Link here. I know a lot of people either don’t have a Tumblr account or can’t bear to interact with the amazingly awful site design long enough to find posts, so I’ll quote the relevant passages here:
worriedaboutmyfern concludes a response to Scott’s NIMBY article with:
And lastly, I apologize for not being able to find a more charitable way to phrase this, but your framing of the NIMBY issue as “It’s not that I agree with them, it’s that I think you guys are so unfair to them” is exactly the same framing you often seem to use for the HBD/Jordan Peterson crowd, and I find it really disingenuous, that’s all. I think the argument would be stronger if you just said straightforwardly what you believe instead of presenting it as a “steelmanning.”
Scott responds (again, only posting the relevant parts):
If I am 30% of the way from socialist to libertarian, and all of my friends are 10% of the way from socialist to libertarian, I think it’s fair to tell my friends “No, look! Libertarians make some good points! We need to pay more attention to the way libertarians think instead of hating them and rejecting everything they say out of hand!” This doesn’t make me a libertarian - I’m still only 30% of the way from socialist to libertarian and so more on the socialist side…I thought I had an SSC post where I explained this further, but I can’t find it. The gist was that if everyone else is at 10% and you think the correct answer is 30%, you can either argue for 30 and have them compromise at 20%, or you can argue 50% and have them compromise at 30%. I’m not sure there’s a right answer to this question, but I sometimes end up arguing for 50% and I think this is at least a defensible choice.
So to make this clear: his argument isn’t that he’s pro-HBD, it’s that he feels others are not pro-HBD enough, so he deliberately argues a position he doesn’t believe in the hopes he can exploit their charity to get them to “compromise” at the mid-point between their apparent positions, which is his actual position.
This may be the most incredibly dishonest, reprehensible, scummy way to “win” an argument I’ve ever heard. You’re not just lying about what you believe, you’re presenting yourself as willing to compromise when you clearly aren’t AND you’re taking advantage of your opponent’s good nature.
Wait, what?
This is bad faith with your friends, but even by Facts and Logic this seems poorly thought out because he isn’t trying to make a compromise deal, whatever he’s doing isn’t with one person, and his audience isn’t homogenous people who are 20% to his left.
I strongly believing in putting forward strong arguments and I fully believe in presenting strong versions of but like… I believe in a two state solution in Israel-Palestine but I don’t think the best way to get there is to convince strong Zionists that we should have slight Palestinian supremacy (maybe 67 borders, no land swaps) and convincing Palestines that Israel should control Palestine even after independence (I don’t know, never giving back area C or something). That’s dumb. It would be more convincing to present what both sides want and be like I am Goldilocks in the middle. That’s fine. But when I want to meet in the middle, I don’t say, “Okay here’s something 20% to the right of my position so later I’ll meet in the middle.”
I think Scott wants to be speaking truth to power, but like… just speak your truth, man. This is another disappointing thing from Scott.
This is a bit of a tangent, but Scott’s take on NIMBYism is so stupid and banal that I can’t help but suspect that the only reason he’s defending the NIMBYs is that someone accused them of being racist (and Scott always sides with those who are accused of racism).
If you ever wanted to convince Scott of Marxism, I’d try conspicuously accusing Marxists of racism whenever Scott is around; I’d wager you’d see a “steelman” from him within a month or two.
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The best indication of how rationalists don’t understand human beings is Scott discussing politics as a slider along some interval rather than actually having beliefs and ethics.
what I like about Scott is he doesn’t realise that you can’t just straight up tell people you’re going to lie to them
Once you dig down to the root of it, a lot of these guys are just really insecure, and all the politics is just a (highly detailed!) layer over that.
1 year ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6fy08b/nathan_robinson_on_the_line_between_liberalism/dim676v/
So, has he both a) Learnt what a socialist is & b) Become 70% socialist since then? Or is he being disingenuous for the sake of escaping criticism?
Can we start calling this the SlateStarCodex fallacy or something. The assumption that people want to come to agreements with you, so you must argue for the stronger version of your stupidest beliefs in the false assumption that people will just randomly start believing your stupid shit.
In Five Dysfunctions Of A Team, “politics” is defined as, roughly, manipulating the information people have in order to ensure they come to the conclusions that you want them to. While a very thin definition in terms of governments and societies, it’s still a useful tool to think with.
In other words, imagine being on this many levels of ideology.
Similarly, I’m only 99.5% Marxist but to convince people who are 0.1% Marxist I have to argue for 100% Marxism.
Note the important “if” there.
Wait till he learns about libertarian socialism! And that American libertarianism is dumb and no one should use it to orient a political spectrum.
How wonderful that policies within a given political ideology are completely fungible, so it doesn’t matter which additional 20% of libertarian ideas Scott argues for or convinces his socialist friends of, just so long as they score exactly the same as him on ideology quizzes.
Of course
thea problem here is, since he’s admitting to using bad faith tactics, how do we know he doesn’t actually want his friends to be 70% or 100% libertarian, and is lying here because he believes that his 30% number is as much as his socialist friends will tolerate, or 50% is as much as they’ll tolerate him devil’s advocating for, but as soon as they’ve become more libertarian, he’ll then ratchet it up to get closer to his true preference? How do we know this is the true Scott?If you’re going to lie, and you want people to believe those lies (all or a fraction of them), you really shouldn’t admit to being a liar.
Thought: what if SA’s friends are like him?
We’ll say there’s only one for simplicity. Due to confusion, she gets the idea that SA is at 50% libertarian. As she is only 30% libertarian, she pretends to be 10% to get SA to compromise. SA now sees this, and decides he MUST pretend to be 50% libertarian, or he might be fooled into actually compromising as opposed to tricking others into adopting his views. Now both parties are faking ideologies to convince the other of views they already hold.
“Just asking questions” and “I am saying as a friend
of the good cause of X, I swear, which makes what I say all the more
significant and impactful” are some of the oldest and dullest rhetorical
tricks in the book. At least Scott admits that he’s dishonest and
manipulative. It gives you a good ‘Bayesian’ reason to set your priors
for trusting anything he says ever again very, very low!