the thing about this thread is, you can’t always tell what these dudes are up to by engaging with their arguments. clever writers are very good at picking narrow, defensible points, and inserting caveats and to-be-sures to keep critics at bay https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1385451294593196034?s=21

a better way to figure out what someone is up to is to think about their audience. and the key to the substack dudes is that they are trying - or at least are very comfortable - appealing to those who like hearing criticism of liberal ideas about race, gender, and social justice

I always talk about “indulgence” because for me that’s the red flag: when you are, consciously or unconsciously, feeding your audience what it wants to hear, usually because it flatters their preexisting prejudices, it’s easy to enter a loop of mutual reinforcement and reward

and this kind of indulgence is particularly intoxicating when you’re indulging the prejudices of white guys, frankly. because a hugely disproportionate share of “respectable,” powerful, important people are white guys. so you’ll get lots of reinforcement from those people

by contrast the criticism and complaints will come disproportionately from people who don’t hold nearly as much social capital or as much respect in intellectual circles. so unless you’re really committed to checking yourself pretty often, it’s easy to ignore that criticism!

I honestly think this loop - where indulgent ideas are reinforced by the people the writer respects most, while the writer fails to realize he respects them in part because there are white guys like him - is the source of the kind of red-pilling dynamic that has become so common

I guess another thing I’d say is that being “smart” rarely protects against this dynamic! many of the guys who fall into this are very very smart, definitely smarter than me, probably smarter than a lot of us.

and I think a lot of the smartest ones think their smartness makes them immune.

but the basic system of reward and reinforcement trascends smartness - their intelligence can actually make them BETTER at rationalizing and defending their views and actions

to me, the key to avoiding falling into this kind of reinforcement loop isn’t being brilliant, but feeling discomfort. if you’re talking about controversial political ideas and everything starts to feel comfortable and obvious, that’s a bad sign