Douglas Adams once said that if it still breaks regularly, it's technology. No one would describe their office as having "chair technology" because no one expects any possibility of chairs being systematically broken.
That seems like an unfair comparison. The article argues that
concepts of racial supremacy developed a mantle of academic authority
during the Enlightenment because they helped justify the imperialism and
slavery which was enriching Europe at the time. Seems plausible, but if
there’s motivated reasoning going on for Scott, it’s much, much subtler
than that. He’s being intellectually lazy and coming to false
conclusions, but the real fault lies with the garbage studies he cites
in support of his views. With his training perhaps he ought to know
better, and I could believe there’s some unconscious racial supremacism
behind his ignorance, but that’s a long way from “I pity them greatly,
but I must be mum, For how could we do without sugar and rum?”
I'm not sure anyone reasonable would accuse Scott of that sort of outright racism, but I think there's a broad tendency among people who benefit from the status quo to seek to justify the status quo as natural. That's ultimately what these people who were justifying slavery were doing, and it's what we're seeing today with the HBD craze and 'End of History'-style defenses of capitalism/Western liberalism.
> I'm not sure anyone reasonable would accuse Scott of that sort of outright racism
You know, there is that tumblr post SA made where he basically blamed the psychiatric problems of his black patients on the non-conventional names their parents gave them. I think he is well capable of being both outright racist and "subtlely racist" (as AlexCoventry calls it).
In case you're including Scott under the heading of "people who benefit from the status quo" of sympathizing with scientific racism, I've always found this questionable. Like, the faction that stands the most to gain from popularizing "HBD" (though I hate that term) hates Jews more than anyone else by far and wants to do the worst things to them/us.
Jews are overrepresented in basically every political movement both left and right, so I would refrain from making any judgments whatsoever on the basis of a group having (prominent) Jewish advocates. They're clearly not acting out of any sense of group membership.
The people who have the "most to gain" from popularizing HBD are those who want to get away with sexually harassing women, and who want to keep ethnic minorities locked up, ghettoized, and a source of easy exploitable servant labor, dumbass. In other words, rich white male Silicon Valley dweebs, riding high in the [8th most unequal state in the nation.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_coefficient)
Jesus Christ this fucking comment. I mean do you seriously think that people like Scott Alexander want to sexually harass women and exploit ethnic minorities? Like really, honestly you read the ssc blog and actually come away with this conclusion? Because that's just criminally stupid.
Do you think it's like at all possible that the reason nerds who read ssc keep drifting right is because when they look left they see this mindless fucking vitriol masking the good ideas and when they look right they see rationalist shibboleths masking the bad ones?
Ooh, I thought those nerds who read SSC were supposed to pride themselves on being charitable and rational and able to sniff out the good ideas no matter what. Thanks for admitting they're bad at it!
You're impressively crap at defending those poor benighted nerds. "Ooh yes, they are bad at the things /r/sneer thinks they're bad at! Yes, that's my witty riposte!"
> I mean do you seriously think that people like Scott Alexander want to sexually harass women and exploit ethnic minorities?
His intractable hostility to feminism lays bare his fear of womens' further empowerment. And the entire Silicon Valley system is fundamentally rooted upon exploitation of migrant labor; can you envision Scott reacting to a hypothetical Californian migrant political movement with anything other than hostility and terror and panicked blather about how the irrationalist Blue Tribe shock troops are coming to dispossess him?
Of course Scott himself probably doesn't *consciously intend* any of this. He is just an unwitting propagator of far-right ideology due to the narcissistic "rationalist" self-image blocking self awareness of his class, gender, and ethnic prejudices. The same is true for his fans. But in the end, those prejudices are the real emotional core of their attitude and worldview, masked by their rationalizations. They react with intense hostility and ranting about "postmodern irrationalist tribalists" when unmasked, but that doesn't make the reality beneath any less true.
Right, this.
Something I've noticed about the crowd that gravitate towards these ideas. They're all social misfits of one stripe or another. Lots of trans people, lots of folks on the spectrum, lots of serious social anxiety. Even among the neurotypical it's almost a rite of passage to share your traumatic experiences with bullying. At the same time, though, they're mostly well educated and well compensated white collar professionals.
They're the least privileged members of the most privileged communities; the bottom of the top, so to speak.
I don't mean that as a criticism. After all, it describes me reasonably well too. But it can be difficult to root for someone else to break their glass ceiling when you're convinced it's also your glass floor.
>His intractable hostility to feminism lays bare his fear of womens' further empowerment
There's nothing intractable about it. His exposure to feminism is like 90% hate-reading bad nerd-shaming polemic and his reaction to it is like 90% defending his perceived ingroup from the same. How you get from this to "wants to get away with sexually harassing women" is beyond me, but it's exactly the kind of statement that sours ssc types on feminism, even though on paper these are exactly the kind of people who would be on board with the broader project of achieving social and economic parity between men and women. As opposed to, you know, actual anti-feminists who attack reproductive rights, oppose paid maternity leave, promote traditional gender norms, etc. You know there are *real enemies* with real political power who do these things, right?
>can you envision Scott reacting to a hypothetical Californian migrant political movement with anything other than hostility and terror and panicked blather about how the irrationalist Blue Tribe shock troops are coming to dispossess him?
I don't know how he would react to it (I assume he would, as per tradition, react more to the form than the content), but let me ask you this. These silicon valley tech nerds have privilege coming out of their ears; what sort of dispossession do you think they're trying to hold at bay? Like what are they so afraid of that they need to cling to HBD bullshit to defend against? Do you think they're afraid of having a few more women and POC in their offices or something? Of higher taxes? Of finding it slightly more difficult to find a well-paying job?
I mean I can see this "they're defending the status quo because they fear their dispossession" argument applying to the nascar fans because "muh jobs", because they actually have something to fear, even if its stupid. But the only thing that can actually threaten the entrenched advantage of the group you're talking about is a complete implosion of the tech sector. All this culture war stuff is piss in the wind.
>self awareness of his class, gender, and ethnic prejudices
Isn't this a problem for like *literally everybody*? Why is it suddenly so despicably offensive when these random rationalist nerds have a hard time with it.
omfg just how do you think privilege is maintained? It's by spreading lies about how some people are naturally inferior. Have you ever read anything about how hierarchies are maintained? Ever read anything from old timey misogynists and racists? If you had, you'd notice how fucking little has changed.
> Do you think they're afraid of having a few more women and POC in their offices or something? Of higher taxes? Of finding it slightly more difficult to find a well-paying job?
You got it. Looky, there's even research done on this exact subject: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/28735
Racism is indeed about locking in unfair advantages.
You are continually, excruciatingly really fucking stupid, so I can't say how long I can remain willing to reply to you before giving up, but here goes: the point I was making is that *it makes no sense, from a purely cost-benefit perspective, for Jews to support "HBD."* The marginal benefit to a Jewish person of something like "keep random black people unjustly locked up" is basically negligible compared to the scary, unknown but probably disastrous cost of conceding neo-Nazis' number one talking point.
It's not unusual at all, the "racial IQ rankings" (lol) put jews and asians just above white poeple, it's not hard to adopt belief system that says that the world is mostly just, and that people like you are actually genetically superior. Of course, the whole concept is a bunch of tosh that ultimately helps prop up white nationalists, but remember, they think they're being rational and unbiased and just looking for the truth man
I think this is getting quite unnecessarily heated on both sides. As a clarification, what's your alternative hypothesis for why Scott believes in HBD nonsense?
My sense of Scott is that he's always been much more vulnerable to ~~peer pressure~~ *milieu* than he thinks he is.
As a recently minted Jungian, perhaps he's familiar with the concept of the Shadow. When you define yourself in terms of a set of characteristics, their opposites can sometimes assert themselves, sometimes in vulgar ways (because they evade your conscious control). This can be much more obvious to others than it is to you.
My experience of Grey Tribe Rationalists is that their social insecurities are never far from the surface, and they're immensely (if unconsciously) vulnerable to absorbing ideas from people who are superficially supportive of them. For Scooter, that includes a steady influx of monarchists, white nationalists, Trump-loving frog Nazis, and more sophisticated-seeming *Enlightenment Now* cranks who are highly motivated to believe and spread HBD ideas.
Maybe I just don't respect Scooter that much, but I think a lot of what he believes and rationalizes comes down to what's popular with his current Ingroup.
> My sense of Scott is that he's always been much more vulnerable to ~~peer pressure~~ *milieu* than he thinks he is.
As a general rule, the more "rational" somebody thinks they are, the more susceptible to bias they become. It doesn't matter how obsessively they "question" themselves; as long as they believe they are rationally superior to everyone else, more self-questioning will just create more elaborate rationalizations for their prejudices.
I think that he's looked into the evidence and thinks it's plausible enough to be worth taking seriously. If there is a self-serving element, I think he wants the left to hedge their bets a little more so that if some form of scientific racism turns out to be proven correct, there's less blowback.
I don't want to interrupt your flamboyant logorrhea or anything, but to briefly respond so that you can ~~go back to~~ _writing **like this**_: sure, we all have have biases, but those are entirely compatible with coming to a conclusion by looking at evidence, or else virtually no one is capable of the latter ever. The only question I was interested in is whether it ultimately makes sense to ascribe a specifically self-serving bias to Scott because scientific racism somehow benefits him politically, which it clearly doesn't if you think about it for more than five seconds.
> I don't want to interrupt your flamboyant logorrhea or anything
Yeah you do, why lie?
I am however extremely impressed by the way you've managed to misrepresent a stream-of-consciousness bulldozer of a sentence by implying that in that sentence I set up a hard distinction between being affected by bias and looking at evidence.
I know, incidentally, that you're being dishonest there, although I leave room for the distinct probability that you're being dishonest with yourself too: you (maybe) and I (definitely) both know that I certainly didn't say that Alexander has failed to come to a conclusion by looking at the evidence. And I didn't set up any dichotomy between looking at evidence and being led by bias. You're so facile in implying that that it's genuinely pathetic.
I thought about it for significantly more than five seconds and came to the conclusion that actually it is politically beneficial for him to at least covertly support scientific racism.
Where's your actual rebuttal, fuckwit? Or can't you be bothered to actually read what is written at you?
>both know that I certainly didn't say that Alexander has failed to come to a conclusion by looking at the evidence.
Okay, then in that case, I certainly didn't say that he lacks intellectual biases, so what on Earth did [your comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/8ow59w/scott_and_friends_have_not_fallen_far_from_the/e0796hh/) have to do with [mine](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/8ow59w/scott_and_friends_have_not_fallen_far_from_the/e077zgk/)? Forgive me for erroneously assuming that you were trying to say something relevant by disputing my point instead of just mouthing off in a random direction. I can see now that that was just way too charitable.
Also, how the fuck did you get a philosophy PhD? You guys are supposed to be *good* at hairsplitting.
Where the fuck did you get the impression I have a philosophy PhD? Or are you just straight-up bullshitting again? Are you lying and saying that I've claimed to have a philosophy PhD or are you just talking nonsense?
As for the rest: I was making the point that it is probable that Alexander is led astray by his own biases, rather than *merely* weighing up the evidence and coming to some intellectually reasonable conclusion. What *you* say is that he adopts a reasoned and respectable position (even given biases, which you only now acknowledge, having not acknowledged them before). What *I* say is that that fails to countenance the possibility that he is not being reasonable.
Like I'd charitably assume you were calling Daydream Nation basic compared with, say, EVOL or some thing, but since this is Planet Rational I'm going to have to go with a snot-nosed "but it's not Wagner"
In other words, gimme your fuckin' lunch money
How many actual human beings have you talked to, like ever? People do things that don't make sense from a pure cost-benefit perspective all the time. Example: my dad voted for Trump. I pointed out to him that this was not to our benefit because Trump is racist and has been making noises about starting a trade war with China. We, being visibly Chinese, are likely to get harassed by racists if Trump ends up fucking up relations with China. He didn't care. Fucking over Muslims was of way more importance to him, even though he's numerically literate enough to know that dying from an Islamic terrorist attack is nil. He literally hate Muslims more than he's worried about racism from his next-door neighbors.
Even if Scooter were driven by cost-benefit analyses the way no actual human is, his cost-benefit analysis would not conclude that HBD was bad for Jews in America. He barely thinks that racism is a problem and still doesn't seem to think the alt-right is a real threat. It's entirely plausible that he likes the ego boost of feeling that Ashkenazi Jews like himself are on top of the racial intelligence hierarchy far more than he's worried about personally being attacked by Nazis.
That is very dumb of Scooter, but so is believing that because there exists a rational incentive for a certain behavior, people will exhibit it.
> How many actual human beings have you talked to, like ever? People do things that don't make sense from a pure cost-benefit perspective all the time.
Okay, cool, then please inform /u/TheHiveMindSpeaketh and /u/KaliYugaz of this immediately, who are suggesting that Scott's beliefs are unconsciously shaped by what makes him feel comfortable.
>He barely thinks that racism is a problem and still doesn't seem to think the alt-right is a real threat.
He thinks that it's in a position to become a threat the same way that Donald Trump was in a position to become a threat.
>Why you think every other Jew would believe in the same premises as you and go to the same conclusions is mystifying.
Most Jews, myself included, are brought up to think of scientific racism as tantamount to Nazism, and we were informed of the consequences of Nazism very, very thoroughly.
It's nice to think that as Jews we'd all perfectly internalize the lessons of anti-Semitism and be stridently anti-racist, but if you can't see the problems in our modern community I'd suspect you aren't looking hard enough. For example, why do we have Ben Shapiro [saying](https://www.creators.com/read/ben-shapiro/06/07/the-radical-evil-of-the-palestinian-arab-population) that “the Palestinian Arab population is rotten to the core” and that since “an entire population [is] corrupted by bloodthirsty anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism,” punishing Palestinian leaders is insufficient: “Collective choices require collective treatment"? Unfortunately, we're fallible too - being Jewish doesn't grant you a stat bonus to Tolerance.
Also, are you claiming that Scott *does not* believe in the HBD thesis? Isn't that just contradicted by his writing?
>For example, why do we have Ben Shapiro saying that “the Palestinian Arab population is rotten to the core” and that since “an entire population [is] corrupted by bloodthirsty anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism,” punishing Palestinian leaders is insufficient: “Collective choices require collective treatment"? Unfortunately, we're fallible too - being Jewish doesn't grant you a stat bonus to Tolerance.
I certainly agree, but I also think that scientific racism is a bridge way too far for even Ben Shapiro. No doubt he'd blame Islam and/or culture for alleged Palestinian pathologies, not their genes.
>Also, are you claiming that Scott does not believe in the HBD thesis?
No, I think he does believe in some form of it.
If I might try to summarize: you agree with me that he believes in some form of HBD. I said in a comment above that people who benefit from the status quo tend to try to justify it as natural, implying that Scott was subconsciously influenced toward believing HBD since it works toward establishing the ordinariness of a hierarchy he's on top of. You're saying that Jews have a built-in cultural bias *against* something like HBD, so it's unlikely that Scott is buying in based on subconscious biases. Presumably, you instead believe that he (possibly reluctantly) believes in HBD because he's dispassionately weighed the evidence and simply can't deny that it's true. Am I reading this right?
Assuming I am, there are several points on which I disagree:
- I don't find the scientific evidence for HBD-like positions compelling, so I discount the possibility that an intelligent person believes HBD on purely evidential grounds.
- I disagree at minimum that *my generation* (I'm in my 20s) of American Jews have received the cultural bias against white nationalist-sounding ideas to the extent you're implying. I think we've become complacent in our relative safety in modern America and largely see the threat of anti-Semitism coming from Islam rather than white supremacists, and I think that scientific racism is a useful super-weapon if you view Islam as the primary threat, which explains why people like Ben Shapiro exist. (I also disagree with you that scientific racism would be a 'bridge too far' for Ben Shapiro.) I can't speak as well to the cultural bias imparted to Scott's generation of American Jews. How old is Scott? I'm assuming closer to my parents' ages.
- (added in an edit:) I don't think that the HBD thesis is intrinsically anti-Jewish, particularly in the centrist technocratic environment that Scott is in (or at least imagines himself to be in). While I certainly agree that white supremacists would use Ashkenazi genetic advantages to support their theories of covert Jewish world domination, I suspect that 'gray tribe' members might be happy to simply say - 'ah, guess I should lean toward hiring more Jewish software engineers'. Additionally, HBD has some significant potential positives (from the view of a successful white American Jew) as a stick with which to beat away petitions from the black/Latino/other communities for affirmative action/other redresses (which, empirically, is how HBD is often used in the rationalist community).
>Am I reading this right?
Yes.
>I don't find the scientific evidence for HBD-like positions compelling, so I discount the possibility that an intelligent person believes HBD on purely evidential grounds.
Given that there's no scientific consensus on the matter by the people most qualified to assess it (academic psychologists), why do you believe reasonable disagreement is impossible? I'm not suggesting that scientific racism is actually correct here, just that "no intelligent person could possibly believe it on the basis of evidence" seems way too strong if you agree that experts are divided.
>I think we've become complacent in our relative safety in modern America and largely see the threat of anti-Semitism coming from Islam rather than white supremacists
I might be able to agree that some of us have come to see Islam as a greater threat, but I've never seen Jewish or Israeli publications like *Tablet* or *The Forward* or *Haaretz* dare to invoke scientific racist explanations for Muslims doing whatever bad things we're talking about. Condemnations of racism have instead been uniform. It's just that sometimes they like to call Muslims racist against Jews.
>How old is Scott? I'm assuming closer to my parents' ages.
32 or 33, I think.
>(added in an edit:) I don't think that the HBD thesis is intrinsically anti-Jewish, particularly in the centrist technocratic environment that Scott is in (or at least imagines himself to be in). While I certainly agree that white supremacists would use Ashkenazi genetic advantages to support their theories of covert Jewish world domination, I suspect that 'gray tribe' members might be happy to simply say - 'ah, guess I should lean toward hiring more Jewish software engineers'. Additionally, HBD has some significant potential positives (from the view of a successful white American Jew) as a stick with which to beat away petitions from the black/Latino/other communities for affirmative action/other redresses (which, empirically, is how HBD is often used in the rationalist community).
I agree there are both philosemitic and antisemitic variants of racism. However, in assessing the overall scariness of promulgating "HBD," the question is which one is more likely to end up getting popularized, and whether the benefit of philosemitic racism is anywhere near as big as the cost of antisemitic racism. Personally, I don't think the perks of, e.g., getting away with hiring fewer black or Latino employees is comparable to the risk of getting ethnically cleansed by some nascent white supremacist faction.
I made a later edit you may have missed, just so you know.
I didn't actually realize Scott was so young. Not sure how that changes my opinion of him :\
> Given that there's no scientific consensus on the matter by the people most qualified to assess it (academic psychologists), why do you believe reasonable disagreement is impossible? I'm not suggesting that scientific racism is actually correct here, just that "no intelligent person could possibly believe it on the basis of evidence" seems way too strong if you agree that experts are divided.
I agree that the issue is hardly settled, and don't claim that 'no intelligent person could possibly believe it on the basis of evidence'. Given I believe not-HBD to be a more correct position, I find it more likely that one arrives to believing HBD via a combination of reasoning + subconscious bias than pure reasoning. This is not meant to be a convincing argument to you, merely an explanation of my beliefs. Additionally, I am not generally a believer in the rationalist ideal that we can be perfect reasoners unaffected by bias, so I'm not claiming myself to be such a reasoner.
> I agree there are both philosemitic and antisemitic variants of racism. However, in assessing the overall scariness of promulgating "HBD," the question is which one is more likely to end up getting popularized, and whether the benefit of philosemitic racism is anywhere near as big as the cost of antisemitic racism. Personally, I don't think the perks of, e.g., getting away with hiring fewer black or Latino employees is comparable to the risk of getting ethnically cleansed by some nascent white supremacist faction.
I agree with you. However, Scott does not appear to see any significant risk of the latter - see his published writing on Trump + cabinet and Charlottesville, for example. Publically supporting HBD (we might say 'HBD-lite') is more evidence to me that he does not view this as a serious threat (for example, if he felt it was a legitimate potential threat, he might feel compelled to keep quiet about his beliefs even if he honestly felt HBD was true - see his post on the parable of lightning, or whatever he called it).
>I agree with you. However, Scott does not appear to see any significant risk of the latter - see his published writing on Trump + cabinet and Charlottesville, for example.
IIRC all he's said is that he doesn't believe that the alt-right is currently anywhere near as big as it wants you to think it is, but that it could grow that big given things like sufficient media coverage, the same way Trump did. And remember that we're discussing a hypothetical world where scientific racism becomes widely accepted and not-taboo; surely in this world he'd think that gives them a massive, vindicating PR boost.
>(for example, if he felt it was a legitimate potential threat, he might feel compelled to keep quiet about his beliefs even if he honestly felt HBD was true - see his post on the parable of lightning, or whatever he called it)
I'd argue he mostly is quiet about scientific racism, in that he generally prefers to allude to it coyly.
> He thinks that it's in a position to become a threat the same way that Donald Trump was in a position to become a threat.
Nobody who actually took racism seriously would write the kind of crap he's written about Donald Trump. Nobody who seriously thought racism was a real problem would have looked at that tweet of Trump celebrating Cinco de Mayo and thought, huh, guess this means ICE won't be ethnically cleansing America right now!
> Most Jews, myself included, are brought up to think of scientific racism as tantamount to Nazism, and we were informed of the consequences of Nazism very, very thoroughly
So you understand some Jews don't share this belief, and yet, despite your own admission Scott is likely a scientific racist, you continue to exempt Scott from any racist motives. You aren't making a good case for Scott being a normal Jew with a healthy fear of anti-Semitism. You're trying to make an argument from statistics, when all anyone has to do is slog through his ponderously boring blog and judge him as an individual.
You also are ignoring the fact that people can experience multiple feelings about something at the same time. It's possible for Scooter to fear the consequences of promulgating scientific racism and stereotypes about Jews while finding the idea that he's genetically superior irresistible.
> Nobody who seriously thought racism was a real problem would have looked at that tweet of Trump celebrating Cinco de Mayo and thought, huh, guess this means ICE won't be ethnically cleansing America right now!
That was so fucking unconscionably stupid I don't know where to begin. But if I get the chance I'm happy to improvise by stuffing Alexander's pasty hat-chewing head into the nearest locker available and just riff from there.
> it makes no sense, from a purely cost-benefit perspective, for Jews to support "HBD." The marginal benefit to a Jewish person of something like "keep random black people unjustly locked up" is basically negligible compared to the scary, unknown but probably disastrous cost of conceding neo-Nazis' number one talking point.
Fucking lol. How are you "calculating" these "benefits"? Do you just like to use science-y sounding buzzwords to show off? This is why I fucking hate you dorks.
Nazis are probably never going to take over California. But maintaining a currently existing white male supremacist hierarchy is of enormous, *immediate*, and *real* benefit to the people at the top of it.
> How are you "calculating" these "benefits"? Do you just like to use science-y sounding buzzwords to show off? This is why I fucking hate you dorks.
Ahhhh this is why I come to this sub. This this this.
>Fucking lol. How are you "calculating" these "benefits"?
The *wildest* dreams of racial justice advocates that are at all common are what, reparations? I think most Jews would strictly prefer the option of paying slightly higher taxes to risking what might happen when a significant portion of the country becomes white nationalist.
>Nazis are probably never going to take over California.
Nazis don't need to have taken over before they become strong enough to pose a major, personal threat, the same way that Islamists haven't conquered France but Jews still occasionally need armed guards stationed outside their schools and synagogues and flee to Israel in droves. That said, we live in an age where most political bets are off, and it's generally silly to pretend that you can accurately foresee how bad things are going to get.
> The wildest dreams of racial justice advocates that are at all common are what, reparations? I think most Jews would strictly prefer the option of paying slightly higher taxes to risking what might happen when a significant portion of the country becomes white nationalist.
No, it's only you who can't see operations of privilege and power beyond the mere distribution of cash.
Look, people like Scott, though they may have been bullied by "Chad jocks" like they always love to bitch about, were still habituated by their culture and community and bullshit geek media to expect *social deference* from their inferiors: women and people of color. But increasingly that deference has not been forthcoming, and this has left them confused, frustrated, and angry. ("Why are they so mean to me?" "Why won't they date me?" Of course the correct answer is that it's because he needs to change his tedious nerd personality, but these kinds of narcissists never think in those terms. It's always about how they can "hack" the other people to force or manipulate them into submission without giving up anything in return.)
And even worse, those inferiors dare to question the authoritarian, elitist power-fantasy narrative at the very core of their "nerd" identity; that they have some kind of special innate genius or special monopoly on the One True Path to objective reality, and everyone else is to be looked down upon as inferior "tribalist" apes to be manipulated at will. They dare to point out that maybe he isn't so "rational" after all; he has his own inherited cultural prejudices and his own Will to Power just like everyone else, and has managed to use his intelligence to rationalize it in highly elaborate ways.
Ah, okay, people like Scott figure that black people's lack of "social deference" is much scarier than legitimizing and empowering virulent racists, who are well-known for deferring to Jews and who don't have a recent history of murdering their families. Thanks for clearing that up!
Scott's a sheltered guy who is clearly more scared of talking to strangers at parties than anything else, so, yeah, I'm gonna say he does lack that sense of proportion.
I am going to politely volunteer the alternative hypothesis that you and /u/KaliYugaz are cretins who are incapable of imagining people you dislike to be less than maximally cartoonish?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/27/cuddle-culture/
> I go into social encounters viewing most people as a combination of scary and boring. I can sometimes overcome that most of the way by spending months getting to know them and appreciate their unique perspective. Or I can cuddle with them for ten minutes.
Who am I to disagree with Scooter's lived experience of himself? You take someone at their word and get accused of treating them like a cartoon. Tsk. Just can't win.
Sorry, I didn't know you despise people with social anxiety and genuinely believe it makes them incapable of performing basic political calculus. Please go tell the folks at /r/socialanxiety not to vote.
Fuck you for weaponising anxiety like that, at least /u/zhezhijian had the good grace to make the serious point that Alexander is a sheltered person whose social anxiety influences his take on the world. All you fucking did was extrapolate from that, stupidly, violently uncharitably, and deliberately dishonestly that they therefore have a problem with socially anxious people. You even went further and made the ridiculous claim that the implication was that being social anxious makes somebody unamenable to "performing basic political calculus".
You're a shitty callous person online. Almost every single thing you say on /r/sneerclub is like that. You just fucking suck and are pathetically self-serving on an extremely human level.
- Sincerely, a lifelong sufferer of severe anxiety.
Sorry, I was oh-so-cruelly banned in the middle of our discussion the other week and I just remembered that I wanted to respond to this comment because it's so hysterical (in both senses of the term).
/u/zhezhijian did not suggest "Alexander is a sheltered person whose social anxiety influences his take on the world;" he or she more specifically said that "fear of talking to strangers at parties" plausibly leaves someone unable to differentiate between the magnitude of the threats of feminists and virulent racists. That is a profoundly terrible and insulting-to-social-anxiety-sufferers thing to say, and I was making fun of them for it, deservedly. There was no "weaponization" of anxiety on my part, nor would I choose to weaponize serious psychological disorders, even if some of their sufferers (like you and /u/zhezhijian) happen to be pretty contemptible people for unrelated reasons.
Anyway, I hope that clears things up. You may now go back to your habit of posting unfailingly boneheaded and tedious garbage.
Wait, what am I supposed to have lied about? It's not always easy to decipher your obtuse confusions, so it'd be helpful in general if you provide some explanation.
Right back at you darling, care to explain?
In this case you're committing a sin of omission. You fail to note in this reply that your complaint wasn't just that /u/zhezhijian "specifically said that "fear of talking to strangers at parties" plausibly leaves someone unable to differentiate between the magnitude of the threats of feminists and virulent racists", but that that complaint indicated that "you despise people with social anxiety".
Let's parse this out a little bit.
1) Somebody with social anxiety could or would have trouble understanding the magnitudes in realistic terms
But this has at least two possible meanings, one of which is reasonable, the other stupid. I contend you implied the stupid one.
1a) Plausibly, a single individual could plausibly be led by their social anxiety to be ignorant of the "magnitude of the threats of feminists and virulent racists". This is obviously the case. Indeed I have met many people whose social anxieties have put them in this position.
1b) Plausibly, anybody or even most people suffering from social anxiety will fall into the category described in (1a).
It seems fairly obvious to me that you would never have been so vitriolic if you hadn't insisted on a reading as in (1b), because no thinking person would agree that it is impossible to be led by social anxiety into leading oneself into the situation as in (1a), and no such thinking person would take umbrage either, as a consequence.
It's also obvious on a remotely charitable reading that /u/zhezhijian was referring to the case (1a), which is why I accused you of, amongst other things, being viciously uncharitable.
So the sin of omission is pretending that all of this wasn't going on. To be honest I think you were committing it deliberately, because I've found you to be viciously uncharitable here before, and I don't want to commit the further sin of pretending that you're stupid enough to believe in the things you say.
All I have to say is...
1. /r/sneerclub is like a pack of succubi. Our goal is to tempt the rationalists into falling into the sin of being uncharitable, so thanks a lot to the doofus for calling us 'contemptible.' We won!
2. Scooter's not the only one who has no sense of proportion cause he doesn't leave the house enough. LMAO that he had to come back after a couple weeks to finish that comment. OOOOh me oh my, that's just sad sad sad he couldn't move on with his life.
>1a) Plausibly, a single individual could plausibly be led by their social anxiety to be ignorant of the "magnitude of the threats of feminists and virulent racists". This is obviously the case. Indeed I have met many people whose social anxieties have put them in this positions.
Um, that's not remotely obviously the case. Did you actually ask them if they'd prefer, and prefer specifically for their own benefit, to legitimize virulent racists who hate their ethnic group more than feminists? Or is this something you just inferred?
Anyway, regardless of your answer to that question, it's not going to be social anxiety alone that causes feminism-phobia; it's going to be things like a history of hostile confrontations with feminists (which sucks regardless of how much anxiety you have) or a media diet that exclusively highlights feminism-related outrage porn.
>It seems fairly obvious to me that you would never have been so vitriolic if you hadn't insisted on a reading as in (1a), because no thinking person would agree that it is impossible to be led by social anxiety into leading oneself into the situation as in (1a), and no such thinking person would take umbrage either, as a consequence.
"It's possible for X to cause bad thing Y" is fully compatible with "that you immediately leap to using X to explain Y is evidence of your contempt for X." There are many awful people on the internet these days who love to declare everyone they hate "autists;" that autism *can* cause particular antisocial behaviors on rare occasions doesn't detract from their obvious contempt for the autistic.
Amazing! You can't engage with the very clear fucking evidence from Scooter's own blog that maybe, just maybe, he has fucked up ideas on how people work on a normal day to day basis, and that this might potentially explain some of his bizarre political views! Way to go.
No, I don't despise people with social anxiety. I've got plenty of it myself. I just despise people like Scott, who mistake their social anxiety as a privileged position from which to pontificate on how racism and sexism work.
> Ah, okay, people like Scott figure that black people's lack of "social deference" is much scarier than legitimizing and empowering virulent racists
Pretty much
>and who want to keep ethnic minorities locked up, ghettoized, and a source of easy exploitable servant labor, dumbass
I wonder which ethnic group *the word ghetto was invented for*.
Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that "HBD"-type thinking massively opens the political floodgates to antisemitic hierarchies which would otherwise remain completely taboo.
Not in Israel, it wouldn't. https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3480345,00.html
"Over two-thirds Israeli teen believe Arabs to be less intelligent, uncultured and violent."
Funny how the home of thousands of thousands of Holocaust survivors ended up being the most racist out of them all, eh? So much for incentives to avoid the problems that give rise to anti-Semitism resulting in anti-racist thoughts and acts.
Thomas Sowell is black and stands to gain from book sales, so it's *clearly* in black people's collective interests to blame the problems plaguing black communities on bad culture instead of systemic racism.
It doesn't really work like that. It's more like you see the unjust treatment your society imposes on some people and it makes you uncomfortable, so you look around for an excuse for it and find it in some pseudoscientific argument that it's the natural order of things. It's not an explicit calculation, it's not even something you let yourself be aware of. SSC's ethics wouldn't allow the kind of explicitly selfish calculation you're describing to shape his behavior, if he was conscious of it.
> It's more like you see the unjust treatment your society imposes on some people and it makes you uncomfortable, so you look around for an excuse for it and find it in some pseudoscientific argument that it's the natural order of things.
I think you underestimate the extent to which scientific racism makes most Jews even more viscerally uncomfortable, and for very good reasons.
He has never explicitly endorsed it, it's true.
But consider the trajectory of his more politically charged blog posts (You Are Still Crying Wolf, Against Murderism, Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning) along with the comments he *has made* in /r/slatestarcodex. Consider also the more telling [comments he *won't make*](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6ip8nf/against_murderism/dj9i0wr/). For me, it becomes a lot harder to avoid the conclusion that he's warming his readership up to a grand coming out party, but framed in an its-ok-I'm-a-social-democrat-so-you-can-believe-this-and-still-be-a-good-california-liberal way.
> Consider also the more telling [comments he *won't make*](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6ip8nf/against_murderism/dj9i0wr/).
There's a good chance I would ignore a question like that if it were directed at me. You say it's honest, but I think you needed to elaborate, because I don't know how to read it as anything but an insult. I don't know how you could read "Against Murderism" and imagine that he thinks slavery wasn't racist.
It's worth noting that Lincoln approached slavery in essentially the way SSC suggests in that essay:
> [I do not propose](https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm) to question the patriotism, or to assail the motives of any man, or class of men; but rather to strictly confine myself to the naked merits of the question.
So, if I was going to take that question seriously, I would probably ask in response, "Was Lincoln despicably racist? Sure, [he *was* racist](https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/abraham-lincoln-racist/), but was he misguided? Do you think you could have done better by impugning his opponents' motives?"
I haven't read the Wolf or Kolmogorov posts, though. Maybe there's something damning there.
I'm 99% sure based on SSC comments that Scott subscribes to some form of scientific racism, though he doesn't shout it from the rooftops. I'm just arguing that he and other Jewish scientific racists aren't primarily motivated by the unconscious desire to justify the subjugation of other minorities. I agree this argument doesn't work as well for scientific sexism.
It’s usually a safe bet that the people yelling about “Enlightenment Values^TM” the loudest are historically illiterate.
Edit: Case-in-point, the r/samharris thread on this.
That seems like an unfair comparison. The article argues that concepts of racial supremacy developed a mantle of academic authority during the Enlightenment because they helped justify the imperialism and slavery which was enriching Europe at the time. Seems plausible, but if there’s motivated reasoning going on for Scott, it’s much, much subtler than that. He’s being intellectually lazy and coming to false conclusions, but the real fault lies with the garbage studies he cites in support of his views. With his training perhaps he ought to know better, and I could believe there’s some unconscious racial supremacism behind his ignorance, but that’s a long way from “I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, For how could we do without sugar and rum?”
Today in Smear Club: they smear the truth.