Thread by @eriktorenberg

Here some my favorite quotes from Slate Star Codex:

For folks new to SSC: slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/08/wha…

slatestarcodex.com/top-posts/

The author seems like one of the great public intellectuals most people have never heard of, outside of the milieu in which he is revered.

Advice is often a placebo, but not in the way that you'd expect:

"High status person is willing to listen to my problems. That means society considers my problems important and considers me important. It means my problems are okay to have and I’m not in trouble for having them"

Does labeling a person as depressed make people feel better, b/c now they know it's not their fault?

Or does it make ppl depressed about how depressed they are, & then go “There’s that depression again, guess this means I’m not getting any better” & become depressed about that?

If you feel like a burden, know that you can’t always trust your brain

If System I is broken, you need to call in System II to route around the distorted cognition so you can understand at least intellectually that you’re wrong.

System 1 is not the most trustworthy arbiter

The term "toxic" is reflexive:

Accusing someone of being something makes it more likely that they turn into that thing

If you keep accusing your (innocent) partner of being angry & suspicious of you, eventually they'll get tired & become angry & suspicious that something's up

Imagine Christians suffer a dramatic loss in prestige such that a cross is equivalent to a confederate flag.

The agreeable Christians suddenly flee, and only the disagreeable diehards are left.

"See, Christians are dogmatic!"

This is what's happened to free speech advocates.

Another dynamic:

Every time we use free speech to justify some unpopular idea, the unpopular idea becomes a little more tolerated, & free speech becomes a little less popular

Every time some group invokes free speech to say controversial stuff, they’re drawing from the commons

HL Mencken once said that “the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

The nightmare scenario is that “free speech” goes the way of “family values”—a seemingly uncontroversial concept gets so tarnished by its association with conservative ideas that it becomes impossible to mention without outing yourself as some kind of far-right weirdo. (Too late)

Insisting that others are deliberately trying to hurt you frees you from any obligation to do the hard work of trying to understand other ppl, or the hard work of changing minds, or the hard work of questioning your own beliefs, or or even remembering that we're on the same team.

Principle of Charity:

You should always assume your ideological opponents’ beliefs must make sense from their perspective

If you can’t even conceive of a position you oppose being tempting to someone, you don’t understand it

“Almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken”

Moloch:

In any complex multi-person system, the system acts according to its own chaotic incentives that don’t necessarily correspond to what any individual within the system wants.

slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/med…

Why do women too have instincts towards polyamory (and&not just men?)

Mayb: "women genetically "want" both to keep an alpha male faithful & to capture maximum genetic variation in their offspring.

thus, It's optimal for Jane to have 3 kids by Tarzan & 1 by a romantic stranger."

Proving too much:

When you challenge an argument b/c, in addition to proving its intended conclusion, it also proves false conclusions.

When someone says, "you can't be an atheist b/c you can't disprove God", respond "yeah, but you can't disprove Bigfoot.

It proves too much.

You can make diff groups support diff things by changing narrative:

e.g Making Red Tribe support climate change

- Renewable energy is triumph of capitalism
- Communist China & Russia are threatening our planet & thus U.S. supremacy. They want global warming.
- You're not racist

What is the “spirit of the First Amendment”?

Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Does not get doxxing. Does not get harassment. Does not get fired from job. Gets counterargument. Should not be hard.

A good response to an argument is one that addresses an idea; a bad argument is one that silences it

Your success addressing an idea depends on how good the idea is—Your success silencing depends on how powerful you are & how many pitchforks & torches you can get on short notice

If you want to stress test a censorship system, design one & then hand it over to your worst enemy & let them run it on you.

If that still gives you the outcome you want, then fine

"Universalize as if the process you use to universalize would itself become universal."

If you try to hold the Koch Brothers “accountable” for muddying climate change waters, they'll laugh in your face.

If you try to hold closeted gay ppl “accountable” for promoting gay rights, it will be very easy & you'll successfully ruin their lives.

Do you want it like this?

Lord Byron wrote of his political philosophy:

I wish men to be free

As much from mobs as kings; from you as me

All I can say to that is – it’s a package deal, people.

Either promote good social norms, or be destroyed by the bad ones when the tide turns against you.

“That other monkey has status that should be my status!” – nobody ever went broke peddling that.

How causes become tribes:

1. Let’s get together to do X

2. Let’s get together to do X, and have drinks afterwards

3. Let’s get together to discuss things from an X-informed perspective

4. Let’s get together to discuss the sorts of things that interest people who do X

How causes become tribes


5. Let’s get together to discuss how the sort of people who do X are much better than the sort of people who do Y.

6. Dating site for the sort of people who do X

7. Oh god, it was so annoying, she spent the whole date talking abt X.

8. X? What X?

Elements of his ideal language:

– It follows E-Prime in throwing out “to be”.

– Assertions require probability statements ("90% confident")

– Assertions about plurals require quantifiers ("all" "at least one")

– “Should” always requires a following “only if…” statement

On making ideal city religious:

I made it religious because I really really like religion, except for the part where it’s wrong.

I like how all the studies show that religious belief improves physical health, mental health, charitable giving, & a host of other useful values.

Contrarianism is this incredibly fragile & precious art which needs to be kept alive for when it's needed.

Cultivating contrarianism is a lot like owning a gun—u get a heck of a lot of opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot, but also very occasionally 1 opp to save ur life.

Why socialism doesn't work:

Managers employ workers, but workers want to slack off or line their pockets

Central planners employ managers but managers want to slack or line their pockets

Public employs central planners, but central planners want to slack or line their pockets

Lottery of Fascinations:

Some people are motivated by business or science or art.

Others are motivated by gossip or drama or trivia.

Luck of the draw.

What happened to New Atheists?

They were useful to democrats to embarrass Bush, but then when Christians faded in power & Muslims became core to democrats' strategy, New Atheism suddenly became inconvenient to democrat strategy.

Many later became Social Justice advocates.

But there’s a risk that postmodernism collapses into ppl ignoring any facts they disagree with, arguing that facts are mutable products of hostile power structures trying to perpetuate themselves.

And by “there’s a risk”, I mean “this has been obviously happening for decades”.

Re: criticizing Social Justice, do better than the pseudo-Nietzschean “Stop crying, babies!”.

All this is doing is granting social justice activists their most dubious claim: that they are trying to use their ideology as a shield for themselves rather than a sword against others

Ironic application of post-modernism on itself:

Postmodernism says that facts often get reframed to support the powerful. So it’s inevitable that post-modernism itself going to be twisted to support the powerful. (e.g. both cultural Marxists, & far-right media).

"Postmodern meta-epistemology, as I call it, is compatible with rationality (& rationalism, & empiricism).

It just contends that “truth” is an unstable concept that depends on a language game to mean, which means there is no ultimate guarantor of what truth per se is.

Disagree"

Assumptions for discussion:

1. Are you trying to present the correct balance btw positions (“judge mode”) or present 1 side of a case (“lawyer mode”)?

2. Do you mean exactly what you say (“the pointing finger”) or are you groping towards a hard-to-explain concept (“the moon”)?

Assumptions (cont):

3. Are you trying to describe how things work in the real world, or the underlying mechanism beneath them?

4. Are you declaring something is definitely correct (“theory”), or bringing it to ppl's attention as an idea worthy of consideration (“hypothesis”)?

Barely even scratching the surface here. There's TONS of stuff I'm not including, across many different disciplines.

Go spend some hours (or years) reading his work:

As a place to start, I also enjoyed this collection of favorite posts by @alexeyguzey:

guzey.com/favorite/slate…