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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26211 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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One is reminded of the Chinese parable where the penalty for being late is death.

This is absolutely irrelevant to anything you are saying, but man, I had forgotten how biting some of the earlier SSC posts are.

Age really does make congenial, erudite but uninteresting milksops of us all.

Oh I think Scott can still push out bangers when he wants to, his fiction is still just as good, it's more he doesn't want to agitate the powers that be much more, which makes sense once your public name is out there.

I wager it's more because he prizes staying in the good graces of his immediate social circle, if memory serves, the dude who happened to date (marry?) his non-binary ex Ozzy leaked private emails from Scott where he acknowledges his surreptitious belief in HBD, which is an unpopular stance to hold in the EA community (and partially taboo in Rat circles like LW). This would be obvious to anyone who read his OG blog, before SSC, covering his trip to provide medical aid to Haiti.

This isn't to deny that he probably didn't like the controversy from the NYT exposé, but from a more detached perspective, it didn't really do him any harm and a lot of good. He garnered a great deal of sympathy, even from his opponents, and his Substack made >250k annually shortly after he opened it. That is already median wage for a US doctor, and at this point I expect it's long eclipsed his regular income.

And he wasn't really susceptible to cancelation in the sense of being sacked and left unemployed, it takes quite a bit to do that to a doctor, and short of being struck off the register for gross malpractice, they have the option of doing private consultation or heading to places with good salaries but more flexible standards in who they hire.

Another reason I hold that opinion is because he still criticizes what might well be called essential elements of the PTB, such as calling for the FDA to be, if not delenda est, significantly reformed.

This isn't to deny that he probably didn't like the controversy from the NYT exposé, but from a more detached perspective, it didn't really do him any harm and a lot of good.

The things he posted after the expose were a lot more milquetoast. I'd say it did a lot of harm.

Harm to the diversity of his writing? Sure. Material harm to him, be it financially or through social ostracism? Quite the opposite.

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