At least in this Scott post, these examples don’t feel like they fall into the “unnecessary political examples” category. Like, it’s not that Scott is explaining some economics concept and in that context is using these quotes, he is analyzing political discourse and in that context, taking care to sample from enough different populations to make it clear he isn’t doing so with a political agenda (or at least no obvious political agenda that would fall along these lines).
If you are trying to give real examples of social shaming, it’s structurally important for the example to be something that has societal backing and a large enough interest group behind it that it seems plausible the shaming could work. There is still IMO virtue in abstracting things away, though the alternative of sampling from enough contradictory perspectives has a similar effect.
One part of me says that these examples are different from what the unnecessary political examples post is talking about since the reader is clearly not meant to take them seriously (as a Silicon Valley-adjacent techbro autist, I don’t feel attacked).
Although the kind of person who makes arguments like this might feel attacked, but hopefully not due to their politics, since multiple examples are different.
Although that kind of person would likely think their ad hominem attacks are justified and the other side’s aren’t. But then if the arguments were politically neutral, they might not even see a realistic argument and think they’re safe because they’re not doing this?
Part of this might be deciding what kind of audience you want. Every choice will alienate some people, but not making any choices wil make your writing boring because it’s not really “for” anyone. It seems like Scott’s writing is for people who don’t necessarily agree with him on political outcomes, but do agree with him that woke people are annoying. That lets him write about things that that audience finds very engaging, even if it causes some people to not like him.
I wonder how widely agreed upon the whole “avoid unnecessarily political examples” in the “politics is the mindkiller” sense is. I was just reading Varieties Of Argumentative Examples by Scott Alexander. The examples seem maximally political:
My memory is fuzzy, but it’s telling me something like:
Scott Alexander uses tons of political examples.
People on LessWrong lean pretty strongly towards avoiding them.
Robin Hanson uses them sometimes but tries to avoid them.
Jacob Falkovich seems to not lean into it as much as Scott Alexander, but is somewhere in the vicinity.
At least in this Scott post, these examples don’t feel like they fall into the “unnecessary political examples” category. Like, it’s not that Scott is explaining some economics concept and in that context is using these quotes, he is analyzing political discourse and in that context, taking care to sample from enough different populations to make it clear he isn’t doing so with a political agenda (or at least no obvious political agenda that would fall along these lines).
If you are trying to give real examples of social shaming, it’s structurally important for the example to be something that has societal backing and a large enough interest group behind it that it seems plausible the shaming could work. There is still IMO virtue in abstracting things away, though the alternative of sampling from enough contradictory perspectives has a similar effect.
One part of me says that these examples are different from what the unnecessary political examples post is talking about since the reader is clearly not meant to take them seriously (as a Silicon Valley-adjacent techbro autist, I don’t feel attacked).
Although the kind of person who makes arguments like this might feel attacked, but hopefully not due to their politics, since multiple examples are different.
Although that kind of person would likely think their ad hominem attacks are justified and the other side’s aren’t. But then if the arguments were politically neutral, they might not even see a realistic argument and think they’re safe because they’re not doing this?
Part of this might be deciding what kind of audience you want. Every choice will alienate some people, but not making any choices wil make your writing boring because it’s not really “for” anyone. It seems like Scott’s writing is for people who don’t necessarily agree with him on political outcomes, but do agree with him that woke people are annoying. That lets him write about things that that audience finds very engaging, even if it causes some people to not like him.