I Am Scott Alexander

At least I wish I were. He's a much better writer than I am. If you're reading this, I suggest you go to his blog at https://slatestarcodex.com/ and read him instead. Here are a few of my favorite posts:

Meditations On Moloch

Beware The Man Of One Study

Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable

I Can Tolerate Anything Except For the Outgroup

Against Lie Inflation

Toxoplasma of Rage

The Categories Were Made For Man, not Man for the Categories

And so many others!

Oh wait...

SlateStarCodex is dead. Here's what happened.

Systemic Racism proves too much

Systemic Racism:

"Refers specifically to the ways in which institutional policies and practices create different outcomes for different racial groups. The institutional policies may never mention any racial group, but their effect is to create advantages for Whites and oppression and disadvantage for people from groups classified as People of Color."

In other words, systemic racism is anything that creates or exasperated racial disparities. If you believe in this definition of racism, you likely see racism pervading society. But when you think about it, systemic racism is not only common across almost every policy we do have, but every policy we could have.

A short memory

I hear a lot of complaining about how Trump gets misinterpreted and taken out of context by the media.

The thing is, they're right. I can't tell you how often over the last 4 years I've thought, "I don't like Trump, but what you're saying is completely asinine."

When I hear right-wing people point out this media inanity in a plea for others to leave the left and embrace the right, where diverse and serious conversations are being had, I have to laugh. How short are their memories?!!

It wasn't so long ago that right-wingers quoted Barack Obama's book out of context, "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." Another time, Obama's line, "you didn't build that" was mistaken to mean, "you didn't build (any of) that" when he clearly meant, "You didn't build that (by yourself)." One ad quoted Obama as saying the troops in Afghanastan are, "just air-raiding villages and killing civilians," again, a quote that was completely taken out of context.

This kind of thing was nonstop throughout Obama's presidency. Obama is a Muslim. Obama is a foreigner. Obama starts a war on Christmas. Obama kowtows to enemy leaders. Obama thinks he's a dictator. Obama is going try to stay in power past 2 terms. Now we're seeing the flipped version of the same thing and I'm supposed to join team Trump?

4 years ago I didn't think CNN was capable of simulating Fox News, but now that it has it doesn't make me any more of a right-winger. If anything I'm just more cynical now. When the left and right see their leaders through rose-colored glasses, and always thinks the enemy tribe leader is satan, the best thing to do is avoid them both and join the majority of Americans who embrace centrism.

Steelmen Vs. Everymen

There are two way to spend IQ points. You can spend them fighting dumb ideas that are wrong or you can spend them fighting smart ideas that are wrong. I don't know what the proper allocation of IQ points should be to battling dumb vs. smart ideas

The term Steelman refers to the best possible argument for your opponent's position, but if that's not what most people actually believe, does it do any good? Wouldn't it be more persuasive to battle the actual objections that average IQ people make? Instead of Steelmen, shouldn't we fight everymen?

Memecraft: The Steep Price of Uninformed Activism