Ask Us Anything: Submit Questions Asking About What We Think SSC is Wrong About, and Why

Yeah, that feels pretty ugly to me too. Sorry you have to face this crap.

Rationalists have a tendency to sound a little bit like Spock, but in reality we are all human here. I'd say that doing a good job managing relationships with other humans, and learning to be kind, doesn't just fall within the realm of rationalism - it's crucial to our success! There are a number of things I love about Scott. To me he seems insightful and even-handed, but most relevant here is that he seems like a nice person. So I was not at all impressed the first time I heard Jordan, when he said:

"Alright so I just read the worst Slate Star Codex article I've ever read (a new low) and I'm now more determined than ever to host an event where I try to convince members of this community that Scott Alexander is a pseudo-intellectual not worth reading."

This was not followed by any explanation of what Scott had done wrong, or what a "pseudo-intellectual" is. Though reportedly it was meant to be facetious, I just couldn't read it that way. If you're going to criticize Scott, try at least not to make obvious mistakes that Scott himself wouldn't make, such as sounding like a jerk.

That said, I am curious what Jordan has to say. For starters, which writers are sufficiently free from mistakes that they are "worth reading", and what criteria qualify a person as "intellectual"?

I'm sure Scott has made mistakes. Personally, I make mistakes with shocking regularity. And I do think when Scott is talking about a subject where he has little expertise, the disclaimer at the top about that lack of expertise should not be in small text, and Scott may need more expressions of uncertainty (weasel words).

But I think there is a tension between correctness and popularity. The thing is, perfection is not only difficult, it's time consuming. I have been known to review my own articles over a dozen times before posting them (and errors may still slip through). My carefulness in turn leads to a low posting frequency, which probably contributes to my unpopularity. If you want to be popular, you have to put out. Look at The Eliezer - I think his stuff is riddled with defects of various types, but he wrote fast and was popular. His stuff is at least mostly good enough to be worth reading, so I do.

I wonder if we could develop a process where the community's best writers (and the occasional newcomer) could write "drafts" which would be posted semi-publicly in a "draft" area and then be edited by members trusted by the author (with expert input, if the subject matter demands expert input), before being reposted "publicly for reals this time". Though if you ask me, priority one for improvement isn't SSC, it's The Sequences.

Your historian friends agreed with the global claim which I believe was fairly well established. From what I've heard talking to the interlocutor hosting this meetup (I am not he), it was *how* you extrapolated to that global claim from a local one that is being taken issue with. Notice that the historian on your blog also believes it is difficult to say to what degree Europe declined during the Dark Ages, although there are many possible markers. Notice that the reddit historian backing you is apologizing for your background rather than providing corroborative concrete evidence related to the structure of your argument. The Dominican Friar thing is nice and it's understandable why you wouldn't quote a private email, but it's of course possible that they would make a similar mistake and taken without detail, it definitely seems like a pithy authority appeal.

As far as this meetup goes, from my discussions with the interlocutor, I'd expect mainly methodological criticisms, and criticisms of the rhetorical moves used to waive the limitations of the methodology. These are not the same as criticisms of the goals of SSC, or even the goals of a particular post. The substitutes recommended will be deeper reading of primary and secondary sources instead of *only* using SSC as a source (being that it's tertiary and pop-sci), at the very least.

Maybe these criticisms once brought to light won't be enough to brand you as a "pseudo-intellectual", but people who do not take these kinds of criticisms into account will read your disclaimers against your expertise, yet would still be left with the inability to understand how these affect the soundness of your claims, because supposedly, they too, are not domain experts. I think such refutations, if valid and pondered, could be educational and sanity-raising for everyone in the SSC blogosphere.

I have to say, it makes me a little uncomfortable to see how strongly this post has been downvoted, and how negative and emotional the reaction to it has been. My objection to this planned event (as I said in my other comment [LW(p) · GW(p)]) was about format, not substance; but it seems to me that other people are reading this as some sort of malicious, personal attack against Scott, which I just don’t see.

For instance—

Sometimes it’s the right call to coordinate against a person in your community, but only as a last resort after the peaceful options have been tried, and this post seems to have immediately jumped to coordinating a group against a person.

Reading this, I would’ve thought that the thing you’re commenting on is some sort of attempt to personally denounce, ostracize, shun, or shame Scott… but that doesn’t seem to be the OP’s intent (I doubt it’s even the intent of this “Jordan” fellow, but of course I can’t be as certain about that).

I mean… is sitting around and discussing someone’s ideas really not peaceful?

[Note: scroll down and start at the paragraph just before the blockquote, and read to the end, for the tl;dr/conclusion of this comment.]

My friend and I are each critiquing a set of ideas, respectively, which happen to come from Scott. My disagreements with Scott I see as at odds with themes in his writing on discourse he himself created. For example, several posts I'm at odds with Scott wrote are part of the Community and Cooperation [? · GW] sequence put together from SSC posts. The rest of them are related to discourse norms specific to the rationality or similar intellectual communities (e.g., New Atheism). I should state at the event these are opinions we will express, separate from each other as individuals. And on that basis, attendees may change their mind about some ideas from SSC. But neither my friend nor I expect that to be the likely outcome. To be fair, Scott himself often builds upon his own ideas sequentially. He doesn't do it along a single theme in as short a period as Eliezer did when he wrote the Sequences. But if one could disagree with a set of ideas that were intended to be read as such with the Sequences, which doesn't seem like it'd be out of question on LW, I don't know why the same standard shouldn't apply to posts by Scott either.

My friend thinks Scott has systematic biases, which I think is a tougher case to make, but he is well-aware with the audience he is facing it's an uphill battle.

While my friend doesn't think Scott's writing is particularly good, I disagree. I think he's as a good a writer as most to be found online, and occasionally much better. I did say both of us disagree with Scott in systematic ways. I don't think Scott is systematically biased. But I believe he has overstated the value of some discourse norms, or that they're generalized to too many types of circumstances. But I didn't state Scott's writing is bad in particular (i.e., his writing style), which is distinct from the content of some of his writing. That's what both of us will be addressing. For example, neither of us take issue with any of Scott's posts on psychiatry.

The title of this post, and of the event, and leaving up top the line about the pseudo-intellectual, have made it appear as if that is all this event will be about. Perhaps that was a mistake. However, that is what my friend called the event when he set it up, and that is the tone he set for the event. So I thought to include those parts to accurately represent what this event might be like. The tone of it is meant to be facetious, but the edge of that humour has apparently been lost.

My friend is certainly no fan of Scott (I think he is a conflict theorist, but I'm unsure). I think he just as a chip on his shoulder, as many of us attending do, which is what we'll be putting to the test when he is in the hot seat, and we challenge his conjectures (shminux corroborates this state of affairs in this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)]). I myself certainly didn't mean to imply Scott was bad as a person. I just think he is wrong about some stuff. I do wish that his status within the rationality community didn't make it feel so hard among rationalists to express significant disagreement with Scott. But going by Scott's comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], he doesn't share that attitude.

Since neither of us is calling Scott a bad person, it's inaccurate to say we've organized an event for people to coordinate around him being bad. Most of the attendees think Scott is a rationalist par excellence. In Vancouver, the SSC meetup is actually bigger than the rationality meetups (at least in terms of regular attendance to events, though there might be more a unified culture among local rationalists). Scott is held in higher regard than Eliezer among a lot of Vancouverites. So that's an odd state of affairs that several local community members are open to hearing out a voice critical of Scott. This event is coming from a place of rationalists seeing it as test of their epistemic virtue and mettle, and a form of comfort zone expansion, in the face of a presentation they expect to walk away from still in disagreement with the theses presented. Both my friend and I are coming into this meetup very much being perceived as filling the role of Devil's Advocates.

What this is meant to be about, then, is organizing an event to criticize multiple, distinct sets of ideas from a single author/blogger (Scott), from different speakers (myself and my friend), who will be speaking to a single audience who are fans of that blogger. The goal is for us to rise to a challenge given to us by the audience, local community members: to convince them some overarching themes from SSC spread out over multiple, thematically related posts. My friend and I will be coming at this from two different angles, as I laid out in another comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], quoted below:

Right, if it wasn't clear in the OP, the statement "Scott Alexander is a pseudo-intellectual not worth reading" is a claim from a friend who is doesn't self-identify as part of the rationality community, but is involved in local hangouts and occasionally attends meetups. I should clarify he will be expounding upon on in his opinion "SSC bungles history and philosophy in general [much of the time], and the history and philosophy of science in particular."

I don't personally believe Scott is a 'pseudo-intellectual.' I think my friend believes something like how Scott has such a degree of influence over so many people that, like it or not, he has found himself as a sort-of intellectual in an age when bloggers wield more influence over public opinion, and accordingly, he should take more intellectual responsibility to not misrepresent the history of ideas. He will be making a case along these lines. Like others in this thread, I'm looking forward to how my skeptic friend will try to convince us of his definition of 'intellectual' or 'pseudo-intellectual,' and that Scott fits the bill for the latter, since he's facing such an uphill battle. I personally believe that to call Scott a pseudo-intellectual is erroneous as he doesn't fit a conventional and common-sensical definition of 'intellectual' in the first place, nor self-identifies as one.

So the claims about SSC being a pseudo-intellectual who misrepresents history, intellectual and other; and my claim about how discourse norms from SSC are over-applied within communities which closely follow SSC, are from two different people. Our thematic disagreements with SSC have little in common.

Some ambiguity from my post might be about how I use 'we' to refer to my friend and I as if we'll be doing the whole event together, as opposed to it being separated into two mostly unrelated halves.

What we're not trying to do is coordinate a hack job to oust someone from the community. Nor are we trying to unilaterally ruin their reputation locally. It's being recorded for those who can't attend who want to watch after. Also, there will likely be a transcription. If it helps, I can ensure the transcription is released before the video, if that's strongly preferred. However, multiple people have expressed an interest in watching a video recording of the live event, so that will also probably go ahead.

If transcripts end up not being provided, I would be willing to transcribe the video or part of the video, depending on how long it is (I'd probably be willing to transcribe up to about 2 hours of video, maybe more if it's less effort than I expect, having never really tried it before).

I can answer the meta-level question. My friend Jordan wasn't intending to write this up, as he was only going to be presenting to the local rationality group. I'm trying to get more rationality meetups/events to happen in Vancouver, so after Jordan made a Facebook event for this for the local rationality groups, I invited more people online, including here on LW. On the event invitation pages, there have been multiple requests to people who won't be present to either take notes, record it on video, and/or have a web presence for people to follow along online. There is already going to be at least ten people at the event in person. There might only be 30 people in the local rationality community, so it's significant. We haven't even invited everyone we might want to yet.

I'm also helping run the local university effective altruism (EA) club this year. My friend who has a background in film and I are going to upload recordings of speaker talks given to the club by experts on various fields related to EA. But we haven't done that before. So I thought what with the multiple requests to put up the product of this event online, this would be a good practice run before we did more official-looking videos for the university club.

Every time I asked Jordan if he was okay with these escalations of how public this event was, he okayed it. Since it was going to be a colloquiam-style event, and people online wanted to see it, I figured we'd take questions online. So I made this post.

Jordan has been hanging out with the Vancouver rationality community for several months, or maybe over a year now. He also knows people outside the community who also read SSC, as it's a popular blog. Apparently he's disliked SSC, told people about it one by one, realized that took too long, and has been planning a simple meetup about it for months. And he finally set it up. Even before I posted about it on LW, locally it definitely took on the feel of what the rationalist equivalent of a sporting event would be like. It has the feel of some kind of epistemic wresting match to me. I don't know how it wound up that way.

Who Jordan considers a real intellectual is a question he'll have to answer. I just think SSC is a neat blog. I'd actually be more critical of how SSC fans, rationalists and effective altruists have taken SSC memes like the virtue of silence, or blaming everything on Moloch, to stifle conversation the way the "politics is the mind-killer" meme is often overused. It seems readers use them in a stronger fashion Scott originally intended. He has never struck me as the sort to state things as if they're set in stone (e.g., he hardly writes in the sweeping tone Eliezer often wrote the Sequences in).

Thanks shminux. The local context is most people attending this event in person are highly skeptical of the thesis being advanced, and while we expect to remain unconvinced, Scott's critic is taking up the challenge. So if anything in the space Scott's critics will be facing an uphill battle.

Well… do you actually think that it’s never worth criticizing an author, rather than that author’s specific pieces of writing? Scott himself does this from time to time, does he not?

We're not trying to make a hostile echo chamber. I can write up some of my responses to Scott in the next week, as I've got a significant amount of free time. My friend didn't originally intend to write up his disagreements with Scott. But if there is sufficient interest from LW and SSC readers, I imagine he'd be willing to write some of it up. For what it's worth, I do believe my friend has picked other pieces, and will sample lots, that he think are representative of Scott's writing, and the ones he might zoom in on the most are just the ones I mentioned. I don't know if for some of the disagreements I have with Scott if there are patterns among them, but a lot of them are discourse-related, and they're popular posts in the SSC corpus.

Here is the video. Since my friend Jordan did the event as a colloquium, and he didn't anticipate the back-and-forth, most of the 2 hours was him criticizing Scott's classic post I Myself Am A Scientismist, launching off into a discussion of philosophy of science from there. In spite of Scott being tired of criticisms of his post on the Dark Ages, my friend Jordan is still convinced it's at a level of sufficient historical inaccuracy/imprecision there should be a record for SSC readers of how in fact misleading Scott can be when he is out of his depth. So, he may in the next few months do a follow-up on the Dark Ages, with a bit on other posts of Scott's he took issue with.

He is disinterested in writing this stuff up for the rationality community, but similar events in the future will be filmed and transcribed so they're more accessible.

They aren't available yet. I'm sorry it's taken us a while to move on this. I have the SD card with the video file on it. But I just realized my laptop doesn't have a port to take it. I can probably find another computer to upload it with in a matter of days. The transcript should be up a few days after that. So at least the video if not the transcript should be up within a week.