[Content note: various slurs and insults]

I.

Last post I thanked some of the people who have contributed to this blog. But I forgot some of the most important contributors: the many readers whose give valuable feedback on everything I write.

So here’s a short sample of some of the feedback I’ve gotten over the past three years. I’m avoiding names and links to avoid pile-ons, but you can probably find most of these if you Google them.

II.

“It’s like someone tried to make fivethirtyeight as uninteresting as possible.”

“Slate Star Codex: 20,000 words on ‘feminism is bad’ and ‘Tom Swifties are the funniest shit I’ve ever seen'”

“Mark Atwood spent a month on the SSC registry of bans. It is my belief that Scott uses his toolbox of psychiatric techniques to manage the range of comment allowable on his blog. This may be justified in order to minimize flaming and trolling, but it is also a stifling form of censorship.”

“Go read the comment section on Slate Star Codex for a week and report back if you think LessWrongism is acceptable. It’s a place for broken people to be shielded from ever hearing that they’re broken and for developing better and better rationalizations for why they’re not broken and shouldn’t do the work needed to fix themselves. And SSC is miles better than lesswrong itself which is a weird cult centered around gnome in charge Eliezer Yudkowski. Just read the post where Scott let ozymandius post about all the ways that Roissy is wrong. The information there permanently disqualifies anyone associated with it from from having anything to do with building a functioning society.”

“Scott Alexander’s blog used to be good, but now he has been terrorized out of politics. Therefore boring. The problem was he purged all frequent commentors to the right of him out of the comments, which means that he had only enemies in his comments. And, being the rightmost, was persecuted. He has stopped posting on politics, I assume as a result of this persecution.”

“it’s by a stuttering aspie with expertise in nothing at all”

“a mentally-ill beta male who literally admitted that he wished he could become an asexual.”

“He is a fairly smart guy who makes well reasoned arguments. (He is also a literal cuckold.)”

“never forget for one fucking second that its author (who is ‘asexual’) and his most avid readers engage in ‘cuddle puddles’ irl, often bringing stuffed animals, and that he recommends this because it ‘increases credence’ in the other cuddlers’ statements.”

“his arguments only seem well-reasoned to people with NO knowledge of the subject matter (like him), and thus his main effect (just like that of his mentor, Eliezer Yudkowsky) is to keep smart people from learning things”

“oh what an expert in psychiatry! he’s a fucking med student in IRELAND. not to mention he uses yudkowsky’s lingo and called Less Wrong “revelatory” or something like that. you are dealing with a 110 IQ reddit type in SSC.”

“here is a series of a few posts (1, 2, 3) about how he is basically a conspiracy theorist, and in these posts he gets completely owned by the guy who cucked him with his tranny ex.”

“Merciful $DEITY. If I had any inclination to participate [on SSC], that [Guns and States] comment thread would have turned me completely off of it. How much more SJW-feminist-entitled can you get?…Extreme? No. Hard-line SJW enough that I’ve got better things to do than try to engage them? Yes. SJW-feminist-entitled? Yes.”

“SSC skews toward highly intelligent discourse, but Scott is very protective of his liberal homies. He will ban you if you stray too far from PC rigor.”

“I’d always got a whiff of fedora from this guy, so I feel gratified in my judgment at seeing him come out as one.”

“Faggot blocked me for calling out some recent bit of his retarded bullshit. Fuck ‘im.”

“Reading Slate Star Codex, I feel like I’m finally strarting to understand how postmodernism happened. First, there’s the whole thing of looking at your friends and a few books you happened to have read recently, and jumping to grand conclusions about all of society throughout all of history. Second, there’s the thing of him writing lengthy posts elaborating at great length on something that might be either boring and obviously true or bold and innovative but also completely wrong.”

“Aargh!! I read that entire Scott Alexander piece…well 65% of it…in earnest with the expectation that there was going to be a POINT to it. Some sort of payoff for my investment of time and attention. But there was nothing. It was just a bunch of bloviation with no purpose.”

“Scott Alexander is the story of a functioning pattern-recognition module trapped in a progressive brain. It would make a great story of its truth-seeking brain blob could eventually break free and rewire his brain to be a born-again reactionary. Not gonna happen though. The prog morality police has a hard, thick grasp on his brain, and all his friends and pseudosexual partners are the leftiest hacks this side of Lenin; so it’s an endless futile battle to square the circle. No wonder he went into psychiatry.”

“I retain great hopes for Scott, he’ll come around. When he does he’ll bring a high level of rigor with him. He is a caterpillar and will become a beautiful reactionary butterfly someday.”

“slatestarcodex is a great example of the difference between ‘knowing how to type’ and ‘knowing how to write'”

“You aren’t reading it right. Scott’s ability to completely identify the problem but still, quite sincerely, ritually abase himself to it at the same time, makes him worthy of connoisseurship. It takes a once in a generation talent to write long sincere *thoughtful* screeds pointing out that baby sacrifice is lowering the birth rate and causing family trauma, though of course he fully understands and endorses that Lord Moloch must be sated with the only food acceptable unto him.”

“Scott Alexander reminds me of some too-nice beta (nominally played by Joseph Gordon Leavitt or a JGL-alike) from some rom-com who’s trying to find his way and get the girl, while painfully oblivious to the fact that he just needs to stop being a too-nice beta and rip out somebody’s jugular. Ostracize someone for their beliefs? Me? Never. Golly gee.”

“seems like these guys are incapable of being dismissive of anything and have to objectively analyze everything.”

“Slate Star Codex is 140 IQ discussion about 105 IQ issues”

“He is sharp and makes good points but is way too fucking verbose. I dont need parts I II III and IV just fucking write concisely and stop vomiting words on your wordpress blog ”

“it’s basically a fish trap for aspies. people who can’t grasp nuance or understand basic human behavior, but are nonetheless obsessed with details and complex systems will inevitably gravitate toward this kind of horseshit. ultimately it’s a bunch of STEM-inclined dudes on the autism spectrum sitting around attempting to unpack societal problems like it was all a game of fucking sim city.”

“I would add that something like Slate Star Codex is also a clinic in the aspie tendency to miss the forest for the trees, except in this case it’s more like closely examining the bark on the trees for no goddamn reason whatsoever.”

“doesn’t this guy have a dayjob as like a doctor or something? why the fuck does he spend hours each day on a blog?” [to which another person on the same forum responded “why the fuck do you spend hours each day posting here?”]

“a blog populated by 99th percentile aspergers/IQ “rationalist” millennials who converse in an abnormally abstract style, and whose concrete cultural experience is drawn mainly from a bunch of weird nerd shit.”

“Its weird brand of reductionism and bizarre, arbitrary specificity plays to the types of spergy assholes and dumb know-it-all teenagers who don’t care about that anyway, or at least that’s how it seems to me. I mean, the ideas themselves seem like they’d be as much of a turn-off to regular people as their proponents’ personalities are, even if in a different way.”

“Oh, hey, the King of the Race Realist Misogynist Libertarian Nerds has Clever Things to say about vaccination.”

“yet another confirmation that: psychiatrists are crazier than their patients. polyamorous, diarrhea of the mouth/pen, math challenged, … i had no idea what an utter piece of shit you were.”

“He keeps his head down for fear of insulting permanently insulted people. He tries hard to be polite to people who hate him and consider him but a dog, unless they need him – and until they need him no longer. It is a waste of intellect, and debasement of character.”

“What makes me sad about Scott is just how close he is. I won’t give up hope on him yet. If only there was some way to secretly inject this guy with testosterone.”

“I wonder if he’s had bloodwork done to check his T count. I have to assume that if someone is an “asexual heteroromantic” as he puts it, that he’s interested in women from some abstract standpoint, and just needs some additional hormones to be thoroughly normal.”

“I literally want to see you kill yourself. I’m serious. You, and everyone else like you, are fucking disgusting wastes of space that are causing the decay of decency in the human race. I’m not going to argue with you, or say that it’s just my opinion or that it’s even up for debate.”

“is it some sort of special ‘Talk Like a Vulcan Day’ over there? Or are they always like that?”

“ssc spends a significant amount of time talking about stuff like how tables and chairs can be genders. he keeps a pretty unhinged tumblr”

“He’s definitely a beta orbiting cuckold.”

“that article seemed like a return ticket to obviousville with eight-hour layovers everywhere”

“That blog is very boring, and I didn’t manage to read long enough to find out what it was about. I hit Page Down a couple of times, and it seemed like it was on an entirely new topic each time.”

“I am thankful that I have never had any desire to seek psychiatric help. I have always had the impression, rightly or wrongly, that folks who pursue psychiatry as a career may themselves be the ones most in need of such therapy. Go to the mountains and look. Get up early and see the sunrise. Stop anywhere and take a minute to look at the beauty of nature all around you. We are a small piece in the universe, but still a part. The plan is good. You are fine. You will succeed if you try hard enough. Everything you need spiritually is inside you and has always been there. Stop complaining.”

“Also that ‘heteronormative asexual’ Scott Alexander. What a bizarre kike. He recently wrote that he’s incapable of not writing. LOL so kikish.”

“I thought it was a blog about science methodology until that post with the talking cactus.”