[eatplayrove]

I fully understand your point re reddit, but I think a single person's blog is different than that. A blog is like a book and reddit is like a bookstore if you will, if you go to a bookstore selling a book that racists read that is not concerning to me (wrongly concerning to your mom as you said), but if you bought the book in question (even if non/anti-racists read it too) I would be concerned if I were your mother - just to make sure you are not aligned with them.

I am not saying this is the case (as I have no connection with the blog), but if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great (which is the main takeaway I got from the article), that needs to be addressed as to why they are attracted there, and Mr. Siskind does not do that. If the claim is bogus, then the claim is bogus, but Mr. Siskind does not refute that they are attracted to his blog.

As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.

[ALittleLight]

Regarding the difference between a blog and reddit I would say that the comment section harbors people with many different views. Some of the comments may be objectionable (again: I didn't see examples) but so what? That's got to be true of everywhere with a comments section. Why make that a focus?

You write "if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great" - but this isn't even the kind of thing that could be true. Imagine how you would prove this claim, do you go to the National Association of Racists and ask for their stance on SSC? Is there a poll of racists and their opinion on niche blogs somewhere?

"Racists" is ill defined by itself. People aren't racist or not the way they are right or left handed. Racism is a spectrum and much of it is debatable and nuanced and affected by context and all that. This is like saying "Some number of an undefined group like something. Prove me wrong." That's not a legitimate claim and there is no need to try and rebut it.

I have no doubt that some racists like the blog and other racists don't like it. Do more racists (proportionally) like and read SSC or the NYT? I don't think you can answer that.

Regarding the feminist issue I'll have to go back and read that post before writing more.

[MrMan]

Some of our applied social scientists are being allowed to work with very large datasets at places like Facebook and I believe they are increasingly in a position to make quantifiable statements on what racists or any other cluster-able groups of humans like. If by spectrum you mean “distance from a centroid” it might be more precise.

Marketing is essentially the working, reproducible arm of the social sciences, and marketers know a lot about human preferences and how to link them to motivation.

[disgruntledphd2]

> Some of our applied social scientists are being allowed to work with very large datasets at places like Facebook and I believe they are increasingly in a position to make quantifiable statements on what racists or any other cluster-able groups of humans like. If by spectrum you mean “distance from a centroid” it might be more precise.

Just because you have more data, it doesn't mean that you can identify constructs like racism from this loads of data. You'd need some kind of ground truth mechanism (like an index of behaviour towards different races) which neither Facebook (nor anyone else) has. It's just wildly implausible.

Maybe, in ten years, NLP will be good enough to identify this, but I don't think these constructs are easily identifiable from text, certainly not in a public space such as Facebook.

> Marketing is essentially the working, reproducible arm of the social sciences, and marketers know a lot about human preferences and how to link them to motivation.

I get what you're trying to say here, and maybe that works in a small number of places, but having worked with marketers in analytics for the past decade or so, suffice it to say that I rarely praise the standards of experimention and (lack of) rigour employed by them.

[ALittleLight]

That still relies on the scientists defining and labeling racists which will be an arbitrary process. Regardless - do you think anything of the kind was done by the NYT?

[chillacy]

Unsupervised learning doesn’t give us named labels. Someone still has to name cluster 1, 2, 3... etc. So not sure that actually gets around what amounts to a semantic question.

[Hasu]

This seems pretty crazy to me - you're saying that if I happen to enjoy anything that also happens to be enjoyed by racists/sexists, you would be concerned? Guess what? Racists and sexists like Harry Potter, and Star Wars, and Marvel movies, and Coca-Cola, and everything else that people who aren't racists and sexists like. I guarantee that you enjoy many, many things that are also enjoyed by people who have detestable beliefs, because people with detestable beliefs sometimes like things that have nothing to do with those detestable beliefs. Racists don't spend all their time reading Mein Kampf and watching Birth of a Nation, they also read the same books you read, watch the same movies and television shows you watch, and, yes, read the same blogs you read.

If the blog has sexist/racist content that attracts sexists and racists, sure, that's a problem, but if the blog had such content, the NYT article wouldn't have resorted to pointing out the commenters, they would have linked the content.

> As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.

Specifically, in context, he said "People who go out of their way to be horrifically mean to other people who are pretty unfortunate and unhappy and don't understand why, just for asking why, are pretty much pure evil", it wasn't an attack on all feminists ever, it was an attack on people who he specifically thinks are doing something extremely terrible. That's the context.

[MrMan]

I never read that blog and don’t read the NYT but I will say in response only to your comment that racists and sexists don’t seem to enjoy Star Wars like they used to. Someone should write a (hopefully thoughtful-seeming) long form rumination on the parallels between what has (allegedly) happened to Disney and what has (allegedly) happened to the NYT.

[yanderekko]

>I never read that blog and don’t read the NYT but I will say in response only to your comment that racists and sexists don’t seem to enjoy Star Wars like they used to.

Most of the ire is directly at the sequel trilogy, notably the last two movies thereof. So if one of your coworkers says they hated The Last Jedi but loved The Mandalorian, then you can reasonably report them to HR for engaging in discomforting behavior.

[dragonsngoblins]

Ah well I'm safe then because I thought Force Awakens was pretty shit and never even saw the following two movies in the ST

[ALittleLight]

I really hope you're joking.

[arcsin]

> but if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great... that needs to be addressed as to why they are attracted there

I'll try to put this as objectively as I can. There is now a cultural overlap between those that support varying degrees of "censorship" and progressives, and between those that support "free speech" and, let's say, anti-progressives. This makes sense because now racism/sexism is more likely to be censored than extreme progressivism. Probably if it were the other way around (if extreme progressivism were more likely to be censored) then those same progressives would become staunch free-speech advocates and anti-progressives would be fighting for more "content moderation".

So if you are generally for the toleration of ideas, perhaps holding some unpopular opinions yourself, and against censorious tactics, you tend to attract extreme anti-progressives as well. For the most part, racists and sexist do not see themselves as racists and sexists, they see themselves as holding true but unpopular beliefs. Another interesting example of this is Sam Harris somehow having a fair amount of Trump-supporting listeners even though he spends a lot of time ranting about how incompetent and morally-bankrupt he thinks Trump is.