hey, *this-corner-of-twitter* followers, i've never read anything from Slate Star Codex til now and it seems i've been missing out, would appreciate it if you pointed me to your favorite posts!
Show this thread
-
What do you think the bad bits are?
He's very confident of his position and he's very big on "principle of charity" as a talking point but he's not actually very good at being charitable to competing worldviews. Most blatant example is that basically every time feminism comes up you need to salt the post liberally.
-
-
Did we read the same blog? Because that does not describe what I remember at all. SSC got a bunch of politicized responses, and those drove a lot of non-reader opinions, in ways largely unrelated to the actual content. I can't help but feeling like that's also going on here.
-
I've read almost every SSC post and very little of the comments or commentary on SSC, so I don't think it is?
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
i don't quite agree w your assessment. wrt feminism he's usually pretty good about calling out his biases from past negative experience, saying he's engaging the worst aspects of online feminism, & ultimately concluding the concept is too fuzzy to be that useful for his point.
-
I agree that he's good at *saying* that he's biased, but I don't feel like that acknowledgement then translates into an actual engagement with the material or genuine charity or uncertainty in how he writes about it.
- Show replies
New conversation -
-
-
My impression was that his relationship with feminism is largely shaped by that thing where you criticize your own side more than the opponent's and don't bother to explain all the ways in which it's good because they feel so obvious to you. So then he comes off as anti-feminist.
-
Hmm no that doesn't feel right. I agree he's not actually sexist/misogynistic/etc. I don't think he's a bad person or anything. I do think he's not engaging well with some of the ways other people are also trying to do good.
- Show replies
New conversation -
-
-
I really like SSC, and it was my first intro to this whole corner of the internet which has been good for me overall. But yes, he has this astoundingly fluent rhetoric generator he can't turn off, and when it gets near his sore spots it spews out very dubious stuff.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
wait you read Scott as confident? I'm not being hostile here I'm just shocked
-
"Confident" is maybe not the right word. "Convincing" perhaps. He's the sort of "not confident" where you tell people you don't know what you're talking about then talk like you know what you're talking about and people come away believing you more than if you hadn't.
- Show replies
New conversation -
-
-
I would also say that while I think he's a smart person, it's the amount and degree of intelligence that allows one to convince oneself entirely of terrible arguments. (And I believe he's more or less said this himself before, though it didn't stop him from keeping on doing it.)
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.