[rrose]

im not going to tell you you're wrong for respecting him, but i feel this comment is only telling half the story. He's very well respected in the "rationalist" community, but he and that community are pretty controversial and definitely not universally respected

[tomcatfish]

The operating point is that Scott Alexander isn't looking for a few extra dollars selling potentially fake health products.

He makes a *lot* of money on Substack, enough that this concertn isn't valid.

Also, "So and so isn't respected in the whole world, only in the people that know about them" isn't a super helpful argument anyways.

[ajkjk]

Well, the point was that he (or at least the community he is in) is actively disrespected by some people as well, so it's a bit more pointed than just "not known about".

Mentioning this only for completeness' sake. I think he's good, on net. But somewhat adjacent to some more dubious and distasteful stuff.

[floxy]

I heard he's been known to wear white after labor day.

[ajkjk]

Yeah, that's not it.

[astrange]

Well, he is trustworthy on psychiatry even if he’s a member of a religion that worships nonexistent AIs and Bayes’ theorem.

But his main posting hobby is that he wants to be friends with weird internet right-wing intellectuals and that you should too. So every time I glance at the comments there someone wants to give their opinions on exactly who is genetically less intelligent than the commenter.

[lalaithion]

Would you write the same comment about a Catholic psychiatrist who wrote a blog about both Catholicism and psychiatry?

Catholicism is definitely pretty controversial and definitely not universally respected, but I think most people would have pretty strong pushback against a commenter who felt the need to bring up an author's Catholicism regarding a blog post that had little to do with catholicism.

[civilian]

If anyone is curious about the controversy, here's the NYTimes piece on Scott Alexander: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod... It's a decent article, and the few attempts at pearl-clutching fall pretty flat.

My only gripe with rationalists is that they suck at running their own conference, CFAR. (:

[0x_rs]

If somebody's interested, I would strongly suggest checking out both sides of the dispute and not only that, as the NYT story caused quite some ruckus at the time.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...