Thiel and Sanders donât have much in common, but Scott has stuff in common with Thiel and Sanders. (I.e. he shares broadly pro-market views and skepticism of social justice and feminism with Thiel, and possibly pro HBD views, although I donât know what Thiel thinks about HBD, plus an interest in futurism and progress, and he shares redistributive and anti-blaming the poor for being poor economic views with Sanders.)
David Mathersđ¸
Karma: 4,328
Fair enough, this does make me move a bit further in the âoverall a jokeâ direction. But I still think the names basically match his ideological leanings.
Having now read the whole thing, not just the bit you quoted originally, I think it is sort of a joke but not really: a funny, slightly exaggerated rendering of what his real ideological views actually are, exaggerated a bit for comic effect. I donât think Thorstad was majorly in the wrong here, but maybe he could have flagged this a bit.
âthe Murray pick was absurdist humorâ What makes you think that? I would feel better if I thought that was true.
One thing I will say here that I think shouldnât be controversial:
At the very least the Cade Metz NYT on Scott fairly clearly did not give readers a misleading impression (whether or not it gave the reader that impression in a fair way.): the article does not state âScott Alexander is a hardcore white nationalistâ, or even, in my view, really give people that impression. What it does give the reader as an impression is that he is highly skeptical of feminism and social justice, his community of followers includes white nationalists, and he is sympathetic to views on race on which Black people are genetically intellectually inferior. All these things are true, as anyone who reads Thorstadâs blogpost can verify. But more importantly, while I understand not everyone reads Scott and his blog commentators religiously, all these things are fairly obviously true if youâve followed Scottâs writing closely. (As I have; I used to like it a great deal, before disagreement on exactly this stuff very gradually soured me on it.*) I think it is a failure of community epistemics that a lot of people jumped to âthis is a smearâ before really checking, or suspending judgment.
*I actually find this whole topic very emotionally upsetting and confusing, because I think I actually have a very similar personality to Scott and other rationalists, and seeing them endorse what to me is fairly obvious evil-Iâm talking here about reactionary political projects here, not any particular empirical beliefs-makes me worried that I am bad too. Read everything I say on this thread with this bias in mind.
Disagree votes are going to be predictably confusing here, since I donât know whether people disagree with the main point that most people who defend Scott do think he is friendly towards HBD, or they just disagree with something else, like my very harsh words about (some) rationalists.
Donât see a significant difference.
Iâd say an obvious difference is that EA family planning orgs arenât doing permanent sterilization.
Iâd also say that the reason Thorstad is upset is probably mostly because he sees Scottâs support for the org as âletâs get rid of drug addicts children from the next generation because they have bad genesâ, and-rightly in my view-worries that this is the sort of logic that the Nazis used to justify genocide of the âwrong sortâ of people, and that if HBD becomes widely believed people might turn this logic against Black people. Scott could (and would) reasonably protest that there is a big difference between being prepared to use violence for eugenic goals, and merely incentivizing people towards them in non-coerceive ways. But if you apply this to race rather than drug addicts âwe should try and make there be less Black people, non-coercivelyâ is still Nazi and awful.
This sort of eugenic reasoning doesnât actually seem to be whatâs going on with Project Prevention itself, incidentally. From the Guardian article, it seems like the founder genuinely values the children of drug addicts as human beings, given she adopted them and is just trying to stop them being hurt. From that point of view, Iâd say she is probably a bit confused though: itâs not clear most children of addicts have lives that are worse than nothing, even though they will be worse than average. So itâs not clear it actually helps them to prevent them being born.
I imagine people inclined to defend Scott are often a) People who themselves agree with HBD or b) people who donât really have an opinion on it (or maybe even disagree with it)* but think that Scott arrived at his âbeliefâ (i.e. >50% credence) in HBD by honest inquiry into the evidence to the best of his ability, and think that is never wrong to form empirical beliefs in this way. I donât think people could believe Scott rejects HBD if they actually read him at all closely. (Though he tends to think and talk in probabilistic terms rather than full acceptance/ârejection. As you should!) In the Hanania review he explicitly says he puts âmoderate probabilityâ on some HBD views, which isnât that different from what he said in the Brennan email.
As to WHY people think a) and b), Iâd say it is a mixture of (random order, not order of importance):
1) People like Scott and that biases them.
2) People want to defend a prominent rationalist/âEA for tribal reasons.
3) People have a (genuinely praiseworthy in itself in my view) commitment to following the evidence where it leads even when it leads to taboo conclusion, and believe that Scottâs belief in HBD (and other controversial far-right-aligned beliefs of his) have resulted from him following the evidence to the best of his ability, and therefore that he should not be condemned for them. (You can think this even if you donât think the beliefs in question are correct. My guess is âthe views are wrong and bad but he arrived at them honestly so you canât really blame himâ is what less right-leaning rationalists like Kelsey Piper or Ozy Brennan think for example, though they can speak for themselves obviously. Maybe Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks this too actually, heâs condemned rationalisms far-right wing in pretty strong terms in the past, though that doesnât necessarily mean he rejects every HBD belief I guess.)
4) A faction of rationalists (and therefore EAs, and also I guess *some* EAs who arenât rationalists are like this, though my guess is much less) are just, well *bigoted*: they enjoying hearing and discussing things about why women/âBlack people are bad, because they like hating on women/âBlack people. As to WHY they are like that, I think (though I may be typical minding here**), that an important part of the answer is that they feel rejected socially, and especially sexually, for their broadly âautisticâ personality traits, and also believe that the general culture is âfeminizingâ against the things that people-mostly, not entirely men-with that type of personality tend to value/âovervalue, truth-seeking, honesty even when it upsets people, trying to be self-controlled and stoical. (I actually agree that certain parts of US liberal culture HAVE probably moved too far against those things.)
*My guess is that Matthew Adelstein/âBenthamâs Bulldog is probably a Scott-defender who thinks HBD is wrong: https://ââbenthams.substack.com/ââp/ââlosing-faith-in-contrarianism
**I have autism, and have recently acquired my first ever girlfriend aged 37, and even as my considered belief is that they are in fact quite unfair to feminists in many ways, a lot of the feelings in Scottâs Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled posts are very, very familiar to me.
Puzzled by your last paragraph. The Guardian article explicitly says that in the US their work has been compared to Nazi eugenics.
Vasco, where do you stand on the worry that farmed animal welfare interventions might be bad because less farmed animals=more wild animals, and wild animals have net negative lives. (Iâm thinking any interventions that raise costs for farms might reduce meat consumption, and therefore number of farmed animals, at least a bit.)
This post seems to strongly hint at endorsing some very strong, implausible claims that arenât particularly necessary to its central point that various EA ways of thinking can make people sad and anxious*. First, footnote 18 seems to suggests that really people should give absolute priority to their own mental health over any ethical considerations whatsoever:
âIt seems to me that any healthy model would place mental wellbeing at the absolute foundation, with ethics as an optional choice, though I could potentially see a case for other models being promoted for strategic reasons.â
I think this is basically self-undermining. Presumably the reason we want people to generally think in ways that are mentally healthy is because we want to prevent harm to them (and others). But that very goal of preventing harm will sometimes point to prioritizing other things over getting people to think in the most mental health-conducive way**. (I personally, as a non-hedonist about well-being also think that sometimes having less healthy but more accurate beliefs can in itself make you overall better off than if you had less accurate beliefs and were less depressed/âanxious, even if the more accurate beliefs bring no practical benefits. But I think itâs totally reasonable to disagree with me about this.)
Secondly thereâs a suggestion that a healthy, balanced person thinks all perspectives are valid***. I donât really get what sense of âvalidityâ this could possibly be true on. If âvalidâ means âpersonal mental health promotingâ then youâve just spent a lot of time arguing, quite plausibly in my view, that a lot of EA perspectives damage mental health, which would make them less valid. This whole post is about arguing that some perspectives are less good and should be abandoned. Equally, not all perspectives are equally true, vaccines donât cause autism. Nor all they all equally moral: think of clichĂŠ examples like Hitler or a serial killer. Obviously, in therapy itself it might make sense for the therapist to ignore all this, and not provide judgments on your thoughts and feelings, but that doesnât mean everyone should always take that attitude in all contexts.
Iâll also say that I think the interaction of this topic with neurodiversity stuff is quite complicated. Much of the ways of thinking you are criticizing here feel to me, as an autistic person, to be distinctly autistic. (But donât just take my word for it! I am only one autistic person.) I think that makes plausible that encouraging them might harm autistic people in one way. But it also means that criticizing them can be stigmatizing. I have already spent a lot of emotional energy on the idea that there is something very wrong and bad and evil with how I process things, related to some of the themes of this post. In some ways, this might have been âhealthyâ in the sense of making me a better person, but it definitely didnât make me feel good about myself.
*I personally think that most EAs already think in roughly those ways before the encounter EA, but that is only a guess.
**If youâve seen The Sopranos, Tony arguably becomes mentally healthier by the end, but only because he has become more sociopathic and therefore feels less guilty. Fiction, yes, but definitely something that could plausibly happen to a real person.
***âMental wellbeing frameworks generally hold that all perspectives are valid, including things that EAâs ethical frameworks assert as bad/âwrong/âinvalidâ
I was aware they are married. I find something slightly unsettling about your comment, but I am not sure quite what, or that I am right to.
As for Geoffrey Millerâs more political comments on here, I am not particularly a fan, but they mostly seem to fall within ânormalâ conservative bounds to me. (For an American anyway; it is an issue in deciding what is/âisnât far-right that mainstream US conservatism has become a bit fascist). Thatâs not to say he ISNâT âfar-rightâ, I think it is reasonably likely he has views that I would characterise as such, only that it is not his main persona on here. At least as I define âfar-rightâ, opinions on exactly what that means can differ.
Ok, Iâll change to indicate it was the same article. Though note that writing an article for them was not her only connection.
Author of Much-DisÂcussed FoÂrum Piece DefendÂing EuÂgenÂics Works for a MagazÂine with Far-Right Links
I actually feel mildly guilty for my comment. Itâs not like Iâve done a proper search, itâs not something I worked on directly, and I dislike neuron count weighting from a more inside view persepctive, so itâs possible my memory is biased here. Not to mention that I donât actually no of any philosophers (beyond Bob and other people at RP themselves) who explicitly deny neuron count weighting. Donât update TOO much on me here!
What you really want to look at-I havenât properly-is the literature on what determines pain intensity, and, relatedly, what makes pain feel bad rather than good, and what makes pain morally bad. Thatâll tell you something about how friendly current theory is to âmore neurons=more intense experiencesâ, even if the papers in the literature donât specifically discuss whether that is true.
Strong *upvote* the comment yes. But there is no strong agreement vote.
Wish there was a way to vote strong agree and not just agree on this comment.
My reading of the post (which is contestable) is that he chose the people as a sort of joke about âhere is a controversial or absurdly in-group person I like on this issueâ. I canât prove that reading is correct, but I donât really see another that makes sense of the post. Some of the people are just too boring choices-Yglesias, for the joke to just be that the list is absurd.