Length and Breadth
Another term for this is “Gish Gallop”. I believe it is important to try to make your points as succinct and plain as possible. Yarvin and his supporters don’t seem to agree. Long, rambling posts that are criticized are met with demands to “go and find where he said that”, then claims that it’s taken out of context when that demand is met. It’s a time-wasting exercise, designed to prevent meaningful disagreement, and it’s very difficult to respond coherently to. I’ve easily spent more than 40 hours myself reading, understanding, and responding to material posted by Yarvin over the last 2 weeks. Yet I’ve barely dented the surface of his writing, and read practically none of the referenced source materials. How does one possibly break that down to a digestible format? It’s designed to be unapproachable.
Selective science
Yarvin likes to cite studies with “hard facts” that support the opinions he already holds, and as far as I can tell, literally ignore studies that call his opinions into question as “comfortable truths”. Yarvin seems to especially like to talk about how IQ varies predictably between races. It’s one of the main points he discussed in his response to the LambdaConf controversy, and it continued in the brief conversation that we carried out in the comments. This belief is important. To him because it’s one of flowers in the daisy-chain of “facts” that his neo-reactionary beliefs depend on, and to everyone else because it is so clearly bullshit dressed up in a lab-coat to look respectable. According to him, many of his critics dismiss the science out of hand. Yarvin & Co then use this dismissal to declare those critics as irrational. So let’s talk about that.
He’ll cite studies and claim that these theories of racial intelligence aren’t related to morality or human dignity, it’s just “a problem [that we] can’t avoid solving”. But he ignores respected opponents of these studies like Jay Gould and Cosma Shalizi. He references a study about affirmative action in college admissions in a blog post that is mostly an extended joke about being able to “purchase” blackness in order to artificially inflate one’s SAT score. But he ignores the ever-growing body of evidence that unconscious biases still permeate our society and hamper the prospect of minority excellence. Here’s a study specifically about how black people perform worse on IQ tests when they’re referred to as such and administered by whites. Here’s a tweetstorm listing about a million more reports & studies on such biases. I wonder, would Yarvin attempt to leave all the other baggage that comes packed with that purchase of blackness at the cashier’s counter? Has he considered that a couple hundred points on the SAT might actually be a fair assessment of stolen potential energy for minority students?
He’s either ignorant or indifferent that the studies he’s citing are the same ones used on the dregs of the internet to justify screeds far less subtle than his own. However much he may say that they are not his ally, the sources they selectively cite are the same. I want to be clear, I’m not saying the study is false because of who cites it. I’m saying that claiming certain science is more likely to be true because it’s been widely panned by the scientific community is an absurd reason, and it’s the same absurd reason used by the titans of intellect in those forums. Claiming these studies of racial intelligence are relevant (or even accurate) in a society with the systemic biases that ours has is questionable, for the hundreds of reasons detailed in the studies I linked to above.
I love this simple quote from Reginald Braithwaite in a recent essay —
It is not necessarily racist to discuss facts. It is racist to use facts to socially engineer injustice against members of a particular race.
False Civility
Civility as Yarvin means it seems to be listening to the entirety of what he says & not attacking him while he weaves a tapestry questioning the intelligence of basically everyone he disagrees with, but most specifically an entire race of people. At least white liberals have the benefit of not being told they’re less intelligent, just woefully ignorant and brain-washed. If you decide it’s too much and respond with a negative emotion (even when it’s the people he’s directly insulting doing so), he and his followers will label you “not civil” and either stop engaging, insult you directly in response, or hold all of your beliefs as suspect because of your emotions.
False Equivalence
Yarvin suggested that I “agree to disagree” with him. This is a book from the civility playbook, and I was only given the privilege of “agreeing to disagree” by engaging in a relatively civil manner for a prolonged time. However, it also gives the argument false authority as an equal opinion. Frequently, saying that one should “agree to disagree” is the same verbal trick as “When did you stop beating your wife?”. There’s no right answer.
His ideas are based on incomplete science, revisionist history, and his personal political opinions. It is not an “agree to disagree” situation. If you respond “yes”, you’re implying there’s a reasonable position to disagree with. If you respond “no”, you’re contracting to continue the argument. If you’re weary of the whole exercise and try to point out the bullshit, you’ve become “un-civil” and lost the argument on principle. (This series of articles is an attempt at the third solution, in the depth that it requires to be comprehensive.)
Logical Fallacies & Shortcuts
Yarvin is a deft writer. He seems to ramble in blog posts, but you can see from his shorter responses on forums like Reddit or his threads here on Medium that he’s capable of being more direct. Yarvin has studied skilled writers, and understands how a writer can manipulate the reader.
An easy example is that Yarvin equivocates when it suits him. See his use of “better” in his response to the LambdaConf issue. He first refers to the belief that “It’s better to be smart than stupid” as a straw-man belief of people that causes the cognitively dissonant idea to believe all humans are equally intelligent in order to avoid being racist. Later he argues for believing in varied intelligence across races because “being intelligent doesn’t make you a better person”. The first “better” is vague, and doesn’t really imply any moral weight, but the second indicates a moral superiority. Tools like this are used to subtly tilt your reader’s emotions and guide them to the conclusion you want.
In the comments to the “Manifesto” that Yarvin submitted to the 2blowhards blog, he even mentions that the essay
uses the rather cheap trick of redefining “violence,” a word which has negative connotations for everyone, to mean “everything that I think is evil.” If I was to write it again I would probably find a way to avoid this.
So he’s made it very clear that he’s aware of his ability to manipulate words, and even that he probably shouldn’t do it, but apparently does not consider it a moral obligation to avoid doing so.
Now, everyone who is attempting to make an argument for a general audience uses these tricks. Modern politicians do practically nothing else. They’re shortcuts that human brains do naturally if we aren’t careful to prevent them, and untrained people won’t pick up on at all. I’ve probably unintentionally used a few myself in this article. My real problem with this isn’t that Yarvin does it, but that he claims an intellectual honesty and purity that is plainly false. He un-ironically quotes Solzhenitsy’s “Live Not By Lies” in one of his responses on the 2blowhards blog, which says (among other things) that an “honest man worthy of respect” must make a choice to —
…not henceforth write, sign, or print in any way a single phrase which in his opinion distorts the truth.
It’s double-speak that directly contradicts his own actions, and unfortunately, not everyone picks up on it.
Unwilling to Admit Errors
I have yet to find a single example of Yarvin admitting or addressing his own biases, or learning from any progressive critiques, and probably only one or two of admitting he was incorrect about something — usually when corrected by a more knowledgable libertarian or conservative on an extremely esoteric point that doesn’t affect the core of his arguments.
This is such a common tactic, I’m not sure why I even need to point it out. If you never admit you’re wrong, you never have to do the difficult task of adjusting public perception of your opinions, or the more difficult task of re-adjusting your worldview and coming to terms with the injustice you may have done in the past when you were mistaken. Unfortunately, a relevant percentage of people value consistency and/or “strength” over more useful traits like actually correcting inconsistencies in your understanding of the world.
Abdication of Responsibility
Now, I have no doubt that Yarvin says what he thinks. It might get a little muddled by his flowery prose, or his own cognitive biases and dissonances, but he speaks his truth. He also sees dishonesty in other people as a cardinal sin. In comment sections, he frequently calls people out for engaging in what he perceives as dishonest tactics. In “Why I am Not a White Nationalist”, he drops the old chestnut, “Truth is always dangerous”.
And yet, Yarvin had this to say, when LambdaConf asked him for a statement:
I’m a writer, not an activist. I’m neither a leader nor a member of any kind of organization. I promote only one kind of action: reading old books. I’ve explicitly denounced any other form of “direct action,” violent or otherwise. Instead I promote passive unresistance, or “passivism.” Frankly, any “follower” who needs me to explain this is a dangerous fool and hasn’t read enough old books.
Trying to abdicate responsibility for inflammatory ideas mis-used because your audience is under-educated is unbelievably disingenuous for as accomplished a student of history as Curtis Yarvin is (meaning, I literally don’t believe him when he claims this). Where do most revolutions in history start if not with a subversive idea? And you don’t have to look any further than the current example of Trump’s presidential run to see that telling people to “read more books” is a laughably ineffective defense against ignorance.
Furthermore, Yarvin might not be in a position of power to “engineer injustice” (as Braithwaite describes in his essay) against the large swaths of people he sees as genetically limited in IQ, but there are many people who find his writings valuable and influential, or even just “interesting”, and it’s safe to assume that some of those people are in positions of influence and power. Although Yarvin himself disowns them, he has vocal proponents in white supremacist movements. People who clearly would take strong action if they could. And how many impressionable young people find his articles, internalize justification for their own biases, and become silent supporters of his ideas? No one can say, but it should be self-evident that it’s more than zero, and probably greater in number than the vocal ones. He’s quoted and referenced multiple times in many lengthy articles about the alt-right movement. His claims to not be a “leader” aren’t even specious, they’re bald-faced lies.
Other “free thinkers” will support Yarvin for little reason other than to be contrarian, or because they see a sophisticated sequence of facts reaching an unusual conclusion, or because Yarvin “knows much more than them” and is “so much smarter than them”. I’ve seen several people mention the last as if it’s a legitimate reason to support an ideology (or even just Curtis Yarvin the folk hero, who so vehemently argues against “IQism”). Yarvin has posts on his blog defending bizarre premises for no reason other than the fun of them, such as how Obama’s 2 years at Columbia are probably fake and how Chomsky is the cause of Aaron Schwartz’s suicide (I assume that second one is rhetorical). Willingness to believe in unlikely facts and questioning of the status quo are valuable skills, but they should be applied judiciously.
Plausible Deniability
When Yarvin chooses to ramble, this itself is a defense. I’ll expand on a conversation that occurred on Twitter.
In response to my suggesting that Yarvin does thoroughly and carefully research what he believes, Amar Shah (a speaker who has withdrawn from LambdaConf 2016 and written on the issue) called Yarvin “a hack with an agenda”. I’ve basically come to agree with Amar, but I have to ask, if someone just passing by had to lay out Yarvin’s agenda, what would they see? A racist can see a logical and scientific excuse for their bigotry, free thinkers can see an intellectual censured by the ignorant left, and proponents of social justice can see a through and through racist. These are all people seeing what they want to see in a man who intentionally obfuscates his true position.
The real barrier to assigning a moral absolute to Yarvin’s agenda (if such a goal is relevant — as many seem to think it is when basing allowance to a conference upon it) is all the people in the middle. The people who won’t read Yarvin’s blog when they hear of this issue (who has time for that, honestly?). People who haven’t read the body of science, sociology, & literature from the last 20 (or 200) years on systematic racism (that Yarvin seems to dismiss out of hand as progressive fluff). People who agree that bigotry is wrong, but think that “affirmative action” is unfair. People who believe in free speech more than they believe in hurt feelings. These are not un-reasonable people, but they are not particularly interested in, nor educated on, the issues in question, and don’t care to be. They’re just living their life. They don’t have time to parse out an agenda — on either side — from the massive amount of noise surrounding this controversy.
Agendas are good. Agendas let people know what’s happening and respond appropriately. You can impugn the morality or accuracy of those protesting the LambdaConf decision, but at least their agenda is clear — “That guy’s an unabashed racist, and we don’t want to be in the same room as him”. Secret or misleading agendas are far less helpful, and beg the question — Why not just lay it out straight? The only reason for misdirection is that you know what you’re dancing around will be taken badly.
Yarvin clearly isn’t obfuscating his views for the benefit of the far left or right, who have already come to their conclusions. No, he’s obfuscating it for everyone else. The people who will defend his right to say it on principle or without investigating & understanding it, and the smaller portion of people scattered through that group who will listen to “new ideas” with rapt attention just because they’re “new”, or because it stokes some self-righteous embers of bias in their heart they hadn’t realized were cold. That’s my problem with the people who have only skimmed Yarvin’s material, or read an op-ed, or sanctify free-speech as an absolute, un-alienable, and weaponizable entitlement. And based on this surface level understanding of the issue, they decide “that isn’t what he means”, or that his posts are an entirely intellectual exercise, or that since he’s not literally advocating physical violence, it’s all good.
But if his intention is pure, why is he confusing so many people? He’s a smart guy, he’s been making this same mistake for years. It’s obvious to him how his writing can be read out of context (if you believe that claim). It’s obvious the controversy that will surround a conference submission (it happened with Strange Loop). What’s the benefit? Other than causing said controversy & polarizing people in a community he claims membership of, building his personal brand as a “free thinker”, and providing arguments to be repeated in the darkest corners of the internet? Is his goal really advocating for his personal programming project? I maintain that if that was truly his goal, there are ways to accomplish that while respecting his peers’ boundaries.
