 What do you think was going on with the social media accounts of those people who stormed Capitol Hill on January 6? What do you think they were posting about? And if there turns out to be a correlation between posting about allegations of voter fraud or posting about QAnon and other right-wing conspiracy theories and then anti-social behavior, is it any wonder that some people want to stigmatize this type of expression in effect to use a broad generalization that many people want to effectively ban Nazis from the public square? So here's a story out of UCLA. So this UCLA student, he stormed Capitol Hill on January 6. And this picture shows him in the presiding officer's chair inside the United States Senate chambers. And the LA Times' story headline, before far-right UCLA student stormed Capitol, he faced a few roar over incendiary tweets. Now, I am virtually a free speech absolutist. And I believe that for every 1,000 people posting incendiary tweets, fewer than 0.1% of them will ever commit a crime related to their posting. So I don't believe there's some sort of inevitable connection between posting incendiary material on Twitter and participating in criminal behavior. On the other hand, I don't believe that the online world and the real world are completely separate. I believe that the online world is part of the real world. And what you do online does affect how you behave in real life. So March 2020, there was a UCLA student, a leftist, Matthew Richard, went on Twitter. I value truth immensely. I also value freedom and equality. And I think that we have a lot of norms of public speech and behavior that reinforce kind of oppressive structures of domination and exploitation. And that in order to give people the kind of dignity and respect as democratic equals that they deserve. OK, so this is philosopher Will Wilkinson talking to Robert Wright, essentially making the case for censorship of Nazis and white nationalists and the like. You have to enforce certain norms about what's OK to say in public. And that's actually a condition for all of us to have meaningful freedom. Now, I disagree with him. But what I want to investigate here is why do people believe as he does? So I don't think it's necessary to have these norms to stigmatize discussion of certain controversial issues to maintain freedom in our republic. But I want to investigate why people like Will Wilkinson think this way. So in March 2020, UCLA student Matthew Richard went on Twitter called for the university to investigate and expel fellow undergraduate Christian Sikor. And he posted a thread with 21 recent tweets from the account of Christian Sikor who founded America First Bruins, a far right student group. Anyone else cop the Hitler sneakers one tweet read and another tweet, can ICE just cough on illegals or something? Outrage followed. Students complained to administrators more than 30,000 people liked a Twitter post by one student who asked, you all think UCLA can expel someone for xenophobia and wishing death upon undocumented people during a pandemic? Well, UCLA can't. Now, Christian Sikor was arrested on Tuesday last week charged with federal crimes for his ledgerall in the US Capitol Hill riot. So he was identified as having sat in the chair that Vice President Mike Pence had just vacated. He was 22 years of age and he stirred up tensions over free speech at UCLA. So a president of UCLA's undergraduate students Association Council Naomi Riley said, this was not some random act that occurred. Him showing up at the Capitol was not out of the ordinary. He was very in line with what has been going on with that organization. So if there's a type of politics that is associated with anti-social behavior or low achievement or just icky behavior that may not be criminal, then it's not shocking that there will be widespread opposition to this type of thinking. Christian Sikor's Twitter feed offers a window into the increasingly explosive topic of free speech rights and extreme a speech on American college campuses. So apparently Christian Sikor was a follower of Nicholas Fuentes who hosted the America First podcast. He practices white nationalism under a mainstream gift wrap. The now defunct America First Bruins Twitter account had as its background a benestating communist art people. His Twitter account called fascism epic and quote, valorizes the 2017 Charlottesville Tiki torch march in Virginia, which featured an anti-Semitic chant. Jews would not replace us. Free speech experts who reviewed the thread Richard Oppost had said Sikor's tweets were a protected speech. And in an interview published last May with the conservative podcast host, Christian Sikor discussed his own views on free speech. I don't support complete free speech. He said, I don't think communism should be legal. He says anarchists and communists are the proponents of hate speech. So Christian Sikor once belonged to Bruin Republicans. Then he left it and started America First club and got a lot of blowback. This is extremely dangerous what this student is promoting, said Richard, who belongs to several leftist student groups. I was scared. We had a lot of events and we had a lot of agitators at our events on campus. So America First Bruins and the Bruin Republicans endorsed an open letter asking then President Trump to institute an indefinite moratorium on immigration to the US due to the pandemic and to rededicate his efforts on the US-Mexico border wall. Sounds reasonable to me. Grayson Peters published an op-ed in her arm. That's a UCLA Jewish newspaper that began. Fascists are organizing at UCLA. All right, so what exactly is the case that these people want to make for essentially banning Nazis from the public square? So there's an economics blogger, Noah Smith. And he wrote, I think Americans dramatically underrate how much better life would be without Nazis around. So what the hell is he talking about? So let's just allow him to make his case and try to understand where he's coming from. By Nazis, I do not mean Republicans or conservatives or Trump supporters or people with racist attitudes in general. I specifically mean hardcore, passionate white supremacists for whom white supremacist activism is a lifestyle. This is a relatively small fringe. Most racists don't make a lifestyle out of it. So the old sore about white nationalists in the United States is that they are one third criminals, one third homosexuals and one third Nazis. So when you've got a group, let's say that what it's standing for is completely rationally defensible. And you can make a good moral defense for it. But the overwhelming majority of people who participate in the movement or who publicly represent the movement seem to be disreputable characters, people with criminal backgrounds, people with antisocial personalities. Then is it any wonder that normies want nothing to do with them? Now Smith writes, even though Nazis are a small fringe in America, they are a fractal fringe. Fractal, that's a mighty big word. So what the hell does fractal mean? Fractal, fractal. Okay, it's a curve or geometric figure. I'm not sure that fractal here really helps us understand, but I think what he means is that they make a lot of noise. So I'm not sure the word fractal really helps us though. So they branch out and ramify. Well, there's another big word, ramify. I believe that's to make... Ramify. To form branches or offshoots. They spread and branch out, they grow and develop in complexity and range. Okay, so mighty big words here. They branch out and ramify and flow into any space that allows them. The 1980s, the Nazi fringe tried to be part of the punk subculture. Punks responded by punching Nazis in the face and kicking them out of the subculture. Nazis have tried to be part of the black metal subculture. Black metal fans responded by systematically excluding them. Game of culture has also tried to kick out infiltrating Nazis with less success and Nazis successfully infiltrated and destroyed 4chan. So if all you know about someone is that they post on 4chan, you immediately assume that they are pro-social, anti-social, or you make no assumptions. Seems to me that probably most people who post spend a lot of time reading 4chan, most likely anti-social. Noah Smith writes, the lesson is that Nazis will relentlessly infiltrate anywhere the powers that be failed to expel them with extreme prejudice. They will infiltrate your web forum. They will infiltrate your blog comments. They will go anywhere where they're not forcibly expelled. Once they are allowed in a space, they will make it awful for everyone else in that space like a single rat turd floating in your jar of cereal. And here's an argument that any movement that preaches intolerance and persecution must be outside the law. As paradoxical as it may seem, this is defending tolerance. Defending tolerance requires to not tolerate the intolerant. This is Noah Smith's line of argumentation. The lesson the punks and metalheads learn is ban the Nazis, things just get better. Yes, it can feel intolerant, but that's the paradox of tolerance. He concludes, I suspect most people vastly underestimate how much better America as a whole will get when our current crop of Nazis finally gives up and goes away. And I think that this doesn't harm. The search for truth because more. Now that's absurd to say, oh, if you say anything that might cause some group to feel oppressed, right? Feelings of oppression, these are entirely subjective that that doesn't harm the search for truth. That's an absurd argument here by Will Wilkinson. Gallitarian norms that make it easier for people who haven't had the same chances as, you know, Anglo white guys like us, or I don't know if you're Anglo, maybe you're German, I don't know. The Irish part of me is the non-angle part. Yeah, I just don't, I think a lot of woke norms or what people think of as political correctness, I see as trying to elevate people who've been pushed down. And for me, as somebody who cares a lot about the discovery of new knowledge, technological innovation and economic growth, I think one of the biggest tragedies in the history of the world is hierarchical social structures that have prevented everyone from contributing, from developing their capacities and contributing all of their talents to the enterprise of the discovery of knowledge and the invention of new technology. We would be vastly richer. You know, if you get the compounding logic of economic growth in your head, if we... Okay, I think that's absurd to believe that the primary reason that underachieving groups of underachieved is because of free speech. Had, you know, women's equality, racial equality a hundred years earlier, we'd be vastly richer than we are today. And I see the norms that some people see as oppressive as being conducive to the kind of equality that brings the best out of everybody and lifts everybody up. And even in my market fundamentalist way, even if like you're just thinking about it in terms of like, I want people to do science so that they can figure out how the world works so that they can make technologies that are gonna make us rich, right? Like that means I want like black girls to get an amazing education. That's what that means, right? And if they are gonna feel demeaned and demoralized if people can talk about them in certain ways and that's gonna keep that from happening, I think that's an outrage. And like, so I don't actually see my... So like, I don't think that what they think is oppressive and a threat to freedom is. And I think that's a big part of the disconnect but they're very sure it is. And they think because the New York times represents a certain viewpoint that they think tends to suppress the kind of diversity of thinking that they think is necessary for free flowing debate and discovery. Like they have an antagonistic attitude towards those kinds of institutions. Yeah, it's funny. Well, Matt Iglesias in his newsletter piece on this talked about the tension between the kind of attitude the rationalist want to cultivate and the kind of read the room sensibility, right? These guys are like against reading the room. And I got to say like Robin Hansen, I kind of inferred that he was not capable of reading the room, but maybe, I mean, you know he has said some things that it's like, no, no, no, you know, Robin stops. Let me say the amount of trouble you're gonna get into. I don't know if he's, and I think some of them may actually be like that. I mean, there is a certain amount of this kind of in Silicon Valley in particular, not that that's where he is, but a kind of non-room reading. But I think Matt was also talking about a kind of an intentional opposition to reading the room. I mean, for example, like, you know, Charles Murray, if I happen to agree with Charles Murray on something unrelated to race, I would probably just to stay on the safe side, find somebody else I agreed with on that subject to site instead of Charles Murray, right? That's kind of like, in a way, some would say a hypersensitive reading the room sensibility, but it's what a lot of people would do. And I think, you know, Matt was saying these people are very against that. And I think for some of them, not reading the room becomes an end in itself, right? Yeah, like, and that's how you get this kind of like, a kind of slippery slope from just completely anodyne, good-hearted, absolutist, liberal toleration for an unfettered marketplace of ideas to a kind of like bad faith right-wing shit-stirring where they like will be like, you know, like, they'll say something overtly sexist or at least just like, it's clear what they're getting at but they just have enough possible deniability. And if you're like, dude, that's a little racist, they're just like, oh, I can't even like, I can't even have a conversation about like difficult issues. Like, and they're doing that not because they're actually being shut down, right? Like they're consciously provoking a reaction so that they can blame the other side for being sensorious and repressive because they actually do have bad illiberal ideas and people who can delegitimize those ideas get in their way. So if they can delegitimize them first as the people who are hostile to free speech and open discussion, then their path is clearer. And I think like a lot of just like really earnest people don't grasp this dynamic and see how they are exploited by some bad people to give them. Okay, let's have our simultaneous sip. This is a crystal light orange banana strawberry. So good. Now, this Will Wilkinson philosopher, journalist guy, he has often been a proponent of cancel culture. He's been glad to see people canceled for saying things that are politically incorrect like that Jason Guy who did a PhD at Harvard on immigration and IQ, Jason Richwine, Will Wilkinson was glad to see him canceled. And ironically Will Wilkinson got canceled for a joke that didn't land right a couple of months ago. And cover for genuinely shitty stuff. Yeah, and I think you'll want to emphasize that you're not saying that Scott is one of the actors. But I think his platform has been. Okay, and when he says genuinely shitty stuff, I think if he was being philosophically sound, he would have to admit that, that which he regards as genuinely shitty is entirely a subjective leap of faith on his part. There's no objective standard for what is shitty. Exploited by people with some really dangerous ideas. And I think it's like a lot of critics of the piece, no, I don't think it's a great piece, but like, look, think about it for a second though. Like this dude wanted to write a story. No, Will Wil, he talks to Scott Alexander. He's like, Hey, I'm gonna write a story about you. And he's like, I wanna be anonymous, can't use my name. And he's like, the rules are that I have to use your name. Now it seems like nobody actually knows what the rules are. Like that seems completely true. And I think it's hard to know because there are so many different kinds of circumstances. I think it's hard to have a general rule about when you should accept. Well, Will Luke Ford accept the DNA altering vaccine, stay tuned, the answer may shock you. And the answer is yes, yes, I will accept it. I will accept it today. Then drink the crystal-knocked light. Ford never disavows a supplement, bro. Boy, it's tough checking in on the left. A subject's request to remain honest. Believe me, it's worth it. Because that can't be your fault as a journalist that if somebody that you talk to who is the subject of the story, says they don't want you to use their name. Like you can't do your job if you're not using people's names. And the thing is like also, Scott's real name was super easy to find. So he hadn't concealed it that well. So it's not like it was like a really secret. So he wanted to write the story. He said, he told the guy, I think just thinking that he's following the rules, that, oh, I can't guarantee you that I can keep you anonymous. Scott just flips his fucking wig and kills his entire website, this giant archive of stuff. And his followers go absolutely apeshit. And some of them like literally freaking, like try to cancel Cade Metz, right? He's getting a world of shit, right? Like if you saw those quotes. Okay, so Cade Metz is the New York Times journalist. Scott Alexander Siskin is the psychiatrist who wrote the blog, Slate Star Codex. And then in July of 2020, Scott Alexander deleted the whole blog because the New York Times wanted to write an article about him. He thought that if he just deleted the blog that it would remove the incentive for the New York Times to write an article about him. So here's the basic timeline on the Slate Star Codex controversy. So in June, New York Times journalist wants to write an article about Scott Alexander and Slate Star Codex and this online community. Then Scott Alexander doesn't want the repercussions of that. So a lot of the loathing of the media and the loathing of journalists is simply a loathing of reality. That you've been publishing all sorts of things which, if more widely known, would threaten your wellbeing. Well, is that really the fault of those who would bring to more public attention things that you have already decided for years to make public, right? Sometimes just fear and loathing of journalism is just fear and loathing of reality. They are going to bring to more public attention things that you've already decided to make public. So you don't wanna face that you feel threatened. Your own wellbeing feels at risk because of your choices. And so you externalize your anxiety and say, ah, it's all the fault of the New York Times. They won't assure me that they won't use my name. Well, we don't have much of a basis for demanding that other people don't say our name, right? If you fear that exposure of your choices, of your performances in the public square will reveal some things that many people won't like. So I've been blogging for 22 years. I've been blogging almost daily for over three years. I've said some things that would get me in trouble if they were published on the front page of the New York Times. But that's not the fault of the New York Times. That's my fault if I'm saying things publicly that I can't handle the repercussions of. So Scott Alexander's community reacted by viciously going after the New York Times. And so the New York Times there would be logically and morally justified in a suspicion that there are dark sides to you and to your community and then writes that as part of its story. I have some responsibility for how you behave, certainly in the chat, because I can ban you if you become anti-social. When people freak out about exposure for things that they've been doing publicly, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy where the exposure becomes incredibly damaging and they fueled that. So there's an easier route. No, it's Elizabeth Spears, you used to write for Gorka. It's an easier route than summoning an army of bots, opposition researchers, dark enlightenment warriors to go after journalists whose work you don't like. Said, pay careful attention to what is it that you're afraid that people are gonna write about you and ask yourself why you would not want it made public. Then apply some rational thinking. Have some understanding of why you wrote what you wrote. Have an ability to explain it to say those who don't have a strong opinion. There are obviously always gonna be people who hate what you're saying and nothing you say will ameliorate it. But I try to perform my work, my vlogging, my blogging with the perspective of the public interest. So I try to do things that are in the public interest and if I'm asked why did you say this and do this, that's gonna be the explanation. That's the motive. What's from, you know, Balaji, I'm gonna try to pronounce his last name. He's a really powerful person in Silicon Valley and he's like basically saying like, we can try to make life a complete nightmare for people. That was a creepy quote. I am prepared to say that unless that was a complete misquote or taken out of context, that guy has some apologizing to do. I don't remember his name either, but it was a creepy quote about how we, you know, basically like we can stick our dogs on reporters we don't like and make their lives miserable. He's a really, really important person in Silicon Valley. Is it Srinivasan? Something like that. It's in the New York Times piece. It's not a quote I want to add to the name. But that's not fake. Kate Metz got a world of shit for even wanting to write a story and just saying that he didn't, couldn't guarantee that he wasn't gonna use his name. Funny thing, Scott's kind of initial post in his, you know, in his new incarnation of his blog, what's it called again? Astral Codex Tannen. Astral Codex Tannen. People shouldn't go there and read his reply in the New York Times piece. But before that, read his initial post, which gets into the original story. And this is why Scott's so great. He effectively acknowledges that that Kate Metz didn't do anything wrong, that he overreacted because he was afraid of what would happen to him. And he just like did, like he took a huge, you know, he knew to site, but nobody was asking him to do that. Like he, like nobody was actually threatening him. It's just like a journalist. He wrote this before this New York, the four guys he signed came out. So in 2006, Will Wilkinson said positive things about Steve Saylor. He wrote, Steve Saylor is a smart, challenging thinker. I find benefit from reading him even when I don't agree with him, which is often thinks Saylor is right that many psychometric studies are simply ignored and the results are politically inconvenient or can be interpreted hurtfully. He's wrong on methodology or in the inferences he draws from studies. And I think that's worth arguing about. I also think Steve Saylor understands the high sensitivity of questions of race. And I think the enterprise of seeking truth through discussion would be better served with less iconoclastic posturing from him, which is what I think many find aggravating, but he's worth taking seriously and seriously engaging. So that's Will Wilkinson December 10, 2006. Now Scott Alexander had many views on human biodiversity and the dark enlightenment that they were very different privately compared to publicly. So publicly he was always condemning near reactionary movement, but privately he sent off an email where essentially he argued that he agrees with much of this dissident perspective. And so his emails were made public in the last few days. So Scott Alexander publicly condemning much of human biodiversity, the Steve Saylor perspective and Curtis Yavin mentions board bargain and that near reactionary perspective, but Scott Siskin is simply not being honest about his history with the far right. So Tofer Brennan posts a branch of the online far right. They call themselves near reactionaries and Scott responded by saying, oh, I agree the people you're thinking of don't have much to value to say, but here are some better examples of near reactionary thought. But what he was saying publicly and what he was saying privately were very different. So publicly he was saying, near reactionary HBD, that's a lot of nonsense, but privately he was saying human biodiversity is probably partially correct or at the least very non-approvably not correct. And there are all sorts of interesting HBD hypotheses which should be strongly investigated. And he adds, I will appreciate if you never tell anyone I said this, not even in confidence, but I appreciate, I mean that if you ever do, I will probably leave the internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge. This is in a private email. There's a great discussion of how complicated the name issue is and you can see that he understands it. He came to be able to see it from the other guy's perspective, like he's overcoming some biases and it's a great pose. But the upshot of it is that he owns some responsibility for what happened. He flipped out about somebody trying to do their job who wasn't doing anything wrong and got that person in kind of a lot of trouble with a lot of people. But his reaction to the piece that actually got written, that was just released, was that again he characterizes it as a hit piece because he somehow thinks the Times has it out for him for making them look bad, which again is the same kind of like they don't care. Like if you've ever dealt with this like gigantic bureaucratic institution, it like it literally couldn't think more of itself. It like it's kind of unhumiliatable. And like they're certainly not going to be mad at a pseudonymous psychiatrist. I mean, I don't think- Okay, so once again, Scott Alexander would say very different things privately than public. And so in this email where he expresses great interest and respect for HBD and near reactionary thinking, he adds, I will appreciate it if you never tell anyone I said this, not even in confidence. And by appreciate, I mean that if you ever do I will probably either leave the internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge. He's imagining that this was kind of a negative piece. I think it was. It's not flattering. And I think like- But what happened to Kate Metz? That's the thing. Like that is what shows you what the community is actually like. So people in the community who are complaining about like something that didn't seem that positive after Scott Alexander massively overreacts like whether or not he intended to his fans dogpiled to this reporter for no reason, completely unjustly. And you expect the guy who's writing a story about you to not think that that doesn't reflect on the nature of the community. That's crazy. But they're acting like it's unfair for him to like think that it had anything to do with anything. Right, so I- Right, if you watch this show and you go out and behave in an anti-social way and say you use some of the rhetoric I use on this show but in a different context and with a different emphasis and it looks absolutely horrible, I'm gonna get pilloried for that. I kind of agree with that. I mean, Scott has the theory. Somebody put this in his head. He says somebody who's like in the now and understands these things said, well the Times is gonna retaliate now because you embarrass him. It reminds me of how when I was at the New Republic Mike Hensley was the editor and we would laugh at how we would get these letters positing these theories about why we did things. I was like, oh, I see you ran these three pieces. It all fell into place. And we're like, wait, one piece was voiced on us by the owner. The other piece came in in the transom and we had a hole to fill in them. There was like no connection but people would always do this. And I think on the one hand he's wrong to think the New York Times was reacting to the original controversy and ordered up this hit piece. On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if the author of the piece had his attitude toward this group soured by the encounter and may have even without being conscious. I mean, maybe what you said that he just logically concludes that, hey, these people aren't great. It could also be that at a kind of unconscious level this is retaliation because they made his life miserable and even if he's doing his best to be objective that still came through. That's possible too. The thing I don't think- I think he's just partly trying to explain why this is the kind of group that would make his life a mess because Scott Alexander overreacted. That could be. I would say it's definitely not a favorable piece. Sounds like Scott may have legit gripes about individual sentences but I think that it was not ordered up by the New York Times. That would be very, very unusual. Well, there's a great story about all of this in the New Yorker this summer by Gideon Lewis-Crowes. And he says the exact right thing that he's like, I used to work for the New York Times magazine and just like the idea that somebody would be like, here's this guy who's popular in Silicon Valley, like get him, is just very, very weird because you know how stories get written. Is that a reporter gets kind of interested in something and wants to poke around and ask their editor, hey, I think there's something here. Should I check it out, like write something up? Okay, let's have a look at the chat. It's like when 10 Oat Riders with 10 followers talk about optics and Dennis Prager says, near reactionary over the alt-right, Ford star codex, Luke de-radicalized me, Luke star codex absurdum, Luke put me on the right path, thanks 40. And yes, Keith Woods just premiered a stream with Josh Neal about his new book, Unextremism. Half collision notes, Luke radicalized and de-radicalized me all within one show, the path of Panassa. Doovid has shown us the way it is up to us to follow. So the New Yorker did a piece on Slate star codex and it notes, the Scott Alexander asked his supporters remain courteous. So this is important. So if I fill you with incendiary perspectives and then say, but please remain courteous, that's disingenuous. It's like, let's say I try to convince you that the 2020 election was stolen by voter fraud. And then I say, well, please remain courteous. Okay, if I make the case that abortion is murder, and then I tell you, but you should treat people who perform abortions with courtesy and civility, that's absurd, right? If people are out there committing murder, and I tell you, well, you should treat them with civility and courtesy and not violate the law. That part of the message simply doesn't translate. Once you make the case that voter fraud determined the 2020 election or may have determined the 2020 presidential election, then all moral restraints are gone. If I can convince you that the performance of abortion is murder, then all moral restraints in reaction to those who perform abortions is gone, right? So I can say, oh, be civil, be law-abiding, be courteous, but that's pointless once I convince you that murder is taking place. Once I make the argument that the election was stolen, then all moral restraints are gone. You're in a victim community and there is nothing that you can do that is morally illicit once you believe that abortion is murder, or once you believe that the 2020 election, presidential election may have been stolen. So Scott Alexander said, please remember you are representing me in the Slate Star Codex community and I will be very sad if you're a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation, ask them to stop doxing random bloggers for clicks. You are some sort of important tech person who the New York Times technology section might wanna maintain good relations with, mentioned that, right? So this kind of plea to remain civil after you then give incendiary reasons for people to be outraged just doesn't work, right? We're all sending mixed messages and it's confusing, but some messages that we send out into the world are far more powerful and overwhelm other messages. So this plea conformed with the online persona, Scott Alexander's publicly cultivated over the years at Slate Star Codex of a gentle headmaster preparing to chaperone a rambunctious group of boys on a museum outing, but just lens plausible deniability to what he surely knew would be taken as incitement. So saying that the 2020 election may have been stolen is inciting to extreme lawless, anti-social and criminal behavior saying that abortion is murder, right? Once you make the claim that abortion is murder, then there is no response that is off the table. So Scott Alexander's appeal listed an immediate reaction from his followers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. In a few days, a petition collected gathered more than 6,000 signatories, including the cognitive psychologist Stephen Pinker, the economist Tyler Cowan, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, cryptocurrency Vitalik Buterin and the quantum physicist David Deutsch, the philosopher Peter Singer, the open AI CEO Sam Altman. People just loved Scott's writing, former venture capitalist and cryptocurrency enthusiast Balaji Srinivasan. That's the Balaji Srinivasan, that's the guy that Will Wilkinson had a great deal of trouble pronouncing his name. As a quarrelsome Twitter personality, tweeted three hours after Scott Alexander's post appeared that this example of journalism is the non-consensual invasion of privacy for profit as courtesy of Cade Metz, technology writer, ordinarily given over to enthusiastic stories on the subject of artificial intelligence. And as you can imagine, Scott Alexander's plea for civility went unheeded. So we're always putting in mixed messages into the ether, but some messages are gonna be much more powerful than others, and we're gonna be much more effective in life when our messages are not at war with each other. You can't incite with your right hand and then plea for civility with your left hand and be effective. It's like slamming your foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time. So Cade Metz and his New York Times editor were flooded with angry messages. Srinivasan turned to address Silicon Valley investors, entrepreneurs and CEOs saying, the New York Times tried to dox Scott Alexander for clicks. Okay, just mentioning some guy's name is not doxing. It's like Ben Shapiro complaining that Breitbart had doxed it and they simply linked to his California state bar page where Ben Shapiro was responsible for all the information that was on it. And Ben Shapiro was idiot enough to list his home address. Ben Shapiro chose to list his home address on his California state bar page. So Ben Shapiro doxed himself. But does Ben Shapiro wanna face that reality that he doxed himself? No, it's much easier to point the finger at somebody else. So Srinivasan tweeted, what will work is freezing them out. Please commit to not talking to New York Times reporters or giving them quotes. Other prominent figures in Silicon Valley, including Paul Graham, followed suit. He says, it's revealing that so many worry that this will be a hip piece. So more dangerous time for ideas now than 10 years ago, the New York Times is less to be trusted. So this atmosphere of danger, mistrust gave rise to a whole spate of conspiracy theories that Scott Alexander Siskin was being doxxed or canceled because his support for Michigan State professor accused of racism because he'd recently written a post about his dislike for paywalls because the New York Times was simply afraid of the independent power of the proudly heterodox slate star Codex cohort. And the others like, yeah, sounds good. And then they go poking around. And sometimes, like in this case, weird shit happens while you're poking around that changes the story. Like, because again, in journalism, the subject doesn't stay still. The subject has interest in being presented a certain way. In this case, it was Scott had an interest in not having his identity revealed and he was, you know, reacted to that danger. But like, and... And the chat says, did the bully not have a right to fight back? Of course they do. But how you fight back is going to make all the difference in the world. Let's say your boss says something bullying to you and you respond by punching him in the face. That's probably not an effective way of fighting back, right? So they're effective and ineffective ways of fighting back. And sometimes the best thing to do is absolutely nothing. So I was in situations where someone was harassing me and I went to my therapist and I said, should I do this or this? My therapist suggested, why not do nothing? That turned out to be the best advice. This guy who was bothering and harassing me turned out to be a valuable friend who found me a job when I desperately needed a job. So sometimes just doing nothing is the best and often doing nothing is better than doing something that is self-destructive. So people often can't stand just sitting still. They want to lash out to protect themselves and they act in anger and they don't think about the repercussions of what they're saying and doing. But once he reacted this way, he created a newer, more interesting story. And so like, I totally get why he'd wanna remain anonymous or, but the thing is like, I don't think it's this journalist's responsibility ultimately, right? Like if you are doing something that you think could get you in huge professional trouble and you've also done a terrible job of concealing your identity, it's not somebody else's fault if somebody comes out and says who you are. And the times you- Right, if you were doing things publicly, online, that you don't want the world to know about, then the problem is not the New York Times wanting to write an article about you. The problem is how did you end up doing all these things that you wanna hide from the world? And where do you think that there'll be no consequences for actions and words that you perform publicly? It hold off on the piece until he- And it didn't publish anything. And it may be that the journalist was in a worse mood than he was the first time around. I wanna read Matt Iglesias in his assessment of this. I think you will not buy this. You've read it, but Matt says that implicit in the New York Times piece is a kind of syllogism. Scott Alexander's blog is popular with some influential Silicon Valley people. That's point number one. Scott Alexander has done posts that espoused views on race or gender that progressives disapprove of. Therefore in the third part of the syllogism, therefore Silicon Valley is a hotbed of racism and sexism. I don't think you'd put it that way. I think you'd say the Times accurately picked up on the idea that there were some people in this community who manifest racism and sexism. And then Scott Alexander was kind of tarred by association with him. Yeah, and the thing is like, I mean like, it's not like, you know, Scott is definitely not woke. He has, you know, a very common kind of like anti-woke hostility that is very common with a lot of liberals who think it's best to just argue things out loud. And but like, I don't think, yeah, I don't think Matt is right about what's going on in the story. I don't think it was that kind of syllogism. Like you just have to get inside the mind of the reporter, right? Like what? Like you might think, okay, this weird thing happened. Yeah, reporters are people too, looking at the uncensored D-Live chat. Tolerance of the intolerant paradox is junk, bro. How long do our boomers intend to perpetuate this denazification program? I really think they should have given up the ghost in the 1990s. You think they ever asked themselves if they are responsible for causing the cringe dead Nazi bouncers that they then catch about? I know it isn't actually a vaccine. The WHO says there's a lack of evidence that any of the gene therapies offer vaccine protection. I'd hate to be labeled a kook. I'm feeling pretty unrestrained, bro. The 2016 election was stolen. Happening to me. I just wanted to write a simple story, just inoffensive. I was initially interested in like, why this guy was right about coronavirus early on. Right, like that just seemed interesting. It seemed like an interesting community. It was interesting that he's popular with all these influential people. And then he tries to start writing this story and he creates this giant controversy that like gets his whole blog nuked and this entire. It's a good idea, particularly if you could be turned into a public figure to never say anything in an email or a text message that you would not like scrolled across the scoreboard at Dodger Stadium or across the front page of the New York Times. Our community incensed at him. And he's like, what happened there? Well, the first question you'd ask is like, why was this guy so fucking scared that people would start scouring his. Right, if you're incredibly scared that comments you've made online are gonna come back to haunt you, then you should ask why. And you should try to come up with an understanding or an explanation that will make the most sense to people who don't have a strong position one way or another. So the New Yorker wrote, the proliferation of such elaborate conjectures, conspiracy theories about this ordinary run of the mill New York Times story is hardly commensurate with the vision of sleet star codex as a touchstone of patience and disinterest, right? This is the rationalist community that they claim to explore things rationally, yet that they reacted to the possibility of a New York Times profile in an irrational manner that completely escalated the situation. And it was Scott Alexander's initial account of his exchange with New York Times journalist, Kate Metz, that ceded this escalation. So sleet star codex prioritizes semantic precision, meaning using your words carefully. But Scott Alexander's account is to be taken at its word, Kate Metz did not propose to dox Alexander but simply to de-anonymize him. Seems difficult to fathom that a professional journalist of Kate Metz's experience in standing would assure a subject, especially at the beginning of a process that he planned to write a mostly positive story. So that was Scott Alexander's supposition and it was incredibly naive. The business model of the New York Times is very little to do with chasing codex and no self-respecting journalists would conclude the pursuit of codex was best served by the de-anonymization of a random blogger. And the author of this New Yorker, he says, until recently I was a writer for the New York Times magazine, the idea that anyone in the organization would direct a reporter to take down a niche blogger because he didn't like paywalls because he promoted a petition about a professor or for any other reason is ludicrous. Stories emerge from casual interactions between curious reporters and their overtax editors. So this story emerged simply because Cade Metz got an email suggestion that he should write on Slate Star codex. And so this is just another story for Cade Metz. But the rationalist, despite their fixation with cognitive bias, read into the contingencies a darkly meaningful pattern. Scott Alexander, who's taken on the role of trying to help explain Silicon Valley to itself, was taken up as a mascot and a martyr in a struggle against the New York Times. He was enlisted as a, New York Times was enlisted as a proxy for the elite gatekeepers, the arbiters of what is and is not okay to say, what is allowed and who is allowed by virtue of their identity to say it. So Scott Alexander is long fretted over the likelihood that the presence of these fringe