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Every normal Christian in America has heard of the Mormon church.
And? That’s completely orthogonal to the point I’m making. Joe Sixpack from Indiana didn’t hear about Mormon polygamy and then because of that decide to log on to the Motte and write a 2000 word essay about Bay Area rationalist polycules and what that says about Scott Alexander’s moral fibre and views of society. That’s clearly a very inside-baseball take from someone who is immersed in the rationalist milieu.
I’m not from Indiana, but certainly from flyover country. I became aware of polyamory through the internet, the same place where I read Scott’s essays and am talking to you now. I do not identify as a rationalist, have never identified as a rationalist, but I enjoyed a lot of Scott’s writings in 2014 about the culture war (as I am a relatively conservative man from flyover country, and he was criticizing the left), and discovered them from a Reddit recommendation on a subreddit recommended to me by a high school friend, also from flyover country.
Polyamory is also widespread, yes under that name, among gay zoomers just about anywhere, so if you’re young and know anyone who’s gay (and there’s a lot of zoomers who identify as gay), you have a good chance of coming across it.
This is a second-hand anecdote, but my mother does hiring at a small organization here in flyover country and had a hilarious, if disastrous, job interview where the candidate told her he was polyamorous. He did not get the job.
This stuff is spreading. It’s not just in San Francisco any more.
I disagree with Tree, but what he said isn’t entirely false about where the criticism comes from. But all the gory details definitely suggest some of the posters are insiders.
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Sure. But "someone who is immersed in the rationalist milieu" and "someone who works in Silicon Valley" are not synonymous, as numerous commenters have taken great pains to explain to you.
Maybe not a 100 percent overlap on the Venn diagram, but certainly a very strong correlation. Frankly I don’t know why you are so perturbed by the idea that you feel the need attempt to employ such casuistry to push back against it.
I'm not "perturbed" by anything: it's simply that your assertion that everyone on the Motte works in Silicon Valley is extremely obviously erroneous.
I don't know if we've ever done a user survey here, but Scott does one of his readers every year, and only 58% of his readers live in the US, and less than 50% work in computer science-related fields. If you assume that there's a lot of overlap between the kinds of people who read Scott and the kinds of people who post here, I'd hazard a guess that at most forty per cent of Motte users work in Silicon Valley - quite a long ways from "all" or "a very strong correlation". I wouldn't be remotely surprised if the real figure was as low as twenty per cent, or ten.
TracingWoodgrains did a user survey back in the Reddit days and only two-thirds of posters lived in the US (I don't know how much the demographics have changed since the migration from Reddit).
I will admit that there are few types of fallacious argument I find more obnoxious than sneering Bulverism, especially when it's based on an untrue assertion.
I made a rather uncontroversial (if snippy) assertion that many people on the Motte hold tech jobs of the kind found in Silicon Valley. Which is something that many many other conversations on here basically take as a matter of fact. Suddenly you and ten other people angrily surge out of the woodwork to gish-gallop me with user survey statistics and bizarre and nonsensical arguments about Mormons. And now I am uncharitably accused of “sneering Bulvarism”.
doesn't accurately describe
but I'm more astonished by the contrast between
versus
It looks like you might have a habit of choosing words inaccurately for the purposes of hyperbole, and that's a bit rough when you're some place like this where Aspergery people like me and your challengers upthread are welcomed, but it's easy enough to fix: when you get called out on it just admit the error, compose an accurate rewording (without pretending it's just an equivalent paraphrase) instead, and you're done. Everybody makes mistakes. Doubling down is just digging the hole deeper.
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No shame in admitting you made a factual error and moving on.
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