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Before that, the sub had a functional moratorium on all IQ topics on grounds of non-relevance to Sam Harris' work. After that...well, that went out the window and nothing good followed.
It really did seem to outrage people that a) it came up and b) we let the discussion go (I was a mod at the time). And those people never left and never got over Harris having the sheer gall.
But this wasn't the first place this happened. There really is something odd going on with reddit where a lot of subs end up degenerating into snark subs critical of the central figure.
It was especially a blow because of who Ezra Klein was supposed to be. Vox was supposed to be the smart, wonky wing of the Democrat's base. You're supposed to be able to get the counter-intuitive take or someone chasing the data to the end. But, on this issue, they took the Rutherfordian line of "just don't worry about it" (at best).
Colors the whole thing.
Who were you?
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Hm? It's a relatively common phenomenum in video game forums. Pretty typical tipping point culture.
Most fan groups have some fan distribution includes some balance of positive fans and disgruntled fans who more or less stay because being disgruntled becomes their hobby. Positive fans grow tired / bored with the content, while disgruntled fans grow larger as more people become disgrunted / have no where else to hang. Eventually, disgruntled fans hit a tipping poing towards becoming a decisive plurality as their toxicity starts to actively drive away positive fans, leaving a greater preponderance of disgruntled fans, making the forum a relatively toxic mess.
It's Vico's Barbarism of Reflection in action
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I can understand the avoidance of IQ topics, given the incendiary nature of them, and to that extent I probably agree with Sam (and maybe Ezra?) that they probably shouldn't be so openly talked about. Too many bad actors.
Ezra just came off so slippery in a bad way in that exchange.
Harris criticized the Vox article that was written by another journalist. Klein then claimed he was editor-in-chief at the time, but didn’t assign or edit it, but that he stood by it, but that it’s ultimately on him as editor-in-chief, but that it was a good article, but that he can only speak from his perspective.
He also said:
"And by the way I’m not here to say you’re racist, I don’t think you are. We have not called you one." Of course, after that he went on to explain all the racially damaging things he thought Sam had done. To Ezra, I guess Sam was (is) effectively a racist, not an intentional racist. That was really the progressive argument in a nutshell for about 10 years.
Smearing someone as a useful idiot for racists at best then psychoanalyzing them for not taking it well...if we're talking about gall, that's up there.
This is one of the reasons I find it hard to be sympathetic now that the worm has turned and people are angry at having to share Twitter with people they think are too interested in the topic. People were absolutely brazen about being bad faith.
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