non_radical_centrist
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User ID: 1327
I thought the Origins of Woke was a great book personally, although I shared a few of Scott's criticisms. Namely I thought it was a little weird how focused Hanania was on making sure workplaces be more conducive to finding sexual partners, and how much he cared about funding women's sports received. But overall I thought the book was great and captured a major causative factor of how Woke is so incredibly strong.
When people aren't allowed to acknowledge the flaws of Wokeness in the workplace or their employees will get sued, it creates an immense chilling effect. That's probably not the sole cause of wokeness, there are other factors like supporting impoverished minorities being a very convenient luxury belief to signal how much of a good person you are, but Hanania convinced me it was a major factor.
I'm generally a fan of "blurry" definitions where something can qualify as X if it fulfills a few of many criteria. I think trying to create hard rules around blurry areas like race and culture is fool's errand, and Scott does a great job laying out how overly strict definitions can go wrong.
Scott Alexander’s review of a 2015 biography of Elon Musk. Elon Musk, to me, is one of the world’s most confusing people. He’s simultaneously both one of the smartest people in the world, creating billions of dollars of value in companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and one of the dumbest, in burning billions on Twitter. Scott’s review I think is a good explanation of what’s up with Musk.
It's a book review submitted to Scott Alexander's blog for his book review contest(not by me, I just enjoyed reading it). It a summary of an Icelandic Saga that's half-fable, half-historical record of a series of legal proceedings in medieval Iceland, and how society that teeters between civilization and barbarism.
