There isn't any CSAM in the Epstein files though? Not even in redacted form? Am I just missing something? Big if true, etc., etc.

A lot of it is is probably a consequence of cranks being annoying and aggressively wrong on topics they care a lot about tbqh.

But I feel like this is insufficient as an explanation for many academics and a large portion of the science communicatariat. Weird cultural dynamics here imo.

Maybe the contempt comes from a feeling that they're less deserving of respect because they've not worked as hard? A romantic attitude towards institutions as sorting the deserving from undeserving?

Obviously there are resource and attention constraints that make it infeasible to humor everyone's (usually bad) ideas. But often there's a level of contempt towards cranks that feels totally excessive. And it isn't clear to me where that contempt comes from.

Not to say you're wrong or anything tho. For costly virtue signaling, second order effects are definitely complicated enough for valid arguments to be made either way for different contexts imo.

Maybe the term is bleached to the point of uselessness, but "doing the work" (costly signaling) really isn't the behavior the term was originally coined to call out.

The overwhelmingly negative responses to this make me feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

It's a cute anecdote, AI empowered him to do something he wouldn't otherwise have been able to do on his own, and he even qualified the positive feelings he has towards the bot at the end.

Oof. Blocked. I thought this was a fairly good-faith interaction. Bummer :/

Idk really, I maybe overthought my reply. What I wanted to get across is: that's a bad reading of what Nate is saying here. His shtick is calling balls and strikes about electoral politics. He's not making a "Douglas-style" argument, he's pointing out a blindspot that he thinks progressives have.

I don't think this is a defensible reading. First, it's probs more than a little anachronistic to attribute Nate's criticism of PMC detachment to Douglas. Second, merely recognizing that public opinion plays a central role in politics doesn't necessarily commit him to a majoritarian politics.

Which isn't to say that nothing good has come out of it.

Like, putting the merits and demerits of Marx's class analysis and concomitant political project aside, he at least tried to provide an objective basis for the class distinctions he was relying on!

What we get instead is usually ad-hoc class analysis along vocational and industrial lines. Which is a weirdly regressive way of understanding politics in a lot of ways?

Formulating effective methods for determining whether a statement in a language is valid really isn't "epistemological" in any straightforward sense, questions about "rational subjectivity" really don't make sense in that context.

To expand on this, Hork doesn't see modern logical formalisms as essentially differing from scholastic approaches to logic because he doesn't see how addressing the shortcomings of scholastic logic involved a fundamental shift in perspective on language.

Content moderation seems like an archetypal example maybe?

I don't think that's her take at all. Tbh.