The issue I had with Slate Star Codex goes a little deeper than that, and doesn’t really implicate your friends or impugn their intelligence or morals. The “Objectivist Bar Problem” (or, in the case of Thiel and his clique, an actual “Nazi Bar Problem”), while real, also strikes me here as a symptom that overtakes the original disease in malignancy. And it starts with the founder of the site.
Over the years I’ve read through (slogged through, really – anyone who’s read them will know what I mean) a few of Scott Alexander’s essays on hot-button issues that came across my newsfeed from start to end. In each case, after twisting my way through a lot of verbose noodling (including, always, fairly absolutist statements about general ethics and moral philosophy), the conclusion (sometimes only implied, because Alexander sometimes pulled his punches) was always something to the effect of:
[group that Fox News conservatives would call “SJWs”] are just as bad as [group that Fox News conservatives would approve of] because they just won’t listen to people with different views. They censor their own forums into echo chambers, which further aggravates the second group and divides the nation into two warring camps.
In other words: gussied-up and somewhat obscured victim-blaming, bothsidesism, total rejection of the concept of social constructs of gender and race, and freeze-peach absolutism – the sort of disingenuous takes we saw from PAPPP in the recently split topic.
And so feminists weren’t listening to guys in the manosphere, white liberals weren’t listening to white supporters of a racist con man, etc. If those darned outrage-driven liberals and progressives were just rational and open to listening to different and “unpopular” and even repugnant viewpoints from thoughtful and compassionate and very fine people, we’d all be independent and civil rationalists like me who transcends ideology and politics into the realm of pure reason.
Given that impression, when I hear that Objectivist and Libertarian and fascist techbros were drawn to this (IIRC) heavily male, heavily white community, I’m not exactly surprised. These views are what led to the disastrous state of the major platforms over the past four years, and to a lot of money going into the pocket of Silicon Valley VCs, founders, and executives.
I’m sure Alexander is a committed left libertarian (I believe he wrote an essay tearing apart right-Libertarianism), but it’s also clear that the arrogant exceptionalism and absolute moral and ethical certainty underlying all libertarianism (small-L and large) and which informs the approach of too many psychiatrists shines through in his essays when you cut through the weeds.
Now people like your friends might focus on the parts about ethics and moral philosophy, about the tools to improve thinking processes and open their minds. But there was a very distasteful subtext going on at Slate Star Codex. As they look for a new community to continue their explorations now that SSC is closed, I hope the one they find has better leaders and better members than the last one.
