I'm unconvinced that the opposite of trite is cruel. A lack of cruelty doesn't require everything to be perfectly sanitized or boring. There's a difference between honesty and cruelty.
For example, I think that rationale about triteness is merely a convenient excuse for shitty behavior. And me saying that is honest, but I don't think it's particularly cruel.
I'm going to say just once how annoying I find your "yah" comments to be. The rest of us just click "like" if we like something. And we mostly know how to spell.
I click "like" a lot, because I like a lotta what I read. Not EVERYTHING, but a lot. This may be obvious to some people reading this, but not likely You, MarkS. It takes very near zero effort to click like. But wasn't it said in a comment, in this very ARTICLE, that it's nice to say TY to an author You appreciate? Yah, I think so.
So why on EARTH You object to me giving an author a pat on the back is not ALL that surprising, but shows You to be a person of some narrow views about people.
I would also observe that I've observed You being very critical of OTHER people. And I wonder if You fit the general rule that there's usually an INVERSE relationship between a person being very critical of others, and their ability to see THEMSELVES in any way realistically.
Intuitions say You NOT the exception to the rule, but ICBW.
I’ll bring up the Megan Markel investigation again. When all was said and done the “Twitter mob” that everyone was sure existed was only a few dozen people.
The lack of agency thing comes up all the time now and I do think it's becoming a huge issue. The internet has seemingly convinced a large swath of the world that literally nothing they do matters so fuck it, why bother. You see this with merciless dunking, climate change (people posting about the climate emergency while driving your SUV to go grab a steak), politics, and literally everything else. When people feel like their decisions don't actually matter in any way they are almost always going to make stupid and destructive decisions, and this is made all the worse by the fact that their decisions still very much matter!
I agree with much of what you're saying here, but I think you're overlooking the fact that the Main Character often isn't someone that people simply don't like, but a person who says something truly ridiculous. People do indeed say some stupid shit on Twitter, and I think sometimes it's good for them to be bullied about it, to let them know that what they said isn't acceptable. I'm thinking of an incident a few weeks ago when an actual therapist posted a video complaining about when her patients "trauma dump" on her. That's an appalling sentiment for a therapist to have, and it's right for people to call her out for it. Did such a pile on accomplish anything? I don't know. Maybe? Maybe not? But if no one had reacted to it at all then that therapist might have continued to believe that such a thought is normal.
Simply do not believe that this kind of thing conditions behavior in a positive way. I think it mostly makes people lash out in a defensive reaction, breeds resentment towards the people leading the pile on, and causes a lot of people to self-censor in ways that ultimately just produces more resentment. Just my honest appraisal.
Maybe the way to deal with that therapist would be, as Freddie alluded to, a DM or email. Pointing out that this behavior could be harmful and maybe they should delete it.
That's fair, but what's the alternative when people say stuff that actually upsets you? How can you condition behavior in a positive way? Doing nothing would just ensure that the behavior continues? I agree that much of the mockery on twitter is petty, but there are certainly also occasions where I see people do or say things that I really want them to stop doing or saying, morally.
Well I guess the idea is that individualistic moral appeals probably only work when they come from someone trusted or respected by the target of said appeals, and for behavior that transcends mere bad social practice we have the legal system. It's not clear to me that I can change my neighbors mind about a behavior I consider suboptimal, but I especially don't think I can change it by screaming at him. And that's how this all feels to the targets, like a giant open maw screaming at them.
I mean, look: Twitter is what, 14 years old? The hive has had almost a decade and a half to regulate behavior in the way you propose. Are people saying dumb shit less often? Are people feeling compelled to pile on less often? If not, when should we assume it's going to start working?
True. For me personally, I'd like to think that if I had said something stupid on the internet (God forbid) and half of twitter got upset, especially if it was about something I thought was inoffensive, I would go through some self reflection about why they felt like that, but I recognize not everyone works that way, and it may make it more likely that people will dig in their heels. This isn't just a function of twitter; it's no different at heart than when you get into a fight with your racist uncle at Thanksgiving. It's just amplified with a lot more people involved.
Shaming isn't a good motivator for positive change. Public shaming seems like an even worse idea. Though I understand there's some evolutionary social utility, I think it's time we as a species moved on. Or at least tried for a more sophisticated strategy than Lord of the Flies.
Shaming may be good for reducing behavior that people *know* is bad when they do it. That's the only place I can reasonably see for it. Example: if you steal a car, or if you hit someone with a bat, or if you defraud your customers or investors, you *know* it's wrong...or, at the very least, you know that 99% of people consider it wrong.
If there was a private way to write this.. Well, I probably wouldn't use it either. Won't now. Just that You're wrong. If You wanna know why, be glad to discuss it.
I think the problem is numbers. As a society we don't understand how huge the world is. From Covid to economics to twitter mobs. Yes, we could "reflect" every time we offend someone. But the math says that on a platform as large and far reaching as Twitter then it would be endless reflection. Literally endless. Because EVERYTHING offends someone.
As far as how is it different than arguing with your "racist" uncle? For one, your uncle most likely comes from a generation where racism is where you hate people for their skin color. Of course today racism has a totally different definition. One that morphs almost daily on social media. Skin color is just a metaphor now. "Whiteness" isn't about being white. It's about power and bias and colonialism etc.
So there's a Tower of Babble element to Twitter too. People from different cultures and generations. All making assumptions about other people over a few words posted. When the social attitudes, slang, sense of irony etc for one group may be TOTALLy different for those reading it.
Bottom line, until we have something like a mono-culture (which I doubt will every happen), maybe everyone just shouldn't be so connected. Too many social variables.
I'm afraid I hafta disagree with that last. ;) I think the idea IS to drive everyone into a mono-culture and that: a) It's impossible to begin with and b) Worst thing that could ever happen.
You have a clear goal: you'd like to change their behavior. I think this is an ineffective goal; the effective goal is to change their mind. That is also a *much harder* goal (likely in many cases nigh impossible with a few dozen characters). Convincing them to shut the fuck up may make them self-censor for a while, in a particular place. The resentment of that authoritarianism is likely to do 2 things: 1) move them to another place where others agree with them, and 2) make them highly susceptible to various kinds of charismatic and authoritarian leaders.
If you change their mind, they stay engaged and the behavior disappears because they no longer think that way.
Persuasion. Not coercion. To me, at least, that's where we want to be to achieve both moral and effective ends.
I think this is an important point, but in the particular case of the therapist I mentioned, it seemed like she was trying to get positive attention, that she expected people to agree with her. I could be wrong about that, though, and there are certainly cases where people say outlandish things for attention. Those are best met with silence.
Say Alice sees Bob say something genuinely kinda fucked up on Twitter -- yours is a good example -- and responds to him in the same way she would IRL. It's maybe a bit sharp, probably not productive, but not terrible either. Then Carol, David, Frank, and a hundred others also say something. Each time it's a bit sharp but not not terrible. Each one thinks, "I mean, I didn't call for him to be fired or anything, just pointed out what he said was stupid and he should rethink it."
Now Bob is looking at a hundred chattering voices yelling at him. The difference between the barbs of one person, and the barbs of a hundred, is exponential, and this hideous chorus is certainly not going to be doing anything productive. Bob is going to lash out, or double down, or be thrown under the bus and destroyed for saying something that, had it been in private conversation, he could have been non-destructively led away from.
That's true, but that goes both ways doesn't it? Bob saying something fucked up privately to Alice is different from him saying it publicly on twitter, and he should realize there may be social consequences for that.
Sure, but Twitter is a manipulative engine designed to maximize "engagement", and to prevent anything from being truly ephemeral. One bad day, one poor judgment call, one ill-advised and ill-considered stress tweet, these are exactly the things the network is designed to extract.
Human brains are overwired to punish. (See the essay titled "Humans Have Deep-Seated, Deranged Impulses Toward Punitive Behavior That Civilization Needs To Keep In Check", that may be enough to get behind the paywall.) You are trying to come up with reasons why your hate and your punishment of others is good, and each time it's pointed out to be wrong, you keep on re-forming your thesis in an attempt to prove that, no, really, YOUR HATE is a good hate.
You posted a dumb take. Fine. 24 hours from now, everyone else will have forgotten. You might still remember, but 24 hours after that it'll be a memory for you, too. Unless to decide to die on this hill.
Substack isn't built for it, so people aren't going to be reposting your take everywhere they can to come up with the perfect dunk.
Isn't it just a common character flaw in MOST people to think their hate.. Their WHATEVER is justified? Hate just being the default mode for a lotta people these days, makes the character flaw all the worse, AFAIK.
I feel like, at some point, we just have to accept that some people are going to have odious, wrong, pants-on-head stupid thoughts and ideas, and also accept that we have no responsibility - individual or as a moral mob - to change them.
That therapist's decision to broadcast her mean, counterproductive thought on a platform where millions of people, most importantly her own clients, could see it was absolutely a dumb move. Doesn't matter whether it came from her being a genuinely bad person, or her being a normal person who had a really, really bad day at her job and made the stupid decision to take her frustration about "trauma dumping" to the socials rather than venting to her spouse. I would hope that the people in her life (colleagues, clients, supervisors, friends) would be able to reach out to her privately to have a conversation with her about the propriety of talking about her work this way, and being more cognizant of her audience.
...But the world is full of ridiculous people with appalling opinions. There are thousands of bad therapists in the world whose stupid ideas have never happened to go viral and a hundred thousand million stupid ideas expressed every day that deserve correction, that might even hurt people in practice. I feel like I want to sidestep the conversation about whether any given ridiculous person deserves ridicule, or what social consequences should flow from what stupid behavior, and focus instead on the fact that, as a social media consumer, my object of ridicule is chosen *for* me. And not even with intention, but by complete and total happenstance.
If no one had reacted to the therapist at all, maybe she would have gone on to think her thought was normal. ...So what? How angry do I get about the idea of bad therapists on an ordinary day? How much would the thought of any given stranger walking the world with a bad idea and a bad therapeutic practice bother me if it had not been laid in front of me by the mob?
"Also - and this will endear me to no one - writing tends to appeal to the shy, the quiet, the lonely."
It endeared You to ME. Two other things wrong.
Bernie Sanders and Socialism are a fantasy.
Take the advice from someone who didn't about smoking. Also applies to ALL social media:
"The best Way not to get addicted is to never start." I lucked out and took that advice about social media. Not on purpose, tho. Just wasn't on the computer when.. I was gonna say "it blossomed." TOTALLY wrong. ".. when it was spawned." Much better.
I have an anon account and I have perhaps three times looked at people within my specialty who engage in Med Twitter. Each time I have lost respect for people who I like and respect in real life so I stopped looking at accounts of people I know and just follow politics and the media.
Not related to my medical specialty, I recently had a Twitter interaction with a full professor who does NIH virology work at a *very well respected* academic department.
Him and some buddies were piling on a grad student who is skeptical of the natural origin narrative of COVID 19. (The virologists on Twitter are making a show of their OJ-style 'looking for the real killer' bit to dispel the lab leak hypothesis, if you are wondering.)
The pile on included of course lots of well funded full and associate professors with their academic affiliations in their bios.
It was embarrassing and made them look mean and petty, and I asked the guy, 'Don't you have something better to do with your time? Do you think this makes you, a professor, an adult, look good in any way?'
What he said, without apparent shame, is that he'd been doing in for 30 years going back to early internet bulletin boards and that it was just good fun.
Imagine being a 45 year old basic science professor and having no shame about acting publicly like a mean 15 year old.
“The virologists on Twitter are making a show of their OJ-style 'looking for the real killer' bit to dispel the lab leak hypothesis, if you are wondering.”
I don’t know if there’s ever been a time when I’ve been this demoralized and hopeless for the future of H. sapiens.
Veering back to the topic: this phenomenon Freddie describes is in no small part why humans, especially those with any sort of public profile or reputation, seem less and less likely to want to go out on a rhetorical limb, whether to describe the problems they see, to propose novel solutions for the problems they see, or even to have honest conversations at all where they take risks and become a bit vulnerable and risk being wrong and looking foolish in hindsight, instead of always looking for the snappiest retort to confirm their place in the social hierarchy. The social hierarchy won’t matter when we’re all dead.
Oops. Forgot to like. Anyhoo... THIS is the problem with both social media and today's version of a so-called H. "sapiens."
THere are a LOTTA stupid people who think that hierarchies are bad by definition. That's "cognitively impaired." ;) Hierarchy is necessary for civilization to survive, right?
But the SOCIAL hierarchy? Just a means of making people compare themselves to others for no benefit, for the MOST part. I didn't say it wasn't USED successfully by a certain class to maintain their power.
But on an individual level. Best, IMHO, to learn it does NOT matter in the semi-shole scheme of things, before it's too late. If You need a utilitarian reason to do so, it'll just make You feel better about Your SELF. IOW, don't look UP to people, nor look DOWN on others. Compare Yourself to Yourself, and You have better agency all around, AFAIK.
I confess to having no technical expertise on this subject and probably am following less closely than you, but was shocked by G Greenwald's latest Substack:
Based on FOIA's, a bunch of global virology experts immediately went to Fauci saying COVID looks like it came out of a lab. He convened an emergency meeting with them and at least a couple, after the meeting, turned 180 degrees saying natural origin signing the Lancet letter.
Supposedly the group of experts he emergently convened has subsequently received $10s of millions in NIAID funding.
How can anyone believe any of the official narrative coming from these guys?
Regarding second part of your comment, I completely agree. My hypothesis is that there is abundant, high quality information available, but that it is increasingly privatized and back-channel. The public square has become so toxic and poorly remunerated you'd have to be crazy to wander in. Better to find semi-opaque markets for your information. If you actually have very good, innovative ideas about something, I am sure our friends in tech will find a way to identify and reward you. None of this is good.
And re Glenn’s post, I’ve been trying to follow this story closely, but the information about the guys who publicly changed their opinion and then got big fat grants was new to me. Not exactly a surprise, but demoralizing nonetheless.
No doubt this sounds childlike and naive, but Science-People are supposed to be interested in the truth as best they see it. As soon as they compromise on that, they’re useless. Science-People can be wrong all day in good faith and still be a valuable part of the community, but as soon as they trade opinions and influence for grant money — when a little thing like the well-being of every person on the planet is at stake — they need to be cast out (ironically, given the topic of Freddie’s post).
I unsubscribed from Greenwald long ago, but read as much as I could of this lastest post. It's the usual histrionic highly misleading set of innuendos that have propelled Greenwald to his 8-figure net worth. It's not quite at the level of quoting "This movie was not great" as "This movie was ... great", but it's pretty damn close. Read the original letters (which at least he links to, knowing full well 99% of his readers are not going to do so), not Greenwald's heavily manipulated snippets and "implications".
"Supposedly the group of experts he emergently convened has subsequently received $10s of millions in NIAID funding." Funding of scientists has an enormous paper trail and a very lengthy process. Millions of dollars are not just tossed around. That Greenwald says or implies otherwise is absurd.
Greenwald is nothing but a match to twitter flames. He should be totally ignored.
Are you saying you have reason to suppose it didn’t happen?
By “it” I mean:
Are you saying that these guys _didn’t_ say, at first, as sensible people with some subject matter expertise might be expected to say, with the facts available to them at the time, “This looks like it might have come from a lab—we need to look into that possibility”?
Are you saying that these guys _didn’t_ quickly change their minds and lend their name to the zoonosis narrative favored by the government (which was up to its necks in having supported risky GoF research), a narrative which looked premature at best in early 2020, but which has looked more and more ridiculous with the passing of time?
Are you saying these guys _didn’t_ subsequently get a bunch of grant money (on which, by the way, their salaries likely depend?)
What you make of those facts is up to each of us to decide. But are you disputing those facts?
What specifically do you think Glenn got wrong?
“Nice grant proposal. Be a shame if something happened to it” is not particularly far-fetched to me as a motivation for changing one’s public opinion, but note that Glenn was very careful not to make that claim and in fact he said outright he wasn’t making the claim. He just set out what happened.
We can each decide for ourselves what might make top virologists spout nonsense publicly, when days before they’d privately said something much more likely and sensible.
That top virologists lent their name to something which any reasonable person might suppose they believed was ridiculous and premature at the time (joining Team Zoonosis, before we had any reason to rule out a lab leak, which looked at least as likely as a zoonotic origin, and which with time has only looked more and more obvious) raises the obvious question: “Why did they do something so ridiculous after talking with our government folks? Surely there’s an explanation?”
That they wanted to continue to receive their grant money and not disrupt their livelihoods is one possible answer supported by those facts. I’d be interested to hear other possible hypotheses about what made those guys change their minds in early 2020.
You (and Greenwald) have no idea how grant proposals and reviews actually work. The scenario that scientists revising an earlier estimate of the credibility of a hypothesis were subsequently rewarded with large grants THAT THEY WOULD NOT HAVE GOTTEN OTHERWISE is EXTREMELY unlikely to anyone who knows how the granting process actually works.
If this scenario occured, there is a paper trail: there are expert-panel reviews that recommended denial that were subsequently overturned and granted by high administrators at NIH. Without those denial recommenations, the case for this scenario is pure vaporware.
Also, large research endeavors are generally funded on an ongoing basis. New grants are submitted for specific projects, but a lab that has been producing good science steadily has a good chance of continued funding at roughly the same level.
So the relevant question is, did the letter-signers' labs get a large INCREASE in their funding, or did these grants just continue at the previous level? Greenwald says nothing about this key question.
All that said, I do believe there was a political aspect to the first letter that led the signers to make a stronger statement than they may have otherwise. I had some fear that Trump might start a war with China over this. (You may say that I have Trump Derangement Syndrome, but that's what I felt at the time.) And I had fears of anti-Asian sentiment rising in the US (stoked by Trump). I suspect the letter-signers may have had similar feelings. They were very well aware that this letter was aimed at the general public, not colleagues who understand Bayesian confidence intervals.
Oh man, he's on the lab leak thing? God I'm glad I stopped paying attention to that schmuck.
The lab leak thing is distressing. I agree that the press was too quick to dismiss it for bad reasons. But that doesn't mean the evidence for it doesn't vary from weak circumstantial to scary sounding misinformation (oooga booga furin cleavage site ooga booga humanized cells)... And yet the Very Serious contrarians have taken it as accepted fact.
Does this really need to be pointed out? That Very Serious know-nothing contrarians have adopted the lab leak in a package with various other wacky ideas, without understanding what they’re talking about, is ***not a refutation of the lab leak hypothesis***.
The preferred government narrative is that the zoonotic origin is more likely and that lab leak hypothesis is the belief of cranks who think the vaccine has magnetic chips in it.
Sometimes the preferred government narrative stands up to scrutiny. Sometimes it doesn’t.
This one doesn’t. There’s basically no evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, for zoonosis and lots of circumstantial evidence for lab leak.
In short: Just because some fools also believe a thing doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
That’s why it’s important that we evaluate claims critically.
If you’re interested in looking at the big picture and putting yourself in a position where you’re then able to make a more informed decision, I recommend the book Viral.
But if you don’t understand ooga-booga furin cleavage sites, I don’t understand why you have such confidence in speaking on this topic.
Like you, I'm distressed at how the media decided to ignore and suppress the lab-leak hypothesis.
This doesn't mean the LLH is *right*. But if it were, GG would be an even bigger hero to his audience, so he's obsessed to prove it right, like that guy who was obsessed with Sarah Palin's uterus.
'After discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.'
One of the *very serious contrarians* you're talking about?
His bio:
Kristian Andersen is a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research, with joint appointments in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, and at the Scripps Research Translational Institute. Over the past decade, his research has focused on the complex relationship between host and pathogen. Using a combination of next-generation sequencing, field work, experimentation, and computational biology he has spearheaded large international collaborations investigating the emergence, spread and evolution of deadly pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, Zika virus, Ebola virus, West Nile virus, and Lassa virus. His work is highly cross-disciplinary and exceptionally collaborative.
Dude, I don't know what you read. From FOIA, Anderson wrote to Fauci 1/31/20:
'After discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.'
Then a few days later, after the meeting with Fauci, Anderson did a total 180.
Very strange that there could be scientific consensus so quickly as to animal origin given complexities of the question!
Did any dispositive *science* occur in that interval?
The issue of funding doesn't prove anything definitively other than that there is a huge conflict of interest, which Greenwald points out.
Add the fact that those outside the virology funding loop with technical knowledge are coincidentally way more suspicious of lab leak.
From the record we have it is clear the virologists were concerned about lab leak but quickly circled their wagons and went on the PR offensive COINCIDENT with this potentially being a career-destroying incident. So at worst, we shouldn't believe anything they're saying, and at the least there should be clear notations of COIs.
I can't be the only person in the world who is not surprised that virologists would circle the wagons around one of their own who is accused of stupidly sparking the worst viral pandemic since HIV, but sometimes I feel like I am.
There's nothing better than going to the twitter of a writer I respect and it's just anodyne "pre-order my new book here" stuff mandated by their publisher. My respect for them instantly shoots up. Moreso if they don't have one at all.
I got permanently banned from Twitter for repeatedly calling Trump a “retard”. Some Q follower reporter me. And while the irony of being kicked off of Twitter by a right wing extremist using a left wing extremist language rules isn’t lost on me, I’m actually thankful. I still read Twitter but I’m mute. Best thing that ever happened to me.
You know how we all laughed at the smoking on Mad Men? “Those people had no clue back in the day.” The next generation will look at our obsession with social media the same way.
I confess that this type of irony is what keeps me coming back to Twitter.
You can hound people from their jobs for *bad Tweets* and absolutely ruin their lives. But decorum absolutely precludes use of the R-word, a bannable offense.
> I got permanently banned from Twitter for repeatedly calling Trump a “retard”.
A fellow gentleman/lady of culture, I see.
...you know, I used to be strongly against "retard". Lot of time in the autism room meant it left a real bad taste in my mouth. Then the moralizers made it forbidden -- and thus, cool. I'd still never call a person with an actual disability that, but the way it stings willfully ignorant moralizers is too good to not take note of. I suspect it's not the insult itself that rings their bell, mind, but the open refusal to play by their language rules, the denial of the power they hunger for above all else.
Find Louis CK's bit on his love for the word "retard". (Post his cancelation, so you might have to pay for it. Doubt it's on Youtube). Side note, I tried to be reinstated on Twitter by insisting that I didn't mean it pejoratively. Which I didn't. I literally think Trump is mentally retarded. Twitter did not reinstate me. Ha!
Michael Kelly => started two businesses, one failed, one operated 4 years & successfully closed at a profit. One consultancy in startup.
CB Miller => ???
Donald Trump => 22,450 employees, successfully plans and builds resort complexes world wide, successfully ran beauty pageants world wide, starred in a very successful reality TV show for years. Bold enough to travel to North Korea and offer Kim Jung-Il a business plan to build his country up.
Maybe Trump is retarded, is he more or less successful than you and I? Show me the evidence.
Or is your label just a version of "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, you're ugly and your mother dresses you funny."
Doesn't that get back to what Freddie said "generations of young lefties have become convinced that the way to do politics is to shitpost and dunk and gif and meme and mock".
Listen to Sam Harris if you want my view on Donald Trump. He doesn't understand how the world works. And there's clearly something wrong with him. His successes were all cons. This has been proven over & over. He has some savant like talent of getting attention, but I'm quite sure he has cognitive damage of some sort. He's not a smart person. And he's clearly insane too.
That said, the fact that cable news & twitter are still slamming him is indeed shameful. They're cashing in on Trump hate. And yes, I agree with Freddie that other, smarter Republicans were more dangerous than Trump. Because he was too stupid to do more damage.
But we're not gonna' agree. So let's leave it there.
Specifically, stating that he has a talent for getting attention is a yuge understatement.
I think it would be fair to say he has dedicated his adult life to two things: (i) figuring out instinctually how the (New York based) media works and then performing for it, and (ii) salesmanship.
Supposedly he went around for 2-3 years before his presidential campaign trying lines out and seeing what the audience responded to.
There was something brilliant and innovative in his approach that, obviously, caught the whole world unaware.
I don't think there's anything brilliant about Trump. I think he's a dangerous sociopath who captured the imagination of a very uninformed public. In my most tinfoil hat moods I still think Russia is involved.
Not in a direct way, but the fact that two gross old men, him & Bernie, with such polar opposite ideas about government got so popular in the first place makes no sense. Even if the dossier was BS, Russia has been trying to divide and conquer us for decades. Putin is clearly NOT retarded.
But Trump is gone. Hopefully for ever. Let's really drop it. (I know. I can stop responding. Just his name does seem to have some Pavlovian effect on both his detractors and his supporters. It's fucking weird. We're in the Matrix.)
I agree about adults behaving like adults. I also try to push certain norms, like not calling out some random commenter or something by name (but I'm not opposed to poking fun of an especially silly comment's substance) and I certainly would not personally do what you describe; I always appreciate criticism, especially if it's pointing out some obvious detail I've missed and doing so in private so as not to embarrass me!
But I do admit to engaging in this kind of thing. I even admit to doing so with no small degree of cynicism: it's clear that a "well executed" dunk is good marketing for the dunker, and therefore it's one of the ways I try to grow my little publication. Again I try to be ethical about it, to not get nasty or particularly personal, and to focus on deserving targets (like conservatives rationalizing this year's changes in local election laws and things like that). But I also admit to the selfishness of this, and that I am not necessarily the best person to judge whether or not I myself have crossed a line in a particular case.
On the flipside, however, I have made more friends than I can count through Twitter. And when I recently wrote an essay about institutional reform, I received very high quality criticisms in that venue. I'm not saying the latter is the typical interaction on there. But the friendships are a common story, and most of my very closest ones these days began there. But your point isn't about social networks per se, it's about the behavior, so perhaps this is besides the point.
As a last remark in this too-long comment, I do wonder about how much the politics of any group is actually hurt by this stuff. To go with the flow on Twitter is a very low energy thing, it's just exceedingly easy. Is it really a substitute for the hard work of organizing and acting to take power? How many of these jokers would really be attending meetings and such, if not for social media? More to the point, in as much as there is a negative influence of social media, *every* ideological group struggles with it, not just the left.
I mean, I'm self-consciously not trying to deny that many people who use Twitter derive real, adult benefits from it. But the sheer volume of ridicule and ritualistic mockery appears to dwarf everything else. That's why I advise unilateral disarmament; just participate in the ways that are of value to you and when a pile on starts just don't participate.
Fair. More or less what I try to do. As things got nastier and nastier in 2015 into 2016, I ramped down for a little while and considered walking away entirely or just engaging in a very limited way. Ultimately with the launch of the publication I took another path, but I do try to treat it as what it is, which is a public venue.
I understand that. Do you, personally, think Dan McLaughlin, the NRO conservative who defends the "stop the steal" reforms in red states, is a deserving target, specifically for doing that, or no?
Do you, personally, think YOU are a deserving target, or no? Probably not, right? But many people may see it differently. And Twitter encourages them to do so.
Selecting deserving targets is a prelude to war. Categorizing people as deserving and undeserving is the first step in a process that leads to cutting your enemies up with machetes. That's what moral dudgeon is FOR -- it anaesthetizes your natural sensitivity to the suffering of others. It is a biological process that exists to help you do what sometimes needs to be done. That's fine. Sometimes we have to kill people. But consider the possibility that social media is a tool for manipulating and stoking that process, just as a slot machine manipulates and stokes the reward system. A process that is meant to be relatively rare, "break glass in case of civil war within the tribe," becomes our everyday habit. Is that a good idea? I think we're in the middle of a vast experiment to find out.
I don't think I am. I think I'm pointing out that this is a system that provokes us to be as vicious as possible with none of the normal constraints of ordinary interaction. And, in particular, that it routinely triggers the mental circuit that enables us to dehumanize our enemies. And I'm questioning whether that's a good idea, carried out at mass scale.
Does that make you uncomfortable? Then sit with it. If it doesn't--ignore me.
No I agree. I also usually avoid the actual pile-ons for that reason, vs picking some specific person to critique/satire/whatever that isn't currently being piled upon.
"Selecting deserving targets is a prelude to war. Categorizing people as deserving and undeserving is the first step in a process that leads to cutting your enemies up with machetes."
I noticed the same moment in this post and planned to respond. My response is slightly different, but I like yours better.
My response was that why are we targeting *anything* but individual tweets? Why are we choosing people to target? Why are people considered "targets" at all?
A very large number of people believe that "stop the steal" reforms are good and necessary defenses of democracy against voting fraud. Snarking on a promoter of these laws is not going to change any minds.
Provide facts, provide analysis of the laws (eg, disparities in numbers of people voting per precinct), provide true anecdotes (eg, WWII veteran without verififiable birth records to get a newly needed ID). Make a sincere effort to convince people that you are right and that McLaughlin is wrong. Do so with goodwill and generosity towards the people you are trying to convince. Best to write a long piece and then tweet out a pointer to it, rather than trying to make your point in 280 characters.
Dan McLaughlin? The guy that has spent months screaming at dummy conservatives that the election wasn't stolen and 2020 was a completely normal thing?
I know Chapo Trap House is obsessed with him to an unhealthy degree, unhealthy like Freddie talked about here. Maybe CTH is leaking into here.
I just searched for "+site:nationalreview.com dan mclaughlin stop the steal" and don't see anything on the front page what's worth burning down the discourse for.
The latest article I could find by him that mentions "stop the steal" (there might be later) is this one
Here and elsewhere he's been doing nothing but rationalizing the electoral reforms that red states have put in place 100% motivated by the stop the steal narrative. He argues that narrative is wrong but still defends state legislatures making it easier to overturn election results.
Reddit has this tone too and it's anonymous. One of the most compelling counterarguments is to put "muh" in front of something. Let me destroy this article for a second: muh acting like an adult.
I think the irony obsession partially stems from people have low confidence in their beliefs. I mean, look at the things people argue for. For example, this blog has discussed the heritability of intelligence. It's hard to argue against in the reason/science/thinking sphere, but it's much easier to defeat in the smugness/mockery/irony one.
It's important to remember that Reddit demo is primarily 14 - 24 male for front page subs. At the risk if sounding r-slurred, their opinions are not representative of objective reality.
I quit Twitter just a few weeks after joining, a looooooooong time ago. When social media started to gain steam as a professional necessity, that was kind of the final straw that kept me from seriously pursuing a career as a writer (there were plenty of other reasons, but that was so distasteful to me, I preferred to just opt out).
What you advise here is humane and reasonable. And I deeply feel your assessment is true. There's a certain contentious Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose Twitter handle is both a reference to a woman journalist of historical importance AND a reference to pop culture slang all in one. To me, that says it all: use it to advance in your profession and inflate your sense of personal importance, but with "plausible" deniability about the seriousness of the medium.
i think the soft mandate that emerged for writers to become social media personalities, first and foremost, was really bad for, well, everyone, but especially the writers themselves.
social media is often characterized in certain culture war context as something writers do to their media employers. but media employers, as much as anyone else, construct and enforce this state of affairs.
I should also point out that the amount of mockery you see on twitter to a great extent depends on who you follow. Half the people I follow are entomologists who post pictures of cool moths. I highly recommend Moth Twitter.
This is the good parts of Reddit/Wikipedia too, right? I remember pushing through the "this is not significant" takedowns of my first Wikipedia entry on a band I liked who didn't have an entry when I was 15 and feeling much joy when the page was able to stay up and the band released a second album with critical acclaim and the page got hundreds of edits in the next few months. The internet, a place for knowledge.
Speaking of Wikipedia, deBoer's is terrible. It's not a very long, yet a big piece is devoted to "debunking" the heritability of intelligence in the Cult of Smart.
Couldn’t agree more. My music Twitter and my film Twitter have very little of this behavior. I gave up my “political / media / culture studies” Twitter earlier this year out of sheer frustration, and haven’t checked it again in months.
Unironically, Twitter functions as a conservative psy op
I'm unconvinced that the opposite of trite is cruel. A lack of cruelty doesn't require everything to be perfectly sanitized or boring. There's a difference between honesty and cruelty.
For example, I think that rationale about triteness is merely a convenient excuse for shitty behavior. And me saying that is honest, but I don't think it's particularly cruel.
yah.
I'm going to say just once how annoying I find your "yah" comments to be. The rest of us just click "like" if we like something. And we mostly know how to spell.
Ah. Suit Yourself. Me? I'll suit myself as well.
I click "like" a lot, because I like a lotta what I read. Not EVERYTHING, but a lot. This may be obvious to some people reading this, but not likely You, MarkS. It takes very near zero effort to click like. But wasn't it said in a comment, in this very ARTICLE, that it's nice to say TY to an author You appreciate? Yah, I think so.
So why on EARTH You object to me giving an author a pat on the back is not ALL that surprising, but shows You to be a person of some narrow views about people.
I would also observe that I've observed You being very critical of OTHER people. And I wonder if You fit the general rule that there's usually an INVERSE relationship between a person being very critical of others, and their ability to see THEMSELVES in any way realistically.
Intuitions say You NOT the exception to the rule, but ICBW.
Thank you. That's all.
I’ll bring up the Megan Markel investigation again. When all was said and done the “Twitter mob” that everyone was sure existed was only a few dozen people.
The lack of agency thing comes up all the time now and I do think it's becoming a huge issue. The internet has seemingly convinced a large swath of the world that literally nothing they do matters so fuck it, why bother. You see this with merciless dunking, climate change (people posting about the climate emergency while driving your SUV to go grab a steak), politics, and literally everything else. When people feel like their decisions don't actually matter in any way they are almost always going to make stupid and destructive decisions, and this is made all the worse by the fact that their decisions still very much matter!
I agree with much of what you're saying here, but I think you're overlooking the fact that the Main Character often isn't someone that people simply don't like, but a person who says something truly ridiculous. People do indeed say some stupid shit on Twitter, and I think sometimes it's good for them to be bullied about it, to let them know that what they said isn't acceptable. I'm thinking of an incident a few weeks ago when an actual therapist posted a video complaining about when her patients "trauma dump" on her. That's an appalling sentiment for a therapist to have, and it's right for people to call her out for it. Did such a pile on accomplish anything? I don't know. Maybe? Maybe not? But if no one had reacted to it at all then that therapist might have continued to believe that such a thought is normal.
Naw.
Simply do not believe that this kind of thing conditions behavior in a positive way. I think it mostly makes people lash out in a defensive reaction, breeds resentment towards the people leading the pile on, and causes a lot of people to self-censor in ways that ultimately just produces more resentment. Just my honest appraisal.
Maybe the way to deal with that therapist would be, as Freddie alluded to, a DM or email. Pointing out that this behavior could be harmful and maybe they should delete it.
That's fair, but what's the alternative when people say stuff that actually upsets you? How can you condition behavior in a positive way? Doing nothing would just ensure that the behavior continues? I agree that much of the mockery on twitter is petty, but there are certainly also occasions where I see people do or say things that I really want them to stop doing or saying, morally.
Well I guess the idea is that individualistic moral appeals probably only work when they come from someone trusted or respected by the target of said appeals, and for behavior that transcends mere bad social practice we have the legal system. It's not clear to me that I can change my neighbors mind about a behavior I consider suboptimal, but I especially don't think I can change it by screaming at him. And that's how this all feels to the targets, like a giant open maw screaming at them.
I mean, look: Twitter is what, 14 years old? The hive has had almost a decade and a half to regulate behavior in the way you propose. Are people saying dumb shit less often? Are people feeling compelled to pile on less often? If not, when should we assume it's going to start working?
True. For me personally, I'd like to think that if I had said something stupid on the internet (God forbid) and half of twitter got upset, especially if it was about something I thought was inoffensive, I would go through some self reflection about why they felt like that, but I recognize not everyone works that way, and it may make it more likely that people will dig in their heels. This isn't just a function of twitter; it's no different at heart than when you get into a fight with your racist uncle at Thanksgiving. It's just amplified with a lot more people involved.
Shaming isn't a good motivator for positive change. Public shaming seems like an even worse idea. Though I understand there's some evolutionary social utility, I think it's time we as a species moved on. Or at least tried for a more sophisticated strategy than Lord of the Flies.
Yah.
Shaming may be good for reducing behavior that people *know* is bad when they do it. That's the only place I can reasonably see for it. Example: if you steal a car, or if you hit someone with a bat, or if you defraud your customers or investors, you *know* it's wrong...or, at the very least, you know that 99% of people consider it wrong.
Your racist uncle has some pre-existing relationship with you, and a natural interest in making peace with his kin, though.
If there was a private way to write this.. Well, I probably wouldn't use it either. Won't now. Just that You're wrong. If You wanna know why, be glad to discuss it.
I think the problem is numbers. As a society we don't understand how huge the world is. From Covid to economics to twitter mobs. Yes, we could "reflect" every time we offend someone. But the math says that on a platform as large and far reaching as Twitter then it would be endless reflection. Literally endless. Because EVERYTHING offends someone.
As far as how is it different than arguing with your "racist" uncle? For one, your uncle most likely comes from a generation where racism is where you hate people for their skin color. Of course today racism has a totally different definition. One that morphs almost daily on social media. Skin color is just a metaphor now. "Whiteness" isn't about being white. It's about power and bias and colonialism etc.
So there's a Tower of Babble element to Twitter too. People from different cultures and generations. All making assumptions about other people over a few words posted. When the social attitudes, slang, sense of irony etc for one group may be TOTALLy different for those reading it.
Bottom line, until we have something like a mono-culture (which I doubt will every happen), maybe everyone just shouldn't be so connected. Too many social variables.
I'm rambling. Such is my wont.
I'm afraid I hafta disagree with that last. ;) I think the idea IS to drive everyone into a mono-culture and that: a) It's impossible to begin with and b) Worst thing that could ever happen.
Agree with rest. TYTY.
(For the record I meant “racist uncle” as a trope. My actual uncle is a lovely man and not racist at all.)
That's not what I heard! ;)
You have a clear goal: you'd like to change their behavior. I think this is an ineffective goal; the effective goal is to change their mind. That is also a *much harder* goal (likely in many cases nigh impossible with a few dozen characters). Convincing them to shut the fuck up may make them self-censor for a while, in a particular place. The resentment of that authoritarianism is likely to do 2 things: 1) move them to another place where others agree with them, and 2) make them highly susceptible to various kinds of charismatic and authoritarian leaders.
If you change their mind, they stay engaged and the behavior disappears because they no longer think that way.
Persuasion. Not coercion. To me, at least, that's where we want to be to achieve both moral and effective ends.
I'm sorry but, myself, I get pretty nervous around people who want to "persuade" people about moral ends. Mebbe I misread. Dunno.
How would you advocate that one convinces others of the value in one's morals?
I suppose one could simply decide morality is 100% personal and shouldn't be discussed in public.
Maybe.
But if we're being honest isn't the point of performative narcissism often to get attention?
I think this is an important point, but in the particular case of the therapist I mentioned, it seemed like she was trying to get positive attention, that she expected people to agree with her. I could be wrong about that, though, and there are certainly cases where people say outlandish things for attention. Those are best met with silence.
Yeah, maybe. I confess that what the therapeutic culture has morphed into is completely inscrutable to me.
Say Alice sees Bob say something genuinely kinda fucked up on Twitter -- yours is a good example -- and responds to him in the same way she would IRL. It's maybe a bit sharp, probably not productive, but not terrible either. Then Carol, David, Frank, and a hundred others also say something. Each time it's a bit sharp but not not terrible. Each one thinks, "I mean, I didn't call for him to be fired or anything, just pointed out what he said was stupid and he should rethink it."
Now Bob is looking at a hundred chattering voices yelling at him. The difference between the barbs of one person, and the barbs of a hundred, is exponential, and this hideous chorus is certainly not going to be doing anything productive. Bob is going to lash out, or double down, or be thrown under the bus and destroyed for saying something that, had it been in private conversation, he could have been non-destructively led away from.
That's true, but that goes both ways doesn't it? Bob saying something fucked up privately to Alice is different from him saying it publicly on twitter, and he should realize there may be social consequences for that.
Sure, but Twitter is a manipulative engine designed to maximize "engagement", and to prevent anything from being truly ephemeral. One bad day, one poor judgment call, one ill-advised and ill-considered stress tweet, these are exactly the things the network is designed to extract.
Human brains are overwired to punish. (See the essay titled "Humans Have Deep-Seated, Deranged Impulses Toward Punitive Behavior That Civilization Needs To Keep In Check", that may be enough to get behind the paywall.) You are trying to come up with reasons why your hate and your punishment of others is good, and each time it's pointed out to be wrong, you keep on re-forming your thesis in an attempt to prove that, no, really, YOUR HATE is a good hate.
You posted a dumb take. Fine. 24 hours from now, everyone else will have forgotten. You might still remember, but 24 hours after that it'll be a memory for you, too. Unless to decide to die on this hill.
Substack isn't built for it, so people aren't going to be reposting your take everywhere they can to come up with the perfect dunk.
Isn't it just a common character flaw in MOST people to think their hate.. Their WHATEVER is justified? Hate just being the default mode for a lotta people these days, makes the character flaw all the worse, AFAIK.
I feel like, at some point, we just have to accept that some people are going to have odious, wrong, pants-on-head stupid thoughts and ideas, and also accept that we have no responsibility - individual or as a moral mob - to change them.
That therapist's decision to broadcast her mean, counterproductive thought on a platform where millions of people, most importantly her own clients, could see it was absolutely a dumb move. Doesn't matter whether it came from her being a genuinely bad person, or her being a normal person who had a really, really bad day at her job and made the stupid decision to take her frustration about "trauma dumping" to the socials rather than venting to her spouse. I would hope that the people in her life (colleagues, clients, supervisors, friends) would be able to reach out to her privately to have a conversation with her about the propriety of talking about her work this way, and being more cognizant of her audience.
...But the world is full of ridiculous people with appalling opinions. There are thousands of bad therapists in the world whose stupid ideas have never happened to go viral and a hundred thousand million stupid ideas expressed every day that deserve correction, that might even hurt people in practice. I feel like I want to sidestep the conversation about whether any given ridiculous person deserves ridicule, or what social consequences should flow from what stupid behavior, and focus instead on the fact that, as a social media consumer, my object of ridicule is chosen *for* me. And not even with intention, but by complete and total happenstance.
If no one had reacted to the therapist at all, maybe she would have gone on to think her thought was normal. ...So what? How angry do I get about the idea of bad therapists on an ordinary day? How much would the thought of any given stranger walking the world with a bad idea and a bad therapeutic practice bother me if it had not been laid in front of me by the mob?
"Also - and this will endear me to no one - writing tends to appeal to the shy, the quiet, the lonely."
It endeared You to ME. Two other things wrong.
Bernie Sanders and Socialism are a fantasy.
Take the advice from someone who didn't about smoking. Also applies to ALL social media:
"The best Way not to get addicted is to never start." I lucked out and took that advice about social media. Not on purpose, tho. Just wasn't on the computer when.. I was gonna say "it blossomed." TOTALLY wrong. ".. when it was spawned." Much better.
TYTY, Sir Freddie.
Ah, good stuff. Thank you.
I am continuously astounded by Twitter.
I have an anon account and I have perhaps three times looked at people within my specialty who engage in Med Twitter. Each time I have lost respect for people who I like and respect in real life so I stopped looking at accounts of people I know and just follow politics and the media.
Not related to my medical specialty, I recently had a Twitter interaction with a full professor who does NIH virology work at a *very well respected* academic department.
Him and some buddies were piling on a grad student who is skeptical of the natural origin narrative of COVID 19. (The virologists on Twitter are making a show of their OJ-style 'looking for the real killer' bit to dispel the lab leak hypothesis, if you are wondering.)
The pile on included of course lots of well funded full and associate professors with their academic affiliations in their bios.
It was embarrassing and made them look mean and petty, and I asked the guy, 'Don't you have something better to do with your time? Do you think this makes you, a professor, an adult, look good in any way?'
What he said, without apparent shame, is that he'd been doing in for 30 years going back to early internet bulletin boards and that it was just good fun.
Imagine being a 45 year old basic science professor and having no shame about acting publicly like a mean 15 year old.
“The virologists on Twitter are making a show of their OJ-style 'looking for the real killer' bit to dispel the lab leak hypothesis, if you are wondering.”
Off topic (and I agree whole-heartedly with your post) but have you seen what Valentin Bruttel (and others) have been posting about omicron? eg, https://twitter.com/vbruttel/status/1466919567565934596?s=21
I don’t know if there’s ever been a time when I’ve been this demoralized and hopeless for the future of H. sapiens.
Veering back to the topic: this phenomenon Freddie describes is in no small part why humans, especially those with any sort of public profile or reputation, seem less and less likely to want to go out on a rhetorical limb, whether to describe the problems they see, to propose novel solutions for the problems they see, or even to have honest conversations at all where they take risks and become a bit vulnerable and risk being wrong and looking foolish in hindsight, instead of always looking for the snappiest retort to confirm their place in the social hierarchy. The social hierarchy won’t matter when we’re all dead.
Oops. Forgot to like. Anyhoo... THIS is the problem with both social media and today's version of a so-called H. "sapiens."
THere are a LOTTA stupid people who think that hierarchies are bad by definition. That's "cognitively impaired." ;) Hierarchy is necessary for civilization to survive, right?
But the SOCIAL hierarchy? Just a means of making people compare themselves to others for no benefit, for the MOST part. I didn't say it wasn't USED successfully by a certain class to maintain their power.
But on an individual level. Best, IMHO, to learn it does NOT matter in the semi-shole scheme of things, before it's too late. If You need a utilitarian reason to do so, it'll just make You feel better about Your SELF. IOW, don't look UP to people, nor look DOWN on others. Compare Yourself to Yourself, and You have better agency all around, AFAIK.
As always, ICBW.
Very interesting.
I confess to having no technical expertise on this subject and probably am following less closely than you, but was shocked by G Greenwald's latest Substack:
Based on FOIA's, a bunch of global virology experts immediately went to Fauci saying COVID looks like it came out of a lab. He convened an emergency meeting with them and at least a couple, after the meeting, turned 180 degrees saying natural origin signing the Lancet letter.
Supposedly the group of experts he emergently convened has subsequently received $10s of millions in NIAID funding.
How can anyone believe any of the official narrative coming from these guys?
Regarding second part of your comment, I completely agree. My hypothesis is that there is abundant, high quality information available, but that it is increasingly privatized and back-channel. The public square has become so toxic and poorly remunerated you'd have to be crazy to wander in. Better to find semi-opaque markets for your information. If you actually have very good, innovative ideas about something, I am sure our friends in tech will find a way to identify and reward you. None of this is good.
Agreed.
And re Glenn’s post, I’ve been trying to follow this story closely, but the information about the guys who publicly changed their opinion and then got big fat grants was new to me. Not exactly a surprise, but demoralizing nonetheless.
No doubt this sounds childlike and naive, but Science-People are supposed to be interested in the truth as best they see it. As soon as they compromise on that, they’re useless. Science-People can be wrong all day in good faith and still be a valuable part of the community, but as soon as they trade opinions and influence for grant money — when a little thing like the well-being of every person on the planet is at stake — they need to be cast out (ironically, given the topic of Freddie’s post).
I unsubscribed from Greenwald long ago, but read as much as I could of this lastest post. It's the usual histrionic highly misleading set of innuendos that have propelled Greenwald to his 8-figure net worth. It's not quite at the level of quoting "This movie was not great" as "This movie was ... great", but it's pretty damn close. Read the original letters (which at least he links to, knowing full well 99% of his readers are not going to do so), not Greenwald's heavily manipulated snippets and "implications".
"Supposedly the group of experts he emergently convened has subsequently received $10s of millions in NIAID funding." Funding of scientists has an enormous paper trail and a very lengthy process. Millions of dollars are not just tossed around. That Greenwald says or implies otherwise is absurd.
Greenwald is nothing but a match to twitter flames. He should be totally ignored.
Are you saying you have reason to suppose it didn’t happen?
By “it” I mean:
Are you saying that these guys _didn’t_ say, at first, as sensible people with some subject matter expertise might be expected to say, with the facts available to them at the time, “This looks like it might have come from a lab—we need to look into that possibility”?
Are you saying that these guys _didn’t_ quickly change their minds and lend their name to the zoonosis narrative favored by the government (which was up to its necks in having supported risky GoF research), a narrative which looked premature at best in early 2020, but which has looked more and more ridiculous with the passing of time?
Are you saying these guys _didn’t_ subsequently get a bunch of grant money (on which, by the way, their salaries likely depend?)
What you make of those facts is up to each of us to decide. But are you disputing those facts?
What specifically do you think Glenn got wrong?
“Nice grant proposal. Be a shame if something happened to it” is not particularly far-fetched to me as a motivation for changing one’s public opinion, but note that Glenn was very careful not to make that claim and in fact he said outright he wasn’t making the claim. He just set out what happened.
We can each decide for ourselves what might make top virologists spout nonsense publicly, when days before they’d privately said something much more likely and sensible.
That top virologists lent their name to something which any reasonable person might suppose they believed was ridiculous and premature at the time (joining Team Zoonosis, before we had any reason to rule out a lab leak, which looked at least as likely as a zoonotic origin, and which with time has only looked more and more obvious) raises the obvious question: “Why did they do something so ridiculous after talking with our government folks? Surely there’s an explanation?”
That they wanted to continue to receive their grant money and not disrupt their livelihoods is one possible answer supported by those facts. I’d be interested to hear other possible hypotheses about what made those guys change their minds in early 2020.
Their stance hasn’t aged well.
You (and Greenwald) have no idea how grant proposals and reviews actually work. The scenario that scientists revising an earlier estimate of the credibility of a hypothesis were subsequently rewarded with large grants THAT THEY WOULD NOT HAVE GOTTEN OTHERWISE is EXTREMELY unlikely to anyone who knows how the granting process actually works.
If this scenario occured, there is a paper trail: there are expert-panel reviews that recommended denial that were subsequently overturned and granted by high administrators at NIH. Without those denial recommenations, the case for this scenario is pure vaporware.
Also, large research endeavors are generally funded on an ongoing basis. New grants are submitted for specific projects, but a lab that has been producing good science steadily has a good chance of continued funding at roughly the same level.
So the relevant question is, did the letter-signers' labs get a large INCREASE in their funding, or did these grants just continue at the previous level? Greenwald says nothing about this key question.
All that said, I do believe there was a political aspect to the first letter that led the signers to make a stronger statement than they may have otherwise. I had some fear that Trump might start a war with China over this. (You may say that I have Trump Derangement Syndrome, but that's what I felt at the time.) And I had fears of anti-Asian sentiment rising in the US (stoked by Trump). I suspect the letter-signers may have had similar feelings. They were very well aware that this letter was aimed at the general public, not colleagues who understand Bayesian confidence intervals.
Oh man, he's on the lab leak thing? God I'm glad I stopped paying attention to that schmuck.
The lab leak thing is distressing. I agree that the press was too quick to dismiss it for bad reasons. But that doesn't mean the evidence for it doesn't vary from weak circumstantial to scary sounding misinformation (oooga booga furin cleavage site ooga booga humanized cells)... And yet the Very Serious contrarians have taken it as accepted fact.
Does this really need to be pointed out? That Very Serious know-nothing contrarians have adopted the lab leak in a package with various other wacky ideas, without understanding what they’re talking about, is ***not a refutation of the lab leak hypothesis***.
The preferred government narrative is that the zoonotic origin is more likely and that lab leak hypothesis is the belief of cranks who think the vaccine has magnetic chips in it.
Sometimes the preferred government narrative stands up to scrutiny. Sometimes it doesn’t.
This one doesn’t. There’s basically no evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, for zoonosis and lots of circumstantial evidence for lab leak.
In short: Just because some fools also believe a thing doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
That’s why it’s important that we evaluate claims critically.
If you’re interested in looking at the big picture and putting yourself in a position where you’re then able to make a more informed decision, I recommend the book Viral.
But if you don’t understand ooga-booga furin cleavage sites, I don’t understand why you have such confidence in speaking on this topic.
It's audience capture.
Like you, I'm distressed at how the media decided to ignore and suppress the lab-leak hypothesis.
This doesn't mean the LLH is *right*. But if it were, GG would be an even bigger hero to his audience, so he's obsessed to prove it right, like that guy who was obsessed with Sarah Palin's uterus.
Is Kristian Anderson, who wrote:
'After discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.'
One of the *very serious contrarians* you're talking about?
His bio:
Kristian Andersen is a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research, with joint appointments in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, and at the Scripps Research Translational Institute. Over the past decade, his research has focused on the complex relationship between host and pathogen. Using a combination of next-generation sequencing, field work, experimentation, and computational biology he has spearheaded large international collaborations investigating the emergence, spread and evolution of deadly pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, Zika virus, Ebola virus, West Nile virus, and Lassa virus. His work is highly cross-disciplinary and exceptionally collaborative.
Dude, I don't know what you read. From FOIA, Anderson wrote to Fauci 1/31/20:
'After discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.'
Then a few days later, after the meeting with Fauci, Anderson did a total 180.
Very strange that there could be scientific consensus so quickly as to animal origin given complexities of the question!
Did any dispositive *science* occur in that interval?
The issue of funding doesn't prove anything definitively other than that there is a huge conflict of interest, which Greenwald points out.
Add the fact that those outside the virology funding loop with technical knowledge are coincidentally way more suspicious of lab leak.
From the record we have it is clear the virologists were concerned about lab leak but quickly circled their wagons and went on the PR offensive COINCIDENT with this potentially being a career-destroying incident. So at worst, we shouldn't believe anything they're saying, and at the least there should be clear notations of COIs.
I can't be the only person in the world who is not surprised that virologists would circle the wagons around one of their own who is accused of stupidly sparking the worst viral pandemic since HIV, but sometimes I feel like I am.
Defies comprehension, doesn't it?
There's nothing better than going to the twitter of a writer I respect and it's just anodyne "pre-order my new book here" stuff mandated by their publisher. My respect for them instantly shoots up. Moreso if they don't have one at all.
I appreciate that as well. I think Lindsay Ellis switched to that after her "cancelling"
Nothing I respect more in our age of performative narcissism than public figures maintaining privacy regarding their thoughts.
I got permanently banned from Twitter for repeatedly calling Trump a “retard”. Some Q follower reporter me. And while the irony of being kicked off of Twitter by a right wing extremist using a left wing extremist language rules isn’t lost on me, I’m actually thankful. I still read Twitter but I’m mute. Best thing that ever happened to me.
You know how we all laughed at the smoking on Mad Men? “Those people had no clue back in the day.” The next generation will look at our obsession with social media the same way.
Our phones are today’s pack of Lucky Strikes.
I confess that this type of irony is what keeps me coming back to Twitter.
You can hound people from their jobs for *bad Tweets* and absolutely ruin their lives. But decorum absolutely precludes use of the R-word, a bannable offense.
> I got permanently banned from Twitter for repeatedly calling Trump a “retard”.
A fellow gentleman/lady of culture, I see.
...you know, I used to be strongly against "retard". Lot of time in the autism room meant it left a real bad taste in my mouth. Then the moralizers made it forbidden -- and thus, cool. I'd still never call a person with an actual disability that, but the way it stings willfully ignorant moralizers is too good to not take note of. I suspect it's not the insult itself that rings their bell, mind, but the open refusal to play by their language rules, the denial of the power they hunger for above all else.
Find Louis CK's bit on his love for the word "retard". (Post his cancelation, so you might have to pay for it. Doubt it's on Youtube). Side note, I tried to be reinstated on Twitter by insisting that I didn't mean it pejoratively. Which I didn't. I literally think Trump is mentally retarded. Twitter did not reinstate me. Ha!
Lets do the math:
Michael Kelly => started two businesses, one failed, one operated 4 years & successfully closed at a profit. One consultancy in startup.
CB Miller => ???
Donald Trump => 22,450 employees, successfully plans and builds resort complexes world wide, successfully ran beauty pageants world wide, starred in a very successful reality TV show for years. Bold enough to travel to North Korea and offer Kim Jung-Il a business plan to build his country up.
Maybe Trump is retarded, is he more or less successful than you and I? Show me the evidence.
Or is your label just a version of "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, you're ugly and your mother dresses you funny."
Doesn't that get back to what Freddie said "generations of young lefties have become convinced that the way to do politics is to shitpost and dunk and gif and meme and mock".
Listen to Sam Harris if you want my view on Donald Trump. He doesn't understand how the world works. And there's clearly something wrong with him. His successes were all cons. This has been proven over & over. He has some savant like talent of getting attention, but I'm quite sure he has cognitive damage of some sort. He's not a smart person. And he's clearly insane too.
That said, the fact that cable news & twitter are still slamming him is indeed shameful. They're cashing in on Trump hate. And yes, I agree with Freddie that other, smarter Republicans were more dangerous than Trump. Because he was too stupid to do more damage.
But we're not gonna' agree. So let's leave it there.
I would give Trump a bit more credit than that.
Specifically, stating that he has a talent for getting attention is a yuge understatement.
I think it would be fair to say he has dedicated his adult life to two things: (i) figuring out instinctually how the (New York based) media works and then performing for it, and (ii) salesmanship.
Supposedly he went around for 2-3 years before his presidential campaign trying lines out and seeing what the audience responded to.
There was something brilliant and innovative in his approach that, obviously, caught the whole world unaware.
I don't think there's anything brilliant about Trump. I think he's a dangerous sociopath who captured the imagination of a very uninformed public. In my most tinfoil hat moods I still think Russia is involved.
Not in a direct way, but the fact that two gross old men, him & Bernie, with such polar opposite ideas about government got so popular in the first place makes no sense. Even if the dossier was BS, Russia has been trying to divide and conquer us for decades. Putin is clearly NOT retarded.
But Trump is gone. Hopefully for ever. Let's really drop it. (I know. I can stop responding. Just his name does seem to have some Pavlovian effect on both his detractors and his supporters. It's fucking weird. We're in the Matrix.)
Are you bragging about your business to win an internet fight??
"generations of young lefties have become convinced that the way to do politics is to shitpost and dunk and gif and meme and mock"
--Freddie deBoer
Why in the world would you bring your business into a discussion to try to win an internet fight?
I agree about adults behaving like adults. I also try to push certain norms, like not calling out some random commenter or something by name (but I'm not opposed to poking fun of an especially silly comment's substance) and I certainly would not personally do what you describe; I always appreciate criticism, especially if it's pointing out some obvious detail I've missed and doing so in private so as not to embarrass me!
But I do admit to engaging in this kind of thing. I even admit to doing so with no small degree of cynicism: it's clear that a "well executed" dunk is good marketing for the dunker, and therefore it's one of the ways I try to grow my little publication. Again I try to be ethical about it, to not get nasty or particularly personal, and to focus on deserving targets (like conservatives rationalizing this year's changes in local election laws and things like that). But I also admit to the selfishness of this, and that I am not necessarily the best person to judge whether or not I myself have crossed a line in a particular case.
On the flipside, however, I have made more friends than I can count through Twitter. And when I recently wrote an essay about institutional reform, I received very high quality criticisms in that venue. I'm not saying the latter is the typical interaction on there. But the friendships are a common story, and most of my very closest ones these days began there. But your point isn't about social networks per se, it's about the behavior, so perhaps this is besides the point.
As a last remark in this too-long comment, I do wonder about how much the politics of any group is actually hurt by this stuff. To go with the flow on Twitter is a very low energy thing, it's just exceedingly easy. Is it really a substitute for the hard work of organizing and acting to take power? How many of these jokers would really be attending meetings and such, if not for social media? More to the point, in as much as there is a negative influence of social media, *every* ideological group struggles with it, not just the left.
I mean, I'm self-consciously not trying to deny that many people who use Twitter derive real, adult benefits from it. But the sheer volume of ridicule and ritualistic mockery appears to dwarf everything else. That's why I advise unilateral disarmament; just participate in the ways that are of value to you and when a pile on starts just don't participate.
Fair. More or less what I try to do. As things got nastier and nastier in 2015 into 2016, I ramped down for a little while and considered walking away entirely or just engaging in a very limited way. Ultimately with the launch of the publication I took another path, but I do try to treat it as what it is, which is a public venue.
"Again I try to be ethical about it, to not get nasty or particularly personal, and to focus on deserving targets"
But literally everyone thinks they are focusing on deserving targets. That's how the whole system operates.
I understand that. Do you, personally, think Dan McLaughlin, the NRO conservative who defends the "stop the steal" reforms in red states, is a deserving target, specifically for doing that, or no?
Do you, personally, think YOU are a deserving target, or no? Probably not, right? But many people may see it differently. And Twitter encourages them to do so.
Selecting deserving targets is a prelude to war. Categorizing people as deserving and undeserving is the first step in a process that leads to cutting your enemies up with machetes. That's what moral dudgeon is FOR -- it anaesthetizes your natural sensitivity to the suffering of others. It is a biological process that exists to help you do what sometimes needs to be done. That's fine. Sometimes we have to kill people. But consider the possibility that social media is a tool for manipulating and stoking that process, just as a slot machine manipulates and stokes the reward system. A process that is meant to be relatively rare, "break glass in case of civil war within the tribe," becomes our everyday habit. Is that a good idea? I think we're in the middle of a vast experiment to find out.
You're taking this line of argument too far. You're essentially concluding that it's impossible to ever judge whether satire or cracking wise is OK
I don't think I am. I think I'm pointing out that this is a system that provokes us to be as vicious as possible with none of the normal constraints of ordinary interaction. And, in particular, that it routinely triggers the mental circuit that enables us to dehumanize our enemies. And I'm questioning whether that's a good idea, carried out at mass scale.
Does that make you uncomfortable? Then sit with it. If it doesn't--ignore me.
No I agree. I also usually avoid the actual pile-ons for that reason, vs picking some specific person to critique/satire/whatever that isn't currently being piled upon.
"Selecting deserving targets is a prelude to war. Categorizing people as deserving and undeserving is the first step in a process that leads to cutting your enemies up with machetes."
I noticed the same moment in this post and planned to respond. My response is slightly different, but I like yours better.
My response was that why are we targeting *anything* but individual tweets? Why are we choosing people to target? Why are people considered "targets" at all?
My answer is "no".
A very large number of people believe that "stop the steal" reforms are good and necessary defenses of democracy against voting fraud. Snarking on a promoter of these laws is not going to change any minds.
Provide facts, provide analysis of the laws (eg, disparities in numbers of people voting per precinct), provide true anecdotes (eg, WWII veteran without verififiable birth records to get a newly needed ID). Make a sincere effort to convince people that you are right and that McLaughlin is wrong. Do so with goodwill and generosity towards the people you are trying to convince. Best to write a long piece and then tweet out a pointer to it, rather than trying to make your point in 280 characters.
People would rather attack people than ideas, because they can feel joy when a person suffers, but can't imagine an idea suffering.
Absolutely, 100%. Let's don't pretend like some folks don't have it coming.
Dan McLaughlin? The guy that has spent months screaming at dummy conservatives that the election wasn't stolen and 2020 was a completely normal thing?
I know Chapo Trap House is obsessed with him to an unhealthy degree, unhealthy like Freddie talked about here. Maybe CTH is leaking into here.
I just searched for "+site:nationalreview.com dan mclaughlin stop the steal" and don't see anything on the front page what's worth burning down the discourse for.
The latest article I could find by him that mentions "stop the steal" (there might be later) is this one
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-do-we-need-a-january-6-commission-for/ which criticizes the *Republicans* for not supporting the January 6th commission.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/not-everyone-should-be-made-to-vote/?itm_source=parsely-api
Neither "stop" nor "steal" shows up in that essay.
What is there that backs up your description of him as "the NRO conservative who defends the 'stop the steal" reforms in red states"?
Here and elsewhere he's been doing nothing but rationalizing the electoral reforms that red states have put in place 100% motivated by the stop the steal narrative. He argues that narrative is wrong but still defends state legislatures making it easier to overturn election results.
Reddit has this tone too and it's anonymous. One of the most compelling counterarguments is to put "muh" in front of something. Let me destroy this article for a second: muh acting like an adult.
I think the irony obsession partially stems from people have low confidence in their beliefs. I mean, look at the things people argue for. For example, this blog has discussed the heritability of intelligence. It's hard to argue against in the reason/science/thinking sphere, but it's much easier to defeat in the smugness/mockery/irony one.
It's important to remember that Reddit demo is primarily 14 - 24 male for front page subs. At the risk if sounding r-slurred, their opinions are not representative of objective reality.
Oh, I'm not sure if social media distributes responsibility.
This is an mean girls behavior, scaled up.
People that form clicks and exclude others for being "bad" or "weird" or "old" or whatever, think they are the most morally upstanding people.
I quit Twitter just a few weeks after joining, a looooooooong time ago. When social media started to gain steam as a professional necessity, that was kind of the final straw that kept me from seriously pursuing a career as a writer (there were plenty of other reasons, but that was so distasteful to me, I preferred to just opt out).
What you advise here is humane and reasonable. And I deeply feel your assessment is true. There's a certain contentious Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose Twitter handle is both a reference to a woman journalist of historical importance AND a reference to pop culture slang all in one. To me, that says it all: use it to advance in your profession and inflate your sense of personal importance, but with "plausible" deniability about the seriousness of the medium.
i think the soft mandate that emerged for writers to become social media personalities, first and foremost, was really bad for, well, everyone, but especially the writers themselves.
social media is often characterized in certain culture war context as something writers do to their media employers. but media employers, as much as anyone else, construct and enforce this state of affairs.
I should also point out that the amount of mockery you see on twitter to a great extent depends on who you follow. Half the people I follow are entomologists who post pictures of cool moths. I highly recommend Moth Twitter.
The Substacks I like the most are about, like, bicycle repair or neoclassical architecture or scrimshaw. Very specific subject-oriented niche spaces.
I would absolutely subscribe to a scrimshaw substack.
For the record: your "Substack of the week" feature is excellent. I'm discovering a lot of interesting writing through it.
This is the good parts of Reddit/Wikipedia too, right? I remember pushing through the "this is not significant" takedowns of my first Wikipedia entry on a band I liked who didn't have an entry when I was 15 and feeling much joy when the page was able to stay up and the band released a second album with critical acclaim and the page got hundreds of edits in the next few months. The internet, a place for knowledge.
Speaking of Wikipedia, deBoer's is terrible. It's not a very long, yet a big piece is devoted to "debunking" the heritability of intelligence in the Cult of Smart.
Once upon a time, seen as straightforwardly not the place of Wikipedia articles!
Yeah definitely not trying to make Wikipedia a utopia, in a lot of ways it's a particular kind of nerd hell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia
https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic-severity-rating
I just removed it. I'm guessing whoever did the hit job doesn't care enough to put it back.
... and it's back. Though I can't tell if a person reverted it or it was automatic due to something I did wrong.
It's great until the mods in charge of your favorite reddit, completely unrelated to politics, decide that they know what's best for you politically.
Couldn’t agree more. My music Twitter and my film Twitter have very little of this behavior. I gave up my “political / media / culture studies” Twitter earlier this year out of sheer frustration, and haven’t checked it again in months.