Maybe I’m misreading the tone here, but it comes off like you have genuine contempt for the people you’re talking about here and that you take their views to be less than sincere or self-serving and their writing as an exercise in showing off.
If I have intuited this correctly, then I think it’s not justified or fair at least for the ones I’m most familiar with.
If you can’t tell me what hobbies I have or what my diet consists of you probably don’t know me well enough to be able to have any useful input on whether or not I’m justified. You’re describing your own views, which are that contempt for these people is unjustified, which we already know you believed by the fact that you are sympathetic to these views.
Fair enough. I guess I don’t think I need to know about your life to make a judgment about whether some people you have contempt for are worthy of contempt, but whatever.
I’m not sure why you think I’m sympathetic to their views. I am to some of them, not to others. I find some things about trends on philosophy substack quite grating. It seems like people who have high confidence in very counterintuitive claims tend to find larger audiences, and views that are underrepresented in online philosophy spaces are often dismissed as crazy despite being held by plenty of serious philosophers either now or historically. While I find these things frustrating, I don’t see good reason to think the people who you talk about are generally motivated by a desire to be edgy or that they’re as homogenous as you suggest (for example, Bentham rightly got a fair bit of pushback for an article talking about how many academics in the 20th century believed crazy things like behaviourism or various kinds of anti-realism). But I don’t expect this to change your mind obviously, just wanted to put my own view forward.
You: "I think you're unjustified disliking these people"
Me: "Do you know anything about my beliefs such that you would be in a position to evaluate whether or not I'm justified"
You: "No, but here are MY beliefs, plenty of Philosophers have been sympathetic to these views in the past..."
Me: To the extent philosophers are sympathetic to these views I think they are mistaken or, sometimes morons inducted into a stupid cult. But that doesn't really matter, because it's completely false (if you read historical philosophers) that they had the same conceptions as we do in the myopic cult of Analytic Anglo-American Philosophy. And, to the extent they engage with the same questions, their engagements with those questions are often much more informative than Matthew Adelsteins idiotic argument mill.
This conversation seems to be a waste of my time. Whether or not you think I'm justified in disliking these people is just some random emotional reaction you are having to me disliking them. You don't know who I am, I don't know who you are. And now I'm writing some pointless paragraph of nothing to engage with nothing. I have work to do, and you don't know anything about me or my beliefs. If you wanted to figure out whether or not I was justified (I literally have no idea what your goals are for this interaction) you would ask a question about my beliefs, such as "Why do you dislike these people". That's how you get an answer about what someone whose beliefs you don't know thinks about something -- you ask them -- you can't figure it out by seeing how their words make you feel.
MATTHEW ADESLSTEIN (lets not promote his already overinflated online persona by calling him Bentham) has had push back from people more informed than him on almost everything he has written about and he continues to simply ignore the strong criticisms of his views and carry on as if they don't exist. He engages initially, when he can't respond any more he doesn't go "oh yeah I'll change my views now", he just ignores the criticisms and hopes his next interlocutor won't know them. He is wasting everyone's time and making the state of Philosophical discourse far worse than it should be with his pretty often completely idiotic positions held only to try to be an edgelord and generate engagement whilst making him feel intelligent for defending ludicrous things with more arguments than your average person who hasnt had years of their life to memorise counter-arguments to nonsense. He is incentivising a completely empty kind of idiotic Philosophy for upper middle class children who do nothing of value whilst ignoring real problems that matter. It's all just some bullshit game for him to waste his parents money and stroke his ego. He has had every opportunity to temper his views or actually learn something useful that would inform his philosophical positions and he has chose clout chasing instead.
I suppose though that on reflection I would like to hear why you think that he’s only trying to be a edgelord and seem clever. And do you off the top of your head have any clear examples of him disingenuously ignoring a criticism that he had previously heard and acknowledged.
I’m sure popular people on this website have mixed motives for what they spend their time thinking about and writing about, some more petty and others more noble. You seem to think that in Matthew’s case and some others that we haven’t named here, it skews heavily towards the former. You’re right that I don’t know the details of your views on this, and I should have asked this in the first place.
The reason why I didn’t ask why you disliked them is because your post made it perfectly clear why to the extend that it was intended as a genuine expression of dislike. My only uncertainty was the extent to which this was an exaggeration.
On the point about many philosophers having agreed with certain views in the past, the point there wasn’t to criticise you for your views by appealing to authority. It was to acknowledge a problem I think you agree is a problem - namely that views that aren’t currently popular in analytic philosophy or in the analytic philosophy community online are often not treated charitably due to complacency about the superior state of current philosophy or its online representation. It was a bungled attempt to establish common ground. I don’t really have more to add.
It is interesting that you have similar politics as Nathan. But you are pretty acerbic to Lance and Nathan. I also have very different views than Nathan on God, intuitions, etc. but i just thought that this post is pretty funny to me.
I do understand how Lance or Nathan's views can have pessimistic implications.
I skimmed this, saw some of the arguments were ziploc rational, and concluded that they all must be. Rationally, skimming is good because any part should reflect the whole. Academics know this!
That’s why it’s best to use Mathematical notation, to make the separating the Wheat from the Chaff easier, as it were. Save those brain cycles for ratiocinating outcomes that save mankind with the most marginal utility.
It seems to me like you don’t have any rational argument, and are just projecting your inability to reason onto those of us capable of rational thinking. I’ve done the calculations, and in the time it took you to write this article, you could have earned $6,412.09 with the average salary at the Center For AI Safety and Cuckoldry (where I work). In not earning that money and donating it, you have effectively ended 1.087 human lives.
Now, let “U” represent my priors, let “R” represent the evidence gathered from my reading this article, and let “A” represent my posterior conclusion. Performing a Bayesian transformation we get:
U + R + A = Fucking idiot.
My probabilistic reasoning is ironclad. Sorry kid, but you’ve lost this one. 🤯
You think this post is funny? I bet you can’t even name all of the fallacies there are. Maybe read some blog posts by the greatest minds of our era Scott Alexander, Richard Hanania and Aella to educate yourself kid.
Thank god I live in germany. We don't print pdfs, we still use fax
Maybe I’m misreading the tone here, but it comes off like you have genuine contempt for the people you’re talking about here and that you take their views to be less than sincere or self-serving and their writing as an exercise in showing off.
If I have intuited this correctly, then I think it’s not justified or fair at least for the ones I’m most familiar with.
I do have genuine contempt for these people.
If you can’t tell me what hobbies I have or what my diet consists of you probably don’t know me well enough to be able to have any useful input on whether or not I’m justified. You’re describing your own views, which are that contempt for these people is unjustified, which we already know you believed by the fact that you are sympathetic to these views.
Fair enough. I guess I don’t think I need to know about your life to make a judgment about whether some people you have contempt for are worthy of contempt, but whatever.
I’m not sure why you think I’m sympathetic to their views. I am to some of them, not to others. I find some things about trends on philosophy substack quite grating. It seems like people who have high confidence in very counterintuitive claims tend to find larger audiences, and views that are underrepresented in online philosophy spaces are often dismissed as crazy despite being held by plenty of serious philosophers either now or historically. While I find these things frustrating, I don’t see good reason to think the people who you talk about are generally motivated by a desire to be edgy or that they’re as homogenous as you suggest (for example, Bentham rightly got a fair bit of pushback for an article talking about how many academics in the 20th century believed crazy things like behaviourism or various kinds of anti-realism). But I don’t expect this to change your mind obviously, just wanted to put my own view forward.
So this conversation is:
You: "I think you're unjustified disliking these people"
Me: "Do you know anything about my beliefs such that you would be in a position to evaluate whether or not I'm justified"
You: "No, but here are MY beliefs, plenty of Philosophers have been sympathetic to these views in the past..."
Me: To the extent philosophers are sympathetic to these views I think they are mistaken or, sometimes morons inducted into a stupid cult. But that doesn't really matter, because it's completely false (if you read historical philosophers) that they had the same conceptions as we do in the myopic cult of Analytic Anglo-American Philosophy. And, to the extent they engage with the same questions, their engagements with those questions are often much more informative than Matthew Adelsteins idiotic argument mill.
This conversation seems to be a waste of my time. Whether or not you think I'm justified in disliking these people is just some random emotional reaction you are having to me disliking them. You don't know who I am, I don't know who you are. And now I'm writing some pointless paragraph of nothing to engage with nothing. I have work to do, and you don't know anything about me or my beliefs. If you wanted to figure out whether or not I was justified (I literally have no idea what your goals are for this interaction) you would ask a question about my beliefs, such as "Why do you dislike these people". That's how you get an answer about what someone whose beliefs you don't know thinks about something -- you ask them -- you can't figure it out by seeing how their words make you feel.
MATTHEW ADESLSTEIN (lets not promote his already overinflated online persona by calling him Bentham) has had push back from people more informed than him on almost everything he has written about and he continues to simply ignore the strong criticisms of his views and carry on as if they don't exist. He engages initially, when he can't respond any more he doesn't go "oh yeah I'll change my views now", he just ignores the criticisms and hopes his next interlocutor won't know them. He is wasting everyone's time and making the state of Philosophical discourse far worse than it should be with his pretty often completely idiotic positions held only to try to be an edgelord and generate engagement whilst making him feel intelligent for defending ludicrous things with more arguments than your average person who hasnt had years of their life to memorise counter-arguments to nonsense. He is incentivising a completely empty kind of idiotic Philosophy for upper middle class children who do nothing of value whilst ignoring real problems that matter. It's all just some bullshit game for him to waste his parents money and stroke his ego. He has had every opportunity to temper his views or actually learn something useful that would inform his philosophical positions and he has chose clout chasing instead.
I suppose though that on reflection I would like to hear why you think that he’s only trying to be a edgelord and seem clever. And do you off the top of your head have any clear examples of him disingenuously ignoring a criticism that he had previously heard and acknowledged.
I’m sure popular people on this website have mixed motives for what they spend their time thinking about and writing about, some more petty and others more noble. You seem to think that in Matthew’s case and some others that we haven’t named here, it skews heavily towards the former. You’re right that I don’t know the details of your views on this, and I should have asked this in the first place.
The reason why I didn’t ask why you disliked them is because your post made it perfectly clear why to the extend that it was intended as a genuine expression of dislike. My only uncertainty was the extent to which this was an exaggeration.
On the point about many philosophers having agreed with certain views in the past, the point there wasn’t to criticise you for your views by appealing to authority. It was to acknowledge a problem I think you agree is a problem - namely that views that aren’t currently popular in analytic philosophy or in the analytic philosophy community online are often not treated charitably due to complacency about the superior state of current philosophy or its online representation. It was a bungled attempt to establish common ground. I don’t really have more to add.
This is a thing of beauty.
Well that was incoherent and filled with straw men. But I guess banging out incoherent attempts at satire is better than drinking.
It is interesting that you have similar politics as Nathan. But you are pretty acerbic to Lance and Nathan. I also have very different views than Nathan on God, intuitions, etc. but i just thought that this post is pretty funny to me.
I do understand how Lance or Nathan's views can have pessimistic implications.
Some misses; more hits.
>I don’t know how to print a PDF document
Harder than it intellectually seems
v Good Comment
"This is brilliant, but you are missing this niche aspect. This whole thing is mine now."
Since you missed this strategy in your brilliant post, it is mine now.
I skimmed this, saw some of the arguments were ziploc rational, and concluded that they all must be. Rationally, skimming is good because any part should reflect the whole. Academics know this!
That’s why it’s best to use Mathematical notation, to make the separating the Wheat from the Chaff easier, as it were. Save those brain cycles for ratiocinating outcomes that save mankind with the most marginal utility.
It seems to me like you don’t have any rational argument, and are just projecting your inability to reason onto those of us capable of rational thinking. I’ve done the calculations, and in the time it took you to write this article, you could have earned $6,412.09 with the average salary at the Center For AI Safety and Cuckoldry (where I work). In not earning that money and donating it, you have effectively ended 1.087 human lives.
Now, let “U” represent my priors, let “R” represent the evidence gathered from my reading this article, and let “A” represent my posterior conclusion. Performing a Bayesian transformation we get:
U + R + A = Fucking idiot.
My probabilistic reasoning is ironclad. Sorry kid, but you’ve lost this one. 🤯
> It’s basically Physics; but for Morality and Politics! (and should be respected as such).
Indeed, I'm currently working on what will be called the string theory of political science.
> Morality is like Mathematics
Well except for fake mathematical concepts like undefinability, indeterminacy, and undecidability, which are postmodernist psy-ops.
> If at first you don’t succeed, check Reality again.
Oh shit, I should've thought of that!
> If a Bayesian argument can be formulated, it MUST be believed.
Do you have a Bayesian argument for that?
> ALL PROBLEMS ARE DECISION THEORETIC.
Except for problems with dating, those are economic and evo-psych problems.
> I have all the right intellectual seemings about what a maximally great, omniscient, perfectly rational being would do ( after all, I am one ).
You forgot to mention I also have the property of "omnibenevolence", which is latin for effective altruist.
> Every man is an island, some men are islands of low human capital
Hey that's sexist, women are islands of low human capital too!
> God is a Neoliberal
Oh dude, that's an *excellent* solution to the problem of evil!
> People often get angry at terms like “Eugenics” because they are doing irrational pattern matching.
Huh, why? Shouldn't it pattern match to something positive?
Not a bad post, but it would've been more rational had you written it in formal logic.
Finally some usefull guidelines on how to become a better Substack philosopher!
You think this post is funny? I bet you can’t even name all of the fallacies there are. Maybe read some blog posts by the greatest minds of our era Scott Alexander, Richard Hanania and Aella to educate yourself kid.
Literally cannot argue with any of this because I have to be objectively rational.