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Notes -
I know I gave my initial reaction below but let me distill my thoughts a bit more:
The reason a post like this from Scott rubs me the wrong way is because I think it undermines a lot of Scott's own writings, and in particular his defense of Institutions. Scott knew the truth about HBD all along, but his public position was still in compliance with HBD denial. He never publicly challenged the wrong consensus, and he drove truthful criticism of the mainstream consensus from his own community- essentially banning it. So even though he privately believed in HBD he still publicly acted like an HBD denier. This is very significant in understanding Culture War and the fallacy of Mistake Theory.
Scott didn't change his public position due to any new argument or new data, he's citing the oldest data there is. His public position on the issue is only changing because the culture war is shifting. Scott should be considered among the highest percentile intelligent, good-faith intellectuals with expertise in the soft sciences. But he still basically enforced the consensus while privately knowing it was wrong, until the political conflict underpinning Culture War took a significant turn.
It is about political conflict, that was what drove Scott's behavior before on his issue, and that's what is driving it now. Institutions are unreliable, it is absolutely possible for something as asinine as HBD denial to exist as consensus in institutions because, at the end of the day, even the best of them are just like Scott and have a million reasons to not put themselves at risk by pointing out the emperor is naked.
In 2017, Scott published this.
From me, this reads as him mostly buying into HBD as far as Ashkenazis are concerned. Of course, once you acknowledge that one ethnic group has a genetic intelligence advantage, it would be an amazing coincidence if all the other ethnics groups were exactly the same, but it is a point he did not make explicitly.
Still, placing the dots out there but not connecting them for the reader is far from "enforced the consensus".
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The reason it rubs me the wrong way is that he used his influence, such as it was, to politically support the very people that were keeping him in terror of speaking out. A part of me feels like it's not fair he gets to breathe a sigh of relief now.
"Don't kick your dog when he comes to you."
Was this a great issue of intellectual integrity for Scott? No.
Has he at long last come around to admitting the truth? Yes.
So accept him as an ally and try to resist bitterly complaining about his past conduct.
I never said that the feelings I have are good or healthy, just that I have them.
But let's not get carried away with all this "ally" talk. I expect an ally to do something when bullets are flying my way. And in any case, I don't particularly care about HBD, I care about people being able to talk about it, without being ostracized.
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Is he still using ACX grants to provide cash for the outgroup?
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Besides endorsing Trump's presidential opponents (IIRC), who were close allies to wokism, what has he done to "politically support the very people that were keeping him in terror of speaking out"?
From what I remember, he has been a vocal critic of woke politics (which would be the ones most likely to attack people over HBD) for quite a few years. The distinction blue tribe v grey tribe was mentioned by him in 2014, for example.
That's strong "aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" energy, he was on the opposite side of the single thing that lets him speak his mind now. In his defense I can only say that even I didn't know the election will have such a strong impact on the vibes.
Also, his past writings are good, but 2014 Scott is a very different writer from 2024 Scott.
While I think that the second Trump presidency is likely an important reason for Meta's change of mind regarding the culture war, I think it is more likely that people becoming fed up with wokeness lead to both the Trump victory and Scott feeling more free to speak his mind.
Scott never had mass appeal, the average US voter was never going to read through his lengthy articles. His main mechanism to effect change was always that some of the people who read him are quite influential, causing his ideas to (sometimes) diffuse far. While for some celebrities, whom they endorse for president is their most important political decision by far, I do not think that Scott's endorsement was all that impactful.
I think that modelling Scott as someone whose most important political goal was to tell the world about HBD is likely wrong. Being able to voice his opinions about HBD without getting cancelled by twitter mobs seems certainly to be part of his utility function, but not the whole of it.
Personally, his article on the martians was what caused me to update towards HBD. He was in a unique position to even make me consider it. I had read him for some time, and he was making a careful argument. He wisely made his argument about the Ashkenazi, not the Haitians. If I had encountered HBD claims elsewhere on the internet, I would most likely have replied "just fuck off back to stormfront".
This is going to be hard to debate, as it largely concerns the inner state of mind of people I either never met, or met only online, but I have a lot of trouble buying into that theory. As far as I could tell wokeness was always ranging from an embarrassment to a source of terror. The true believers were always a minority (something in the range of 10% if memory serves, there were some studies / surveys done on that but I'm not sure I can find them), and it doesn't really look like they suddenly changed their mind either. If you look at the sentiment on Twitter, it didn't change because suddenly people got fed up, it only changed because people were no longer being banned, or were even getting unbanned.
To me it looked like Kamala vs. Trump was "Wokeness on trial", if it delivered a victory, we'd still be stuck in the 2016-2024 vibes. The Blue Tribe went all in with the Coconut-Couchfucker-Joy offensive and there was no sign anyone was getting fed up. In fact, I distinctly remember people making the same old "if you want wokeness to subside, vote for Harris" argument that they were making during Biden's campaign, on the same assumption that it's the trumpness of Trump that made everybody go crazy, and if he wins again, we're just going to have a rerun of 2016-2020... except that didn't happen, he won, and now everybody is talking about the "vibe shift". I really honestly doubt this would be happening if Harris was president.
I agree, because I think the way you're describing it is going way too far, but to me it's clear the issue is quite important to him. I mean, it's literally the first thing he chose to talk about when the environment became more permissive. It's not like he's short on controversial takes he could revisit after the fear of cancellation went away,
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Right, Kolmogorov Complicity IS complicity. It's one thing to shut up, and to tell others they should shut up because otherwise the state will kill them. But Kolmogorov himself actively testified against his mentor. And Scott Aaronson suggests as part of the Kolmogorov Option that "You even seek out common ground with the local enforcers of orthodoxy." Sorry; at that point you're you're just one of their footsoldiers, and deserve contempt.
Yeah, but that's the difference: Kolmogorov and Aaronson compromised themselves too much, and for me at least, ended up on the wrong side of the friend-enemy distinction, while Scott (very, very) mildly condemned giving that much succor to one's enemies.
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It refutes the main far right talking points.
Voting doesn’t matter : Trump’s election has loosened the tongues of intellectuals who can finally express “what the man on the street is really thinking”.
Discussion is pointless/conflict theory: The Truth triumphs yet again against all attempts to censure it (including a brief attempt by our own mods) ; kept alive by the tireless arguing of myself and others, transferred to the public, voted in, correcting course, guiding & guarding us on our way to a better future.
...through conflict, and not through discussion. This is derived directly from the previous point.
The discussion was had and was highly relevent to subsequent developments. There was more than zero conflict, particularly around the aquisition of X/Twitter, but discussion ultimately won.
Do you think we'd be where we are now on the issue, if Harris won?
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Is voting conflict now? According to SS and his ridiculous euphemism "memetic political conflict", even discussion is conflict.
As Clausewitz famously said, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Another way of looking at it is that politics is a continuation of war by other means.
Some people use this logic to justify democracy as the alternative to bloody civil war. Rather than slaughtering each other to resolve political conflicts, we vote and then accept majority rule.
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Of course.
Another way to look at it is the vote that happens after a debate to determine the winner.
But even from a perspective of the vote as representing force, the vote is less an instrument of conflict than a sublimation of it.
It's a proxy for "how many divisions can you field" and the further it is removed from that the less useful it is as a consensus mechanism. Because then, you "win" an "election" and the people with more divisions topple your illegitimate regime.
You can't escape violence, you can only add abstractions on top of it. Liberals used to understand this before they fell for their own propaganda.
I understand one-man-one-gun-one-vote fine, I don't see why it should undermine debate or democracy.
If you want; then I am pro-abstraction. One man goes around shooting people - another talks to them, then counts their vote, and then, only if he has won, uses limited force. Do you think they are the same?
It's not the same. We've long known of the distinction between abstraction heavy and light regimes, i.e. Machiavelli's Foxes and Lions. But I'm not sure you are fully aware of the tradeoffs.
For instance, a common criticism of fox regimes is that they, by nature, have to be totalitarian. The legitimacy they rest on relies on the illusion of public support, which means they have to control and shape public opinion as much as possible. This is how it is paradoxically democracies that have brought forth general conscription, total war and the most sophisticated forms of psychological warfare.
This isn't all to say that debate is useless or pointless. Nor even that Fox regimes are strictly worse that Lion ones. Merely that it is foolish to think oneself secure from the forces of power, however many pieces of paper one hides behind.
Debate only really is possible in the areas of life that do not concern power, and this isn't something that can be changed. To the dismay of any and all anarchists.
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Yes, voting is conflict. Unlike discussion, voting means the majority wins.
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What does taking over specific positions of political power have to do with the truth triumphing via discussion? Why were the intellectuals' tongues so tied before the elections? Why couldn't they just convince their opponents of the truth by making superior arguments? Yeah, in this context it's clearly conflict.
So voting works, we’re definitely done with all the nonsense about elites controlling everything and democracy being a sham? Okay, next.
They did. Some, like our progenitor, in a rather ‘conflict avoidant’ way. Not my style, but still. Or did HBD warriors use their fists beat up on their enemies until they gave up?
Sure, but that necessarily means that discussion doesn't.
> A billionaire very likely changed the result of the election by buying a communications platform
> "we’re definitely done with all the nonsense about elites controlling everything and democracy being a sham?"
How? Why?
He didn't. He got bullied into keeping his mouth shut, and into personally shutting the mouths of anyone who agreed with him, until Trump won.
People, a large part of which knows nothing about HBD, used their votes to take away power from people who were censoring and terrorizing HBDers.
Why? Is discussion incompatible with democracy?
According to the previous alt right theory, “‘the elites” were acting collectively, in a specifically “‘New York Times” direction, against the wishes of the masses, always successfully. It wasn't predicting an isolated eliteman taking a turn to the right with popular support.
Although maybe that’s a caricature of alt right thinking on my part. A caricature of my position would be that billionaires/elites are just as influential as normal people.
That’s not what Moldbug’s theory was. Moldbug’s theory was always that a lot of ‘nominal’ elites were successful finance/tech/etc people who had a lot of money but were actually subordinate in power terms to a class of people who cared more about politics.
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Maybe we could discuss the actual merits of, say, de Mesquita et al.'s theory of the selectorate held against modern incarnations of Elite Theory instead of pretending that a school of political analysis that dates back to Polybius is a machination of a barely extant US political movement?
Who knows, we may well learn something.
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You gave "Voting doesn’t matter" along with "Discussion is pointless/conflict theory" as points that disprove the dissident right narrative. In the case we are discussing (I should have pointed out that "necessarily" was still meant in the context of the conversation, not universally) voting mattering is a direct consequences of discussion yielding no results, while a political victory caused a massive shift.
If discussion yielded results, it's not clear that voting would have mattered.
EDIT: actually let be more brief - when you are not voting on the issue that's being discussed, but the vote has a huge impact on the truth triumphing, while discussion has almost none, then the discussion not mattering results directly from voting mattering.
Well, perhaps you can outline what your actual position is, and then I can properly respond to it? You've been mostly focused on caricaturing the right, rather than putting forward what you believe.
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You'll notice that success at the polls was conditionned on coordinated elite action. Without Elon Musk, there is no trifecta. Voting works as a coordination mechanism for existing forces, it doesn't create forces out of thin air.
You should read Michels instead of imagining caricatures of his political model.
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No it wasn't. In 2017 he wrote The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project, as well as this post that was probably the most explicit pre-AstralCodexTen:
Learning To Love Scientific Consensus:
Coincidentally that post also addresses your point. Even with something as taboo and suprressed as HBD, you can anonymously survey experts in the field and get overwhelming support. That doesn't translate into "institutions" being automatically trustworthy, something like a public statement by a university or an article in the New York Times has little in common with an anonymous survey of experts. But I don't think he ever said otherwise. He's posted about how media outlets rarely outright lie and prefer misleading people in other ways, but that isn't the same as saying they're generally trustworthy.
I think that first one definitely had an influence on me seeing population IQ differences as a reasonable sort of thing to believe in, before I'd even considered wider implications.
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I'm kind of curious about your response here, so I'm hoping you'd be willing to make it more concrete. Can you pick out the top one to three posts from Scott that you think are contradicted by his current position on HBD?
I'm not sure if I follow on the connection between HBD and Mistake Theory vs. Conflict Theory. Surely, the following can both be true: 1) IQ differences between groups are real and explained in part by genetic differences, and this affects the kinds of societal institutions that can be successful, and 2) it is better to treat policy disputes as debates where facts and evidence could theoretically make everyone converge to the correct prescriptions for society (mistake theory), rather than treating them as a war (conflict theory.)
Heck, going back through Scott's original Conflict vs. Mistake article, I find:
Most of that, except maybe the part about voters seems completely compatible with HBD. Even taking the voters into account, through a combination of voluntary eugenics, and public education you could theoretically raise the societal IQ and show that mistake theory is a possible path to a successful society.
This line from "Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell":
...caused me to update negatively on Scott when I learned of the Christopher Brennan emails (which were sent before it) - not because I disapproved of his private position, but because this implied that line was a pure Denial of Peter.
Not that pure. There’s three levels of deniability to soften the lie of ‘I disagree with’: ‘sort of’ , ‘in a way’(redundant), ‘creeps me out’ (focusing on his feelings to avoid admitting his thoughts).
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That conflict vs. mistake article is pretty wild to go through.
Not, "mistake theorists believe that black people are dumber, but hide their power levels because doing otherwise would mean sticking their necks out."
...an almost exact summation of why the technocracy supported anti-HBD views. And the only way to get Scott to reveal his true thoughts was to change who was powerful. No amount of debate and convincing would have worked - he was already privately convinced, after all.
I reject the idea that there is a hard binary - you can believe that mistake theory is right for some circumstances for some people and conflict theory in others. When I talk to my dad about how stupid DEI is, he is receptive. When I argue with my brother about HBD... well it's just a bad idea. Thanksgiving dinners are a lot more pleasant if I just accept conflict theory on that one and recognize the only way to change anyone's mind is to simply win a presidential election first.
Why is it a wild read? You seem to be saying Scott is part conflict theorist, but I don't think you've argued it well.
A mistake theorist does not lie down on a train track to kill himself. He will move out of the way of an oncoming train. A mistake theorist will not try to have a discussion with a train. Likewise, a mistake theorist knows that conflict theorists exist. He will probably not try to have a discussion with them.
Know the difference
For Scott to "be a Conflict theorist on some things" you would need to demonstrate that he believes his opponents to be the enemy, in the #2 sense. I think you've only demonstrated that he does not lie down on train tracks.
He himself is someone who could only be modelled by conflict theory - his public actions and stated opinion were not motivated because he was mistaken about HBD; he misrepresented his own beliefs because the dominant intellectual paradigm prevented the technocracy (ie Scott) from publicly advancing the most accurate viewpoints or influencing policy in a logical direction. He could only be 'convinced' by a display of political power by the opposition. This is exactly the situation presented by the conflict theorist in the quote I pulled.
Oh, this doesn't make Scott a Conflict Theorist (Know the difference between #1 and #2). This just means the Conflict Theorist's description of reality is correct - Power is power.
Agreed. I was trying to say that the post was wild because in retrospect because many of the conflict theorist's beliefs seem justified in retrospect, and that Scott's own revealed behavior is a repudiation of his (and, admittedly, my own) naive inclination towards mistake theory as a descriptive model.
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Scott changed his public opinion on HBD due to the shifting winds of the passions of the (at least online- i.e. his audience) public, largely thanks to Elon Musk acquiring Twitter- unbanning all the icky right-wingers who did the uncredited yeoman's work for many decades challenging a blatant lie deeply rooted in our collective consciousness. Scott participated in the censorship of that group of people, although you could argue he low-key sabotaged the consensus with whatever support he gave of TheMotte.
But Scott's public opinion hasn't changed because of increasing IQ of technocrats motivated to improve policy; it changed because of a turning point in a memetic political conflict. You can't change the hearts and minds of the technocrats with evidence and well-reasoned arguments in the most important cases, you have to do it with political victory.
If this political shift hadn't happened, the high-IQ technocrats, including himself, would have happily continued defending the blatant lie of HBD denial and the catastrophic downstream political effects. But I do think his turnabout on HBD is basically explained by Musk's acquisition of Twitter. What people call a "vibe shift" is literally a politically-motivated billionaire changing content TOS and moderation on a political platform, not technocrats being convinced by rational argumentation and new evidence.
The intelligence-worship falls apart, because even the most intelligent are slaves to political conflict. You can't ignore it or pretend you are above participation or taking sides and only care about IQ, evidence, and reason.
I think you're kind of assuming too much.
I think it is perfectly consistent for Scott to chose to sacrifice any gains in the HBD space, for all of the other gains he could get everywhere else in the Overton window. That kind of pragmatism isn't a repudiation of mistake theory, it is an example of living it out.
If a position is truly poison for those who profess it in the public sphere, then it makes sense to me that a good mistake theorist will plod along in the background, working on fixing the policy issues they can openly and safely speak about without risk of reputational damage.
The reputational damage is caused by opponents engaging in conflict theory, but nothing says you have to stoop to their level.
The consequence of Scott's ethos is that, even though his job is ostensibly to be a rational, independent thinker in the public space, he's ultimately a Johnny-come-lately to one of the most important questions of the day. And his hesitancy was due to political headwinds- not evidence and arguments. I don't doubt the personal practicality of abstaining from the debate- and banishing dissent of the consensus from his own community, I question his value for "moving the Overton window" on things like the Melatonin Question but abstaining on HBD until political winds shifted in favor of the viewpoint he has now taken.
I definitely think he was a factor in me being convinced of HBD. Posing as a within-the-overton-window thinker while talking about views that might direct one to find what's actually true more plausible worked in my case, and surely there were a bunch of others for whom that was true as well.
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Scott could have been debanked and stripped of any professional license. Imagine not being able to get a bank account or credit card.
No, Scott was not at serious risk of being debanked; in the speech context, that was reserved for those who made a serious run at pre-Musk Twitter, and Scott was too niche for that. And all he had to do to vastly reduce the risk of being stripped of his professional license... was not to practice in the place most utterly under the control of the people who would do that. Scott never should have moved back to the Bay Area.
If you have celebrity status in one place on earth, you live there.
There are other cities with active rationalist communities. He could have gone to New York or Portland, and that would have been slightly less insane. Even better, he could have moved to Austin or Miami and been totally safe.
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How would Scott self-immolating have helped anything? It's not like he was sitting on some special knowledge that no one else in the universe had or that people couldn't read about in other blogs if they were inclined to. If he had explicitly pushed against the Overton Window on it, the Overton Window would have thrown him into the outer darkness. You push against the things you can shift, not sleeping tigers that are blocking the path.
Sometimes the Kolmogorov Option is the right one.
I don't think posting this exact blogpost 7 years ago would have been self-immolation. It would have been interesting and brave, neither of which it is now. Scott never claimed to be any Galileo, but what's clear is that to be a Galileo you need to have a bone to pick politically in order to be induced to face the headwinds of actually challenging Authority. It's not just about rational arguments and evidence.
What bones did Scott have to pick with authority back in 2017 outside of stuff like "unfuck the FDA somehow"?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-does-culture/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/
Or in general
https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/things-i-will-regret-writing/
https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/things-i-will-regret-writing/page/2/
Some of these were likely more controversial in their original than their current form.
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He picked quite a few bones with the entire social justice memeplex, which was clearly backed by authority.
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He doesn't, hence the capitulation to the consensus until the winds shifted. But Scott would mark it as a virtue that he has no bones to pick, or a vice that HBD-believing right-wing poaster is motivated politically. But it is clear that political radicalism is required to challenge strongly-held beliefs like this. The right-wingers speaking truth to power actually advanced knowledge in the face of adversity, Scott played neutral Switzerland until it was convenient to take the other side.
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I disagree somewhat. The politically motivated billionaire made the vibe shift possible by changing the TOS on his platform, but in my opinion the vibe shift didn't happen until Trump won. My impression is that until his victory was secured, progressives still thought Musk could be dealt with in the short to medium term.
Oh sure, but that only drives the point home. In essence, Scott has changed his public opinion on HBD because Trump won. We are very far from "high-IQ technocrats policy-maxing social utility." Nope- it's political conflict.
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I was under the impression that he did this on purpose and essentially told people who could read between the lines explicitly in "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning". You're totally right about what he was doing and he was always a HBD enjoyer, but he was very clearly pursuing a specific strategy to try and do as much as possible without getting the eye of sauron turned on him and his community. I think he was right to do so as well - the "cause" of HBD wouldn't really be served by Scott Alexander self immolating and tainting the reputations of a lot of other people who believed essentially the same thing, as opposed to what he actually did in continuing to allow his community to exist.
Also, look just how many likes that post got. Clearly a lot of his commenters got the message.
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