I used to hang out pretty regularly at one of those named group houses that serves as a salon / regular party spot, which was popular with the rationalist crowd and a variety of techies. I don't know Eliezer super well, but I met him several times there, and I realized after Scott released his name that I have met him as well (but didn't know who he was, at the time).
Eliezer is decidedly left-leaning socially, moderate economically. The idea that he would endorse "fascism" is pretty much loony. Scott is I think a bit more conservative in some pragmatic sense -- he seems to be at least open to the idea that "the good life" for many people involves a world that rescues them from the pains of the "paradox of choice" by circumscribing a lot of options, and pushing them into more of a traditional lifestyle. But he also is clearly _opposed_ to the neo-reactionary types who want to achieve that kind of vision of conservative lifestyles by way of violently repressing those who disagree. Maybe you think it's bad that he will engage with those neo-reactionary types via polite conversation; maybe you think all Nazis need punching, and buy into the "paradox of tolerance" idea that for people whose end goal is intolerant, we can't try to just reason with them. But for the Times author to tar Scott as a right-winger like Thiel is a deep misreading of his arguments. I'm sure I disagree with him about a number of things, but I respect that he has a deep reverence for the value and autonomy of each human being.
"the idea that "the good life" for many people involves a world that rescues them from the pains of the "paradox of choice" by circumscribing a lot of options, and pushing them into more of a traditional lifestyle" = right wing. Some people (smart white men like them) deserve agency, the rest of us subhuman dummies don't have the brains for that, so we should just shut our pretty mouths and let the ubermensch tell us what to do. It's for our own good, really. We'll be much happier.
That's what they believe. Say that. Don't distract with free speech norms and how much SJWs suck. That's the belief that's at issue. Let's discuss it directly.
Having actually talked to the guy, I feel comfortable saying that you're over-simplifying his attitude to the point of caricature.
I don't think he actually would trust any particular authority, including himself, to make the decisions about how to structure the world for other people. But he does have a certain kind of respect for people who choose to live by, for instance, Orthodox Jewish laws, or for observant Catholics, and he at least thinks that those of us (including myself) who choose a life that is more libertine and cosmopolitan should not assume everyone making those choices is some kind of brainwashed fool.
And BTW, I don't think SJWs suck as a general rule. A close friend of mine has jokingly characterized himself as a Social Justice Bard, and my personal views put me much closer to SJW-world than to Scott. The people I'm probably closest aligned with politically are Yglesias and Klein -- and closer to Klein, in terms of taking the concerns expressed by minorities / women / historically-oppressed groups seriously.
Just to be clear, I absolutely _am_ attributing to Scott the idea that a lot of people are happier in a more constrained world. He has a post talking about this in his own life -- that he's not sure he wouldn't have been happier in something more like a shtetl, where he would've had many fewer choices, but would've felt tightly integrated into a community where his contributions would be meaningful and valued in a clear way.
The point, I think, is not that modern liberal society is bad, but that if we want to think seriously as consequentialists / utilitarians -- if we want to try to structure society to provide happiness or the good life to more people -- then it might actually be desirable to leave some space in the world for people to choose their own version of a more conservative or circumscribed life.
Just to take a really easy example, there are a lot of French people who basically think that women cannot _choose_ to observe the Muslim head-covering rules, and that they should ban that dress style in public. It seems obvious to me that while we should intervene to protect women from being _forced_ by their families / husbands to observe conservative Muslim rules, we also should _allow_ women to observe those rules if they have looked at the alternatives and decided for themselves that this style of modesty suits them.
Are you sure you're not confusing the "happier in a shtetl" thing with Scott Aaronson, the Other Scott, who writes "Shtetl-Optimized", and got some people very angry with him, and then Scott wrote "Untitled", and more people got angry? Maybe they could have both said it.
Oh, it's possible you're right. Though I definitely recall Scott in the old SSC expressing some sympathy for the idea that not everyone is enamored of the world of infinite possibilities that has been laid before them.
Thanks for the article! Do you think it's still correct to assume that Scott Alexander is a conservative, given that he's a self described Warren-Biden voter? Or are you basing that inference more on a large body of his writing than recent voting patterns?
And I mean, by that standard *you’re* a conservative too. It’s not really a fair description, I should think, to define conservative as meaning “with a lick of common-sense” :)
He doesn't so much strike me as conservative, more broadly liberal but willing to loudly question emerging left wing cultural views on gender, race, speech, etc. I'd make a comparison to writers like Jesse Singal and Matthew Yglesias.
So he's an HBD, evo psycher, "heterodox skeptic" whatever term they use. Then they're right wing. There are some foundational issues and that's one of them. That's also the only reason SSC is different from any other prestige publication or celebrity academic. Take out the beliefs on race and gender and Siskind would probably be a reguar guest on Pod Save America.
Politics has multiple axes, but I don't get the impression that Siskind is particularly far right on race/gender as compared to the American population as a whole. Maybe in the right quarter of the Democratic party? I don't think "right wing" is a useful descriptor of that set of beliefs. Have you read any posts, or just complaints about posts? I'm not sure if we're disagreeing on what he believes, or if you simply want to make that segment of the Democratic party unwelcome (which would make Democratic electoral wins extremely difficult).
I can't speak for the D party as a whole. But he believes in "hereditarianism" by his own admission. Saler, basically. I don't care if we call it right or left-wing.
I'm fine with making that unwelcome tbh. I'm normally against purity tests. I could work with a racist/sexist on climate change or taxes or whatever, sure. But those views can't gain purchase.
Why are you dancing around the issue. He's a conservative on one thing! His free speech activism is in service of one thing! The reason Obama didn't give his blog a shout out and he doesn't have a Ted Talk is because of one thing!
Reminds me of the surprisingly boring New Yorker article by Anna Weiner article about Hacker News from a while back, which painted the site as a cesspit of sexism and racism. In reality, its mostly just nerds arguing about functional programming, but that's not the narrative that the New York literary establishment wants to read.
That's silly. Every movement is mostly nerds talking about weird esoterica. Every Jacobin communist or SJW harpy shrieking about pronouns spends most of their time talking about movies, or their hobbies, or whatever. It's just how numbers work. The question is, are the racists and sexists tolerated by the rest? WHY are they tolerated? Seen as better than the "SJWs"? More numerous in that community than others? More influential?
It's like people who snark "More people in California voted for Trump than people in Mississippi!" It just means you're trying to obfuscate with numbers.
Huh? When Jacobin readers get together, they are probably talking about their political beliefs a whole lot more than they're talking about anything else. Politics is the thing they have the most in common with each other after all. That's why they all came to the Jacobin site. Do you really think people on Stormfront are spending most of their time discussing their love of ping pong?
The answers for "more numerous" are readily available, both for the tech industry and the SSC readership. They're a flaming disaster for that part of the case you're trying to make; any suggestion for how quantify whether the tiny minority of right-wingers in those spaces is unusually influential?
It's very hard to read this outside of the weird emerging culture war between Tech and Tech Journalism — c.f. the weird recent moral panics about Clubhouse. There seems to be a constituency of journalists who are clearly suspicious of pretty much any online space that operates under a different set of moral values than their own, while the anti-journo tech-adjacent world thinks the Times just hates free thinkers who actually make things. So maximum amount of bad faith is assumed, and, because this is the internet, everyone calls each other secret fascists.
"As for Nazis in Scott’s comment section, I personally think he should have banned these people long ago"
I cannot remember seeing a single self-identified Nazi ever posting on the blog, although there was at least one communist and is one Marxist. Can you offer examples?
Or are you using "Nazi" to mean anyone who doesn't accept large parts of the current left orthodoxy? There were certainly lots of people who fit that description.
I just looked at his new blog yesterday and the top comment was by Steve Sailor, who's a "HBD" person, aka a scientific racist. The rationalist blogsphere's level of scientific enquiry seems to be just enough to attract all those people, who are just asking questions about how all this math they did shows they're morally and genetically superior to black people, and isn't it a shame the liberal SJW orthodoxy won't admit this.
Contemporary antiracism is a form of scientific racism.
Contemporary antiracism asserts that there is a materially correct (rather than merely morally correct) racial composition for every organization, every field of inquiry, and every hobby. This is used to describe any group that diverges from this ideal racial composition as inherently suspicious, and probably immorally contributing to the suffering of under-represented minorities.
The material fact can be disputed, as if you look into e.g. education research, you will find that actually, getting improvements in outcomes is very difficult and it is hard to make those improvements stick. Even the Perry Preschool Project (which doesn't have an overwhelming sample size) couldn't get much traction on cognitive performance - the savings mostly come from a reduction in crime.
The reduction in crime is good. It is great that fewer people spent time in jail, and it is great that fewer people ended up as victims of crime. That is an excellent investment.
*But.*
There is no slam dunk against the Steve Sailers of the world. If you had a school with nearly-fully-converged outcomes to point to working from a proper sample, it would be easy to blow Steve out of the water.
Since you can't do that, because you don't have that, it's best to avoid to avoid making arguments that depend on taking antiracism and human performance as primarily driven by experience as a material fact.
Telling people to "go meditate on their 'whiteness'" has been an ongoing disaster.
I'd say Scott is a conservative in the sense that sometimes, he timidly puts out a hand in the path of history and mutters: "Hey guys. Can we like, talk about this a bit more first please?"
And your description of the rationalist community is pretty spot on. I find some of its esoterica interesting which keeps me coming back to it. But politics is not commonly a topic of conversation except for despair at the poor incentives political actors tend to face and some fun engaging in prediction markets.
Also, really glad this episode led me to your substack. I liked your blog back in the days and I'm happy you're still around.
This also just acadonte, but I help run an effective altruist group at a British university and I'd have said the people there are further to the left than the average uni student at a UK top 10 uni, i.e very very left wing by normal people standards.
I have lived and been active in the front lines in SV for 20+ years and I can tell everyone that Noah Smith is right on mark here. There is no facism developing but there is a growing pocket of centrists developing.
I think this was an astute piece - the NYT sucks at representing the Best Coast in general. Things to think about:
- It's worth watching movements that are harmful when they're small when they might grow larger. Imagine expressing concern in 2008 that 4chan would end up being a destabilizing factor for the oldest democracy on the planet - you'd get laughed out of any newsroom. Here we are. I could have told you that the style and speed of communication being engendered by said website was spreading quickly, and I was 19.
- I think few of the rationalists themselves were openly Silicon Valley people. The two that I used to read obsessively were Slate Star Codex and Gene Expression, written by a Jewish-American psychiatrist from California and a Bangladeshi-American geneticist who grew up in Oregon and now is in Texas, for what it's worth. Neither techies. In retrospect the entire Rationalist blog network (including Brad DeLong) was good on democratizing academic discussion and expertise and intensely naïve about politics - it seemed to be assumed that the US would settle into a left/libertarian multicultural détente, when we've actually seen a younger young millennial/Gen Z group that is heavily minority and enraged at the moral and economic ruin they've inherited (wokes), older whites that are worried that the homogeneity of their racial and economic world is going away (Trumpies) and everyone else caught somewhere between them.
- Banning Nazis is a good idea. I have been through a lot of fun Slate Star Codex threads that become a lot less fun when Steve Sailer shows up.
The question is why they didn't ban Steve Sailer. I bet they'd ban Ta-Nehisi Coates if he weren't famous.
This is exactly my point. It's not just tech. It's a whole movement. The intellectual philosophy types, the scientists, the Chan trolls and shitposters, many of the professional atheists, all of whom dislike Trump personally but know an opportunity when they see it. Noah quibbles about whether it's Silicon Valley or not. But it's something. It's a real movement. And it's moved beyond blogs that look like they were made on MS paint into the highest level of everything.
100%. Honestly, what I learned from my political experience in those worlds is just that extremely well-off white guys with "liberal" politics will quickly talk themselves of of said politics when in an echo chamber and decide that the Victorian Age was the peak of civilization.
Someone (was it Noah just now?) called Scott a temperamental conservative, and I think that gets at the basic reason. Steve Sailer is an extremely nice guy. He is level-headed, never rants in the comments section, doesn't respond to people trying to bait him. Scott had a post at some point five or six years ago talking specifically about the scientific racism crowd that he had met one of these people at a party and he was very pleasant to be around and it was only later he found out the person's actual repugnant views. Scott has a very strong bias toward people who are calm and pleasant and make for an orderly comments section and it's why he gets tarred in this way. I think it's very clear from reading him for the last seven years that he is not a racist, but he does associate with racists because some of them are very nice people he gets along with quite well.
I think this is an easy trap to fall into for most people, but it's worse for Scott because he has made a commitment to calm discourse no matter the topic a central tenet of his public identity.
For what it's worth, his comments section is really a lot better than it used to be. All of the worst people long since left for the Reddit or Discord communities for ex-SSC exiles, but this only means "worst" in the sense of people who can't consistently keep their calm while being morally repugnant. Steve Sailer will likely stick around until he dies.
Ok, but they call themselves rationalist. Their whole deal is that they only care for facts and objectivity, not dumb emotional things like manners. Now they’re saying good manners trump actual beliefs? He understands that blank slate SJWs with pronouns in their bios can be nice too, right?
> Ok, but they call themselves rationalist. Their whole deal is that they only care for facts and objectivity, not dumb emotional things like manners. Now they’re saying good manners trump actual beliefs?
The commitment was to pleasant discussion of ideas and being against ideological censorship on principles. No was banned SSC has been banned for their beliefs.
Has be banned any nice 'blank slate SJWs with pronouns in their bios'?
Don't get me wrong -- while enjoying many SSC posts, and some segments of the community discussion, I've been uneasy for years about the ways in which it may have boosted the reach and reputation of some far-right intellectuals and movements. There's definitely a serious critique to be made about the practical effects of an 'almost everyone is welcome provided they are superficially civil and intellectually serious' policy. But I get the feeling you're hastily drawing conclusions based on a limited understanding of the blog, its author and its community norms.
I'm happy to change my mind, if you have evidence of 'nice' progressives/leftists being banned, or other instances of Scott actively forcing out people on the left while keeping their right-wing equivalents around.
Is the issue that the site is just...OK also important? The tweet below sums up my impression of SSC: very long posts that didn't say much. He's not some horrible person (not that I think the NYT article made him out to be one), nor are his readers. But while I think he and many of his readers are well-intentioned, intelligent people, I've never been as impressed what what I saw of SSC as others were.
That SSC is extremely unconcise is a big check against him. The topics were of more interest to me. There were not many places on the web where there were smart people were having fascinating discussions of whether New Atheism was a failed hamartiology (theory of why there is evil in the world) or if The Origin of Consciousness/Bicameral Mind thesis had merit, for instance. Now that Twitter has sucked away so much of the energy that used to power the blogosphere, there are even fewer.
I have some experience with people from the various spheres involved. The average bay area Rationalist type is socially liberal in certain respects, supports government benefits but dislikes regulation of tech etc. This is also a tiny community and not that important, as you say. Although their fake research institute gets a lot of funding. The only politically important person who you could remotely call Rationalist is Dominic Cummings, who may not be politically important any longer.
Scott came up from the Rationalist community but most of his audience don't describe themselves as Rationalist. I think you strongly underestimate his reach. His subreddit, r/slatestarcodex, has 40k subscribers, and its offshoot, r/theMotte has 14k. Most people who read some of his work probably haven't subscribed to this subreddit, and might just read articles they find through HackerNews or something, so there are probably many more people who know who he is. There's no incentive for substack to pay a pre-agreed upon large salary to a guy with a tiny readership.
These subreddits have drifted further and further right, and have contributed to the radicalization of people who join them (have seen people from there admit to this). The whole reason r/theMotte was made was because Scott didn't want the kind of content appearing in their "culture war discussions" to be officially associated with him anymore, but he still recommends people go there etc.). After Scott said he'd talk less about "culture war" related issues, a lot of people from his subreddits got angry with him because that's what they primarily liked him for.
The SSC associated communities actually do provide some sort of "libertarianism to fascism pipeline" where people come in because Scott's criticism of the left resonates with them, and then learn the rest from his comments section and associated subreddits. This isn't really that different from Hacker News or what the various chans have become these days, except that it's more socially acceptable to talk about. This phenomenon isn't really a consequence of his ideological views, although it's worth noting he hasn't really done anything to stop it.
As for the ideology of Scott himself, he's pretty vague about what he believes, but he insists that racial and gender disparities in various contexts are essentially entirely biological in nature. The NYT article does not give good evidence for this. It's hard to find actual receipts now that the old blog is gone and he's probably going to avoid discussing these issues in the future. If you're interested, you should actually read most of the things he says about hereditarianism, and look at his interactions with Emil Kierkegaard etc, which I'm sure are archived by some fans of his. Whether or not this makes him "right wing" is none of my business but it's something I'm rather concerned about given his reach.
"The SSC associated communities actually do provide some sort of "libertarianism to fascism pipeline" where people come in because Scott's criticism of the left resonates with them, and then learn the rest from his comments section and associated subreddits."
"It's hard to find actual receipts now that the old blog is gone and he's probably going to avoid discussing these issues in the future."
Slate Star Codex is still visible at https://slatestarcodex.com/archives/ , and things deleted from there are generally still archived on the Internet Archive, as is his previous LiveJournal blog ( https://web.archive.org/web/20131229231407/http://squid314.livejournal.com/ ). If you think he thinks "racial and gender disparities in various contexts are essentially entirely biological in nature" as opposed to just being willing to consider partial biological explanations, you should provide evidence for that.
Not really. I think it would be undesirable if SSC were a pipeline to neoreaction and the alt-right, because I think neoreaction and the alt-right are mostly false. However, I do not believe that the discussion of probably-false political ideas as such should be punished, since open discussion rather than censorship of improbable ideas tends both to make it clearer that the false ones are actually false and to make it easier to find the occasional miscategorized true idea. (I am not saying that most spaces should be open to such ideas -- it makes sense for a group dedicated to one ideology to exclude its alternatives (e.g. a group discussing Christian theology excluding arguments for Islam, or a group of communists excluding libertarians) and for most groups to exclude ideas whose discussion tends to be disruptive (as Noah noted, open discussion of neo-Nazism tends to drive out all but the most open-minded non-neo-Nazis; more prosaically, the way culture-war politics tends to outrage people and distract them from other subjects makes it reasonable to ban or restrict discussion of politics in a not-primarily-political discussion forum) -- but rather that, for any particular idea, it should be possible for interested people to openly and rationally discuss it somewhere, even if the idea is bad enough that any rational discussion of it will lead to the conclusion that it is false.) I was not trying to support such punishment in my previous comment.
"Partial biological explanations" for differences in tests of cognitive abilities is pretty much the core of Charles Murray style "scientific racism", assuming that partial means some non-negligible proportion of achievement gaps has a genetic rather than an environmental explanation. I suppose one could speculate that if we could somehow control perfectly for average environmental differences (a bunch of babies raised in the Matrix where the ethnicity of their virtual bodies was assigned at random, say) there might still be some nonzero but basically negligible remaining difference in average IQ, say less than one point, without being considered an advocate of scientific racism by most people's standards. But also note in that case one would have to acknowledge it'd be about as likely as not that any such remaining difference would go in the opposite direction as the currently observed (and by assumption, nearly entirely environmental) difference in average scores, a possibility that for some strange reason is not even considered by people like Murray (as Ned Block points out in his critique at https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html --see the section 'the simple argument').
"Partial biological explanations for differences in tests of cognitive abilities" are the scientific consensus and pretty much the result of any twin study done on this topic? But admitting that has nothing to do with racism unless you also think there are genetic differences re: genes affecting cognitive performance between different races which is something COMPLETELY different and debunked.
I was responding to a comment about whether Scott 'thinks "racial and gender disparities in various contexts are essentially entirely biological in nature" as opposed to just being willing to consider partial biological explanations', i.e. the comment was specifically about "partial biological explanations" for "racial and gender disparities", not biological differences having a role in disparities between individuals. And Scott does seem to be sympathetic to the idea of significant genetic contributions to differences in ability/test scores between ethnic groups, as I mentioned in another comment where I wrote:
'he does at least assign a high plausibility to the idea that differences in achievement between ethnic groups are due to average differences in the genetic component of intelligence, see for example https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ with the comment 'I find the solution by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending really compelling', where their solution was to posit Ashkenazi Jews have undergone a selection process at the genetic level that has increased their average intelligence. Sections 5.3.1 - 5.4.2.1 of Scott's anti-reactionary FAQ at https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ also seem to treat it as a reasonable position that differences in test scores between groups are due to genetics, and approvingly cites the work of Richard Lynn who is popular with "scientific racists".'
"As for the ideology of Scott himself, he's pretty vague about what he believes, but he insists that racial and gender disparities in various contexts are essentially entirely biological in nature. The NYT article does not give good evidence for this. "
Not surprising, since it isn't even close to true, unless you count the effect of lead poisoning on inner city blacks, an issue Scott has discussed several times, in your "entirely biological" category.
Scott differs from the current orthodoxy in being willing to consider that some causes of such disparities may be due to innate biological causes. I don't believe he has ever claimed that all or essentially all are, certainly not for racial disparities. If you disagree, perhaps you can quote a relevant passage.
What you say about SSC has a grain of truth to it, although I would describe it as more of a libertarianism-to-race-realism pipeline, and when you imply that's true of 4chan/8chan also, I would agree to an extent. But the idea that HN has a anything-to-fascism pipeline is risible. Most of the debate there is about technology or the politics around technology.
HN commenters are typically just incredibly cynical about everything. It means they're frequently wrong because they assume a world where everyone is lying to make more money, rather than the world that actually exists. I don't think they'd go for fascism though, it seems a bit too organized.
I'm going to have to disagree. Not just Thiel, and Ton-That, and Yudkowski. They might be the minority in numbers, but they have outsised influence relative to their numbers. And they're changing the culture. After decades of grubby little pamphlets like Unz and VDARE, this ideology is taking hold and it's because of tech. Also, that liberal/conservative bar graph is meaningless and I'm surprised you posted it. You can believe in climate change, welfare, be an atheist, gun control, abortion, gay marriage, even unions and socialism. It doesn't matter. Believing black people and women are genetically inferior is like multiplying by zero. It wipes out everything else on the list. They'e standard liberal nerds with ONE VERY BIG DIFFERENCE.
And even if most of Silicon Valley doesn't overtly agree with Thiel and Siskind, they're the type to lead the culture. Look how fast same sex marriage went from a fringe weirdo SJW cause, to the accepted law of the land. They're thought leaders. This is early. Besides, I bet Silicon Valley hates "Social justice warriors" "woke" "cancellers" etc far more than they hate Siskind and Thiel (and Jared Taylor and Charles Murray and Quillette and Noah Carl and half Joe Rogan's guests).
I have sat around and had a long conversation in a group where Yudkowsky and Siskind were both present, and I feel absolutely confident that neither of them would assert that black people or women are genetically inferior, or unsuited to work in tech, or anything like that. In fact I have never met a self-identified rationalist who asserted that.
I have met one (not Eliezer or Scott) who argued that some kind of inherent personality traits are responsible for more of the effects of profession choice than liberals / SJWs wanted to admit, in terms of seeing low numbers of women in tech -- he was a fan of that nimrod James Damore. Which is not great, but, it doesn't make him a "fascist" or anything like that, either.
My own position on this is kind of in line with Ezra Klein's -- how about we actually try to operate the world without actively driving minorities and women _out_ of STEM for a generation, and then _see_ what choices people make. And I thought Yonatan Zunger's critique of Damore was entirely on-point ( https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788 ).
My personal suspicion is that in fact mental aptitudes and traits are barely if at all gendered, because if you look at the studies, what you'll see is that there are statistically-significant differences, but they're much smaller than the dispersion within each group -- so, like, 35-40% of men are "more feminine" than the average woman, and vice versa. (Like so: https://www.flickr.com/photos/plymouths/4833644896/ ) We have all of this social pressure in favor of gender stereotypes, and that's all the difference we get? If you took away that social pressure, my baseline assumption is that the difference would evaporate.
The Times also presented a more general case that I was a bad ally to women in tech. I deny this claim. I have repeatedly blogged about studies suggesting that women are underrepresented in tech not because of explicit discrimination on the part of tech companies, but because women lose interest in tech very early, at least by high school (high school computer science classes are something like 80% male, the same as big tech companies). The post that most effectively sums up my thoughts on this topic is Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences. I continue to believe these studies are true, I’ve spoken with some of the researchers who have performed them, and the New York Times itself has previously written about and praised these same studies. I think understanding the reasons behind gender imbalances in tech is vital towards figuring out how to address them better than we’re addressing them now. There is no evidence that women are inherently any less intelligent or any worse at math than men, and I have tried to make this very clear in all of my posts on the subject - for example in the Contra Grant post linked above, where I say, quote, “My research suggests no average gender difference in ability”.
"I feel absolutely confident that neither of them would assert that black people or women are genetically inferior, or unsuited to work in tech"
But by "genetically inferior" and "unsuited" are you just talking about a blanket generalization that all members of some ethnic group are inferior or unsuited, or would you also disagree that Scott seems to be sympathetic to the Charles Murray style view that group genetic differences play a significant role in certain ethnic groups being statistically less likely to show aptitude in tech fields or on tests relevant to ability?
I really don't think he is. My understanding is that he has quite specifically said he believes there is _not_ good evidence for genetically-based intelligence differences related to race, or between men and women. He mentioned the latter in his piece responding to the NYTimes yesterday, which I linked. He thinks there is evidence that that psychological traits (both stuff like the "openness to experience" trait that is commonly seen as a differentiating factor between modern liberals and conservatives, and aptitudes for some symbolic analysis tasks that are valued in the modern economy) are heritable to a substantial degree, and that there are also cultural factors involved (which aren't genetically heritable, but are still passed down from parent to child via nurture; and this is not specifically about racial cultures -- I know he's a fan of the "Albion's Seed" account of the various subcultures of early America).
"Mental aptitudes and dispositions are substantially heritable" does not imply a difference between racial groups.
In the piece that the NYTimes cited saying he had aligned himself with Murray, the specific thing on which he was agreeing with Murray was that we ought to have a Universal Basic Income. He was saying that he doesn't think we even have a firm grasp on why some groups remain poor, and that a lot of proposed solutions (like retraining middle-aged truckers who get displaced by self-driving trucks to become coders or something) sound very pie-in-the-sky and unlikely to work. He thinks that just giving people money, so they're less desperately poor, would at least be a start.
In any case, it's not like I've read everything he ever wrote; I've been an occasional reader for years, and after I found out who he was in real life I realized he was somebody that I'd talked to at parties for a few hours, and found to be an engaging conversationalist. He's significantly less long-winded, and more of a listener, in person, as compared to his blog -- the therapist training probably counts for something.
I also haven't spent a ton of time on the comments below his blog posts, or the Reddit devoted to following him, and I understand there's a lot more unsavory stuff bubbling around in those, and that people feel he should be less concerned with "free speech" or engaging politely with the neo-reactionary types who really _do_ buy into stuff like Murray (or worse). But I don't think Scott himself agrees with those folks. I think he (like a significant number of the rationalists) elevates the ideal of freely engaging with ideas into something that is exploitable by people whose end goals are incompatible with a free society -- the "paradox of tolerance" problem.
I linked to some of his comments about group differences and genetics in another comment, I'll repost here:
'he does at least assign a high plausibility to the idea that differences in achievement between ethnic groups are due to average differences in the genetic component of intelligence, see for example https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ with the comment 'I find the solution by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending really compelling', where their solution was to posit Ashkenazi Jews have undergone a selection process at the genetic level that has increased their average intelligence. Sections 5.3.1 - 5.4.2.1 of Scott's anti-reactionary FAQ at https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ also seem to treat it as a reasonable position that differences in test scores between groups are due to genetics, and approvingly cites the work of Richard Lynn who is popular with "scientific racists".'
On the other hand, Scott also linked and praised an anti-racialist FAQ in his post at https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/17/someone-writes-an-anti-racist-faq/ , but he made it sound as though this was the first time he'd seen any arguments against the "HBD" position that held water, saying that it's "so good that I actually have specific criticisms of it". And at https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/01/links-for-november/ he also posted a link to a study showing the most g-loaded questions on IQ tests are actually the most culture-specific, suggesting that what IQ is measuring isn't that similar to what we think of when we talk about 'general intelligence', but added "They give a very culturalist explanation of the finding, but I’m not convinced". So overall it's possible his mind is not strongly made up and he just thinks the HBD side has compelling arguments, but that's basically what I meant when I said that Scott is "sympathetic" to Charles Murray style views on the role of genetics in racial achievement gaps.
You don't really understand what it means when someone asserts, on multiple occasions and in many words, that race and gender disparities have a genetic factor.
Of course it seems harmless, but why would someone obsess over gender and race differences? It must be because they correctly identified a problem. Now there are two choices: You can take the much harder position, that race and gender differences are primarily socially learned. This forces you to actually acknowledge that the problem is open, and worse, it might require systemic change.
Or you can take a much easier position, that the differences are largely due to IQ, and that working towards equality in itself is a pointless goal. Scott has an essay about exactly this.
So, what is the logical end point of this belief then? If a politician strips away affirmative action policies, Scott would probably look the other way, or at least some of his readers would. That is, ultimately, the way in which this belief changes your mind.
So, I definitely think Scott and them don't believe these minorities are inferior, in their own head that is. But there's a subtle admission when you spend a lot of your time arguing that disparities are genetic. Either the differences are not very genetic, and you're spending a lot of wasted time trying to convince people the futile genetic component matters, or they're very genetic, and you're arguing nothing can be done.
Having majored in cognitive science, I just think it's not helpful to answer research with "you shouldn't research that", especially not when there's so much evidence that mental aptitudes vary tremendously _within_ any given racial / ethnic / gender grouping, regardless of whether any differences in averages or variance have to do with genetics, culture, or environment.
I definitely hold culpable the people who work in the field and who sensationalize shaky studies or willfully misinterpret things -- I actually chose to pursue linguistics in part because I read Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct when I was in high school, and, wow, has he been a disappointment over the past couple decades. Louann Brizendine is also terrible.
But _even if_ you grant that (a) there probably _are_ genetic factors that play into mental aptitudes of various sorts, and (b) those may well be unevenly distributed across racial groups, that doesn't even represent a good argument against affirmative action, as long as there are disparate-impact cultural factors still in play that you need to fight against. (And note that I pulled a bit from the anti-reactonary FAQ where Scott was acknowledging these cultural factors that disadvantage blacks.)
Furthermore to the extent that races or genders turn out to have differing aptitudes (e.g. the alleged tendency of boys to like toys that engage with the material world like trucks, and girls to like toys that engage more with social roles), even beyond the "fine, you can find a statistical difference in the average, but it's swamped by the variance within each group, so who cares?" issue, it's a huge leap to go from these types of aptitude difference to an assertion that one group is just worse at some profession (see: Yonatan Zunger dismantling the stupid Damore argument).
To be clear, I think (a) and (b) above are _probably true_, at least in some sense, and that the argument for a pluralist society is robust in the face of that. It seems likely the role of genetics in mental development is _much_ more complicated than racialists like to assert, but that doesn't mean we won't eventually have better research on the topic -- in fact, having that research will probably be valuable. Maybe we get _much_ better treatments for severe mental illness. Maybe we figure out much fancier ways to create human-machine interfaces. Maybe there are benefits we can't even anticipate yet, as is so often the case with basic research.
If you buy a materialist view generally, then it seems like it almost _has_ to be true that there would be genes that influence how brain structures develop, and that this would lead to _some_ kind of differences in mental inclinations and aptitudes. I'm skeptical that our ways of measuring and analyzing this are well-enough developed to even properly track these variations, though, and I think the whole idea of IQ or "general intelligence" is just unhelpful. The exercise of "intelligence" involves many systems and subsystems distributed across the brain (and possibly the rest of the body), and there may be both genes that affect any one of those individually, and genes that have widely distributed effects that may involve tradeoffs.
I think if somebody is legitimately willing to engage with the science, it should be possible to show them that cognitive science remains in a really quite primitive state. Our understanding of cog-sci is perhaps comparable to where chemistry or medicine stood in like the late 17th century. If people want to persist in arguing for public policies with material outcomes that help some people and hurt others, based on the intellectual equivalent of alchemy and bodily humours, you're justified in suspecting that either they aren't as "rational" as they claim, or that there's some other motivation.
That somehow tech is more racist or sexist than any other industry. In fact, I would bet that techies are less racist or sexist than media journalists. Journalism, an industry of white failsons, is somehow the arbiter of who is racist or not! Give me a break!
I think you'll want the numbers on "Human Biodiversity". ("How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?") They seem pretty evenly spread; about three-tenths of readers had favorable, and a twelfth very favorable, views of the idea. Seven-tenths had neutral or negative views. Opinions of feminism were significantly more positive.
All I want to say is that while people like Peter Leyden makes me (a bog standard liberal and minority) want to vote Democratic, people like SDG makes me want to vote for the first non-fascist non-racist Republican that comes along.
A lot of guilt by association going on in the NYT article. You cannot judge someone's opinions by the commenters on their blog. There is always a substantial number of contrarians and outright trolls. Just last week Matt Yglesias's substack had a commentator who was clearly promoting, to be kind, race realist ideas. Yglesias was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, clearly not having spent enough time in comment sections to recognize the type as well as his readers had.
"Fellow commenters on the site, he noted, represented a wide cross-section of viewpoints. “They range politically from communist to anarcho-capitalist, religiously from Catholic to atheist, and professionally from a literal rocket scientist to a literal plumber — both of whom are interesting people.”
"The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. "
Pure innuendo that the blog was sympathetic to, or at least tolerant of, these views.
The first part of that was a quote from me. "The voices also ..." part is presented so a casual reader will think it is a quote from me, but it isn't. Nor, so far as I can remember, is it true. Anyone here who disagrees is welcome to offer examples of posters who were neo-fascists or white supremacists — I can't think of any.
It’s really not fair to hold commenters against the writer. All commenters are, after all, ill informed assholes. :) (My apologies to Epimenides of Crete)
It’s a self deprecating joke. I am positing that all commenters are ill informed, when I am myself a commenter on this platform. Epimenides was a Cretan, who famously said that all Cretans are liars. It is merely a paradox :)
Nazis, fascists, far-right... all those terms are flung left and right while being devoid of substance. Instead of calling people names or asking them to identify themselves I find it much easier to ask this one quesiton:
Yes or no, do you believe that the current social inequalities between black and white people (whether they be in the US or between say Africa and Europe) are partially due to black people being genetically dumber?
"I’ve never heard them use Slate Star Codex jargon."
I doubt this is strictly true. At least one piece of SSC jargon has gained widespread use: "motte and bailey." Sure, sure, it's an older term by a philosopher.
I used to hang out pretty regularly at one of those named group houses that serves as a salon / regular party spot, which was popular with the rationalist crowd and a variety of techies. I don't know Eliezer super well, but I met him several times there, and I realized after Scott released his name that I have met him as well (but didn't know who he was, at the time).
Eliezer is decidedly left-leaning socially, moderate economically. The idea that he would endorse "fascism" is pretty much loony. Scott is I think a bit more conservative in some pragmatic sense -- he seems to be at least open to the idea that "the good life" for many people involves a world that rescues them from the pains of the "paradox of choice" by circumscribing a lot of options, and pushing them into more of a traditional lifestyle. But he also is clearly _opposed_ to the neo-reactionary types who want to achieve that kind of vision of conservative lifestyles by way of violently repressing those who disagree. Maybe you think it's bad that he will engage with those neo-reactionary types via polite conversation; maybe you think all Nazis need punching, and buy into the "paradox of tolerance" idea that for people whose end goal is intolerant, we can't try to just reason with them. But for the Times author to tar Scott as a right-winger like Thiel is a deep misreading of his arguments. I'm sure I disagree with him about a number of things, but I respect that he has a deep reverence for the value and autonomy of each human being.
"the idea that "the good life" for many people involves a world that rescues them from the pains of the "paradox of choice" by circumscribing a lot of options, and pushing them into more of a traditional lifestyle" = right wing. Some people (smart white men like them) deserve agency, the rest of us subhuman dummies don't have the brains for that, so we should just shut our pretty mouths and let the ubermensch tell us what to do. It's for our own good, really. We'll be much happier.
That's what they believe. Say that. Don't distract with free speech norms and how much SJWs suck. That's the belief that's at issue. Let's discuss it directly.
Having actually talked to the guy, I feel comfortable saying that you're over-simplifying his attitude to the point of caricature.
I don't think he actually would trust any particular authority, including himself, to make the decisions about how to structure the world for other people. But he does have a certain kind of respect for people who choose to live by, for instance, Orthodox Jewish laws, or for observant Catholics, and he at least thinks that those of us (including myself) who choose a life that is more libertine and cosmopolitan should not assume everyone making those choices is some kind of brainwashed fool.
And BTW, I don't think SJWs suck as a general rule. A close friend of mine has jokingly characterized himself as a Social Justice Bard, and my personal views put me much closer to SJW-world than to Scott. The people I'm probably closest aligned with politically are Yglesias and Klein -- and closer to Klein, in terms of taking the concerns expressed by minorities / women / historically-oppressed groups seriously.
Just to be clear, I absolutely _am_ attributing to Scott the idea that a lot of people are happier in a more constrained world. He has a post talking about this in his own life -- that he's not sure he wouldn't have been happier in something more like a shtetl, where he would've had many fewer choices, but would've felt tightly integrated into a community where his contributions would be meaningful and valued in a clear way.
The point, I think, is not that modern liberal society is bad, but that if we want to think seriously as consequentialists / utilitarians -- if we want to try to structure society to provide happiness or the good life to more people -- then it might actually be desirable to leave some space in the world for people to choose their own version of a more conservative or circumscribed life.
Just to take a really easy example, there are a lot of French people who basically think that women cannot _choose_ to observe the Muslim head-covering rules, and that they should ban that dress style in public. It seems obvious to me that while we should intervene to protect women from being _forced_ by their families / husbands to observe conservative Muslim rules, we also should _allow_ women to observe those rules if they have looked at the alternatives and decided for themselves that this style of modesty suits them.
Are you sure you're not confusing the "happier in a shtetl" thing with Scott Aaronson, the Other Scott, who writes "Shtetl-Optimized", and got some people very angry with him, and then Scott wrote "Untitled", and more people got angry? Maybe they could have both said it.
Oh, it's possible you're right. Though I definitely recall Scott in the old SSC expressing some sympathy for the idea that not everyone is enamored of the world of infinite possibilities that has been laid before them.
And actually I think a lot of Scott's advocacy on this point is in direct reaction to the fact that a lot of rationalists are poly / libertine types.
Thanks for the article! Do you think it's still correct to assume that Scott Alexander is a conservative, given that he's a self described Warren-Biden voter? Or are you basing that inference more on a large body of his writing than recent voting patterns?
For the SF Bay Area he's definitely a conservative! :-)
And I mean, by that standard *you’re* a conservative too. It’s not really a fair description, I should think, to define conservative as meaning “with a lick of common-sense” :)
He doesn't so much strike me as conservative, more broadly liberal but willing to loudly question emerging left wing cultural views on gender, race, speech, etc. I'd make a comparison to writers like Jesse Singal and Matthew Yglesias.
So he's an HBD, evo psycher, "heterodox skeptic" whatever term they use. Then they're right wing. There are some foundational issues and that's one of them. That's also the only reason SSC is different from any other prestige publication or celebrity academic. Take out the beliefs on race and gender and Siskind would probably be a reguar guest on Pod Save America.
Politics has multiple axes, but I don't get the impression that Siskind is particularly far right on race/gender as compared to the American population as a whole. Maybe in the right quarter of the Democratic party? I don't think "right wing" is a useful descriptor of that set of beliefs. Have you read any posts, or just complaints about posts? I'm not sure if we're disagreeing on what he believes, or if you simply want to make that segment of the Democratic party unwelcome (which would make Democratic electoral wins extremely difficult).
I can't speak for the D party as a whole. But he believes in "hereditarianism" by his own admission. Saler, basically. I don't care if we call it right or left-wing.
I'm fine with making that unwelcome tbh. I'm normally against purity tests. I could work with a racist/sexist on climate change or taxes or whatever, sure. But those views can't gain purchase.
Elizabeth Warren is a conservative by the SF Bay area standard.
Why are you dancing around the issue. He's a conservative on one thing! His free speech activism is in service of one thing! The reason Obama didn't give his blog a shout out and he doesn't have a Ted Talk is because of one thing!
Do you think that everyone who voted Trump/Pence likes Trump? Or Pence? Or is a conservative? Or Republican?
If not, then it goes both ways.
Reminds me of the surprisingly boring New Yorker article by Anna Weiner article about Hacker News from a while back, which painted the site as a cesspit of sexism and racism. In reality, its mostly just nerds arguing about functional programming, but that's not the narrative that the New York literary establishment wants to read.
That's silly. Every movement is mostly nerds talking about weird esoterica. Every Jacobin communist or SJW harpy shrieking about pronouns spends most of their time talking about movies, or their hobbies, or whatever. It's just how numbers work. The question is, are the racists and sexists tolerated by the rest? WHY are they tolerated? Seen as better than the "SJWs"? More numerous in that community than others? More influential?
It's like people who snark "More people in California voted for Trump than people in Mississippi!" It just means you're trying to obfuscate with numbers.
Huh? When Jacobin readers get together, they are probably talking about their political beliefs a whole lot more than they're talking about anything else. Politics is the thing they have the most in common with each other after all. That's why they all came to the Jacobin site. Do you really think people on Stormfront are spending most of their time discussing their love of ping pong?
The answers for "more numerous" are readily available, both for the tech industry and the SSC readership. They're a flaming disaster for that part of the case you're trying to make; any suggestion for how quantify whether the tiny minority of right-wingers in those spaces is unusually influential?
It's very hard to read this outside of the weird emerging culture war between Tech and Tech Journalism — c.f. the weird recent moral panics about Clubhouse. There seems to be a constituency of journalists who are clearly suspicious of pretty much any online space that operates under a different set of moral values than their own, while the anti-journo tech-adjacent world thinks the Times just hates free thinkers who actually make things. So maximum amount of bad faith is assumed, and, because this is the internet, everyone calls each other secret fascists.
"As for Nazis in Scott’s comment section, I personally think he should have banned these people long ago"
I cannot remember seeing a single self-identified Nazi ever posting on the blog, although there was at least one communist and is one Marxist. Can you offer examples?
Or are you using "Nazi" to mean anyone who doesn't accept large parts of the current left orthodoxy? There were certainly lots of people who fit that description.
I just looked at his new blog yesterday and the top comment was by Steve Sailor, who's a "HBD" person, aka a scientific racist. The rationalist blogsphere's level of scientific enquiry seems to be just enough to attract all those people, who are just asking questions about how all this math they did shows they're morally and genetically superior to black people, and isn't it a shame the liberal SJW orthodoxy won't admit this.
Contemporary antiracism is a form of scientific racism.
Contemporary antiracism asserts that there is a materially correct (rather than merely morally correct) racial composition for every organization, every field of inquiry, and every hobby. This is used to describe any group that diverges from this ideal racial composition as inherently suspicious, and probably immorally contributing to the suffering of under-represented minorities.
The material fact can be disputed, as if you look into e.g. education research, you will find that actually, getting improvements in outcomes is very difficult and it is hard to make those improvements stick. Even the Perry Preschool Project (which doesn't have an overwhelming sample size) couldn't get much traction on cognitive performance - the savings mostly come from a reduction in crime.
The reduction in crime is good. It is great that fewer people spent time in jail, and it is great that fewer people ended up as victims of crime. That is an excellent investment.
*But.*
There is no slam dunk against the Steve Sailers of the world. If you had a school with nearly-fully-converged outcomes to point to working from a proper sample, it would be easy to blow Steve out of the water.
Since you can't do that, because you don't have that, it's best to avoid to avoid making arguments that depend on taking antiracism and human performance as primarily driven by experience as a material fact.
Telling people to "go meditate on their 'whiteness'" has been an ongoing disaster.
>I just looked at his new blog yesterday and the top comment was by Steve Sailor, who's a "HBD" person, aka a scientific racist.
So, then, not a nazi. How is he relevant to this discussion?
I'd say Scott is a conservative in the sense that sometimes, he timidly puts out a hand in the path of history and mutters: "Hey guys. Can we like, talk about this a bit more first please?"
And your description of the rationalist community is pretty spot on. I find some of its esoterica interesting which keeps me coming back to it. But politics is not commonly a topic of conversation except for despair at the poor incentives political actors tend to face and some fun engaging in prediction markets.
Also, really glad this episode led me to your substack. I liked your blog back in the days and I'm happy you're still around.
This also just acadonte, but I help run an effective altruist group at a British university and I'd have said the people there are further to the left than the average uni student at a UK top 10 uni, i.e very very left wing by normal people standards.
*average person there
I have lived and been active in the front lines in SV for 20+ years and I can tell everyone that Noah Smith is right on mark here. There is no facism developing but there is a growing pocket of centrists developing.
I think this was an astute piece - the NYT sucks at representing the Best Coast in general. Things to think about:
- It's worth watching movements that are harmful when they're small when they might grow larger. Imagine expressing concern in 2008 that 4chan would end up being a destabilizing factor for the oldest democracy on the planet - you'd get laughed out of any newsroom. Here we are. I could have told you that the style and speed of communication being engendered by said website was spreading quickly, and I was 19.
- I think few of the rationalists themselves were openly Silicon Valley people. The two that I used to read obsessively were Slate Star Codex and Gene Expression, written by a Jewish-American psychiatrist from California and a Bangladeshi-American geneticist who grew up in Oregon and now is in Texas, for what it's worth. Neither techies. In retrospect the entire Rationalist blog network (including Brad DeLong) was good on democratizing academic discussion and expertise and intensely naïve about politics - it seemed to be assumed that the US would settle into a left/libertarian multicultural détente, when we've actually seen a younger young millennial/Gen Z group that is heavily minority and enraged at the moral and economic ruin they've inherited (wokes), older whites that are worried that the homogeneity of their racial and economic world is going away (Trumpies) and everyone else caught somewhere between them.
- Banning Nazis is a good idea. I have been through a lot of fun Slate Star Codex threads that become a lot less fun when Steve Sailer shows up.
The question is why they didn't ban Steve Sailer. I bet they'd ban Ta-Nehisi Coates if he weren't famous.
This is exactly my point. It's not just tech. It's a whole movement. The intellectual philosophy types, the scientists, the Chan trolls and shitposters, many of the professional atheists, all of whom dislike Trump personally but know an opportunity when they see it. Noah quibbles about whether it's Silicon Valley or not. But it's something. It's a real movement. And it's moved beyond blogs that look like they were made on MS paint into the highest level of everything.
100%. Honestly, what I learned from my political experience in those worlds is just that extremely well-off white guys with "liberal" politics will quickly talk themselves of of said politics when in an echo chamber and decide that the Victorian Age was the peak of civilization.
Someone (was it Noah just now?) called Scott a temperamental conservative, and I think that gets at the basic reason. Steve Sailer is an extremely nice guy. He is level-headed, never rants in the comments section, doesn't respond to people trying to bait him. Scott had a post at some point five or six years ago talking specifically about the scientific racism crowd that he had met one of these people at a party and he was very pleasant to be around and it was only later he found out the person's actual repugnant views. Scott has a very strong bias toward people who are calm and pleasant and make for an orderly comments section and it's why he gets tarred in this way. I think it's very clear from reading him for the last seven years that he is not a racist, but he does associate with racists because some of them are very nice people he gets along with quite well.
I think this is an easy trap to fall into for most people, but it's worse for Scott because he has made a commitment to calm discourse no matter the topic a central tenet of his public identity.
For what it's worth, his comments section is really a lot better than it used to be. All of the worst people long since left for the Reddit or Discord communities for ex-SSC exiles, but this only means "worst" in the sense of people who can't consistently keep their calm while being morally repugnant. Steve Sailer will likely stick around until he dies.
Ok, but they call themselves rationalist. Their whole deal is that they only care for facts and objectivity, not dumb emotional things like manners. Now they’re saying good manners trump actual beliefs? He understands that blank slate SJWs with pronouns in their bios can be nice too, right?
> Ok, but they call themselves rationalist. Their whole deal is that they only care for facts and objectivity, not dumb emotional things like manners. Now they’re saying good manners trump actual beliefs?
The commitment was to pleasant discussion of ideas and being against ideological censorship on principles. No was banned SSC has been banned for their beliefs.
Has be banned any nice 'blank slate SJWs with pronouns in their bios'?
Don't get me wrong -- while enjoying many SSC posts, and some segments of the community discussion, I've been uneasy for years about the ways in which it may have boosted the reach and reputation of some far-right intellectuals and movements. There's definitely a serious critique to be made about the practical effects of an 'almost everyone is welcome provided they are superficially civil and intellectually serious' policy. But I get the feeling you're hastily drawing conclusions based on a limited understanding of the blog, its author and its community norms.
I'm happy to change my mind, if you have evidence of 'nice' progressives/leftists being banned, or other instances of Scott actively forcing out people on the left while keeping their right-wing equivalents around.
Is the issue that the site is just...OK also important? The tweet below sums up my impression of SSC: very long posts that didn't say much. He's not some horrible person (not that I think the NYT article made him out to be one), nor are his readers. But while I think he and many of his readers are well-intentioned, intelligent people, I've never been as impressed what what I saw of SSC as others were.
https://twitter.com/graykimbrough/status/1360603839511035910
That SSC is extremely unconcise is a big check against him. The topics were of more interest to me. There were not many places on the web where there were smart people were having fascinating discussions of whether New Atheism was a failed hamartiology (theory of why there is evil in the world) or if The Origin of Consciousness/Bicameral Mind thesis had merit, for instance. Now that Twitter has sucked away so much of the energy that used to power the blogosphere, there are even fewer.
I have some experience with people from the various spheres involved. The average bay area Rationalist type is socially liberal in certain respects, supports government benefits but dislikes regulation of tech etc. This is also a tiny community and not that important, as you say. Although their fake research institute gets a lot of funding. The only politically important person who you could remotely call Rationalist is Dominic Cummings, who may not be politically important any longer.
Scott came up from the Rationalist community but most of his audience don't describe themselves as Rationalist. I think you strongly underestimate his reach. His subreddit, r/slatestarcodex, has 40k subscribers, and its offshoot, r/theMotte has 14k. Most people who read some of his work probably haven't subscribed to this subreddit, and might just read articles they find through HackerNews or something, so there are probably many more people who know who he is. There's no incentive for substack to pay a pre-agreed upon large salary to a guy with a tiny readership.
These subreddits have drifted further and further right, and have contributed to the radicalization of people who join them (have seen people from there admit to this). The whole reason r/theMotte was made was because Scott didn't want the kind of content appearing in their "culture war discussions" to be officially associated with him anymore, but he still recommends people go there etc.). After Scott said he'd talk less about "culture war" related issues, a lot of people from his subreddits got angry with him because that's what they primarily liked him for.
The SSC associated communities actually do provide some sort of "libertarianism to fascism pipeline" where people come in because Scott's criticism of the left resonates with them, and then learn the rest from his comments section and associated subreddits. This isn't really that different from Hacker News or what the various chans have become these days, except that it's more socially acceptable to talk about. This phenomenon isn't really a consequence of his ideological views, although it's worth noting he hasn't really done anything to stop it.
As for the ideology of Scott himself, he's pretty vague about what he believes, but he insists that racial and gender disparities in various contexts are essentially entirely biological in nature. The NYT article does not give good evidence for this. It's hard to find actual receipts now that the old blog is gone and he's probably going to avoid discussing these issues in the future. If you're interested, you should actually read most of the things he says about hereditarianism, and look at his interactions with Emil Kierkegaard etc, which I'm sure are archived by some fans of his. Whether or not this makes him "right wing" is none of my business but it's something I'm rather concerned about given his reach.
"The SSC associated communities actually do provide some sort of "libertarianism to fascism pipeline" where people come in because Scott's criticism of the left resonates with them, and then learn the rest from his comments section and associated subreddits."
While this is true sometimes, I think the opposite is true more often. Scott tends to seriously and open-mindedly discuss various subjects in a way that is often critical of the left (especially in terms of dishonest tactics like motte-and-bailey arguments or cancel culture) but is also critical of the right at times (e.g. the anti-reactionary FAQ or his objections to pure libertarianism) and supports leftist ideas when he thinks they make sense (e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-highly-demanding-of-rigor/ and https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/30/the-wonderful-thing-about-triggers/ and https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic-jobs-against-hijacking-utopia/ ). I think this is likely to leave people who become disenchanted with the mainstream relatively reasonable rather than leading them to embrace some extreme ideology; this was my experience and apparently that of several other readers (as described at https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lixeor/why_slate_star_codex_is_silicon_valleys_safe_space/gn6c1zs/ ). It is true that there's a significant number of far-right people who comment on his blog because he is too committed to free discussion &c. to just ban them entirely, but I think you overstate their effect on his readers overall.
"It's hard to find actual receipts now that the old blog is gone and he's probably going to avoid discussing these issues in the future."
Slate Star Codex is still visible at https://slatestarcodex.com/archives/ , and things deleted from there are generally still archived on the Internet Archive, as is his previous LiveJournal blog ( https://web.archive.org/web/20131229231407/http://squid314.livejournal.com/ ). If you think he thinks "racial and gender disparities in various contexts are essentially entirely biological in nature" as opposed to just being willing to consider partial biological explanations, you should provide evidence for that.
Just by writing this you've conceded that he should be punished if it _were_ a left-to-right pipeline rather than vice versa.
Not really. I think it would be undesirable if SSC were a pipeline to neoreaction and the alt-right, because I think neoreaction and the alt-right are mostly false. However, I do not believe that the discussion of probably-false political ideas as such should be punished, since open discussion rather than censorship of improbable ideas tends both to make it clearer that the false ones are actually false and to make it easier to find the occasional miscategorized true idea. (I am not saying that most spaces should be open to such ideas -- it makes sense for a group dedicated to one ideology to exclude its alternatives (e.g. a group discussing Christian theology excluding arguments for Islam, or a group of communists excluding libertarians) and for most groups to exclude ideas whose discussion tends to be disruptive (as Noah noted, open discussion of neo-Nazism tends to drive out all but the most open-minded non-neo-Nazis; more prosaically, the way culture-war politics tends to outrage people and distract them from other subjects makes it reasonable to ban or restrict discussion of politics in a not-primarily-political discussion forum) -- but rather that, for any particular idea, it should be possible for interested people to openly and rationally discuss it somewhere, even if the idea is bad enough that any rational discussion of it will lead to the conclusion that it is false.) I was not trying to support such punishment in my previous comment.
"Partial biological explanations" for differences in tests of cognitive abilities is pretty much the core of Charles Murray style "scientific racism", assuming that partial means some non-negligible proportion of achievement gaps has a genetic rather than an environmental explanation. I suppose one could speculate that if we could somehow control perfectly for average environmental differences (a bunch of babies raised in the Matrix where the ethnicity of their virtual bodies was assigned at random, say) there might still be some nonzero but basically negligible remaining difference in average IQ, say less than one point, without being considered an advocate of scientific racism by most people's standards. But also note in that case one would have to acknowledge it'd be about as likely as not that any such remaining difference would go in the opposite direction as the currently observed (and by assumption, nearly entirely environmental) difference in average scores, a possibility that for some strange reason is not even considered by people like Murray (as Ned Block points out in his critique at https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html --see the section 'the simple argument').
"Partial biological explanations for differences in tests of cognitive abilities" are the scientific consensus and pretty much the result of any twin study done on this topic? But admitting that has nothing to do with racism unless you also think there are genetic differences re: genes affecting cognitive performance between different races which is something COMPLETELY different and debunked.
I was responding to a comment about whether Scott 'thinks "racial and gender disparities in various contexts are essentially entirely biological in nature" as opposed to just being willing to consider partial biological explanations', i.e. the comment was specifically about "partial biological explanations" for "racial and gender disparities", not biological differences having a role in disparities between individuals. And Scott does seem to be sympathetic to the idea of significant genetic contributions to differences in ability/test scores between ethnic groups, as I mentioned in another comment where I wrote:
'he does at least assign a high plausibility to the idea that differences in achievement between ethnic groups are due to average differences in the genetic component of intelligence, see for example https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ with the comment 'I find the solution by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending really compelling', where their solution was to posit Ashkenazi Jews have undergone a selection process at the genetic level that has increased their average intelligence. Sections 5.3.1 - 5.4.2.1 of Scott's anti-reactionary FAQ at https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ also seem to treat it as a reasonable position that differences in test scores between groups are due to genetics, and approvingly cites the work of Richard Lynn who is popular with "scientific racists".'
"As for the ideology of Scott himself, he's pretty vague about what he believes, but he insists that racial and gender disparities in various contexts are essentially entirely biological in nature. The NYT article does not give good evidence for this. "
Not surprising, since it isn't even close to true, unless you count the effect of lead poisoning on inner city blacks, an issue Scott has discussed several times, in your "entirely biological" category.
Scott differs from the current orthodoxy in being willing to consider that some causes of such disparities may be due to innate biological causes. I don't believe he has ever claimed that all or essentially all are, certainly not for racial disparities. If you disagree, perhaps you can quote a relevant passage.
What you say about SSC has a grain of truth to it, although I would describe it as more of a libertarianism-to-race-realism pipeline, and when you imply that's true of 4chan/8chan also, I would agree to an extent. But the idea that HN has a anything-to-fascism pipeline is risible. Most of the debate there is about technology or the politics around technology.
HN commenters are typically just incredibly cynical about everything. It means they're frequently wrong because they assume a world where everyone is lying to make more money, rather than the world that actually exists. I don't think they'd go for fascism though, it seems a bit too organized.
> It's hard to find actual receipts now that the old blog is gone
Did you miss that he put the blog back up? https://slatestarcodex.com/archives/
I'm going to have to disagree. Not just Thiel, and Ton-That, and Yudkowski. They might be the minority in numbers, but they have outsised influence relative to their numbers. And they're changing the culture. After decades of grubby little pamphlets like Unz and VDARE, this ideology is taking hold and it's because of tech. Also, that liberal/conservative bar graph is meaningless and I'm surprised you posted it. You can believe in climate change, welfare, be an atheist, gun control, abortion, gay marriage, even unions and socialism. It doesn't matter. Believing black people and women are genetically inferior is like multiplying by zero. It wipes out everything else on the list. They'e standard liberal nerds with ONE VERY BIG DIFFERENCE.
And even if most of Silicon Valley doesn't overtly agree with Thiel and Siskind, they're the type to lead the culture. Look how fast same sex marriage went from a fringe weirdo SJW cause, to the accepted law of the land. They're thought leaders. This is early. Besides, I bet Silicon Valley hates "Social justice warriors" "woke" "cancellers" etc far more than they hate Siskind and Thiel (and Jared Taylor and Charles Murray and Quillette and Noah Carl and half Joe Rogan's guests).
It would be easier for you to get it if you didn't build strawmen about others
I'm sorry, what's the strawman? And against whom?
I have sat around and had a long conversation in a group where Yudkowsky and Siskind were both present, and I feel absolutely confident that neither of them would assert that black people or women are genetically inferior, or unsuited to work in tech, or anything like that. In fact I have never met a self-identified rationalist who asserted that.
I have met one (not Eliezer or Scott) who argued that some kind of inherent personality traits are responsible for more of the effects of profession choice than liberals / SJWs wanted to admit, in terms of seeing low numbers of women in tech -- he was a fan of that nimrod James Damore. Which is not great, but, it doesn't make him a "fascist" or anything like that, either.
My own position on this is kind of in line with Ezra Klein's -- how about we actually try to operate the world without actively driving minorities and women _out_ of STEM for a generation, and then _see_ what choices people make. And I thought Yonatan Zunger's critique of Damore was entirely on-point ( https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788 ).
My personal suspicion is that in fact mental aptitudes and traits are barely if at all gendered, because if you look at the studies, what you'll see is that there are statistically-significant differences, but they're much smaller than the dispersion within each group -- so, like, 35-40% of men are "more feminine" than the average woman, and vice versa. (Like so: https://www.flickr.com/photos/plymouths/4833644896/ ) We have all of this social pressure in favor of gender stereotypes, and that's all the difference we get? If you took away that social pressure, my baseline assumption is that the difference would evaporate.
Incidentally, Scott addresses this topic directly in his response to the NYTimes piece, here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article
<blockquote>
The Times also presented a more general case that I was a bad ally to women in tech. I deny this claim. I have repeatedly blogged about studies suggesting that women are underrepresented in tech not because of explicit discrimination on the part of tech companies, but because women lose interest in tech very early, at least by high school (high school computer science classes are something like 80% male, the same as big tech companies). The post that most effectively sums up my thoughts on this topic is Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences. I continue to believe these studies are true, I’ve spoken with some of the researchers who have performed them, and the New York Times itself has previously written about and praised these same studies. I think understanding the reasons behind gender imbalances in tech is vital towards figuring out how to address them better than we’re addressing them now. There is no evidence that women are inherently any less intelligent or any worse at math than men, and I have tried to make this very clear in all of my posts on the subject - for example in the Contra Grant post linked above, where I say, quote, “My research suggests no average gender difference in ability”.
</blockquote>
"I feel absolutely confident that neither of them would assert that black people or women are genetically inferior, or unsuited to work in tech"
But by "genetically inferior" and "unsuited" are you just talking about a blanket generalization that all members of some ethnic group are inferior or unsuited, or would you also disagree that Scott seems to be sympathetic to the Charles Murray style view that group genetic differences play a significant role in certain ethnic groups being statistically less likely to show aptitude in tech fields or on tests relevant to ability?
I really don't think he is. My understanding is that he has quite specifically said he believes there is _not_ good evidence for genetically-based intelligence differences related to race, or between men and women. He mentioned the latter in his piece responding to the NYTimes yesterday, which I linked. He thinks there is evidence that that psychological traits (both stuff like the "openness to experience" trait that is commonly seen as a differentiating factor between modern liberals and conservatives, and aptitudes for some symbolic analysis tasks that are valued in the modern economy) are heritable to a substantial degree, and that there are also cultural factors involved (which aren't genetically heritable, but are still passed down from parent to child via nurture; and this is not specifically about racial cultures -- I know he's a fan of the "Albion's Seed" account of the various subcultures of early America).
"Mental aptitudes and dispositions are substantially heritable" does not imply a difference between racial groups.
In the piece that the NYTimes cited saying he had aligned himself with Murray, the specific thing on which he was agreeing with Murray was that we ought to have a Universal Basic Income. He was saying that he doesn't think we even have a firm grasp on why some groups remain poor, and that a lot of proposed solutions (like retraining middle-aged truckers who get displaced by self-driving trucks to become coders or something) sound very pie-in-the-sky and unlikely to work. He thinks that just giving people money, so they're less desperately poor, would at least be a start.
In any case, it's not like I've read everything he ever wrote; I've been an occasional reader for years, and after I found out who he was in real life I realized he was somebody that I'd talked to at parties for a few hours, and found to be an engaging conversationalist. He's significantly less long-winded, and more of a listener, in person, as compared to his blog -- the therapist training probably counts for something.
I also haven't spent a ton of time on the comments below his blog posts, or the Reddit devoted to following him, and I understand there's a lot more unsavory stuff bubbling around in those, and that people feel he should be less concerned with "free speech" or engaging politely with the neo-reactionary types who really _do_ buy into stuff like Murray (or worse). But I don't think Scott himself agrees with those folks. I think he (like a significant number of the rationalists) elevates the ideal of freely engaging with ideas into something that is exploitable by people whose end goals are incompatible with a free society -- the "paradox of tolerance" problem.
I linked to some of his comments about group differences and genetics in another comment, I'll repost here:
'he does at least assign a high plausibility to the idea that differences in achievement between ethnic groups are due to average differences in the genetic component of intelligence, see for example https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ with the comment 'I find the solution by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending really compelling', where their solution was to posit Ashkenazi Jews have undergone a selection process at the genetic level that has increased their average intelligence. Sections 5.3.1 - 5.4.2.1 of Scott's anti-reactionary FAQ at https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ also seem to treat it as a reasonable position that differences in test scores between groups are due to genetics, and approvingly cites the work of Richard Lynn who is popular with "scientific racists".'
For some other examples, he speaks positively about Charles Murray without any qualifications about his racial arguments at https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/12/clarification-to-sacred-principles-as-exhaustible-resources/ and in a post at https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/14/more-links-for-may-2014/ one of his links is to a page he summarizes as "A black guy writes a FAQ on the human biodiversity movement" where the FAQ in question makes several arguments for the likelihood of genetic contributions to group IQ differences .
On the other hand, Scott also linked and praised an anti-racialist FAQ in his post at https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/17/someone-writes-an-anti-racist-faq/ , but he made it sound as though this was the first time he'd seen any arguments against the "HBD" position that held water, saying that it's "so good that I actually have specific criticisms of it". And at https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/01/links-for-november/ he also posted a link to a study showing the most g-loaded questions on IQ tests are actually the most culture-specific, suggesting that what IQ is measuring isn't that similar to what we think of when we talk about 'general intelligence', but added "They give a very culturalist explanation of the finding, but I’m not convinced". So overall it's possible his mind is not strongly made up and he just thinks the HBD side has compelling arguments, but that's basically what I meant when I said that Scott is "sympathetic" to Charles Murray style views on the role of genetics in racial achievement gaps.
You don't really understand what it means when someone asserts, on multiple occasions and in many words, that race and gender disparities have a genetic factor.
Of course it seems harmless, but why would someone obsess over gender and race differences? It must be because they correctly identified a problem. Now there are two choices: You can take the much harder position, that race and gender differences are primarily socially learned. This forces you to actually acknowledge that the problem is open, and worse, it might require systemic change.
Or you can take a much easier position, that the differences are largely due to IQ, and that working towards equality in itself is a pointless goal. Scott has an essay about exactly this.
So, what is the logical end point of this belief then? If a politician strips away affirmative action policies, Scott would probably look the other way, or at least some of his readers would. That is, ultimately, the way in which this belief changes your mind.
So, I definitely think Scott and them don't believe these minorities are inferior, in their own head that is. But there's a subtle admission when you spend a lot of your time arguing that disparities are genetic. Either the differences are not very genetic, and you're spending a lot of wasted time trying to convince people the futile genetic component matters, or they're very genetic, and you're arguing nothing can be done.
Having majored in cognitive science, I just think it's not helpful to answer research with "you shouldn't research that", especially not when there's so much evidence that mental aptitudes vary tremendously _within_ any given racial / ethnic / gender grouping, regardless of whether any differences in averages or variance have to do with genetics, culture, or environment.
I definitely hold culpable the people who work in the field and who sensationalize shaky studies or willfully misinterpret things -- I actually chose to pursue linguistics in part because I read Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct when I was in high school, and, wow, has he been a disappointment over the past couple decades. Louann Brizendine is also terrible.
https://slate.com/technology/2008/07/meet-the-believers.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/science/24scibks.html
But _even if_ you grant that (a) there probably _are_ genetic factors that play into mental aptitudes of various sorts, and (b) those may well be unevenly distributed across racial groups, that doesn't even represent a good argument against affirmative action, as long as there are disparate-impact cultural factors still in play that you need to fight against. (And note that I pulled a bit from the anti-reactonary FAQ where Scott was acknowledging these cultural factors that disadvantage blacks.)
Furthermore to the extent that races or genders turn out to have differing aptitudes (e.g. the alleged tendency of boys to like toys that engage with the material world like trucks, and girls to like toys that engage more with social roles), even beyond the "fine, you can find a statistical difference in the average, but it's swamped by the variance within each group, so who cares?" issue, it's a huge leap to go from these types of aptitude difference to an assertion that one group is just worse at some profession (see: Yonatan Zunger dismantling the stupid Damore argument).
To be clear, I think (a) and (b) above are _probably true_, at least in some sense, and that the argument for a pluralist society is robust in the face of that. It seems likely the role of genetics in mental development is _much_ more complicated than racialists like to assert, but that doesn't mean we won't eventually have better research on the topic -- in fact, having that research will probably be valuable. Maybe we get _much_ better treatments for severe mental illness. Maybe we figure out much fancier ways to create human-machine interfaces. Maybe there are benefits we can't even anticipate yet, as is so often the case with basic research.
If you buy a materialist view generally, then it seems like it almost _has_ to be true that there would be genes that influence how brain structures develop, and that this would lead to _some_ kind of differences in mental inclinations and aptitudes. I'm skeptical that our ways of measuring and analyzing this are well-enough developed to even properly track these variations, though, and I think the whole idea of IQ or "general intelligence" is just unhelpful. The exercise of "intelligence" involves many systems and subsystems distributed across the brain (and possibly the rest of the body), and there may be both genes that affect any one of those individually, and genes that have widely distributed effects that may involve tradeoffs.
I think if somebody is legitimately willing to engage with the science, it should be possible to show them that cognitive science remains in a really quite primitive state. Our understanding of cog-sci is perhaps comparable to where chemistry or medicine stood in like the late 17th century. If people want to persist in arguing for public policies with material outcomes that help some people and hurt others, based on the intellectual equivalent of alchemy and bodily humours, you're justified in suspecting that either they aren't as "rational" as they claim, or that there's some other motivation.
Well said. (sorry for low effort response, but it was well said)
That somehow tech is more racist or sexist than any other industry. In fact, I would bet that techies are less racist or sexist than media journalists. Journalism, an industry of white failsons, is somehow the arbiter of who is racist or not! Give me a break!
Here's the 2020 SSC User Survey.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd4I-x9oArWW1Tz5mEK4uHmxcJzVKGA28RfKPsDvW8hzZNViw/viewanalytics
I think you'll want the numbers on "Human Biodiversity". ("How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?") They seem pretty evenly spread; about three-tenths of readers had favorable, and a twelfth very favorable, views of the idea. Seven-tenths had neutral or negative views. Opinions of feminism were significantly more positive.
All I want to say is that while people like Peter Leyden makes me (a bog standard liberal and minority) want to vote Democratic, people like SDG makes me want to vote for the first non-fascist non-racist Republican that comes along.
it will be a long wait at this rate.
A lot of guilt by association going on in the NYT article. You cannot judge someone's opinions by the commenters on their blog. There is always a substantial number of contrarians and outright trolls. Just last week Matt Yglesias's substack had a commentator who was clearly promoting, to be kind, race realist ideas. Yglesias was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, clearly not having spent enough time in comment sections to recognize the type as well as his readers had.
That's true except the article didn't pick on the commenters. It specifically mentioned, and linked to SSC's posts.
But it does:
"Fellow commenters on the site, he noted, represented a wide cross-section of viewpoints. “They range politically from communist to anarcho-capitalist, religiously from Catholic to atheist, and professionally from a literal rocket scientist to a literal plumber — both of whom are interesting people.”
"The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. "
Pure innuendo that the blog was sympathetic to, or at least tolerant of, these views.
The first part of that was a quote from me. "The voices also ..." part is presented so a casual reader will think it is a quote from me, but it isn't. Nor, so far as I can remember, is it true. Anyone here who disagrees is welcome to offer examples of posters who were neo-fascists or white supremacists — I can't think of any.
Steve Sailer has commented on that NYT post a lot of times, got a lot of likes.
I follow Steve Sailer on Twitter just because I need to know where the very edge of the Overton Window is.
Exactly. It was an aside inserted by the NYT writer without any evidence or examples.
It’s really not fair to hold commenters against the writer. All commenters are, after all, ill informed assholes. :) (My apologies to Epimenides of Crete)
We aren't just cherry picking the few worst isolated examples.
What percentile are you picking?
It’s a self deprecating joke. I am positing that all commenters are ill informed, when I am myself a commenter on this platform. Epimenides was a Cretan, who famously said that all Cretans are liars. It is merely a paradox :)
Nazis, fascists, far-right... all those terms are flung left and right while being devoid of substance. Instead of calling people names or asking them to identify themselves I find it much easier to ask this one quesiton:
Yes or no, do you believe that the current social inequalities between black and white people (whether they be in the US or between say Africa and Europe) are partially due to black people being genetically dumber?
"I’ve never heard them use Slate Star Codex jargon."
I doubt this is strictly true. At least one piece of SSC jargon has gained widespread use: "motte and bailey." Sure, sure, it's an older term by a philosopher.
But search twitter for the term. Before July 2014, people using the term were actually talking about castles. After, early adaptors like Megan McArdle, Sam Bowman and other think tank types used it. https://twitter.com/search?q=motte%20Bailey%20filter%3Averified%20until%3A2015-1-1&src=typed_query&f=live
This doesn't quibble with anything you've written, but in terms of influence Scott Alexander punches way above his readership weight.