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>I don’t think I’m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Like I mean that on most topics, I cou
>I don’t think I’m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Like I mean that on most topics, I could demolish their position and make them look like an idiot. Reduce them to some form of “Look, everything you say fits together and I can’t explain why you’re wrong, I just know you are!” Or, more plausibly, “Shut up I don’t want to talk about this!”
> And there are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not on every topic, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments.
He is admitting he might lose an argument against experts with decades worth of experience in their topic (most humble rationalist.)
Not sure if your comment is positive or sarcastic. Are you familiar with Scott Alexander's writings?
Yeah, I read some of his essays. I like some of the ones where he stayed in his area of expertise, like "Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics" (
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-con...). The other ones I've read are big fancy word salad unfortunately. Can you recommend others like the series I linked above?
The one I enjoy the most is
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
They're dense sometimes but for me the furthest thing from word salad. Every paragraph feels carefully considered and apposite.
If anything, Scott is underselling himself, and could probably argue circles against the average educated person.
Debates are the rationalists bread and butter, and you should expect them to be better at you the same way you would expect a trained boxer to beat you in a fistfight.
lmao
I've been to dozens of rationalist meetups (I don't know why), people are constantly talking out of their ass while constantly referencing contrived rhetorical devices. A lot of "just asking questions", confidently asserting solutions to e.g. palestine, cartels, etc. and contending with things TV pundits say.
I like some of Scott Alexander's writing, but "rationalists" in general online or IRL have not been very impressive to me.
Haha yeah, I've been to rationalist meetups too, and have come to the same conclusion that I don't like them very much. Too much IQ stroking for my tastes.
Scott specifically though, has an established history of thinking through arguments that I find much better than most, and I still think someone who trains at this stuff will do better.
To extend my analogy a little further from before, if you go to a boxing gym or boxing enthusiast meetup, there will be plenty of people there who like the idea of fighting, but don't know how to fight. That doesn't mean that a trained boxer still won't be tough in the ring though.
With boxing you know who won because the judges say so. If Scott argues something at a party, and the other person says "I don't know why you are wrong but you are." Who is to say who "won"? Scott comes away thinking he's an amazing thinker. The other person comes away thinking he is a contrarian good at inventing plausible sounding nonsense. Who won here?
It's funny he says circles so much.
Being an expert doesn't necessarily make you a good debater. Debates aren't about who's "right", they're about who has made a more convincing argument.
The article used alternative history cranks as an example of someone good at conjuring up seemingly convincing arguments, despite being pretty much the opposite of an expert.
The 10 Principles of Rationality:
1. Your beliefs and assumptions are facts and logic; other people's beliefs and assumptions are emotions and biases
2. If someone describes an experience you can't relate to, it's an anomaly and you should ignore it
3. You know more than other people (except for third-parties who agree with you: they are an unquestionable authorities)
4. Never engage with issues in the context of real events; only examine issues in contrived, hypothetical scenarios
5. Avoid debates with real people; instead, make up imaginary people and argue against the make-believe opinions you give them
6. If you do debate a real person, your primary goal is to make them look foolish (not to change their mind, or yours)
7. Your understanding of other people's feelings and beliefs is more accurate and nuanced than their own
8. Your wild guesses and baseless estimates are valid statistical data
9. It's ok to bend the truth when necessary to prove a point
10. If someone disagrees with you, it's because they're less rational than you
The 10 Decrees of Rationality:
1. A person's wealth is a direct measurement of their contribution to society
2. The best way to help people is by getting rich as fast as possible (it doesn't matter how)
3. When helping people, it's best to ignore their input and feedback (if they had sound judgement then they wouldn't need help)
4. When someone does something good, they're probably secretly doing it for terrible reasons
5. When rich people do something terrible, they're probably secretly doing it for good reasons
6. Believing in your favorite unproven conspiracy doesn't make you a "conspiracy theorist"
7. Stereotypes are based in truth, except for the ones that you find personally offensive
8. When people say your research is bogus, it means your research is really so profound that they're scared of its implications
9. Super-intelligent AI is the greatest threat to humanity
10. Capitalism is a natural, fair, and sustainable system that makes our world a better place
This is coming late and you might not read this, but I think you're reading too much into that quote.
Scott has an uncanny ability to cherry-pick facts, usually absurd ones to paint funny narratives. He even wrote a whole fiction book based on the concept, a universe that actually runs on Kabbalah. Here's a short self-contained chapter that showcases this:
https://unsongbook.com/interlude-%D7%AA-trump/ https://unsongbook.com/interlude-%D7%AA-trump/
It's totally believable that Scott could use this skill with serious facts in a serious argument, and befuddle almost anyone. Doesn't make him smarter or more right, just very persuasive in this narrow method.
> Scott specifically though, has an established history of thinking through arguments that I find much better than most
He has an established history of writing down detailed articles about arguments, yes.
Unfortunately, a significant number of his articles contain schoolboy errors that anyone who wants to claim they are better at thinking through arguments than the average person should never have made.
I'll mention just one such article:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/01/empireforest-fire/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/01/empireforest-fire/
Scott says:
"...democratic nations, like the US and UK, which have gone three hundred or so years with only the tiniest traces of state-sponsored violence (and those traces, like the camps for the Japanese during WWII, have not come from the Left)."
The two obvious, egregious schoolboy errors here are:
(1) Don't wars count as "state-sponsored violence"? The US and UK certainly haven't gone three hundred years without wars. And some of those wars were civil wars, so even the lame excuse of "well, wars are violence, but not against the state's own people" doesn't count.
And even if we let that pass, what about the US's treatment of Native Americans? What about the UK's treatment of Ireland? And so on. To say that the US and UK have gone three hundred years with "only the tiniest traces of state-sponsored violence" shows a level of historical ignorance that is just staggering.
(2) But even if we let all of the above pass: doesn't Scott know that the President who interned Japanese citizens in WWII was from the Left?
While Scott does make errors, I've found he works hard to avoid making them and forthright when he does (e.g., not everyone has a Mistakes page in the main navigation bar of their site[1])
What you're missing in your example is that, in context, the state-sponsored violence he's talking about is "against one's own people" (e.g., he also refers to it as a "reign of terror" a few times, like those of Robespierre, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc). I think there's a difference of kind between say the 19th century US's (awful) treatment of Native Americans (who were explicitly treated as "other" very consistently) and Stalin's (also awful) dekulakization (in which one-time typical members of Russian society were declared enemies of the state and purged).
So his point isn't that the UK and US have done no wrong, it's that despite having democratic systems for centuries that haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mistakes https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mistakes
> he works hard to avoid making them
He does so when he sees that there is a potential mistake to be made, yes. But he doesn't seem to me to work hard at all at questioning things that he appears to think are too obvious to need questioning. And yet those things are where he makes the egregious mistakes.
> forthright when he does
Yes, I agree with this: once he recognizes he's made a mistake, he's much better than most at acknowledging it.
> What you're missing in your example is that, in context, the state-sponsored violence he's talking about is "against one's own people"
I don't buy the hairsplitting distinction he's making there, but even leaving that aside, I already addressed this point in my post. The UK fought a war against its own people in the American Revolution. The US fought a war against its own people in the US Civil War. The US fought against Native Americans. The UK fought against Ireland. And so on.
> I think there's a difference of kind
I think this is even more of a hairsplitting distinction that I don't buy. But again, leaving that aside, if Scott wanted to make an argument for such a difference in kind, he should have made one. Just taking it as so obvious as not to need any argument is not justified. And the need for making such an argument doesn't even seem to be on Scott's radar. I find that either astoundingly obtuse, or astoundingly disingenuous.
I agree with you, and I think this is a recurring flaw you'll see in Rationalist communities: they love smart, Rationalist, Just So stories ("X can be explained by Y", never mind whether that explanation is actually correct...and best not mention it if you want to be an upstanding member of the community).
Btw, I noticed another egregious error: "France, where a reign of terror five years after the Bourbon monarchy is clearly contrasted with a hundred fifty terror-free years since it became democratic in 1870." Um, what? France is now on its Fifth republic, and the transitions haven't always been peaceful. Not to mention Indochina, Algeria (France's own leaders explicitly described what the French did to subdue Algeria as "terrorism"), etc. And many of the people who were terrorized in Algeria were French citizens.
> the Left?
You mean the GOPs modern definition of a leftist, or the vast majority of the times definition of a leftist?
https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Norman_Thomas/ https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Norman_Thomas/
Have you considered that it's possible that both you and Scott are particular good at reasoning, and it's everyone else that is much worse at this stuff?
You're pointing out a bunch of errors, but it's not clear to me that they're schoolboy errors (i.e. errors a schoolboy wouldn't have made). I would also venture to guess that the average educated person would make much more egregious mistakes.
> it's not clear to me that they're schoolboy errors (i.e. errors a schoolboy wouldn't have made)
If this is the case, IMO it's more a reflection of the awfulness of the schooling in our time than anything else. No schoolboy in the US of a century ago would have made such egregious historical errors, because they would have been taught some actual history instead of what students in the US today get taught.
My tongue in cheek response is that you are correct, because a century ago, WWII didn't happen yet.
Can you provably demonstrate that education quality was better a century ago? I'm not outright trying to refute you, so much as I have a belief that people tend to overstate the "good old days", so I usually prefer more concrete data points.
> To say that the US and UK have gone three hundred years with "only the tiniest traces of state-sponsored violence" shows a level of historical ignorance that is just staggering
Scott is not ignorant, therefore it seems more plausible that you should reconsider whether Scott is making the point that you think he's making.
> haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have
I'll comment on this separately because it goes deeper into the central claim of the arrticle. If you're going to make this claim, you need to ask whether the UK and US have actually avoided such things, or merely made sure they happened in other countries instead.
The US under Woodrow Wilson enabled the Soviet Union to exist by failing to support the Kerensky government, even though the US had troops in the area, and by discouraging the other allied powers from helping on the grounds that everybody was already too exhausted after four years of war. (Not to mention that Communism wasn't of Russian origin; it was exported to Russia by American and British intellectuals, such as Jack Reed. And one of their reasons for doing so was that Communism was supposed to be more "democratic".)
The US, UK, and France created the conditions for the Nazis to take power in Germany by imposing such harsh terms in the Treaty of Versailles (terms which were nothing like what the Armistice had implicitly promised).
The UK under Chamberlain, along with France, enabled Hitler's Germany to conquer Eastern Europe by pursuing a policy of appeasement.
The US under FDR allowed Stalin to take over all of Eastern Europe at the end of WW II (which, btw, made WW II a failure in Europe since the stated objective was to free Eastern Europe from tyranny, and Stalin by any measure was a worse tyrant than Hitler) because FDR wanted to suck up to Stalin and be his friend. (For example, read the historical book Stalin's War.) And even before that, FDR and his administration (and the press, such as the New York Times) systematically lied to the American people about the true nature of Stalin's regime, which was well known to the US government (and to reporters who were there) in the 1930s. If the American people had known what was actually happening in Stalin's Russia, they would never have agreed to having the USSR as an ally in WW II or allowing the USSR to take over Eastern Europe.
The US allowed Mao and his Communists to take over China by withdrawing support for Chiang Kai-Shek. If the US had supported Chiang, the entire country of China would have a government that's basically the government Taiwan has now (since Taiwan is where Chiang and his supporters went when Mao drove them out of China). Imagine how much better the geopolitical situation would be if that were the case.
Sure, if you want to make hairsplitting distinctions, none of these counted as "state-sponsored violence" against the people of the US or UK. But Scott's central claim in the article is that it is repressive monarchy, not "democracy", that causes reigns of terror. Before making such a claim and exonerating "democracies", one should at least examine the possibility that the "democracies" actually enabled the reigns of terror. And when you examine that claim historically, you find that, yep, "democracies" were doing exactly that.
> haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have
There's another point about this as well. Scott claims in the article that his "alternate model" makes better predictions than his "Reactionary model" (which is something of a straw man, but let that pass). But if we look at the cases he cites, here is how they actually stack up against the models:
French Revolution: Ended up with Napoleon taking power as Emperor, i.e., a monarch. Sure looks more like the Reactionary model to me.
Russian Revolution: While the USSR did end up falling apart of its own weight after decades of terror gradually morphing into somewhat less terrifying bureaucracy, what has happened to Russia since looks more like "repressive monarchy" than "government mellows out and does pretty okay".
Chinese Revolution: I suppose that the fact that the Chinese Communist Party has adopted some features of capitalism in order to allow the country to actually have some economic growth might count as a sort of "mellowing out", but it would still be very hard to make a case that China's government is closer to "doing pretty okay" than it is to "strong repressive monarchy".
In other words, even if we agree that the US and UK have reached Step 6 of Scott's "alternate model", historically, those countries (and other countries in the British Commonwealth, like Canada and Australia) are the only cases where that has happened. Historically, reigns of terror brought on by repressive regimes have in all other cases led to new repressive regimes.
(Btw, this is not to say that the Reactionary model's claim that the new monarchy in its last step is an improvement, is correct. The actual historical facts are that the new repressive regimes are often worse than the old ones.)
The claims he's addressing are, boiled down:
1) That leftist movements inevitably become more prone to violence (purges, genocide, violent repression of opponents in general, "reigns of terror") over time, and
2) Democracies have a strong-bordering-on-inescapable tendency to incubate such leftist movements, and to grow more leftist over time.
What we should expect to see, then:
1) Radical, violent leftist movements that gain power get ever-more violent over time.
2) Democracies become more unstable and prone to those specific sorts of violence, over time, and this unabated increase pushes ever closer to crisis points .
What we see instead is:
1) The worst leftist violence tends to be immediately preceded by authoritarian governments (which is what these fringe folks Scott's responding to want more of—this is a very specific and out-there movement making very specific and out-there claims, not the entire field of criticism of leftism or democracy), rather than to be preceded by democracy; to reach their fever-pitch very quickly; and to cool off over time rather than doing what we'd expect based on what was claimed to be true, which would be for them to typically get worse the more time passed.
2) Meanwhile, democracies seem... fairly stable, actually, without a clear, inevitably-trending-upward trend line on leftist-induced violence and chaos, or what have you. Fluctuating, sure, but where's the trend line for specifically that? Where are the ones ending in leftist reigns of terror? All of them are supposed to be heading toward a fever-pitch of leftist purges and genocide. Like, that specific thing is what was claimed. Does it look that way? LOL no.
I think what's key to following this is that the thing he's arguing against is a pretty fringe political view. He's not addressing some more-tame, more-mainstream criticism or model-for-the-development of either the left, or democracies, that might be stronger. He's trying to suss out whether the above, specifically, appears to describe actual, observable tendencies of leftism and democracies in the real world.