While I love blaming slatescott for things, I do think there’s maybe a deeper story to the fascination with addies than slatescott blogging about it once.
A lot of millennials were prescribed stimulants as kids, enough that we have some level of folk knowledge about them. In Adderall Risks he more or less admits to handing them out like candy and he is far from the only (lol ex) psychiatrist to do so.
The article, while clearly endorsing stimulants as a safe nootrooic that everyone should take (and is good for the world now let me munch a few more pills 💊), is actually more of an apologia to convince people who are already using stimulants that no harm will come to them. Sure there’s the usual amount of discovering an apple pie from scratch new atheist libertarian bloviating that obscures it, but he does that about everything.*
One funny aspect of his ‘stimulants are required for modern work’ argument is that he’s basically endorsing the social model of disability, though more recently he has decided that expressing ableism to own the libs is more important than being correct.
*Except if he wants to sneak in an idea without you thinking about it. Those will usually be the hardcore nrx ones.
more recently he has decided that expressing ableism to own the libs is more important than being correct.
I already know these people are eugenicists who would rather die than think about sociology for one minute, but still I feel the need to say: god what a cunt.
Or rather die than come up with good metaphors to attack his shitty strawman. He knows his Everest metaphor is shit – some summiters are blind or double amputees, and the amount of equipment ableds need to climb everest is *evidence* of the social model – he backpedals halfway through, but he makes the metaphor anyway! NASA is literally trying to figure out how to design space travel for disabled astronauts, which he’d know if he’d typed two words into google.
He’s just… being a cunt.
Also the distance between the social model of disability and transhumanism is measured in nanometers, and yet these assholes are so offended that disabled people might be using the enhancements of their eugenicist dystopias.
These motherfuckers.
I’m glad you mention Zvi’s piece, it feels like the real insider take on SBF.
I don’t accept that as an excuse - because if it is a “joke”, then it’s one that only works if they say this stuff all the time seriously.
It’s the species of “it’s a joke!” that’s serious until someone calls them out on it, then they retreat to claiming it was just a joke.
This is essay worthy in itself. There is this thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately around the conflation of the flexibility of language and a flexibility of the definition of words. Just because language evolves it doesn’t necessarily mean that the meaning of words can, should, does, change with it. Every time someone says “it’s obvious this was a joke” they are fucking with the definition of a joke.
My favorite Stewart Lee bit is about this. (In regards to conservative trolls, but the point still holds.)
It’s just a joke!.. But in addition to it being a joke, it’s also my sincerely held true belief.
Holy shit, I used to watch the hell out of this routine. Thanks for this. It holds up tremendously well!
This came up after. I neeeed to go to a Stewart Lee show
In some sense I’m relieved that the “rationalist” crowd seem to be exactly as creepy and cultish in real life as they appear online.
lol
That being said, I think the article conflates a bit “rationalists”, “effective altruists” and “longtermists”. I’m pretty sure the boundaries between the groups are very blurry, but I guess for reasons of fairness one should still make an attempt to distinguish them.
A rationalist, an effective altruist, and a longtermist walk into a bar. He says, “ouch.”
