I've said it before back on Reddit, and I'll say it again here: This guy seems to have a solid point to make about the efficacy of Ivermectin, but he keeps sullying it with personal attacks against Scott Alexander. He very clearly has an axe to grind against Scott, which is why he uses hyperbolic titles like "Scott Alexander wounds Rationalism!!!". His work has a great amount of light, but he adds a bunch of unnecessary heat either out of resentment towards Scott, in an attempt to clickbait, or both.
And this is what Alex had to say about it to which you made no reply whatsoever: Obviously I can't be held accountable for other people's opinions in the comments. This is not a standard Scott would pass either, so the fact that it is being raised here feels like isolated demands for rigor.
Alexandros explicitly endorsed ("Liked by Alexandros Marinos") many of the disparaging comments I was talking about.
Cite a source for your claim.
I searched Google for "Scott Alexander wounds Rationalism!!!", and nothing came up.
It's the article I was responding to on Reddit, which I linked up above. The official title is "Scott Alexander corrects error: Ivermectin effective, rationalism wounded." In other words, according to Alexandros, Scott was so catastrophically negligent that he wounded Rationalism in its entirety. Combine this with the accusatory nature Alexandros' article, and it comes off like Alex wants to tarnish Scott's legitimacy beyond his Ivermectin take.
Does it appear that you can read the mind of Alex better than the rest of us? A far more plausible theory, if I were to engage in the same rhetoric, is that this community has a handful of members who hold Scott Alexander to be their darling, leader, or authority and thereby get upset if anyone fairly and squarely criticizes his opinions with valid points that cannot be refuted rationally.
If you're implying I'm a blind Scott fanboy then I categorically reject your assertion. Scott's just a smart guy who approaches a variety of topics from a rationalist perspective. Nothing more, nothing less. He's certainly capable of making mistakes, and the fact that he hosts a list of them is part of what makes him unique. He benefits from critiques like everyone else.
The issue with Alex he mixes good criticism, i.e. "here's where your analysis is wrong, and here's the stats to back it up", with bad criticism, i.e. "rationalism wounded" and other such nonsense attempting to draw meta-level conclusions on Scott's credibility from limited object-level events.
But it doesn't actually say that Scott wounds rationalism
Semantics. "Scott did something, and as a result rationalism has been wounded" is functionally equivalent to this. If Alex sincerely didn't intend to say anything about Scott wounding rationalism then he should have reworded his title, but the accusational tone of the entire article leads me to believe he did want to. I'm referring to stuff like:
Sadly, the rationalist community’s biggest contribution to pandemic discourse was to assist in shutting down a promising treatment
The damage rationalists have done to pandemic discourse darkens my heart.
his essay is still there, & its impact on "independent thinkers" permanent.
If even rationalists are responding to your careful analysis and argumentation with vague notions of tone and "bad faith," it suggests to me that they don't have a rational defense of their position. Whether they are or not, they appear to be acting as if they are wounded.
This is silly. I'm taking Alex's statistical critiques of Scott's work as a given, because I don't really care that much about the efficacy of Ivermectin to look into it that deeply. There's some utility to be gleaned from correcting errors in now-irrelevant issues and seeing where they happened to prevent them in the future, which I think Scott did a decent job of doing in his response.
On the other hand, I'm very interested in how criticism should be done in a general sense. Phrasing criticism constructively and in a non-inflammatory way is just as important as making the criticism in the first place. It's one of the founding principles of this site! Optimize for light, not heat. Failing to do so makes people reflexively defensive and less likely to engage with you in the future... which is exactly what happened with Scott. He stopped responding to Alex after initially putting in the effort to do so, since he felt that every interaction ended up badly.
Let's say I responded to your post with something like this:
"Wow, it must be great to be a person who's so oblivious to human communication that they think everything needs to be stated literally, as all the insinuated insults people lob won't land! It's just a shame it also likely implies some level of autism..."
The correct response would be "What the heck!?! We were having a sensible disagreement and now you're accusing me of having autism???"
To which I responded with "why are you offended? You're just paraphrasing my statement. I never said you specifically have autism!"
That's what I feel like is going on here.
For the record, I'm not accusing you of having autism, nor being "oblivious to human communication". That statement is used purely for demonstrative purposes.
So I guess you could technically say Alex never directly insults Scott, he just does something like what I just wrote instead. Of course he uses less crass words than what I just used, but it's still a personal attack.
Maybe the title "Scott Alexander corrects error: Ivermectin effective, rationalism wounded." indeed wasn't supposed to say that Scott himself wounded rationalism with his article, and that it was just about the community response not aggressively pushing back. In that case, let's take a few other instances:
What about when Alex accuses Scott of cognitive dissonance for not fully retracting his article?
What about when Alex lists a bunch of tenets of rationalism and implies that Scott broke them because they disagree on something?
What about when Alex accuses Scott of stopping where he did because he wants to "confirm his biases"?
Maybe some or all of those aren't meant to be inflammatory or to be personal attacks. If that's the case though, he should really, really change his writing style because to at least some people, it comes off that way.
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Notes -
I've said it before back on Reddit, and I'll say it again here: This guy seems to have a solid point to make about the efficacy of Ivermectin, but he keeps sullying it with personal attacks against Scott Alexander. He very clearly has an axe to grind against Scott, which is why he uses hyperbolic titles like "Scott Alexander wounds Rationalism!!!". His work has a great amount of light, but he adds a bunch of unnecessary heat either out of resentment towards Scott, in an attempt to clickbait, or both.
Alexandros explicitly endorsed ("Liked by Alexandros Marinos") many of the disparaging comments I was talking about.
It's the article I was responding to on Reddit, which I linked up above. The official title is "Scott Alexander corrects error: Ivermectin effective, rationalism wounded." In other words, according to Alexandros, Scott was so catastrophically negligent that he wounded Rationalism in its entirety. Combine this with the accusatory nature Alexandros' article, and it comes off like Alex wants to tarnish Scott's legitimacy beyond his Ivermectin take.
If you're implying I'm a blind Scott fanboy then I categorically reject your assertion. Scott's just a smart guy who approaches a variety of topics from a rationalist perspective. Nothing more, nothing less. He's certainly capable of making mistakes, and the fact that he hosts a list of them is part of what makes him unique. He benefits from critiques like everyone else.
The issue with Alex he mixes good criticism, i.e. "here's where your analysis is wrong, and here's the stats to back it up", with bad criticism, i.e. "rationalism wounded" and other such nonsense attempting to draw meta-level conclusions on Scott's credibility from limited object-level events.
Semantics. "Scott did something, and as a result rationalism has been wounded" is functionally equivalent to this. If Alex sincerely didn't intend to say anything about Scott wounding rationalism then he should have reworded his title, but the accusational tone of the entire article leads me to believe he did want to. I'm referring to stuff like:
This is silly. I'm taking Alex's statistical critiques of Scott's work as a given, because I don't really care that much about the efficacy of Ivermectin to look into it that deeply. There's some utility to be gleaned from correcting errors in now-irrelevant issues and seeing where they happened to prevent them in the future, which I think Scott did a decent job of doing in his response.
On the other hand, I'm very interested in how criticism should be done in a general sense. Phrasing criticism constructively and in a non-inflammatory way is just as important as making the criticism in the first place. It's one of the founding principles of this site! Optimize for light, not heat. Failing to do so makes people reflexively defensive and less likely to engage with you in the future... which is exactly what happened with Scott. He stopped responding to Alex after initially putting in the effort to do so, since he felt that every interaction ended up badly.
Let's say I responded to your post with something like this:
"Wow, it must be great to be a person who's so oblivious to human communication that they think everything needs to be stated literally, as all the insinuated insults people lob won't land! It's just a shame it also likely implies some level of autism..."
The correct response would be "What the heck!?! We were having a sensible disagreement and now you're accusing me of having autism???"
To which I responded with "why are you offended? You're just paraphrasing my statement. I never said you specifically have autism!"
That's what I feel like is going on here.
For the record, I'm not accusing you of having autism, nor being "oblivious to human communication". That statement is used purely for demonstrative purposes.
So I guess you could technically say Alex never directly insults Scott, he just does something like what I just wrote instead. Of course he uses less crass words than what I just used, but it's still a personal attack.
Maybe the title "Scott Alexander corrects error: Ivermectin effective, rationalism wounded." indeed wasn't supposed to say that Scott himself wounded rationalism with his article, and that it was just about the community response not aggressively pushing back. In that case, let's take a few other instances:
What about when Alex accuses Scott of cognitive dissonance for not fully retracting his article?
What about when Alex lists a bunch of tenets of rationalism and implies that Scott broke them because they disagree on something?
What about when Alex accuses Scott of stopping where he did because he wants to "confirm his biases"?
Maybe some or all of those aren't meant to be inflammatory or to be personal attacks. If that's the case though, he should really, really change his writing style because to at least some people, it comes off that way.
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