(2021-02-14) In Defense Of Interesting Writing On Controversial Topics

Matthew Yglesias: In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics. Some time ago, Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous author of the Slate Star Codex blog, announced that he was abandoning his site.

This, in turn, led to a lot of condemnatory rhetoric from his fans and admirers, many of whom work in the technology industry and had a set of preexisting grievances with what they call “the media” and what I would call “the technology coverage of a half dozen outlets, notably including The New York Times.”

Then, on Saturday, Cade Metz’s NYT article about SSC finally dropped. And it’s terrible. 2021-02-13-MetzSiliconValleysSafeSpace

I tend to think that too much time and mental energy is expended, including by me, on critiquing bad articles, and not enough time and energy is spent on praising good ones. So I feel kind of bad about writing a detailed criticism of a single bad article. But, given the larger context in which this story appeared, my sense is it’s going to become a flashpoint for a whole bunch of interesting struggles, so I think it’s useful and informative to say what I think.

On its face, the idea of profiling an obscure blog written by a pseudonymous psychiatrist that has a surprisingly high-clout readership is perfectly good. Alexander’s readers include many Silicon Valley people, including — as Metz details — some very high-ranking executives. It’s an interesting story. But I think Metz kind of misses what’s interesting about it from the get-go.

But Metz does not seem interested in actually exploring rationalist ideas or understanding their content or the scope of their influence. Instead, the article is structured as a kind of syllogism

the logic is specious, and the whole thing is an incredible missed opportunity to help people understand some valuable and interesting ideas.

Rationalism as I understand it:

Rationalists’ big thing is that the natural human process of cognition is capable of reaching accurate results, but that’s not really the default mode. And rationalists are not just aware of this — they think it’s a big problem, and they try really hard to push back on it and develop better reasoning skills.

there’s more to it than predicting. The key to Metz’s point is that part of the practice of rationalism is that in order to do it effectively, you have to be willing to be impolite

A rationalist would say that human psychology is over-optimized for reading the room, and that to get at the truth you need to be willing to deliberately turn off the room-reading portion of your brain and just throw your idea out.

In progressive circles, it is common to observe the norm that because the struggle against racism and misogyny is important, it is impolite to dissent from an anti-racist claim or argument unless you have some overwhelmingly important reason for doing so.

In the (liberal, coastal, urban, very political) circles that I travel, everyone (especially parents) knows and acknowledges that men and women are, on average, different in ways that end up mattering for the distribution of outcomes. But everyone also believes that sexism and misogyny are significant problems in the world, and that the people struggling against those problems are worthy of admiration and praise. So to leap into a conversation about sexism and misogyny yelling “WELL ACTUALLY GIOLLA AND KAJONIUS FIND THAT SEX DIFFERENCES IN PERSONALITY ARE LARGER IN COUNTRIES WITH MORE GENDER EQUALITY” would be considered a rude and undermining thing to do. This is just to say that most people are not rationalists — they believe that statements can be evaluated on grounds beyond truth and falsity. There is suspicion of the guy who is “just asking questions.”

Sometimes, Facts Man is less about truth than raising questions.

Personally, I find myself somewhere between Lowrey and Alexander on this. The pure vision of the rationalists and the belief that statements could or should be read devoid of context or purely literally strikes me as untenable. But I think that in the Trump era, journalism as a whole has tilted too far in Lowrey’s direction, with too much room-reading and groupthink and not enough appreciation of the value of annoying people with inconvenient observations.

The radicalism of effective altruism:

I think if you want to understand rationalism and its nexus with Silicon Valley as a movement relevant to politics, you have to understand effective altruist thinking. And you have to understand it correctly, because it’s honestly much more controversial than anything Metz critiques in his piece

effective altruists don’t think you should make charitable contributions to your church (again, relative to the mass public, this is the most controversial part!) or to support the arts or solve problems in your community. They think most of the stuff that people donate to (which, again, is largely religiously motivated) is frivolous. But beyond that, they would dismiss the bulk of the kind of problems that concern most people as literal “first world problems” that blatantly fail the cost-benefit test compared to vitamin A supplementation in Africa.

Effective altruists also believe that you should give much more to charity.

Neither left nor right:

Metz is very interested in painting Alexander as racist, writing for example that “in one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray.

It is true that he did that, but if you read the post, he was aligning with Murray’s suggestion that we should have a universal basic income to reduce poverty, not with Murray’s ideas about race and I.Q.

That’s particularly odd, because it’s not difficult to find Alexander expressing genuinely controversial views about race over the years.

Five million people participated in the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter campaign. Suppose that solely as a result of this campaign, no currently-serving police officer ever harms an unarmed black person ever again. That’s 100 lives saved per year times let’s say twenty years.

The round-trip bus fare people used to make it to their #BlackLivesMatter protests could have saved ten times as many black lives as the protests themselves, even given completely ridiculous overestimates of the protests’ efficacy.

This is an extremely hot take! And while I would not say this paragraph is typical of SSC content, it does a good job of expressing the SSC view toward most of what passes for politics in the United States of America — that it doesn’t matter at all.

I find the level of abstraction involved in rationalist discourse a little untenable. You wind up in a situation in which because there are so many chickens on the planet and chickens are typically raised in deplorable conditions, minor improvements to the living standards of chickens weigh very heavily in the universal moral calculus

Similarly, rationalists believe that existential risk — the kind of risk that would lead to human extinction — is overwhelmingly important, so incredible stakes can rest on the question of whether there’s a 0.1% chance or 0.001% chance of something ending in human extinction.

But if you want to know about rationalism and effective altruism’s influence on Silicon Valley, I think it’s useful to look at MacKenzie Scott, who is giving away her share of the Bezos Family Fortune in a very particular way: "accelerate my 2020 giving through immediate support to people suffering the economic effects of the coronavirus crisis".

The result over the last four months has been $4,158,500,000 in gifts to 384 organizations

This is what I think most Americans wish billionaires would do with their money

A very different approach is what Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz are doing with their smaller fortune and the Open Philanthropy Project. This is decidedly less apolitical than Alexander’s views, but clearly reflects rationalist thinking

looks at these three factors:

• Importance: How many individuals
• Neglectedness
• Tractability: We look for clear ways in which a funder could contribute to progress.

The neglectedness view is that an additional $1 million is unlikely to make a difference in a heavily funded area like climate advocacy, but could make a huge difference in some other space that isn’t already full of money.

Metz names Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and Paul Graham as SSC readers, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they are among those funding the Fast Grants initiative

It’s good to read things

I enjoy its successor blog, too. I highly recommend it to you. And critically, by “highly recommend it to you” I do not mean “I agree with all the takes.”

the way you learn things and get smarter is to read strong writers and try to understand what they’re saying — not by trying to pick it apart for clout or finding ways to caricature and snark about it

I have never in my life identified as a “free speech absolutist” and I hope I never will. But something about the internet is making people into infantile conformists with no taste or appreciation for the life of the mind, and frankly, I’m sick of it.