#Scott “Scott Alexander” Alexander Siskind

[thosearentcrimes]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[cadyrocks]

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

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

Have we forgotten about this email?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[aronarchy]

A few years ago, I spent a considerable amount of time engaging with folks in the Slate Star Codex community. I can confirm that Scott Alexander Siskind attracts a lot of fascists, racists, & bigots. I learned about contemporary scientific racism in part because SSC fans *kept on* bringing it up & I wanted to refute them. Siskind maintained distance from the more openly oppressive & offensive followers. But it’s got to be more than coincidence. As others are emphasizing, the fandom scene around Siskind is a major pipeline of fascist & eugenicist recruitment. I tried to humanize social justice warriors to SSC folks & argue against the oppressive narratives popular among them in shared rationalist terms. While the experience was always intellectually simulating, I eventually moved away from that approach. As pleasant as aspects of SSC culture are, the persistent prominence of fascism & eugenics ultimately says the most about the project.

I hope Siskind’s current notoriety doesn’t lead more people down the recruitment pipeline. I might quibble about certain details, but overall I support the negative attention Siskind & SSC are getting.

I still intend to write a longer piece aimed at Slate Star Codex types that argues disability radicalism makes the focus on IQ & so on irrelevant.

Yes, humans differ & society only accommodates specific minds & bodies.

Yes, people lie about this & refuse to accept reality.

The solution ain’t to double down on selection, but rather to create environments where all feeling beings can thrive.

The IQ debate highlights the utter hegemony of meritocracy. It’s an overwhelmingly intra-eugenicist dispute where hardly anyone even acknowledges the underlying assumptions, much less challenges them.

Scientific racist: “Ability differs between populations, so fuck equality & fuck you.”

Liberal eugenicist: “No, ability only differs between individuals. Equality of opportunity facilitates selection.”

Mystical meritocrat: “It’s not about ability but the choice to work hard.”

Each of these jerks supports having some thrive while others languish, whether determined by the free market, the experts, bureaucrats, or what have you. They’re all eugenicists, including the mystical meritocrat who will never admit it.

Likewise, disavowals of IQ typically retain the concept of intelligence in normative terms & reinforce its social value: “Only idiots believe in IQ! (Implied: I am very smart!)”

Only communists take the relatively radical position of (theoretically) wanting everyone to have absolutely equal access to material nice [things] regardless of intelligence or ability of any sort. They rarely entertain notions of *social equality*, however.

.

[illustir]

Finally got around to reading Elizabeth Sandifer's essay and if there was any doubt, this makes it clear how much of an unserious and malicious person Scott Alexander/Siskind is. Siskind's writing deliberately pretends to be respectable to provide ideological cover to some real evil.

[fucked-up-rats]

It was kind of fucked up for Scott Alexander/Siskind to “witness” that Elena Churilov was trustworthy and not disclose that they were dating. It was kind of fucked up for him to say he didn’t think this gave him a responsibility to warn people about the ways she had not been trustworthy in the past.

[arcticdementor]

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

Scott Alexander

[reddragdiva]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[proletariattigress]

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

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

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

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

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

[liskantope]

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

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

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

[fierceawakening]

Okay, read the article.

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

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

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

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

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/silicon-valleys-safe-space-the-new-york-times/

Silicon Valley’s Safe Space - The New York Times

More than 7,500 people signed a petition urging The Times not to publish his name, including many prominent figures in the tech industry. “Putting his full name in The Times, the petitioners said, “would meaningfully damage public discourse, by discouraging private citizens from sharing their thoughts in blog form.” On the internet, many in Silicon Valley believe, everyone has the right not only to say what they want but to say it anonymously.

Amid all this, I spoke with Manoel Horta Ribeiro, a computer science researcher who explores social networks at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He was worried that Slate Star Codex, like other communities, was allowing extremist views to trickle into the influential tech world. “A community like this gives voice to fringe groups,” he said. “It gives a platform to people who hold more extreme views.”

But for Kelsey Piper and many others, the main issue came down to the name, and tying the man known professionally and legally as Scott Siskind to his influential, and controversial, writings as Scott Alexander. Ms. Piper, who is a journalist herself, for the news site Vox, said she did not agree with everything he had written, but she also felt his blog was unfairly painted as an on-ramp to radical views. She worried his views could not be reduced to a single newspaper story.

I assured her my goal was to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness. But she felt that discussing both critics and supporters could be unfair. What I needed to do, she said, was somehow prove statistically which side was right.

When I asked Mr. Altman, of OpenAI, if the conversation on sites like Slate Star Codex could push people toward toxic beliefs, he said he held “some empathy” for these concerns. But, he added, “people need a forum to debate ideas.”

In August, Mr. Siskind restored his old blog posts to the internet. And two weeks ago, he relaunched his blog on Substack, a company with ties to both Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. He gave the blog a new title: Astral Codex Ten. He hinted that Substack paid him $250,000 for a year on the platform. And he indicated the company would give him all the protection he needed.

In his first post, Mr. Siskind shared his full name.

[thosearentcrimes]

One reason we sometimes choose not to distinguish between the person who says “I’m not a racist, but...” and the person who says “I am definitely a racist”, is that the former is lying or misinformed, and both are going to try to make the government more racist if at all possible. We can use the short-hand “racist” for both, because it is true for both. The abundance of distinct political tendencies that use either argumentative strategy (or even both) leaves us unable to specify further. Is taking the “I’m not a racist” part seriously why you believed that racist Jewish pundit Scott “Scott Alexander” Alexander Siskind was not racist, and possibly still believe that despite the leaked e-mails where he said he was racist but hiding it? Just to be clear, I do not think he is a nazi.

I also don’t quite understand why it is so important to your arguments whether someone is Jewish or not. Like, say there is a person who agitates for race, nation, and state to become one, scapegoats an unpopular minority, advocates for authoritarian rule and a police state, makes what some of their followers seem to regard as calls to terrorist action, and engages in Jingoism. Does it really matter if the unpopular minority is not Jewish people, the conception of race and nation includes Jewish people, or if the person themselves is Jewish? Does that break the analogy somehow? And that’s even assuming that Jewish identity and anti-semitism are mutually exclusive, which is simply not true. For example, I think it’s undeniable that the Soros conspiracy theories are anti-semitic. Do they somehow magically cease to be anti-semitic simply because the son of the PM of Israel shares them? I’m not saying it’s reasonable to call Ben Shapiro a nazi, he’s very much your classical reactionary type. Someone like Milo Yiannopolous, on the other hand, is obviously a nazi.

What I don’t understand about your argument is that we already have concepts to distinguish various kinds of right-wingers. When we don’t use them, it is because they are not immediately relevant, or because we don’t have enough information to classify the person or act. Some people are also just not politically educated enough to use terms accurately, a problem you can’t solve by demanding the creation of new terms for them not to learn. But by all means, if you want to try to establish a formal political taxonomy, go right ahead. First off, is the taxonomy going to be morphological or phylogenetic?

And actually that's something I really struggle with in terms of leftist vocabulary, it's really flattened all kinds of bigotry into an undifferentiated mass.

Like, a racist jewish pundit really is different from a self-described Nazi who constantly posts on Stormfront and even as I try to explain that I realize I don't have the vocabulary to say what I mean.

There are people out there, breaking into the Capitol, wearing clothes celebrating Auschwitz and the mass murder of Jewish people and undesirables.

This is a different phenomenon from holding unconscious bias, voting Republican, or being Ben Shapiro.

I believe this difference is extremely important even if you believe all the things I just listed are bad.

And by calling all of those kinds of people Nazis you limit the ability to talk cogently about each of them, whether it be their similarities or differences.

I'm not trying to minimize anything but more and more I do think that it's frustrating to have no easy short-hand way to distinguish between the person who says, "I'm not a racist, but..." and the person who says, "I am definitely a racist, I'm proud to be one, and I'm going to try to make the government more racist if at all possible."

[choppedcowboydinosaur]

BTW, Scott Alexander's last name is Siskind. Thank The Unit of Caring for the dissemination of this.

I have no idea what this is about tbh.

[arcticdementor]

As I understand it, Scott's saying: >I used to believe censorship was about the Obviously Correct Majority keeping the Obviously Wrong Minority from spouting bullshit. This is an unnecessary use of force, as we can identify bullshit. Let them spout bullshit and shout it down. >However, Obviously Correct gay rights people were censored, and we're now censoring the factually-correct and secretly-popular eugenics people, because they're morally wrong and we don't want them to realize that everyone's on the same page and doing soft eugenics. >Therefore, since censorship is actually about social power and coordination, and my preferences are no censorship > my censorship > your censorship, given that "no censorship" is off the table, I'd better get with The Right Side of History and censor the bad people. >TL;DR in nRx speak, "bitch, I'm with the Cathedral now!"

Zontargs, on Dr. Siskind’s “Social Censorship: the First Offender Model”

[reddragdiva]

philosophically, there may be at least one rationalist who isn’t a fucking idiot

apparently scott alexander, speaking as scott siskind, saying straight up “gosh i sure do love HBD and the wisdom of the following list of ardent scientific racists and gosh the reactionaries are insightful" somehow does not in any way make scott a scientific racist into reactionaries and promoting the reactionary line, precisely as he appeared to be for the past several years

the strategy seems to be blank denial that scott declaring himself to be firing the smoking gun constitutes a gun with smoke coming out, it's probably just a cardboard replica shooting confetti or something. throwing up chaff

rationalists argue like republicans or bitcoiners, all claims are tentative and instantly changeable if they sound like they might not constitute good news for bitcoin today

and this is even before we get to eliezer yudkowsky declaring all his and scott’s detractors to be suppressive persons:

[irradiate-space]

I maintain that Cade Metz either didn't understand what Scott was writing, or didn't read half of what Scott wrote. The article describes the Grey Tribe essay thusly:

The essay was a critique of what Mr. Siskind, writing as Scott Alexander, described as “the Blue Tribe.” In his telling, these were the people at the liberal end of the political spectrum whose characteristics included “supporting gay rights” and “getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots.”

If that's Cade Metz's takeaway from the essay, I don't think he read it all the way to its conclusion.

Freddie is not amused.