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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34586 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Looks like I missed Scott's latest on the Alexandros front.

On a factual level, it's high-quality and it seems he comes surprisingly close to Alexandros' perceived effect size.

On a conversational level, I hope that he considers this final. From my comment on the article:

gestalt vibes of untrustworthiness

Cue 37-part series from Alexandros explaining why Scott is Betraying Rationalism by including such a phrase.

I jest, but Alexandros has gotten so much mileage out of waging the culture war on this topic. He has worked very hard to frame his stance as simultaneously subversive and indignant. This shouldn't detract from the legitimate research he has collected. But it does predict his response to any high-profile conversation with Scott.

Anything Scott says can and will be used...not exactly against him, but for retweets and Substack follows. That does mean against him if and when Alexandros can frame it as punching up.

So I'll be satisfied if this is the end of the line. Scott has engaged, over and over again, with the factual scaffolding of Alexandros' arguments. The 5-10% chance is an adequate conclusion. Let Pascal and Omura wager accordingly.

Scott's posts contain so much content that fully responding to him requires 37 parts (or a less exaggerated version thereof). You don't get to post something containing large numbers of arguments that would take enormous amounts of space to respond to and then complain that your opponents are using up enormous amounts of space in replying to it.

This is why people don't like Gish gallops, and it seems like a no-win demand. Don't respond to some of what Scott said, letting him win because of volume regardless of his argument quality, or respond and get people complaining that you wrote 37 parts.

Scott wrote a bunch because he was responding to a bunch, and he was responding to a bunch because a meta analysis just genuinely is a bunch, and a meta analysis was necessary to draw any conclusions at all because there was, at the time, no single RCT with solid enough procedures and a sufficiently large sample size to draw reliable conclusions from that alone.

I don't know that I'd use "gish gallop" to describe someone dropping a meta-analysis of dubious quality into the discussion, despite the structural similarity.

That said, I do think an adversarial collaboration would have been a better way at making their argument legible to everyone else than a series of blog posts sniping at each other.

because a meta analysis just genuinely is a bunch

In which case, you shouldn't be complaining that someone used 37 parts to talk about it! It's a bunch, and you can't fully discuss it without using 37 parts.

We're both talking about the paragraph

I’ll be honest - I also didn’t want to read a 21 part argument. I would say I have read about half of his posts, and am mostly responding to the summary, going into individual posts only when I find we have a strong and real disagreement that requires further clarification. I also have had a bad time trying to discuss this with Alexandros (not necessarily his fault, I can be sensitive about these kinds of things) and am writing this out of obligation to honor and respond to someone who has put in a lot of work responding to me. It is not going to be as comprehensive and well-thought out as Alexandros probably deserves.

right? I took that more as a complaint of the form "21 posts is a number of posts that outweighs my desire to engage with this topic", not "writing 21 posts about this topic is bad". Complaining that something is a lot of work doesn't mean that you're saying that there's any specific thing that a specific person should have done to make the thing be less work, sometimes a complaint is just venting. And I think this is one of those times.

I was referring to this

Cue 37-part series from Alexandros explaining why Scott is Betraying Rationalism by including such a phrase.

where netstat seems to think that there's something wrong with Alexandros posting something long, because it's long.

Oh. Never mind then, I just fail at reading comprehension.

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