Recessions are fractally complicated. Not only do they have different causes, but the causes have different causes, and so on to infinity.
Most of the post is about psychiatric conditions, which he argues are even more complex.
Speaking of Scott Alexander, yesterday, the NYT published a piece on him that is totally misleading. If you read it at all, read it here, not at the NYT web site. Don’t feed trolls. Scott blogged a response, but for me the article was self-evidently dreck.
I have to say that Scott is not the first person about whom the NYT published a lie to make the individual sound racist. I wrote to the NYT asking for a correction, but none was forthcoming. One of these days, somebody actually will sue them.
When I read the NYTimes article it didn’t seem that out of the ordinary from what I see in the times. The only accusations, as far as I can tell, is that:
1) Scott believes Charles Murray stuff
2) Scott lets people on the right comment on his blog
“The Times points out that I agreed with Murray that poverty was bad, and that also at some other point in my life noted that Murray had offensive views on race, and heavily implies this means I agree with Murray’s offensive views on race. This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.”
In his reply Scott tries to distance himself from Murray and basically unpersons Murray as far as I can tell. Seems short sighted. They already did all the damage they possibly can to him, why lie about Charles Murray at this point. There is little left to protect.
You can’t build an accurate model of the world, which Scott is trying to do, without acknowledging the facts in question.
“There is no evidence that women are inherently any less intelligent or any worse at math than men, and I have tried to make this very clear in all of my posts on the subject – for example in the Contra Grant post linked above, where I say, quote, “My research suggests no average gender difference in ability”.”
But again, we all know average IQ of sexes is identical. The question is one of interest and ability at the +3/4 SD level in technical fields. That’s where James Damore got involved, and the Times article even mentions him. Scott could try to defend Damore, but instead he throws him under the bus like Murray.
Look, I don’t mean to give Scott a hard time. But the simple fact is that all of the leverage being sued against him is over the fact that sex, race, and class difference in ability are taboo. Scott takes the bait and denies it, even if that’s clearly not what he really believes. It’s self censorship, and I don’t think it’s going to help him. He should just state the truth and let people deal with it.
In my prudish mind, the most devastating part of the article was the inclusion of polyamory, group houses and hippies in the same paragraph. Makes it sound like a cultish commune. This is most likely not an accurate representation, but I’m not entirely certain.
I think Scott had some sort of dysfunctional poly relationship with a tranny for a long time, but I’m 100% willing to admit I might be wrong on that entire statement. It’s not something I’ve investigated or thought about much. I just think he mentioned something like that on his blog, which is awhile ago now and maybe I’m misremembering or mixing him up with another rationalist.
The most devastating part of the article is that it has gotten people riled up about things other than Scott’s intellectual work. The bubbling argument is now about if Scott is a victim of the NYT or the representation of him, and only a few people have noticed that the NYTs has put out a piece on an intellectual without actually addressing his work directly in any way. They have minimized the most important contributions that he has made or attempted to make. In short they have managed to frame the discussion as ‘is he a racist’ and avoided the ‘is he an important and valuable voice’ despite the latter being about as close to indisputable as it could be.
The only question is, “Is he a potential competitor for intellectual authority who is not 100% aligned with the New York Times?” If so, time to try and ruin his reputation.
“We can’t have that, and have got to get ahead of this thing. The first thing people should hear when asking their friendly subscriber, “Who is this Scott Alexander I’ve heard about?” should be, “Oh yeah, I read about him, some weird racist on the internet.” – “Ah, another one? Oh well, thanks, yet another thing to ignore.” So, give him the bigot treatment.” – “Yes sir! One hatchet job, coming up!”
The SLPC entry for Charles Murray is still the #1 Google Search result for his name.
Other than his Twitter account and AEI bio, the top 10 results include takedowns by Vox, NYTimes, Scientific American, and The Harvard Crimson.
Handle, your idea is echoed by Reason:
https://reason.com/2021/02/15/what-the-new-york-times-hit-piece-on-slate-star-codex-says-about-media-gatekeeping/
One starts to get the feeling that the Times simply wants to tarnish every view that exists outside its own narrow purview,
The intellectual gatekeeper trying to put another finger into another hole in the dyke to stop the flow of good knowledge / information / data which doesn’t thru their own gate.
Alright, here is a substantiative thing from Scotts reply to the NYTimes. He voted for Elizabeth Warren in the democratic primary.
Does this knock him down some pegs in the FIT draft?
Tom Cullis: The most devastating part of the article is that it has gotten people riled up about things other than Scott’s intellectual work.
No, this is it: “The new SSC consists of factual rebuttals to the stuff the NYT allegedly got wrong, but does not dispute the frame that it is right to cancel people who know Peter Thiel, or are not ‘allies of women in tech’. A capitulation. ” https://twitter.com/balensphere/status/1360766310674743300
The Number One Pick’s ethos is “devil take the hindmost.”
“This is most likely not an accurate representation, but I’m not entirely certain.”
You should increase your uncertainty, because that’s a not entirely inaccurate representation. There were the occasional commenters, but the 800-2000 comments PER POST were from some seriousy whack people who viewed him as a guru.
Re: Complexity and dynamical systems.
I get it that one hallmark of science is to explain much with little. (Think Newton’s simple 2nd law of motion, f=ma, which explains a helluva lot about nature.) But protean minds should take care to distinguish analogies from homologies. Equilibrium, gradient climbing (or gradient descending), and local maximum (or local minimum) are indeed concepts that can explain much with little. But the analogy between recessions and depressive mood states seems overdrawn. Every something is somewhat like something else. Clever minds delight in finding patterns. But a bat is a mammal and a bird is not.
The last time I checked, the top 100 chess players in the world were all men.
I have met hundreds of men that like working on cars. Maybe met a couple women, but I can’t remember any.
Even women do not militate that 50% of auto mechanics should be women. Why is that?
I like the expression of Scott Alexander’s, the “Dark Enlightenment.”
“The Dark Enlightenment” is from Nick Land. He had a whole series on it, worth checking out.
Matt Yglesias on Scott Alexander:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/slate-star-codex
I didn’t know that what I call “thinking” has been reborn as “rationalism.”
I should also note that contemporary rationalism is both a set of ideas and also a specific community in the Bay Area that as I understand it involves polyamory and communal living of some kind. I don’t have any real knowledge or understanding of the latter and am just talking about ideas.
Rationalists’ big thing is that the natural human process of cognition is capable of reaching accurate results but that’s not really the default mode. And rationalists are not just aware of this, they think it’s a big problem and they try really hard to push back on it and develop better reasoning skills.
I think that’s probably why a rationalist blog is very popular in Silicon Valley. The nature of VC investing or the management of an early-stage startup is that there is incredible monetary value in making correct predictions in the face of imperfect information. Then on top of that, the kinds of recommendations that rationalists give for how to reason better tend to align with engineers’ natural instincts and inclinations — be more bloodless and objective, evaluate claims on the merits in isolation, gather and surface all available facts.
“I wrote to the NYT asking for a correction, but none was forthcoming. One of these days, somebody actually will sue them.”
The NYT is evil, and it would be best if they went bankrupt soon. Cade Metz is a putz and a momzer, and he knows it.
Nevertheless, you should hope no one sues them. The judges will just side with NYT like they’ve always done, but also like always, they will have to come up with some crazy hand-waving rationalization to do so, which will establish a precedent which will do even more damage to our crumbling legal institutions, and spread the harm far and wide.
Which brings up an even more troubling thought I had this week.
We all know that “Give the Devil the benefit of Law” quote from A Man For All Seasons. Well, a lot of key institutions talked themselves into cutting a great road through the law to get after the Devil.
The law in this case was the norms of their professions such as those of objectivity, fairness, accuracy, neutrality, self-restraint, fidelity, disinterestedness, and so forth. Yes, those are all well and good, in normal times with normal people, but in this day and age, with all the evil of all the demons loose in the land, it was time to not just to drop the norms but even the pretense of the virtue of those norms, and to come right out and admit and even argue for their suspension and abandonment in the name of the greater good. Whatever you could do for the cause, whatever it took to achieve it, was not just worth it, but morally compulsory.
The trouble is, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Once you unleash the hounds of hell in order to hunt down the Devil, you burn up some institutional and organizational capital that is just impossible to recover or renew. One sees it at the NYT now, with the constant intimidation and pressuring of leadership by their own woke lower ranks (something that happened the French Revolution, China’s Cultural Revolution, and during Japanese’s descent into a spiral of militaristic madness.) You can’t just declare victory and go back to normal, you poisoned your own well to prevent the enemy from getting a drink.
Something similar has happened in our judiciary. In order to achieve the right results when they were not also the legally correct results, the empowerment of lower level district judges to issue commands by edict was necessary, but again, once people get used to operating in a system like that, you aren’t going to be able to re-impose any sort of discipline on them after whatever goal you were pursuing has been accomplished. They got the taste of real power and there is no going back, they are going to continue to indulge in its exercise to do what they want and make names for themselves.
Likewise, at the top level of SCOTUS, the willingness to issue rulings that no longer even pay lip service to the effort to maintain jurisprudential coherence, and the establishment of tools of infinite flexibility in terms of tests and standards the proper application of which cannot be determined and thus cannot be policed, means that they have destroyed as well the possibility of there being an intellectual basis to impose any kind of legalistic discipline on the branch in general.
Just like the NYT now has to live and suffer from its own perpetual internal insurgency, so too does the judiciary simple have to live with the reality of countless rogue Hawaiian judges who feel free to blatantly disregard any attempt at constraint.
In short, the Devil has turned round on them, there is no place to hide, the laws all being flat.
Well, you might think, they deserve it! The trouble is, they only have to live with a tiny portion of the fallout, the rest of which will fall on us.
See, some people hold out hope for the current troubles to end once the progressives achieve their complete triumph of a permanent One Party State, and that, with a certain and secure hold on power, they can all finally chill out and cut it out with the evil distortions and recruitment of each and every influential institution to the cause of their aims.
The trouble is, they broke those institutions in the process, in a way that can’t be easily and quickly fixed, and not fixed at all by people who convinced themselves that the needed to be broken in the first place. Even if they wanted to chill out and get things back to normal, they have to work with smoking heaps of rubble instead of the useful infrastructure they demolished to win the war. So even in the ‘optimistic’ scenario, things still end up really, really bad. And most likely we won’t even get that lucky.
False light claim against NYT.
*Defendant published something embarrassing (easy)
*Portray the plaintiff in a false or misleading light (medium)
*Reckless disregard as to its offensiveness (hard)
But what about a joint complaint from, say, 100 similar plaintiffs? Let attorneys sort for the 10 best claims to put forward.
I want to say something really nasty here, but in the interest of respecting the collegial tone of this blog, I’ll just say that if Dean Baquet had a shred of personal integrity, spine, or professional ethics, he’d fire Cade Metz and whoever he reports to, then resign himself. But he doesn’t, so he won’t.
Take heart, for a charge of racism these days is a badge of honor.
I honestly don’t know what the term racism means anymore – it’s been stretched so far and thin at this point that it’s become meaningless other than as a weapon to silence anyone that disagrees with someone of a certain protected skin tone.
The libertarians and “rationalists” just need to just accept it and not worry about it so much. No one cares….the term has been inflated out of existence and pretty much everyone knows it. Just have the bravery and courage to endure it like Rush Limbaugh and Charles Murray have for basically their entire careers. There is actually nothing new here.
You can’t decide to defuse a word on your own. It if were possible it would have been done a long time ago. If when someone does an internet search of your real name, and on the first page there is some prominent accusation of racism, then you just became became ineligible for 90% of the nice spots, and of course no one will ever tell you why. It doesn’t matter if it is a lie and you put up a solid defense, the few legal wins out there are the exceptions that prove the rule, and ones that probably won’t last anyway. If you are young and vulnerable, that’s a life sentence to a low class lifestyle for your whole family, and the ways things are going, eventually to the gutter itself.
I would rather be accused of having shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
“You can’t decide to defuse a word on your own.”
I seemed to have misplaced my glasses. Is that Handle writing or…is that Captain Obvious :)?
Look, if you wanna play with third rail race or sex issues publicly, then have a robust safety net to catch your fall. Otherwise you’re a fool who can’t feign martyr status. We’ve known this since at least 1994 with the publication of “The Bell Curve” and all of the dirty disgusting tricks that the media and academia play. That’s the world we live in, so accept it already and optimize your life and risk tolerance based on that.
However, the stigma of being dubbed a “racist” is starting to lose its power as racism is being cried everyday and everywhere for the most innocuous of offenses. I honestly don’t care if the NYT or anyone else calls me racist on the internet since the term is becoming meaningless. I would still be able to find a job, which is basically what we are talking about, right? Or am I supposed to be fixated more broadly on what the community thinks of me?
The NYT author didn’t sincerely think Scott Alexander was racist, he deliberately twisted some bogus story to craft a negative perception of him. Journalists are notorious for these types of dirty deeds. Scott Alexander has a strong enough reputation and enough prominent defenders like Steven Pinker to survive this.
I still greatly respect Scott Alexander, but I’m disappointed to read that Scott Alexander voted for Warren in the primary and Biden in the general and is a part of the very same political coalition as the NYT.
I’m a bit surprised that amidst the apocalyptic hand wringing in the various comments here no one has even noticed that the net effect of this episode has been to shift some cultural influence in the direction this blog wants it shifted.
The NYT has lost subscribers over this episode, received much criticism, and made no new friends. They ultimately decided not to publish Scott’s real name before he decided to do so himself despite the fact that he had made surprisingly little effort to make it hard to find, especially for someone viewed as something of a guru on how these things work.
Meanwhile Scott has received a lot of publicity, positive attention and support. He is likely to be much more widely read in the future than he was in the past and also to be much better paid for it and much better protected from cancellation. This is a net win for him and net loss for the NYT. People here would be happier about that if they noticed it at all.
+1 I don’t get it either. Dude decided to voluntarily straddle the fence between anonymity and publicity while discussing taboo topics. You wanna play with fire, make sure you’ve got a plan b. As far as I can tell, he has won.
Good call on the publicity. I think most SSC, now Astral 10 readers have been less opposed to cancel culture censors than to Trump’s tweets. Plus they want to argue against the steelman arguments, not the usual NYT style strawman (= fakeman?)
Without Trump to be enraged about:
a) NYT needs other targets to keep their Dem readers in permanent high-news buying outrage,
b) those elites who argue against “evil conservatives” are likely targets, since their engaging with conservatives can be called associating with conservatives,
c) these SSC Dems who want to appear “fair”, at least to themselves, will be increasingly targeted. And publicized, as well as unfairly demonized.
I suspect more will become more outraged at cancel culture as they become the Thinkers being cancelled. Some might even regret their prior votes.
It occurs to me this is an example of Conquest’s first law – everybody is conservative about what they know most. Scott & his readers know they’re not the demons that NYT is making them out to be.
Will they possibly imagine that Trump, also, was not such a demon as portrayed by NYT & WaPo?
Naaaaahhhh.
The proper response these days to being called a racist is, “ ok, what’s your point ?”
In Scott’s reply, he notes that he quit his job and started another. It looks like he’s migrating into a more professional pundit place. I truly wish him well, and there’s clearly a big market available for Dems who are willing to question, honestly, the dishonesties so often seen by Democrats. Tho that market is more Reps and Independents rather than Dem true believers.
The NYT did get something right about the “voluble” amount of text. When I took the time to read him, Scott was excellent in arguments, but so soo soooo loooooong.
Magazine long form long, tho with much higher density of info than most magazines. With about 80% of the words in too much detail about the 20% of the less common cases or uses. I like Arnold’s too brief style much more.
This kerfluffle with the Times will help Scott.
Open question for Arnold – would Scott’s letter reply count as a “win”?
I’m seriously having trouble figuring out which intellectuals are actually doing wins.
I don’t find Charles Murray nor Scott nor Arnold convincing on UBI rather than a National Service job offer to help poor people get out of poverty. To me, UBI is to make endless poverty more comfy, but never leave it.
It’s no surprise Scott voted for cancel culture Dems – I think Arnold did too, but in any case all arguments should be looked at on their own terms. Scott is among the best to do this. Zvi does this, too (plus comments!), FIT might help Zvi move up faster than without it, and is the kind of good FIT result we hope for.
For me, results are far far more important than style. But style is not unimportant.