I used to watch debates a lot, and sometimes a debate would come along where both speakers were so good that I was constantly agreeing with the last person who spoke. It was an exhilarating experience, constantly being enlightened by perspectives I hadn't thought of at all. Scott manages to create that experience in a one-man article; by showing arguments and counter-arguments that are both convincing.
Small-side note: This is just a personal preferences but I don't like this unnecessary number inflation in "Now that Scott has walked us through one million examples". He showed 14 examples. You could've used many, a plethora, etc. or even just 14 and gotten the same point across with the added benefit of being accurate.
That's fair. I wrote a million because I'd been wading through these examples forever and I need a word to humorously describe a very large number, and couldn't think of a better one.
I think his book reviews are otherworldly and every post is a book/dissertation topic waiting to be written. This is in a world where academics/ writers have maybe 3-10 major ideas in their entire career, if they're really lucky. My favorites is I'll Tolerate Anybody But the Outgroup, where he pulls the reader along with his reasoning through the problem, applying his thinking in almost real time, and then ends by turning his reasoning back onto himself. It's sublime.
Before I start, I want to be clear: I strongly disagree with Scott's race science stuff and think that that's the worst topic that he consistently writes about. I also disagree with his anti-woke/anti-feminist stuff for the most part.
About a quarter of the way through the first post and
> Siskind clearly thinks that they do, using them as the basis for his oft-cited taxonomy of the red tribe, the blue tribe, and the obviously superior tribe to which he and his readers belong, the grey tribe.
From the actual article Elizabeth is talking about, I can tolerate anything except the outgroup,
> This essay is bad and I should feel bad.
> I should feel bad because I made exactly the mistake I am trying to warn everyone else about, and it wasn’t until I was almost done that I noticed.
> How virtuous, how noble I must be! Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that silly Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing my own tribe and striving to make it better.
> Yeah. Once I’ve written a ten thousand word essay savagely attacking the Blue Tribe, either I’m a very special person or they’re my outgroup. And I’m not that special.
> Just as you can pull a fast one and look humbly self-critical if you make your audience assume there’s just one American culture, so maybe you can trick people by assuming there’s only one Blue Tribe.
> I’m pretty sure I’m not Red, but I did talk about the Grey Tribe above, and I show all the risk factors for being one of them. That means that, although my critique of the Blue Tribe may be right or wrong, in terms of motivation it comes from the same place as a Red Tribe member talking about how much they hate al-Qaeda or a Blue Tribe member talking about how much they hate ignorant bigots. And when I boast of being able to tolerate Christians and Southerners whom the Blue Tribe is mean to, I’m not being tolerant at all, just noticing people so far away from me they wouldn’t make a good outgroup anyway.
So, maybe the rest of the article has better points, but this is a HUGE reading comprehension error. Scott explicitly says that the Grey Tribe is not better, and that identifying with the Grey Tribe at all is a huge mistake. (edit: after reading the whole article, she completely chooses not to acknowledge the part where he criticizes himself. Incredibly disingenuous—either she actually lacks reading comprehension, which I doubt because this is a generally well-written article, or she is choosing to paint him in as bad a light as possible, in which case I just don't trust her.)
A little further down, I take issue lumping Yarvin in with Scott, because Yarvin actually consorts with Thiel and Vance and all the would-be destroyers of the American Experiment, whereas Scott is literally just an edgy milquetoast liberal (he endorsed Warren for god's sake). I think she's doing the sort of outgrouping Scott is warning against, which is another bit of irony.
> This sounds extreme. That’s because it is. Scott Siskind provided intellectual legitimacy to a movement that led directly to a fucking fascist coup.
Okay, well, I'll stop reading this here. I have thoughts on "platforming" (namely that "deplatforming" does not work and is the equivalent of ignoring bullies), and that avoiding arguing against NRX stuff doesn't give you the moral high ground, but I'll read the other article now.
> Alexander’s writing is dangerously credulous about far right ideas. One need not know more than that.
Again, this is what I'm talking about. You can't just ignore all of the ideas you don't like in hopes that they'll go away, and you can't blame people who talk with the far-right for refusing to simply ostracize them and let them stew within their own echo chambers.
> Alexander admits that he does not write carefully.
Okay, well, I guess this is another hit piece. I'm not incredibly thrilled by reading two pieces from people who are very clearly trying to convince me that Scott is the worst.
> At this point I treat Scott Alexander’s writing as an infohazzard. Unless you are willing to check his facts and citations, it is probably inadvisable to read his material, as it is constructed to build a compelling narrative.
> Unless and until Scott Alexander commits to adopting a robust editorial process where blatant errors that are reported to him are corrected promptly, his work should be read as fiction “based on a real story, sorta”.
…should this not be the case for all bloggers? Blogs by definition are not fact-checked, don't have editors, and haven't come out of writers' rooms in major newspapers. You should be factchecking anything you read if you're sufficiently credulous, right?
> So very many of them say “If the lure of making money as a programmer/entrepreneur hadn’t called to me, I’d’ve studied Physics!” Because Physics is the Apex Smart Degree. What they don’t admit is that they went into programming because it was easier than engineering and the credits transferred. The people who do well in physics programs have an entirely different variety of clinical obsession / curiousity than those who go into programming. Or those who get decent engineering degrees and go into engineering.
I studied Physics lol it is certainly not the Apex Smart Degree and I have no idea what this guy is talking about. Weird STEM supremacy in here but ok
> Alexander can be very smart. His essay Meditations on Moloch remains a marvel I recommend to anyone. His two essays on NRx are necessary reading if one wants to understand the movement. And my fascination with his Niceness, Community, and Civilization essay is not dulled by his failings at the values it describes but rather sharpened by the cautionary example of how thinking his principles protected him from bad actors failed, may even have made him dangerously overconfident.
> But he is also very stupid. No, he cannot tune out the garbage.
> This presents a problem, because someone has to debunk false and evil ideas and present the critiques to a candid world. This post is among my attempts to do that work. I have a sober sense of how that is difficult and important.
> Alexander, for all his genuine wit at his best, is just far too intellectually reckless to be trusted with the delicacy of sifting through bad ideas. He demonstrates us how garbage sources are bad for you even if you go in knowing they are garbage. His wit is a handicap. It makes him overconfident. It presents an illusion that he is a rigorous thinker.
> Beware.
I think this is probably the most convincing section of the second article, and the most convincing section of everything you've posted, because it was the most fair. I don't think I'm going to go so far as to condemn Scott entirely (he notably did endorse Harris https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein), but he does have a problem with "tuning out garbage" and his decision to stay close to NRX people on the basis of "I consistently but rarely get nuggets of interesting information from them" does seem stupid—even from his own Bayesian lens, he should understand that he's vastly increasing the probability that he accidentally imbibes something stupid.
Anyway, this ended up longer than I'd wanted it to be. I guess I'll just say that your descriptor of
> mediocre hobbyist writer
almost turned me off from reading your comment entirely. *I'M* a mediocre hobbyist writer. The two other sources you cite recognize Scott as an excellent hobbyist writer, and are complaining mostly about his ideas, which is fair. I appreciate you bringing this to my attention though!
the problem is his lack of respect for the facts! I don’t know why this escaped your notice.
“The list of groups here contains a mixture of ethnic groups living in the same geographic area (Hutus/Tutsis, Yugoslavian groups, and to an extent the Nazis and the Jews), an example of sectarian conflict (Ireland) and two situations in which an indigenous population and a colonial population are in conflict. All of these are treated as basically the same thing. Perhaps an argument could be made for why this is true, but crucially, Siskind hasn’t made it. Instead he’s relied on the very slow tick of his rhetorical engine, essentially warranting all of this on the fact that he said two wrong things first.”
“And now it’s getting deployed casually to the list of conflicts in the previous section when, to make a very obvious statement, the differences between indigenous black people in South Africa and the colonial occupiers who engaged in a decades-long project of politically disenfranchising them are quite fucking large actually.”
bluntly speaking: he’s bullshitting! he doesn’t know history, doesn’t have a conception of it beyond the narratives he likes to superimpose on it. and that you didn’t pick up on this makes him *dangerous* — because he can just say things, and if they sound convincing, people believe him.
it is okay to be a mediocre hobbyist writer if you are writing to an audience of ~epsilon (like you and I.) far less so if you know people think of you highly, regard you as an expert, give your views and thoughts real credence. if you have power you have a responsibility to at least try to be correct.
(to be clear: my stance is that for writing to be good it should be true. if you don’t have respect for the facts, you don’t get beyond “mediocre.”)
Again, I'm going to go back to the actual article, because you're citing the first article by Elizabeth, which I called out for having reading comprehension issues. I'm not particularly trusting of that piece, because it is so obviously uncharitable and cherry-picks the worst parts of Scott's writing to make him seem worse on average than he is. To be clear, the worst parts of his writing are REALLY bad. I'm not defending those.
So, it looks like the internet archive version cited by Elizabeth actually is different from the current version. The new version goes like this:
> We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.
But the old version has an extra line:
> And we have those same people absolutely ripping into their in-groups – straight, white, male, hetero, cis, American, whatever – talking day in and day out to anyone who will listen about how terrible their in-group is, how it is responsible for all evils, how something needs to be done about it, how they’re ashamed to be associated with it at all.
I'm not sure what to make of this, but it's interesting.
Anyway, the point he's trying to make with the historical examples is this:
> In other words, outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and scary foreigner types can become the in-group on a moment’s notice when it seems convenient.
I think he's overcorrecting for the idea that you present—the obviously correct notion that people who look very different from one another end up being outgroups. The point is just that people can be outgroups even when they look very similar.
> the problem is his lack of respect for the facts! I don’t know why this escaped your notice.
It "escaped my notice" because I don't agree with you: I think he has a comparatively high respect for facts, especially when compared to most other bloggers. Everyone has a set of facts they're wrong about. The difference with Scott is that he is CATASTROPHICALLY wrong about what he's wrong about (mostly race IQ stuff). But I've been a reader for a long time now, and I think his blog is more often right than most other opinion columns out there, including the established ones in mainstream media.
Out of curiosity, are you a reader of his? What's your basis for thinking that he's wrong more often than most people are, instead of just catastrophically wrong about one or two topics?
> it is okay to be a mediocre hobbyist writer if you are writing to an audience of ~epsilon (like you and I.) far less so if you know people think of you highly, regard you as an expert, give your views and thoughts real credence. if you have power you have a responsibility to at least try to be correct.
This is something I absolutely agree with, and something I've been thinking about more and more. I think that the larger bloggers should do either of two things:
1. Hire an editor/fact-checker and do what you're saying in being highly judicious about the facts they put out into the world.
2. Have two blogs, one in which they publish only edited and fact-checked work, and one in which they publish whatever they feel like. I prefer this option, because the former is just reinventing the newspaper—at least the latter preserves the point of a blog, which is to be a public-facing repository for personal writing.
I used to watch debates a lot, and sometimes a debate would come along where both speakers were so good that I was constantly agreeing with the last person who spoke. It was an exhilarating experience, constantly being enlightened by perspectives I hadn't thought of at all. Scott manages to create that experience in a one-man article; by showing arguments and counter-arguments that are both convincing.
Small-side note: This is just a personal preferences but I don't like this unnecessary number inflation in "Now that Scott has walked us through one million examples". He showed 14 examples. You could've used many, a plethora, etc. or even just 14 and gotten the same point across with the added benefit of being accurate.
That's fair. I wrote a million because I'd been wading through these examples forever and I need a word to humorously describe a very large number, and couldn't think of a better one.
I think his book reviews are otherworldly and every post is a book/dissertation topic waiting to be written. This is in a world where academics/ writers have maybe 3-10 major ideas in their entire career, if they're really lucky. My favorites is I'll Tolerate Anybody But the Outgroup, where he pulls the reader along with his reasoning through the problem, applying his thinking in almost real time, and then ends by turning his reasoning back onto himself. It's sublime.
probably worth reading https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method , or https://miniver.blogspot.com/2024/01/scott-alexander-siskind-slate-star-codex.html?m=1 , etc before you get too enthusiastic about a mediocre hobbyist writer
Before I start, I want to be clear: I strongly disagree with Scott's race science stuff and think that that's the worst topic that he consistently writes about. I also disagree with his anti-woke/anti-feminist stuff for the most part.
About a quarter of the way through the first post and
> Siskind clearly thinks that they do, using them as the basis for his oft-cited taxonomy of the red tribe, the blue tribe, and the obviously superior tribe to which he and his readers belong, the grey tribe.
From the actual article Elizabeth is talking about, I can tolerate anything except the outgroup,
> This essay is bad and I should feel bad.
> I should feel bad because I made exactly the mistake I am trying to warn everyone else about, and it wasn’t until I was almost done that I noticed.
> How virtuous, how noble I must be! Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that silly Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing my own tribe and striving to make it better.
> Yeah. Once I’ve written a ten thousand word essay savagely attacking the Blue Tribe, either I’m a very special person or they’re my outgroup. And I’m not that special.
> Just as you can pull a fast one and look humbly self-critical if you make your audience assume there’s just one American culture, so maybe you can trick people by assuming there’s only one Blue Tribe.
> I’m pretty sure I’m not Red, but I did talk about the Grey Tribe above, and I show all the risk factors for being one of them. That means that, although my critique of the Blue Tribe may be right or wrong, in terms of motivation it comes from the same place as a Red Tribe member talking about how much they hate al-Qaeda or a Blue Tribe member talking about how much they hate ignorant bigots. And when I boast of being able to tolerate Christians and Southerners whom the Blue Tribe is mean to, I’m not being tolerant at all, just noticing people so far away from me they wouldn’t make a good outgroup anyway.
So, maybe the rest of the article has better points, but this is a HUGE reading comprehension error. Scott explicitly says that the Grey Tribe is not better, and that identifying with the Grey Tribe at all is a huge mistake. (edit: after reading the whole article, she completely chooses not to acknowledge the part where he criticizes himself. Incredibly disingenuous—either she actually lacks reading comprehension, which I doubt because this is a generally well-written article, or she is choosing to paint him in as bad a light as possible, in which case I just don't trust her.)
A little further down, I take issue lumping Yarvin in with Scott, because Yarvin actually consorts with Thiel and Vance and all the would-be destroyers of the American Experiment, whereas Scott is literally just an edgy milquetoast liberal (he endorsed Warren for god's sake). I think she's doing the sort of outgrouping Scott is warning against, which is another bit of irony.
> This sounds extreme. That’s because it is. Scott Siskind provided intellectual legitimacy to a movement that led directly to a fucking fascist coup.
Okay, well, I'll stop reading this here. I have thoughts on "platforming" (namely that "deplatforming" does not work and is the equivalent of ignoring bullies), and that avoiding arguing against NRX stuff doesn't give you the moral high ground, but I'll read the other article now.
_____________________________________________________________________________
> Alexander’s writing is dangerously credulous about far right ideas. One need not know more than that.
Again, this is what I'm talking about. You can't just ignore all of the ideas you don't like in hopes that they'll go away, and you can't blame people who talk with the far-right for refusing to simply ostracize them and let them stew within their own echo chambers.
> Alexander admits that he does not write carefully.
Okay, well, I guess this is another hit piece. I'm not incredibly thrilled by reading two pieces from people who are very clearly trying to convince me that Scott is the worst.
> At this point I treat Scott Alexander’s writing as an infohazzard. Unless you are willing to check his facts and citations, it is probably inadvisable to read his material, as it is constructed to build a compelling narrative.
> Unless and until Scott Alexander commits to adopting a robust editorial process where blatant errors that are reported to him are corrected promptly, his work should be read as fiction “based on a real story, sorta”.
…should this not be the case for all bloggers? Blogs by definition are not fact-checked, don't have editors, and haven't come out of writers' rooms in major newspapers. You should be factchecking anything you read if you're sufficiently credulous, right?
> So very many of them say “If the lure of making money as a programmer/entrepreneur hadn’t called to me, I’d’ve studied Physics!” Because Physics is the Apex Smart Degree. What they don’t admit is that they went into programming because it was easier than engineering and the credits transferred. The people who do well in physics programs have an entirely different variety of clinical obsession / curiousity than those who go into programming. Or those who get decent engineering degrees and go into engineering.
I studied Physics lol it is certainly not the Apex Smart Degree and I have no idea what this guy is talking about. Weird STEM supremacy in here but ok
> Alexander can be very smart. His essay Meditations on Moloch remains a marvel I recommend to anyone. His two essays on NRx are necessary reading if one wants to understand the movement. And my fascination with his Niceness, Community, and Civilization essay is not dulled by his failings at the values it describes but rather sharpened by the cautionary example of how thinking his principles protected him from bad actors failed, may even have made him dangerously overconfident.
> But he is also very stupid. No, he cannot tune out the garbage.
> This presents a problem, because someone has to debunk false and evil ideas and present the critiques to a candid world. This post is among my attempts to do that work. I have a sober sense of how that is difficult and important.
> Alexander, for all his genuine wit at his best, is just far too intellectually reckless to be trusted with the delicacy of sifting through bad ideas. He demonstrates us how garbage sources are bad for you even if you go in knowing they are garbage. His wit is a handicap. It makes him overconfident. It presents an illusion that he is a rigorous thinker.
> Beware.
I think this is probably the most convincing section of the second article, and the most convincing section of everything you've posted, because it was the most fair. I don't think I'm going to go so far as to condemn Scott entirely (he notably did endorse Harris https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein), but he does have a problem with "tuning out garbage" and his decision to stay close to NRX people on the basis of "I consistently but rarely get nuggets of interesting information from them" does seem stupid—even from his own Bayesian lens, he should understand that he's vastly increasing the probability that he accidentally imbibes something stupid.
Anyway, this ended up longer than I'd wanted it to be. I guess I'll just say that your descriptor of
> mediocre hobbyist writer
almost turned me off from reading your comment entirely. *I'M* a mediocre hobbyist writer. The two other sources you cite recognize Scott as an excellent hobbyist writer, and are complaining mostly about his ideas, which is fair. I appreciate you bringing this to my attention though!
the problem is his lack of respect for the facts! I don’t know why this escaped your notice.
“The list of groups here contains a mixture of ethnic groups living in the same geographic area (Hutus/Tutsis, Yugoslavian groups, and to an extent the Nazis and the Jews), an example of sectarian conflict (Ireland) and two situations in which an indigenous population and a colonial population are in conflict. All of these are treated as basically the same thing. Perhaps an argument could be made for why this is true, but crucially, Siskind hasn’t made it. Instead he’s relied on the very slow tick of his rhetorical engine, essentially warranting all of this on the fact that he said two wrong things first.”
“And now it’s getting deployed casually to the list of conflicts in the previous section when, to make a very obvious statement, the differences between indigenous black people in South Africa and the colonial occupiers who engaged in a decades-long project of politically disenfranchising them are quite fucking large actually.”
bluntly speaking: he’s bullshitting! he doesn’t know history, doesn’t have a conception of it beyond the narratives he likes to superimpose on it. and that you didn’t pick up on this makes him *dangerous* — because he can just say things, and if they sound convincing, people believe him.
it is okay to be a mediocre hobbyist writer if you are writing to an audience of ~epsilon (like you and I.) far less so if you know people think of you highly, regard you as an expert, give your views and thoughts real credence. if you have power you have a responsibility to at least try to be correct.
(to be clear: my stance is that for writing to be good it should be true. if you don’t have respect for the facts, you don’t get beyond “mediocre.”)
Again, I'm going to go back to the actual article, because you're citing the first article by Elizabeth, which I called out for having reading comprehension issues. I'm not particularly trusting of that piece, because it is so obviously uncharitable and cherry-picks the worst parts of Scott's writing to make him seem worse on average than he is. To be clear, the worst parts of his writing are REALLY bad. I'm not defending those.
So, it looks like the internet archive version cited by Elizabeth actually is different from the current version. The new version goes like this:
> We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.
But the old version has an extra line:
> And we have those same people absolutely ripping into their in-groups – straight, white, male, hetero, cis, American, whatever – talking day in and day out to anyone who will listen about how terrible their in-group is, how it is responsible for all evils, how something needs to be done about it, how they’re ashamed to be associated with it at all.
I'm not sure what to make of this, but it's interesting.
Anyway, the point he's trying to make with the historical examples is this:
> In other words, outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and scary foreigner types can become the in-group on a moment’s notice when it seems convenient.
I think he's overcorrecting for the idea that you present—the obviously correct notion that people who look very different from one another end up being outgroups. The point is just that people can be outgroups even when they look very similar.
> the problem is his lack of respect for the facts! I don’t know why this escaped your notice.
It "escaped my notice" because I don't agree with you: I think he has a comparatively high respect for facts, especially when compared to most other bloggers. Everyone has a set of facts they're wrong about. The difference with Scott is that he is CATASTROPHICALLY wrong about what he's wrong about (mostly race IQ stuff). But I've been a reader for a long time now, and I think his blog is more often right than most other opinion columns out there, including the established ones in mainstream media.
Out of curiosity, are you a reader of his? What's your basis for thinking that he's wrong more often than most people are, instead of just catastrophically wrong about one or two topics?
> it is okay to be a mediocre hobbyist writer if you are writing to an audience of ~epsilon (like you and I.) far less so if you know people think of you highly, regard you as an expert, give your views and thoughts real credence. if you have power you have a responsibility to at least try to be correct.
This is something I absolutely agree with, and something I've been thinking about more and more. I think that the larger bloggers should do either of two things:
1. Hire an editor/fact-checker and do what you're saying in being highly judicious about the facts they put out into the world.
2. Have two blogs, one in which they publish only edited and fact-checked work, and one in which they publish whatever they feel like. I prefer this option, because the former is just reinventing the newspaper—at least the latter preserves the point of a blog, which is to be a public-facing repository for personal writing.
Come on don't use his last name. He really doesn't like it.