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I wrote a much better comment a few minutes ago, but one of the cats I'm fostering because my girlfriend foisted them upon me jumped on my keyboard and deleted it. So I apologize in advance if this is a low effort comment.
I think that the distrust of experts on this site goes way too far. 99% of the topics experts agree on or are on places like Wikipedia are true. If you look up something like the Central Limit Theorem on Wikipedia the answer will be more or less correct. But most things are boring. The ideas we focus on that are controversial and we don't trust them on are ones that cause the experts to lose their minds over and lose the ability to be impartial. Some examples are HBD and Covid. But if you open up a biology textbook, you can take most of that knowledge to the bank.
I want to give an example of this guy I know who worked at Best Buy with me in college. He is a Muslim guy and the elusive moderate Muslim. He is more or less progressive on every topic. I saw him recently at a tech meetup in Austin and he more or less sounded like a straight up Jihadist. And I helped this guy get his job at a major networking company after he got his law degree as a project manager, so I can confirm I thought he was a rational and trustworthy person. Which he is, except on the Israel-Palestine issue. He literally can't be rational. I thin for "experts", this is the same thing. They literally can't be rational on a few issues and it causes them to act insane and make people lose trust in institutions.
I'll give a less controversial example. I have a CS degree and I worked for this company that sold software that helped people automate things. We'd get this guy on a call with potential customers after the sales people and sales engineers did their thing and he would just shit on Azure and AWS and how he could do this and that if they switched to Linux and open source and the customers hated it. I had to pull him aside I was like dude we make software that works with Azure wtf are you doing. He was incapable of putting that hammer and nail away. It was like who gives a shit if a company uses Microsoft but he literally couldn't be rational about it.
I think a lot of people default to something similar to Foucault's theories on knowledge and power where knowledge and power are so linked that they end up essentially being the same thing. I completely agree with him, and I think power and knowledge combine to influence, manipulate and create NPCs that don't think. But in the case of experts, I think it is their biases causing this top down gas lighting instead of anything from the regime. The simplest and most likely answer is these people just believe this stuff due to ideology and are incredibly biased on hot culture war issues. It's not a conspiracy, they literally just can't think about these issues rationally.
I wanted to reply to this, but I realise I'd essentially just be regurgitating Scott's 2017 post "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning"*, so I'm just going to link it and summarize its thesis below.
It's no good saying "experts are reliable, aside from one or two blind spots". This isn't true from a reputational perspective, for the same reason that noticing a small factual error (no matter how minor or inconsequential) in a news article inevitably undermines the reader's confidence in the quality of the rest of the article: "if they got this wrong, what else did they get wrong?" But it's also no good for the simple fact that knowledge is holistic, not atomised. It's not like the facts and theories governing HBD are siloed in a separate warehouse from every other topic: they are inextricably intertwined with facts and theories in evolutionary biology, psychology, the social sciences, education, criminology etc. You might think that "the earth was created 6,000 years ago" is just a belief which can sit comfortably in your matrix of beliefs without affecting anything else, but before long you'll find yourself arguing that dinosaur skeletons were planted there by Satan or the speed of light changed over time.
So no, you can't just say to people "everything in these warehouses is 100% a-ok, but caveat emptor for those two warehouses labelled 'HBD' and 'Covid'." There's only one big warehouse and everything is touching everything else without so much as a sheet of clingfilm to prevent cross-contamination.
*Reading it six years later makes me sad: it almost scans as a preemptive apology for Scott's subsequent retreat into self-imposed intellectual incuriosity and cowardice, when his fearless willingness to step on whatever toes he pleased is what made his name in the first place.
The most stunning thing for me is that cancel-culture enjoyers read the Parable of the Lightning and then just go on like they didn't just read someone talking about how they almost definitely believe in societally-unapproved wrongthink. He's defending hiding your true views in order to escape social censure and talking about the consequences of it, but the people providing that censure are so unperceptive that they don't even see someone practically bragging about it openly.
It's interesting, because the parable of the lightning could be taken in two ways:
"I am currently pretending not to be a crimethinker so as to cover my ass, but I'm not going to tell you which opinions of mine are crimethink." (Your interpretation.)
"I have already shown my power level by explicitly decrying all of the tenets of Ingsoc I disagree with - but it's lamentable that others in a more precarious social situation than me must continue to pretend not to be crimethinkers."
At the time of writing, Scott had already slaughtered a lot of the sacred cows of wokeness/progressivism/liberalism: arguing that hysteria around Trump was unfounded, that there are real differences between male and female brains which impact upon career choices, that false rape accusations are real and potentially life-destroying, that incels deserve our sympathy and some of their grievances are perfectly legitimate, that a lot of modern feminism is just socially-sanctioned bullying of low-status men. It wouldn't be unreasonable to think that a man brave enough to slaughter these sacred cows has already slaughtered all of the sacred cows that he's ever going to.
But Scott has not publicly come out in favor of HBD, which we know from his leaked e-mail he believes. That's a huge heresy, the kind of thing you get fired for.
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You're absolutely right. My Straussian reading of "Kolmogorov" is that he's hinting at endorsing HBD (and possibly copping to a great deal more scepticism on the trans issue then he generally lets on) without coming out and saying so explicitly. He later came a lot closer to outright saying he endorses HBD in his review of The Cult of Smart.
But I wouldn't blame someone familiar with Scott's writing up to that point for interpreting "Kolmogorov" to mean "I've already come out and planted my flags in the sand, it's just a shame that so many other intelligent, well-meaning people can't do so for fear of social censure or cancellation".
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