But it doesn't actually say that Scott wounds rationalism
Semantics. "Scott did something, and as a result rationalism has been wounded" is functionally equivalent to this. If Alex sincerely didn't intend to say anything about Scott wounding rationalism then he should have reworded his title, but the accusational tone of the entire article leads me to believe he did want to. I'm referring to stuff like:
Sadly, the rationalist community’s biggest contribution to pandemic discourse was to assist in shutting down a promising treatment
The damage rationalists have done to pandemic discourse darkens my heart.
his essay is still there, & its impact on "independent thinkers" permanent.
If even rationalists are responding to your careful analysis and argumentation with vague notions of tone and "bad faith," it suggests to me that they don't have a rational defense of their position. Whether they are or not, they appear to be acting as if they are wounded.
This is silly. I'm taking Alex's statistical critiques of Scott's work as a given, because I don't really care that much about the efficacy of Ivermectin to look into it that deeply. There's some utility to be gleaned from correcting errors in now-irrelevant issues and seeing where they happened to prevent them in the future, which I think Scott did a decent job of doing in his response.
On the other hand, I'm very interested in how criticism should be done in a general sense. Phrasing criticism constructively and in a non-inflammatory way is just as important as making the criticism in the first place. It's one of the founding principles of this site! Optimize for light, not heat. Failing to do so makes people reflexively defensive and less likely to engage with you in the future... which is exactly what happened with Scott. He stopped responding to Alex after initially putting in the effort to do so, since he felt that every interaction ended up badly.
Let's say I responded to your post with something like this:
"Wow, it must be great to be a person who's so oblivious to human communication that they think everything needs to be stated literally, as all the insinuated insults people lob won't land! It's just a shame it also likely implies some level of autism..."
The correct response would be "What the heck!?! We were having a sensible disagreement and now you're accusing me of having autism???"
To which I responded with "why are you offended? You're just paraphrasing my statement. I never said you specifically have autism!"
That's what I feel like is going on here.
For the record, I'm not accusing you of having autism, nor being "oblivious to human communication". That statement is used purely for demonstrative purposes.
So I guess you could technically say Alex never directly insults Scott, he just does something like what I just wrote instead. Of course he uses less crass words than what I just used, but it's still a personal attack.
Maybe the title "Scott Alexander corrects error: Ivermectin effective, rationalism wounded." indeed wasn't supposed to say that Scott himself wounded rationalism with his article, and that it was just about the community response not aggressively pushing back. In that case, let's take a few other instances:
What about when Alex accuses Scott of cognitive dissonance for not fully retracting his article?
What about when Alex lists a bunch of tenets of rationalism and implies that Scott broke them because they disagree on something?
What about when Alex accuses Scott of stopping where he did because he wants to "confirm his biases"?
Maybe some or all of those aren't meant to be inflammatory or to be personal attacks. If that's the case though, he should really, really change his writing style because to at least some people, it comes off that way.
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Notes -
Semantics. "Scott did something, and as a result rationalism has been wounded" is functionally equivalent to this. If Alex sincerely didn't intend to say anything about Scott wounding rationalism then he should have reworded his title, but the accusational tone of the entire article leads me to believe he did want to. I'm referring to stuff like:
This is silly. I'm taking Alex's statistical critiques of Scott's work as a given, because I don't really care that much about the efficacy of Ivermectin to look into it that deeply. There's some utility to be gleaned from correcting errors in now-irrelevant issues and seeing where they happened to prevent them in the future, which I think Scott did a decent job of doing in his response.
On the other hand, I'm very interested in how criticism should be done in a general sense. Phrasing criticism constructively and in a non-inflammatory way is just as important as making the criticism in the first place. It's one of the founding principles of this site! Optimize for light, not heat. Failing to do so makes people reflexively defensive and less likely to engage with you in the future... which is exactly what happened with Scott. He stopped responding to Alex after initially putting in the effort to do so, since he felt that every interaction ended up badly.
Let's say I responded to your post with something like this:
"Wow, it must be great to be a person who's so oblivious to human communication that they think everything needs to be stated literally, as all the insinuated insults people lob won't land! It's just a shame it also likely implies some level of autism..."
The correct response would be "What the heck!?! We were having a sensible disagreement and now you're accusing me of having autism???"
To which I responded with "why are you offended? You're just paraphrasing my statement. I never said you specifically have autism!"
That's what I feel like is going on here.
For the record, I'm not accusing you of having autism, nor being "oblivious to human communication". That statement is used purely for demonstrative purposes.
So I guess you could technically say Alex never directly insults Scott, he just does something like what I just wrote instead. Of course he uses less crass words than what I just used, but it's still a personal attack.
Maybe the title "Scott Alexander corrects error: Ivermectin effective, rationalism wounded." indeed wasn't supposed to say that Scott himself wounded rationalism with his article, and that it was just about the community response not aggressively pushing back. In that case, let's take a few other instances:
What about when Alex accuses Scott of cognitive dissonance for not fully retracting his article?
What about when Alex lists a bunch of tenets of rationalism and implies that Scott broke them because they disagree on something?
What about when Alex accuses Scott of stopping where he did because he wants to "confirm his biases"?
Maybe some or all of those aren't meant to be inflammatory or to be personal attacks. If that's the case though, he should really, really change his writing style because to at least some people, it comes off that way.
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