The Library of Scott Alexandria
October 16, 2015 7:25 AM Subscribe

Scott Alexander writes a lot. He's a psychiatrist, but talks about all kinds of stuff (in his about page, he calls out cognitive science, psychology, history, politics, medicine, religion, statistics, transhumanism, corny puns, and applied eschatology). Every time I read something of his, I'm struck by how reasonable he is. Evidently, I'm not alone: his posts each attract hundreds of comments. And he gets linked here a good bit. So a long-time reader of his combed through all his writings of the past decade-or-so and assembled this best-hits list. It's going to take me several happy months to get through it.
posted by AABoyles (140 comments total) 52 users marked this as a favorite

Oh my goodness! The blue and yellow / cognitive bias piece is basically what the infamous dress meme was about, right?
posted by Omnomnom at 7:35 AM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Scott Alexander is the only Internet Rationalist I can stand to read. Meditations on Moloch is a classic.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 7:35 AM on October 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

I love the eminently reasonable man who sticks Neo-Nazi anti-semitic cartoons among caricatures of nerds as a gotcha. He is good, to me.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:50 AM on October 16, 2015 [12 favorites]

"Infinite Jest is about wireheading."
posted by sammyo at 7:53 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

That whole article that Rustic Etruscan links to sure does, uh, poke some holes in how reasonable he comes off when the topic is feminism.
posted by griphus at 7:55 AM on October 16, 2015 [12 favorites]

Yeah, SSC is good but he is stalked by a giant feminist straw-woman, which is a shame.
posted by Zarkonnen at 7:59 AM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Every time I read something of his, I'm struck by how reasonable he is

Isn't this editorialising?
posted by marienbad at 8:03 AM on October 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

Yes it is. Is that against the rules or considered in bad taste?
posted by AABoyles at 8:06 AM on October 16, 2015

Congrats on your first post, AABoyles!

Generally, editorializing isn't done here, but it's not explicitly against the guidelines. If you have specific questions, feel free to check out the FAQ or visit metatalk.

--

I stopped reading Alexander after he included three neo-nazi cartoons about Jews in that post Rustic Etruscan links to.
posted by zarq at 8:13 AM on October 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

His take on feminism is screwed up, but there's a lot more wrong with SSC than just that. For example, he's argued that

The more things turn out to be genetic, the more I support universal funding for implantable contraception that allow people to choose when they do or don’t want children – thus breaking the cycle where people too impulsive or confused to use contraception have more children and increase frequency of those undesirable genes. I think I’d have a heck of a lot easier a time changing gene frequency in the population than you would changing people’s locus of control or self-efficacy or whatever, even if I wasn’t allowed to do anything immoral (except by very silly religious standards of “immoral”).

That reads to me as an uncritical acceptance of eugenics presented as if it were courageous honesty and unvarnished plain-thinking.
posted by kewb at 8:18 AM on October 16, 2015 [20 favorites]

Thanks, zarq. I'll refrain from editorializing in the future.
posted by AABoyles at 8:18 AM on October 16, 2015

(Sorry for the big edit; the cut-and-paste didn't come through fully.)
posted by kewb at 8:19 AM on October 16, 2015

Who's Anon?
posted by kmz at 8:21 AM on October 16, 2015

No worries. We were all new here at one point or another. :)
posted by zarq at 8:23 AM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

I misread zarq's meta-comment/comment delimiter (--) as an Anon attribution. My mistake, fixed.
posted by AABoyles at 8:24 AM on October 16, 2015

Yeah, between the eugenics, the hatred of women, the failure to understand what structural oppression or privilege is, and the equation of fedora-mocking with anti-Semitism, this guy turns out to be a complete douche.
posted by OmieWise at 8:27 AM on October 16, 2015 [10 favorites]

kewb, it seems to me that the phrase "allow people to choose" rather de-fangs that interpretation-- would you characterize anything that changes gene frequency in the human population to be eugenics?
posted by 4th number at 8:37 AM on October 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

Oh the [untitled] piece isn't on the list of greatest hits. Hmm.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:43 AM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Eugenics is just the belief that you can improve the genetic features of human populations through selective breeding and sterilization. Forced sterilization is part of 19th/20th century eugenics, not the whole thing.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 8:45 AM on October 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

Augh, this guy. He's such a beautiful writer, and often profound, but his opinions on 'biological determinism' make me deeply, deeply uncomfortable. Those kinds of attitudes are so much more threatening and hard to take coming from someone whose work I otherwise respect.
posted by Kilter at 8:45 AM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Am I the only one who would appreciate his writing (ignoring the problematic aspects for now) but finds the length of posts to be excruciating?! Using Rustic Estruscan's link again as an example, there's over 13,000 words there!

This sort of post always makes me want to reconsider the true ability of the author, assuming that anyone with a true grasp of their ideas ought to be able to communicate them in far fewer words.

Or is it just that I have a much lower attention span that I used to?
posted by Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer at 9:08 AM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

No, prolixity is definitely a Thing in the rationalsphere or whatever it is they're called.
posted by griphus at 9:12 AM on October 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

I do have a lower attention span I used to, but I will take 13,000 words on a page over the same 13,000 words broken up into 200 tweets any day of the week.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:23 AM on October 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

This sort of post always makes me want to reconsider the true ability of the author, assuming that anyone with a true grasp of their ideas ought to be able to communicate them in far fewer words.

This is a function of writing without an editor, at least in part.
posted by OmieWise at 9:24 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Am I the only one who doesn't get surprised or angry anymore when the writing of some sober, well-read, right-leaning blogger turns sexist/etc.? It's just par for the course. There's a deep satisfaction that's hard to get without reading well-written arguments on the other side of political opinion. When your opinions are left-leaning, I don't see how to do that without swallowing random turds with the punch. I don't read blogs like this as often as I used to, and a main reason is that I expect this when I do. (Not that anyone here should feel the need to)
posted by IShouldBeStudyingRightNow at 9:29 AM on October 16, 2015

I think I agree that the "rationalsphere" in general has a problem with word count, with Curtis Yarvin as maybe the most prominent example. It's possible that re-inventing, from scratch, most of the concepts and terminology that the rest of the world takes for granted forces you to explain yourself in far more detail than is otherwise necessary...
posted by Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer at 9:51 AM on October 16, 2015

I find material like this easier to read while listening to this self-aware Lil Dicky song.
posted by StrikeTheViol at 9:51 AM on October 16, 2015

I think I agree that the "rationalsphere" in general has a problem with word count, with Curtis Yarvin as maybe the most prominent example. It's possible that re-inventing, from scratch, most of the concepts and terminology that the rest of the world takes for granted forces you to explain yourself in far more detail than is otherwise necessary...

For those who don't know, Curtis Yarvin also goes by Mencius Moldbug, which pseudonym may sound more familiar:

“Moldbug.” The name sounds like it belongs to a troll who belches from the depths of an Internet rabbit hole. And so it does. Mencius Moldbug is the blogonym of Curtis Guy Yarvin, a San Francisco software developer and frustrated poet.

[...]

Yarvin’s public writing tapered off as his software career solidified. In 2007, he reemerged under an angry pseudonym, Moldbug, on a humble Blogspot blog called “Unqualified Reservations.” As might be expected of a “DIY ideology . . . designed by geeks for other geeks,” his political treatises are heavily informed by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Lucas. What set Yarvin apart from the typical keyboard kook was his archaic, grandiose tone, which echoed the snippets Yarvin cherry-picked from obscure old reactionary tracts. Yarvin told one friendly interviewer that he spent $500 a month on books.

Elsewhere he confessed to having taken a grand total of five undergraduate humanities courses (history and creative writing). The lack of higher ed creds hasn’t hurt his confidence. On his blog, Yarvin holds forth on everything from the intricacies of Korean history to contemporary Pakistani politics, from the proper conduct of a counterinsurgency operation to macroeconomic theory and fiscal policy, and he never gives an inch. “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point,” he writes.

In short, Moldbug reads like an overconfident autodidact’s imitation of a Lewis Lapham essay—if Lewis Lapham were a fascist teenage Dungeon Master.

posted by Rustic Etruscan at 10:12 AM on October 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

I know a number of compassionate and rigorously thinking people who really like his writing and say that they've learned a lot from reading him. If you are one of those people, I wonder, what do his essays do for you that you haven't found elsewhere? What is it about his writing that resonates with you?

(As for me, I get stuck every time because I usually try to read his essays on things I know something about, like feminism and social justice. As has been noted before, in those spaces he *really* comes across as someone who is trying to write his way through the subject without consulting anyone who actually knows anything about it.)
posted by esker at 10:16 AM on October 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

I know a number of compassionate and rigorously thinking people who really like his writing and say that they've learned a lot from reading him. If you are one of those people, I wonder, what do his essays do for you that you haven't found elsewhere? What is it about his writing that resonates with you?

Well, I am not a compassionate and rigorously thinking person that you know (that I am aware of, anyway), but it could be that they don't agree with your opinion that he doesn't know anything about feminism or social justice. MetaFilter is rather an echo chamber around these topics, and Scott's writing is one of the few places I get an alternative perspective (and let me just say, lol @ "hatred of women" from up above) that isn't just obviously coming from a place of stomach-turning conservatism.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 10:26 AM on October 16, 2015 [16 favorites]

I like to read writers who make me think, whether I agree with them or not. Alexander strikes me as a writer who goes to great efforts to derail the reader's own critical thinking and replace it with his own, and that is just annoying. Nearly every link he uses to prove his points falls into the "Appeal to Authority" fallacy. It's comfortable to have your worldview reinforced by so many Authoritative Sources. He strikes me as similar to one of the "MetaFilter Contrarians" who got a lot of attention here in the past, but who smartly keeps to a forum he is in total control of.

When a member here finds somebody who they believe has a convincing counter-argument, I can usually expect to see it offered on the front page, and subjected to (mostly) intelligent critique in the comments. I just hate with a passion the contention that MetaFilter is an "echo chamber"... I was here during the 'Boy Zone' era, and consider this NOW to be the most Enlightened Forum on the Web (not perfect, but nothing will ever be).
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:52 AM on October 16, 2015

MetaFilter is rather an echo chamber around these topics

I am so tired of this. A bunch of people saying, "Yup the Earth revolves around the sun" is not an echo chamber. In the same way a bunch of people, but especially women saying, "Yep, sexism is real and it happens to me in ways both obvious and insidious (or sometimes both!)" is not an echo chamber but merely an expression of reality.

This guy has a bunch of coolthoughts (tm) but some of them are sexist. So I think it's fair to muse, "why does this guy appeal to people? what does he have that people who aren't sexist don't that's drawing people to him?"
posted by Saminal at 10:55 AM on October 16, 2015 [26 favorites]

It's true it's a terrible echo chamber where many of us agree that women are people too.
posted by winna at 10:59 AM on October 16, 2015 [18 favorites]

lol "echo-chamber"
posted by OmieWise at 11:08 AM on October 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

I mean I think one of the problems with using Alexander as an authoritative alternate perspective on e.g. feminism is that he will cite sources like Breitbart as part of his arguments and that doesn't reflect well on his having an educated view on the subject instead of extremely long-winded just-so stories and speculation based on his experiences.
posted by griphus at 11:10 AM on October 16, 2015 [12 favorites]

I'm not sure that it's entirely productive to label someone as a sexist when it appears that they're genuinely engaged by feminism and are broadly supportive of it.

I agree, and that sort of thing is what motivated my echo chamber comment. I agree that MeFi is the most enlightened web forum that I have found thus far; I actually can't read the comments on Slate Star Codex because of all the eye-rolling libertarianism on display. On preview, I agree with griphus about Alexander's shortcomings on the topic, but I don't think he's completely without merit, either.

The sort of comments comparing people who may not 100% agree with the MeFi consensus around these topics with flat-earthers and suggesting they don't think of women as people is really exactly the kind of thing I had in mind when applying the echo chamber label.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 11:13 AM on October 16, 2015 [16 favorites]

I just picked an essay at random and was immediately struck by how well it fit into the discussion in this metafilter thread.
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:21 AM on October 16, 2015

Probably better to leave the what-about-MetaFilter discussion to MetaTalk if anybody really needs to have it any further right now.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:27 AM on October 16, 2015

the "rationalsphere" in general has a problem with word count […] It's possible that re-inventing, from scratch, most of the concepts and terminology that the rest of the world takes for granted forces you to explain yourself in far more detail than is otherwise necessary

Yeah, Alexander's logorrhea (IMO it's far beyond mere "prolixity" and into the realm of apparently compulsive behavior) is an unmistakable hallmark of his autodidacticism, indeed his propensity to reinvent the wheels of whole fields of inquiry, of whose centuries-long backgrounds and major texts he's just utterly, innocently unaware. He's a great example of the Engineer Syndrome guy who doesn't trust any humanities and social sciences that he didn't make up himself.
posted by RogerB at 11:36 AM on October 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

He's a great example of the Engineer Syndrome guy who doesn't trust any humanities and social sciences that he didn't make up himself.

He's a psychiatrist. (same problem, not limited to engineers, MDs show it in abundance, as do other technological specialists)
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:38 AM on October 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

Okay, Doctor Syndrome.
posted by RogerB at 11:39 AM on October 16, 2015

but it could be that they don't agree with your opinion that he doesn't know anything about feminism or social justice.

Frankly, if he does know about feminism and social justice and still says that we need to take special care in discussions on rape so that men don't feel ostracized and spends a lot a lot a lot of words whining that he will likely be falsely accused of rape someday and so on, then that's a lot worse than simply being ignorant.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:41 AM on October 16, 2015 [13 favorites]

He's definitely the only one of the LessWrong crew I can ever read. The Moloch one I actually think about pretty often in life. And the long takedown of the neo-reactionaries in more-or-less their own terms, and some of his writing about his actual field (psych). My biases (excuse me, my totally legit Bayesian priors) about LW suggest hiscritical thinking fails him on some other subjects though.
posted by atoxyl at 11:51 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

He also pushes the line that the kind of feminists he doesn't like and the manosphere (the MRA community) are equal and opposite forces:

I am not the first person to notice that the feminist blogosphere and the manosphere are in many ways mirror images of each other. Some feminists give incisive criticism of social structures that affect women; some manospherites give incisive criticism of social structures that affect men. On the other hand, some feminists are evil raving loonies and some manospherites are evil raving loonies. Feminists talk about male privilege and misogyny, manospherites talk about female privilege and misandry.
...
The only difference between the feminists and the manosphere here is that people call out the manosphere when they do it. But the feminists have their little Playmobil motte, so that’s totally different!

posted by griphus at 11:52 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

(If that's an unfair ellipsis, please let me know.)
posted by griphus at 11:54 AM on October 16, 2015

He also pushes the line that the kind of feminists he doesn't like and the manosphere (the MRA community) are equal and opposite forces:

Yeah this forced neutrality schtick - missing for example that the meninists have intentionally set up as a mirror image of a superficial impression of feminism - makes one apply palm to face.
posted by atoxyl at 11:58 AM on October 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

But isn't it useful to have a different perspective that is rational and from outside the echo chamber?

Dog whistles in italics for ease of use.
posted by OmieWise at 12:00 PM on October 16, 2015 [8 favorites]

Yep, everyone who doesn't 100% agree with you is arguing in bad faith and hiding a secret, evil agenda. Scott had a post on this mindset, maybe even the one griphus excerpted? On my phone and a conference call, so I can't really spare the cycles to look it up.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 12:10 PM on October 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm not sure that it's entirely productive to label someone as a sexist when it appears that they're genuinely engaged by feminism and are broadly supportive of it. It feels like sometimes men who want to be allies of women, but who have questions, criticisms or misapprehensions about feminism are brushed off rather than being encouraged to learn more. Something about the perfect being the enemy of the good.

It's fine to want to learn more. Telling women they're doing feminism wrong while ignoring the very real differences in privilege and power between genders is a non-starter, though. To learn, one must first listen and try to empathize, rather than becoming defensive.

Also, he's not much of a feminist, despite his protestations to the contrary. My impression is that he's written thousands of words decrying false rape accusations and attacking the concept of rape culture, in what I can only conclude are attempts to muddy those issues in a common, shitty "but what about the men?!" MRA tactic against women. That is not the behavior of a good person who gives a damn about the welfare of women and girls.
posted by zarq at 12:12 PM on October 16, 2015 [16 favorites]

Scott Alexander is the one who made up "gray tribe" so that he didn't have to be part of the red or blue "tribes," right?
posted by PMdixon at 12:13 PM on October 16, 2015

I don't think he's arguing in bad faith. I think he's sincerely arguing a bunch of stuff I disagree with, sometimes in ignorance of knowledge from humanistic fields, and that many his overall perspective -- which seems informed very strongly by an extremely reductive version of biological determinism, naive Bayesian analysis, and the golden mean fallacy -- is probably not that helpful in the end.
posted by kewb at 12:14 PM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also, he's not much of a feminist....

In his Anti-reractionary FAQ, he tosses off some line about "the sane 30% of feminists." So no, he's not much of a feminist.
posted by kewb at 12:19 PM on October 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

He's written about this explicitly:

I do not identify either as feminist nor as anti-feminist. The feminist movement contains far too many viewpoints for me to be able to attach a simple “I’m for all of these!” or “I’m against all of these!” to the category as a whole.

posted by griphus at 12:21 PM on October 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yep, everyone who doesn't 100% agree with you is arguing in bad faith and hiding a secret, evil agenda.

No one here has even tried to suggest this. This is itself a muddying of the waters.
posted by shakespeherian at 12:22 PM on October 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

I mean it's that same sort of South Park Libertarian "both sides are bad!" stuff but written much more elegantly and much more more-ly.
posted by griphus at 12:22 PM on October 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

No one here has even tried to suggest this.

Yes, OmieWise indeed has. The phrase "dog whistle" is itself a dog whistle.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 12:27 PM on October 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think a lot of the problem stems from his conception of feminism as a sort of explicit political structure where you read the party platform and go down to Feminist Headquarters and they give you a badge and a Tumblr and now you're a Registered Feminist ready to fight the good fight and god forbid you step out of line because the rest of the Registered Feminists take you to the guillotines right quick.

And the thing is when you spend your time writing about feminism arguing against this really flawed conception of it, you come off as looking rather foolish to people who know better.
posted by griphus at 12:33 PM on October 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

the phrase 'the phrase "dog whistle" is itself a dog whistle' is itself a dog whistle
posted by shakespeherian at 12:34 PM on October 16, 2015 [21 favorites]

Yes, OmieWise indeed has. The phrase "dog whistle" is itself a dog whistle.

No I haven't, and no it isn't. Those phrases are dog whistles. I'm sorry you don't like that, but I don't think you can make it go away by getting upset when someone points it out. I assure you that if I felt like you were hiding an evil agenda I would just say so.

You may well get something from this guy. We are all making our own way through this crazy world. But I think the guy presents a pretty limited viewpoint that comes down to basically defending his privilege by ignoring some pretty huge elephants. That doesn't mean I think he's evil, or that you are. It does mean that in a hagiographic post (which contains more editorializing than content), I am likely to point out that both his reasoning and his rhetoric partake of some unsavory elements.
posted by OmieWise at 12:36 PM on October 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

It'd be dog-whistles all the way down, except that actual dog whistles are silent while dog-whistle-whistles blow shrilly and continuously
posted by RogerB at 12:36 PM on October 16, 2015

The phrase "dog whistle" is itself a dog whistle.

the phrase 'the phrase "dog whistle" is itself a dog whistle' is itself a dog whistle

Far be it from me to interrupt a good recursion off, but I don't think either phrase is, in the key sense of going unnoticed by the Auslander.
posted by PMdixon at 12:38 PM on October 16, 2015

except that actual dog whistles are silent while dog-whistle-whistles blow shrilly and continuously

I suppose what we really want as a metaphor here is one of those 18KHz anti-teenager noisemakers except somehow in the canonical example it's mostly aging racists who have the well-functioning crop of figurative high-frequency-sensitive cilia. Which isn't exactly punchy; we may have to stick with the existing idiom.
posted by cortex at 12:41 PM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think a lot of the problem stems from his conception of feminism as a sort of explicit political structure where you read the party platform and go down to Feminist Headquarters and they give you a badge and a Tumblr and now you're a Registered Feminist ready to fight the good fight and god forbid you step out of line because the rest of the Registered Feminists take you to the guillotines right quick.

Doesn't that fairly explicitly contradict this?

I do not identify either as feminist nor as anti-feminist. The feminist movement contains far too many viewpoints for me to be able to attach a simple “I’m for all of these!” or “I’m against all of these!” to the category as a whole.

I think he's just overly invested in being The Reasonable Guy Taking The Middle Road, plus big-time nerd persecution complex. Anyway that pose works for certain purposes like when he tries to dismantle the neo-reactionaries and hardcore red-pillers starting from a position that takes them seriously. But there's a bunch of stuff that he just doesn't really get.
posted by atoxyl at 12:50 PM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

big-time nerd persecution complex

Certainly, and his blind spot there is a little aggravating.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 12:58 PM on October 16, 2015

I missed this post of his before, but here he comes out saying that he gets really upset ("triggered") when he encounters social justice concepts. (See also: the aforementioned big-time nerd persecution complex.)

My introduction to him was a post he wrote against the use of anger as a tool for social change. I can't find it right now (sorry, lazy of me), but I felt like it was trying to create a generalized argument based on his own feelings, and completely missing any input from other work and writing that's been done by people who use, study, and critique it from within the social justice context. It's not like it's hard to find. If he gets so upset about it, I guess I understand why he'd prefer to come up with hypotheses and judgments on his own. I don't think it's very useful, though.
posted by esker at 1:04 PM on October 16, 2015

At the same time I definitely think it's true that a place like MeFi will go to town on a weak study suggesting "biological determinism" while letting a weak study on, say, stereotype threat slide a long ways. So I do appreciate his take on stuff like that, though I would like even more to see genetics analyzed by geneticists and statistics by statisticians because sometimes I don't know enough to know whether he knows what he's talking about.
posted by atoxyl at 1:06 PM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Scott Alexander's comments section is one of the most respectful places on the internet. Actually more respectful than Metafilter for controversial subjects - as is seen on this post. Accusing him of "hatred of women" should require more than a sentence, for example. I know for sure that he would be interested in responses to things you disagree with, and I would too, as long as they were similarly intellectually honest.
posted by freyley at 1:11 PM on October 16, 2015 [10 favorites]

I figure he's (to borrow some of his phrasing) a Useful Adversary, and worth reading in that regard. (Not to say that I always disagree with him, but where his assessment of things and mine diverge, there's enough there that I can feel like I'm not wasting time by checking things deeper)
Or, as noted above, the most reasonable within the LessWrong/'grey tribe' sphere, and so a good person to watch to get a sense of what sort of topics/arguments are bubbling up deeper in that area.

That said, Meditations on Moloch is one of those things which I reread every few months, as it's definitely an important/useful thing. So for that, at least, there's always some respect there.
posted by CrystalDave at 1:18 PM on October 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

As intellectually honest as equating fedora-shaming and neonazi antisemitism? I want to be sure to understand the metrics here.
posted by OmieWise at 1:22 PM on October 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

One thing that's nice about the prolixity of the rationalsphere (and why this library is exciting to me, in part) is the ability to link to long, closer-to-definitive posts, when someone brings up something that I've argued a dozen times before. I pretty regularly offer links to folks rather than trying to rehash those concepts, like:

tsuyoku naritai
and
rationalist taboo

What I was attempting to say before, which I think I can say better now, is that I'd much prefer such a link in response to, say, someone complaining of an "echo chamber" to people just dismissing or laughing them off. This is the equivalent of

https://xkcd.com/1053/

In other words - we're all, all of us, always new to most of human knowledge, and we should treat each other as beginning discovery, rather than defective for not knowing something. And yes, it's on us to read and learn, but just saying "shut up and learn" may not get you people who agree with you. Scott Alexander has probably read tons of feminist material, and he disagrees with you about its meaning. Shocking, I know. If he's not a complete idiot, which enough of us like him to suggest he's maybe not, then engaging with him (or us) via links to prolix writing may be more effective than being exasperated or similar.
posted by freyley at 1:33 PM on October 16, 2015 [8 favorites]

OmieWise - I haven't read that one, and don't see a link anywhere in here to either it, or a response to it, and that's certainly not it's title, so I'm having some trouble engaging with whether it's intellectually honest. I'd hope we wouldn't judge his entire work by one piece, but maybe it's reasonably representative of a set of his work - if someone made that argument, well, with sources, I'd consider that an excellent. Do you object to that as the metric?
posted by freyley at 1:59 PM on October 16, 2015

It was linked in the 3rd comment in this thread.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:04 PM on October 16, 2015

I come across this guy's stuff once in a while. He reminds me a lot of myself, when I was 20, and I thought that most things people argued fiercely about could actually be settled amicably if everyone was super-super careful about defining their terms, and unemotionally interrogating their own assumptions and principles to see whether they were being consistently and reliably applied.

But I don't think that anymore. I don't believe people actually can get out from under all the stuff besides rationality that makes up our thinking, and, more importantly, I no longer really believe we should.
posted by escabeche at 2:06 PM on October 16, 2015 [19 favorites]

and that's certainly not it's title

Doesn't have a title. Makes it more difficult to find. Almost as if that's the thinking behind not giving it a title.

or a response to it,

starting here.

The relentless inability of the "rationalsphere" to actually go and search out things and the insistence on reinventing several wheels, and also be spoonfed here like I am doing for you, makes me distrust all claims of rationality and interest in learning by them.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:12 PM on October 16, 2015 [12 favorites]

Sorry, I had a longer response typed out before one of my babies unplugged the computer, the little darling.

Suffice it to say that the arguments trotted out in the "untitled" post are the same as arguments employed by many men who dismiss and willfully misunderstand the lived experience of women in favor of an equally misunderstood picture of the lived experience of men. They are de facto misogynistic because of that. All arguments that fail to recognize the structural nature of gender oppression are misogynistic, regardless of any protestations by their authors.

Further, we have discussed this many many times at Metafilter. You should familiarize yourself with those arguments before asking for more prolix responses to this guy, because I feel confident that we have many hundreds of thousands of words on the guy. Similarly, the "echo chamber" accusation has been asked and answered here, and is only trotted out by people who don't agree (in this case) with the lived experience of the majority of the women on this site.
posted by OmieWise at 2:28 PM on October 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

I am planning to read these and think about them. I remember reading Laurie Penny's article and thinking it was great. I had/have not read Scott Alexander's post on the subject, and it may be that it'll join a set of things he's written I really disagree with. When I disagree with him, I'll write about why, rather than calling him a hater of women.

I'm sorry that we don't all have exactly the links that you think are most relevant to the conversation in our heads, or can find them immediately upon a Google search, or even recognize that they're most important to you when discussing something with you. I'll take the rationalist community's prolix and link nature over your expectations any day.

I again really encourage you to consider the XKCD comic's implications on this debate - people are constantly coming in and out of communities and spaces, and there is this constant complaint that they haven't read all the things that you expect them to. It doesn't seem like those expectations are working.
posted by freyley at 2:53 PM on October 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

-The Darkness Before the Right
-Neoreaction and the Dark Enlightenment: "Land would prefer to simply abolish democracy and appoint a national CEO."

also btw...
-" 'it's highly probable' that @MikeBloomberg will run for President"
-"map of neoreaction"
-Writing: A Guide
posted by kliuless at 3:00 PM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

In other words - we're all, all of us, always new to most of human knowledge, and we should treat each other as beginning discovery, rather than defective for not knowing something.

This is related to a concept he's fond of: Principle of Charity. Which looks good on paper: one should embrace "heretics" with opposing views, and treat their ideas and arguments generously, with the assumption that they are not actually saying anything stupid.

Personally, I believe extending good faith initially is positive. But the problem is, when "heretical" arguments turn out to be based on fallacy and wrongheaded assumptions, treating them with respect -- as if they are credible and deserve thoughtful, painstaking responses -- is folly. Blithely dismissing the lived experiences of women regarding sexual assault as well as ways they are treated in a patriarchal culture is not laudable behavior, and shouldn't be treated as such.

Learning would mean asking questions and engaging material differently than he is currently doing. It would certainly require a shift in tactics on his part. Fewer false equivalencies, to start. (Personally, I thought the nazi cartoons addition was particularly egregious.) As some of his targets have noted, he also likes to engage in ad hominem attacks including tu quoque "gotchas." The ad hominems are often raised as rhetorical questions against strawman arguments. The fewer of those, the better.

So yes, it's on him to read and learn. Simply reading isn't enough. And yes, sometimes there is real value in shutting up and listening.
posted by zarq at 3:01 PM on October 16, 2015 [8 favorites]

We don't need to relitigate misogyny every time we encounter it, and suggesting that we do is deeply disrespectful. Alexander's misogyny is garden variety, and not at all novel.
posted by OmieWise at 3:03 PM on October 16, 2015 [15 favorites]

I again really encourage you to consider the XKCD comic's implications on this debate - people are constantly coming in and out of communities and spaces, and there is this constant complaint that they haven't read all the things that you expect them to. It doesn't seem like those expectations are working.

I don't think that a community having the base standard of "if you wish to join us, we ask that you take the effort to learn the basics of our underpinnings" is all that onerous a request.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:18 PM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Alexander's misogyny is garden variety, and not at all novel.

Well it is novel-length.
posted by shakespeherian at 3:35 PM on October 16, 2015 [14 favorites]

I like Scott a lot, although he can admittedly be hit or miss in his ideas. (It's a significant intellectual disadvantage to have started out in the so-called rational-sphere). When he's on, some of his work is just magnificent; even when he's off there's some stuff of interest.

I don't think he's a misogynist. Part of this is that I agree with him on some of his beliefs about 'social justice', but in general I don't think that being critical of some forms of feminism is the same as being misogynist. It's true that most misogynists are anti-feminist, but it does not therefore follow that anyone anti-feminist in any context is misogynist. I think the inability to engage with the points he's making in any other frame besides 'he's on the wrong side! he must be a misogynist' is itself evidence for some of the points he's getting at about contemporary discourse.

Alexander's logorrhea (IMO it's far beyond mere "prolixity" and into the realm of apparently compulsive behavior) is an unmistakable hallmark of his autodidacticism, indeed his propensity to reinvent the wheels of whole fields of inquiry, of whose centuries-long backgrounds and major texts he's just utterly, innocently unaware.

I sympathize with this criticism of the so-called rational-sphere in general (both the loghorrea and the apparent need to start human knowledge from scratch), but I give him more of a pass on it than others. People like the truly odious and ignorant Mencius Moldbug practically radiate adolescent arrogance; it's not just that they're reinventing the wheel but that they're incapable of listening to others and entertaining the idea that the thoughts and experiences of others are worthwhile. Scott has a real humility to him even when he's putting up a 20,000 word disquisition trying to rethink some topic from scratch. You can really see this in how he writes about his work and his patients. There's clearly a human being in there who is engaged with other human beings struggling with the world, is concerned with their pain, and is trying to help them. That goes a long long way in helping you think better.
posted by zipadee at 3:48 PM on October 16, 2015 [8 favorites]

I think the inability to engage with the points he's making in any other frame besides 'he's on the wrong side! he must be a misogynist' is itself evidence for some of the points he's getting at about contemporary discourse.

This is a weird an incorrect summation of the responses in both this thread and the one linked to by the man of twists and turns, above.
posted by shakespeherian at 3:53 PM on October 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

but in general I don't think that being critical of some forms of feminism is the same as being misogynist. It's true that most misogynists are anti-feminist, but it does not therefore follow that anyone anti-feminist in any context is misogynist. I think the inability to engage with the points he's making in any other frame besides 'he's on the wrong side! he must be a misogynist' is itself evidence for some of the points he's getting at about contemporary discourse.

Good thing nobody is saying that, then! What people are saying is that his specific arguments against feminism are misogynistic. This is a strawman that gets pulled out a lot, and it's getting old (see also: "tribalism".)
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:55 PM on October 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

All arguments that fail to recognize the structural nature of gender oppression are misogynistic, regardless of any protestations by their authors.

This definitely sounds like "Anyone who disagrees with me (that structural oppression is a useful concept, and that it applies to oppression of women, and not to oppression of men) is misogynist." If you believe there are reasonable, non-misogynist arguments against structural oppression (which you simply disagree with), I'd love to see them.

At the very least, the idea of structural oppression gets abused to excuse actions by the Right side and attack actions by the Wrong side. Just for instance, "racism" in the academic feminist sense refers to structural oppression due to race—so "everyone is racist" because we all have internalized racist attitudes in favor of the dominant race (white, at least in the USA), but this is less of an individual moral failing and more of a cognitive bias that we can be aware of and try to fix. At the same time, colloquial "racism" is hateful bigotry of the kind shown by the KKK and segregationist, and anyone who expresses it is backwards and immoral and should get fired from their job, or have their TV show canceled, or whatever. But some people equivocate between those two senses, so they can excuse bigotry by the Right side because "it's not structural oppression" while attacking minor slip-ups by the Wrong side as KKK-level "racism."

Another example: since structural oppression is, by definition, part of the structure of society and not confined to any specific event, some people think it's excusable to be careless about the details of particular events because they're all just products of the overall system. (I.e. "maybe this shooting or rape or murder doesn't quite fit the narrative, but it doesn't really matter because so many others do, so let's keep using it for the greater good.") And as one of the commenters on SSC said, "If bringing out the literal guns is a matter of quantitative threat, and it's ok to lie about quantitative levels of threat, it is ok to lie about someone until you have to shoot them."

I don't think either of these criticisms of structural oppression is misogynist, nor racist or any other negative -ist. (Of course, they could just be "wrong.") They apply just as well to, say, Trump fans who believe Mexican immigrants are structurally oppressing them, or MRAs who accuse women of structural oppression. It's just that, as far as I know, neither of those groups would use the term "structural oppression" because to them it's probably jargon of the Other side.
posted by Rangi at 4:36 PM on October 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

If you believe there are reasonable, non-misogynist arguments against structural oppression (which you simply disagree with), I'd love to see them.

Yeah, I don't. Your examples are why it may or may not sometimes be an abused concept, not why it's an incorrect concept. Do you have others that show that oppression is simply personal rather than structural?

I'm not an expert, but I don't know of a single scholar who takes racism or sexism seriously (who isn't themselves a racist like Charles Murray) who disagrees that oppressions of this sort are primarily structural.
posted by OmieWise at 4:51 PM on October 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

At the very least, the idea of structural oppression gets abused to excuse actions by the Right side and attack actions by the Wrong side.

Well it's part of the whole point of framing issues in terms of structural oppression to support an argument that there isn't an equivalence to be made between the "sides."
posted by atoxyl at 4:56 PM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

I tentative memory (but 85 % confident) Scott bought a metafilter account and posted one comment in one thread here previously but I cannot find it.

Anybody else remember that?
posted by bukvich at 5:02 PM on October 16, 2015

Well it's part of the whole point of framing issues in terms of structural oppression to support an argument that there isn't an equivalence to be made between the "sides."

Which there often isn't, which is the sort of thing Scott Alexander tends to miss!

Though I do think the old "X can't be/must be Y-ist against Z because we are using *my* definition of Y-ism" is becomes a pretty obnoxious rhetorical technique when it's not clear that all parties are in fact using the same definition of Y-ism. Not that "no look you're wrong the dictionary says Y-ism means Q" is any better.
posted by atoxyl at 5:13 PM on October 16, 2015

If we agree that sexism is a large structural problem, the term that feminism uses for that problem is 'patriarchy.' And feminism critiques patriarchy in all of its forms, whether it's rape culture, unrealistic beauty standards, the wage gap, toxic masculinity, disparities in emotional labor expectations, sexual dynamics, etc. Aspects of patriarchy which predominantly affect men are also critiqued by feminism. That's the nature of critiquing a large systemic problem -- it affects everything, and all of these effects are worthy of critique.

To argue against the concept of structural problems is, therefore, anti-feminist, and it is likewise impossible to say that feminists participate in an opposing and equitable structural problem against men without being anti-feminist. And to be anti-feminist is to be anti-woman. In other words, 'both sides do it' equivalencies or denials of patriarchy are inherently misogynistic.
posted by shakespeherian at 5:16 PM on October 16, 2015 [13 favorites]

Scott Alexander's comments section is one of the most respectful places on the internet. Actually more respectful than Metafilter for controversial subjects - as is seen on this post.

I was curious about this, so I looked at two posts, the "untitled" post, and the first one on his home page today. My method was to randomly scroll down, read a few comments, scroll some more, etc. I spent five minutes on this.

People’s priorities reveal things about themselves too. The Real Feminists are there, tirelessly working to change any condition that might harm a woman in any way, no matter how slight or unlikely. But the Real Feminists are too busy to change any condition that hurts men, no matter how large, no matter if it trades on their own name in order to wreak destruction. That set of priorities is not what I would expect to see from a “real feminism” that cares about gender equality for all. It’s exactly what I would expect to see from a “real feminism” that wants to exalt women and hurt men.

The Real Feminists wanted to protect women from domestic violence, so they did something about it. They spoke and used their political power to have laws passed protecting women from domestic violence. In passing these laws, either they or the Not Real Feminists did a lot of harm to men, by erasing and covering up the fact that men are domestically abused as often as women, and enshrining into law the men are presumptively guilty and do not deserve equal protection under the law because they are threats to women. If the Real Feminists are not responsible for this, then they just saw it happening right next to them, carried out by people using their names and using their political power, and made no effort whatsoever to stop it. That is a condition that’s damn well close enough to “being responsible for it” that the distinction doesn’t really matter.

There might indeed be fifty perfectly reasonable “feminists” for each Jezebelian, but this is unimportant because the feminists with power and influence, those who write columns for the new statesmen, who own and write for the likes of gawker, who are academics in various feminist fields, and who write popular and influential feminist blogs almost always are of the same type as Marcotte. The elite of feminism is far more fanatical than the rank and file, and because feminism is an essentially top-down media based movement, it is perfectly reasonable to consider what the elite wants as “what feminism wants” because they essentially are feminism.

This has a lot to do with the PR campaign to make “feminist” a prerequisite for “decent human being”: anyone who doesn’t reject the whole leftist frame thinks of themselves as a feminist, because nobody thinks they’re not a decent human being.

I really don’t understand why you believe that feminists are expressing the real reasons they’re disgusted with this behavior from men.

They’re women – their sexual attraction isn’t something they explicitly understand.

Short summary – women are approached and choose. Men approach. Evidence? The entire history of mankind. As a result women generally don’t even have to understand their own feelings in sexual matters for them to work. Get approached – go with it if it turns you on – reject if the approach doesn’t. Pretty simple and very non-conducive to having the ability to systematize what you find attractive and why you find those traits attractive. More evidence – women attribute all kinds of positive traits to a man that she’s attracted to that he clearly doesn’t have – and no, this isn’t the halo effect where good looking people are thought better in all areas – that’s actually reasonable as good looks are a reflection of high genetic quality.

These women don’t find nerdy men attractive because they’re women so they don’t find lack of timidity and lack of masculinity attractive. They’ve been marinated in feminist teaching for their whole lives so when they reach for a framework for why they feel this way – well that’s what they come up with.

Simple explanation that fits the facts and what basically everyone should understand about human nature.

As a reminder – PUAs explicitly have systematized what women’s attraction triggers are and no one argues that they’re wrong – just that maybe they’re evil or something.

This is the perfect example of exactly how evil your ideology is. You literally cannot interpret someone trying to point out how it can SOMETIMES do something bad as anything other than an all-out condemnation. And instead of counter-argument, instead of any attempt to reconcile, you simply attack, emotionally, and insanely. How is anyone supposed to compromise with this? Despite being a cry about how sad anti-feminists make you, you provide a perfect justification for anti-feminism.

Scott’s rebuttal is perfectly apt and polite, so perhaps mine is unnecessary. And perhaps it is unkind. But I think you need to take a long, hard look at why you believe what you believe about people, and about yourself.

If the majority of homeless people would prefer their current living standards to that of a simple farmer, then I will drop my proposal and suggest letting them continue sleeping on cardboard and drinking all day.

I mean, I’ve lost a friend to schizophrenia (and fuck you for saying I feel he had it coming), but it’s not clear to me that deaths due to schizophrenia are morally culpable by anyone the way a genocide might be. It’s not clear that we’re not earnestly trying to treat schizophrenia, and even if we weren’t, it seems unlikely that we’re deliberately causing it. John Oliver is not a reliable source of earnest truth seeking.

I’m sure you, like 80% of women in history, can make a baby if you try.

Again, this is five to ten minutes of work, and represents at least 75% of the comments I read. I'm confused as to what the metric for respectful is. No one in this thread has said "fuck you," nor have people in this thread spouted noxious and reactionary comments about women or homeless people.
posted by OmieWise at 5:24 PM on October 16, 2015 [23 favorites]

He's cropped up on Mefi before (previously, previouslier, and again). Back then a surprising number of people had a hard time with someone clever and articulate and not obviously member of one of Mefi's favoured enemy classes who nevertheless disagrees with them. One way to resolve that dissonance is to decide he's secretly a member of the enemy classes after all.

I haven't actually seen him say there is no such thing as structural oppression, but he writes faster than I can be bothered to read, so I'd be interested to see a reference to somewhere he does say that.

I'll agree he does have a bit of a bee in his bonnet about what I'll call Internet SJ, not because he's a misogynist who is ignoring lived experience of structural oppression (the dogwhistles are again italicised for your convenience). Rather, he's stuck in this weird quandary where he seems to believe a couple of contradictory things. That is, that Internet SJ-ists have special moral insight that he should feel bad for ignoring, and that they're are terribly wrong and are hurting people he cares about and won't listen to argument/splaining about that. So he kind wants ignore them, but then he feels bad, and ends up writing huge blog posts to justify himself. Back in one of the previous threads, officer_fred suggested that nerds take everything a bit too seriously and have malfunctioning bullshit detectors, which would explain why he feels the need to write massive screeds justifying his decision to disagree with Internet SJ or libertarianism or neo-reaction or whatever, rather than just going about his business. It does make for some interesting blog posts, though.
posted by pw201 at 5:31 PM on October 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

I'll agree he does have a bit of a bee in his bonnet about what I'll call Internet SJ

The SJW death threats might have something to do with that.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 5:40 PM on October 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

Back then a surprising number of people had a hard time with someone clever and articulate and not obviously member of one of Mefi's favoured enemy classes who nevertheless disagrees with them.

Was there a big sale on straw today or something? Some kind of Halloween promotion?
posted by kewb at 6:21 PM on October 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

It astonishes me that some people in this thread are positioning Scott "feminism is literally Voldemort” Alexander as having some kind of reasonable neutral stance on the issue.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 6:24 PM on October 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

Back then a surprising number of people had a hard time with someone clever and articulate and not obviously member of one of Mefi's favoured enemy classes who nevertheless disagrees with them. One way to resolve that dissonance is to decide he's secretly a member of the enemy classes after all.

Just glancing at the conversations you linked to, it doesn't appear anyone had difficulty articulating exactly what is so awful about Alexander's arguments and ideas.
posted by shakespeherian at 7:45 PM on October 16, 2015 [11 favorites]

Yeah this is the guy with the "grey tribe" of supposedly unaligned people who just happen to be libertarians who blather million word essays full of right wing derailing material every time they touch a keyboard.

So, so not into him.
posted by ead at 9:17 PM on October 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

it doesn't appear anyone had difficulty articulating exactly what is so awful about Alexander's arguments and ideas.

Engaging with the argument is great. But there's also a bit of "and that means he's one of THEM": he's a misogynist, he's a libertarian (nope), and so on.

The SJW death threats might have something to do with that.

If I'd read about that, I'd forgotten. Googled it, and if you're referring to the stuff described here, yes, that may well explain it and I probably shouldn't have used "bee in his bonnet" to refer to the mental aftereffects of that experience.

It astonishes me that some people in this thread are positioning Scott "feminism is literally Voldemort” Alexander as having some kind of reasonable neutral stance on the issue.

Not quite what he wrote, is it? The edit to the essay where he used the Voldemort analogy is pretty funny, though.
posted by pw201 at 4:35 AM on October 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

This would be a good time to admit that I am massively, massively triggered by social justice.

I know exactly why this started. There was an incident in college when I was editing my college newspaper, I tried to include a piece of anti-racist humor, and it got misinterpreted as a piece of pro-racist humor. The college’s various social-justice-related-clubs decided to make an example out of me. I handled it poorly (“BUT GUYS! THE EVIDENCE DOESN’T SUPPORT WHAT YOU’RE DOING!”) and as a result spent a couple of weeks having everyone in the college hold rallies against me followed by equally horrifying counter-rallies for me. I received a couple of death threats, a few people tried to have me expelled, and then everyone got bored and found some other target who was even more fun to harass. Meantime, I was seriously considering suicide.

But it wasn’t just that one incident. Ever since, I have been sensitive to how much a lot of social justice argumentation resembles exactly the bullying I want a safe space from – the “aspie”, the “nerd”, that kind of thing. Just when I thought I had reached an age where it was no longer cool to call people “nerds”, someone had the bright idea of calling them “nerdy white guys” instead, and so transforming themselves from schoolyard bully to brave social justice crusader. This was the criticism I remember most from my massive Consequentialism FAQ – he’s a nerdy white dude – and it’s one I have come to expect any time I do anything more intellectual than watch American Idol, and usually from a social justicer.

(one reason I like the MsScribe story so much is that it really brings into relief how aligned social justice and bullying can be. I’m not saying that all or even most social justice is about bullying. Just enough)

The worst part was when I read some social justice essay – I can’t remember where – which claimed that it was impossible to bully a member of a privileged group. That it didn’t count. That there was no such thing. So not only did they sound suspiciously like bullies, but they were conveniently changing the rules so that it was impossible by definition for me to be bullied at all, and all my friends (except for the black ones) who had problems with bullies as a child or in the present – didn’t count, didn’t exist, didn’t deserve any sympathy.

I believe you mentioned in your essay that feeling like you’re being told you’re not a person is really scary? Well, just so.

So suffice it to say I am triggered by social justice. Any mildly confrontational piece of feminist or social justice rhetoric sends me into a panic spiral. When I read the essay this post was based on, I got only about four hours of sleep that night because my mind was racing, trying to figure out whether I was going to get in trouble about it and whether anyone who supported it could hurt me and how I could defend myself against it.

Here's what he says about social justice. Based on the other stuff he's said, even in that essay where he pats himself on the back for given human kindness to a poor aggrieved racist based on his rationalist principles, I don't find him a reliable narrator of what happened. I'd love to see the cartoon Alexander says was misinterpreted.

Poor guy. He really seems like he's had a rough time of it. He's like someone who says their racism is logical because they got mugged by a Black guy twenty years ago.
posted by OmieWise at 6:34 AM on October 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

writing guide II :P
posted by kliuless at 9:41 AM on October 17, 2015

Aw man, I missed dictionary update day again. OK, 'listen' == 'agree with.' What else?
posted by PMdixon at 9:54 AM on October 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

For a community that is so keen to remind everyone that we should listen when people tell us their stories, it seems that many Metafilter commentators are remarkably unwilling to listen to someone recounting a personal experience that conflicts with their preferred narrative.

This sounds a bit like "if liberals were really tolerant, they would find a way to welcome misogynists to their communities," but I'm honestly not sure because it's so oblique. I can't parse all the non-specific nouns.
posted by OmieWise at 10:03 AM on October 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

There was an incident in college when I was editing my college newspaper, I tried to include a piece of anti-racist humor, and it got misinterpreted as a piece of pro-racist humor. I handled it poorly (“BUT GUYS! THE EVIDENCE DOESN’T SUPPORT WHAT YOU’RE DOING!”) and as a result spent a couple of weeks having everyone in the college hold rallies against me followed by equally horrifying counter-rallies for me

He publishes something int he college paper. People, particularly people who actually live the experiences he's trying to comment on, have a different experience of it. He responds by telling them they are objectively wrong. They get even madder.

And this proves that he's the tolerant, open-minded one? And the conclusion he draws from his publishing something that pisses lots of people off, telling them they're wrong on the evidence, and getting backlash is "a lot of social justice people are bullies?"

Where's the part where he tries to figure out *why* other people thought the material he published was racist? It isn't there; those other people are just wrong "on the evidence." Because Scott Alexander is the impartial judge, the final arbiter of what the evidence means. His intentions are pure with regard to social justice, he tells us, and so we are to see that whatever he does is well-intentioned and probably correct.

That is the problem a lot of us have with Slate Star Codex, in a nutshell. Alexander is very invested in being Right About Other People's Stuff, and when Other People tell him he's Wrong, he doubles down on insisting he's Right and Rational and they are Wrong and Irrational until there's a backlash. Then he declares them bullies.

Well, except when they are wrong in the direction of neoreaction or MRA ideology; then he tries very hard indeed to inhabit their perspective. The disparity in response and the selectivity of his imaginative identifications with opponents is noticeable.
posted by kewb at 10:35 AM on October 17, 2015 [15 favorites]

Assuming we can take all of that as good faith explanation, it's still screwed up. He refers to the "counter-rallies in support" of his work as "equally horrifying," but in the end those folks are not "triggering" for him the way social justice advocates are. Granting that people who think they're supporting him are unlikely to threaten him, the way "equally horrifying" is tossed off but never seems to be treated as part of the traumatic experience otherwise suggests a serious blind spot on his part.

The implication is that the counter-rallies were horrifying because they were supporting him without adopting the perspective that whatever he printed was "anti-racist." (Why else would they be horrifying, after all?) But Alexander doesn't have room to consider whether those support rallies might have been traumatizing for anyone else. And in the end, only one side is painted as a bunch of threatening bullies; it's not the racists.

Alexander expects anti-racist people to be his allies by default, because he is certain that he is effectively anti-racist. If they don't see that, well, then they're the ones doing it wrong. Because he does not expect racists and reactionaries to be his allies by default, he seems much more willing to extend them sympathy and try to rationalize their choices and ideological preferences even when he otherwise claims to disagree with them. But in practical terms, this means that he gives them a lot of cover while loudly claiming that he opposes them; and he spends much more time saying that feminists are 70% lunatics and that "enough" social justice proponents are bullies that the social justice movement is deeply untrustworthy.

If it's not bad faith, then it's deeply, deeply unreflective thinking. He either doesn't understand what he's talking about, or he's genuinely more sympathetic to MRA nonsense but wants to be able to call himself something else. In either case, it makes him a very poor source of analysis on the topic.
posted by kewb at 10:55 AM on October 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

Yes: best-case scenario, Alexander is an ally who centers his allyship on himself rather than the people he claims to be advocating for. This isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's bad allyship, and it can and does genuinely hurt people. And I'm not sure that the best-case scenario is even all that plausible.
posted by shakespeherian at 12:59 PM on October 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

escabeche I don't believe people actually can get out from under all the stuff besides rationality that makes up our thinking, and, more importantly, I no longer really believe we should.

This. The rationalist movement holds "clarity" as an ultimate virtue. Whenever clarity doesn't work, the reflex response of a rationalist is I need to be more clear! This only works on the sort of people who are inclined to rationalism anyway. For non-rationalists, the reaction is "You're throwing even more words at me! Stop!".

When the only tool we have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; while these people may have tools other than Logic and Evidence and Citing Sources, those are definitely their favorites, and they typically resort to them first, persist with them past the point of frustration for themselves and their interlocutor, and if it doesn't work, declare their interlocutor to be unreasonable and convincing them to be impossible.

Yet Empathy, Sympathy, Group Identity Assertion and Emotional Appeal would have worked just fine. The rationalists have persuaded themselves that victories--meaning, "what I wanted to happen, happened"--obtained by mechanisms other than Logic and Evidence and Citing Sources are not legitimate victories. They are entitled to have this view, but the proximate result is they lose a lot of arguments that they didn't even need to have an argument about at all.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 2:35 PM on October 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

The only-slightly-unspoken underpinning of the rationalist movement is the notion that you should divorce yourself from your ethnicity, your gender, your sexuality, etc., in order to be Logical and Pure of Thought, and that if those things inform your thinking then your thinking isn't 100% rational and is therefore bad. It's a re-elevation of status quo philosophizing.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:46 PM on October 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

I don't think you really need to throw out the baby of philosophical rationalism with the bathwater of Internet-autodidact "rationality" as rhetorical bludgeon. Genuine rationality has far more thoughtful exponents in the world of ideas than Scott Alexander and his blogroll.
posted by RogerB at 2:49 PM on October 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Alexander is very invested in being Right About Other People's Stuff, and when Other People tell him he's Wrong, he doubles down on insisting he's Right and Rational and they are Wrong and Irrational until there's a backlash. Then he declares them bullies.

Perhaps he considers them bullies because they made death threats and tried to have him expelled? Lots of people are wrong about a lot of things. If someone respond to people being wrong with death threats, odds are good they're being bullies, whether they're on the "Right" side or not.

Good causes aren't immune to zealots or people using them as an excuse for treating others like shit. I still vividly remember the day a kid brought the wrong kind of lunch to grade school - a Lunchable, the epitome of environmental waste - and a good chunk of the students, hopped up on the importance of the environment or just the chance to scare one of the less popular kids, chased him around as a mob.
posted by dragoon at 8:15 PM on October 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

he's a libertarian (nope)

I suggest scrolling down that page you linked, to the part where he says:

I agree with this form of libertarianism one hundred percent, and if that is how you define the philosophy, I am a libertarian.

Carry on with the nopes. I'll carry on calling his bullshit. Triggered by social justice? Give me a break. Imagine how triggered he'd be if he had a real problem.
posted by ead at 9:49 PM on October 17, 2015

Good causes aren't immune to zealots or people using them as an excuse for treating others like shit. I still vividly remember the day a kid brought the wrong kind of lunch to grade school - a Lunchable, the epitome of environmental waste - and a good chunk of the students, hopped up on the importance of the environment or just the chance to scare one of the less popular kids, chased him around as a mob.

No one here is defending death threats. However, even in Alexander's account, that stuff doesn't happen until after he tells the people criticizing him that they're wrong on the evidence and after there are reactionary counter-rallies ostensibly on his behalf.

The situation he describes is more complex than one group bullying one lone person, but he and his defenders equate it to that. It's not a million miles away from the standard 'Gater defense that point out that there's been doxxing and threats from self-proclaimed SJWs, and therefore the SJWs are the *real* bad guys.

And this is without pointing out the difference between a child bringing a lunch his parent bought and a college student printing something in a school newspaper.
posted by kewb at 4:09 AM on October 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

My fundamental objection to his piece is that he says that he is "triggered by social justice" when in fact he is describing mob action on both sides of a contentious campus dust-up. It's like saying "I'm triggered by sharing" because you were raised in an abusive commune.

I'm sorry that he experienced that trauma, but curious that his own writing on the subject fails the standards of rational analysis that he would hold others to.
posted by verb at 8:00 AM on October 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is a good piece on emotion & rationality that's somewhat relevant.
posted by astrofinch at 2:48 PM on October 18, 2015

Also, some of the writing in this thread reminds me of this.
posted by astrofinch at 3:11 PM on October 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Nice piece of cherry-picking there ead.

The context of that sentence is the following few paragraphs:

To many people, libertarianism means the belief that over-regulation is a greater danger than under-regulation and therefore the burden of proof is on anyone who thinks a problem can be solved with more regulations. I agree with this form of libertarianism one hundred percent, and if that is how you define the philosophy, I am a libertarian.

But to other people, libertarianism means that politics must be seen solely as a cosmic battle between the State and the Individual, and that the only solution to this dichotomy is to oppose the State in all its actions. That any concession to “statism” is a betrayal of humanity liable to end in Soviet communism or worse, and that proposed regulation can be immediately dismissed as either a plot to seize power for the dark forces of Statism or as the idiotic fantasies of bleeding-hearts with no grasp on reality.

If you are the first form of libertarian, you will probably agree with many things in this FAQ, and find other things so simplistic as to completely fail to address your strongest arguments. If you are the second form of libertarian, this FAQ is aimed at you.

This as part of a document entitled: "The Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka Why I Hate Your Freedom)"

I think a default skeptical stance on new regulation is firmly within the normal range of US political discourse, don’t you? We’re hardly talking fringe political beliefs here.
posted by pharm at 4:31 PM on October 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

Yet Empathy, Sympathy, Group Identity Assertion and Emotional Appeal would have worked just fine. The rationalists have persuaded themselves that victories--meaning, "what I wanted to happen, happened"--obtained by mechanisms other than Logic and Evidence and Citing Sources are not legitimate victories.

If you're already certain that your beliefs are correct, then yes, those tactics are useful for getting people to agree with you. But if you're still evaluating your beliefs for correctness, tactics like "sympathy" and "group identity assertion" are completely unrelated to being right. I mean, if you show sympathy for the plight of poor white Southern US citizens, and appeal to their identity as white people who are discriminated against by "liberal Yankees," you can get them to complain about socialism while supporting Medicare. (I'm sure you can imagine another example which would invoke Godwin's law.) From the (aspiring) rationalist point of view, (ideal) rationalist beliefs are whichever ones you arrive at after you stop being biased toward the demographics and in-groups that you already belong to.

Victory is not measured by "what I wanted to happen, happened"! It's measured by "the fair, just, unbiased thing happened." Of course, if someone believes they are less biased and more rational than everyone else, they'll believe that their desired outcomes are more fair; but regardless, saying "You aren't sympathizing with my in-group enough" is not even seen as a valid objection to their position. ("You're still biased toward your own in-group" is.)

I still vividly remember the day a kid brought the wrong kind of lunch to grade school - a Lunchable, the epitome of environmental waste - and a good chunk of the students, hopped up on the importance of the environment or just the chance to scare one of the less popular kids, chased him around as a mob.

Wow, really? When I was in middle school (which wasn't so long ago) Lunchables were a popular item, especially since you could easily share/trade the crackers-with-toppings with other kids. Was this more about the food itself, or about the unpopular person who brought it? I'm surprised that kids would identify so strongly with the environmentalist point of view; "don't waste packaging" seems like the same kind of morality-from-authority ethic as "don't do drugs" or "don't fight back against bullies."
posted by Rangi at 6:45 PM on October 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

No cherry picking implied, by all means read the whole quote. The position he's describing is indeed common in America, and it's (mildly) libertarian. It can be both those things at once. Like lots of libertarians, and presumably like you're implying here, Alexander imagines himself in a position of political neutrality. In this he is wrong.

I'm not trying to paint him as some great Satan. He just provides a fairly continuous and annoying stream of intellectual cover fire for lazy mainstream libertarianism to ignore real power inequality and play "fair and balanced". So I'd prefer he knock it off.
posted by ead at 8:44 PM on October 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

You may also enjoy his "left libertarian manifesto" in which he continues on this mad journey. Maybe I'll make it plainer: there hasn't been a "left" libertarian in any meaningful sense in a hundred years. Just a bunch of ancaps running around confused about vocabulary and the power of their armchair economics treatises.
posted by ead at 9:03 PM on October 18, 2015

One comment deleted. So, yeah, some weirdness with crossover posting stuff complaining about this post at Reddit, apparently, but this isn't the place to discuss site related stuff. If we should talk about it, it needs to be in Metatalk. Thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 12:20 AM on October 19, 2015

ead: So you’re making classic rhetorical move of noting that someone has “mildly” libertarian beliefs that are very, *very* common across US politics (left and right) and tarring them with the brush of association with the nuttier end of the libertarian fruitcake fringe.

This seems rhetorically dishonest to me.
posted by pharm at 12:33 AM on October 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't think it's rhetorically dishonest to label someone who wrote a *libertarian manifesto* as a libertarian, but I guess YMMV. I'm not sure I'd describe anyone with a conviction that the FDA should be abolished as "mildly" libertarian either for that matter.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 12:44 AM on October 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, lets pull some quotes from that libertarian manifesto shall we? (Just to show that I can cherry-pick quotes too perhaps?) The one that actually happens to be entitled “A Something Sort Of Like Left-Libertarianism-ist Manifesto”

“...Others might support both free markets and a social safety net. You could call them “welfare capitalists”. I ran a Google search and some of them seem to call themselves “bleeding heart libertarians“. I would call them ‘correct’”.

Outrageous!

“...that position seems to be the sweet spot between these two extremes and the political philosophy I’m most comfortable with right now. It consists of dealing with social and economic problems, when possible, through subsidies and taxes which come directly from the government.”

Shocking!

But you know, you guys get your hate on.
posted by pharm at 1:04 AM on October 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

You could look at some of the substance, the bit where he spends his actual rhetorical energy doing intellectual laundering of opposition to unions, minimum wage, affirmative action and environmental regulation, only to hedge right at the end and explain that he didn't really mean all that and we should usually keep the regulations. You could notice that libertarians who position themselves as "left" and "centrist" nevertheless spend an awful lot of energy preparing the ground for "feed everyone to the market" politics, because it's the only "rational" optimum. You could note that this is about as fresh a style as Ronald Reagan and that people have been pointing it out for decades. You could note that politics do not begin or end with the US, where this nonsense is most readily digested. You could even read his comments sections.

Or you could go by the "centrism" written on the box and ignore what's inside. I think I've said all I can in objection. If you think the contents delicious, I think you ought to know what you're eating.
posted by ead at 2:21 AM on October 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

So effectively you believe that this is all signalling & Scott is just carrying water for a political program that you strongly disagree with: Hence there’s no point appealing to the text, because for you the text isn’t what’s at issue, it’s what’s behind the text that’s important & every sentence is read with that interpretation in mind.

Given that, I don’t think there’s really any way to have a productive discussion based around the text itself is there?
posted by pharm at 3:49 AM on October 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

No I think the text is a long intellectual exploration of how actual leftist politics are terrible followed by a half hearted attempt to claim neutrality and well gosh I guess we can't go eliminating all social programs, but really that'd be best if we could, because flexibility and distortions and incentives and nanny states and censors and welfare bums. Does a great job shifting the window of discourse.

You might also dig the economist, they write an editorial like that every few pages.
posted by ead at 4:09 AM on October 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

(Perhaps I should also add: for the US moderate-right, there is nothing so distasteful as "politics", so it is essential canon when doing political writing of that form to pepper your work with disclaimers of neutrality, centrality, rationality, common sense, etc. The individuality and rationality narratives are dominant in the US and so "politics" codes for tribal, mob or herd mentality. This tactic is not unique to Alexander.)
posted by ead at 4:30 AM on October 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

Uh, maybe we're past that point already and/or I misunderstood what was going on up there and no one is intentionally doing this, but I think it's better not to speculate on whether someone has "legitimately" experienced trauma. (Which is separate from discussing how they publicly respond to it.)
posted by esker at 6:48 AM on October 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't think anyone was doing that. I think the question is whether or not Alexander presents the cause of that trauma accurately. We can't really know, since we only have his word, but it makes a big difference in how we view his subsequent claims about what happened.
posted by OmieWise at 7:28 AM on October 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

What OmieWise said. I personally would be much more traumatized by having a bunch of kluxers having a rally to support me than by a bunch of Social Justice Wizards having a rally against me.
posted by hydropsyche at 8:34 AM on October 19, 2015

fwiw!

"The fact is you cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. And opinions held for sound reasons have less emotional unity than the opinions of dogmatists because reason is non-party, favouring now one side and now another. That is what people find so unpleasant about it. In education, pupils ought to be made to admit one unpleasant opinion every day, and no person whose views form a self-consistent whole should be allowed to teach. Then, perhaps, the virulence of orthodoxies might diminish." --Bertrand Russell

"When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition." --RP Feynman

"Big problem with macro theory: Each paper models only one phenomenon, but gives policy recommendations as if that's the ONLY phenomenon." --@Noahpinion
posted by kliuless at 10:10 AM on October 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

" In extreme cases there can be little doubt of the superiority of one race to another. North America, Australia and New Zealand certainly contribute more to the civilization of the world than they would do if they were still peopled by aborigines. It seems on the whole fair to regard Negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination (apart from the question of humanity) would be highly undesirable." -- Bertrand Russell

"All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic....On the way to the bar I was working up the nerve to try the master's lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don't feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who's trying to get you to buy her drinks -- but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?" -- R.P. Feynman
posted by kewb at 3:13 PM on October 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

The moral seems to be that in some fields, it is best to judge the validity of the results by examining the methods; but in social justice, it seems better to judge the validity of the method by examining its results. Transporting the one standard to other field may not achieve the ends of justice.
posted by kewb at 3:16 PM on October 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Thank you, kewb!
posted by OmieWise at 3:30 PM on October 19, 2015

in social justice, it seems better to judge the validity of the method by examining its results.

Where exactly do you get that moral? Every zealot feels their ends justify their means, their cause is so important that all other moral standards can be thrown out, deemed invalid.

Since the topic is Scott Alexander, I'll mention his piece In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization which criticizes Arthur Chu for exactly such an attitude.
posted by dragoon at 7:17 PM on October 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

'Judge the validity of the method by examining its results' does not mean 'the ends justify the means.' It means that in some fields the desired end goal is not in question: Social justice is not a scientific hypothesis which is falsifiable. Subjecting it to some parody of a dispassionate rhetorical inquiry is offensive.
posted by shakespeherian at 7:26 PM on October 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

The word "ends" in that phrase means "purposes" or "projected goals," not "actual outcomes or results."
posted by kewb at 7:43 PM on October 19, 2015

Thanks for the links, AABoyles. Sorry it appears to have been received poorly by some and created some drama.

I haven't read much of what he's written but I Can Tolerate Everything But The Outgroup is one of the most brilliant, amazing things I have ever read. I link it whenever I can. Gonna poke around some of the other links but I suspect he is a bit too wordy for me.

I tentative memory (but 85 % confident) Scott bought a metafilter account and posted one comment in one thread here previously but I cannot find it.

Anybody else remember that?

You may be thinking of Scott Adams?
posted by Drinky Die at 3:29 PM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

No. Scott Adams registered under a nym and made 20 or 30 posts before he got dox'd.

My recollection is this other Scott here registered under his own name and made exactly one post in a thread about his blog--it said something weird like "it's gratifying that not everybody here totally hates me"--and then he never posted again. I searched for about ten minutes and couldn't find so who knows maybe I imagined the whole thing.

I found this comment on his blog which is not at a complete variance with this picture.
posted by bukvich at 5:42 PM on November 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

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