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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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What's pseudo about it? She's genuinely an intellectual. In fact she bested Meghan Murphy in their debate over porn and sex work on Benjamin Boyce's podcast a few years ago.

That's probably one of the better examples of her being a pseudo-intellectual. "That's not a study, that's a TikTok poll" was a KO line that she never recovered from (though, I dunno, has she improved her methodology since?).

But Murphy came with no empirical evidence whatsoever. And there was more to the discussion than that.

Arguments don't have to be empirical. Also she never pretended to be doing empirical "studies", so pointing out the lack of evidence on her part is a smaller loss for her than it was for Aella. Finally, even if you're right, that does not make her not a pseudo-intellectual.

Murphy's "it just feels in my gut wrong" isn't going to cut it. It can supplement it though. And you say "pretended to be doing," but it's just weak empiricism, not a total absence. It's cursory and vaguely suggestive, which counts for something. Scattershot qualitative impressions are in a similar boat.

They're not quantitative, and, again, they're not pretending to be. What's more they don't have to be. Many people, including highly renowned rationalists, male their arguments off of incentive analysis, and priors, and that's pretty much what Meghan Murphy did, as far I rember.

And again, if she was as bad as you're saying, Aella defeating her would have no bearing on whether she's an actual intellectual, which is the position you have to defend.

Yeah but look at how awful the quality of work in social studies (especially anything sex-related) is.

Aella having an audience of people who are autistic enough to answer broadly-truthfully and being autistic enough to just present the info she gets instead of trying to massage it into a structure that suits whatever the agreed-upon orthodoxy of academic circles is is a level of truthiness I don't believe the current state of academic inquiry on this subject actually matches.

It's pretty strange to argue that Aella has a sample with a certain bias and then assume that all other research is deliberately "massaged" as opposed to them not having that particular problem.

(Not to mention that some research, e.g. evopsych-inspired research, is offensive to the orthodoxy as well yet still gets done)

I have negative faith in the ability of social studies to deliver anything that isn't what they've already decided amongst themselves is the appropriate conclusion. Evopsych a tad different since it's a harder science and even then there's a lot of 'our data might say X pretty clearly and we'll publish it but we'll try and say we concluded Y instead'

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