1) Scott, because he agrees with 97% and identifies with feminism, is seen as a “traitor”, whereas Bryan is simply an enemy (along with much of the country.) Traitors are always punished more harshly, and this even extends to how governments handle spies vs foreign soldiers.
2) Feminist activists know that, because of Scott’s identity and general agreement, he can be influenced and bullied. But Bryan, since he puts almost no weight on such activists’ opinions, can’t be — unless his livelihood can be jeopardized (which it mostly cannot be, due to tenure.)
Although, to be clear: I wouldn’t have *predicted* this result. And none of us would have been surprised to discover a violent crowd outside of the lecture hall prepared to throw paint on Caplan, or the like. So perhaps this explanation leaves something to be desired.
It's clearly a case of Scott Alexander's outgroup. You're part of the red/grey tribe, so the blue tribe already knows they hate you. However, Aaronson is part of the blue/grey tribe, so the blue tribe punishes disloyalty.
What I'm saying is that Murray, Aaronson, and Caplan have different groups, therefore different outgroups, therefore different reactions are to be expected. I think.
As for the differences in the race vs sex groups - I am saying that the groups react differently to violations of their territory. The race group tends towards physical violence, the sex group towards online violence.
Aaronson is assuming that he is engaging with people who are interested in ideas. His haters were not that sort of human. They were the feminist equivalent of religious fanatics. They have hate in their heart, and they have a need to aim that hate at an enemy. Aaronson was a great target, because he said in his post that he felt shame. Fanatics are to shame as sharks are to blood in the water.
Caplan does not show evidence that he is ashamed, or even concerned that people will disagree with him, beyond an intellectual interest in hearing why people think he is wrong. For that reason, he is not an interesting target.
Smart people often make the mistake of thinking that other people think like them. The people who went after Aaronson are simply not smart enough to form a real argument. They are driven only by emotion. Show them that you feel negative emotions (shame, fear, envy, etc.) and they will attack you without mercy. Show them that they can't hurt your feelings, and they will find someone else to destroy.
I don't think you have a lot of readers within the sjw community, especially not very influential ones. Maybe if an sjw stumbles upon your posts by accident they could share it and the witch hunt will still come. It's too early to tell.
One thing that I have noticed though is that they often go harder after people that admit to guilt easily. Those who are unapologetic about their behavior are harder to punish. So maybe the fact that Scott considered himself a feminist made him an easier target.
Aaronson included a sad personal tale in his post about feminism. Feminists pounced on him for that because they (subconsciously, at least) felt he was trying to steal victimhood points from them. If your book had included anecdotes where you, for example, lost out on a promotion to a less qualified woman, you would also be perceived as stealing victimization points.
Feminism was a big deal when Aaronson was whining about it; anti-racism is now a bigger deal.
Also, years of woke overreach have anaesthesized people on both sides. Woke midwits are used to everyone hating them, normal people are used to polite denunciations of wokeness.
Sure: Scott is implicitly giving the feminist crowd moral authority by starting with all the ways in which he agrees with them. Bryan is doing no such thing, which forces them to either engage with his arguments or to ignore him. (Or to simply destroy him if they can, but they can't, either psychologically or professionally.) Scott is coming across as an insider, pleading for their acceptance and acknowledgement, giving them the upper hand. That approach might work with a group known for its mercy and compassion, like the peace churches (e.g. the Amish, Mennonites, Bruderhof, etc.), but most of the time the side on top will take it upon themselves to discipline the wayward member.
I agree with this. I'll also speculate that, for biological reasons, a man surrendering and showing his belly before women is likely to invite a particularly harsh response. Doing so before a group of typical men might not invite as much mercy as the Anabaptists, but neither will it invite quite as much contempt and disgust as doing so before a group of women -- and feminists, at that.
Our ancestors surely witnessed countless scenarios in which a man submitted himself and pled for mercy, and it was socially advantageous for his male opponent to offer mercy and move on from the dispute in relative amity, their relative social positions now clarified. But very seldom can we imagine men doing this before women and inviting anything but utter disgust and contempt from them, their bodies telling them that under no circumstances should they let him get close enough to father their child.
Additionally, Scott falls into the archetype of the "nice guy". In his case, it is probably because he is genuinely nice.
In general, women hate "nice guys". I have had some women explain to me that they are suspicious of their motives: they can't tell if a man is genuinely nice or poses as being nice in order to get into their pants. The stereotypical jock, on the other hand, makes his motives clear and is therefore not deceitful.
A less charitable explanation would be that they feel disgusted by nice guys because they perceive them as weak. Therefore, they do not want to affiliate with them and humiliation serves to keep them away. Then they use the claim of unclear motives to justify their behavior, because the truth doesn't sound good.
I don't know if any of these explanations are true, so I will remain agnostic, but it is worth thinking about.
The way I understand the typical operation of the human mind, the women in this case would feel disgust and contempt, and then their minds would search for an explanation to rationalize that feeling.
There's a bit of truth to this point about deception, but there's no way it's all or most of the story. A powerful man might be rightly suspicious of the loyalty of a male inferior who is excessively sycophantic, and yet sycophancy can still be a winning strategy for demonstrating loyalty and maintaining the support of a patron. Meanwhile even a whiff of sycophancy is a death sentence to a man's romantic aspirations with a woman.
1) Aaronson was more pitiable in his comment than you were in the book. Thus, it was easier to sneer and mock him given that he published a heartfelt blog comment rather than a well argued book.
2) People get much more mad at the people that are 97% on board with their side than the people that totally disagree. I heard from someone that Bin Laden said at one point that he hated more than the Americans and anyone else the Shiites.
Scott’s audience is much different than Bryan’s audience. Coworkers, too, probably. If Bryan’s coworkers were the humanities professors of UC Berkeley, they would be putting pressure on him.
Ideas compete for particular niches, like religions. Christians don't schism from Buddhists - they schism from other Christians with very similar ideas, who compete for the same niche.
Leninists and Trotskyites are far more contentious than either vs. Royalists.
Consider the following thought experiment: Caplan wrote a blog post like Aaronson, and Aaronson wrote a book like Caplan's. In that world, what would the reaction be?
My intuition is that the firestorm would fall on Caplan in this case, and Aaronson would get a few nasty blog comments.
If that intuition is correct, then this is not about who is influential. It is about who is vulnerable.
Aaronson's writing makes it clear his feelings can be hurt. Thus he is an ideal target for the sort of person who sees feminism as a great excuse to kick people who are down.
Scott's demeanour is a lot more nervous and anxious, and he admits how attacks negatively affect him. This means he is a juicy target, both for people who simply take delight in the suffering of others, and those who want their actions to have a significant effect and don't think too deeply about whether that effect actually results in good outcomes for their side or not.
How does this situation fit the model? Aaronson wasn't tolerated and Caplan was, right? Does this imply Aaronson's in the outgroup and Caplan isn't? Or vice versa?
I think the claim would be that Aaronson is in the relevant feminists' Outgroup whereas Caplan is in their fargroup (so far away in ideological space as to attract less notice/energy/hatred).
Thanks! I had forgotten about this distinction in Alexander's original article, and had mostly remembered the "you get no virtue points for tolerating something you don't actually mind" part.
First, Scott wasn't destroyed or anything, he was criticized, which in our times already is seen as equal to Stalinism.
Second, the reason was that he basically blamed feminism for not getting sex as if there is a right to sex and if feminism/women were to blame for him not getting sex and not just him having social anxiety like so many nerds (yes, I know he said that he didn't believe in a conspiracy to prevent him from getting sex, he just said how much he suffered from not having sex and how feminism doesn't acknowledge this suffering). It's the same reason why Robin Hanson was heavily criticized after he talked about redistributing sex. Blaming women for not getting sex is probably the root of misogyny, so people react more harshly to that.
> First, Scott wasn't destroyed or anything, he was criticized, which in our times already is seen as equal to Stalinism.
The word "criticism" can mean anything from "I disagree, because ..." to "You are a !@#$%^&*( for daring to question my ideology". The criticism aimed at Aaronson was nothing like the former. It was angry, unhinged, sexist invective aimed at a man who was suffering greatly to avoid causing minor inconvenience to women. To describe the hate aimed at him as "criticism" is to blur the distinction. That distinction matters.
"a man who was suffering greatly to avoid causing minor inconvenience to women."
That's the point. He literally said he suffered because women didn't give him sex. That's the reason why he was criticized harshly, he was blaming women for not getting sex instead of seeing the real issue (his social anxiety that is typical for young nerds).
Arprin's reaction here is a great synopsis of the feminist reaction to Aaronson though. Which makes me think Arprin internalized their takes, and/or is a woman.
While a man might hear about a woman's struggles with men and think of it as an opportunity for himself, it just seems it's very hard for a woman to hear these kinds of words and not twist them into something that justifies her disgust and contempt for him.
If a woman struggles in dating and blames it all on men being evil and denying her what she wants, would men show sympathy for her? The Manosphere usually has visceral hate against such women and uses slurs like "cum bucket", "post-wall whore", "used-up roastie"; etc.
To be clear, as Frange Bargle noted, that's not at all what Aaronson did.
But also to answer your question, YES, men would show sympathy to her. There is an entire category of young man who invests a lot of time and energy into listening to women complain about the evils of the men they date. In the Manosphere, I believe he's called the "beta orbiter". The Manosphere won't show sympathy to her, but the Manosphere has defined itself in opposition to this sort of behavior, plus it's very low on sympathy overall.
1) Scott, because he agrees with 97% and identifies with feminism, is seen as a “traitor”, whereas Bryan is simply an enemy (along with much of the country.) Traitors are always punished more harshly, and this even extends to how governments handle spies vs foreign soldiers.
2) Feminist activists know that, because of Scott’s identity and general agreement, he can be influenced and bullied. But Bryan, since he puts almost no weight on such activists’ opinions, can’t be — unless his livelihood can be jeopardized (which it mostly cannot be, due to tenure.)
This is the answer, that I came, more or less, to say. Thanks for doing it for me.
To put this answer another way: "Read Atlas Shrugged."
Although, to be clear: I wouldn’t have *predicted* this result. And none of us would have been surprised to discover a violent crowd outside of the lecture hall prepared to throw paint on Caplan, or the like. So perhaps this explanation leaves something to be desired.
It's clearly a case of Scott Alexander's outgroup. You're part of the red/grey tribe, so the blue tribe already knows they hate you. However, Aaronson is part of the blue/grey tribe, so the blue tribe punishes disloyalty.
So why does Charles Murray get assaulted?
He's a lot more well-known and influential. Plus, I think Murray's work, being *empirical* rather than *philosophical,* is much more threatening.
I think the physical violence vs. online violence is different when discussing race vs. sex.
Okay... is that an explanation of the phenomenon, or a restatement of its description? Why would the out group get a pass on one but not the other?
What I'm saying is that Murray, Aaronson, and Caplan have different groups, therefore different outgroups, therefore different reactions are to be expected. I think.
As for the differences in the race vs sex groups - I am saying that the groups react differently to violations of their territory. The race group tends towards physical violence, the sex group towards online violence.
Aaronson is assuming that he is engaging with people who are interested in ideas. His haters were not that sort of human. They were the feminist equivalent of religious fanatics. They have hate in their heart, and they have a need to aim that hate at an enemy. Aaronson was a great target, because he said in his post that he felt shame. Fanatics are to shame as sharks are to blood in the water.
Caplan does not show evidence that he is ashamed, or even concerned that people will disagree with him, beyond an intellectual interest in hearing why people think he is wrong. For that reason, he is not an interesting target.
Smart people often make the mistake of thinking that other people think like them. The people who went after Aaronson are simply not smart enough to form a real argument. They are driven only by emotion. Show them that you feel negative emotions (shame, fear, envy, etc.) and they will attack you without mercy. Show them that they can't hurt your feelings, and they will find someone else to destroy.
I don't think you have a lot of readers within the sjw community, especially not very influential ones. Maybe if an sjw stumbles upon your posts by accident they could share it and the witch hunt will still come. It's too early to tell.
One thing that I have noticed though is that they often go harder after people that admit to guilt easily. Those who are unapologetic about their behavior are harder to punish. So maybe the fact that Scott considered himself a feminist made him an easier target.
Aaronson included a sad personal tale in his post about feminism. Feminists pounced on him for that because they (subconsciously, at least) felt he was trying to steal victimhood points from them. If your book had included anecdotes where you, for example, lost out on a promotion to a less qualified woman, you would also be perceived as stealing victimization points.
Feminism was a big deal when Aaronson was whining about it; anti-racism is now a bigger deal.
Also, years of woke overreach have anaesthesized people on both sides. Woke midwits are used to everyone hating them, normal people are used to polite denunciations of wokeness.
This is my guess too.
Sure: Scott is implicitly giving the feminist crowd moral authority by starting with all the ways in which he agrees with them. Bryan is doing no such thing, which forces them to either engage with his arguments or to ignore him. (Or to simply destroy him if they can, but they can't, either psychologically or professionally.) Scott is coming across as an insider, pleading for their acceptance and acknowledgement, giving them the upper hand. That approach might work with a group known for its mercy and compassion, like the peace churches (e.g. the Amish, Mennonites, Bruderhof, etc.), but most of the time the side on top will take it upon themselves to discipline the wayward member.
I agree with this. I'll also speculate that, for biological reasons, a man surrendering and showing his belly before women is likely to invite a particularly harsh response. Doing so before a group of typical men might not invite as much mercy as the Anabaptists, but neither will it invite quite as much contempt and disgust as doing so before a group of women -- and feminists, at that.
Our ancestors surely witnessed countless scenarios in which a man submitted himself and pled for mercy, and it was socially advantageous for his male opponent to offer mercy and move on from the dispute in relative amity, their relative social positions now clarified. But very seldom can we imagine men doing this before women and inviting anything but utter disgust and contempt from them, their bodies telling them that under no circumstances should they let him get close enough to father their child.
Additionally, Scott falls into the archetype of the "nice guy". In his case, it is probably because he is genuinely nice.
In general, women hate "nice guys". I have had some women explain to me that they are suspicious of their motives: they can't tell if a man is genuinely nice or poses as being nice in order to get into their pants. The stereotypical jock, on the other hand, makes his motives clear and is therefore not deceitful.
A less charitable explanation would be that they feel disgusted by nice guys because they perceive them as weak. Therefore, they do not want to affiliate with them and humiliation serves to keep them away. Then they use the claim of unclear motives to justify their behavior, because the truth doesn't sound good.
I don't know if any of these explanations are true, so I will remain agnostic, but it is worth thinking about.
The way I understand the typical operation of the human mind, the women in this case would feel disgust and contempt, and then their minds would search for an explanation to rationalize that feeling.
There's a bit of truth to this point about deception, but there's no way it's all or most of the story. A powerful man might be rightly suspicious of the loyalty of a male inferior who is excessively sycophantic, and yet sycophancy can still be a winning strategy for demonstrating loyalty and maintaining the support of a patron. Meanwhile even a whiff of sycophancy is a death sentence to a man's romantic aspirations with a woman.
I think there were a few points.
1) Aaronson was more pitiable in his comment than you were in the book. Thus, it was easier to sneer and mock him given that he published a heartfelt blog comment rather than a well argued book.
2) People get much more mad at the people that are 97% on board with their side than the people that totally disagree. I heard from someone that Bin Laden said at one point that he hated more than the Americans and anyone else the Shiites.
Scott’s audience is much different than Bryan’s audience. Coworkers, too, probably. If Bryan’s coworkers were the humanities professors of UC Berkeley, they would be putting pressure on him.
Ideas compete for particular niches, like religions. Christians don't schism from Buddhists - they schism from other Christians with very similar ideas, who compete for the same niche.
Leninists and Trotskyites are far more contentious than either vs. Royalists.
FWIW, Monty Python knew this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA
Fully agree on this explanation combined with a bit of the one below.
Because Aaronson submits to the jurisdiction of bad people and Caplan does not.
Please take this as dispassionately as you can
Because Scott Aaronson is believed to have potential to influence the world with his thinking, which makes him a threat; while you are not
Consider the following thought experiment: Caplan wrote a blog post like Aaronson, and Aaronson wrote a book like Caplan's. In that world, what would the reaction be?
My intuition is that the firestorm would fall on Caplan in this case, and Aaronson would get a few nasty blog comments.
If that intuition is correct, then this is not about who is influential. It is about who is vulnerable.
Aaronson's writing makes it clear his feelings can be hurt. Thus he is an ideal target for the sort of person who sees feminism as a great excuse to kick people who are down.
Scott's demeanour is a lot more nervous and anxious, and he admits how attacks negatively affect him. This means he is a juicy target, both for people who simply take delight in the suffering of others, and those who want their actions to have a significant effect and don't think too deeply about whether that effect actually results in good outcomes for their side or not.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Here’s the directly applicable SSC post on the topic, which I think is pretty spot on (and aligns with many of the takes here):
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/
How does this situation fit the model? Aaronson wasn't tolerated and Caplan was, right? Does this imply Aaronson's in the outgroup and Caplan isn't? Or vice versa?
I think the claim would be that Aaronson is in the relevant feminists' Outgroup whereas Caplan is in their fargroup (so far away in ideological space as to attract less notice/energy/hatred).
Thanks! I had forgotten about this distinction in Alexander's original article, and had mostly remembered the "you get no virtue points for tolerating something you don't actually mind" part.
Yup, Sir Edmund got what I was going for.
hah, beat me to it.
They smelled blood
First, Scott wasn't destroyed or anything, he was criticized, which in our times already is seen as equal to Stalinism.
Second, the reason was that he basically blamed feminism for not getting sex as if there is a right to sex and if feminism/women were to blame for him not getting sex and not just him having social anxiety like so many nerds (yes, I know he said that he didn't believe in a conspiracy to prevent him from getting sex, he just said how much he suffered from not having sex and how feminism doesn't acknowledge this suffering). It's the same reason why Robin Hanson was heavily criticized after he talked about redistributing sex. Blaming women for not getting sex is probably the root of misogyny, so people react more harshly to that.
> he basically blamed feminism for not getting sex as if there is a right to sex and if feminism/women were to blame for him not getting sex
Let me guess: you have never read what Scott wrote, only what his opponents wrote about him.
I read everything he wrote.
> First, Scott wasn't destroyed or anything, he was criticized, which in our times already is seen as equal to Stalinism.
The word "criticism" can mean anything from "I disagree, because ..." to "You are a !@#$%^&*( for daring to question my ideology". The criticism aimed at Aaronson was nothing like the former. It was angry, unhinged, sexist invective aimed at a man who was suffering greatly to avoid causing minor inconvenience to women. To describe the hate aimed at him as "criticism" is to blur the distinction. That distinction matters.
"a man who was suffering greatly to avoid causing minor inconvenience to women."
That's the point. He literally said he suffered because women didn't give him sex. That's the reason why he was criticized harshly, he was blaming women for not getting sex instead of seeing the real issue (his social anxiety that is typical for young nerds).
> He literally said he suffered because women didn't give him sex.
That statement is obviously true. He was suffering. The suffering was caused by lack of sex.
> he was blaming women for not getting sex instead of seeing the real issue
You are reading something he did not say. He did not claim that women have a moral obligation to alleviate his suffering by sleeping with him.
If he had made that claim, I would agree with your assessment, and I would criticize him. But he did not make this claim.
Arprin's reaction here is a great synopsis of the feminist reaction to Aaronson though. Which makes me think Arprin internalized their takes, and/or is a woman.
While a man might hear about a woman's struggles with men and think of it as an opportunity for himself, it just seems it's very hard for a woman to hear these kinds of words and not twist them into something that justifies her disgust and contempt for him.
If a woman struggles in dating and blames it all on men being evil and denying her what she wants, would men show sympathy for her? The Manosphere usually has visceral hate against such women and uses slurs like "cum bucket", "post-wall whore", "used-up roastie"; etc.
To be clear, as Frange Bargle noted, that's not at all what Aaronson did.
But also to answer your question, YES, men would show sympathy to her. There is an entire category of young man who invests a lot of time and energy into listening to women complain about the evils of the men they date. In the Manosphere, I believe he's called the "beta orbiter". The Manosphere won't show sympathy to her, but the Manosphere has defined itself in opposition to this sort of behavior, plus it's very low on sympathy overall.