GeniesLoki

i seriously recommend not poisoning your brain with Scott Alexander words

if something can poison your brain just with words it's good writing (assuming you're not stoopid); so is scott bad, or is he harmful? can't be both

Counterpoint: if this is the case why does everyone have a Hogwarts house? (I am not as negative about SSC as Erin but I'd still hesitate to recommend his work without a lot more context TBH)

I guess to add to this: I put SSC in the same category as a lot of woo. He is worth reading and trying to extract value from, but the process is intrinsically a slightly adversarial one and taking him too seriously is worse than not reading him.

Reading him is a net positive if you're able to cleanly separate the good bits from the bad bits, but he isn't going to do that for you (because he can't), and I'd rather people not take on either than take on both.

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.

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.