Man, the NY Times thing must have messed with his head - SSC-era-Scott would have written a similar article but would have at least tried to look unbiased with the data selection.

Evidence fit to consider:

1. A bunch of cherry-picked polls and graphs and surveys on policy positions and voting patterns that can be interpreted to mean whatever you want.

Evidence that must be ignored:

1. The fact that the current president is a milquetoast centrist and the last president was a lunatic.
2. The fact that the current president’s voters are kinda ambivalent on his performance while the last president’s voters worship him as their god-emperor.
3. The fact that the last president tried to foment a coup after losing an election and anyone in his party who criticized it has been forced to beg forgiveness.
4. Any material examples of government action, like the Supreme Court shenanigans or the state-level attacks on the first amendment and LGBT rights we’ve seen in the past couple years (that have no equivalent on the left).
5. Literally fucking anything other than cherry-picked polls and graphs and surveys.

EDIT; credit to sleepcrime for pointing out this in an SSC comment;

This point seems kind of obvious, and it makes me sad; an enormous amount of Scott’s scrutiny and skepticism is reserved for DW-Nominate, which, for all its failures in capturing a complex phenomenon, nevertheless represents the serious efforts of the best scientists in the field. Weighting it less (and not engaging with the large body of political science lit that attempts to answer this question) than a poll of tumblr users seems very much like an isolated demand for rigor.

No points for guessing which side DW-Nominate found is more extreme.

I’ve been reading Scott on and off for a while now, and I hoped the recentish decline in his political analysis is fallout from the NYT thing - he clearly had a massive overreaction that he’s never recovered from, in an unusually egotistical approach to what is effectively a minor infraction, if we’re being r*tionalist (though when it comes to AI, speech and privacy they are the exact opposite of cold rationality). But it’s sadly not. It was clear in 2014-2016 that Scott had a passionate hatred for SJW activists that he at least sort of realized was creating a blind spot for political and social issues, but it’s gone completely off the rails recently.

I think the issue is that Scott lives in, and is surrounded by, the most left wing environment and people in the United States, and is unusually either unaware of it or unable to incorporate that into his analysis. If you live in California, an effectively one party state, of course you’re going to think Democrats have a lot more power and are a lot more extreme than they actually are. If I lived in Alabama I’d probably think the same for Republicans. But unless you never leave your bubble or read the news, it’s hard to externalize this nationwide (or, worse yet, worldwide).

I know the rat community hates credentialism but this is SneerClub - I have multiple degrees in political science, international relations and public affairs, from highly prestigious universities (including an Ivy), and I’ve done TA work from time to time, and I can say with some confidence that this level of analysis would barely pass a freshman class.

His methodology is beyond laughable (thirty republicans on tumblr?! let me rephrase - thirty non-randomly selected non-representative participants in an anonymous online survey is nothing but red flags), the analysis is shallow to the point of inanity, and it’s clear that the questions were selected to provide the results he wanted, not because they’re the right questions to ask.

Why would it matter which party is more extreme compared to 1900? Is this something people are actually arguing about? How Trump and Biden compare to William Jennings Bryan or McKinley in terms of policy? This question ridiculously privileges the conservative option because the conservatives are supposed to ‘move’ less, by definition of the word. Completely irrelevant non-sequitur without some insane qualifiers, and even then I’d see no value beyond a throwaway 538 analysis Nate Silver does for fun.

Looking purely at policy ignores message and rhetoric (but then again, this seems to me more and more a feature of Scott’s thinking - as long as someone isn’t actively herding you into gas chambers, it’s all an intellectual policy debate, right?). Looking at voting records alone ignores which party is willing to play scorched earth more, or break with precedent, or establish negative precedents. Socio-political decay does not happen over night and is predicated by a number of seemingly small, innocuous, limited moves - one fruit vendor sets himself on fire in Tunisia and five years later Russia and Iran are militarily intervening in Syria against an Islamic expansionist regime. There’s tons of scholarship on extremism and the only thing it truly agrees on is that it’s impossible to predict with any certainty; the best we can get are risk factors and warning signs.

Not to mention that there is a massive difference between party voters, party supporters, party politicians and party leadership - a reasonable person can debate whether the average conservative leaning voter moves more to the right than her counterpart did to the left; they can debate whether the inverse holds true for consistent and strong supporters; and maybe, maybe even for lower-level politicians (you could argue AOC is equally extreme in the opposite direction to someone like MTG. I think that’s wrong but I can recognize it as an argument a not-insane person could make).

But to look at the past two years and both sides party leadership is utterly inane. One party’s supporters attempted a coup. Their politicians hemmed and hawed until the leadership backed it, and now they’re in lockstep. One party is actively defending a group of violent anti-democracy extremists and the other isn’t. One party built a literal cult of personality around their leader and the other can barely stand their elected President.

I’m honestly at the point where I think this is the straw that broke the camel’s back: there’s nothing to be gained, morally or intellectually, from engaging with Moldbug-types - their thinking is, to put it bluntly, moronic. If Scott has thrown his lot with enlightened centrists (that somehow always seems to mean “i criticize the left and defend the right equally”), for the same type of intellectually vacuous and emotion-based reasons of ‘i prefer this group that seems to prefer the tribe i most self-associate with’ (and for Scott that’s clearly still ‘awkward white males with poor dating success’), then I see no reason to engage with him any further.

He’s not in any relevant position of power, he’s not a world-renowned expert, he’s not pushing the discipline he barely knows about in an exciting new direction - just a guy writing down some musings fairly eloquently. At some point, you realize the musings are pretty shallow.

good on him for featuring someone else’s comment that is more insightful than the rest of his post combined

Commenter Alex Z mentions that in the first ten years of this period, the Democrats and Republicans were both moving left at about the same trajectory. Around 2004, the Democrats keep along the same course, but the Republicans suddenly stop, and sometimes make a tentative move rightward. From the point of a 1990s Democrat who expected both parties to keep moving left at the same rate forever, it must look like Republicans have suddenly and unilaterally defected from this happy equilibrium. Maybe this is behind some of the Democrats’ intuition that it’s the Republicans who are getting extremier faster.

Like this immediately defeats the whole point of the meme, because Democrats get more progressive, but so do Republicans, because Democrats only get more progressive as a result of ordinary people getting more progressive, and as Scott mentions later, Median Voter Theory suggests that you need to move with the voters in order to keep winning elections.

So if you were to actually keep standing in the middle without moving the whole time, you actually end up further right than the Republicans!

(except, also, like Alex Z mentioned, the Republicans are actually attempting to go backwards)

Its just interesting how the things that the Democrats are supposedly going ‘too far’ on are issues being debated right now, such as the existence of trans people.

None of these centrist ‘classical liberal’ fucks ever says that the democrats went too far when they supported gay marriage, or when they opposed segregation, despite these being the biggest changes that (in Scott’s argument) support the idea that the Democrats get more extreme over time.

Shut the fuck up Elon, in 50 years you’ll be 100% in alignment with the Democrat’s current platform and instead be complaining about treegenders or fuel rationing or state-mandated veganism or some shit

Conclusion: Obviously your party is normal and the other one has gone completely off the rails. I’m being disgustingly “both-sides-ist” by even pretending there could be any possible equivalence. When the other party seizes power in an undemocratic coup, it will be the fault of cowards like me who refuse to call out how one party is infinitely worse than the other on this axis.

Getting a head start on the counterprograming marathon of false equivalences that starts tomorrow, I see.

Even while being bad faith and narrowing the argument to electoral policies and vote patterns, he has to admit that supporting a coup became mainstream policy for one of the parties, then throws up his hands at the end anyway. What a performance.

I’m less wise, so I’ve been trying to look into this question. My conclusion is: man, people really have strong emotions on this.

First part should explain why you got that conclusion.

(And yes he knows exactly what he is doing here, just setting himself up as the wise neutral stoic greytriber, even if we know he is more NRx)

Among Republicans, 79% said they would press a magic button that replaced current policies/institutions/norms with those of 1990; among Democrats, only 33% would.

You would think a psychiatrist would understand that the phrasing of a question can affect the answers. The chances that 79% of Republicans want a Democratic Congress are… slim.

The corresponding topic on the SSC subreddit is locked which means we have more freespeech than they do.

Scott has a ludicrous bad faith argument here. People aren’t saying republicans are more extreme because their voting patterns have become more extreme. It’s because of nonsense like supporting violent coups and refusing to acknowledge global pandemics.

These things wouldn’t show up in the data, at least not in aggregate over a long period of time, because congress doesn’t try to pass a statistically significant number of bills on those subjects.

If your political party has policies on monetary rules and the environment within a median voter theory standard deviation, but supports seizing power by force of arms, they are the more extreme party. He doesn’t even attempt to address why that isn’t the problem

who linked this post in a rationalist chud space and attracted these idiot commenters, show yourselves

I think this is the basic point Wright and Musk are trying to make, and it’s a good one.

I don’t know anything about Wright but Musk’s point is quite obviously “haha I can make a lot of people mad with this and it will be fun for me” and pretending it’s anything other than that is completely fucking idiotic

Surprised he surveyed Tumblr instead of querying the Omniscient GPT-3

Jesus, since joining this sub this is the first rationalist piece I’ve actually taken a long look at. How does anyone take these guys seriously?

The second comment is about xx and xy chromosomes.

Edit- a little further down is a comment about how Jan 6 was a mass trespass and even that is arguable because “public building”

One party supported a literal coup instead of peacefully ceding power in the last Presidential election. One party is about to turn women into birthing vessels by confusing insemination with consent to motherhood. But let’s worry about too many pronouns or genders or “birthing people” being a phrase instead because thinking is hard and red party make strong ooga ooga noises.

It doesn’t matter who’s more extreme, it matters who’s right and who’s wrong. In this case right wing extremists are of course wrong but extremism is not inherently wrong. Political extremism has often been a vehicle for progress throughout history and essentially all great historical figures in the realm of government and politics either were extremists or were labeled as such.

The phrase “who are the extremists?” implies one of the two parties isn’t extreme. Talk about a loaded statement. The framework of this post isn’t “who is the bad guy and who is the good guy?,” it’s whether whether the right has gone righter than the left has gone left or vice versa.

It’s pretty much a concrete fact that when one party begins to radicalize, it’s opposing party must also begin to radicalize.

Acting like the Democratic Party has not become more aggressive and radical over the last 5 years in response to the Republican Party would be a dubious statement at best fam

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