[kristopolous]

That's almost every reddit thread I've been involved in.

Oratory prowess is way more important than accuracy. If you ever want to "lose a debate" on reddit, pick something that's counter-intuitive or widely misunderstood and use nuance and citations in your defense. You'll get cyberbullied every time - sometimes even banned from the sub.

[smogcutter]

From those examples, I think you’re maybe also running up against people generally having a low threshold for giving a stranger on the internet the benefit of the doubt.

It’s hard to be surprised that “eugenics, but the good kind, just hear me out!” and “state’s rights, but not the disingenuous lost cause kind, just hear me out!” are a tough sell with complete strangers who have no prior reason to trust you or be interested in your opinions.

[kristopolous]

correct!

Btw, I removed them from my examples, didn't want to "discuss" that here.

I'm kind of a history nerd and it's like a fishing hook with delicious bait when I see stuff like that. "Oh wait! You think it was just the south that argued states rights?! Actually (brings up fugitive slave clause jurisprudence)"

Or how manner and conduct books of the 1800s, eugenics texts, and jordan peterson's 12 rules for life are basically dots in a straight line. That stuff is just catnip.

I just need to stop being distracted and go write actual books or something.

[nqrac]

Peterson an academic who is clueless about the real world. His best work was discussing politics in connection with liberty, especially the Trucker protests.

His biggest flaw is that (like the other Daily Wire pundits) he never goes into economics and has absurd ideas that we live in a competence hierarchy.

The whole "intellectual dark web" imploded after the start of the Ukraine war, when they first went full neocon, then realized that their audience does not like that and now start backpedaling massively.

[kristopolous]

I'd like to recommend "decoding the gurus" podcast which is probably the best treatment of this material I've seen.

It's still lacking but I should "put up or shut up". They're doing a fine job

[pfannkuchen]

I’m no fan of Peterson, but I’m curious— how are intentionally altering the gene pool of a group and cleaning your room colinear?

[kristopolous]

Look at the table of contents of this book titled "Eugenics" https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/6/mo...

There were multiple points of interest for the Eugenicists. One of them was for the general public and how to get them to have a proscribed conduct and behavior.

Maybe you've seen those diagrams where they have 2 life paths depicted from the Victorian era. That's from Eugenics. Example: https://ia800301.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages....

Here's "The Road to Success" for "The Young Man" https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/244/...

Again, this is part of Eugenics. We focus on the part that was removed (race science) and leave mostly unexamined the parts that were reinvented or repurposed as say, "The Power of Positive Thinking".

Eugenics books, for the general public, were a different beast. Probably the best succinct description for how they thought of themselves can be summarized in this 1921 diagram: https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/efc97918-8073-4...

It is a dangerous psuedoscientific epistemology - a practice with a bunch of faulty logic and ways of knowing that can lead to disasters and it's alive and well - for instance, assuming a social structure in lobsters applies to humans. That these adherents tend to be revealed as secretly racist and thus subscribe to the part which was removed, should be of no shock.

We've mischaracterized Eugenics[1] and allowed it to fester by other names or as Maurice Bardèche, the french neo-fascist observed about fascism in the 60s, "With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn"

The point is that if you don't draw the perimeter right around an idea, you can't reign it in. It'll just escape from your hands and re-emerge as something else. So, for instance, the slave plantation becomes the prison farm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm).

We tend to, for good reason, ignore societal trainwrecks and blights on our past. But trainwrecks are the most important thing to study if we strive to build safer trains and seek to avoid similar disasters in the future.

Things have to be accurately tackled with in order to defeat them.

---

[1] it's worth noting it's a big topic and some "real" science has also come out of it, such as biosocial theory and biostatistics studies. Peer reviewed journals such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Heredity used to be eugenics journals. This is, however, a very small minority.

[barrysteve]

Manners and conduct existed before eugenics and continues to exist after eugenics. You can't pull one blighted moment in the 1920s as proof the whole idea is faulty.

There is little accuracy in your description of events. Peterson said we share serotonin with lobsters and it fuels a victory/defeat set of behaviours. If you drop the serotonin from his idea, it's no longer what he was talking about.

Your description falls to my mind as a velvet blanket to hide underneath from scary racist and nazi ideas that have nothing to do with Victorian era manners and metaphors about behaviour, expanded out of natural science.

You can't draw a 'perimeter' around the wind.

[kristopolous]

I genuinely appreciate your engagement but this exact thing is what I was trying to avoid as a time suck.

This type of literature has been a hobby of mine for years and recently I've noticed that I've given myself some expertise.

Hopefully I'll be motivated to write a more complete volume in the future. It takes many pages to build proper context here.

Thanks. I've read your reply but I'm trying to be judicious with my time these days.

[wholinator2]

This doesn't make sense to me. But isn't there a difference between senior engineer and jail? Are you saying we should have no input on how children grow up or society behaves because some eugenics people picked the idea up once? Why must we be afraid of _everything_ the eugenicists _ever said_. Can't people sometimes have even a single good idea? I'm not in favor of eugenics at all. But social conduct and manners? That sociology, social psychology, we should grow away anything from any field that has ever been touched by _bad people_?

When i was younger the things Jordan Peterson said actually helped me. This whole "Reverse Midas Touch" thing is getting really out of hand. Just because a person has had bad ideas, doesn't make the person bad or require destruction of every idea they've ever held or spoken. Just because a group of racist and ignorant people held bad beliefs, doesn't mean every possible belief they held was bad and must be destroyed. This whole argument is just, "but the bad people thought that so it must be bad too", without ever establishing what's actually bad about it. Tell me what's wrong with the ideas without mentioning a group of bad people, tell me about why the ideas are bad. Tell me about the people who "manners and proper behavior" has hurt, and then explain to me why it can't possibly be different. Speak about the ideas, not the people. Everyone knows why those people were bad. Now tell me about the ideas

[kristopolous]

I genuinely appreciate your engagement but this exact thing is what I was trying to avoid as a time suck.

This type of literature has been a hobby of mine for years and recently I've noticed that I've given myself some expertise.

Hopefully I'll be motivated to write a more complete volume in the future. It takes many pages to build proper context here.

Thanks. I've read your reply but I'm trying to be judicious with my time these days.

[gsinclair]

Awesome comment; thank you.

[jiggawatts]

I post on both Reddit and YC News regularly, and it is fascinating to see the differences in biases, counter-arguments, or outright rejections of reality.

YC News people generally seem to prefer to hear the truth, especially from sources that appear knowledgeable. I've had people here comment in reply to me saying I've "changed their mind". That never happens on Reddit.

Reddit has cliques, quasi-religions, and fads. Anything contrary to the group-think is mercilessly voted down. Intelligent, thought-out counter arguments that aren't entertaining are especially likely to garner lots of downvotes. Not only do the readers feel "personally attacked" by contrary opinions, there is also that ever present undercurrent of anti-intellectualism of typical Americans that makes intelligent discourse distasteful to them.

[avgcorrection]

It’s amazing to me in all my years on the internet how many communities I insert myself into, then in private feel like a pretender, and yet how relatively uncommon it is that people call me an idiot.

[smcl]

Good afternoon, fellow Imposter Syndrome Haver :) Just jumping in to say that you are most likely not a pretender or an idiot, you're probably just very self-conscious, hold yourself to high standards and give yourself lofty goals.

[alophawen]

Can confirm. Was banned from /r/golang for speaking well of Rust. I use both.