GeniesLoki

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.

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.

Scott definitely seems to me to be anti-the-current-feminist-movement (even though like most people he agrees that marital rape should be illegal and women should be able to have credit cards and so on). Like, what *current* feminist issues has he expressed support for?

Comparatively, Scott is uncontroversially an effective altruist, and no one would, reading his articles, mistake him for an anti-EA person because of how much he criticizes EA.