I’m sorry, but the lack of concreteness here makes this sound like an unsubstantiated slam. Would you mind saying what you mean? Which of ESR’s views cause you to say this? what are the components of the particular affective spiral that you believe he has fallen subject to?
A lack of interest in dealing respectfully with opposing opinions causes people with more moderate opinions to stop visiting the blog, leaving the comments mostly a mixture of sycophants and trolls, reinforcing belief in the flawed moral character of those who disagree with the Big Idea.
The process then repeats until the blog has become its own little microcosm of silliness. Again, this is not specific to ESR or his views[1], nor is it relevant whether his views are correct; with a bit of time I could find plenty of examples of the same behavior from many different political positions. In ESR’s case, the effect seems to be strongest when he’s talking about firearms or violent military retribution.
Consider the commentary linked in this post. One of ESR’s remarks is “I think it is relevant that Gould seems to have been a believing Marxist who...” Come again? How on earth is this possibly relevant? One can deduce from this that at least one of ESR’s Big Ideas requires that Marxists are a Hated Enemy, hence reinterpreting some perfectly normal self-aggrandizing dishonesty as being yet another mark of evil against opponents (treated as an ambiguous collective group) of the Big Ideas.
The tragedy of it all is not in the rightness or wrongness of his political views; the tragedy is that ESR is an interesting, intelligent guy who is wasting his time stuck in an orbit around an irrelevant positive-feedback attractor in idea-space. Hence, why I was happy to see something from him that was mostly non-political.
[0] “Fringe” here is not a slam, just an observation. I couldn’t think of a word with a similar but less negative connotation. Blogs that advocate mainstream political parties tend to have very different failure modes, so the distinction is necessary.
[1] Nor is it even limited to politics; the same behavior can be found surrounding crackpot “scientific” theories[2][3], or fundamentalist religious groups (such as the churches my family attended when I was younger).
[2] I was tempted to make a cheap joke here and insert a link to string theory, but decided not to.
I’m sorry, but the lack of concreteness here makes this sound like an unsubstantiated slam. Would you mind saying what you mean? Which of ESR’s views cause you to say this? what are the components of the particular affective spiral that you believe he has fallen subject to?
It’s not the specific views per se, but how he goes about having them; it’s the common failure mode of most bloggers that advocate fringe political opinions[0]. A small handful of Big Ideas are seized upon, after which everything is viewed through the lens of those Ideas. Things that line up with the Big Ideas are proof of correctness; things that don’t are proof that the mainstream sheeple need more of the blogger’s Big Idea in their lives.
A lack of interest in dealing respectfully with opposing opinions causes people with more moderate opinions to stop visiting the blog, leaving the comments mostly a mixture of sycophants and trolls, reinforcing belief in the flawed moral character of those who disagree with the Big Idea.
The process then repeats until the blog has become its own little microcosm of silliness. Again, this is not specific to ESR or his views[1], nor is it relevant whether his views are correct; with a bit of time I could find plenty of examples of the same behavior from many different political positions. In ESR’s case, the effect seems to be strongest when he’s talking about firearms or violent military retribution.
Consider the commentary linked in this post. One of ESR’s remarks is “I think it is relevant that Gould seems to have been a believing Marxist who...” Come again? How on earth is this possibly relevant? One can deduce from this that at least one of ESR’s Big Ideas requires that Marxists are a Hated Enemy, hence reinterpreting some perfectly normal self-aggrandizing dishonesty as being yet another mark of evil against opponents (treated as an ambiguous collective group) of the Big Ideas.
The tragedy of it all is not in the rightness or wrongness of his political views; the tragedy is that ESR is an interesting, intelligent guy who is wasting his time stuck in an orbit around an irrelevant positive-feedback attractor in idea-space. Hence, why I was happy to see something from him that was mostly non-political.
[0] “Fringe” here is not a slam, just an observation. I couldn’t think of a word with a similar but less negative connotation. Blogs that advocate mainstream political parties tend to have very different failure modes, so the distinction is necessary.
[1] Nor is it even limited to politics; the same behavior can be found surrounding crackpot “scientific” theories[2][3], or fundamentalist religious groups (such as the churches my family attended when I was younger).
[2] I was tempted to make a cheap joke here and insert a link to string theory, but decided not to.
[3] Grahamesque footnotes are fun! I feel anonymously recursive already.