#scott siskind

[cadyrocks]

Some discourse passed my dashboard today, and I want to comment on it.

It's a little weird to see people talking about "what Scott Siskind (of Slatestarcodex and Astral Codex Ten fame) believes" based on his writing. Like, sure, you can glean certain things from it (like his obsession with IQ tests), but... well...

Have we forgotten about this email?

Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but here's a pull quote:

1. HBD* is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct. [Links to blog posts by racists] This then spreads into a vast variety of interesting but less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses which should probably be more strongly investigated if we accept some of the bigger ones are correct. See eg [another link to a blog post by racists] (I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by "appreciate", I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge.)

*note: "HBD" or "Human biodiversity", as used by these folks, was just the latest euphemism for "scientific racism"; an attempt to back up hereditary racism and eugenics with a patina of (bad) science.

I think this is probably the most important thing to know about Scott Siskind (other than maybe his disgusting but entirely expected and typical response to Kathy Forth's sexual abuse and suicide). He was knowingly lying about how racist he was, and he likely still is.

Once you admit to "hiding your power level" on your beliefs in the scientific validity of racism, anything you write will necessarily need to be filtered through that lens. Things that might seem innocuous if written by most people might come off very differently given this context. The consistent tolerance of racist bigots (including very famous racist bigots like Steve Sailer!) in his comments sections starts to feel less like a genuine principled defense of free speech and more like he's just generally fine with platforming racist bigots. Things that might vaguely sound a little bit "eugenics-y" start to sound really fucking bad when the person saying them has been shown to have racist sympathies that he knows would get him in trouble and was hiding on purpose. Racist sympathies he supports by linking to a famous white supremacist.

So what does Scott Siskind believe about dysgenics? Why should anyone care? He's a racist who believes in hereditary explanations for gaps in racial performance (as opposed to, y'know, the long and ongoing history of systemic racism, colonialism, and exploitation). Whatever his beliefs on eugenics or dysgenics are, odds are good that he's not being cogent about how he really feels, and that his beliefs based on those arguments would be interpreted differently (and more correctly!) by people who know that this dude drank the scientific racism kool-aid.

The degree to which this man is still considered a public intellectual after the leak of those emails is a good sign of how tolerant we are of lying, cowardly racists pretending to be Very Serious People.

[honouredsnakeprincess]

anyways, here's some fun stuff about rationalists and scott alexander (who is a totally serious intellectual with tons of great ideas that are trustworthy and sensible and do not at all speak to profoundly reactionary politics)

None of this is surprising.

[fruityyamenrunner]

Are 'Blues' in your vocabulary same as Scott's 'Blue Tribe', or something else?

no, not at all. aren't they just Democrats as lightly laundered into the alternative-universe rationalist ontology? rats are a Blue tendency with an ugly hegemonising habit.

Blues are simply the opposite tendency to Gaians. see the appropriate tag for posts on them.

there is an emic point d'appui for the term, but it's not siskind - it's hanson

since the future is far in time, thinking about it tends to invoke a far mode of thought, which introduces other far mode defaults into our image of the future. And thinking about the far future makes us think especially far. Of course many other considerations influence any particular imagined future, but it can help to understand the assumptions your mind is primed to make about the far future, regardless of whether those assumptions are true.

For example, since we expect things further away in time to also be further away in space, we expect future folk to live further away, such as in space, and to habitually travel longer distances. Since the distant past is also further away in time, we also expect past folk to live further away and travel longer distances, but the many concrete details we know about the past reduces this effect.

Since blue light scatters more easily than red, far away things in our field of view tend to look more blue. So we expect future stuff to look blue. And since blue stuff looks cold, we expect future stuff to look cold. Finally, since we expect far away things to have less detail, we tend to imagine them with fewer parts and flourishes, and less detailed textures and patterns. The future is not paisley.

[thoughtswordsaction]

Bent Knee Unveiled Lyric Video For "Never Coming Home" Ahead Of New Album Release

Image courtesy of the band. Indie band Bent Knee has released a captivating lyric video for their latest song, “Never Coming Home,” which is a part of their upcoming album Twenty Pills Without Water, set to be released on August 30 via Take This To Heart Records. The video, animated by Scott Siskind, visually complements the band’s intricate sound and poignant lyrics, immersing viewers in a…

[thosearentcrimes]

Sometimes someone will say something that's basically fundamentally impossible to prove. It's a claim that you can provide arbitrary amounts of more or less convincing evidence for, but by the nature of the claim, proof just can't show up, and yet the claim is sufficiently important that it cannot be ignored. Frequently, statements about secret beliefs or intentions fall under this category. If I claim someone believes something or intended some result of their actions, I can hardly be proven wrong (I can always claim that person is lying) but likewise I can never be proven right (they can always lie).

Some Scott "Scott Alexander" Alexander Siskind fans thought this is what was going to happen with his ties to the neoreactionary movement, when he took his blog down because the New York Times was writing an article about him. Critics had thought and said for a long time that he was trying to launder reactionary ideas and racism through his blog posts, that he was dogwhistling to the right-wing elements of his audience while retaining plausible deniability for his other readers who he was trying to convert. In the event, the article barely even hints at this criticism, but that was enough to irritate a fanbase already primed to melt down. Conveniently for those fans, since the claims in question are about the intentions and beliefs of a man who by definition would seek to keep those intentions and beliefs secret, they could literally never be proven wrong.

Unless. What if Scott had written a lengthy email almost a decade ago, in which he had declared that the neoreactionaries are right about "HBD", that is, that he was a racist, believing in the superiority of some races over others? That he had been actively hiding that fact from both the general public and his own audience? That he agreed on various other things (such as correct interpretation of WW2, and crime/criminal justice) with the neoreactionaries? What if he had said that his intention with his writings was to raise his own profile by way of provocation, to spread neoreactionary ideas he agrees with (recall that those include race, WW2, and crime) to as wide an audience as possible, and to raise the profile of and personally befriend neoreactionaries. Enter Topher Brennan, with the email in question.

An interesting side note about the email is that basically every public figure in the Rationalist space assumed it was real, even though Scott hadn't commented on it publicly. Was it because of some sort of private warning that the email was real and they should avoid the embarrassment of denying it? Was it because many of them were in fact familiar with his secret views and intentions, and as such not surprised he had brought them up with others in private? It is a mystery that requires an explanation. If it was absurd and evil to insinuate (not even claim, just possibly somewhat imply) that Scott was racist or overly friendly to racists, then surely emails in which he declares himself to be racist and friendly to racists would be quite literally incredible to them, no?

In any case, what I think is more important is what happened to the unprovable claim. As far as I can tell, what happened is that everyone determined that since the claim was clearly unprovable, it was as good as disproved, and could safely be considered basically false or at least nonsense (if this seems like uncharacteristically loose reasoning, recall that some of the thought leaders involved almost certainly already privately knew the claim was true). Since the claim was false, the revelation of that exact form of proof whose impossibility had been accepted as a premise was irrelevant. The email could be cheerfully ignored (well, not entirely ignored, some retribution for the offense would be in order) because we already knew the thing it's trying to prove is false, because the proof that is now being offered cannot really exist, even though nobody doubts that the proof is genuine. It seems to be a sort of reasoning cul-de-sac.

This event was also a specific manifestation of an interesting paradox around racism. Racism is considered to be so obviously horrific that accusing someone of it is a monstrous injury. However, if that racism is proven, not only is that supposed universal horror often in remarkably short supply, the accuser is generally not forgiven for the monstrous injury they have inflicted. In practice, it seems that accusing a racist of racism is quite frequently less acceptable than racism. Curious, isn't it? The assertion that racism is totally unacceptable working to shield racism.

[arcticdementor]

You can’t sell anything “to patients”. You can only sell things to pharmacies. Patients haven’t even figured out goodrx.com exists yet, they’re definitely not going to know about your weird buspirone smuggling scheme.

Scott Alexander

[cadyrocks]

Well the whole Grey/Red/Blue thing is straight from SSC, as well as the bizarre insistence that the blue tribe is somehow uniquely hostile to the greys. The fash aesthetic may have been more a factor of the comments section and subreddit than the actual blog. The whole "techbros should leave and start their own country" is very much in line with the Archipelago blog posts. A lot of it seems very similar to the topics discussed in Neoreaction In A Nutshell, a blog post that reads very differently once you read the emails to Topher Brennan about how Scott is hiding his power level, but that's probably reversing cause and effect.

The veneration of the cops is somewhat novel, I'll give them that. I just find it interesting to watch how these ideas morph over time, from the rationalist steelman versions posted by people who really don't want to be perceived as being as racist or reactionary (despite very much being both of those things) to the actual policy proposals of rich fascists trying to gain political power - something that was always very predictable if you hung around the SSC subreddit.

I admit I'm posting this more out of a personal grudge than anything else (my position basically being "what is wrong with people for them take Scott Siskind seriously as an intellectual after seeing the emails where he spells out to a friend of his that he is both more racist and more supportive of neoreactionaries than he lets on publicly") but as someone who read a lot of SSC a decade or so ago, this all sounds remarkably familiar. A lot of it feels like the natural conclusion of "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup" (which, it should be said, is not an essay made of good arguments) as read by a fascist tech billionaire who's been marinating in the ideas of cryptofascist neoreactionaries like Siskind.

>go to hear an aspiring politician >as him if he's a right-wing authoritarian or a left-wing populist >he says "neither. i am charting a bold new direction. a fusion of the best ideas from the left and right. a third way, if you will, not beholden to any outdated dogmas of anachronistic ideology." >he shows me his policies >mfw he's a right-wing authoritarian

[garudabluffs]

B2 Bobby Sands at 20:45​ by Scott Siskind 1985

[reddragdiva]

when i talk about the LessWrong rationalists, Effective Altruists etc as disaster chucklefucks, i don't enough bring up that race-IQ science is endemic as a belief inside the subculture, and that is 100% sufficient reason to start off from a position of assuming bad faith in them

i did a whole podcast on this with I Don't Speak German - me and Elizabeth Sandifer, author of Neoreaction a Basilisk, talking to our estimable hosts Jack Graham and Daniel Harper

https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/82-scott-alexander-slate-star-codex-with-david-gerard-and-elizabeth-sandifer

the specific impetus was Scott Siskind/Alexander of Slate Star Codex's 2014 email leak revealing he explicitly started SSC to further race science and reactionary ideas, after years of pretending he hadn't:

https://www.tumblr.com/reddragdiva/643400252772302848/topher-brennan-ive-decided-to-say-screw-it

the subculture was outraged at this as a breach of privacy, not as a lie. so it seems to be real. bup-pow.

here's el sandifer's essay that does a deep dive analysis of why Scott Siskind is a fucking awful human being behind a polite civilised veneer. https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method

the starting pistol in the LessWrong subculture was these two pieces:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould

the second is interesting. actual biologists answer in the comments that Yudkowsky is talking nonsense, though you'll have to expand the comments to read them because the fans dutifully downvoted them. we go through the post in question in the podcast.

the gould piece reads like someone assembled a list of talking points for yud and he just ran with it.

this was around the time that thiel started funding lesswrong too.

lesswrong is also where the neoreactionaries got their start. it's important in understanding the flow of ideas that this isn't just an online subculture - it's a real-life in-person bay area subculture too.

most people don't get their political opinions from reasoned philosophical discourse. they pick them up from their friends. the rationalists and neoreactionaries are friends. the rationalists adopted the neoreactionaries' race science wholeheartedly.

Caroline Ellison from FTX-Alameda (tumblr now deleted) is a good example of an Effective Altruist who is also a massive fucking race scientist, and literally cares more about wild fish suffering or possible electron suffering than the real suffering caused to existing humans by racism. and she is absolutely a normative example of these people.

so if you find lesswrong or ssc ideas interesting, i suggest you may want to reconsider trying so hard to strain kernels of corn out of sewage flows.

and just to make your life worse, here's the aella thread for your entertainment. CW: aella. https://twitter.com/davidgerard/status/1556391089124286467

[fruityyamenrunner]

if i do start reading harriet martineau and she is not Victorian Scott Siskind i will be disappointed

[brazenautomaton]

No one is saying that it's correct that Scott Siskind is a racist. They're saying it's very non-provably not-correct that he's a racist

I'm not about to not correct your inferences with the back of my hand

[argumate]

Scott Siskind provided intellectual legitimacy to a movement that led directly to a fucking fascist coup.

there's a lot to unpack here, but I'm not sure if the QAnon shaman in the horns and the dude in the pro-Auschwitz t-shirt actually had any intellectual legitimacy at all, nor did the "movement" that "led directly" to them.

[dude toppling tiny domino labelled "misrepresenting feminism" that leads to increasingly huge dominoes culminating in "fucking fascist coup"]

but it does make me wonder, given the awesome power that bloggers and shapers of memes on twitter appear to wield, why can't they ever do anything cool with it? why do their crafty machinations only ever seem to lead to random nonsense that may or may not have happened anyway? where is the social media Lenin??

[collapsedsquid]

Since emotions around this are so hot and more than a little tribal it might help to say that it’s not like I’m some sort of bellicose, ignorant stranger to the “rationalist” community that has congregated around Siskind’s truly captivating, mind-expanding blog. Slate Star Codex grew out of Eliezer Yudkowksy’s Less Wrong, which grew out of Robin Hanson’s Overcoming Bias, which I read from the beginning because I’ve been friendly with Robin since my days at the Mercatus Center in the early Aughts. I’ve been to Robin’s house. He invited me to give a talk at the Center for the Study of Public Choice. My literary better half even wrote an amazing piece about Robin, his wife Peggy, and their conflicting attitudes toward cryonic preservation for, yes, the New York Times.

Love he feels the need to launder his associations with Scott and Yud by claiming “no I was only best friends with Robin Hanson,“ dude I would say Hanson is worse in any measure.

[proletariattigress]

There are two main schools of responses going around in response to criticism of Scott Siskind/Alexander right now:

The first is: Scott does not have a cult, nor a following of racial supremacists. Anyone who knows Scott knows this isn’t true.

The second is: Race science is real and I demand you apologize for ever criticizing Scott you culture warrior leftist SJWs

I’m posting this here because I was very surprised today to have a representative of the latter DM me and demand to make unilateral statements for the entirety of leftist thought, and insisted suggesting that intelligence wasn’t based on genetics was the road to authoritarianism.

And to think I had almost convinced myself I was being uncharitable to Mr Siskind’s entourage. What a day.

[liskantope]

Seriously though, yesterday’s New York Times piece disparaging Scott Alexander Siskind, the community around his blogs, and the Bay Area rationalist culture in general, felt like an especially disturbing read given that even the quotes from friends/members of the community (e.g. Scott Aaronson, who in his own writing comes across like he would take a bullet for his namesake) sound like they’re very subtly disparaging Scott and the community surrounding him. I’m guessing the reporter interviewed both friends and enemies of Scott in order to appear unbiased but then quoted the friends very selectively.

I have no respect for this kind of journalism. Maybe that’s being uncharitable, given that I don’t actually understand much about how things work in the field of journalism, but it would seem a little rich to complain about my lack of charitableness in this situation.

And on that note, does anyone have a recommendation of a news source (I liked the idea of it being a major newspaper, but maybe that’s not optimal) I can subscribe to with less naked bias than the NYT has shown in recent months?

[fierceawakening]

Okay, read the article.

Still think the name thing is odd. All reporter needed to do was say “I’m not gonna say Siskind but, I mean, Scott Alexander Siskind is one of the first Google auto completes abd i cab5 help you there.”

Definitely think the gray tribe thing is real. May be my tolerance changed over time or may be they got more aggravations but I definitely got the vibe from several people I’ve now blocked that there was a “I’m ND, therefore you can’t take issue with me thinking Jerkass Thing.”

Imx it went from “society isn’t all that great to ND men and that’s actually still ableism” to “being in any way uneasy about how actively anti feminist I am is ableism” and I just got tired.

Then stuff like the gun thing happened and I just... I like several people I’ve met through those avenues and I like several of Scott’s posts (“motte and Bailey” was great) but... no.