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Comment by ineptech | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Yeah. It's a little disappointing. I've always found his posts around cryptography especially to be very interesting, and he clearly knows at least as much about it as anyone else. So finding that he can be so close-minded and judgmental in other areas makes me sad.

The person you're responding to is wrong.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Maybe they have me confused with someone else, maybe they're referring to the person who brought Alexander's flirtations with racial supremacy up on the first place ('tweren't I), or maybe they've concluded that not looking warmly on Alexander's claims of being "doxxed" by the NYT equates to believing he's a white supremacist. But, as you can see: Alexander is not a topic I find myself talking about all that much about on HN.

Regardless: the mail is right there for all of us to read, and I reach the obvious conclusions having read it. I'm not as interested in Scott Alexander's moral failings as I am in other people's feeble defenses of HBD-ism; unlike Alexander, HBD is generally problematic, and does tend to demand a response.

Finally: if you go looking through the 'dang comment archives, you'll find that we're not supposed to be litigating our posting histories or trying to dig up dirt on thread participants at all. Instead of replying to that comment warmly, you might have instead considered flagging it. I have trouble with this rule too --- there's a person on HN who fervently believes authenticated encryption is a bad thing, and I have a hard time not bringing that up in every cryptography thread they're in --- so I'm certainly not high-horsing you about it. At any rate, though: I'm right about the authenticated encryption thing, and whoever that rando is upthread, they're not right about me.

I was referring to this[0]. I said you've felt that way for a long time, not that you post about it frequently. All I'm accusing you of is having held this position strongly and for a long time. If you say the people trying to convince you otherwise aren't wasting their time, fair enough, my mistake.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16560938

That link says the opposite of what you claimed. Of course, I don't agree with it anymore; I hadn't seen the email when I wrote it. You've refuted your own argument, but that's not interesting, since it was refuted one comment previously already. You've also misrepresented your argument (which was not "you held this position for a long time"), just like you did in the thread I linked to upthread; of course, like the Alexander email, your bogus argument is right there for everybody to read.

Fair enough about the not dredging up comments thing, I shouldn't have piped up, but you're taking this as waaay more of an attack than it was. The more nicely-phrased version might've been something like "If you're only casually acquainted with this debate, and are thinking of reeling off a low-effort paragraph or two of rebuttal, it's probably not going to go anywhere because his position on this famously contentious and vitriolic topic is well-studied." It wasn't phrased that nicely, because I like and respect Scott and find these threads a little triggering, but it was a mildly rude comment from the sidelines, not an accusation of devilry or a claim to be refuted. The "weird fixation" and "bogus argument" stuff is a little over the top.

It's not the rudeness so much as the dishonesty, as I explained. If you want to defend Alexander effectively, best not to create the perception that his supporters are amoral and untethered from reality.

... in fact, if you dip into the Alexander doxxing thread, you'll find the person you're replying to made the same false allegation last year, too. That's a weird fixation to have, but everyone's got their hobbies, I guess.

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