I think people are quite reasonably deciding that this post isn’t worth taking the time to engage with. I’ll just make three points even though I could make more:
“A good rule of thumb might be that when InfoWars takes your side, you probably ought to do some self-reflection on whether the path your community is on is the path to a better world.”—Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence
“In response, the Slate Star Codex community basically proceeded to harass and threaten to dox both the editor and journalist writing the article. Multiple individuals threatened to release their addresses, or explicitly threatened them with violence.”—The author is completely ignoring the fact that Scott Alexander specifically told people to be nice, not to take it out on them and didn’t name the journalist. This seems to suggest that the author isn’t even trying to be fair.
“I have nothing to say to you — other people have demonstrated this point more clearly elsewhere”—I’m not going to claim that such differences exist, but if the author isn’t open to dialog on one claim, it’s reasonable to infer that they mightn’t be open to dialog on other claims even if they are completely unrelated.
Quite simply this is a low quality post and “I’m going to write a low quality post on topic X and you have to engage with me because topic X is important regardless of the quality” just gives a free pass on low quality content. But doesn’t it spur discussion? I’ve actually found that most often low quality posts don’t even provide the claimed benefit. They don’t change people’s minds and tend to lead to low quality discussion.
Also the sleight of hand where the author implies that Scott is a white supremacist, and supports this not by referencing anything that Scott said, but by referencing things that unrelated people hanging out on the SSC subreddit have said and which Scott has never shown any signs of endorsing. If Scott himself had said anything that could be interpreted as an endorsement of white supremacy, surely it would have been mentioned in this post, so its absence is telling.
It’s part of the SSC ethos that “if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do”, then you should consider the possibility that that’s because you don’t understand, rather than because they’re stupid; the “principle of charity”. So that means taking ideas seriously — even ones you’re uncomfortable with. And the blog and its associated subreddit have rules of debate: that you’re not allowed to shout things down, or tell people they’re racist; you have to politely and honestly argue the facts of the issue at hand. It means that the sites are homes for lively debate, rare on the modern internet, between people who actually disagree; Left and Right, Republican and Democrat, pro-life and pro-choice, gender-critical feminists and trans-activist, MRA and feminist.
And that makes them vulnerable. Because if you’re someone who wants to do a hatchet job on them, you can easily go through the comments and find something that someone somewhere will find appalling. That’s partly a product of the disagreement and partly a function of how the internet works: there’s an old law of the internet, the “1% rule”, which says that the large majority of online comments will come from a hyperactive 1% of the community. That was true when I used to work at Telegraph Blogs — you’d get tens of thousands of readers, but you’d see the same 100 or so names cropping up every time in the comment sections.
(Those names were often things like Aelfric225 or TheUnBrainWashed, and they were usually really unhappy about immigration.)
That’s why the rationalists are paranoid. They know that if someone from a mainstream media organisation wanted to, they could go through those comments, cherry-pick an unrepresentative few, and paint the entire community as racist and/or sexist, even though surveys of the rationalist community and SSC readership found they were much more left-wing and liberal on almost every issue than the median American or Briton. And they also knew that there were people on the internet who unambiguously want to destroy them because they think they’re white supremacists.
I think people are quite reasonably deciding that this post isn’t worth taking the time to engage with. I’ll just make three points even though I could make more:
“A good rule of thumb might be that when InfoWars takes your side, you probably ought to do some self-reflection on whether the path your community is on is the path to a better world.”—Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence
“In response, the Slate Star Codex community basically proceeded to harass and threaten to dox both the editor and journalist writing the article. Multiple individuals threatened to release their addresses, or explicitly threatened them with violence.”—The author is completely ignoring the fact that Scott Alexander specifically told people to be nice, not to take it out on them and didn’t name the journalist. This seems to suggest that the author isn’t even trying to be fair.
“I have nothing to say to you — other people have demonstrated this point more clearly elsewhere”—I’m not going to claim that such differences exist, but if the author isn’t open to dialog on one claim, it’s reasonable to infer that they mightn’t be open to dialog on other claims even if they are completely unrelated.
Quite simply this is a low quality post and “I’m going to write a low quality post on topic X and you have to engage with me because topic X is important regardless of the quality” just gives a free pass on low quality content. But doesn’t it spur discussion? I’ve actually found that most often low quality posts don’t even provide the claimed benefit. They don’t change people’s minds and tend to lead to low quality discussion.
Also the sleight of hand where the author implies that Scott is a white supremacist, and supports this not by referencing anything that Scott said, but by referencing things that unrelated people hanging out on the SSC subreddit have said and which Scott has never shown any signs of endorsing. If Scott himself had said anything that could be interpreted as an endorsement of white supremacy, surely it would have been mentioned in this post, so its absence is telling.
As Tom Chivers recently noted: