> IMO part of his service to the community is helping define those boundaries for the less... socially aware members of the community (ie, the things you Do Not Discuss).
I wish more people cited Frances Yates on Bruno - his heliocentrism was a side note even before he attacked Copernicus but he had some fantastic mnemonic techniques
The quality of comments on Slate Star Codex were part of what really made it great. (I assume Yates came to mind because of the comment to that Bruno post. That and many of the other comments to that post did a great job criticizing the argument that curious, intelligent people such as scientists must be irrepressible contrarians.) I hope that continues on Substack.
… And now I realise why people don't like SlateStarCodex. (I still like it.)
I'm no historian, but the stuff he wrote about Catholicism doesn't actually seem right. Argued better than I can in [0].
And some of the comments are not just atrocious, but are not argued against[1]:
> I think there are commonly-known models in all four quadrants. For example:
> a. Widely accepted and good fit for reality:
(Law of supply and demand)
• “Supply and demand” is a good first-order model for certain market dynamics, but it only explains… at a guess, ⅓ of the economics I personally interact with.
> b. Socially unacceptable and good fit for reality:
(IQ tests as a good proxy for mental ability)
• IQ tests are a reasonable proxy for certain, specific axes of mental ability within a subpopulation; the general “IQ tests are a good proxy for mental ability” claim is blatantly absurd.
> c. Widely accepted and bad fit for reality:
(Sexism as main cause of gender wage gap)
• “Sexism is not the main cause of the gender wage gap”… I'm less certain that this is wrong, but I have actually done quite a bit of research on it (including reading what Scott Alexander wrote on the topic!) and this is splitting hairs, to be charitable; I think labelling it “rhetoric” is more accurate. No, several of the systemic injustices aren't due to individual people going “aha! I know what I'm going to do today: not pay my female underlings!”, you're right! But everybody already knows this,[2] and that's not what they mean when they say it's due to sexism. Things like a culture of “you only get a raise if you push for it” (not sure how widespread this is) can contribute to this, and that is, when considered in combination with the rest of everything (e.g. men may be “forthright” and “assertive”, but women are “bossy”), a sexist aspect of the culture.
> d. Socially unacceptable and bad fit for reality
(Vaccines cause autism)
(The rest of the comment is mostly okay, apart from those three examples above; I'm cherry-picking to make a point, but I think the point's valid.)
These are just trotted out as “obvious if you're one of us”, when they're probably not even correct. You don't go into a room where people say sensible things and think that your association with those people somehow makes what you say sensible, and you certainly don't sit in the audience of an entry-level lecture and assume that your fellow audience-members are all experts in the field, so why assume that you should take as blind truth things you read in the comments of a blog‽
Also, I'm not certain I agree with the message Scott's trying to convey. This uncertainty correlates with my uncertainty about the historical accuracy of his examples: when he has a point he wants to make and finds some evidence after the fact, it's generally obvious that he's doing so (probably because that skill doesn't get much use).
Are you talking about stuff like this? https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f...