Oh, I agree with that--I think cognitive behavioral therapy is overrated for that reason.
But it's also worth noting that a lot of people have mental health issues--myself, and tons of other people on this sub, and many others outside of this sub--who nevertheless are committed leftists, unlike Aaronson, who prefers to class SJWs with the true villains of this world. In fact, the general fight for the care and inclusion of the mentally ill is a leftist fight. Social anxiety only goes so far as an excuse for bad behavior, contrary to what Aaronson might believe, and it certainly does _not_ excuse misogynistic behavior, or hating social justice.
The thing is, he's a powerful member of an institution known for being sexist (academia), in a field known for being sexist (CS). Suppose you're a young woman and he's your graduate advisor, and you go to a conference and you are sexually harassed. Do you seriously imagine that the man capable of writing a blog post wherein he yearns for the days of arranged marriages in a patriarchal religious society, would be able to help you out? Or do you think he'd be more likely to say, oh, that conference guy grabbed your ass because he's socially awkward. Be nice to him if you see him around again.
Newsflash--most STEM dudes who are already more liberal and less neurotic than Aaronson are going to go for the latter. I've had a lot of unfortunate firsthand experience with this. You may not have any experience with people who are delusional, but I've had _plenty_ of experience seeing women being harassed by men, and men failing to take it seriously.
If Aaronson were just some dude in a basement, his blog would be a little creepy but no big deal. As a professor, though, he ought to be held to a higher standard, and if his mental issues make it impossible for him to protect young women from predatory men in academia, he can't be trusted with female students. In an ideal world, someone else of equal talent would replace him as a professor completely. Or maybe even someone of lesser talent--shit, I'll take a more gender egalitarian academia over faster progress in proving P != NP any day.
Yeah, I'd say you should raise your expectations--so long as he's in a position where he can seriously affect other people's careers, he can't get any passes.
> Re: hating social justice- Aaronson regularly claims he supports social justice, and I believe him!
I suppose when Trump tweeted a photo of himself eating guacamole on Cinco de Mayo that proved he didn't hate Hispanics, either.
> He very likely supports it more than the other Scott, except when it intersects with this paralyzing fear.
You just described Scooter himself--decent enough guy, except that feminists scared the shit out of him once and he's been badmouthing them ever since. They're quite similar.
> I'll take a more gender egalitarian academia over faster progress in proving P != NP any day.
What do you think is the purpose of the academia, for the record?
But I try to remind myself every day that the human race doesn’t
consist solely of Arthur Chus (or Amanda Marcottes, or Lubos Motls, or
SneerClub posters, or Paul Manaforts or Donald Trumps). The world
contains millions of women and men of every background and ideology who
want actual dialogue, many of whom I’m lucky to count as friends, many
of whom I met through this blog. Vulnerability is possible because the
world is not uniformly evil.
It’s kinda weird to think that by virtue of posting sardonic remarks
here, I am become the shadowy evil at the heart of mankind for some
people. I mean shit, I went to a talk that Aaronson gave a couple of
weeks ago and asked a few questions. I wonder if he picked me out as the
sinister corruption at the heart of society on the spot?
I particularly like how SneerClub contains members who are no doubt far more active than he is in actual activist work, like resisting ICE. OOPS GUESS THEY WERE JUST VIRTUE-SIGNALING
I don't think it's that weird that someone would have somewhat irrational negative feelings about a community that makes fun of them and their friends fairly frequently. I mean, obviously it doesn't sit well the self-image of Rationalism, but we know that's bollocks anyway.
It's not that irrational hatred of SneerClub is risible; it's the level of irrationality where this hatred gets linked to the family separations and the Holocaust. Plus the whiny "I'm being persecuted for being a nerd!" Like look at this:
> I’m despised by a large fraction of the world just for being who I am, and
it’s only a matter of time until big, scary armed guys come for me, as they came for so many other nerdy misfits.
What a disgusting level of self-pity.
Well yes, he is hyperbolic to the point of eye rolls here, but I'm perfectly prepared to believe that he's been genuinely miserable for large parts of his life, and I like to cut miserable people some slack on their lack of perspective on their personal problems.
When he stops defending Robin Hanson in public, I'll cut him some slack. My sympathy for miserable people stops right where they start hurting other people. If Aaronson stuck to "woe is me, a Nerd," it'd be a minor curiosity to be pitied, but leaping to the defense of fellow nerds who propose earnest thought experiments about 'gentle silent rape' is a whole different peanut.
Agreed.
I really \_want\_ to like Aaronson, inasmuch as I can relate to a lot of his problems and insecurities. But then he keeps inching his toe over the line of completely unacceptable.
>If Aaronson stuck to "woe is me, a Nerd," it'd be whatever, but leaping to the defense of fellow nerds who propose earnest thought experiments about 'gentle silent rape' is a whole different peanut.
What the actual fuck? Feeling alienated for having interests outside of the mainstream doesn't override another person's consent and autonomy. Actual victims of domestic violence and more life-threatening police brutality have far less self-pity than this dude.
I suppose the most compassionate takeaway is that growing up so sheltered that your social skills are crippled is as bad as being the victim of physical abuse.
That take is extremely charitable given how most people know at least one awkward person who can successfully exercise "putting yourself in the other person's shoes".
I think good* people who grow up in a bad environment tend to want to work on themselves, or are inherently less self-centered, and for less good people who grow up in shitty environments...they use their shitty childhoods as an excuse to not work on themselves. For the sake of the former, I'd like to move towards a world where being too sheltered is recognized as a form of bad parenting. I definitely don't want to move towards a world where self-centeredness is okay, but recognizing that shelteredness is bad is not an endorsement of that.
* an excessive simplification
from r/ssc:
> So then he’s admitting that Amanda Marcotte and Arthur Chu have him dead to rights, he’s guilty as accused, and his position makes him unable to see how he’s wrong?
> Maybe this isn’t really how he should be portraying this.
I think my favorite thing about this is that he posted this story to
his professional blog, which is read by colleagues, students, and so on.
He clearly doesn’t realize it, but he comes off very poorly in this,
even though—or rather, especially because—the story is of his own
telling. Aaronson is sufficiently secure in his career that this blog
post isn’t going to cause him any substantial harm, but way to make
yourself look like a fool in front of your peers, nerd.
Aaronson needs to be kept away from blogging about
non-technical/academic things for his own good.
It's actually heartening to see how many good comments there are breaking down where Aaronson went off the rails. Like this [one](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/95oxdh/scott_aaronson_got_handcuffed_and_interrogated_by/e3ufml9/).
But at least in my experience, an actual arrest isn’t like that. The
presumption of innocence, Miranda rights, all the things you might learn
about in civics class—none of it seems to play any role.
Yes they do. That’s why they arrested you instead of any of the 100s
of other people nearby.
From the very beginning, there’s an overwhelming presumption of
guilt. Everything you say gets interpreted as if you’re a red-handed
criminal trying to fabricate a story, no matter how strained and how
ludicrous such an interpretation might become.
There’s a presumption of guilt whenthere’s multiple witnesses and
security footage of you committing a crime. Did your civics class not
cover probable cause?
And something strange happened: the officers seemed so certain I was
guilty, that after only a few minutes I started to feel guilty. I still
had only a hazy sense of my “crime,” but I knew I was going to be
punished for it, and I only hoped that the punishment wouldn’t tear me
away from my family and previous life forever.
You were guilty. And lucky for you, you weren’t punished
either.
I came away from this incident with a visceral feel for just how easy
it would be to procure a false confession from someone, which I didn’t
have before but which will now stay with me as long as I live.
That’s what those miranda rights thingies are for. Since they didn’t
read them to you, any “false” confession of you would have been no good
in court. Yay 5th amendment! They didn’t read them to you because either
they didn’t need a confession given the other evidence or because
they’re airport security who aren’t as well-trained as regular cops.
For someone who says they accept responsibility, they have an awful
lot to blame on other people.
Third, I emerged from my arrest with a self-help technique that’s
probably well-known to somebody, but that was new to me, and that I hope
others will find as useful as I’m finding it. Here it is: when something
freakishly bad happens to you, draw a directed graph of all the known
causes of the event, and the causes of the causes, and so forth as far
back as you can trace them. Also draw all the known measures that could
have blocked the causal path leading to the bad event, and what
prevented those measures from working or from being tried.
This sounds like the mathematician’s version of CAPA or Corrective
And Preventive Action. His version is overly complicated for most
people, but not a bad technique. I won’t quote his entire example, but I
count 11 people and things he puts some blame on.
Looking over the strange chain of events that led to my arrest, I
could find much to support my “default narrative,” that the laws of
probability are broken and the universe is grotesquely awful.
Probability isn’t broken. All those things that went wrong are
correlated events. And despite that, he still could have avoided arrest
if just, you know, didn’t take the tip money. But seriously, how rare of
an event does he think it is to be both late to the airport and tired
after traveling?
>You were guilty. And lucky for you, you weren't punished either.
Just because he did something, and people saw him do it, does that *really* mean he did it though?
Apparently not.
I feel just…flabbergasted, reading this. Like am I even a member of
the same species as this guy? I’ve never been accused of something by a
cop, but I’ve been mugged, I’ve gotten into scuffles with bigger guys,
and while all these incidents of physical violence inspire much the same
rage in me that some online interactions do, it would never occur to me
to compare the two.
This whole blog post just seems so overwrought to me. I’m not a fan
of cops and would prefer to see them abolished along with the rest of
the state apparatus, but the leap from “I was arrested for accidentally
stealing in tips” to “this is how family separations happen, and by the
way all the people who don’t like me online are evil,” served with an
appetizer of “they’re persecuting me because I’m a nerd!” is
breathtaking.
How does someone get to be a professor with a family while still
lacking a sense of proportion? Like this is just really
disturbing–Aaronson clearly understands that a lot of people have it way
worse than he does, he understands racism’s out there and victimizing
people even as we speak, but all his emotion seems to be saved for his
personal brand of nerd identity politics.
It doesn't strike me as that alien to me. Aaronson has talked about struggles with ["crippling, life-destroying anxiety"](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664) before, it seems like he has an extreme fear of being labelled as evil by people, to the point where any criticism of white nerds becomes warped to be a threat to him personally. As someone with anxiety problems myself I do sympathise with him, but he is still wrong. He should really just never talk about social justice ever, for his own sake.
Yeah, fair, I guess I've done it myself, but I make different leaps, and so his particular leaps make no sense to me. And agreed, he should just shut up about social justice.
> "I was arrested for accidentally stealing $3 in tips"
Even ignoring the weird sense of proportion he has, is it normal wherever he is for businesses to put people's change into a plastic cup? Most places I've been have a cup like that for tips.
I guess if someone is jetlagged, stressed, or just really not thinking straight then they might somehow reach into a cup, take $4 in change for some reason, and then completely fail to understand a conversation where an angry employee tells them that they're tips and not change, and then forget about that conversation when questioned by police moments later...
But even if that highly implausible situation is the case, the reasonable response isn't to talk about how mean the police officers were, how the employees had failed to properly explain that the money in the tip jar was tips not change, or suggest that people should assume you're innocent despite being plainly guilty. Instead the reasonable response is to say "Holy shit, I think I just had a stroke and accidentally took those tips, they're absolutely right and you're right to pull me up for it. I've just been on a long stressful flight and here's how I messed up".
You don't say "I'm a computer science professor and a lifelong nerd, I would never steal! Can't you see the comical absurdity of it all!" when everybody saw you take the money from the tip jar.
You left out the part where he thought that when the employee said 'hey! That's the tip jar', said when he grabbed the tray on the countertop containing the 'change' jar, he pulled out his wallet and left a dollar on the counter thinking it was a rude demand to leave a tip.
WTF
While trying to find the linked article earlier through Google search, I found an article where he got arrested another time when he got drunk with some physicists and punched one after calling him an "ignorant farmer".
Not sure if it's relevant but I feel like it should be.
... I had more respect for him when I thought he actually got into a fight, compared to now realising that he thought that was a funny April fool's joke...
According to the blog post of his that i found, he blamed it on the fact that he couldn't handle his alcohol and they pressured him to keep up with their drinks.
But I agree with your assessment that it's probably just more evidence that he's an asshole. And also terrible at coming up with insults.
That's something I find fascinating about this blog post--how much do his self-centeredness and his anxiety feed into each other? Because if you think everything really is all about you, 100% of the time, then of course the world will be a terrifying place, which will then cause you to worry even more about yourself, and so on. He's so bad at taking the perspective of other people, and it must be part of why he's so miserable all the time.
It's also great how he doesn't really accept any responsibility for causing his mishaps earlier in the day. It's all couched in terms of misbehaving children \_making\_ him be forgetful or the slow shuttle \_causing\_ him to not get his suitcase before the bomb squad (there are other ways of getting around Logan)
**Fundamental attribution error**
In social psychology, fundamental attribution error (FAE), also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is the concept that, in contrast to interpretations of their own behavior, people tend to (unduly) emphasize the agent's internal characteristics (character or intention), rather than external factors, in explaining other people's behavior. This effect has been described as "the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are".
***
^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^]
^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
> I guess if someone is jetlagged, stressed, or just really not thinking straight then they might somehow reach into a cup, take $4 in change for some reason, and then completely fail to understand a conversation where an angry employee tells them that they're tips and not change, and then forget about that conversation when questioned by police moments later...
Being fair, I've done things extremely close to this. On the other hand, separately, I've had the social wherewithall upon being challenged by cops to actually ask them what I'm being arrested for, even under extreme stress.
>I guess if someone is jetlagged, stressed, or just really not thinking straight then they might somehow reach into a cup, take $4 in change for some reason, and then completely fail to understand a conversation where an angry employee tells them that they're tips and not change, and then forget about that conversation when questioned by police moments later...
Sounds like something I would do, to be perfectly honest.
The difference is that once I'd get it sorted out, then shrug and let it slide off and not go whine about it in a really melodramatic way on the internet.
the dude is literally an absent-minded professor, it's a very silly response. Still doesn't justify calling the cops or arresting someone over three bucks of course.
Why is theft not a good reason to mention it to a cop that's passing by? Sure, it's only a couple of dollars from your store but he's still in the area and might go in a few other stores before he leaves.
And obviously he wasn't arrested. They just spoke to him and told him to give the money that wasn't his back to the business. It's not like they interrogated him in a cell, or charged him with anything.
> It says in the post that he was handcuffed, and they tried to press charges.
He claims he was cuffed but nobody tried to press charges, it looks like they just wanted their money back. Remember that we're dealing with a story teller who, by his own admission, was so confused and unable to comprehend basic language that he thought people were putting his change in a tip jar and that he should decide how much change he deserved. We can't expect him to have fully understood what the police said or claimed.
>Cops are bad, do not report people to them unless it's serious.
Sure, that can be a valid argument but on the other hand, stores are generally going to report thieves hanging around the area. Given that they attempted to simply ask him to return the money and he refused to do so, they need some other way of protecting the livelihood of their staff.
And given that he's a middle aged white dude, even an interaction with bad police is probably not going to end badly for him.
In the context of the extremely fucked up police force/criminal justice system of the united states, I think it is kinda immoral to report someone to the police for petty theft. Of course, it would be worse if this was a minority, but the manager who reported the incident hadn't met Scott and wouldn't have known he wasn't. It actually is ridiculous for the police to handcuff someone over a theft of three bucks, but not out of character for an awful institution like the US police force. I will repeat again: the police are bad.
>In the context of the extremely fucked up police force/criminal justice system of the united states, I think it is kinda immoral to report someone to the police for petty theft.
I don't know - if it was petty theft from a big business' cash register, then sure. But we're talking about stealing from minimum wage workers who need those tips to afford basic necessities.
And yeah it was only $4.. *that day*. But if it happens every day, or a few times a week, at some point they need to protect their employees. If talking to the person and asking them to give it back doesn't work then are they just to expect their employees go without basic needs that week?
>Of course, it would be worse if this was a minority, but the manager who reported the incident hadn't met Scott and wouldn't have known he wasn't.
He reported him to the cops so he would have given them a description.
>It actually is ridiculous for the police to handcuff someone over a theft of three bucks, but not out of character for an awful institution like the US police force. I will repeat again: the police are bad.
Again we have to keep in mind that he's not a reliable narrator. Given that his own retelling that is presented after enough time to construct the best possible description makes him sound like a madman, I wouldn't be surprised if they cuffed him for his own safety.
But sure, nobody is denying that the police can be bad and reporting someone isn't a decision to be taken lightly. And I'd imagine they were probably airport security, not cops.
> I wouldn't be surprised if they cuffed him for his own safety.
I don't think so. I think they cuffed him because he was near the exit and about to leave. It was excessive but not unreasonable. And given how absent minded he was that, I wouldn't be surprised if the cops were following behind him, yelling to get his attention, for like 50 ft. He could have even looked back and thought "I wonder who these cops are yelling at?" and then kept on walking.
> I'd imagine they were probably airport security, not cops.
They had pistols and handcuffs, and asked people whether or not to press charges. Assuming they were police is fairly reasonable.
> I wouldn't be surprised if they cuffed him for his own safety.
Yes, because the police in the US have never been known to go overboard when apprehending suspects. Geesh, I thought this was a leftist sub, didn't expect to see people bend over backwards to defend cops here.
It's a sub that's mostly leftist, but it's not a communist or anarchist sub.
Besides, in this thread, people are only defending *these cops* in *this particular situation*.
Can't we split the middle here? Stealing from minimum wage workers is bad, cops are also bad? This doesn't really have anything to do with cops. It has everything to do with the weird sense of entitlement that leads Aaronson to get defensive about stealing even when he's truly guilty of stealing. If Scott Aaronson had been chased down by an angry store manager, he probably would've written the exact same blog post.
Agree completely. This is why guys like Paul Bloom, who think empathy is overrated, are so wrong. You can understand that something is evil, but without the right emotional circuitry, you won't be motivated to do jack shit.
>How does someone get to be a professor with a family while still lacking a sense of proportion?
Seems like a feature, not a bug. The higher up you go, the less sense of proportion you can afford to have.
He is the least self-aware person I have ever read. And that's saying something.
The note at the end about Seinfeld is the kicker - he doesn't realize that the characters on Seinfeld are psychopaths - and that's why the show is funny! We identify with them, but not too much.
Yes, I think this neatly explains a lot of rationalist attitudes towards social justice critics. That last point in particular--despite Aaronson's weird self-esteem issues, he's a hugely egocentric being. He completely failed to realize that _any_ person who took the tip jar would've been subjected to the cops coming, and chose to think, "oh no! They're coming cause I'm a nerd! Because I'm ME."
>He completely failed to realize that any person who took the tip jar would've been subjected to the cops coming, and chose to think, "oh no! They're coming cause I'm a nerd! Because I'm ME."
Sigh. He'd be tased at best and killed at worst if he was black. Unlike the former, "Nerd" isn't something visibly apparent that can't be removed.
But moreover, is this story real? It’s titled “beyond fiction,” and
I’m not sure which direction “beyond” indicates here and the story while
not impossible does not seem to merit the gravity implied—except a
strange flavor of personal gravity that is certainly beyond my—what’s
that weird informatics/economic scott-adjacent thing?—my hardy-weinburg
rational-agreement time-for-calculus (?).
Obligatory Gertzian “all ethnography, even autoethnography, is a form
of fiction….”
That's what's sneerworthy. On one hand, I feel bad for anyone whose anxiety problems are _this_ bad. On the other hand..._REALLY_? That getting arrested for stealing the contents of a tip jar is occasion enough for this blog post, proof of the persecution of nerds, is astounding. He was actually, factually guilty of stealing, _not_ of being a nerd, and he still can't see this even though he's an adult with children. Like I really _want_ to feel sorry for someone else with mental health issues, because I've spent my life there, but for this, I just can't.
The tone of the piece is so jars with the actual content of it. I mean, even now I am trying to parse whatever transitions are occurring between each lined break. It's such a weird piece. But on the subject of anxiety, mental illness, and the trials of life---I kinda feel in the age of the internet, we're learning that individual neurosis and pathologies are just insufficient explanations for almost anything anymore. It's like: who hasn't talked to a mental health professional, who hasn't medicated or self-medicated, who doesn't feel real or "false" oppression and stress. Aaronson embodies the worst characteristic of the identity-politics spector reactionaries so often decried by reactionaries (I'm sure he's even decried it): the whole story is about his internal conditions of identity, thought, and feeling. But no one else at the scene gives a damn---it's about the 3 dollars he stole. It's funny that tries to beat Chu, Marcotte, and SneerClub over the head with his "psychoanalytic limb"---but he grows a whole self-psychoanalytic tree by his "Second,..." section. My diagnoses: psychological exhibitionism, with false sincerity and cosmic victimhood.
Exhibit 1: He did actually take the money from the tip jar, but "the universe is grotesquely awful" and everyone turns out to be gears in the Aaronson-oppressing bureaucracy.
(There is, btw, something uncanny about this story of misunderstanding at a juice bar in juxtaposition to the arrest of Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson at a Philly Starbucks earlier this year---something Aaronson weirdly alludes to, whether he meant to or not.)
Wow a rationalist that actually got arrested for something that’s
not, like, an embezzlement charge five years from now?
Then, completely forgetting I hadn’t paid cash this time, I looked
down for my change: in an unmarked plastic change cup. I collected the
change, put it in my wallet, then completely forgot about it.
After a minute, an employee angrily pointed down at a tray that the
plastic cup was on (though not clearly at the cup itself), and said
“hey, the tips go here!” So I took a dollar from my wallet and put it
on the tray. I thought: this guy has some chutzpah, to demand
a tip, and for an over-the-counter smoothie! But whatever, he probably
needs the dollar more than I do. So if it will make him stop being
angry…
HAHAHAHAHA how do you do that?
To most people something like this becomes just a weird/cool/funny
story to tell people, and maybe embellish it to make the cops look like
idiots. But he just goes on and on and on whining about it like it’s the
most upsetting thing ever. It’s not that big a deal bub, shit
happens.
tldr “Hello my name is Scott Aaronson and I am very surprised to find
out that I am exempt from the capitalist hellscape police-state food
chain due to being very intelligent”
Hey there, just a small point to make. I am a
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, and you are correct in a very limited sense
that we are “extreme”. However, we are only extreme from the standpoint
of the average irrational person. We wish to re-organize society on a
rational basis – where all means of production are seized by the
proletariat and used to their full potential. This is not extreme in the
slightest, and those who wish to deny our aims through violence (the
capitalist imperialists and comprador bourgeoisie) are actually the ones
who are extreme I think.
I think your blog misrepresents us as “extreme”, although I
understand that there’s a lot of capitalist propaganda out there which
could easily make people biased and repeat how we’re supposedly extreme
without really giving it a second though.
I would love to have a respectful dialogue with you on this point
because mainstream media and twitter pundits try to shut out a calm,
level-headed and kind discussion of the benefits of communism.
Aarsonson:
Even though your ideology led to the deaths of 100 million people in
the last century, I predict that you might have more success winning
mainstream support for it nowadays than for the ideology that says that
socially awkward male tech workers bleed when you prick them. 😉
Myself:
I don’t really know what this comment means. The winking smiley
indicates that you might be joking about it it? Can you explain what you
mean more thoroughly without using irony or hiding your intentions
behind an obfuscating joke?
Communism didn’t kill 100 million people, this is simply propaganda
repeated ad nauseam by twitter pundits and capitalist media. Is there a
single methodology you can propose which calculates the deaths of 100
million under communism which wouldn’t result in a much more dire
bodycount if we used the exact same methodology for capitalism?
In any case, we can look at the massive rise in living standards,
health, literacy and so on that communism provided for people and see
that yes, it is undoubtedly a more rational system.
Fellow sneerers, judge for yourselves who was more open to polite
good-faith dialogue in the above exchange.
This comment has just made me wonder--isn't one reason America has a higher standard of living than many ex-communist countries because it didn't get curb-stomped by various invading armies? Like, Russia's population still hasn't recovered from WWII yet. Surely a lot of the credit capitalism gets for high living standards is just because WWII was never fought on American soil.
I think we'd probably want to look at European countries like France and Germany too, particularly the East/West Germany divide. Though the water is muddied by the fact that what is capitalism to most Europeans is raving far left socialism to a lot of Americans.
That's true, but the communist states didn't have the benefit of the Marshall Plan either. The other thing I've heard is that America's economy had the chance to develop without serious competition. But basically, there's a lot of mitigating factors that diminish the apparent success of capitalism.
The fact that Aaronson was wrong in quoting some unsourced dumb stat doesn't mean Lenin and Stalin didn't approve of mass massacres and incarcerations, caused starvation, etc. Are we going to argue about the number of tens of millions of people who died from authoritarian communism? Is it so much better if 20 or 40 million died instead of 100 million?
If someone is using the fake 100 million figure to make a political point (or if someone else wrote a book with cooked numbers to get to 100 million to support the same political point) it seems strange to then insist that there's not much difference whether there was 100 million or 20 million victims. If there was no difference for the exact point being made then they wouldn't have mentioned the 100 million number to begin with - or, better yet, mention the smaller, better corroborated numbers - and yet that number is mentioned *all the time*.
Not to mention the suppression of science by the Soviets. Hardly a "rational system"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed\_research\_in\_the\_Soviet\_Union](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Soviet_Union)
Research is suppressed in the so-called "rationalist" capitalist systems. The contours and details do make important differences between the two systems of intellectual suppression, but it's wrong to juxtapose Soviet suppression of science (like genetics research (which they rightly recognized as being part and parcel with Nazism and eugenics) as unique compared to 1st-world suppression of research under capitalism.
Of course I know. I was raised by a maoist mom and a trotskyist-turned-anarchist dad. You don't have to list a bunch of questions - I know the case. You don't have to assume I'm a bigot who lumps all "the Chinese" in a single group (your quotes). I currently live in an Asian Communist/Socialist country and while they have many flaws, it's still a great country full of great individuals. I did not make those generalizations, you did.
Aaronson's smug argument is ridiculous and doesn't stand scrutiny and sounds like something Charlie Kirk would write. That still does not validate what authoritarian communism has done to humanity, in terms of misery. There are good sides, I'm thinking of Cuba's incredible leaps in educations and literacy for example. The process to get there still committed massive murders.
"Authoritarian" doesn't really mean anything much to me aside from a media buzzword. We live in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and I would prefer to live in a dictatorship of the proletariat.
As the child of someone whose family suffered a lot during the Cultural Revolution, and lost a grandfather, I'm going to need a better answer than that.
Sorry, there isn't a better answer. Class struggle is gonna continue whether we like it or not and a lot of people will be collateral damage. That's what war is.
Fair enough, and I accept that answer. However, China held to communist principles at first, and it's still become a corrupt, vastly unequal place. Collateral damage is ok if you end up with a truly classless society, but China paid that price and didn't arrive there. How would you prevent that from happening?
Where's that adorably persistent MarxBro that we all know and love? I'm not as salty as you might think about Mao--hell, my dad got sent to a labor camp and even he still thinks the Marxist critique of capitalism was excellent. As an anarcho-primitivist I'm fine with blood.
But Bakunin ended up being right about communism so far, and there must be some Marxist who has an answer for where things went wrong with China. So if you can point me to any communists who have thoughts on how to prevent the betrayal of the revolution next time, I'd be curious. I don't begrudge the suffering of my family, per se--they were members of the bourgeoisie, and I know the creation of an equitable society is likely to involve armed resistance from members of that class. That's cool. I understand also that not every struggle will be successful. The deaths of countless martyrs have been spent unsuccessfully. That's upsetting, but that's just how it is. Like I said, though, China's in an awful state, and I don't want to see the next leftist struggle degenerate into what China is now. So. Is there a better answer than "fuck Bakunin, we're just going to have to keep trying what Mao did until it works out"? That's all I'm looking for. Where did Mao go wrong? How could things have turned out differently?
>I don't want to see the next leftist struggle degenerate into what China is now.
That's a much better outcome than what happens with anarchists - a whole lot of nothing.
Kinda hard to get shit done when your communist comrades have a habit of turning on you. /shrug
It's a pity you'd rather engage in a substantial exchange with Scooter Aaronson than with me, but that's your prerogative, I guess.
[deleted]
It’s kinda weird to think that by virtue of posting sardonic remarks here, I am become the shadowy evil at the heart of mankind for some people. I mean shit, I went to a talk that Aaronson gave a couple of weeks ago and asked a few questions. I wonder if he picked me out as the sinister corruption at the heart of society on the spot?
I think my favorite thing about this is that he posted this story to his professional blog, which is read by colleagues, students, and so on. He clearly doesn’t realize it, but he comes off very poorly in this, even though—or rather, especially because—the story is of his own telling. Aaronson is sufficiently secure in his career that this blog post isn’t going to cause him any substantial harm, but way to make yourself look like a fool in front of your peers, nerd.
Aaronson needs to be kept away from blogging about non-technical/academic things for his own good.
Edit: The /r/SSC thread about this is fantastic. Like, check out this quality sneer
Yes they do. That’s why they arrested you instead of any of the 100s of other people nearby.
There’s a presumption of guilt whenthere’s multiple witnesses and security footage of you committing a crime. Did your civics class not cover probable cause?
You were guilty. And lucky for you, you weren’t punished either.
That’s what those miranda rights thingies are for. Since they didn’t read them to you, any “false” confession of you would have been no good in court. Yay 5th amendment! They didn’t read them to you because either they didn’t need a confession given the other evidence or because they’re airport security who aren’t as well-trained as regular cops.
For someone who says they accept responsibility, they have an awful lot to blame on other people.
This sounds like the mathematician’s version of CAPA or Corrective And Preventive Action. His version is overly complicated for most people, but not a bad technique. I won’t quote his entire example, but I count 11 people and things he puts some blame on.
Probability isn’t broken. All those things that went wrong are correlated events. And despite that, he still could have avoided arrest if just, you know, didn’t take the tip money. But seriously, how rare of an event does he think it is to be both late to the airport and tired after traveling?
I feel just…flabbergasted, reading this. Like am I even a member of the same species as this guy? I’ve never been accused of something by a cop, but I’ve been mugged, I’ve gotten into scuffles with bigger guys, and while all these incidents of physical violence inspire much the same rage in me that some online interactions do, it would never occur to me to compare the two.
This whole blog post just seems so overwrought to me. I’m not a fan of cops and would prefer to see them abolished along with the rest of the state apparatus, but the leap from “I was arrested for accidentally stealing in tips” to “this is how family separations happen, and by the way all the people who don’t like me online are evil,” served with an appetizer of “they’re persecuting me because I’m a nerd!” is breathtaking.
How does someone get to be a professor with a family while still lacking a sense of proportion? Like this is just really disturbing–Aaronson clearly understands that a lot of people have it way worse than he does, he understands racism’s out there and victimizing people even as we speak, but all his emotion seems to be saved for his personal brand of nerd identity politics.
[deleted]
[deleted]
There it is
God, I wish he’d stop talking about us.
But moreover, is this story real? It’s titled “beyond fiction,” and I’m not sure which direction “beyond” indicates here and the story while not impossible does not seem to merit the gravity implied—except a strange flavor of personal gravity that is certainly beyond my—what’s that weird informatics/economic scott-adjacent thing?—my hardy-weinburg rational-agreement time-for-calculus (?).
Obligatory Gertzian “all ethnography, even autoethnography, is a form of fiction….”
Wow a rationalist that actually got arrested for something that’s not, like, an embezzlement charge five years from now?
HAHAHAHAHA how do you do that?
To most people something like this becomes just a weird/cool/funny story to tell people, and maybe embellish it to make the cops look like idiots. But he just goes on and on and on whining about it like it’s the most upsetting thing ever. It’s not that big a deal bub, shit happens.
The rationalizations of a thief caught red handed are always interesting but never surprising.
That boy needs therapy
tldr “Hello my name is Scott Aaronson and I am very surprised to find out that I am exempt from the capitalist hellscape police-state food chain due to being very intelligent”
Scott Aaronson: I’m right here if you truly want a dialogue. I’ve commented on your blog before and you rudely snubbed me. Your politically naive “rationalism” is no match for the science of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Myself:
Aarsonson:
Myself:
Fellow sneerers, judge for yourselves who was more open to polite good-faith dialogue in the above exchange.
If he’d been shot by the police he’d say it was almost as bad as a woman laughing at him - but he still wouldn’t join a Black Lives Matters protest.