Is people being called fascist for using a web browser a common thing? I am aware of some pretty far left people who say “Brave is bad because the creator is homophobic, so I don’t think people should use it” but not people who say “you are a fascist if you use Brave.” That sounds like maybe some kind of weird ultra far left purity testing type of thing that a tiny minority of people expressed that then got amplified to right wing audiences as ragebait.
In general, this transitive badness idea seems like a leap. I think hoe_math is bad because he says really messed up stuff, and his ideas seem sufficiently messed up and wrong that I think that make approximately all of his opinions suspect. I think someone who likes him and watches his content is probably getting a lot of bad ideas from him. So in that sense, I think they are bad, but I don’t think they are getting transitive badness via contact. I think they are actually bad, and getting actual badness from him in the form of bad ideas.
It was hedging because I don’t think you can ever actually see the future, but you can make lots of reasonable guesses about someone’s views, or the trajectory their views seem to lead, etc.
I think hoe_math being a racist with bad ideas about racial genetics seems totally in line with the trajectory I saw in his content the last time I looked at it (1-2 years ago? not sure of exact timeline.)
He seemed like a misogynist with bad ideas about gender/sex genetics at the time. And he seemed like he was generally sort of “black pilled”, very arrogant and pseudo-intellectual, and very far right. I think that combination predictably leads to this kind of racism. My assumption at the time was that he was also racist, he just happened to focus on redpill/gender stuff because it got engagement and because overt racism was less socially acceptable even 1-2 years ago.
I think I did say what I meant. It is kinda tautological, I guess. Of course people with a bad understanding of biology are not the best people to trust in matters of biology, how could they not be? But that’s why I thought it shouldn’t be a very controversial idea, or be difficult to agree with.
Remember, I said it in reply to this:
This seems to me like you are pushing back against my suggestion that his biological arguments would be worth extra scrutiny. But I disagree with that. I think they would deserve extra scrutiny.
If I said “people who are bad at math aren’t the best people to trust about math” you could also say the conclusion is in the premise. But I’m only saying it because, effectively, it seemed like there was some question about whether or not to trust a math teacher who sucked at math. To the extent it is a strange thing to say, to the extent the conclusion is in the premise, to the extent that it is tautological… I feel like that’s kind of my point? Does that make sense?
Like, imagine I said “don’t listen to that guy about math, look, here are 20 pages of twitter screenshots where he goes on angry math screeds about how 1x1=2 and says black people aren’t able to do math” and then you pushed back. So then I said “I think a good principled position is you shouldn’t trust math comments from racists who suck at math” — like, yeah. that seems almost like a dumb, self-evident argument. But… I don’t think that’s my fault, exactly.
You’ve gone further than I did with this. I didn’t say that “racists” don’t understand biology and are untrustworthy on it. I said “racists with a bad understanding of biology” are untrustworthy on matters of biology. My view is that people might be racist for a variety of reasons, but racists like hoe_math who specifically say things like “it is baked into their black DNA to experience strong impulses to kill, rape, and steal” are racists who have a bad understanding of biology.
Someone who is racist for some other reason than a bad understanding of genetics might be more okay to trust on matters of biology. For example, someone could be racist because they believe (right or wrong) that another race of people have some sort of unfair social advantage, and they are angry about that and decide to mistreat that race as a result. But they could believe that benefit has nothing to do with biology. Such a person would be racist, but might be very well-informed about biology.
I suspect you already know this… so I’m not entirely sure why you assumed I was saying something other than what I said.
I dunno. Maybe we’ll get that far eventually? Maybe not.
One way you could learn something that might be enduring is learning a bit better how to identify certain bad idea clusters and trends? If hoe_math’s racism is surprising to you, but it wasn’t surprising to me, maybe you could try to figure out what you missed or something. That could maybe help you avoid wasting your time in the future on people who are spreading bad ideas.
If you have specific questions that you think could help you learn something, you can always ask.
You should not always assume someone with bad idea in X subject also has bad ideas in Y subject. No. But you could, if their bad ideas in X subject are really bad and really unusual so that it seems like their thinking ability is impaired. Or you could if you think that X subject specifically has overlap into Y subject (e.g. they both involve biology.)
But those are contextual. I think hoe_math’s bad ideas on biology probably have reach across all biology-related subjects. But if hoe_math recommended a lasagna recipe, maybe you could take his recommendation because you do not see how his racism would impact the lasagna recipe.
I think it depends a lot on the specific context. My guess is that you actually agree with me, too, but you do it intuitively and maybe don’t realize you have a similar heuristic?
But like, I bet if someone had a sufficiently bad idea by your judgement, you would assume their other ideas are more likely to be flawed. Think of the worst, stupidest, most evil, most incoherent, craziest idea you can possibly imagine. Now imagine someone is shouting about that idea, and then they tell you “I also have good ideas about economics, race, physics, and math!” — would you say you should always neutrally hear them out on every subject? I suspect not.
It seems like maybe you are thinking we have to take this principle to some logical principled extreme, so that my position is actually that if anyone is ever wrong about anything then we must stop trusting them. But I’m not advocating for that.
I think this is a super messy controversial aside that is about to balloon out even more. You listed lots of stuff there. The way you framed it here is kind of aggressive. I am aware that most of those things are claimed. There are one or two items that I am not sure I’m familiar with. And of the ones I am familiar with, I disagree that they are all real issues — I think some of them are basically hysteria/misinformation/etc. and have been made into culture war issues.
So how do we proceed? Isn’t this just going to create a dozen new sub-arguments?
My inclination is to just ignore this for now. But it’s problematic because you were using this example to make a point about the current topic. I don’t necessarily agree with you about the underlying example.
If you are including scale, then aren’t both of these trivial? Lots more people have died as a result of the war in Ukraine, or from malaria in Africa, or whatever.
So like, even if I pretend I agree with you 100% about the Lancet thing, people not wearing seatbelts is way worse than anything those doctors said, because way more people die as a result of not wearing seatbelts.
IDK, just seems kind of silly and irrelevant I guess. I thought we were talking about the content of the bad statements, not the overall social impact of many people making small bad decisions. That seems like a different topic.