This pisses me off so, so much. Warning: what follows is not very calm. Probably not very charitable either. I write “fuck” a lot.



I disagree with Scott about a lot of things (and I’m not gonna @ him here, because I’m sure somebody with his online presence gets a lot of stupid hate mail, and if I were him, I would have no interest in seeing more). I think Scott discounts the effects of systemic racism a bit too much, he’s more libertarian than I am, and I think his pro-Dark Ages argument misses the point somewhat. I also think he worries too much about AI, and he once compared the Bay Area to Renaissance Florence in a way that I think was a little funny.

But holy shit, Slate Star Codex is “evil?” What kind of utter bullshit is this? Who, in possession of a single shred of self-awareness or basic human fucking decency, has the capacity to sit down and write a tweet like this, and then post it? A single utterly shallow pass of a blog like Slate Star Codex reveals it to be the work of a person who is deeply concerned with the suffering of his fellow human beings, someone who cares intensely about truth, about doing the right thing, and more than that, exhibits a fucking rare virtue in this benighted age of caring more about *actually* doing the right thing than *being seen* to be doing the right thing: someone who cares more about having a *good, correct, useful* opinion rather than an opinion that is *seen to be good, seen to be correct, or seen to be useful*. I don’t want to exaggerate too much, but discovering Slate Star Codex several years ago didn’t just expand my intellectual horizons, it *made me a better person* in specific ways: the emphasis Scott put on charity and compassion in some of his earlier posts made me fundamentally re-evaluate how I approach certain kinds of personal interaction, especially online, and reawakened in me a concern for cultivating certain specific virtues that I had left unattended for years prior to that point. Like, I’m not saying you have to read SSC to be a good person (plainly not), but in what fucking universe can SSC be construed in any useful sense as “evil”?

Do you know what this reeks of to me? This reeks to me of the only criticism I ever hear levelled of Scott, outside of people who are (and yes I hate the term) rationalist-adjacent: whenever SSC posts poke their head into a more mainstream corner of the internet (one where they are less heavily contextualized by a norm of honest truthseeking and calm debate), I only ever see contempt levelled at Scott and at the rest of the rationalist tribe, and this is contempt of a deeply anti-intellectual cast. How dare these nerds, says this contempt, how dare these nerds, these utter fools, try to engage in calm and honest debate? How dare these nerds be interested in truth for its own sake, and much less not register beforehand their obesiance to our particular cultural norms or the basic assumption of our worldview? How dare they not take on a specific label, of capital-L Libertarian, or Proud Social Justice Warrior, or dyed-in-the-wool True American Patriot, so that we know which box to dump them in, which label to slap on them, so that we don’t ever have to read what they actually write, so that we don’t ever have to judge their ideas on their actual content or their arguments on their actual epistemological and methodological narrative, so we can ignore them and instead react to what we have imagined they have written?

And to make this bullshit even more galling, they then go on to project whatever label they imagine to be most dramatic or most threatening–to call Effective Altruists cold-hearted sociopaths, or label people worried about AI risk or hopeful for the Singularity to be nerds crazed by watching too much sci-fi, or to call all rationalists libertarians or authoritarians or technocrats (pick one, each of those is mutually exclusive!)–and they *still* never actually engage with the ideas presented. Nevermind the factual claims: even the more general, more basic, “here is how to be epistemologically humble, and, incidentally, not a giant asshole in online discussions.” I guess at this point there’s nothing *more* threatening to a huge swathe of the internet’s self-perception than people who go “hey, maybe we shouldn’t be a giant asshole to each other online”, which goes a long way to explaining why you might need to reduce Scott’s huge and varied and really interesting output to a snarky tweet that implies mansplaining and “a dusting of evil.”

I am so fucking sick of tone arguments and clever put-downs and snark and sneering being mistaken for insight and wisdom and things which are actually *useful and interesting and good.* I am so fucking sick of this notion that we can’t just interact with each other (especially in online spaces), we can’t just share ideas in a forthright and honest fashion (and shitposts and stupid jokes), but we have to position our particular subculture to be *better* than your particular subculture. You know what? All subcultures are dumb. And everything is subcultures. Your Yale English department, your Caltech physics department, your My Little Pony subreddit, your anti-malaria NGO, your merry band of twitter followers: it’s all subcultures all the way down, we’re all just human beings doing their best to muddle through life and advance the cause of the ideas and the people we care about, and insisting that you’re so much better than someone else, that your ideas are so much more worthy, the pure contempt you must feel to so cackhandedly smear something as essentially decent as SSC, is not making the world a better place. You, and everybody who smugly retweeted you, should feel ashamed of yourself.

P.S.: Scott, if you do see this for some reason, I think you’re awesome, and you do great stuff. Don’t listen to the haters.