pretending that there's a legitimate, good faith, reasonable-people-can-disagree debate about "race & IQ" is one of the most obvious giveaways.
from January 2025 [0]:
> Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country.
a bit of additional context from Wikipedia [1]:
> Richard Lynn was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal.
he claims that Lynn's work is still "hotly debated" and links to an article in "Aporia Magazine" which is published by the "Human Diversity Foundation" [2]:
> The Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) is a far-right company founded in 2022 to publish "race science" through the Aporia Magazine and Mankind Quarterly. It also publishes Edward Dutton's The Jolly Heretic podcast. Key persons of the HDF including its founder support remigration and white nationalism.
the role that Alexander plays reminds me of the attempts in the early 2000s to "teach the controversy" [3] about evolution vs. creationism. there is no actual scientific debate, but people with a political axe to grind want to shift the Overton window and give the impression that there is one.
That person is way too far down the rabbit hole themselves to give a decent criticism of Alexander.
When someone's #1, heavy-hitting, come-out-swinging criticism amounts to "his group is not as smart as they think they are" then they're already done. They've cooked themselves. I read that paragraph and heard it in the mean girl voice they thought they were hiding.
#2 is that his wrong ideas are immoral. #3 is that #2 draws the wrong crowd.
It's not like I don't get the point. It's just written for an audience that already deep in that corner of the blogosphere.
I'm sure they pump their fists at such a clean summing-up of why they hate him. But my eyes are glazing over.
This is just a preaching-to-the-choir description of the fact that Siskind does not hold 100% to egalitarian leftism. Unless you're already a doctrinaire egalitarian leftist, I don't see why reading this would change your opinion of him by a millimeter
> Unless you're already a doctrinaire egalitarian leftist, I don't see why reading this would change your opinion of him by a millimeter
It seems possible that if someone wasn’t familiar with Scott’s position on race science, they could read about his position on race science and then have that influence their opinion of him.
Out of curiosity, are you lumping everybody into two groups? The way your sentence was worded it sounds like there are on one hand people that believe in race science, and on the other hand “doctrinaire egalitarian leftists”. If the only qualification required to be a “doctrinaire egalitarian leftist” is “not believing in race science”, then you’ve kind of just said “Unless [you don’t believe in race science], I don’t see why reading this would change your opinion of him by a millimeter”, which might actually kind of underscore some people’s issue with him.
Thank you for clarifying that you are using the term “doctrinaire egalitarian leftist” to refer to any individual that does not believe in race science, or more specifically any individual that doesn’t agree with Scott Siskind’s position on race science.
I’m personally not super familiar with that label and assumed because of the definitions of those words that it would have some sort of philosophical or ideological connotation — but since a person needn’t be doctrinaire, a philosophical egalitarian, or a leftist to not be a fan of Scott’s blog, when you say “doctrinaire egalitarian leftist” here you mean it like when a Juggalo says somebody isn’t “down with the clowns”
I’d pick another word for non-Codexers or Scott Thots (I’m guessing, I don’t know what label your fandom self-applies here), as someone could mistakenly think that you are trying to make some sort of point. (Which we know that you are not, since your original post was essentially just “Bringing up Scott’s positions on race science won’t change the opinions of the fans of Scott’s positions on race science” just phrased in a maximally-confusing and belabored way)
I've read only perhaps 1% of Siskind's work and don't have a particularly close familiarity with him or opinion on his work, and from that position I'm pointing out that the blog post is not particularly persuasive. It just states that Siskind does not hold to the same presuppositions as the author without making an argument for those presuppositions
> I've read only perhaps 1% of Siskind's work and don't have a particularly close familiarity with him
I see the point you’re trying to make here and I’m sorry I’m just not interested in becoming part of your fandom. I don’t really care how little you feel someone needs to read of Scott’s blog to find race science to be so compelling
Yeah, I guess it's true that people who (1) like eugenics and "human biodiversity" (i.e., race science), and (2) think neoreactionism is "edgy and cool" are not egalitarian or leftist.
This seems to boil down to that Elizabeth Sandifer, a self described "middle-aged trans anarchist", believes https://www.astralcodexten.com is "fertile grounds for white nationalist recruitment".
This is just wrong and anyone can visit the blog to see for themselves.
Well, for one thing, that comment is in response to a link to a blog post that Scott wrote about how The Feudalism Blogger’s old posts about how feudalism is good were better than The Feudalism Blogger’s new posts about how feudalism is good.
He sort of panders to an audience that fancies themselves much smarter than the average person, and as such categorically demand opinions that average people do not hold — no matter how sensible they might be. To accommodate that requirement he repackages existing (more usually conservative/libertarian) cultural gripes by pairing them with some light criticism and branding it as some sort of enlightened centrist/Third Way perspective. This sort of practice in general has lost some of its illusory appeal in recent years since so many previously “politically inscrutable” rich and influential folks dropped their centrist/apolitical trappings and came out as staunchly right-wing.
That being said there are quite a few readers that still want to play the “Are they right wing? Are they left wing? Are they something magical and ascendant?” game, and audience capture is a real phenomenon, so the entrenched players have no reason for introspection or change.
I have noticed this too. I've only ever read him off and on, and I get the feeling that he must have written something during one of the periods I wasn't reading his still at all that got him "canceled", but I have no idea what it was.
When the American Left split into progressive and liberal camps in the mid 2010s, the rationalist and adjacent communities underwent a huge internal conflict. Scott and a lot of his orbit tend to stay on the liberal side which these days is called and often calls itself "centrist". The aftermath of the split has had pretty huge effects in most Western spaces. A lot of the progressive left is really angry at the centrist left wing and many centrists think the progressive left is misguided and hate on them. The hate that Scott gets is largely a fallout from this schism.
He seems to get more hate than more mainstream people on the more centrist side of that split... Granted, they do all get hate, and your description does resonate. But he still seems to be an outlier.
He was considered a core, visible member of the rationalist community from well before the split. For better or for worse he is considered a figurehead of the movement. With the acrimony of the split there was no way he was going to escape unscathed no matter which side he ended up on just by sheer visibility of his writing.
But it's not rationalists mad about this split who seem to have outsized vitriol for him. It seems to me that it's people who were not involved in that community to begin with.
My read has always been that the angry folks were always rationalist adjacent even if they weren't rationalists themselves. There's a lot of people in my IRL network, for example, who are 1-3 degrees of separation from Scott or Yud but have never posted about them or in the rationalist blogspace at all.
In the schism the other person replying to you is talking about, Scott didn’t go fully into the far left progressive ideology when it happened so therefore he’s a traitor since he should “know better”.
One tenant of the progressive thinking is if you know their argument then you must agree with them because they’re “right”. So you’re either ignorant or evil - there’s no room for smart people that just think they’re wrong. They know Scott isn’t ignorant so therefore he must be evil.
My other comment got flag killed because I mentioned the core group I think is responsible for this kind of thinking within that community.
I’ve read LessWrong on and off since 2014. Read SSC and ACX semi-regularly. Scott’s a crank. He writes convincingly, he understands charisma and style, but he just can’t hold his own in an intellectual exchange.
Just last week he and Tyler Cowen of Marginial Revolution got into a dispute over USAID and DOGE and the degree to which Scott fails over and over again to read otherwise simple sentences is staggering.
