My suspicions were aroused when I saw they interviewed J. Michael Bailey, who has been doing science backwards for decades now to paint me and the people who saved my life as a bunch of deluded perverts.

The manifesto on "race realism" (!!!) is enough to convince me that the authors of this piece would shoot me dead if they ever got the chance.

They can kindly fuck off back to the 1920s with that nonsense.

Is that link correct? It appears to point to an empty page

While I have seen any kind of participation (hence quality and dubious patterns) in Wiki articles, this is what you find there:

> W spends most of his time on Twitter talking about _ and the alleged evils of _. He commonly retweets _ and other so-called _. W identifies as a member of the _ which is basically an attempt by _ to re-brand themselves as political moderates.[ref]

That is profiling work. (Not just "Ad hominem".)

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The clash with the name "rational-wiki" is too strong not to be noted.

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(Sniper, put some argument there: you are qualifying yourself. Not in a good light.)

RationalWiki is a highly biased cancel community which has attacked people like Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander before.

That may be the case, but you don't have to believe RationalWiki's subjective assessments; you can just follow the links. In this case, they provide pretty straightforward support for the claims.

I find RationalWiki to be directionally useful, with maybe just a little bit of extra clicking. If they say somebody is, say, anti-vax, you can usually quickly determine from the cited sources whether that's a reasonable claim, or somebody willfully misreading an ambiguous statement on Twitter at some point.

Then why not instead link those (which?) links directly? Then we can perhaps discuss the evidence, e.g. this[1]. The fact that a research topic is taboo doesn't mean it is pseudoscience.

[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ALzE9JixLLEexTKSq/...

Because they're already handily collected at the link provided.

Yes, I can also provide link lists, like the one above. So who's right?

In this case? RationalWiki is.

That's far from clear.

What's wrong with attacking Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander?

You apparently think it's okay to attack RationalWiki, so what is the distinction?

RationalWiki tries to get people cancelled, unemployed, destroy their career prospects and perhaps ruin their lives. All the while they hypocritically and cowardly hide between their anonymity. It is disgusting.

It shouldn't be necessary to point out the difference between attacking a person and a movement/belief set/organization, but I guess it is.

Maybe you should point out what you mean by "attacking" a person?

I assume they were "attacking" (as in disagreeing with?) the belief sets of Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander as outlined in their blogs?

They tried to cancel them for being considerers of heretical thoughts.

In every time period of the past there have been things which were taboo to discuss, which were outside the Overton window. There is no reason to believe our times are different in this regard. That's why intellectually honest people should engage by engaging with arguments themselves, whatever they may be, not by engaging in cancellation and character assassination.

I don't know enough about those two bloggers to comment in a fair manner, but I'll just say I don't think the distinction between arguments and character assassinations is as clear as you are drawing it.

If I think people born on a tuesday have no souls based on deductive reasoning, and invite likeminded folks to spread the word, is that an argument or a character assassination? I would say the latter, someone else might say the former.

> I don't think the distinction between arguments and character assassinations is as clear as you are drawing it.

It's certainly very clear in this case that the NYT conducted a character assassination of Scott Alexander, so I don't know why you're making this argument.

> I assume they were "attacking" (as in disagreeing with?) the belief sets of Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander as outlined in their blogs?

You assume wrong. The NYTimes article on Scott Alexander (I haven't read the one on Scott Aaronson) attacked his character in addition to his beliefs.

Oh, and they doxxed him, which is categorically different than pointing out that RationalWiki does profiling and ad-hominem attacks.

Rationalwiki is just encyclopedia dramatica for people who feel holier than those using encyclopedia dramatica.