I agree it's a thoughtful post and it makes a good point, but at the same time, it's an issue with the way a lot of people take Scott Alexander's posts. He is c

I agree it's a thoughtful post and it makes a good point, but at the same time, it's an issue with the way a lot of people take Scott Alexander's posts. He is clearly not putting this out there as absolute truth, just saying here is an explanation, it sounds plausible, and I can't find much evidence immediately to disprove it. But he also says there are other equally plausible explanations he can't disprove. He often, if not always, puts an "epistemic status" disclaimer at the top of his posts, and the wider web community doesn't seem to know how to deal with those. They are used to interpret bloggers and the opinion sphere as 100% believing and promoting anything they write about. But that is very much not what Scott is doing. He understands quite well that causality is way too complicated to ever conclusively answer a question like "why did history turn out the way it did?"