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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35540 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I like the works of both Scotts, Aaronson and Alexander, but they both viscerally.. piss me off, they are such massive dweebs they are begging me to throw paper planes at them or knock their books out of their hands.

I understand this is a low rung form of thinking and thus compartmentalize "respect".

This is the feeling that “Rationalism” gives me in general, but I make an exception for Scott Alexander. His writing is a lot more tolerable and often quite enjoyable.

good writing does not mean an enjoyable person or personality. I don't have any problem with either of them though . I cannot think of anything either Scott has done to piss me off besides max trump dergement in the case of the other Scott. TDS comes from having very strong moral convictions about disliking trump. It does not mean being a shitty person.

It does not mean being a shitty person.

That's true. A lot of the general online Orange Man Bad stuff does go along with other indicators that the person is shitty, but the names I recognise generally aren't that type of person. It's just a shame it took over so many people's brains. For instance, I think Hillary would have been a terrible president because she was going for the war-hawk image to show she was Tough Enough to be president, and I think she might have imitated some kind of incident a la Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War. I don't, though, think that Hillary is Pantsuit Woman Bad in the same way as TDS.

That being said, today I've read a story about the US and Iranian drones in Syria, and huh. Funny how that turned out, eh? War mongering Donnie Trump was too dangerous to re-elect, but what about Biden now?

My exceedingly cynical reaction to that story was (1) goodness, I wonder from whom the Iranians learned to send drones off to do the killing for them? (2) The US is just mad they used drones to kill US citizens, that's a job for America!

I'm not going to argue against the importance of the (reversed) halo effect. How many people would openly say they didn't want him to win because he was an asshole? How many felt it, but justified such a base sentiment with political commentary?

I do think there is merit to the argument that Trump was unusually dangerous for a President. Not uniquely, but unusually. The diplomatic posture, the disdain for existing channels. Livestreaming his brand over Twitter. Not coincidentally, these were all big parts of his outsider appeal.

The probability that America kept doing garden-variety Bad Things was pretty similar between Trump and Hillary. The probability that it did something dramatic seemed higher under Trump.

I agree that Scott Alexander writes in a pretty enjoyable way. He mostly avoids the typical writing flaws of many rationalists, Motteizens, and maybe just highly online hyper-intellectuals in general: 1) verbosity unjustified by either its information density or its entertainment value, 2) egotistical showing off in the form of unnecessary intellectual references and theatrical writing style, and 3) overuse of jargon like "-adjacent" and "priors".

Although his titles beginning with "Contra [whoever]" come off as affected (and always remind me of Iran-Contra).

his last essay was all of those but it got tons of votes and praise, so evidently readers do like verbosity and showing off even if everyone likes to claim otherwise

I think I see some of that too. Maybe substack inflates certain metrics but this not the same as popularity

I suspect that many who do not like it simply do not read in the first place, and thus do not comment on it.

but then if it was bad it would not have gotten as many votes

Wait, what? He avoids none of those, his writing is just good enough that he makes up for it.

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