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Personally I think Scott Alexander is overrated. His writing style is extraordinarily verbose, which lends itself well to argumentative sleights of hand that ma
by _t9ow 1y ago
Personally I think Scott Alexander is overrated. His writing style is extraordinarily verbose, which lends itself well to argumentative sleights of hand that make his ideas come across as much more substantive than they really are.
- amarcheschi 1y agoVerbose? Only that? That guy had done a meta review of ivermectin or similar things that would make anybody think that's a bad idea but no, apparently he's so well versed he can talk about ai and ivermectin all at once i also wonder why he had to defend such a medicine heavily talked about one side of the political spectrum... Then you read some extracts of the outgroup and you see "oh i'm just at a cafe with a nazi sympathizer" (/s but not too much) [1] [1] https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to...
- _t9ow 1y agoI stopped reading him ~10 years ago, so I didn't keep up with what he wrote about ivermectin. Thanks for sharing that blog post. I think it illustrates very well what I meant by employing argumentative sleights of hand to hide hollow ideas.
- amarcheschi 1y agoAnd they call themselves rationalist but still believe low quality studies about iq (which of course find whites to be higher iq than other ethnicities). the more you dig deep, the more it's the old classism, racism, ableism, misoginy, dressed in a shiny techbro coat. No surprise musk and thiel like them
- refulgentis 1y agoThis is so damn good, thanks for sharing. I've gotten some really really good links from HN the last month that I never would have guessed existed and are exactly the intellectual argument I'm missing for some of my extreme distastes.* I gotta get widen outside Twitter. * Few things tell me more than when someone invoke "grey tribe" as an imaginary group of 3rd people who, of course, think ponderously and have the correct conclusions, unlike all those other people with motivated thinking.
- amarcheschi 1y agoI'm absolutely glad about someone finding my comments - and more than my comments, the article posted - enlightening. On my submbissions you might find some similar articles i posted in the last days, i'll link here some: this is an asnwer of an actual ai researcher to some of the ai 2027 research and the sphere in general: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_ive-just-reviewed-what-might-be-the-most-activity-7313692424499789824-Sbs0/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_ive-just... https://www.truthdig.com/articles/before-its-too-late-buddy/ https://www.truthdig.com/articles/before-its-too-late-buddy/ https://www.truthdig.com/articles/effective-altruism-is-a-welter-of-fraud-lies-exploitation-and-eugenic-fantasies/ https://www.truthdig.com/articles/effective-altruism-is-a-we... https://web.archive.org/web/20130426115531/http://plover.net/~bonds/cultofbayes.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130426115531/http://plover.net... https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-of-longtermism-and-existential-risk https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/07/the-dangerous-id... there's also a sarcastic subreddit that dunks on this sphere called sneerclub