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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36477 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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It's a bit petty and I haven't talked about it here to my recollection, but basically: when he ran a survey of his fanbase, he copied the format and many of the questions I used to survey r/themotte, repeating a number of items verbatim and copying much of my presentation of the results down to specific color choices. That's totally fine in my book—I'm glad he was impressed enough to use it, and it's a fun format that I think should spread—but when sharing the results of the survey, he first requested someone make an imitation of my results table, then removed all mention of my initial table after someone had copied it. You can see the archive here, where it links my work, with no mention of it in the live version.

Technically he did attribute my original when he was asking the questions, but it left a bit of a bitter taste for me when he edited any attribution out of the results page itself, and when I reached out asking about it, he first replied by saying that he didn't know what I was talking about, then went radio silent. It's not the sort of thing I'm interested in making a huge fuss over, but it did leave the lingering impression that his disagreeable approach is more than just an affect and that he can be a genuinely unpleasant person on an interpersonal level.

Wait, Richard Hanania is Motte-adjacent enough to have seen your survey somehow and think it was useful to him? Interesting.

I don't know about the motte but he was definitely on SSC back in the day.

Yeah. His description was a bit odd ("I found an image online of a survey in which SlateStarCodex fans rated various things"), so it's hard to tell just what sort of proximity we're looking at, but definitely some sort of Motte-adjacency.

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