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I wanted to reply to this, but I realise I'd essentially just be regurgitating Scott's 2017 post "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning"*, so I'm just going to link it and summarize its thesis below.
It's no good saying "experts are reliable, aside from one or two blind spots". This isn't true from a reputational perspective, for the same reason that noticing a small factual error (no matter how minor or inconsequential) in a news article inevitably undermines the reader's confidence in the quality of the rest of the article: "if they got this wrong, what else did they get wrong?" But it's also no good for the simple fact that knowledge is holistic, not atomised. It's not like the facts and theories governing HBD are siloed in a separate warehouse from every other topic: they are inextricably intertwined with facts and theories in evolutionary biology, psychology, the social sciences, education, criminology etc. You might think that "the earth was created 6,000 years ago" is just a belief which can sit comfortably in your matrix of beliefs without affecting anything else, but before long you'll find yourself arguing that dinosaur skeletons were planted there by Satan or the speed of light changed over time.
So no, you can't just say to people "everything in these warehouses is 100% a-ok, but caveat emptor for those two warehouses labelled 'HBD' and 'Covid'." There's only one big warehouse and everything is touching everything else without so much as a sheet of clingfilm to prevent cross-contamination.
*Reading it six years later makes me sad: it almost scans as a preemptive apology for Scott's subsequent retreat into self-imposed intellectual incuriosity and cowardice, when his fearless willingness to step on whatever toes he pleased is what made his name in the first place.
Call me overly optimistic, but I can see him slowly toe the line in contentious CW matters more often these days. I recall modestly controversial statements about autism and transgenderism being linked because of the body sending signals that the autistic process incorrectly as a sign they don't have their ideal gender identity.
He's still more cowardly than I like, especially since the large sums he makes from Substack (>200k the last time he mentioned it) should more than insulate against any attack on his psychiatric practise, and he'd have a loyal base of patients nonetheless.
I think it's largely because he's too nice to alienate many of his friends in the rat community who have woke tendencies, but maybe he'll find a spine eventually, not that I don't enjoy his work.
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The most stunning thing for me is that cancel-culture enjoyers read the Parable of the Lightning and then just go on like they didn't just read someone talking about how they almost definitely believe in societally-unapproved wrongthink. He's defending hiding your true views in order to escape social censure and talking about the consequences of it, but the people providing that censure are so unperceptive that they don't even see someone practically bragging about it openly.
It's interesting, because the parable of the lightning could be taken in two ways:
"I am currently pretending not to be a crimethinker so as to cover my ass, but I'm not going to tell you which opinions of mine are crimethink." (Your interpretation.)
"I have already shown my power level by explicitly decrying all of the tenets of Ingsoc I disagree with - but it's lamentable that others in a more precarious social situation than me must continue to pretend not to be crimethinkers."
At the time of writing, Scott had already slaughtered a lot of the sacred cows of wokeness/progressivism/liberalism: arguing that hysteria around Trump was unfounded, that there are real differences between male and female brains which impact upon career choices, that false rape accusations are real and potentially life-destroying, that incels deserve our sympathy and some of their grievances are perfectly legitimate, that a lot of modern feminism is just socially-sanctioned bullying of low-status men. It wouldn't be unreasonable to think that a man brave enough to slaughter these sacred cows has already slaughtered all of the sacred cows that he's ever going to.
But Scott has not publicly come out in favor of HBD, which we know from his leaked e-mail he believes. That's a huge heresy, the kind of thing you get fired for.
says "has not archived that URL"
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You're absolutely right. My Straussian reading of "Kolmogorov" is that he's hinting at endorsing HBD (and possibly copping to a great deal more scepticism on the trans issue then he generally lets on) without coming out and saying so explicitly. He later came a lot closer to outright saying he endorses HBD in his review of The Cult of Smart.
But I wouldn't blame someone familiar with Scott's writing up to that point for interpreting "Kolmogorov" to mean "I've already come out and planted my flags in the sand, it's just a shame that so many other intelligent, well-meaning people can't do so for fear of social censure or cancellation".
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I think he's slaughtering cattle at a lower rate than he did before, especially since the NYT doxxing and the opening of the Substack.
Still occasionally committing a bit of crimethink, but most of the fire has been directed at less contentious (if important) targets like the FDA.
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You are correct that neither perspective is wrong. But it seems outrageously myopic and self absorbed to conclude that the people focused on "Twitter experts" (which include everyone from the media up to the Chief medical advisor to the President) care more about political consequences than the truth.
The people you refer to as experts are not the experts presented to the public, while the people presented to the public as experts shape public policy, so yes, we do care about political consequences and the wielding of power. This is the culture war thread after all. But the reason we are flipping out is because the twitter experts are the ones with actual power over society, and they are lying their asses off 90% of the time, and trying to hide their ignorance the other 10%. It is precisely the truth that we care about.
What's more, you have developed a definition of expert which renders everything you say inscrutable (at best) to everyone else, which is generally only good for sticking your head in the sand, not for engaging in thoughtful conversations.
Yeah I'm sorry, saying you are sticking your head in the sand was dumb - you're here after all, and you engage as much as you can from what I've seen. It totally fucked up the point of that paragraph too, because what I was really driving at was that it negatively impacts your ability to have conversations here about the culture war, because people either won't understand you or will think you are behaving maliciously.
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