightbulb, but couldn't get filaments that lasted more than a few minutes. That's where Latimer shined, but he's not a household name.
The last part of this writing is an important part of this discussion. Yes, there's an implicit argument being made that these people with problematic behaviors are necessary for innovation in one...
I think we should question whether innovation really requires this kind of trade-off. Or, if this framing simply and unfairly normalizes a "necessary evil" mindset that doesn’t hold these individuals accountable. I mean, modern governance and ethics standards do exist for a reason, they were not drafted up just because someone felt like it but because they have been necessary.
The last part of this writing is an important part of this discussion.
Tolerant institutions and culture have been a necessary component of industrial supremacy since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. America was not always the only country that permitted breakthrough industrialists to build unproven new industries and upend the economic order, but it is today. If any other society wishes to match or outpace America in this regard, it will have to do the same.
Yes, there's an implicit argument being made that these people with problematic behaviors are necessary for innovation in one reading, the way it seems to me is that it's a race, and the people who are willing to break the rules and take risks that others wouldn't take are the ones leading the pack, and it happens that America happens to be more tolerant of these people than other societies and thus they are saying that is how the US is the leader in innovation. Now I don't know if that claim is true that the US is the leader in innovation, it's perhaps broad and also vague enough to fit different criteria, but my point is the claim doesn't seem to be saying it's necessary for innovation period, rather than it's necessary to innovate faster than others.
From a societal or national standpoint, you can argue that there is a lot of gain from innovation happening first within your society or within your borders, and to me this is pervasive in all aspects of our governing structure. Many of the things we allow to happen are basically "if we don't do it, then someone else will". If we don't let all our US companies merge together into vertical stacks within their primary industries until they have an outsized influence over society and little to no competition, which allows them to exert influence US culture and influence globally as well, then some other country will do it. If we don't exert influence in global affairs and play world police, someone else might, and they will be the one that gets to dictate terms that favor them instead of us.
It's an insidious approach to collective organizing of people in our society, because there's perhaps an element of truth to it. It's a bit of projection, we thought about doing it and then considered that if we thought about doing it, surely others are too, so we need to do it first, but is there actually anything unique about the people in the US that says we'd have been the only ones to capitalize on this? No, meaning if the US hadn't done it, there's every reason to believe another country would have. Is the world better off because the US did it instead of some other country? Not necessarily, despite that the US probably has tried to portray it this way for so long. Is the US better off because the US did it instead of some other country? In the short term, it seems most likely yes. In the long term, maybe still yes, maybe not. No country or government lasts forever, how do you know what the ceiling is until you hit it? I think we're at the stage where it is going to destabilize our government and country because these few corporations and wealthy people have such extreme outsized influence over the country that what is good for the country and the people are of less relevance compared to what is good for the wealthy and those corporations. It's not the people that are worried about TikTok etc. influencing the American public so much as it is the wealthy elite in the US that are worried that they lose influence and their ability to maintain control over the institutions of this country by influencing what the public thinks, allowing for the illusion of democracy to continue while they still hold the reins.
To me it's a race to the bottom, and I don't know the solution, because it's an uphill climb first so it's a race to the top initially, but it's a long fall down once you get there. That's what it is about to me, innovation and business is just another form of an arms race that a collective of people don't want to lose to another collective of people, and the willingness to tolerate increasingly bad behavior from select individuals in order to win that race, because the other collective of people is also likely willing to turn a blind eye to select individuals in order to win that race.
It makes sense to me that if you break rules, don't care about consequences or harming people, that you can innovate faster, so if that's the implicit argument in this post, then I believe it. I don't think it's necessary to have innovation at all, I just think it's necessary to innovate faster than someone else who is willing to do those things.
There is an excellent (in my opinion much better than this one) long article on the broader questions of this framing by Scott Alexander, with a strangely confusing name: Matt Yglesias Considered...
There is an excellent (in my opinion much better than this one) long article on the broader questions of this framing by Scott Alexander, with a strangely confusing name: Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman.
It's about the dilemma of slave morality versus master morality - basically the opposite extremes of "whatever you do is irrelevant if you're a bad person" and "how amoral you are is irrelevant if you're a strong successful achiever" - and possible alternatives. It also gives some examples of specific people, how these views applied at various points in history, but mostly it asks questions that might help explore and understand the topic more in detail.
I've been reading him for a few years now, including some of his old articles from the previous blog, and I disagree with this entirely. And quite honestly I really dislike people just calling...
I've been reading him for a few years now, including some of his old articles from the previous blog, and I disagree with this entirely. And quite honestly I really dislike people just calling someone a racist on an unrelated article that greatly expands the topic of the original post without being very clear why.
I have written longer posts on it before, and since that seems to upset people I decided to do a "hey this guy says shitty things" thing this time. I'm on my phone and can't easily go pull those...
I've been reading him for a few years now, including some of his old articles from the previous blog, and I disagree with this entirely. And quite honestly I really dislike people just calling someone a racist on an unrelated article that greatly expands the topic of the original post without being very clear why.
I have written longer posts on it before, and since that seems to upset people I decided to do a "hey this guy says shitty things" thing this time. I'm on my phone and can't easily go pull those posts up right now, so I'll summarize.
Last time I went back and read several more of his blog posts and his more recent reddit comments and I believe the man consistently falls into biological determinism sorts of opinions about women as well as POC. Human Biodiversity is just outright racism, it's just the renaming of racialism, not any sort of as actual science, and the fact he's even engaging with it when most people have never heard of it, because it's literally Stormfront material is a bit of a flag on its own. Believing in it even in a "oh I don't know if I can disprove this" way matches his other comments where he's skeptical of the effect of minority teachers on improving minority student outcomes, or where talks about how women are less interested in programming and that this is innate rather than engaging with the fact that women were programmers until it got prestige. (And there's no new evidence that human biodiversity aka racialism aka scientific racism is real, it's just a fancy new name on a supremacist ideology. It's been debunked for a long time and any amount of skepticism about the sources of it would lead someone away from agreeing with it.)
I don't demand anyone agree with me, but I don't like ignoring or washing people's bigotry and as long as he continues to be posted, I'll continue to point out his history. I personally dislike the frequency with which he's posted here because of his views but as I said in a recent thread, I don't think silence to that is the correct answer.
There are two parts to this. The first one is the ideological part - what it's used for, by whom, etc. In that context I agree with you. The second part is examining the actual evidence for and...
Human Biodiversity is just outright racism, it's just the renaming of racialism, not any sort of as actual science, and the fact he's even engaging with it when most people have never heard of it, because it's literally Stormfront material is a bit of a flag on its own.
There are two parts to this. The first one is the ideological part - what it's used for, by whom, etc. In that context I agree with you.
The second part is examining the actual evidence for and against it while attempting to be unbiased by the first part. In that context (and the context of western left wing internet commonly denying unpopular science like psychometrics in general, although of course much less often than the US right does it), with all due respect, I trust him much more than I trust you because he tries to be very open about his reasoning and his sources - that is in fact why I read him in general.
I see no issue with engaging biological determinism in the same way. Based on all I read I don't think it's fair to say that he pushes biological determinism, just that he actually considers the possibility of some forms of it existing. This is viewed as at the very least unfashionable in todays western world, which causes the same issue as with the above - even if some parts of it were true, most people don't touch it with a ten foot pole, so it's generally not even considered in situations where it has not been strongly disproved (because that's a very hard thing to do and neither social sciences nor biology are really able to do it, yet).
Example regarding programming: I remember reading about the peculiar effect of women participating in STEM fields to a much larger degree in developing countries and the numbers reducing as the overall wealth in their society increases. This can be interpreted as women going into STEM fields when forced by economic pressure but not actually prefering them when they have more of a choice on average, or by the economic pressure towards STEM changing into different social pressures away from STEM as the society changes from increased wealth. But I don't see a good reason to say that just mentioning the first possibility makes one a bigot.
I do approach this from the point of view that in general I believe that the notion that on average, in very broad strokes, sex differences do not ever innately correlate with differences in personal preferences, is not well scientifically funded. Neither is the opposite, mind, but I have zero issues with someone talking about either. This does not really affect how I behave towards individuals because broad averages are not relevant for that, but it causes me to not see merely discussing it as offensive.
I disagree that his comments on this subject were along the lines of "just mentioning the first possibility." He fully ignored that women in the US were programmers until pushed out of it by men,...
Example regarding programming: I remember reading about the peculiar effect of women participating in STEM fields to a much larger degree in developing countries and the numbers reducing as the overall wealth in their society increases. This can be interpreted as women going into STEM fields when forced by economic pressure but not actually prefering them when they have more of a choice on average, or by the economic pressure towards STEM changing into different social pressures away from STEM as the society changes from increased wealth. But I don't see a good reason to say that just mentioning the first possibility makes one a bigot.
I disagree that his comments on this subject were along the lines of "just mentioning the first possibility." He fully ignored that women in the US were programmers until pushed out of it by men, and that girls were pushed away from computers at a young age when they were bought for boys, and dismissed the harassment and other negative experiences of women in tech or even more so, in school leading up to being in tech.
In general I disagree that he's engaging in these in a "wow some evidence does maybe exist for it" way. I think he believes in biological determinism because that is a consistent throughline in his writing. One of his more recent reddit posts was asking about whether there was yet evidence that teacher representation didn't make a difference in performance for minority students.
But those emails explicitly say that he thinks this racist ideology is "probably correct or at least not provably incorrect" and that he doesn't want that to get out. That's not just "considering the possibility." He also expressed support for sterilizing "undesirables" and states he's pro-eugenics. Those are not "examining things other people won't touch."
I think "what's wrong with just mentioning it" and "being willing to consider things other people won't touch" are the cover he uses to continue to engage with bigotry and never thoroughly debunk it, even though science has done so repeatedly. Even though women explicitly say they're harassed out of tech fields. And we keep seeing him linking to and engaging with other people with similar opinions that are slightly less couched (the last one I saw posted here was a far right Catholic blogger who even more explicitly espoused racist ideology). He says himself that he's smart enough to ignore "the garbage" but frankly, he wouldn't agree with me on what that garbage is. And I'm not the deity of good opinions, but I do think that when "human biodiversity" is explicitly racialism we can go "oh I don't have to listen to that because we've already debunked it."
If you prefer, in the future when I see him posted I'll give the longer answers instead of the short ones. And I'll always remain respectful and within the intent of the Tildes community, but I won't ignore the promotion of someone who believes "probably" that racial minorities are inherently less intelligent than white people.
I don't have any short answer except I disagree with most of your interpreteations and where I don't, I don't see it as bigotry. Regarding programming, the world is not just the US and the fact...
I don't have any short answer except I disagree with most of your interpreteations and where I don't, I don't see it as bigotry.
Regarding programming, the world is not just the US and the fact that one thing that affected the number of women in programming happened does not in any way clearly imply that that is the thing that caused it. Programming nowadays is also a very very different area from programming in the 60s up to say early 90s. And some biological determinism seems to clearly exist since there are for example sex differences in mating that seem to be universal across cultures even though many sexual and long-term mating preferences can culturally differ by a lot, so the overall concept is not inconceiveable either.
Regarding intelligence specifically, I don't think it is at all unreasonable to start with the assumption that current social consensus might be wrong - in fact I think the conditions are there for it:
Much of old IQ vs ethnicity research was clearly crap even from a naive point of view. Then we collectively realized that racism and eugenics leading to ethnic cleanses or genocides are a terrible idea, so attempts to prove scientific racism abruptly stopped, and almost nobody has been seriously directly studying it since. How much of IQ is hereditary has been a subject of debate for a long time, but that is by no means a settled thing. This article that was also posted on Tildes did seemingly a pretty good job saying that actually very little is heritable (and indeed Scott Alexander shared it as interesting and well written), however a new study claims that one of the key studies cited in that article contains an important mistake and as a result does not support his conclusions, plus it spawned several replies that accuse him of omitting non-controversial evidence that supports twin studies or obfuscating his data to better support his points.
And, of course, studying this topic directly (it is sometimes done indirectly, for example by government agencies trying to extrapolate IQ from standardized tests administered to students) is only done by either nazis or massive weirdos, firstly because of the eugenics implications and secondly because academia is largely dominated by western liberals, and among western liberals there's a strong dislike of IQ in general, let alone the idea of it being innately bound to something we cannot control. This increases the likelyhood that there are things we simply do not know because nobody credible is making an effort to find them out.
I don't think that saying any of that is dangerous, bigoted or pseudoscientific, unless you start adding eugenics to it or pretend that IQ in any way measures the overall value or quality of a person. Which neither me nor Scott Alexander does.
You're ignoring that the ideology he thinks is "probably true" is literally white supremacist. It is "race science" You're also ignoring him explicitly saying he supports eugenics. I have...
You're ignoring that the ideology he thinks is "probably true" is literally white supremacist. It is "race science"
You're also ignoring him explicitly saying he supports eugenics.
I have absolutely zero interest pondering whether its reasonable to question "social consensus" on this, despite it being scientific consensus that it's bunk.
As for women in tech, the article of his I read didn't deal with the "developing world". I don't recall anything dealing with anywhere besides America but it's been a few months.
I don't support people that believe white supremacist ideology is "probably true." And I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when he implies things that align with those explicit statements.
I don't really care if you agree with me and I've said nothing about your beliefs, but I genuinely have zero interest in discussing whether racial science is legitimate or not. He explicitly said those things in emails and LJ comments and reddit comments in addition to the implications around his blog posts. If he doesn't want people to think he supports eugenics he probably shouldn't say so.
I don't have a strong opinion on this matter, I only know about Scott Alexander in passing like his AI turing test post from a little while ago. With which I did have some issues, but that is...
I don't have a strong opinion on this matter, I only know about Scott Alexander in passing like his AI turing test post from a little while ago. With which I did have some issues, but that is beside the point.
But, I do want to point out that having followed someone for years doesn't exclude them standing for something you might not have realized. I often have seen this response because people feel that it would reflect on them as a person if something like this turns out to be the case, and they didn't notice. Which is a fallacy in itself.
I was curious, so I did briefly look into it, the logical place seems to be rationalwiki for this context where there is some passing mention like this
Alexander does not consistently censor racist and sexist opinions in his comments section (except on open threads, where race and gender discussions are always banned), a decision about which some of his fellow LessWrong-style rationalists have expressed concerns.
There is also this bit about Race and IQ
Alexander identifies with the 'hereditarian left',[41] and considers The Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray to be a close ideological ally.[42][43] He has also expressed support for Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's hypothesis that the frequency of congenital diseases among Ashkenazi Jews (of which Alexander is one) is caused by selection for intelligence,[44] as opposed to the multiple bottlenecks and founder effects for which there is actual evidence.[45] There is almost nothing he won't try to apply human biodiversity to, e.g. Harry Potter.[46]
So while you personally might disagree with it entirely based on what you have seen, it doesn't mean there isn't necessarily some truth to the claim you are responding to.
It is also possible that @DefinitelyNotAFae is referring to the mentioning of Matt Yglesias, not the article author. Matt does have some controversy attached to his name surrounding various statements he made.
Edit:
Replied before I saw your edit
And quite honestly I really dislike people just calling someone a racist on an unrelated article without being very clear why.
Shit, I was slightly unclear and now I possibly made you spend time unnecessarily. Sorry. I have seen most of criticisms of Scott Alexander because he's very unpopular in left-bias subreddits,...
Shit, I was slightly unclear and now I possibly made you spend time unnecessarily. Sorry.
I have seen most of criticisms of Scott Alexander because he's very unpopular in left-bias subreddits, much more than here, and that made me do a double check a couple years ago and explore the controversial stuff, including some email leaks.
I really dislike the tone of Rationalwiki, as usual in politics or culture-war related articles, because they refuse to approach things they disagree with in good faith, which is imo warranted in this case. Another issue is that they link evidence of him seemingly supporting controversial views, but ignore evidence of him criticizing the same views, which due to his approach to writing about controversial topics happens commonly. He was accused of being a neoreactionary while at the same time writing something like a "neoreactionary hater's handbook", a long summary of things that are wrong with the movement (note that this is an example and I did not search whether they link this specifically, I just don't have time to look up anything that I don't remember off the top of my head).
I have seen some of the controversial sources they link, and imo the only thing that he's guilty of is that while most of society refuses to touch those controversial topics with a ten foot pole, for reasons that are understandable, he feels it's no issue with approaching it from a standpoint of "okay, so what if it's true? Let's explore the evidence that goes either way and think about the possible implications", which I personally find incredibly refreshing in a time where most of the internet is very emotionally loaded whenever approaching anything mildly culture-war or US politics related.
The mentioned email leaks from a private conversation were some of the most controversial things regarding him, and they could essentially be summarized as "I reviewed all the supposed evidence supporting human biodiversity (potential links between ethnicity genetics and IQ) and I've found that some of it is hard to disprove, which is making me really worried because the consequences of that would be frightening". As long as this is done in good faith from a genuine and educated point of view (which clearly showed that he doesn't want those things to be true), I have no issue with that whatsoever.
He's also a long time democrat voter and recommends his voters to vote democrat (or optionally third party in places where it doesn't matter), if that says anything.
No worries, I didn't spend that much time. Even if it doesn't apply to you, I think it is worth it to point out the fallacy I was talking about for others :)
Shit, I was slightly unclear and now I possibly made you spend time unnecessarily.
No worries, I didn't spend that much time. Even if it doesn't apply to you, I think it is worth it to point out the fallacy I was talking about for others :)
I think that there’s value in some of the personality traits in question, but as it does with many things the US takes the permissiveness way too far. Sometimes it’s a good thing to be assertive...
I think that there’s value in some of the personality traits in question, but as it does with many things the US takes the permissiveness way too far.
Sometimes it’s a good thing to be assertive and occasionally buck norms when nobody else seems to be willing to. Without people like that it’s easy to wind up in a stagnant, navelgazey state that’s too caught up in insignificant details and too willing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good to be able to accomplish anything.
It’s something else to take that to its natural extreme, letting this sort of personality run the show and giving them the green light to do as they please regardless of legal or moral considerations. That’s dangerous and unnecessary.
It kinda feels like the author hasn't met any people. If you get to know them, pretty much everyone is a little nuts. They just don't have the resources to go big with it. There are all sorts of...
It kinda feels like the author hasn't met any people.
If you get to know them, pretty much everyone is a little nuts. They just don't have the resources to go big with it.
There are all sorts of interesting things you can find in common between many uber financially successful people. Lack of empathy comes up a lot, fixation on legacy, there are a lot of dreamers in there too. I don't see how you can pick the examples the author did and not talk about how most of them were assholes.
Is that because it was the unspoken premise? We need to accept douchebags for the greater good? Certainly the modern examples included some undeniable douchbags.
You can be a little crazy and change the world because of it without being a dick. If not then we need to reevaluate the entire context.
There might be some truth in there about the personalities of groundbreaking industrialists. But I can’t help feeling uneasy about how it seems to frame some of their problematic behaviors. It almost feels like there’s an implicit argument that being eccentric, or more problematic, even outright unethical is a necessary ingredient for innovation and progress. The article also doesn't really define the difference between eccentric and problematic and lazily lumps them together.
Is it really acceptable to excuse or overlook harmful behaviors just because the end result benefits society? I am not convinced that this needs to be case.
This framing risks romanticizing harmful traits and presenting them as inevitable, which is just plain ridiculous in my opinion.
It also seems outright dishonest as I don't see any attempt to question that narrative. It is more or less presented as a given fact while it very well might just have cherry-picked the individuals.
I think we should question whether innovation really requires this kind of trade-off. Or, if this framing simply and unfairly normalizes a "necessary evil" mindset that doesn’t hold these individuals accountable. I mean, modern governance and ethics standards do exist for a reason, they were not drafted up just because someone felt like it but because they have been necessary.
I really think your analysis understates the bias of this article. It’s a justification of the “great man” framing of history, which is incredibly problematic because it doesn’t give you a full picture of why things happen and handwaves away the experiences of the near entirety of the planet. It also handwaves away the problems these people present to society. He calls them “a little nuts” when they are delusional psychopaths who are directly responsible for the misery of the masses who live in the same society they are supposedly a part of.
It should also be mentioned that the author appears to be an analyst, which is a job designed to improve things for management and executives. I’m not saying that the arguements are bad faith - on the contrary, the analysts I have known all legitimately believe this kind of thing - just that this kind of thinking is bad for society.
There is a lot of history that proves this kind of mindset is bad. For US history I would read up on the gilded age - a period of then-unprecedented wealth inequality that lead up to worker revolts and most of the major worker’s rights that we appreciate. The author would do well to read more about the history of the labor movement in general.
Oh yeah, there is much more wrong with the framing of the article and the way it approaches history. I honestly went for the thing that to me did seem to the common thread of the article. It clearly is not so much as a history piece as it is more an opinion piece using history to "proof" a point. I did debate pointing that out as well as the last paragraph makes it very clear that this is agenda driven.
As it is, I settled on trying to describe the base problem of the premise.
Edit:
Also to make people aware of issues it sometimes can help to not go full on things like these. While I agree with your assessment of "delusional psychopaths" to some extent, for someone where the great man theory is not a known debunked trope it comes on very strong. By pointing out the overall baseline issues I feel like you can achieve more in changing the way people look at these sort of things.
Just to be clear, I am less trying to say that their history is “wrong” and more saying that there are historical examples that demonstrate the problems with empowering “great men”.
It isn't necessarily wrong. But, it is very much cherry-picked and framed in a specific way that suits the agenda of an analyst in a way that I do think is harmful if people take it at face value. And yeah, one of those things is the fact that empowering "great men" also has lead to outright atrocities and other terrible things.
Also...Edison didn't invent half the things people think he did. He was not unlike Musk in that way, happy to gather the fame and fortune off other people's work.
Edison had much more input and understood the things he did much more than Musk (though to be fair, the technology was much simpler than something like SpaceX or Neuralink back then), and I think you heavily underestimate the effort and skills necessary to convert an invention into something self sustaining that actually gets to the masses. There are numerous examples of seemingly brilliant inventions that laid in an archive for years or decades because someone failed doing that.
I don't have time to go digging, but one example off the top of my head: there's an oral probiotic that, so far conclusively in rodents and preliminary data suggest that it's going to be the same for humans, reduces dental cavities by around 80% because it displaces the bacteria that cause about 80% of cavities. It was engineered in the 90s, but the inventor was unable to get it to proper testing and that was it until someone found a way to do it 25 years later and made a deal with them.
I see at least two distinct skills there, both are underestimated: packaging a technology in a way that's convenient and intuitive enough for the general public to understand its value (Steve Jobs' emphasis on user experience comes to mind) and then the ability to make a new technology fit a business model that's economically viable long-term.
Unfortunately someone with the power in an organisation to execute their vision in either of these skillsets usually has the power to hog the credit for the technical achievement too.
And that right there is the point of why the Great Man framing is a problem. Almost nobody did all of these things on their own.
The smartphone was going to be a thing, regardless of Steve Jobs. Somebody would have probably even gotten the UI and packaging just right, it just might have taken a few more years. Everyone remember that Jobs was as influential on the hockey puck mouse as he was the iPod.
The great man framing is why so many people feel that CEOs deserve 1000x or more pay than other workers...that the CEOs somehow have this magical innate quality that is worth much more than the sum of everyone under them.
That is not to say that the role of good leadership is unimportant, but rather that leadership is merely a different necessary cog in the machine, not the single most important one.
Edit: IIRC that's actually the situation Edison was in. He had a lightbulb, but couldn't get filaments that lasted more than a few minutes. That's where Latimer shined, but he's not a household name.
The additional problem is that fitting a technology into an economically sustainable business often ruins it along the way.
The last part of this writing is an important part of this discussion.
Yes, there's an implicit argument being made that these people with problematic behaviors are necessary for innovation in one reading, the way it seems to me is that it's a race, and the people who are willing to break the rules and take risks that others wouldn't take are the ones leading the pack, and it happens that America happens to be more tolerant of these people than other societies and thus they are saying that is how the US is the leader in innovation. Now I don't know if that claim is true that the US is the leader in innovation, it's perhaps broad and also vague enough to fit different criteria, but my point is the claim doesn't seem to be saying it's necessary for innovation period, rather than it's necessary to innovate faster than others.
From a societal or national standpoint, you can argue that there is a lot of gain from innovation happening first within your society or within your borders, and to me this is pervasive in all aspects of our governing structure. Many of the things we allow to happen are basically "if we don't do it, then someone else will". If we don't let all our US companies merge together into vertical stacks within their primary industries until they have an outsized influence over society and little to no competition, which allows them to exert influence US culture and influence globally as well, then some other country will do it. If we don't exert influence in global affairs and play world police, someone else might, and they will be the one that gets to dictate terms that favor them instead of us.
It's an insidious approach to collective organizing of people in our society, because there's perhaps an element of truth to it. It's a bit of projection, we thought about doing it and then considered that if we thought about doing it, surely others are too, so we need to do it first, but is there actually anything unique about the people in the US that says we'd have been the only ones to capitalize on this? No, meaning if the US hadn't done it, there's every reason to believe another country would have. Is the world better off because the US did it instead of some other country? Not necessarily, despite that the US probably has tried to portray it this way for so long. Is the US better off because the US did it instead of some other country? In the short term, it seems most likely yes. In the long term, maybe still yes, maybe not. No country or government lasts forever, how do you know what the ceiling is until you hit it? I think we're at the stage where it is going to destabilize our government and country because these few corporations and wealthy people have such extreme outsized influence over the country that what is good for the country and the people are of less relevance compared to what is good for the wealthy and those corporations. It's not the people that are worried about TikTok etc. influencing the American public so much as it is the wealthy elite in the US that are worried that they lose influence and their ability to maintain control over the institutions of this country by influencing what the public thinks, allowing for the illusion of democracy to continue while they still hold the reins.
To me it's a race to the bottom, and I don't know the solution, because it's an uphill climb first so it's a race to the top initially, but it's a long fall down once you get there. That's what it is about to me, innovation and business is just another form of an arms race that a collective of people don't want to lose to another collective of people, and the willingness to tolerate increasingly bad behavior from select individuals in order to win that race, because the other collective of people is also likely willing to turn a blind eye to select individuals in order to win that race.
It makes sense to me that if you break rules, don't care about consequences or harming people, that you can innovate faster, so if that's the implicit argument in this post, then I believe it. I don't think it's necessary to have innovation at all, I just think it's necessary to innovate faster than someone else who is willing to do those things.
There is an excellent (in my opinion much better than this one) long article on the broader questions of this framing by Scott Alexander, with a strangely confusing name: Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman.
It's about the dilemma of slave morality versus master morality - basically the opposite extremes of "whatever you do is irrelevant if you're a bad person" and "how amoral you are is irrelevant if you're a strong successful achiever" - and possible alternatives. It also gives some examples of specific people, how these views applied at various points in history, but mostly it asks questions that might help explore and understand the topic more in detail.
Also some selected added thoughts or polemics from the readers, some of which add interest.
It's long, but I had a great time reading it. And this is so stupid that it made me laugh out loud:
FWIW, this is one of those "supports racist ideology in cover of rationality" guys.
I've been reading him for a few years now, including some of his old articles from the previous blog, and I disagree with this entirely. And quite honestly I really dislike people just calling someone a racist on an unrelated article that greatly expands the topic of the original post without being very clear why.
I have written longer posts on it before, and since that seems to upset people I decided to do a "hey this guy says shitty things" thing this time. I'm on my phone and can't easily go pull those posts up right now, so I'll summarize.
Last time I went back and read several more of his blog posts and his more recent reddit comments and I believe the man consistently falls into biological determinism sorts of opinions about women as well as POC. Human Biodiversity is just outright racism, it's just the renaming of racialism, not any sort of as actual science, and the fact he's even engaging with it when most people have never heard of it, because it's literally Stormfront material is a bit of a flag on its own. Believing in it even in a "oh I don't know if I can disprove this" way matches his other comments where he's skeptical of the effect of minority teachers on improving minority student outcomes, or where talks about how women are less interested in programming and that this is innate rather than engaging with the fact that women were programmers until it got prestige. (And there's no new evidence that human biodiversity aka racialism aka scientific racism is real, it's just a fancy new name on a supremacist ideology. It's been debunked for a long time and any amount of skepticism about the sources of it would lead someone away from agreeing with it.)
I don't demand anyone agree with me, but I don't like ignoring or washing people's bigotry and as long as he continues to be posted, I'll continue to point out his history. I personally dislike the frequency with which he's posted here because of his views but as I said in a recent thread, I don't think silence to that is the correct answer.
There are two parts to this. The first one is the ideological part - what it's used for, by whom, etc. In that context I agree with you.
The second part is examining the actual evidence for and against it while attempting to be unbiased by the first part. In that context (and the context of western left wing internet commonly denying unpopular science like psychometrics in general, although of course much less often than the US right does it), with all due respect, I trust him much more than I trust you because he tries to be very open about his reasoning and his sources - that is in fact why I read him in general.
I see no issue with engaging biological determinism in the same way. Based on all I read I don't think it's fair to say that he pushes biological determinism, just that he actually considers the possibility of some forms of it existing. This is viewed as at the very least unfashionable in todays western world, which causes the same issue as with the above - even if some parts of it were true, most people don't touch it with a ten foot pole, so it's generally not even considered in situations where it has not been strongly disproved (because that's a very hard thing to do and neither social sciences nor biology are really able to do it, yet).
Example regarding programming: I remember reading about the peculiar effect of women participating in STEM fields to a much larger degree in developing countries and the numbers reducing as the overall wealth in their society increases. This can be interpreted as women going into STEM fields when forced by economic pressure but not actually prefering them when they have more of a choice on average, or by the economic pressure towards STEM changing into different social pressures away from STEM as the society changes from increased wealth. But I don't see a good reason to say that just mentioning the first possibility makes one a bigot.
I do approach this from the point of view that in general I believe that the notion that on average, in very broad strokes, sex differences do not ever innately correlate with differences in personal preferences, is not well scientifically funded. Neither is the opposite, mind, but I have zero issues with someone talking about either. This does not really affect how I behave towards individuals because broad averages are not relevant for that, but it causes me to not see merely discussing it as offensive.
I disagree that his comments on this subject were along the lines of "just mentioning the first possibility." He fully ignored that women in the US were programmers until pushed out of it by men, and that girls were pushed away from computers at a young age when they were bought for boys, and dismissed the harassment and other negative experiences of women in tech or even more so, in school leading up to being in tech.
In general I disagree that he's engaging in these in a "wow some evidence does maybe exist for it" way. I think he believes in biological determinism because that is a consistent throughline in his writing. One of his more recent reddit posts was asking about whether there was yet evidence that teacher representation didn't make a difference in performance for minority students.
But those emails explicitly say that he thinks this racist ideology is "probably correct or at least not provably incorrect" and that he doesn't want that to get out. That's not just "considering the possibility." He also expressed support for sterilizing "undesirables" and states he's pro-eugenics. Those are not "examining things other people won't touch."
I think "what's wrong with just mentioning it" and "being willing to consider things other people won't touch" are the cover he uses to continue to engage with bigotry and never thoroughly debunk it, even though science has done so repeatedly. Even though women explicitly say they're harassed out of tech fields. And we keep seeing him linking to and engaging with other people with similar opinions that are slightly less couched (the last one I saw posted here was a far right Catholic blogger who even more explicitly espoused racist ideology). He says himself that he's smart enough to ignore "the garbage" but frankly, he wouldn't agree with me on what that garbage is. And I'm not the deity of good opinions, but I do think that when "human biodiversity" is explicitly racialism we can go "oh I don't have to listen to that because we've already debunked it."
If you prefer, in the future when I see him posted I'll give the longer answers instead of the short ones. And I'll always remain respectful and within the intent of the Tildes community, but I won't ignore the promotion of someone who believes "probably" that racial minorities are inherently less intelligent than white people.
I don't have any short answer except I disagree with most of your interpreteations and where I don't, I don't see it as bigotry.
Regarding programming, the world is not just the US and the fact that one thing that affected the number of women in programming happened does not in any way clearly imply that that is the thing that caused it. Programming nowadays is also a very very different area from programming in the 60s up to say early 90s. And some biological determinism seems to clearly exist since there are for example sex differences in mating that seem to be universal across cultures even though many sexual and long-term mating preferences can culturally differ by a lot, so the overall concept is not inconceiveable either.
Regarding intelligence specifically, I don't think it is at all unreasonable to start with the assumption that current social consensus might be wrong - in fact I think the conditions are there for it:
Much of old IQ vs ethnicity research was clearly crap even from a naive point of view. Then we collectively realized that racism and eugenics leading to ethnic cleanses or genocides are a terrible idea, so attempts to prove scientific racism abruptly stopped, and almost nobody has been seriously directly studying it since. How much of IQ is hereditary has been a subject of debate for a long time, but that is by no means a settled thing. This article that was also posted on Tildes did seemingly a pretty good job saying that actually very little is heritable (and indeed Scott Alexander shared it as interesting and well written), however a new study claims that one of the key studies cited in that article contains an important mistake and as a result does not support his conclusions, plus it spawned several replies that accuse him of omitting non-controversial evidence that supports twin studies or obfuscating his data to better support his points.
And, of course, studying this topic directly (it is sometimes done indirectly, for example by government agencies trying to extrapolate IQ from standardized tests administered to students) is only done by either nazis or massive weirdos, firstly because of the eugenics implications and secondly because academia is largely dominated by western liberals, and among western liberals there's a strong dislike of IQ in general, let alone the idea of it being innately bound to something we cannot control. This increases the likelyhood that there are things we simply do not know because nobody credible is making an effort to find them out.
I don't think that saying any of that is dangerous, bigoted or pseudoscientific, unless you start adding eugenics to it or pretend that IQ in any way measures the overall value or quality of a person. Which neither me nor Scott Alexander does.
You're ignoring that the ideology he thinks is "probably true" is literally white supremacist. It is "race science"
You're also ignoring him explicitly saying he supports eugenics.
I have absolutely zero interest pondering whether its reasonable to question "social consensus" on this, despite it being scientific consensus that it's bunk.
As for women in tech, the article of his I read didn't deal with the "developing world". I don't recall anything dealing with anywhere besides America but it's been a few months.
I don't support people that believe white supremacist ideology is "probably true." And I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when he implies things that align with those explicit statements.
I don't really care if you agree with me and I've said nothing about your beliefs, but I genuinely have zero interest in discussing whether racial science is legitimate or not. He explicitly said those things in emails and LJ comments and reddit comments in addition to the implications around his blog posts. If he doesn't want people to think he supports eugenics he probably shouldn't say so.
I don't have a strong opinion on this matter, I only know about Scott Alexander in passing like his AI turing test post from a little while ago. With which I did have some issues, but that is beside the point.
But, I do want to point out that having followed someone for years doesn't exclude them standing for something you might not have realized. I often have seen this response because people feel that it would reflect on them as a person if something like this turns out to be the case, and they didn't notice. Which is a fallacy in itself.
I was curious, so I did briefly look into it, the logical place seems to be rationalwiki for this context where there is some passing mention like this
There is also this bit about Race and IQ
So while you personally might disagree with it entirely based on what you have seen, it doesn't mean there isn't necessarily some truth to the claim you are responding to.
It is also possible that @DefinitelyNotAFae is referring to the mentioning of Matt Yglesias, not the article author. Matt does have some controversy attached to his name surrounding various statements he made.
Edit:
Replied before I saw your edit
Which is entirely fair as well.
Shit, I was slightly unclear and now I possibly made you spend time unnecessarily. Sorry.
I have seen most of criticisms of Scott Alexander because he's very unpopular in left-bias subreddits, much more than here, and that made me do a double check a couple years ago and explore the controversial stuff, including some email leaks.
I really dislike the tone of Rationalwiki, as usual in politics or culture-war related articles, because they refuse to approach things they disagree with in good faith, which is imo warranted in this case. Another issue is that they link evidence of him seemingly supporting controversial views, but ignore evidence of him criticizing the same views, which due to his approach to writing about controversial topics happens commonly. He was accused of being a neoreactionary while at the same time writing something like a "neoreactionary hater's handbook", a long summary of things that are wrong with the movement (note that this is an example and I did not search whether they link this specifically, I just don't have time to look up anything that I don't remember off the top of my head).
I have seen some of the controversial sources they link, and imo the only thing that he's guilty of is that while most of society refuses to touch those controversial topics with a ten foot pole, for reasons that are understandable, he feels it's no issue with approaching it from a standpoint of "okay, so what if it's true? Let's explore the evidence that goes either way and think about the possible implications", which I personally find incredibly refreshing in a time where most of the internet is very emotionally loaded whenever approaching anything mildly culture-war or US politics related.
The mentioned email leaks from a private conversation were some of the most controversial things regarding him, and they could essentially be summarized as "I reviewed all the supposed evidence supporting human biodiversity (potential links between ethnicity genetics and IQ) and I've found that some of it is hard to disprove, which is making me really worried because the consequences of that would be frightening". As long as this is done in good faith from a genuine and educated point of view (which clearly showed that he doesn't want those things to be true), I have no issue with that whatsoever.
He's also a long time democrat voter and recommends his voters to vote democrat (or optionally third party in places where it doesn't matter), if that says anything.
No worries, I didn't spend that much time. Even if it doesn't apply to you, I think it is worth it to point out the fallacy I was talking about for others :)
I think that there’s value in some of the personality traits in question, but as it does with many things the US takes the permissiveness way too far.
Sometimes it’s a good thing to be assertive and occasionally buck norms when nobody else seems to be willing to. Without people like that it’s easy to wind up in a stagnant, navelgazey state that’s too caught up in insignificant details and too willing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good to be able to accomplish anything.
It’s something else to take that to its natural extreme, letting this sort of personality run the show and giving them the green light to do as they please regardless of legal or moral considerations. That’s dangerous and unnecessary.
It kinda feels like the author hasn't met any people.
If you get to know them, pretty much everyone is a little nuts. They just don't have the resources to go big with it.
There are all sorts of interesting things you can find in common between many uber financially successful people. Lack of empathy comes up a lot, fixation on legacy, there are a lot of dreamers in there too. I don't see how you can pick the examples the author did and not talk about how most of them were assholes.
Is that because it was the unspoken premise? We need to accept douchebags for the greater good? Certainly the modern examples included some undeniable douchbags.
You can be a little crazy and change the world because of it without being a dick. If not then we need to reevaluate the entire context.