What’s strange is that it seems like a nonsense binary on its face -
why would stripping out context be necessarily a good thing? Aren’t many
complex ideas necessarily complex? Isn’t speaking about
abstract, acontextual ideas without applying them to the real world what
these people criticize ‘ivory tower academics’ for?
To be fair to the blogger who wrote the post OP is linking in that thread; there's *slightly* more nuance in the blog post, with the allowance made that maybe it's not always good to be a "high decoupler". Both the OP and /r/slatestarcodex just interpret it as "high decoupler = good, low decoupler = bad", though.
I'm the OP and I did not interpret it that way. I think (along with the original author) that this most usefully describes two styles of thinking rather than two kinds of people; each works well in different situations and for different problems. I liked the point someone made in the linked thread that many problems (e.g. computer security) require a more holistic/low-decoupling mindset.
Speculatively, we might imagine that there is a “cognitive decoupling
elite” of smart people who are good at probabilistic reasoning and score
high on the cognitive reflection test and the IQ-correlated cognitive
bias tests. These people would be more likely to be male, more likely to
have at least undergrad-level math education, and more likely to have
utilitarian views. Speculating a bit more, I’d expect this group to be
likelier to think in rule-based, devil’s-advocate ways, influenced by
economics and analytic philosophy. I’d expect them to be more likely to
identify as rational.
Predictably, the comment thread is much like the “Conflict Theorist /
Mistake Theorist” comment thread, with commenters falling over
themselves to declare they’re one of the “High Decoupler” elite and not
some common “Low Decoupler” scum.
(edit) Wow, the thread gets even better: this supposedly explains the
Harris/Klein HBD debate (the pro-HBD side are rational “High Decouplers”
and the anti-HBD side are irrational “Low Decouplers”) and
/u/ScottAlexander shows up… to argue that that is too charitable
to the anti-HBD side.
At least /u/895158 calls him on it:
Come on Scott, OP is saying race science denial can be explained by
irrationality and you’re criticizing this for being too generous? What
happened to the principle of charity?
> Predictably, the comment thread is much like the "Conflict Theorist / Mistake Theorist" comment thread, with commenters falling over themselves to declare they're one of the "High Decoupler" elite and not some common "Low Decoupler" scum.
Jumping in here to just to quickly say that I can *definitely* see the emperor's beautiful new uniform, and man, is that a good use of cornflower!
What strikes me about all of these is that they're written as dichotomies between thinking styles, not between people.
I think that I'm reasonably adept at both "high coupling" and "low coupling" approaches. I use both frequently in different contexts and I have little difficulty switching between them as needed. I will often apply both to the same fact pattern, revealing different but complimentary sets of insights from each pass. The same applies, _mutatis mutandis_, to mistake vs conflict, meta vs object, and all the rest.
From where I'm sitting the idea of only having one analytical framework in my intellectual toolbox looks more like a crippling handicap than anything else.
Nevertheless, every time one of these gets discussed people inevitably and immediately identify which extreme feels more "rational" and start tripping over each other to score purity points around how icky they find the other extreme. It's not a great look.
Micro answer is that I personally have decided that posting on SSC is bad for my mental health.
Macro answer, I suspect, is that this kind of thinking runs counter to the fantasy that the smartest person with the best tended intellectual habits must necessarily be the most correct in all things.
When multiple analytical tools all have different strengths and weaknesses and all give flawed and incomplete answers then we're back to thinking about tradeoffs. Go too far down that road and you might have to develop a sense of humility in the face of your own fallability.
>Micro answer is that I personally have decided that posting on SSC is bad for my mental health.
Fair enough. I'll continue to enjoy the snarks from the peanut gallery.
>Macro answer, ...
That makes such commentary even more valued. Like, this whole rationality-sphere thingy had some noble goals, including a sense of humility in the face of fallibility, correcting / updating on mistakes and oops-ing when confronted with them.
And before I sound too apologetic: Occasionally (uncharitably: unavoidably), this runs into hilarious (and sad) train-wrecks. E.g. accusing Eliezer of excessive humility would be ridiculous, but he at least intellectually agrees with the need for it (joke material: intersperse quotes from his latest series on inadequacy with previous texts extolling the virtues of humility, "hear, hear").
Apart from other train-wrecks, like Eliezer spawning a community almost worshiping every word of his, that then goes on to become toxic enough to drive him out to facebook (just quote from his articles on affective death spirals, "hear, hear").
Or Scott spawning a community almost worshiping every word of his, that then goes on to become radioactive enough that he feels that it is reputation-damaging to be associated with (quote from his article about witches congregating on voat, "hear, hear").
It takes someone truly rational and completely objective to come to the stunning realization that there are only two real categories of people: Smart, amazing people that all agree with me and the wretched peasantry who do not understand my genius.
I was just reading about a really early study in group identity formation: the [Minimal group paradigm](https://www.dowellwebtools.com/tools/lp/Bo/psyched/12/Minimal-Group-Paradigm). To break it down to the simplest result, you can put people into completely arbitrary groups by telling them they overestimate or underestimate the number of dots on a screen, then they will vote to give more cash rewards to their group than the other group, even when that means they get less cash than if both groups were awarded evenly.
You see, American culture is sharply and cleanly divided between urban liberals (the "blue tribe") and rural conservatives (the "red tribe").
But rationalists are generally both urban and conservative! And they quietly endorse a left of center idea or two when pressed! They must be some social snowflake group (the "gray tribe", gray for their famed apolitical neutrality) that is the sole exception to the otherwise inescapable polarization of society.
In the rest of the world we just call those kind of things "subcultures", but whatever.
This is brutal and I love it because it's exactly what I was thinking about last night on the toilet after I logged off reddit to go out and do something with my life
See, you may naively think that political coalitions have a fractal structure which is bound together at all levels as much by pragmatic concerns and historical accidents as they are by philosophical harmony. But if you were truly Rational you would understand that anyone who votes for Democrats more often than not is signaling membership in the blue trube and is therefore culturally and politically indistinguishable from all other blues. /s
**Edit:** added sarcasm tags because apparently Poe's Law remains in full effect.
You really expect the only first world country that couldn't manage to transition to the metric system to follow the world's lead in picking team colors? It's a miracle we're didn't manage to screw up "left" and "right".
This is just the lumpers v . splitters all over again.
There are 10 kinds of people: people who think this joke is about
binary numbers, people who think this joke is about number systems, and
people who understand the joke is about itself.
Just another form of Smartness vs non-Smartness. The degree to which
the Rationalosphere transforms insights into cognitive processes into a
form of self-congratulation is one of its least intellectually healthy
trends
Scott and the rascies are still butthurt about the Harris-Klein
thing? I suppose that’s to be expected. One of their avatars tried to
re-wage their favorite battle in a public way and lost catastrophically.
Essentially, it was a massive own-goal.
Now we’re all doomed to watch weeks and weeks of bad, uh,
rationalizations for why they lost. How can it be possible that
a group of such self-identified geniuses as they managed to lose a
debate with an SJW?
This is some fairly meaningless internet drama, so feel free to skip this post.
About a year ago, Sam Harris (semi-famous atheist podcaster) had Charles Murray ([proponent of scientific racism](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/07/why-is-charles-murray-odious)) on his podcast and gave him an extremely favorable and credulous interview. Vox magazine published[ a response article](https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech) from actual experts in the field (Murray has no relevant credentials) and Harris complained that experts telling him he was wrong was censorship. Vox founder Ezra Klein emailed him and they had a fairly long correspondence over it.
Recently Harris started [attacking Klein on twitter](https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/977889565238153222), which Klein eventually [responded to with a second article](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve) on Vox. Harris claimed this was also somehow censorship and responded by [publishing their emails](https://samharris.org/ezra-klein-editor-chief/). Which was kind of a bizarre thing to do because Klein came off as very reasonable in them while Harris looked like such a jerk that even [his own subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/87myd2/sam_harris_responds_to_ezra/) took Klein's side.
The eventual result of this was that Harris had Klein on his podcast and debated him. Most people outside the SSC echo chamber seem to think Klein won, so the scientific racists are all steamed up over it.
Note: the post that this excerpt is embedded in has CW content, and
what’s more, CW content that’s currently banned even in the CW
thread.
i.e. the original blog post is
an apologia - sorry, a let’s consider both sides - for Harris
and Murray
The Bell Curve (note that I haven’t read it, I’m going on reasonably
reliable hearsay) is almost entirely about the uncontroversial 1-5. It’s
in general quite careful in sticking to the established science[6], and
race issues are only a very small part of it.
So, this is the way forward for our freinds - they have to put
another layer of euphemism on it and use links when they want
to call black people intrinsically stupid.
Does “high-decoupling” correlate with “the insistence that one
doesn’t need to make any effort to communicate, because there’s an
intangible Essence of What You Meant that should be obvious, and if it’s
not, it’s the audience’s fault”?
The original blog post seems like it borders on criticism of nerd
culture at some points:
>I don’t normally talk about my own dislike of cognitive decoupling.
It’s way too easy to sound unbearably precious and snowflakey, ‘oh my
tastes are far too sophisticated to bear contact with this clunky nerd
stuff’. In practice I just shut up and try to get on with it as far as I
can. Organised systems are what keep the world functioning, and whining
about them is mostly pointless.
Which, I mean, if you take away the depressing
apologia-for-one’s-own-personality, is basically a point about
privilege? That nerdy people have an easy time interfacing with the
increasingly abstract-systems world, and anti-nerdy people are feeling
pushed out. Which, uh. Is something I’ve heard a lot of and sympathise
with intensely. Seems to go right over r/ssc’s head, though. Should have
been more abstract.
Edit - why “high-decoupling”? Shouldn’t that just be “low
coupling”? But that would ^imply ^^rationalists ^^^aren’t ^^^^good
^^^^^at ^^^^^something
That's a long standing reddit meme. People get weird PMs from random users. People make ironic usernames soliciting weird PMs. People make post-ironic usernames soliciting PMs they actually want. and so on and so forth.
see also https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2a0nfq/people_with_pm_me_usernames_what_is_the_most/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/4l51pv/where_did_pm_me_your_originate/
I see, I figured something like that. It sorta reminded me of the (really old and obsolete) memes about "give SOJ" back in the day - which I think was a Diablo thing?
Is this just some bullshit trying to make Sam Harris out to be
smarter than he really is? This honestly reads like a veiled defense of
Sam “this conversation would be unproductive and we need to do some
housekeeping” Harris. It’s basically saying that people like us are too
stupid to decouple race science from history.
cognitive decoupling elite
Oh, ya ya ya, what a load of garbage. Harris needs to decouple his
head from his ass.
Edit: Yup, the author mentions Harris later on in the post. I totally
saw it coming. And then there’s this:
Your subreddit appears to be abusive and needs to be banned. The
people participating in the sort of bullying you are encouraging usually
have dark tetrad characteristics. While I understand you guys need an
outlet for your sociopathy, ideally this would involve willing
participants and not outside victims. Hat tip to you. Link
Surprise, surprise! Who is the victim now? You guys are hypocrites of
the highest order.
The article itself is not (quite) as bad as the excerpt makes it sound, but the SSC thread discussing it is *awful*. A lot of commenters immediately buy into the "high decoupler = good, low decoupler = bad" thing, then declare themselves to be "high decouplers".
--------------------
(edit)
This post originally contained quotes from a couple of the more egregious posts in that thread, I've removed them as they seemed to be causing offense.
For what it's worth, I agree with sushi that username pings are uncool if you're making fun of that user in a different conversation or subreddit.
E: Appreciated. It's still fine to quote stuff from the thread, just don't ping the authors into hostile territory.
> But if we had them tested, I'm going to bet they would score substantially lower on IQ (I'll hypothesize at least 1 standard deviation) than the high-decouplers. In addition, I would hypothesize that the IQ distributions of high-couplers and low-couplers are roughly Gaussian and that the bulk of the curve is non-overlapping.
LOL that guy didn't read any of the research either, the research says that a substantial portion is uncorrelated to IQ. Only certain classes of cognitive bias resistance are correlated to IQ
Your subreddit appears to be abusive and needs to be banned. The people participating in the sort of bullying you are encouraging usually have dark tetrad characteristics. While I understand you guys need an outlet for your sociopathy, ideally this would involve willing participants and not outside victims.
Hat tip to you. *block*
It's not, you guys are like /r/Drama or /r/ShitRedditSays. Subreddits built around commenting on other subreddits generally don't attract good-faith participants, but psychopaths who make people objects of their discussion, and whose relationship to those objects is much the same as children setting fire to cats and torturing frogs.
I appreciate the mentions, keep em coming, the "block user" button is handy and may clean up my experience. :)
>psychopaths who make people objects of their discussion, and whose relationship to those objects is much the same as children setting fire to cats and torturing frogs.
Damn, dude; you are taking some comparatively gentle mockery *ridiculously* hard. Consider stepping away from the internet for an hour or two, maybe take a walk around the block or get yourself a churro or something. Get some perspective.
If you want, you can PM me and I'll take that quote of yours out of my earlier post.
It's fascinating to me that the dude accusing everybody here of being in the grip of a personality disorder or flat out psychopathy just for that fact is also the one accusing other people of being abusive.
SSC: "I'm glad we have this space where ideals like freedom of expression are truly respected so we can finally discuss freely how we are inherently intellectually superior to the rest of the world."
Rest of the World: "Now wait just a goddamn minute you arrogant little pricks..."
SSC: "This harrasment is unconscionable and the perpetrators should be censored by the relevant authorities at once!"
I mean I wouldn't have tagged you if I had made the post, but shouldn't it be easy just to ignore it if it's that bothersome? This is the internet, not the schoolyard; if someone calls you out there is no expectation of a response (in my opinion). In that way, I don't think you were dragged into it, since no one is forcing you to respond.
My name was mentioned, so I am personally being discussed somewhere outside of where I posted. I find this problematic in the same way that the shaming of August Ames led to her [suicide](https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/12/08/porn-star-august-ames-kills-herself-after-twitter-uproar/) after a tweet she made was widely ridiculed, attacked, and misinterpreted.
I'm not asking all the dark tetrad people that exist in the world to just stop existing, of course. However, I can do what's in my power to discourage their activity.
A sub like this one ("Sneer Club") has two purposes:
* An ostensible purpose to discourage disliked activity. For example, "rationalists" seem arrogant, let's make fun of them so that they might be shamed to stop.
* An actual purpose to engage in griefing. The more a victim feels aggrieved, the greater the satisfaction.
My purpose here is to remove from you the satisfaction of griefing, and to provide you with a mirror of what exactly it is that you're doing. If anyone becomes ashamed of their dark tetrad ways, that is a win. The incorrigible griefers of course cannot be made to feel ashamed because they have ASPD. Perhaps one day we will ban them, we'll see. :-)
> people who do not engage in debate the way you would prefer
No, instead people who won't understand "by X I don't mean Y".
I also go further in subsequent comments to explain how I don't think all academia is high IQ. I describe a dynamic where the lack of an objective test of truth, via the Dunning Kruger effect, leads to entire fields of study being dominated by mediocre impostors driven by recognition, while any real competent people are driven out or treated as outsiders and shunned. (\*)
I hypothesize these fields are the same ones full of non-decouplers.
I can now go further to hypothesize that this particular subreddit contains people who are both (1) impostors in their field of study, i.e. not the most competent people, with the allowance that whole fields of study can be full of such impostors, and (2) who happen to have malevolent traits, as well.
I have previously bet $500 on what I claim in the paragraph marked with (\*). If you would like to formalize the parameters of the bet, you are welcome to win that if you can disprove it.
> Do you often find yourself concluding that people who don't respond the way you want them to must necessarily have personality disorders?
Low-grade malevolent traits do not necessarily rise to the level of a disorder because they are so common. That's why I speak of the dark tetrad.
It's supported by a study that most conflict on Reddit is created by attack subreddits. Attack subreddits have a specific kind of participant, and this is an attack subreddit. Only different from the other ones in that it's smaller, that is all.
>An ostensible purpose to discourage disliked activity. For example, "rationalists" seem arrogant, let's make fun of them so that they might be shamed to stop.
>An actual purpose to engage in griefing. The more a victim feels aggrieved, the greater the satisfaction.
I don't think anybody is under any illusion that this subreddit is designed to any particular purpose other than impotently pointing and laughing, but I suppose you're as free to invent victim narratives about other people's intentions here as you are in SSC's comment section.
I agree with the general sentiment, but empirically it seems like this subreddit has evolved into a half decent escape hatch for anyone who wants to nope the fuck out of the rationalist bubble with their self image intact.
SSC, in particular, creates a pretty compelling false binary between swallowing the dogma whole and abandoning your intellectual integrity. It's always helpful to have in the world a constant reminder that false choices are false.
But that's how it works! The victim becomes the abuser.
Israel, a refuge for victims of genocide, runs an apartheid state.
The anti-fa, to fight senseless violence motivated by superficial traits, adopts senseless violence motivated by superficial traits.
The gay community, tired of being shamed to suicide, turns around and shames people to suicide.
This here is another phenomenon like that, except the original aggression is not clear.
Why is it not possible to simply talk about what you want in the actual places that have a "rationalist problem"? Are your posts being censored? Do you get discouraged by downvotes? Or is it that the responses are hard to handle?
:D You are mistaken about the origins of my sensitivity. (I do not mean *over* sensitivity; I believe I *am* detecting something that's really there, which lots of people miss.)
It comes mainly from years of Reddit and observing people in online PvP, and also [studies like this one](http://www.ww.uni-magdeburg.de/fwwdeka/femm/a2008_Dateien/2008_37.pdf). I find the pseudonimity of the internet provides a preferred outlet for minor-league sadists.
> The gay community, tired of being shamed to suicide, turns around and shames people to suicide.
That's a rather stiff thing to say about my community from somebody supposedly urging others not to say unpleasant things.
Please correct me if I said something unfair. At best, August Ames was shamed to death by *allies* of this community, if you want to invoke "no true Scotsman" about whether folks like [Jaxton Wheeler](http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/porn-star-august-ames-dies-after-backlash-to-controversial-tweet/news-story/02f6071201d946c52c18372401a4239b) are its members or aren't.
I'm not playing "No True Scotsman" when I point out you're being slippery by switching from "the gay community" to "members" and "allies" of it, asshole
It's really funny to me that somebody who indicted literally the whole gay community as responsible for a single individual's suicide is now blocking me for calling him an asshole, apparently because swearing at an asshole (by calling, correctly, him an asshole) is indicative of an inadequate intellectual reach.
I hope one day /u/sushiandwow unblocks me out of sheer curiosity so that he can find me telling him I've contributed more to the world's intellectual life on reddit alone than he'll achieve in a lifetime of smarmily misreading cogent critiques of Human "Bio-Diversity" in the comments section of Quillette "Magazine"
always great to see the frequency and immediacy with which rationalists, on being pressed even in the slightest about some unrelated topic, will out themselves as openly reactionary basically unprompted
Dude.
I literally quoted your post once and implied it was dumb, then offered to take it down when you got mad (offer still stands, BTW - I'm assuming you didn't see it earlier because you blocked me). Nobody else insulted you or said anything derogatory until you showed up and made a dozen or so posts ranting about how this entire subreddit is made up of bullying psychopaths trying to drive you to suicide.
Do you think *maybe* you're being a little over the top here?
> offer still stands, BTW - I'm assuming you didn't see it earlier because you blocked me
You guessed correctly why I do not see that.
I would suggest, do what you think is best. You summoned me here, now I'm here. If you choose to remove it, I guess there would no longer be a reason for me to be here, assuming comments don't continue to pop up.
I don't mind being here as long as I'm being summoned by comment notifications. Do as you prefer.
> Nobody else insulted you or said anything derogatory until you showed up
Sure, but after I showed up there were immediately several sneers of the type I anticipated.
> made a dozen or so posts
I have made fewer than one reply per comment notification.
> ranting about how this entire subreddit is made up of bullying psychopaths trying to drive you to suicide.
Not me in particular, just in general, yes. I'm pointing out that if you have a sneer club, you're probably a type of person who enjoys sneering.
> Do you think *maybe* you're being a little over the top here?
I wouldn't say so. Perhaps this is a high-brow version of /r/Drama, but not categorically better, and not even qualitatively better given some of the replies I've seen.
I welcome anyone (who has not posted an abusive response here, and whom therefore I have not blocked yet) to respond to my original comments in the subreddit where they were posted. I will not however entertain abuse, and you also are being blocked.
If you think you may harm yourself because of things posted on this thread then please stop reading and responding here. /r/SuicideWatch has resources on the sidebar as well as people willing to listen if you need to talk.
See, this is the abuse I was talking about. Condescension masquerading as helpfulness. Another tool in the psychopathic toolbox, pretending to be concerned while actually bullying.
Of course I'm not at risk. That's evident. I'm saying this subreddit exists to bully, perhaps because it lacks another way to deal with the perceived threat (the awful "rationalists").
Sorry, English is not *actually* my first language. Therefore you're trying to abuse someone who speaks your first language better than you speak your second one, most likely.
[According to this:](https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/dragged-versus-drug)
> Using “drug” as the past tense of “drag” is a dialect common to people who live in the southern United States, but linguists have noted that it is used frequently in states as far west as Nebraska.
Luckily, English does not have a language authority that governs by decree such as French, for example. I picked up "drug" from my exposure to native English speakers, therefore my use is actually *ding* valid.
Now, without further ado... good riddance. :) *block* Per aspera ad astra... Heh.
Nah I won't block you yet, so far you're being reasonable. :) I can take some opinions as long as the person is trying to make an argument. The problem with this subreddit is that it's a refuge for people who can't conduct a constructive conversation with so-called "rationalists", so they join this "sneer club".
I can see how you'd think I'm being insufferable if you don't know that context. I definitely was insufferable here on purpose.
What’s strange is that it seems like a nonsense binary on its face - why would stripping out context be necessarily a good thing? Aren’t many complex ideas necessarily complex? Isn’t speaking about abstract, acontextual ideas without applying them to the real world what these people criticize ‘ivory tower academics’ for?
Read this from the link and try not to sneer:
Predictably, the comment thread is much like the “Conflict Theorist / Mistake Theorist” comment thread, with commenters falling over themselves to declare they’re one of the “High Decoupler” elite and not some common “Low Decoupler” scum.
(edit) Wow, the thread gets even better: this supposedly explains the Harris/Klein HBD debate (the pro-HBD side are rational “High Decouplers” and the anti-HBD side are irrational “Low Decouplers”) and /u/ScottAlexander shows up… to argue that that is too charitable to the anti-HBD side.
At least /u/895158 calls him on it:
This is just the lumpers v . splitters all over again.
There are 10 kinds of people: people who think this joke is about binary numbers, people who think this joke is about number systems, and people who understand the joke is about itself.
Just another form of Smartness vs non-Smartness. The degree to which the Rationalosphere transforms insights into cognitive processes into a form of self-congratulation is one of its least intellectually healthy trends
Scott and the rascies are still butthurt about the Harris-Klein thing? I suppose that’s to be expected. One of their avatars tried to re-wage their favorite battle in a public way and lost catastrophically. Essentially, it was a massive own-goal.
Now we’re all doomed to watch weeks and weeks of bad, uh, rationalizations for why they lost. How can it be possible that a group of such self-identified geniuses as they managed to lose a debate with an SJW?
A new esoteric signal phrase to differentiate yourself from the unwashed normies?
Unzip.
There are two kinds of people in this world, son. People who split everyone into two kinds of people and people who don’t.
i.e. the original blog post is an apologia - sorry, a let’s consider both sides - for Harris and Murray
So, this is the way forward for our freinds - they have to put another layer of euphemism on it and use links when they want to call black people intrinsically stupid.
aaand they’ve taken Scott’s subthread (archive) as “permission to be a scientific racist sir” “granted”
Does “high-decoupling” correlate with “the insistence that one doesn’t need to make any effort to communicate, because there’s an intangible Essence of What You Meant that should be obvious, and if it’s not, it’s the audience’s fault”?
The original blog post seems like it borders on criticism of nerd culture at some points:
>I don’t normally talk about my own dislike of cognitive decoupling. It’s way too easy to sound unbearably precious and snowflakey, ‘oh my tastes are far too sophisticated to bear contact with this clunky nerd stuff’. In practice I just shut up and try to get on with it as far as I can. Organised systems are what keep the world functioning, and whining about them is mostly pointless.
Which, I mean, if you take away the depressing apologia-for-one’s-own-personality, is basically a point about privilege? That nerdy people have an easy time interfacing with the increasingly abstract-systems world, and anti-nerdy people are feeling pushed out. Which, uh. Is something I’ve heard a lot of and sympathise with intensely. Seems to go right over r/ssc’s head, though. Should have been more abstract.
Edit - why “high-decoupling”? Shouldn’t that just be “low coupling”? But that would ^imply ^^rationalists ^^^aren’t ^^^^good ^^^^^at ^^^^^something
Complete aside: what’s with all the PMMeYourX usernames? I haven’t been active on Reddit long and feel like I’ve missed a meme…
Is this just some bullshit trying to make Sam Harris out to be smarter than he really is? This honestly reads like a veiled defense of Sam “this conversation would be unproductive and we need to do some housekeeping” Harris. It’s basically saying that people like us are too stupid to decouple race science from history.
Oh, ya ya ya, what a load of garbage. Harris needs to decouple his head from his ass.
Edit: Yup, the author mentions Harris later on in the post. I totally saw it coming. And then there’s this:
Surprise, surprise! Who is the victim now? You guys are hypocrites of the highest order.
Did anyone here actually read the article?