This is an (in style for the subject matter, fairly verbose and long-winded) takedown of Scott "Alexander" Siskind, a prominent blogger in the "rationalist" community-slash-cult recently covered...
This is an (in style for the subject matter, fairly verbose and long-winded) takedown of Scott "Alexander" Siskind, a prominent blogger in the "rationalist" community-slash-cult recently covered in the New York Times. The author mostly focuses on two of his essays: "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" and "Untitled", coming to these conclusions:
Scott Siskind [suggests] that criticism of Gamergate is basically the same as antisemitic conspiracy theories, that criticisms of misogyny in nerd culture are fundamentally out of bounds, that in fact it’s the feminists that are making these criticisms who are the real villains. And doing it all in his long-winded, pseudo-intellectual style, making it all seem so bland and anodyne and harmless.
This sounds extreme. That’s because it is. Scott Siskind provided intellectual legitimacy to a movement that led directly to a fucking fascist coup.
Were you to take to Twitter and accuse Scott Siskind of poorly supported conclusions or of dangerously shoddy thinking about apartheid his defenders would immediately show up demanding citations. And it’s nearly impossible to give them, because the damage isn’t done by what he says (which is as always very little), but rather by what he doesn’t, or by the way in which he stretches the act of not actually supportng his claims over several paragraphs. There’s no smoking guns; it requires the sort of 2500 word exegesis I just engaged in to point out. [emphasis mine] Indeed, this is crucial to the rhetorical strategy of Siskind and his ilk (a strategy shared by Yarvin/Moldbug and Yudkowsky, who could just as well have been the subjects of very similar essays). When they’re arguing for their own claims the structure is this sort of elongated non-speech.
Siskind is extremely popular in silicon valley tech circles—a point made clear in the New York Times profile. And while I can’t draw a causal link […] I cannot imagine consequences of an intellectually dishonest eugenicist and rape apologist being tremendously influential among tech CEOs to be good, y’know? It doesn’t seem like telling the CEOs of social media companies that feminists shouldn’t be listened to is gonna have great consequences for how online abuse is handled. It doesn’t seem like telling the CEOs of big data companies that poverty is hereditary and eugenics are a good idea is going to lead to good things.
I don’t have a big, stunning conclusion here. Or, rather, I’ve already made it, back when I wrote the book that was why Cade Metz got in touch with me for his article. Scott Siskind is yet another example of extreme stupidity that’s nevertheless extremely dangerous—one that ties in directly to neoreaction, to the rise off the alt-right, to the malevolence of Peter Thiel, and to everything else I talk about in that book. We aren’t any less fucked, and I still don’t know what I can do other than point all of this out.
Now, when I see articles posted by him or other "rationalist" talking heads, from their own domains, LessWrong or Substack (who are apparently busy attracting bigots that managed to be openly bigoted enough to get banned from twitter as a public figure, with six-figure advance bonuses) on here, it deeply concerns me. Tildes is perhaps uniquely at risk for being infiltrated by this group, both by demographic — we are a site that's mostly cis-male, us-american and tech-affine — as well as the site's philosophical goal of civil discussion, while, as we've seen here, a whole load of impressive-seeming non-content can very easily be used to blandly, boringly, even "civilly", advocate for absolutely heinous things without ever calling someone "cunt" or the n-word or whatever.
If we don't want to wind up having people here trying to discuss the value of "scientific" racism, or whether there's a causal link between attractiveness and IQ, or whether feminists really have been the real nazis all along, or whether The Poors In Shithole Countries really simply should've chosen to not be so destitute, and along the way also want to avoid the bemusement that is reading uneducated people wildly extrapolating their weird hypotheses to invent Pascal's Wager But In Space from first principles, we need to be careful with which content we share here.
I think it's a fair concern you raise. Thankfully the Tildes community has done quite well at rejecting this sort of deceptive-intellectualism thus far. See the comments from this thread just...
I think it's a fair concern you raise. Thankfully the Tildes community has done quite well at rejecting this sort of deceptive-intellectualism thus far. See the comments from this thread just earlier today where they (we) eviscerate an article that reads a little too close to rape apologism.
Still, when there's a bad idea but it's been wrapped in an appealing package, it might be harder to debunk. I've seen reasonable people able to justify unreasonable actions because it meshed with their world-view.
As one example, I've heard friends casually ask: "Would somebody just shoot Trump?". This is obviously a terrible idea. Even if you can somehow condone such an action, and that's a big if, the political ramifications would be just as bad. Trump dies as a martyr and hero to his party. The media stops focusing on any of his negative policies or actions and his party earns millions of sympathy votes in the next election. This should be so incredibly obvious that I'm shocked to have heard it suggested from multiple people.
So I feel that even otherwise rational people will have their blind spots. That applies to us too. All we can really do is try and illuminate those blind spots, and allow for opposition to let us know when we're being ideologically motivated instead of seeing the full story.
Here's the thing though, I don't want to see that rape apologist thread on Tildes, at all. Sure, it's nice to see people in the thread railing against the author, but there are people in there...
Thankfully the Tildes community has done quite well at rejecting this sort of deceptive-intellectualism thus far.
Here's the thing though, I don't want to see that rape apologist thread on Tildes, at all. Sure, it's nice to see people in the thread railing against the author, but there are people in there also arguing in favor of what's presented. As an aside, a small discussion about this on the discord server resulted in the conversation needing to be paused and someone leaving the server entirely.
I feel like we need to do better. We need to be proactively removing these threads. They don't garner any noteworthy discussion and the only thing they accomplish is to cause people to leave the platform. These kinds of posts and these kinds of discussions are what's been repeatedly driving the minority voice on this platform away and they certainly do not make me feel welcome.
Okay, as one of the most vocal opponents to that thread, in that thread, I have to repeat my question and hopefully make it more explicit: who? I had to read through it again to make sure I wasn't...
there are people in there also arguing in favor of what's presented.
Okay, as one of the most vocal opponents to that thread, in that thread, I have to repeat my question and hopefully make it more explicit: who?
I had to read through it again to make sure I wasn't losing my mind. There's a couple people who are trying their best to salvage the article, and a couple more who are essentially saying they got something positive out of it (good for them?). There's exactly one person which actually defends the article, and they seem to be defending the form, not being rape apologists.
I have to double check here because I'm starting to wonder if you're referring to me, if I somehow accidentally defended that shitty article or something.
I don't think it was good content, definitely not tildes-worthy, but what exactly are you implying can be done better? You or I might post a bad piece once in a while, it happens. The #1 thing that I would think would drive content contributors away is stressing the fuck out about having potentially misunderstood something in what they're posting and being flayed by the community for it.
In more actionable terms: I would personally like to see labels on posts especially Noise, Malice and Exemplary. I'm sure we can then have the discussion about how automatic vs. manual the flagkilling can be based on such labels.
But above anything else I would like to keep giving people the benefit of the doubt. And I'd much rather incorrectly give it than incorrectly take it away. And to be clear, the benefit of the doubt is not an infinite resource: it absolutely goes away after multiple offences, especially if you have "the talk" with someone and they're still testing the limits. But the way you're framing your post right now is just a general "people are doing this" and that can mean anyone. Let's just be specific.
It's not you and I don't want to start a witch hunt so I'm going to politely decline to name any names. This was the vibe I got from the thread. Of note, I am heavily biased, as I have been...
It's not you and I don't want to start a witch hunt so I'm going to politely decline to name any names. This was the vibe I got from the thread. Of note, I am heavily biased, as I have been sexually assaulted in my past.
For the record, if it were me, I would much rather hear about it directly. The "benefit of the doubt" works both ways, in that if I'm making someone uncomfortable and am unaware of it, I want to...
For the record, if it were me, I would much rather hear about it directly. The "benefit of the doubt" works both ways, in that if I'm making someone uncomfortable and am unaware of it, I want to hear about it. I suspect most tilders feel the same way. I suspect you feel the same way.
IMO, the "witch-hunt" vibe is a lot more present when things remain unsaid like this. Of course, I don't want to pressure you into naming names either; and you definitely don't have to deal with this thread at all (or keep thinking about it), so I'll leave it be if you just want to move on.
One doesn't get to say "There are witches afoot!" with stirring calls to action and then go "oh, I don't mean to start a witch hunt..." If @Gaywallet thinks someone's behavior is so unacceptable...
Exemplary
One doesn't get to say "There are witches afoot!" with stirring calls to action and then go "oh, I don't mean to start a witch hunt..."
If @Gaywallet thinks someone's behavior is so unacceptable they should report the user and let Deimos ban them if he sees fit.
Based on what I saw in the article and thread in question, and the fallout in the (unofficial) discord, I'll just say that I have more trust in Deimos's decision making than in someone casting sharp aspersions at a very vague crowd.
If anything, the behavior that makes me want to give up on the site is the way this community seems to have a remarkably consistent cycle of verbose outbursts and trying to outdo themselves finding the worst possible interpretation of some weak article or discussion, and turning it into drama that festers on the front page for days afterward.
Any time I see a post with more than 10-20 comments, I don't think to myself "Oh, this will be interesting and informative!", but "Oh no, here we go again..."
I can't think of any other site I frequent where this is the case.
I have spoken privately with Deimos and other individuals about this matter. All I said is that there were people in that thread who were not lambasting the author. I apologize if this was...
I have spoken privately with Deimos and other individuals about this matter.
All I said is that there were people in that thread who were not lambasting the author. I apologize if this was construed as starting a witch hunt. In the future I will avoid making any comments on user interaction and focus on my call to action, which was merely that I do not want to see this low quality, bad faith content (the article in the linked thread) on this website at all.
A little bit uncharitable. People are saying that they're being driven off the site. We don't want that. We want more people, and a wider variety of people, to be using Tildes. We should probably...
One doesn't get to say "There are witches afoot!" with stirring calls to action and then go "oh, I don't mean to start a witch hunt...
A little bit uncharitable. People are saying that they're being driven off the site. We don't want that. We want more people, and a wider variety of people, to be using Tildes. We should probably listen a bit more when people talk about having a bad time here, and we should probably spend a bit less time asking "but can you give me detailed specific examples so that I can tell you why you're wrong to have those feelings".
This is directly suggesting that multiple other users are "rape apologists"/in favor of rape apologism. I don't want to re-litigate the article and whether or not it should've been posted or...
that rape apologist thread .... there are people in there also arguing in favor of what's presented.
This is directly suggesting that multiple other users are "rape apologists"/in favor of rape apologism. I don't want to re-litigate the article and whether or not it should've been posted or removed, and I understand that some people were upset by the presence of the article, but I cannot imagine a good-faith reading of the contents of that comment thread that allows calling other users rape apologists as part of acceptable dialogue.
we should probably spend a bit less time asking "but can you give me detailed specific examples so that I can tell you why you're wrong to have those feelings"
This is neither a real quote from me nor (obviously, I would have thought) the point I was making, and it honestly feels like exactly the sort of bad-faith interpretation I mentioned.
I'm done with this thread, and clearly I need to take a break from the site for a while.
Why do you think I'm quoting you? I clearly say "we", meaning "people in general on this site". It's a bit odd that you insist other people need to bend words to find a possible good meaning,...
Why do you think I'm quoting you? I clearly say "we", meaning "people in general on this site".
It's a bit odd that you insist other people need to bend words to find a possible good meaning, while you're going to bend words to find the worst possible interpretation.
As an aside, a small discussion about this on the discord server resulted in the conversation needing to be paused and someone leaving the server entirely.
I appreciate your summary because, while I suspect I'm sympathetic to the author's views, I can't bear to read anything that mimics his style. Libertarian circles often present their worldview as...
I appreciate your summary because, while I suspect I'm sympathetic to the author's views, I can't bear to read anything that mimics his style.
Libertarian circles often present their worldview as the product of a purely rational process. Despite how dramatically Trumpism (and the Tea Party before it) have shifted the Overton window to the right, for aspiring technocrats (and the wealthy in general), it's not necessarily culturally acceptable to be aligned with the far- or alt-right (unless you're as shameless as Peter Thiel I guess).
And so this rationalist stuff offers the appealing cocktail: You get to appear scientific and, y'know, rational* while loosely masking many of the same bigoted, anti-media, and socially conservative values of more mainstream far-right circles.
*(How often do these essays talk about "updating their priors" and cite philosophers and critical theorists across thousands of words to mask the hollowness of their actual ideas?)
This is the ironic thing. They’re mostly engaging in discourse that was within the range of accepted opinion 20 or 30 years ago. At the time the jury was still out on certain claims about genetic...
How often do these essays talk about "updating their priors" and cite philosophers and critical theorists across thousands of words to mask the hollowness of their actual ideas?
This is the ironic thing. They’re mostly engaging in discourse that was within the range of accepted opinion 20 or 30 years ago. At the time the jury was still out on certain claims about genetic propensity and racial differences. Since then anthropologists, historians, ethnologists, geneticists, even behavioral economists have largely come down on the liberal side of many of these debates so it’s exceedingly difficult to bring those topics up with any kind of good faith if you’re at all informed or amenable to learning.
But you’ll notice the arguments from the rationalist crowd almost never cite mainstream academics who made their careers over the past 20 years. It’s always theorizing based on outdated ideas that people probably picked up around high school and never updated. The justification is to claim the modern academy has been “taken over” by SJW hacks. Anytime you hear people say “critical race theory” in spooky terms that’s what they’re doing. But it’s basically a form of anti-intellectualism. You’ll also notice the general disdain for anything not STEM as a field of study or any methods of analysis that rely on qualitative evidence or aren’t accessible to the methods of the natural sciences. Because those people come up with troublesome conclusions that force us to question the narratives we absorbed as kids.
thank you. That actually changed my mind on scott. I never understood when people acused him of bigotry. and somehow nobody would exactly point out how or why. this essay did it while being a good...
thank you. That actually changed my mind on scott. I never understood when people acused him of bigotry. and somehow nobody would exactly point out how or why. this essay did it while being a good read.
It has certainly changed my perspective since I have previously, incorrectly characterized him as a misguided "thoughtful progressive" in a previous thread here on Tildes. It seems the difference...
It has certainly changed my perspective since I have previously, incorrectly characterized him as a misguided "thoughtful progressive" in a previous thread here on Tildes.
It seems the difference between, say Sargon of Akkad, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and Scott Siskind is a matter of degrees to which they attempt to obfuscate their racist and harmful rhetoric. Thinking back on it now, I shouldn't have been so shocked that Siskind was so comfortable to bring the writings and thoughts of folks like Douglas Murray into conversations about public policy.
I have to confess I rarely comment on anything related to Slate Star Codex (or really, most rationalist writing) specifically because of what this article talks about. I don't feel like commenting...
I have to confess I rarely comment on anything related to Slate Star Codex (or really, most rationalist writing) specifically because of what this article talks about. I don't feel like commenting unless I have a good grasp of the person's argument, but he's just so damned tedious to read that I can never get through it without my eyes glazing over. I try to go from one section to the next and simply can't follow the thread of what he's trying to argue. I skip to the end to see if I can work backwards from the conclusion to see if the additional context can help me piece together what the initial blocks are building to, but it comes to no avail. So I relegated myself to judging him by the quality of his fan-base who, lacking his talent for inducing torpor, end up making the implicit much more explicit. I assumed, as Scott claims, that they're not reflective of his views and must just be missing some kind of nuance in his thought that's buried underneath all that exposition.
Enough people I respect had been saying that he's a good and thoughtful writer and I just couldn't see it. I can never follow the thread on anything the guy is saying. All this time I assumed it was because I was just a smooth-brained millennial who can't get it owing to dulling his capacity for focus and attention through too much smartphone use. Could my capacity for understanding arguments have really atrophied that much from the college days when I was reading and writing essays about Kant? I mean my God it's KANT! Surely if I could get through Kant I could get through this!?
I'm glad to see that this is not the case and, in fact, he actually does just go off at length about nothing and just try to draw connections between disparate topics by attaching threads of yarn between the images and asserting that it's ALL CONNECTED MAN.
You know where else this sort of thing shows up in a physically harmful way? Toxic chemical regulation and litigation. Lots of very well paid “science” firms generate reasonably well written and...
You know where else this sort of thing shows up in a physically harmful way? Toxic chemical regulation and litigation. Lots of very well paid “science” firms generate reasonably well written and seemingly scientifically rigorous studies that do get published but cast lots of doubt on toxicity and causation.
u/deing, I just want to say, this is one of the best written essays to be linked here on Tildes in my opinion. I continue to come to this site for content like this.
u/deing, I just want to say, this is one of the best written essays to be linked here on Tildes in my opinion. I continue to come to this site for content like this.
Previous relevant Tildes discussions on Scott Siskind and his blog: "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" Silicon Valley’s Safe Space: Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many...
Previous relevant Tildes discussions on Scott Siskind and his blog:
Ignoring them gives them free reign to recruit and spread their bullshit. In the absence of the ability to ban bigotry and bad-faith screeds from large swathes of the Internet, addressing and...
Ignoring them gives them free reign to recruit and spread their bullshit. In the absence of the ability to ban bigotry and bad-faith screeds from large swathes of the Internet, addressing and debunking it is the least-harmful option.
I agree, especially for voices like Jordan Peterson and Alexander Siskind, as the folks who follow these... bloggers? personalities? are sometimes more intellectually honest and open to the...
addressing and debunking it is the least-harmful option.
I agree, especially for voices like Jordan Peterson and Alexander Siskind, as the folks who follow these... bloggers? personalities? are sometimes more intellectually honest and open to the criticism and deconstruction of far-right talking points than those who follow the more traditional alt-right personalities.
I wasn't going to respond to this article, because I no more want to spend time debating this than the person who wrote it wanted to write her article. Suffice it to say that, though there is an...
I wasn't going to respond to this article, because I no more want to spend time debating this than the person who wrote it wanted to write her article. Suffice it to say that, though there is an interesting close reading in it, it's so dripping with hate for Scott Alexander, telling you what to think in every paragraph, that I think it counts as misinformation itself.
But, some people here seem to be taken in by it. Do I need to write something to respond to that misinformation?
I have a better idea: maybe @Demios should delete this topic altogether. Nobody is going to have a good time here.
The original article goes to some very dark places. For example, from the conclusion: This seems like a serious allegation but it's not substantiated. It seems to be because she thinks Scott had...
The original article goes to some very dark places. For example, from the conclusion:
What I want is for Scott Siskind to stop hurting people while the number of people whose deaths his actions have directly and materially contributed to is still in the single digits.
This seems like a serious allegation but it's not substantiated. It seems to be because she thinks Scott had something to do with someone's suicide? Despite, apparently, never having met her.
I don't think we want to get into this here on Tildes.
I think the author is successfully doing the exact opposite of what she criticizes Siskind for. (emphasis in original) She wrote an opinion piece where her own opinion is clear. You can agree with...
telling you what to think in every paragraph
I think the author is successfully doing the exact opposite of what she criticizes Siskind for.
But having looked at the essay pretty extensively, I’m confident in this claim: its conclusions are not actually supported by evidence, not merely in the sense that the argument does not work but in the sense that the argument is not actually there in the first place.
(emphasis in original)
She wrote an opinion piece where her own opinion is clear. You can agree with her or disagree with her, but you at least know what her position is. Her central criticism of Siskind, as I read it, is that he writes opinionated pieces, but ones without an easily identifiable thesis or topic statement.
What you refer to as "telling you what to think" I would refer to as...rhetoric? Any well-written op-ed in any newspaper in the world could also fall under this criticism. Good rhetorical writing is "here's a topic, here's what I think about it, why I think it, and why I think you should think the same way I do about it. "Telling you what to think" is not a bug of this type of writing, it's a feature. It's the explicit goal.
The central problem the author seems to have with Siskind, and it's a frustration I share, is that when a piece of rhetorical writing doesn't have a clear topic or thesis, it's impossible to engage with it in any meaningful way. You can't write a response about why you agree with it, or disagree with it, or agree in some parts but disagree in others, when there's no central unifying idea that can be agreed or disagreed with.
telling you what to think in every paragraph, that I think it counts as misinformation itself.
This is a...uh...expansive definition of misinformation. I'm really struggling to apply the principle of charity here and read this as something other than "I disagree with this post so strongly I think it should be removed from the site".
To be fair I did think some parts early on and in the conclusion sort of overstated the case by making a broad generalization and slinging accusations without directly supporting them. That’s not...
What you refer to as "telling you what to think" I would refer to as...rhetoric?
To be fair I did think some parts early on and in the conclusion sort of overstated the case by making a broad generalization and slinging accusations without directly supporting them. That’s not immediately “disqualifying” or whatever since not everything can be about everything and she more or less just asks you to take or leave her conclusions on those.
But it’s one of those things that’s not terrible individually but ends up being kind of noxious when applied by a bunch of people all at once. It’s not really stated that it’s just her opinion that he’s racist or for sure a White Supremacist, it’s presented as a fact and given in a way where the accused can’t really rebut. You can see it exhibiting the first 3 “cancel culture” tropes that Natalie Wynn talks about. Namely presumption of guilt, generalization, and essentialism. It also somewhat flirts with the sixth trope about transitivity by implying very strongly that anyone who has found anything valuable in his writing must also be sympathetic to White supremacists.
I don’t generally see these tropes as being as destructive in a long form essay so it’s not a big deal. They do end up being problematic when they’re tossed out as tweets without context though, since people are less primed to have their thinking caps on and evaluate truth claims critically in a Twitter context compared to an essay context. They tend to vacillate between everything being 100% untrustworthy bullshit or 100% accurate without much follow up. Before long assertions become accepted consensus with barely any gristle connecting them, much like a typical Slate Star Codex article.
If it were a response to one essay that she didn't like, that would be okay. But it's not that. This is arguing that Scott Alexander is a terrible person and should be cancelled. It includes a...
If it were a response to one essay that she didn't like, that would be okay. But it's not that. This is arguing that Scott Alexander is a terrible person and should be cancelled. It includes a huge amount of accusations of various kinds that are really going to take a lot of work to go through.
I am concerned that people are going to use this to argue that nothing Scott wrote should be shared on Tildes because he's an "extremely dangerous" person. That seems to be that way this is going.
This is an (in style for the subject matter, fairly verbose and long-winded) takedown of Scott "Alexander" Siskind, a prominent blogger in the "rationalist" community-slash-cult recently covered in the New York Times. The author mostly focuses on two of his essays: "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" and "Untitled", coming to these conclusions:
Now, when I see articles posted by him or other "rationalist" talking heads, from their own domains, LessWrong or Substack (who are apparently busy attracting bigots that managed to be openly bigoted enough to get banned from twitter as a public figure, with six-figure advance bonuses) on here, it deeply concerns me. Tildes is perhaps uniquely at risk for being infiltrated by this group, both by demographic — we are a site that's mostly cis-male, us-american and tech-affine — as well as the site's philosophical goal of civil discussion, while, as we've seen here, a whole load of impressive-seeming non-content can very easily be used to blandly, boringly, even "civilly", advocate for absolutely heinous things without ever calling someone "cunt" or the n-word or whatever.
If we don't want to wind up having people here trying to discuss the value of "scientific" racism, or whether there's a causal link between attractiveness and IQ, or whether feminists really have been the real nazis all along, or whether The Poors In Shithole Countries really simply should've chosen to not be so destitute, and along the way also want to avoid the bemusement that is reading uneducated people wildly extrapolating their weird hypotheses to invent Pascal's Wager But In Space from first principles, we need to be careful with which content we share here.
I think it's a fair concern you raise. Thankfully the Tildes community has done quite well at rejecting this sort of deceptive-intellectualism thus far. See the comments from this thread just earlier today where they (we) eviscerate an article that reads a little too close to rape apologism.
Still, when there's a bad idea but it's been wrapped in an appealing package, it might be harder to debunk. I've seen reasonable people able to justify unreasonable actions because it meshed with their world-view.
As one example, I've heard friends casually ask: "Would somebody just shoot Trump?". This is obviously a terrible idea. Even if you can somehow condone such an action, and that's a big if, the political ramifications would be just as bad. Trump dies as a martyr and hero to his party. The media stops focusing on any of his negative policies or actions and his party earns millions of sympathy votes in the next election. This should be so incredibly obvious that I'm shocked to have heard it suggested from multiple people.
So I feel that even otherwise rational people will have their blind spots. That applies to us too. All we can really do is try and illuminate those blind spots, and allow for opposition to let us know when we're being ideologically motivated instead of seeing the full story.
Here's the thing though, I don't want to see that rape apologist thread on Tildes, at all. Sure, it's nice to see people in the thread railing against the author, but there are people in there also arguing in favor of what's presented. As an aside, a small discussion about this on the discord server resulted in the conversation needing to be paused and someone leaving the server entirely.
I feel like we need to do better. We need to be proactively removing these threads. They don't garner any noteworthy discussion and the only thing they accomplish is to cause people to leave the platform. These kinds of posts and these kinds of discussions are what's been repeatedly driving the minority voice on this platform away and they certainly do not make me feel welcome.
Okay, as one of the most vocal opponents to that thread, in that thread, I have to repeat my question and hopefully make it more explicit: who?
I had to read through it again to make sure I wasn't losing my mind. There's a couple people who are trying their best to salvage the article, and a couple more who are essentially saying they got something positive out of it (good for them?). There's exactly one person which actually defends the article, and they seem to be defending the form, not being rape apologists.
I have to double check here because I'm starting to wonder if you're referring to me, if I somehow accidentally defended that shitty article or something.
I don't think it was good content, definitely not tildes-worthy, but what exactly are you implying can be done better? You or I might post a bad piece once in a while, it happens. The #1 thing that I would think would drive content contributors away is stressing the fuck out about having potentially misunderstood something in what they're posting and being flayed by the community for it.
In more actionable terms: I would personally like to see labels on posts especially Noise, Malice and Exemplary. I'm sure we can then have the discussion about how automatic vs. manual the flagkilling can be based on such labels.
But above anything else I would like to keep giving people the benefit of the doubt. And I'd much rather incorrectly give it than incorrectly take it away. And to be clear, the benefit of the doubt is not an infinite resource: it absolutely goes away after multiple offences, especially if you have "the talk" with someone and they're still testing the limits. But the way you're framing your post right now is just a general "people are doing this" and that can mean anyone. Let's just be specific.
It's not you and I don't want to start a witch hunt so I'm going to politely decline to name any names. This was the vibe I got from the thread. Of note, I am heavily biased, as I have been sexually assaulted in my past.
For the record, if it were me, I would much rather hear about it directly. The "benefit of the doubt" works both ways, in that if I'm making someone uncomfortable and am unaware of it, I want to hear about it. I suspect most tilders feel the same way. I suspect you feel the same way.
IMO, the "witch-hunt" vibe is a lot more present when things remain unsaid like this. Of course, I don't want to pressure you into naming names either; and you definitely don't have to deal with this thread at all (or keep thinking about it), so I'll leave it be if you just want to move on.
One doesn't get to say "There are witches afoot!" with stirring calls to action and then go "oh, I don't mean to start a witch hunt..."
If @Gaywallet thinks someone's behavior is so unacceptable they should report the user and let Deimos ban them if he sees fit.
Based on what I saw in the article and thread in question, and the fallout in the (unofficial) discord, I'll just say that I have more trust in Deimos's decision making than in someone casting sharp aspersions at a very vague crowd.
If anything, the behavior that makes me want to give up on the site is the way this community seems to have a remarkably consistent cycle of verbose outbursts and trying to outdo themselves finding the worst possible interpretation of some weak article or discussion, and turning it into drama that festers on the front page for days afterward.
Any time I see a post with more than 10-20 comments, I don't think to myself "Oh, this will be interesting and informative!", but "Oh no, here we go again..."
I can't think of any other site I frequent where this is the case.
I have spoken privately with Deimos and other individuals about this matter.
All I said is that there were people in that thread who were not lambasting the author. I apologize if this was construed as starting a witch hunt. In the future I will avoid making any comments on user interaction and focus on my call to action, which was merely that I do not want to see this low quality, bad faith content (the article in the linked thread) on this website at all.
A little bit uncharitable. People are saying that they're being driven off the site. We don't want that. We want more people, and a wider variety of people, to be using Tildes. We should probably listen a bit more when people talk about having a bad time here, and we should probably spend a bit less time asking "but can you give me detailed specific examples so that I can tell you why you're wrong to have those feelings".
This is directly suggesting that multiple other users are "rape apologists"/in favor of rape apologism. I don't want to re-litigate the article and whether or not it should've been posted or removed, and I understand that some people were upset by the presence of the article, but I cannot imagine a good-faith reading of the contents of that comment thread that allows calling other users rape apologists as part of acceptable dialogue.
This is neither a real quote from me nor (obviously, I would have thought) the point I was making, and it honestly feels like exactly the sort of bad-faith interpretation I mentioned.
I'm done with this thread, and clearly I need to take a break from the site for a while.
Why do you think I'm quoting you? I clearly say "we", meaning "people in general on this site".
It's a bit odd that you insist other people need to bend words to find a possible good meaning, while you're going to bend words to find the worst possible interpretation.
.. Tildes has a discord?
No.
A small group of people on Tildes has a discord to talk about Tildes, but Tildes itself does not have a discord.
https://discord.gg/PcP8qHS
I appreciate your summary because, while I suspect I'm sympathetic to the author's views, I can't bear to read anything that mimics his style.
Libertarian circles often present their worldview as the product of a purely rational process. Despite how dramatically Trumpism (and the Tea Party before it) have shifted the Overton window to the right, for aspiring technocrats (and the wealthy in general), it's not necessarily culturally acceptable to be aligned with the far- or alt-right (unless you're as shameless as Peter Thiel I guess).
And so this rationalist stuff offers the appealing cocktail: You get to appear scientific and, y'know, rational* while loosely masking many of the same bigoted, anti-media, and socially conservative values of more mainstream far-right circles.
*(How often do these essays talk about "updating their priors" and cite philosophers and critical theorists across thousands of words to mask the hollowness of their actual ideas?)
This is the ironic thing. They’re mostly engaging in discourse that was within the range of accepted opinion 20 or 30 years ago. At the time the jury was still out on certain claims about genetic propensity and racial differences. Since then anthropologists, historians, ethnologists, geneticists, even behavioral economists have largely come down on the liberal side of many of these debates so it’s exceedingly difficult to bring those topics up with any kind of good faith if you’re at all informed or amenable to learning.
But you’ll notice the arguments from the rationalist crowd almost never cite mainstream academics who made their careers over the past 20 years. It’s always theorizing based on outdated ideas that people probably picked up around high school and never updated. The justification is to claim the modern academy has been “taken over” by SJW hacks. Anytime you hear people say “critical race theory” in spooky terms that’s what they’re doing. But it’s basically a form of anti-intellectualism. You’ll also notice the general disdain for anything not STEM as a field of study or any methods of analysis that rely on qualitative evidence or aren’t accessible to the methods of the natural sciences. Because those people come up with troublesome conclusions that force us to question the narratives we absorbed as kids.
thank you. That actually changed my mind on scott. I never understood when people acused him of bigotry. and somehow nobody would exactly point out how or why. this essay did it while being a good read.
It has certainly changed my perspective since I have previously, incorrectly characterized him as a misguided "thoughtful progressive" in a previous thread here on Tildes.
It seems the difference between, say Sargon of Akkad, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and Scott Siskind is a matter of degrees to which they attempt to obfuscate their racist and harmful rhetoric. Thinking back on it now, I shouldn't have been so shocked that Siskind was so comfortable to bring the writings and thoughts of folks like Douglas Murray into conversations about public policy.
I have to confess I rarely comment on anything related to Slate Star Codex (or really, most rationalist writing) specifically because of what this article talks about. I don't feel like commenting unless I have a good grasp of the person's argument, but he's just so damned tedious to read that I can never get through it without my eyes glazing over. I try to go from one section to the next and simply can't follow the thread of what he's trying to argue. I skip to the end to see if I can work backwards from the conclusion to see if the additional context can help me piece together what the initial blocks are building to, but it comes to no avail. So I relegated myself to judging him by the quality of his fan-base who, lacking his talent for inducing torpor, end up making the implicit much more explicit. I assumed, as Scott claims, that they're not reflective of his views and must just be missing some kind of nuance in his thought that's buried underneath all that exposition.
Enough people I respect had been saying that he's a good and thoughtful writer and I just couldn't see it. I can never follow the thread on anything the guy is saying. All this time I assumed it was because I was just a smooth-brained millennial who can't get it owing to dulling his capacity for focus and attention through too much smartphone use. Could my capacity for understanding arguments have really atrophied that much from the college days when I was reading and writing essays about Kant? I mean my God it's KANT! Surely if I could get through Kant I could get through this!?
I'm glad to see that this is not the case and, in fact, he actually does just go off at length about nothing and just try to draw connections between disparate topics by attaching threads of yarn between the images and asserting that it's ALL CONNECTED MAN.
You know where else this sort of thing shows up in a physically harmful way? Toxic chemical regulation and litigation. Lots of very well paid “science” firms generate reasonably well written and seemingly scientifically rigorous studies that do get published but cast lots of doubt on toxicity and causation.
u/deing, I just want to say, this is one of the best written essays to be linked here on Tildes in my opinion. I continue to come to this site for content like this.
Previous relevant Tildes discussions on Scott Siskind and his blog:
"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup"
Silicon Valley’s Safe Space: Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many tech leaders building our collective future. Then it disappeared.
Scott Alexander has deleted his Slate Star Codex blog due to the New York Times planning to reveal his real name in an article
Debating, analyzing, and discussing these people’s ideas just gives them legitimacy.
Ignoring them gives them free reign to recruit and spread their bullshit. In the absence of the ability to ban bigotry and bad-faith screeds from large swathes of the Internet, addressing and debunking it is the least-harmful option.
I agree, especially for voices like Jordan Peterson and Alexander Siskind, as the folks who follow these... bloggers? personalities? are sometimes more intellectually honest and open to the criticism and deconstruction of far-right talking points than those who follow the more traditional alt-right personalities.
I wasn't going to respond to this article, because I no more want to spend time debating this than the person who wrote it wanted to write her article. Suffice it to say that, though there is an interesting close reading in it, it's so dripping with hate for Scott Alexander, telling you what to think in every paragraph, that I think it counts as misinformation itself.
But, some people here seem to be taken in by it. Do I need to write something to respond to that misinformation?
I have a better idea: maybe @Demios should delete this topic altogether. Nobody is going to have a good time here.
Sounds like excessive gatekeeping, especially since most of the discussion so far has been polite and interesting.
The original article goes to some very dark places. For example, from the conclusion:
This seems like a serious allegation but it's not substantiated. It seems to be because she thinks Scott had something to do with someone's suicide? Despite, apparently, never having met her.
I don't think we want to get into this here on Tildes.
I think the author is successfully doing the exact opposite of what she criticizes Siskind for.
(emphasis in original)
She wrote an opinion piece where her own opinion is clear. You can agree with her or disagree with her, but you at least know what her position is. Her central criticism of Siskind, as I read it, is that he writes opinionated pieces, but ones without an easily identifiable thesis or topic statement.
What you refer to as "telling you what to think" I would refer to as...rhetoric? Any well-written op-ed in any newspaper in the world could also fall under this criticism. Good rhetorical writing is "here's a topic, here's what I think about it, why I think it, and why I think you should think the same way I do about it. "Telling you what to think" is not a bug of this type of writing, it's a feature. It's the explicit goal.
The central problem the author seems to have with Siskind, and it's a frustration I share, is that when a piece of rhetorical writing doesn't have a clear topic or thesis, it's impossible to engage with it in any meaningful way. You can't write a response about why you agree with it, or disagree with it, or agree in some parts but disagree in others, when there's no central unifying idea that can be agreed or disagreed with.
This is a...uh...expansive definition of misinformation. I'm really struggling to apply the principle of charity here and read this as something other than "I disagree with this post so strongly I think it should be removed from the site".
To be fair I did think some parts early on and in the conclusion sort of overstated the case by making a broad generalization and slinging accusations without directly supporting them. That’s not immediately “disqualifying” or whatever since not everything can be about everything and she more or less just asks you to take or leave her conclusions on those.
But it’s one of those things that’s not terrible individually but ends up being kind of noxious when applied by a bunch of people all at once. It’s not really stated that it’s just her opinion that he’s racist or for sure a White Supremacist, it’s presented as a fact and given in a way where the accused can’t really rebut. You can see it exhibiting the first 3 “cancel culture” tropes that Natalie Wynn talks about. Namely presumption of guilt, generalization, and essentialism. It also somewhat flirts with the sixth trope about transitivity by implying very strongly that anyone who has found anything valuable in his writing must also be sympathetic to White supremacists.
I don’t generally see these tropes as being as destructive in a long form essay so it’s not a big deal. They do end up being problematic when they’re tossed out as tweets without context though, since people are less primed to have their thinking caps on and evaluate truth claims critically in a Twitter context compared to an essay context. They tend to vacillate between everything being 100% untrustworthy bullshit or 100% accurate without much follow up. Before long assertions become accepted consensus with barely any gristle connecting them, much like a typical Slate Star Codex article.
If it were a response to one essay that she didn't like, that would be okay. But it's not that. This is arguing that Scott Alexander is a terrible person and should be cancelled. It includes a huge amount of accusations of various kinds that are really going to take a lot of work to go through.
I am concerned that people are going to use this to argue that nothing Scott wrote should be shared on Tildes because he's an "extremely dangerous" person. That seems to be that way this is going.