5 ms·

Lots of very in depth book reviews. Scott is a psychiatrist, so lots of posts on the replication crisis in the soft sciences. And plenty of "rationalist" posts,

by texuf 6y ago

Lots of very in depth book reviews. Scott is a psychiatrist, so lots of posts on the replication crisis in the soft sciences. And plenty of "rationalist" posts, which are just deep thoughts on culture and society. I'm still not entirely sure why he's controversial. He's definitely very very smart. Unfortunately the rationalist community has a few people who will start arguing that IQ is at least partially genetic, therefore IQ is also tied to race somehow... I think? So watch out for those landmines.

bpodgursky 6y ago
Scott is very intentional about not getting into the landmine issues. IMO part of his service to the community is helping define those boundaries for the less... socially aware members of the community (ie, the things you Do Not Discuss).
- ardy42 6y ago
  > IMO part of his service to the community is helping define those boundaries for the less... socially aware members of the community (ie, the things you Do Not Discuss). Are you talking about stuff like this? https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f...
  - bpodgursky 6y ago
    This one comes to mind https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      I wish more people cited Frances Yates on Bruno - his heliocentrism was a side note even before he attacked Copernicus but he had some fantastic mnemonic techniques
      - wahern 6y ago
        The quality of comments on Slate Star Codex were part of what really made it great. (I assume Yates came to mind because of the comment to that Bruno post. That and many of the other comments to that post did a great job criticizing the argument that curious, intelligent people such as scientists must be irrepressible contrarians.) I hope that continues on Substack.
        selimthegrim 6y ago
        No, actually I didn’t get that far in the comments - I happen to have a copy of her book The Art of Memory
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        selimthegrim 6y ago
        I just wanted to say I did read and appreciate your followup.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      … And now I realise why people don't like SlateStarCodex. (I still like it.) I'm no historian, but the stuff he wrote about Catholicism doesn't actually seem right. Argued better than I can in [0]. And some of the comments are not just atrocious, but are not argued against[1]: > I think there are commonly-known models in all four quadrants. For example: > a. Widely accepted and good fit for reality: (Law of supply and demand) • “Supply and demand” is a good first-order model for certain market dynamics, but it only explains… at a guess, ⅓ of the economics I personally interact with. > b. Socially unacceptable and good fit for reality: (IQ tests as a good proxy for mental ability) • IQ tests are a reasonable proxy for certain, specific axes of mental ability within a subpopulation; the general “IQ tests are a good proxy for mental ability” claim is blatantly absurd. > c. Widely accepted and bad fit for reality: (Sexism as main cause of gender wage gap) • “Sexism is not the main cause of the gender wage gap”… I'm less certain that this is wrong, but I have actually done quite a bit of research on it (including reading what Scott Alexander wrote on the topic!) and this is splitting hairs, to be charitable; I think labelling it “rhetoric” is more accurate. No, several of the systemic injustices aren't due to individual people going “aha! I know what I'm going to do today: not pay my female underlings!”, you're right! But everybody already knows this,[2] and that's not what they mean when they say it's due to sexism. Things like a culture of “you only get a raise if you push for it” (not sure how widespread this is) can contribute to this, and that is, when considered in combination with the rest of everything (e.g. men may be “forthright” and “assertive”, but women are “bossy”), a sexist aspect of the culture. > d. Socially unacceptable and bad fit for reality (Vaccines cause autism) (The rest of the comment is mostly okay, apart from those three examples above; I'm cherry-picking to make a point, but I think the point's valid.) These are just trotted out as “obvious if you're one of us”, when they're probably not even correct. You don't go into a room where people say sensible things and think that your association with those people somehow makes what you say sensible, and you certainly don't sit in the audience of an entry-level lecture and assume that your fellow audience-members are all experts in the field, so why assume that you should take as blind truth things you read in the comments of a blog‽ Also, I'm not certain I agree with the message Scott's trying to convey. This uncertainty correlates with my uncertainty about the historical accuracy of his examples: when he has a point he wants to make and finds some evidence after the fact, it's generally obvious that he's doing so (probably because that skill doesn't get much use). [0]:https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/#comment-561556 https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-... [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/#comment-562561 https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-... [2]: https://blog.jaibot.com/ https://blog.jaibot.com/
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  His article about Hungarian mathematicians and the followup about Israeli Nobel Prize winners definitely hits those landmines. Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
- shadowprofile77 6y ago
  There should never exist a rubric known as "things you do not discuss" in any society that takes open debate and free expression seriously. Discussion is not violence and it should always be defended as a freedom regardless of how boorish or controversial its subjects. The very idea of such a category is grotesque and cowardly, to start.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - morlockabove 6y ago
    That's all well and good, but I'd still rather not see a bunch of autistics fired and unpersoned for unwittingly questioning modern dogma. We live in an increasingly religious time; better to go into questioning the orthodoxy with your eyes open.
  - lukifer 6y ago
    When I finally took the time to learn how the proof of The Halting Problem worked, I was fascinated by just how "edge-case" it actually is: it's less a general principle, than a proof that a black-hat exploit can always exist that will break any given halting-prediction algorithm. With the caveat that I'm a Chomskyan free-speech absolutist, and I generally agree with you: it's not hard to apply the same Halting Problem concept to free expression. Such an exploit can manifest many ways: QAnon, Red Guards, literal Nazis, Woke "Neo-Marxists", etc; but regardless, scale the intersection of extremist ideology and human social behavior until they approach infinity, and it's easy to see how they can (and historically have) resulted in a systemic collapse of free expression and free thought. (This was what Popper was trying to capture in his now-oft-quoted Paradox of Tolerance, which is now ironically over-applied as a lever of pre-emptive intolerance of challenges to orthodoxy!) I do agree that it's both a categorical and strategic mistake to succumb to an epidemiological model of memetic extremism. Even to the extent that model applies, extremist ideas only spread under social preconditions of susceptibility (as described by Hoffer [0]), and I don't think pre-emptive idea suppression is either right, or wise, or helpful. Extremist ideological infection is more a symptom than a root cause. And yet: we can still recognize that certain taboos might exist for a reason, such as the one against openly voicing "maybe we should just kill the people who disagree with us". James Lindsay (perhaps the second-most infamous opponent of postmodernist thought) has described postmodernism as a "universal solvent", capable of taking apart any idea. It's not that you never use such a cognitive tool; rather, one uses it cautiously and judiciously, when one has the wisdom to wield it properly. Similarly, we need safe spaces for dangerous thoughts, even of the Popperian or Halting Problem variety; yet it may be appropriate to hold social taboos against those ideas being used casually in polite society and the public discourse, lest they dissolve polite society and public discourse themselves. [0] https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-without-belief-in-a-devil/ https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-n...

by texuf 6y ago

bpodgursky 6y ago

Scott is very intentional about not getting into the landmine issues. IMO part of his service to the community is helping define those boundaries for the less... socially aware members of the community (ie, the things you Do Not Discuss).

ardy42 6y ago
> IMO part of his service to the community is helping define those boundaries for the less... socially aware members of the community (ie, the things you Do Not Discuss). Are you talking about stuff like this? https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f...
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  This one comes to mind https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    I wish more people cited Frances Yates on Bruno - his heliocentrism was a side note even before he attacked Copernicus but he had some fantastic mnemonic techniques
    - wahern 6y ago
      The quality of comments on Slate Star Codex were part of what really made it great. (I assume Yates came to mind because of the comment to that Bruno post. That and many of the other comments to that post did a great job criticizing the argument that curious, intelligent people such as scientists must be irrepressible contrarians.) I hope that continues on Substack.
      - selimthegrim 6y ago
        No, actually I didn’t get that far in the comments - I happen to have a copy of her book The Art of Memory
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        selimthegrim 6y ago
        I just wanted to say I did read and appreciate your followup.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    … And now I realise why people don't like SlateStarCodex. (I still like it.) I'm no historian, but the stuff he wrote about Catholicism doesn't actually seem right. Argued better than I can in [0]. And some of the comments are not just atrocious, but are not argued against[1]: > I think there are commonly-known models in all four quadrants. For example: > a. Widely accepted and good fit for reality: (Law of supply and demand) • “Supply and demand” is a good first-order model for certain market dynamics, but it only explains… at a guess, ⅓ of the economics I personally interact with. > b. Socially unacceptable and good fit for reality: (IQ tests as a good proxy for mental ability) • IQ tests are a reasonable proxy for certain, specific axes of mental ability within a subpopulation; the general “IQ tests are a good proxy for mental ability” claim is blatantly absurd. > c. Widely accepted and bad fit for reality: (Sexism as main cause of gender wage gap) • “Sexism is not the main cause of the gender wage gap”… I'm less certain that this is wrong, but I have actually done quite a bit of research on it (including reading what Scott Alexander wrote on the topic!) and this is splitting hairs, to be charitable; I think labelling it “rhetoric” is more accurate. No, several of the systemic injustices aren't due to individual people going “aha! I know what I'm going to do today: not pay my female underlings!”, you're right! But everybody already knows this,[2] and that's not what they mean when they say it's due to sexism. Things like a culture of “you only get a raise if you push for it” (not sure how widespread this is) can contribute to this, and that is, when considered in combination with the rest of everything (e.g. men may be “forthright” and “assertive”, but women are “bossy”), a sexist aspect of the culture. > d. Socially unacceptable and bad fit for reality (Vaccines cause autism) (The rest of the comment is mostly okay, apart from those three examples above; I'm cherry-picking to make a point, but I think the point's valid.) These are just trotted out as “obvious if you're one of us”, when they're probably not even correct. You don't go into a room where people say sensible things and think that your association with those people somehow makes what you say sensible, and you certainly don't sit in the audience of an entry-level lecture and assume that your fellow audience-members are all experts in the field, so why assume that you should take as blind truth things you read in the comments of a blog‽ Also, I'm not certain I agree with the message Scott's trying to convey. This uncertainty correlates with my uncertainty about the historical accuracy of his examples: when he has a point he wants to make and finds some evidence after the fact, it's generally obvious that he's doing so (probably because that skill doesn't get much use). [0]:https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/#comment-561556 https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-... [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/#comment-562561 https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-... [2]: https://blog.jaibot.com/ https://blog.jaibot.com/
Rebelgecko 6y ago
His article about Hungarian mathematicians and the followup about Israeli Nobel Prize winners definitely hits those landmines. Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
shadowprofile77 6y ago
There should never exist a rubric known as "things you do not discuss" in any society that takes open debate and free expression seriously. Discussion is not violence and it should always be defended as a freedom regardless of how boorish or controversial its subjects. The very idea of such a category is grotesque and cowardly, to start.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- morlockabove 6y ago
  That's all well and good, but I'd still rather not see a bunch of autistics fired and unpersoned for unwittingly questioning modern dogma. We live in an increasingly religious time; better to go into questioning the orthodoxy with your eyes open.
- lukifer 6y ago
  When I finally took the time to learn how the proof of The Halting Problem worked, I was fascinated by just how "edge-case" it actually is: it's less a general principle, than a proof that a black-hat exploit can always exist that will break any given halting-prediction algorithm. With the caveat that I'm a Chomskyan free-speech absolutist, and I generally agree with you: it's not hard to apply the same Halting Problem concept to free expression. Such an exploit can manifest many ways: QAnon, Red Guards, literal Nazis, Woke "Neo-Marxists", etc; but regardless, scale the intersection of extremist ideology and human social behavior until they approach infinity, and it's easy to see how they can (and historically have) resulted in a systemic collapse of free expression and free thought. (This was what Popper was trying to capture in his now-oft-quoted Paradox of Tolerance, which is now ironically over-applied as a lever of pre-emptive intolerance of challenges to orthodoxy!) I do agree that it's both a categorical and strategic mistake to succumb to an epidemiological model of memetic extremism. Even to the extent that model applies, extremist ideas only spread under social preconditions of susceptibility (as described by Hoffer [0]), and I don't think pre-emptive idea suppression is either right, or wise, or helpful. Extremist ideological infection is more a symptom than a root cause. And yet: we can still recognize that certain taboos might exist for a reason, such as the one against openly voicing "maybe we should just kill the people who disagree with us". James Lindsay (perhaps the second-most infamous opponent of postmodernist thought) has described postmodernism as a "universal solvent", capable of taking apart any idea. It's not that you never use such a cognitive tool; rather, one uses it cautiously and judiciously, when one has the wisdom to wield it properly. Similarly, we need safe spaces for dangerous thoughts, even of the Popperian or Halting Problem variety; yet it may be appropriate to hold social taboos against those ideas being used casually in polite society and the public discourse, lest they dissolve polite society and public discourse themselves. [0] https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-without-belief-in-a-devil/ https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-n...