posted on February 20, 2021 12:46 PM by
u/white_raven0
140
u/DELETED75 pointsat 1613850848.000000
I have to confess, I’ve read the entire SSC blog, and considered it
very thoughtful and interesting even though I often disagreed with it. I
never thought the same about Yud or NRx types, but SSC resonated a ton
with me. I liked the outgroup essay too. Reading The Beigeness revealed
some real problems that I’m ashamed to have missed on my own. Gotta go
update my priors about the probability that I’m a gullible rube.
I think a big part of the problem of rationalism, and a source of its
appeal to people like me, is its promise that if you are one of the Very
Very Smart people, you can apply about one day of thought to any given
topic and have as or more valid an understanding of it as any given
expert in that topic. It sucked me in to some extent for a long time;
its a big carrot. But by accepting that premise, that this particular
carrot exists and is gettable, a reader gives SSC and other gurus of
rationalism license to back big, sweeping, generalist conclusions (like
outgroup) with extremely superficial treatments of examples
(i.e. conflating colonialism, sectarianism, and ethnic conflicts between
neighbors, proving “proximity” matters and just adding “… and small
differences” for free). When somebody writes as an Expert, something
that superficial raises red flags. But after you accept an epistemology
that undermines expertise to such a huge extent, a thorough command of
the details seems relatively unimportant. Whoops.
Anyway. Thanks for helping me see it. I need to do two things now:
find better generalist thinker content to read, and find out how to
become a better critical reader so I don’t get suckered like this
again.
Get smart quick using these five tricks the fat cats in Big Academia don't want you to know!
I do feel some empathy for all these programmer types who discovered in adulthood that they really do have a yen for intellectual pursuits, but they're autodidacts who tuned out of school (which might have been poorly taught anyway) so they just have no foundation to start on, either the basics you need in order to learn more, or even just the basics you need in order to know where to look. I don't know where else to point them for such a broad variety of topics. Siskind offers a very low barrier to entry and the temptation that you can understand a lot more of the world with only a few new tools in your kit.
What he does that's so appealing is he dips your toe in a wide variety of interesting ideas. What he doesn't do well is put them in perspective, or argue them effectively, or even understand them fully. These thousand-word rambles merely start you thinking, and they often send you off with a push in the wrong direction.
(if it makes you feel better, I have an actual hard-earned Certificate of Expertise in a topic and I still fell for this shtick for a few years; I have the r/ssc community to thank for helping me realize [far too slowly](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/7gnzdb/is_it_the_people_or_the_philosophy/) what was going on and where the problem originated)
I think that a big draw that Siskind had was that he scratched the curious-generalist-who-happens-to-be-employed-in-STEM itch. Hell, I'm a history prof, and some of my favorite students are often the curious STEM kids in the World History surveys who, all things being equal, would prefer to study history or literature or philosophy but were told by their parents, "you're going to be an engineer" or just looked at the job prospects of various majors and went for a hard science.
The problem with the SSC community is that the curious generalists basically take a look at any non-STEM field, and, well, [Munroe said it better](https://xkcd.com/793/).
Ha.... I feel like I could have written that post of yours that you linked to. I went through the same lifecycle.
I too have an actual expertise, and at one point seeing how this group thought about my actual area of expertise and how obscenely overconfident they were about their grain-of-truth-but-mostly-wrong understanding was one of the things that helped me disengage, despite still not knowing exactly why I found so much of the rest of it so persuasive.
I actually have a liberal arts undergrad degree too, I have just had to specialize so much in adulthood for my career that my breadth has really suffered as a result.
Sounds like engineer’s disease.
I definitely have it myself and learned a lot about it from my experience with SSC. Like when I started getting skeptical I wanted to be able to point out what was wrong, but I lacked the ability to put it into words or do a close reading like Elizabeth does. I assume Elizabeth learned to do this during her PhD.
Engineers and our ilk generally don’t respect PhDs enough, especially non STEM ones.
This question made me think alot, and write a long response and delete it and start over to try and be concise (edit: I failed)
I first heard of rationalists, I think, through [this](https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/rokos-basilisk-the-most-terrifying-thought-experiment-of-all-time.html). My immediate impression was that this Yudkowsky guy sounds like a quack, but I don't really know much about tech or AI, and I enjoy reading philosophy and thought experiments, so I clicked through to LessWrong and ended up reading alot. This was also a time when I was reading alot of "how to improve your generalist thinking about stuff" literature like Thinking Fast and Slow, Superforecasting, etc etc.
Anyway, I tried to harvest the useful thinking tools and new ideas from LessWrong and its successor blogs, even though I rejected alot of the "object level" conclusions. So for example, I started taking an effective altruist approach to my giving, but rejected AI stuff as a cause area and concluded MIRI was basically a scam (I donated to against malaria foundation instead). Discussions about cryonics, some NRx stuff that would bubble to the surface, seemed obviously misguided to me. I even identified some of the patterns that generated those wrong conclusions (long chains of extrapolations with probability estimates at every step and a "small probability of infinite impact" kicker), even though I missed these very same patterns in alot of SSC's work and others.
Anyway, to my detriment, I did not actively look for criticism of the successor blogs like SSC. I obviously knew there was criticism of cryonics, of MIRI, of effective altruism, and other conclusions popular among the LW crowd and successors, but I did not seek out criticism of rationalism in general. To be honest, I did not think it had enough of a following to generate critical literature targeting it, I thought I was just reading a couple of moderately popular nichey blogs. For the record, I also don't personally know any rationalists or sneerers, I don't live near the bay area or NY, so I have no direct connection to any of the people involved besides reading blogs and lurking on forums.
So my flaw was in not forming an opinion of "the people" -- either the rationalists themselves or their critics -- except Yud where my assessment was basically right and Siskind where my assessment was too generous. My approach was to treat rationalist blogs/forums as a buffet line of unconventional ideas -- look at it all, pass on the garbage, take what looked helpful -- rather than thinking of it as a coherent literature where my very own assessment of how problematic some of the arguments/conclusions were should impact my opinion of the people presenting them -- should raise a flag that the same problems might be present in the arguments/conclusions that appealed to me and I might be missing it. Maybe if I had gone down this road, it might have struck me as more important to seek out criticism of rationalism in general, and form an opinion of the critics too. Because while I would not expect there to be a body of criticism for any particular SSC post or topic, I wouldn't have been surprised to think there was criticism of Rationalism in general, especially given I had rejected many parts of it more or less out of hand.
You could do a lot worse, in attempting to become a better critical reader, than following ElSandifer on Twitter and also reading more of her essays, tbh. Like, even her stuff about Doctor Who or other "trivial" topics -- she brings a vast depth and breadth of analysis to everything she talks about, and some of it will rub off on you.
In some ways that's *better*, really, because you're less likely to have some sort of nasty cognitive-dissonance reaction if she says something you think is wrong ;)
(Full disclosure: El and i are friends. I agree with about 80% of her litcrit output, and disagree extremely vehemently with the other 20%. But she always teaches me something and makes me a better reader.)
Let me disabuse you of one more unspoken rationalist trope: that every possible mistake has a "level" and you can avoid a mistake by levelling up your rationality past the level of the mistake. That's nonsense. It's just not how humans work. All humans are susceptible to biases, and you might be able to train yourself to catch your own biases in one particular domain, but it is not a given that the training is transferable. As the essay explains very well, SS's writing style is practically designed to sneak flawed premises past you with florid rhetoric. Don't beat yourself up about it. I know some very smart people who have fallen down the rabbit hole.
It's a well written article, but it's depressing to realize how even though Alexander and others are such flawed rhetors, he still has had a significant impact on people's beliefs and actions.
Neither of these happen in particularly flashy ways. That is largely
the point. Were you to take to Twitter and accuse Scott Siskind of
poorly supported conclusions or of dangerously shoddy thinking about
apartheid his defenders would immediately show up demanding citations.
And it’s nearly impossible to give them, because the damage isn’t done
by what he says (which is as always very little), but rather by what he
doesn’t, or by the way in which he stretches the act of not actually
supportng his claims over several paragraphs. There’s no smoking guns;
it requires the sort of 2500 word exegesis I just engaged in to point
out.
This is.. good. I’m also surprised the rationality fanboys haven’t
completely jumped all over it already (as they do any criticism of
Scott) - couldn’t really find it shared elsewhere on twitter or
reddit
It was already posted and removed from ssc.
And on themotte it would prob go as well as [the email leaks](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/lk8abe/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_15/gntrgx0/) (the person falling hook line and sinker for the 'what is topher hiding' bullshit is embarrassing).
The rest of the reactions of themotte and theschizm is mostly either 'we already knew [that thing which we call sneerclub bad faith evil people for implying about scott]', 'I don't care', or 'it was a long time ago'.
I think (and I don't know if this is a hypothesis that is supported by evidence) - a large majority of the people who actually land on SSC and spend some time on it and associated communities bounce (because of the associated NRx type toxicity in comment sections and the Motte) - and the people who remain - are essentially a tiny minority of that.
This is a big article, and I wanted to make some brief tl;dr for the
lazy, but seriously it’s a masterpiece smooth as silk. I wish I had half
the analysis capabilities of Sandifer.
And I’m left with horror inside.
It’s a cakewalk to dismiss blatant lies like those by PragerUrine
& friends, and to an extent even to distance yourself as much as
possible from those “flood the zone with shit” outlets where somehow
we have always been at war with Eastasia. But how can you call
out such thinly permeating gaslighting without a 12K words essay?
Yes, there is the gish gallop of completely arbitrary and more
wrong than “not even wrong” crap. And yes, there is also
everybody’s favourite motte and bailey over and over again. But even
with fractally wrong pieces like the one directly on feminism (where the
opposition gets so ridiculous that “getting relationships to
dick” is mathematically absurd on top of logically and ethically wrong)
there’s no smoking gun.
It’s not really facts per se that are being sold to the
audience, but more like a “generic narrative” (world wiew?
philosophy¿¿). And even if all the proofs and reasoning beneath were to
be disproven wholly, some fucking how absence of evidence still ain’t
evidence of absence, amirite?
Should the too-disingenous-to-be-honest rhetoric be underlined?
Should the “atmosphere” getting pushed out be criticized?
… Or maybe should the whole thing just be discarded
altogether, as in “look at how I’m gonna tell you more insightful things
in just three sentences”?
EDIT: for example, when discussing tolerance, Popper could be brought
up (in fact, I don’t even know how you can pretend to “make high IQ
arguments” without mentioning that here). Or when the topic is “nerd
oppression”, the most obvious reality of “jock mentality and toxic
masculinity models aren’t fucking feminism” could try to hijack the ride
of soon-to-be-incels from their destination into circlejerking land.
> It's not really facts per se that are being sold to the audience, but more like a "generic narrative" (world wiew? philosophy¿¿).
Scott Alexander is Jordan Peterson as a better writer.
Jordan Peterson is an objectively terrible writer. He doesn't even coherently present *his own* ideas. The good is worn-out cliches and the original is fucking bizarre.
But Peterson's terrible writing somehow *resonates* with his audience, who turn into the "SO TRUE!" meme. What's going on here?
That's the effect Scott's blog (now, by the process of anagram, called Excreta Sandbox) achieves.
> Scott Alexander is Jordan Peterson as a better writer.
Jordan Peterson is Sam Harris with a crap academic position.
Sam Harris is Yudkowsky who occasionally reads contemporary work on his subjects of interest.
Yudkowsky is Moldbug who thinks he's already read everything
Moldbug is Scott Alexander with a giant book collection of material published early than 1945
Scott Alexander is Robin Hanson moonlighting as
i think we may have found a new reality tv genre
God, I wish I realized all these guys are failsons with nothing to their name way earlier. Jordan Peterson published more than a hundred papers. Except all of them have to do with Big Five personality traits, so he's a personality psychologist, not a clinical psychologist, as he claims to be. Sam Harris has a PhD in neuroscience. Except his dissertation is this bizarre “I did tons of fMRI of religious and non-religious people over and over again”, and that's about it. And these are the guys with degrees. The others have made even less impact on the progress of science. WTF is this world.
> Sam Harris has a PhD in neuroscience. Except his dissertation is this bizarre “I did tons of fMRI of religious and non-religious people over and over again”, and that's about it.
[about that](https://rhizzone.net/articles/sam-harris-fraud/)
Good share, thank you. I've lately consumed some of his podcasts while walking the dog. Never paid any attention to him before. Many of my suspicions of Harris were confirmed reading that link. Especially his thin skin around critiques of his positions. And qua neuroscientist, he seems to me like a charlatan
Remember when people read 12 rules for life and went 'wow, how the fuck did I miss this guy was a conservative?'
[Guess what](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/26/book-review-twelve-rules-for-life/)
[subtext: Alexander writing a glowing review for Peterson should have been a warning]
Mhh, I guess there's an argument to be made that there are different tiers in the pipeline.
You have alex jones performative insanity to bait people that could legitly qualify for real as having a low IQ. Then you have shapiro's heady eloquence to intoxicate your average joe.. Last but not least, the Daddy's self-help weasel words, and Scott's actually "cogent" arguments to cover all possible entry points for younger people.
(though unlike the author, I'm not really sure Yud can *really* be considered part of the same villain universe.. he's a useful idiot at most imo)
And after writing my own personal stream of consciousness, I feel like you probably need to take a different "therapeutic" (educational?) approach with each one of them.
> Scott Alexander is Jordan Peterson as a better writer.
I just wanted to say this, because everyone spends all their time shitting on Scott Siskind non-stop in this subreddit: " …And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes" is actually pretty clever and I very much enjoyed it.
I'd have to re-read it to see how much it could lose in the editing. But with the pile of books I need to catch up with, I'm not in any great rush to do so.
I'm also a little sympathetic to fiction writers who get a little carried away and write too much. I don't think it's the worst sin that he didn't bother to edit down a short story that he wrote for fun.
I'm much worse than he is in that respect: I wrote and self-published a mystery novel that ended up being 240,000 words (640 pages, 6" x 9"). I could have honed it down some more (it's actually 10% shorter than the first draft), but I finally decided Fuck It and put it out there.
I think it's sold 7 copies. Ah well.
Yeah, I agree on both counts- I've actually enjoyed the examples of Scott's fiction I've read, though it could often use a few cuts. Logorrheia is a lesser sin in fiction than nonfiction, though, imho. I think, at times, literature has followed Hemingway a little too rigorously at times- there is something to be said for a bit of linguistic indulgence in fiction. A Confederacy of Dunces could also be a third of its current length, but it wouldn't be nearly as good. Definitely not claiming Scott is anywhere near that good, of course, nor that he doesn't need any cuts, because he definitely does. (Of course, as a writer also occasionally prone to over-verbosity at times, I mildly worry that this hot take of mine is just me covering my own ass. 😂)
Never read Scott's novel, though. Is it comparable in entertainment value to his short stories?
I've read it. It is much better as a series of biblical pun-based flash fiction than a coherent narrative. Also it has some moments that are pretty offensive in basically exactly the ways you'd expect. If anyone feels tempted to read it, you should instead just read the Interlude chapters until you get offended/bored.
I didn't even know he had written a novel. It's called *Unsong*, and [here's the Goodreads page](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/28589297-unsong).
The reviews note that there are a lot of puns in it. I couldn't make it through his pun-based mystery short story; there's no way I could handle a novel full of them from him.
That's a common thing with rationalism in general - the fiction is a lot better than the non-fiction, because the entire philosophy works a lot better in constructed worlds. A common critique of the movement is how its adherents lose a ton of real world context and nuance because they insist on simplifying whatever phenomena they're discussing to fit whatever ultra-simple model they are trying to peddle. That even happens in the article we're commenting on, when Scott simplifies the source of all out-group hatred into "proximity + small differences".
In a fictional, constructed universe, things really are that simple. The world actually does operate in a way intuitive to the main characters. A rational protagonist actually can unlock the mysteries of the universe just by thinking about things from first principles, because their universe was created by a rationalist and that's the entire point. It's impossible to accidentally (or willfully) ignore context when you control what the context is. There's no need to do research when you control what the details behind any situation are. All the common failings of rationalism are completely expunged by the construct of fiction.
This doesn't have that much relevance to "And I'll Show You How Deep the Rabbit Hole Goes", because (if I remember correctly) that's a short story. But it is a common feature of rationalist authors that I felt the need to point out - their fiction is always a lot better than their non-fiction, because their entire way of thinking/arguing/etc... is better suited to fictional worlds than the real one.
It's also why r/rational is hands-down, by-far the best part of the rationalist-sphere. If you liked "And I'll Show You How Deep the Rabbit Goes", then I'd strongly recommend checking some of the stories there out; they can be pretty good.
> the fiction is a lot better than the non-fiction, because the entire philosophy works a lot better in constructed worlds
I think this is the best explanation I've ever found for why I've enjoyed (some of) Ayn Rand's novels while despising everything she stands for. As science fiction, they can work.
Okay, having read “Untitled” before, I had absolutely no
idea that Scott Aaronson was responding to a woman sharing her
story of being sexually assaulted. That completely ruins the “innocent
nerd being shamed by mean feminazis” narrative that Siskind peddles, and
honestly that alone is a major mark against his credibility.
>Okay, having read "Untitled" before, I had absolutely no idea that Scott Aaronson was responding to a woman sharing her story of being sexually assaulted.
... Because it isn't true? The other commenter only [comes forward with her story](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326861) *after* [Aaronson's infamous comment](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664).
The article would be a lot better without such distortions to make the two of them look worse. It's not like it's needed.
Unholy necromancy!
But no, she writes in a *general* sense in comment 144 - you *can* read it as suggesting personal experience, but not in the same way as the later comment talking more specifically*. And indeed Aaronson did allow that reading:
> If that’s been your experience, then I understand how it could reasonably have led you to your views. Of course, other women may have had different experiences
But the OP's article goes on to describe her as "someone who has just confided their sexual assault." That's... like, those are different words, with different implications. As are "a woman sharing her story of being sexually assaulted," above.
& fwiw, IMHO, partly since u/dgerard & swim often get this
wrt cryptocurrency & so I’ve started tracking the life of this theme
a bit, the “you’re just doing it for profit” line is pretty
straightforward (((hate))), regardless of whether there are any
(((actual outgroup members))) involved. it’s funnier when it comes from
people whose profits dwarf those of the people who are being attacked
(eg in crypto), but i think it functions the same regardless.
it is never not hilarious when some bitcoiner, who is 110% in it for number go up, accuses me of only talking about it for the money. Yes, I get money for providing useful information, not picking pockets.
(deleted a comment here where I was arguing against scott, but it was
actually against something which was not being said, my bad).
E1: Ontopic btw, small point but still, Sandifer transforms ‘asking
people on a date’ into ‘finding someone to have sex with’ which is
totally unfair. Scott identifies as asexual [more correctly
heteroromantic], there is no reason to make his search for romance into
something about just wanting to get laid.
(It is common for SC detractors to accuse us of saying that Scott is
some sort of sex pest, which I have not seen before myself, but I just
want to set the record straight (I will now again try to not bring it up
again, as that is none of our fucking business), and yes, it is
addressed later in the article).
E2: For a very short while it linked on
ssc (sorry I coudln’t help myself). Bonus content somebody going:
‘What are the 14 words I can quote for infinite upvotes? I missed that
meeting’, remember that kid who if you asked somebody to not do
something then started that doing over and over again? Found that kid.
‘Sounds useful.’ Good job, somebody says ‘this is what neo-nazis use to
ID themselves’ and you go, ow im going to use that, love to identify as
a neo-nazi.
No it makes sense in the context of the article, because later it is brought back and shown that the concern is actually about sex (which could have been better foreshadowed). And my bad, I didn't point this out well myself, which is why I edited the 'addressed later' part later after I realized it.
I just wanted to point it out because people have accused SC of not knowing this about Alexander.
E: to be more specific, it is either, like Sandifier says, about sex (aka, women have it easier to get sex), or it is about the sexual hierarchy, where nerdy men are at the bottom and can only get into companionship when a woman decides to date down. (which is bull, and also leads to toxic 'this person is out of your league' conversations).
>> Although both men and women suffer from these stereotypes, men really do have a harder time ~~getting relationships~~ get married, and the experience is not the same.
> Note that ~~“getting relationships”~~ "getting married" becomes the sole standard of oppression. It apparently really does collapse to getting laid. Although a thing that’s probably worth pointing out is that in a heteronormative society in which polyamory is discouraged it’s necessarily true that roughly the same number of men and women have relationships at any given point. Like, the basic claim here is literally mathematically impossible.
Assuming hetronormativity and monogamy, every man must pair up with a woman. There is an equal amount of men and women.
But if it is just about sex, one man can fuck all the women (or one woman can fuck all the women, I don't judge) leaving none left. Chad MacFucksalot has simply satisfied all the women, the poor nerds can't keep up.
It is of course a little bit more complicated than that because people don't always stay in relationships etc, but this is the basic complaint.
E: that is also how you can read Pennies confession that nerdy women also face trouble and arrive at the conclusion that men still have it worse.
>E: that is also how you can read Pennies confession that nerdy women also face trouble and arrive at the conclusion that men still have it worse.
NB. Do read Penny’s account of getting married during the apocalypse in Wired. It’s lovely & heartwarming & funny all at the same time.
He could have written an update any time he wants. He could have added nuance. Esp if he was depressed at the time, this can provide the context/perspective to new readers (who are in that place), provided by a person they look up to.
But nope; 'I stand by it a lot' in the disclaimer, and reducing the font size by a lot. (Annoy people who have reading problems with this simple trick! (Hold control and use your scrollwheel btw)).
But as I said at the top level comment the sexual hierarchy thing also fits, but that is also toxic. (I certainly was extra messed up when I fucked up the relationship with the woman who people told me was out of my league (humblebrag ;) )).
E: He could have also updated the part on 'the one-dimensional model of privilege' any time he wanted. As that isn't how privilege is used (if you do good faith readings of feminism). But to admit that he also has to admit that the issue people had with the other person is that he was talking over a woman who was abused by nerdy men, but that would require deleting a lot of text.
(Argh reddit ate my reply)
Yes, I agree that the pain is real, and resonates with others (including me), but it also was a bit misplaced, but yeah you can't always keep trauma inside.
And tbh, a lot of it was made worse because years ago there was the hight of anti-feminist/feminist clickbait (jezebel was so bad)/bad faith bullshit, and Scott repeats a lot of the anti-feminist/MRA arguments here (he also pulls quite a few nasty tricks, some of the articles he links to don't seem to say what he is suggesting they are saying, he even blames feminism for not talking about how hard it is to date as a nerd and then uses an articles which says that it is hard to date as proof nerds are being called entitled. Even worse, his stick here is 'journalists are getting on the 'Talking about “entitled nerds” is the hot new thing' did he miss that these articles were written in reaction to Elliot Rodgers, The fucking murderer? It is very worrying that nobody even brought this up while 3 out of 4 are about that partially (2 of them are also about the same Arthur Chu article) But I'm sidetracked here). That Scott didn't bring up that Aaronson was reacting to people talking about them being hurt. In fact he even cut the leading part of Aaronsons remark off his quote, which was pretty relevant.
Esp as Aaronson is hurt by people saying 'you lack the feminist language' and he says 'I read Dworkin, and other radicals' (and then the quote begins).
Penny noticed this, reacted to this, and expressed regret that Aaronson started with Dworkin. Because that is weaponized shame. And then Scott ignored that (Aaronson otoh praised Penny) and went back to talking about how all feminism is bad, in a very conspiratorial matter. (Every time I read back 'untitled' it seems to get worse (there are more moments where it is made clear Scott was talking about sex btw).
My problem isn't with Aaronson at all, like it was stupid he made it about himself, but genuine pain, read the wrong feminist books, so he was a bit misinformed, who among us hasn't. We all have to learn that when somebody likes SCUM you probably dealing with a terf/swerf. The problem was the grand unified theory of horrible feminists Scott made about it, and all the weird little unspoken assumptions and rhetorical tricks in that. He had a moment to dial down the heat. He turned it up.
I can't recall Sandifier denying that there aren't any bad parts in feminism btw, it is more a deconstruction of Scotts bad arguments and putting it in context. Aka, there is a reason why Scott turned up the heat, either a malicious NRx promoting plot, or just because he was in that RW part of the culture war at that time. Sandifier points out that Scott is conflating things which aren't the same thing. And personally I didn't find the part on GG that strong, it is only a small part of untitled, and a small part of the whole movement after all, but Scotts article and others certainly did help to provide cover for the rightwing counterculture movement of the NRx/Alt-right/GG etc which helped the whole rise of trump/coup (in small ways of course, before I get misrepresented as saying 'it caused it'). And it is weird Scott picked a gamergate related image, and sure it was a joke. But remember the sixth meditation on superweapons. The whole sexual economics part is also very redpill (no not the jewish conspiracy one, the other one, no not estrogen, the other one, no not the one that wakes up/kills Arnold in total recall, the other one, no not...), and Sandifier is correct in pointing out how weird it is. This kind of redpill thinking also combines with a lot of other far right, or conservative worldviews (which is part of the problem, Rationalists think this isn't a redpill article, but it is). I would say in some moments Sandifier used restraint, she didn't bring up that Scott was using articles which were written in reaction to an incel murderer without pointing that out. So in sort, I think you are wrong to paraphrase Sandifiers complaints as 'this is just another neoreactionary lie'.
Sorry I can't recall Ozy's take.
And sorry this got a bit longer than I wanted, as I got annoyed when rereading parts of untitled again.
Do you think that it is possible to argue that Scott is engaging with feminism or feminists in *good* faith? That he has actually read up on feminist thought, as opposed to misrepresenting journalism by feminists? (Receipts for that claim are given in the blog post).
[TL;DR: I agree but have some nitpicky nuance. He has read up on feminist thought, but he doesn't care about that.]
I think he has read up on some feminist thought, but for some reason he always seemed to interpret it as cover, or of secondary importance, as he always was very worried by the men hurt by pop clickbait feminist gawker era stuff. His meditations on superweapons (deleted on livejournal, you can read the [sixth here](https://web.archive.org/web/20180224100329/https://squid314.livejournal.com/329171.html), and after reading that, as a new drinking game, drink every time he uses this superweapon in 'untitled'), a series on bad rethorical tricks [subtext: used by feminists].
Relevant quote:
> Sometimes I read feminist blogs. A common experience is that by the end of the article I am enraged and want to make a snarky comment, so I re-read the essay to pick out the juiciest quotes to tear apart. I re-read it and I re-read it again and eventually I find that everything it says is both factually true and morally unobjectionable.
This shows he tried to engage on the feminists points, but found nothing to object to directly, so it had to become about the bad faith readings.
Note, if you go read through the archives that this was probably written before his descend into neoreaction, and his decision to start secretly promoting neoreaction. Which we can only prove happened a few years later, according to the email leak, in which he even says how much he hates writing about gender (the roots are there already there, I think as iirc there is an undertone of 'men have to apologize too much for things they don't do' (which he referenced to email as retarding growth)).
So he isn't engaging in good faith, but that to him doesn't matter, because his accusation is that the feminists are in bad faith, which he believes due to various reasons (gawker era clickbait feminism, trauma, obsession with rationality/superweapons, to get rationalist clickbait, etc) while he knows the good faith stuff is out there, he treats all feminism as bad faith because of this.
Bonus: (and counterpoint to my 'he might not have been promoting NRx yet'), [in 2013 he wrote](https://web.archive.org/web/20131229231549/http://squid314.livejournal.com/354385.html) that if Donald Trump and Rebecca Black would fight in a bar the media would destroy Donald trump, and suddenly Old Moldy is brought up (Scott disagrees with moldbug here). Bonus content just for the whole 'media would destroy Trump' thing which is in hindsight funny.
Scott is highly accomplished at technically doing the reading, and taking away fucking bizarre interpretations. Source: every book review he's ever posted.
Certainly, as I said, nitpicky.
And even then there is some doubt, he could have just written a review because he has written the wikipedia blurb or something. (That episode was funny).
[For context for any new readers, Scott wrote a book review, and the author of the book accused him of not having read it, and the author was right].
I remember actually reading that comment exchange, but for the life of me I can't find it. Do you have a link?
EDIT: [Found it](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/gc27k5/author_reacts_to_ssc_book_review/), it's a bit more complicated than “Scott wrote a book review without reading the book”, but the larger point of “Scott doesn't understand what he reads” still stands.
I’m pretty sure "Untitled" was the point at which I quit thinking that Scott was verbose but sometimes interesting & started looking at his writing with a far more suspicious eye.
> him and Aaronson and everyone who agreed with them are just reactionary cranks then I would be back to being alone and probably crazy in thinking I don't deserve to be hated.
so the scotts are the only people who don't think men should be hated just for being men?
Did you ever seek out more compassionate feminist figures at that time, or even now? Because there was a whole fucking industry of neoreactionaries bandying about every "crazy" feminist they could find and treating them as representative of the whole. I certainly fell victim to that line of thinking for a time, but I found it just wasn't true when I removed myself from that media bubble, and found plenty of feminists who'd speak up for the ways men are harmed by systemic issues and condemn that sort of hateallmen attitude.
I notice you're very careful to qualify your statements as being "as far as you were aware" or "most feminists a young man might be exposed to". The problem is, that's very much not a true representation of feminists online.
That's not to say a young man would be wrong to be hurt by people talking about male genocide or the like, but that that hurt was very much a manufactured product to be sold to young men, rather than something that naturally happened due to its prominence in feminist circles, and that hurt was manufactured to detract from feminist complaints (see Gamergate). That's not to say all of that hurt is invalid, but treating that hurt as a product of feminist thinking, when it was in reality mostly fringe figures being amplified by right wing media, is ultimately misguided.
I did read the things you linked in your original comments prior to sending my response.
I'll kindly ask you not to imply I'm waving away trans concerns with this sort of thing. I mentioned what I did because you used very specific qualifiers in both your original post, which I specifically noted in my reply to you.
Would it make you feel better if I edited my response to say "the vast majority of that hurt". I'm not saying that none of this hurt is valid. I'm saying that Gamergate and other right wing movements manufactured that outrage in spades, and these views you're decrying, while they exist, are far from representative of most feminists online. To bring it back to your original statement, if "most feminists that young men are exposed to online" are of this toxic sort you decry, it is because right-wing media gave them a platform of prominence. You cannot separate the two.
Again, this isn't to say the toxic views were made up by right-wing media. They exist (mostly in TERF circles these days, I'll say). But you can't hold them up as being representative of feminism as a whole. Many feminists also decry that sort of toxicity, but they don't receive the outrage platform of the right, so "young men online" are exposed to a very warped and slanted view of feminism. It'd be like saying "Feminism has a TERF problem that they need to address" when TERFs aren't anything but a small minority of of people calling themselves feminist, and they are routinely called out and rejected by feminism at large. Yes, TERFs are a problem (as is the toxic sort of feminism you decry), but they're not representative of feminism as a whole.
It seems odd to blame feminism for this IMHO. Maybe because I grew up in a place where feminism was considered a bad thing. And now live in a place where most women I know still hesitate to ID as feminist. But the behavior you're talking about is endemic in both these places.
It's probably why it's so hard to get out of feminist places. That said, I think feminist places are much less accepting of this behavior than they were 10 years ago, and much less accepting than the general culture. So if you're like me, and bigender, I definitely feel quite comfortable in feminist spaces.
mate, a woman stating off-handedly “hey, hitting on a woman in a lift at a con hotel in a one-to-one situation is highly uncomfortable, maybe don't do that” caused **the** downfall of the whole organized atheist / skeptic movement.
that is the level of misogyny we're living with.
Scott used to *date* a feminist who was talking publicly *years ago* about how patriarchy hurts men and feminism has flaws and can hurt people (yes-that-Ozy).
You don't even have to leave the rationalsphere! All you have to do is go looking rather than nutpicking on social media.
Okay, this is fucking ridiculous. The laurie penny piece scott was replying to was incredibly compassionate and kind, and reached out for shared empathy, and scott replied by taking a massive shit all over it. Speaking as an anxious guy who has had trouble with dates in the past, *untitled* ws the very anithesis of compassionate, because scott made it very clear that he cares about people like me, but noone else. It was the most bad faith hit-job piece of crap i;ve ever read, and you should feel disgusted for liking it.
I knew it, I fucking called it holy shit.
I was writing this long earnest post that basically boiled down to “feminism hurting straight cis men may or may not be true, and maybe feminism should reflect on that, but in my experience every time I tried to engage in an honest civil debate with an anti-SJW rationalist, I've been met with dishonesty, manipulative rhetoric, toxicity, and bad faith, so I learned not to trust men complaining about feminism”, and guess what motherfucker?
On a whim I decided to check your posting history, and almost every post you made, with very few exceptions, is you pretending to be a leftist concern-trolling about feminism being bad for straight cis men.
So yeah, post hog, no earnest civil debate for you, shithead.
For the record, I think feminists made a huge tactical error in not focusing on how gender stereotypes affect men negatively too. One could write a long form post about how the need to always be tough prevents men from dealing with their emotions effectively, resulting in depression, substance abuse, and other social ills.
But unfortunately the general area is full of bad faith takes, which makes it very hard to talk about without the smooth brains who pop up to blame all their issues on women having rights.
Feminist writing is full of "actually, the patriarchy hurts men too" takes. Which frankly displays more generosity of spirit than Scott & his ilk have ever offered in return.
Feminists did spend a ton of time doing exactly that though? Like, "patriarchy hurts men too" was practically a meme throughout Gamergate, as feminists desperately tried to correct the "evil manhater" smear that the right wing was spewing nonstop.
The X tears meme specifically references right wing chuds getting upset that a woman dared to point out sexism in video games or star in a superhero movie or otherwise throwing a fit about any sort of pushback on the status quo. There is no male tears slogan without toxic expressions of masculinity as a direct reaction against milquetoast gains for women in areas like video games or nerd culture. It's a way of neutralizing anger and hate, not a condemnation of male emotion in general. This is exactly how the meme works with liberal tears, feminist tears, conservative tears, and every single other group that has ever gotten upset over something. To try to paint it as some smear against men crying in general is so disingenuous that I would throw a pen at you if you were in my office right now.
(to expand on this, even, the phrase "white tears" literally predates male tears. Are you going to argue that phrase was also born to shame white people who cry?)
>feminists really were that deeply aware of patriarchal gender roles and their impact on men
Oh for fuck's sake. Feminists and feminist allies have been publishing on this topic for half a century. The men who largely started the Men's Liberation movement, Jack Sawyer and Joseph Pleck, published together with prominent feminists of the time back in the 70s. Pleck and Sawyer published literally one of the first anthologies dealing with men's issues *Men and Masculinity* back in 1974 with contributions from Gloria Steinem. Feminists have been aware of patriarchal gender roles and their impact on men (and supportive of combating them, and actively working for the causes you claim to care about!) for literally longer than you've been alive, I'd be willing to bet. Christ, read some stuff from actual feminists and the OG men's lib guys and quit buying into the outrage industry's warped perception of feminism or your own warped perception.
If you want to point me to where I said your pain wasn't real, that's it's made up, and you deserve it, be my guest. I've repeatedly *repeatedly* said that there are valid reasons to be hurt. All you're doing here is carrying water for reactionaries and repeating their talking points with absolutely zero critical thought behind it at all. (i.e. your post about male tears and about how "feminists just don't know about how the patriarchy impacts men"). It's so blisteringly ignorant. Your pain is real, but it doesn't give you an excuse to spread ignorance or carry water for reactionaries.
So, again I say, fucking read a book. Learn about the men's liberation movement if nothing else. Go look up Michael Messner, who is an actual men's studies scholar who has been writing on the topic for literal decades, and see what he has to say. But don't act like your hurt, as valid as it may be, excuses ignorance or shoddy thinking
Oh piss the fuck off, I literally recommended *multiple* men's studies scholars. Wallow in your damned ignorance. Don't do anything that could actually position yourself to be listened to. Don't learn a single damn thing about topics you do nothing but talk about. Don't learn about the people who actually fucking agree with you. Don't find out that there are [actually feminists out there arguing for the same damn shit you are](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/30/feminists-treat-men-badly-its-bad-for-feminism/). Just wallow in your helpless ignorance until you die while others do the damn work you refuse to do.
hey um. you sound like you're projecting a whole fuckton of personal trauma onto random fucking strangers online, and you're really blinkered to the point where you're not thinking straight about what people are actually saying to you. there are indeed serious conversations to have, but you, in particular, are absolutely not equipped to be having this discussion on feminist practice, especially not as an outsider to the movement who'd explicitly been abused (I'm assuming) by a card carrying member.
you're too biased is what I'm saying. go to therapy, and I'm not saying this as a put-down. I'm concerned.
like, not to overshare, but I just recently dealt with a man who had a fuckton of trauma, and he lashed out at me and my mother when we told him he needed help to resolve all this aggression and violence. and... he assaulted us. so that's... why I'm concerned. you're already too angry at this broad nebulous group of people, for reasons that you've already admitted are personal, not political. it's not the job of every feminist online to satisfy your personal need for justice and closure. I'm sorry you were hurt. please get help.
(If I'm taking this shit way too seriously, forgive me. it's like 11 and - like I said before - I got my face kicked in by a dude because my mom told him to go to therapy, so, I might be feeling a bit antsy. a bit paranoid, yanno? whatever)
Yeah, the fact that you see "male tears" and immediately reject how the term in used, how similar terms are used, and the reasons they're used in the first place to try and shore up your worldview. The fact that you repeat right wing talking points in a slightly more polite fashion showing your complete ignorance of not only feminist thought and history but also related men's liberation theory and history. It definitely shows me you're not functioning with any ideological blinders on whatsoever.
For fuck's sake, read a book and *learn* something about the causes you claim to care about. I even recommended something. Go and learn
Right, in the modern era they’ve done a lot more of that. I think they would’ve been even more successful if they’d done more of that earlier. In a few decades I think we’ll all be very grateful that they’ve been doing that since GG happened, since cultural change is a slow process.
It’s a fairly minor comment on my part, to be clear.
I did not phrase that correctly; I should have said “earlier” in the above statement. You’re correct that feminists are now currently focusing on that, and I think that it’s both tactically and morally wise; I just wish they would’ve focused on it earlier (if they did and I missed that, my apologies).
But in a few decades, because cultural change is slow, we will be very thankful that they did focus on it now.
No group should ever have the number of reactionaries persuaded as their success metric; most of them are hopeless, and groups shouldn’t be judged for failing to do the impossible. The goal should always be to persuade the persuadable.
When I first heard the arguments from feminists about how feminism was good for men, my reaction was “this is a brilliant point, I wish they’d been saying this earlier, it might convince more men”. If that’s more an issue of who I was listening to rather than what was being said, I’ll cop up to that. But I mostly started hearing that around the time of GG or so.
I was attracted to feminism in the first place precisely because it was the only ideology that recognized that men are people, and aren't sex-obsessed animals or pawns in the sexual marketplace red-pillers and other scum paint us to be. So no, I strongly disagree, I think feminism is doing the best job it can at focusing on men's issues, given the constraints and limitations it has to work within.
Boggles the mind that somebody would be so much distressed (disturbed?) by such issues, to even consider themselves somehow liable of political persecution.
Mhh, yes it is, quite indeed.
I'm able to do both things with just one account, and I don't see in which shape or form "your brain" would relax differently because your username is different (in fact "having to switch" sounds like an extra chore).
So, I can only explain that in terms of "something to do with the external world".
I mean, I have various alt reddit accounts that I use to post about different things -- I don't think it's that weird to want to keep those things separate -- but if I had an alt account purely devoted to concern trolling about feminism, I think that would certainly say something about me.
Sure, but then again, this is about your own privacy, not "handiness" or "relax".
I can understand why not everybody is fine with horniness on main, or whatever other special situation there might be within one's country or closed acquittances.
But the same thing applied to "warrior accounts" (and not of the social justice kind), sounds like you are afraid your opinions might be too edgy/extreme/*misunderstandable* to risk your peers finding them out. And I don't think he lives in china or russia, so that narrows down our scenarios....
Not only that, the account's only contributions to SneerClub is concern trolling about feminism and nothing else, which means it's way more likely that he's a reactionary doing “how do you do, fellow progressives?”. I'm just being Bayesian here lol.
Mhh, I don't know, the concern trolling accusation seems always a very slippery slope to me.
I mean, I completely understand the dire situation mods of certain *hot* subreddits are in, but I have literally just been unbanned here last week, because once upon a time in a thread I commented thrice positively for some Yang primary point (which I didn't even like much myself tbh).
I tend to put my bar for dishonesty a bit higher, say logical incoherence, or that they continue to repeat the same bullshit over and over again, even though it was previously implicitly accepted.
...
Besides, SSC straight away locked down their discussion thread on the article, so I mean.. Are you really a troll when you actually don't have a better place to reason on the matter? It's ironic that the people that will entertain everything and the kitchen sink "out of purely academical interest", have forsaken what should be an atomic bomb on their very behaviours.
I was the original person who said "concern trolling" and I'll admit I doubt this person is actually intentionally concern trolling in the purest sense tbh. But I meant it more in the sense of, they are making a point of going around raising Very Reasonable Objections to the feminist critique of Scott's writing while going "but I'm not defending him! but doesn't he make some good points we should address tho" which, even if it is true it's just... not what we're talking about right now
I mean, if you see the point of the sub just as a circlejerk (which is also more or less the same kind of snark my "you got banned" message once suggested) of course it's trolling the "bandwagon".
But it cannot be concern trolling if you are just trying to reason... even if you are coming from a thousand miles away (though it is if you are poking people left and right, just to provoke)
And on the other hand, I just noticed today that u/ParkerPipe is no more, and they deleted all content here and elsewhere. -.-
i haven't seen as much of the "all men are trash" stuff, mostly from terfs, and then the people hounding and calling them out the most are trans people in places like /r/GenderCynical, themselves almost always feminists. different circles i guess.
even then though, i didn't get the impression the author was making much of a comment on that really, mostly just pointing out that that wasn't the time or place for Scott Aaronson to drop that and that Scott Alexander was dishonestly framing everything
I don’t think the author is positing at all that men don’t have feelings. The assertion is that bad feelings do not oppression make and certainly when someone is expressing literal assaults that happened to them it’s almost always unhelpful to say “I am sad sometimes too” as if feelings are all that matter.
I am sure you are correct that there are cruel people on Twitter who direct their cruelty towards men. But there are people being cruel on Twitter for *just about everything*.
It picks apart two SSC posts, explaining both their individual flaws and how the are a part of a larger pattern where Scott Alexander uses excessive wordiness to make it hard to concisely call him out in his BS.
I have to confess, I’ve read the entire SSC blog, and considered it very thoughtful and interesting even though I often disagreed with it. I never thought the same about Yud or NRx types, but SSC resonated a ton with me. I liked the outgroup essay too. Reading The Beigeness revealed some real problems that I’m ashamed to have missed on my own. Gotta go update my priors about the probability that I’m a gullible rube.
I think a big part of the problem of rationalism, and a source of its appeal to people like me, is its promise that if you are one of the Very Very Smart people, you can apply about one day of thought to any given topic and have as or more valid an understanding of it as any given expert in that topic. It sucked me in to some extent for a long time; its a big carrot. But by accepting that premise, that this particular carrot exists and is gettable, a reader gives SSC and other gurus of rationalism license to back big, sweeping, generalist conclusions (like outgroup) with extremely superficial treatments of examples (i.e. conflating colonialism, sectarianism, and ethnic conflicts between neighbors, proving “proximity” matters and just adding “… and small differences” for free). When somebody writes as an Expert, something that superficial raises red flags. But after you accept an epistemology that undermines expertise to such a huge extent, a thorough command of the details seems relatively unimportant. Whoops.
Anyway. Thanks for helping me see it. I need to do two things now: find better generalist thinker content to read, and find out how to become a better critical reader so I don’t get suckered like this again.
As a note, for anyone coming to this essay who is new to Sneerclub: hi, I’m the one who wrote the Twitter thread about my abuse at the hands of LW. Here’s my Tumblr post with all of my threads from 2018 for more detail.
Gotta say I enjoy reading this as much as Sandifer clearly hated writing it.
This is a very good essay.
This is.. good. I’m also surprised the rationality fanboys haven’t completely jumped all over it already (as they do any criticism of Scott) - couldn’t really find it shared elsewhere on twitter or reddit
This is a big article, and I wanted to make some brief tl;dr for the lazy, but seriously it’s a masterpiece smooth as silk. I wish I had half the analysis capabilities of Sandifer.
And I’m left with horror inside.
It’s a cakewalk to dismiss blatant lies like those by PragerUrine & friends, and to an extent even to distance yourself as much as possible from those “flood the zone with shit” outlets where somehow we have always been at war with Eastasia. But how can you call out such thinly permeating gaslighting without a 12K words essay?
Yes, there is the gish gallop of completely arbitrary and more wrong than “not even wrong” crap. And yes, there is also everybody’s favourite motte and bailey over and over again. But even with fractally wrong pieces like the one directly on feminism (where the opposition gets so ridiculous that “getting
relationshipsto dick” is mathematically absurd on top of logically and ethically wrong) there’s no smoking gun.It’s not really facts per se that are being sold to the audience, but more like a “generic narrative” (world wiew? philosophy¿¿). And even if all the proofs and reasoning beneath were to be disproven wholly, some fucking how absence of evidence still ain’t evidence of absence, amirite?
Should the too-disingenous-to-be-honest rhetoric be underlined? Should the “atmosphere” getting pushed out be criticized?
… Or maybe should the whole thing just be discarded altogether, as in “look at how I’m gonna tell you more insightful things in just three sentences”?
EDIT: for example, when discussing tolerance, Popper could be brought up (in fact, I don’t even know how you can pretend to “make high IQ arguments” without mentioning that here). Or when the topic is “nerd oppression”, the most obvious reality of “jock mentality and toxic masculinity models aren’t fucking feminism” could try to hijack the ride of soon-to-be-incels from their destination into circlejerking land.
Okay, having read “Untitled” before, I had absolutely no idea that Scott Aaronson was responding to a woman sharing her story of being sexually assaulted. That completely ruins the “innocent nerd being shamed by mean feminazis” narrative that Siskind peddles, and honestly that alone is a major mark against his credibility.
this is excellent.
& fwiw, IMHO, partly since u/dgerard & swim often get this wrt cryptocurrency & so I’ve started tracking the life of this theme a bit, the “you’re just doing it for profit” line is pretty straightforward (((hate))), regardless of whether there are any (((actual outgroup members))) involved. it’s funnier when it comes from people whose profits dwarf those of the people who are being attacked (eg in crypto), but i think it functions the same regardless.
I have nothing insightful to say here. I will take a pause from sneering to say that this is very good and very sad.
(deleted a comment here where I was arguing against scott, but it was actually against something which was not being said, my bad).
E1: Ontopic btw, small point but still, Sandifer transforms ‘asking people on a date’ into ‘finding someone to have sex with’ which is totally unfair. Scott identifies as asexual [more correctly heteroromantic], there is no reason to make his search for romance into something about just wanting to get laid.
(It is common for SC detractors to accuse us of saying that Scott is some sort of sex pest, which I have not seen before myself, but I just want to set the record straight (I will now again try to not bring it up again, as that is none of our fucking business), and yes, it is addressed later in the article).
E2: For a very short while it linked on ssc (sorry I coudln’t help myself). Bonus content somebody going: ‘What are the 14 words I can quote for infinite upvotes? I missed that meeting’, remember that kid who if you asked somebody to not do something then started that doing over and over again? Found that kid. ‘Sounds useful.’ Good job, somebody says ‘this is what neo-nazis use to ID themselves’ and you go, ow im going to use that, love to identify as a neo-nazi.
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Tldr?
Thanks for that article. I’ve been iffy on ssc for a bit, primarily bc of the misogyny, and today I cancelled my subscription. So - useful article.