His critique of Marxism is on the level of skimmed Wikipedia articles and your patriotic eighth-grade teacher The idea that Marx naively thought "Good people will replace evil ones after a clean slate" is not a critique of Marx It does not remotely resemble anything he thought
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It's just a shining example of how Scott, like his partner-in-arms Jordan Peterson, thinks he's really fucking smart and really fucking "fair" and empathetic and he doesn't even faintly live up to his own ideals
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He's spent exactly *zero time* even actually trying to learn what Marxists *actually think*, much less debate them in "good faith" or "steelman" their position The same applies to critical race theory, feminism, and all the other bogeymen of the Slatestarcodex community
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Like, if I had to name a particular academic tendency that's like the anti-Slatestarcodex in every respect -- not that they'd understand it enough to oppose it -- it's Afropessimism (Indeed, Scott is like the ultimate avatar of the "whiteness" Afropessimism is pessimistic about)
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And then Scott, Mr. Rational Facts Man himself, in his constant search for contrarian ideas to out-insightful himself, comes *this close* to inventing the basic idea of Afropessimism Only of course he doesn't because the word "racism" is taboo to himhttps://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/06/asymmetric-weapons-gone-bad/ …
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The above blog post is him musing about the scary Lovecraftian idea "What if there are incorrect ideas that are so perversely attractive to the human mind that the *more* you think about them, the *more likely you are to be wrong*"
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"Such that people's naive, emotional rejection of certain ideas is more likely to be right than other people's obsessive lifelong expertise on the matter The experts are the ones who are the most wrong, because the reason they become invested is their attraction to wrongness"
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And the big historical example he gives for this is... communism! Which was once, in his view, a universally popular idea, and now has been irrefutably proven to be evil
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Even if he were right about this it'd be kind of useless to fucking bring it up now that all the hegemonic world powers agree with him and "won the argument" in 1991 huh But then maybe that's why he hasn't actually read the Communist Manifesto Gotta avoid those memetic viruses
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At NO POINT does he EVER apply this to his own community and to the hordes of people lamenting "I've spent my life trying to research the genetic basis of IQ and everyone keeps calling me a racist!" Why the hell would he He can tolerate everything but the outgroup
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End of conversation
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