Bismarck's Bullshit

I had an internet beef.

1 Introduction

With all due respect, you're such a fantastic moron. What are you talking about? It's so painful. It's so painful to listen to this idiocy. Please stop displaying your imbecility. Don't put on public display that you're a moron, at least have the self possession to shut up. At least have some humility. You have no idea what you're talking about, it's just so embarrassing.

—Norman Finkelstein

My piece criticizing Walt Bismarck was published a few days ago, and Walt has now written a reply to me. It’s a bizarre reply, beginning with him, a 30-something-year-old man, making fun of my voice and boasting about how he makes more money from writing than I do (though I have a bigger audience) and scored higher than I did on an online internet IQ test—one where I skipped the last 5 or so questions because I got bored and which is, as anyone who knows about IQ tests knows, very unreliable—a bit like boasting about one’s mental vitality from a Scientology test. My sense was that boasting about being richer than college students is generally frowned upon, and indicative of deep insecurity, but I don’t plan to explore that thesis in any detail.

Seeing as I am not an insecure 15-year-old Mensa member, I will not bother getting into this pissing match, beyond noting that how much money one makes via blogging does not say anything about the quality of their writing—Alexander Pruss makes nothing despite having perhaps the cleverest blog on the internet. When I say true things about anthropics, I obviously get many fewer reads than Walt saying false and provocative things about the alt-right.

The article is filled with a lot of posturing—posturing about his IQ, his rapid launch to substack microfame, and the fact that I “remind him of himself at my age.” He attributes my errors to my IQ of 119 (on an IQ test that I took quickly on the internet while skipping the last several questions) and spends a lot of time talking about starting university at a young age and doing well on standardized tests. Kudos! But if one takes a sober look at the things we’re actually arguing about, it becomes clear that he is completely wrong across the board and deeply confused.

He claims he is bringing up his greater substack wealth “not … to bully the kid,” but instead, “making the point that my style of rhetoric is demonstrably more effective than his.” This I would have to agree on. If you write like Bismarck, in a way that appeals to people emotionally on the internet, even while most of what you say is false, it’s easy to draw a bigger crowd, just as Trump draws a bigger crowd talking about politics than Milton Friedman does.

The first part of Walt’s essay involves a truly ridiculous amount of bluster. He says sentences that I would not type out of sheer embarrassment like “Unlike BB, I understand how things like prestige coding and implicit power relations subtextually curtail what we’re allowed to talk about, and am talented at manipulating the Overton Window using oblique rhetorical tactics.” Ah yes, I’m deeply ignorant of the fact that sometimes when you say certain things it makes you sound low status. Glad someone like Walt is around to dispense such pearls of wisdom. Walt also responds to a commenter of mine:

Walt says:

Like BB, this person is probably around 115 IQ, so he simply doesn’t have the mental horsepower to comprehend that my intersubjectivism is substantively different from moral subjectivism

Of course, as is to be expected, Bismarck is wrong. If one goes to, for example, the first page of Wikipedia, they’ll find this definition of ethical subjectivism:

1. Ethical sentences express propositions.

2. Some such propositions are true.

3. The truth or falsity of such propositions is ineliminably dependent on the (actual or hypothetical) attitudes of people.

Which Walt believes, of course. He thinks that moral sentences are propositional (capable of being true or false) and that they are intersubjectively determined to be true—by some combination of people. So he is a moral subjectivist by definition. Of course, Walt doesn’t know what he’s talking about, so he sort of waffles incoherently on the topic.

He says that because of my supposed 115 IQ—which he derives by randomly subtracting 4 points from an online test I took in a few minutes while getting bored and skipping several questions—I, like Philip, "likewise [don’t] understand how concepts like distance and dimensionality stem in a trivial way from the limits of human cognition and sensory processing.” This is a fancy way of saying that we don’t understand that people care less about other people who are further away. But of course, neither I nor (presumably) Philip are ignorant of that fact: the claim is that we shouldn’t give people less moral consideration because of their physical distance. Physical distance is obviously not morally relevant: your moral reasons to save someone’s life don’t recede as they take a plane and get further away!

There’s something amusing about boasting about your IQ, using fancy language to express an utterly banal thought, and then being completely and totally wrong.

Analytic Philosophy is an intellectual cancer that produces boring and impotent thinkers whose repugnantly autistic rhetorical style ensures they will never make any money, never seize political power, never have any cultural influence, and never get laid.

Ah yes, being an edgy guy who talks about race on the internet is a great way of getting laid and seizing political power (something Walt says he cares about only to change the memes and way people talk). But, of course, this is completely false. The effective altruism movement, kick-started by a bunch of analytic philosophers, has been infinitely more effective than Walt’s beloved WN movement. The effective altruists have saved around 50,000 lives a year despite being only a very small number of people. What has Walt’s movement achieved?

As for boring and impotent thinkers—really? Peter Singer who advocates some kinds of infanticide is a boring thinker? Stephan Kershnar who has advocated things so shocking and offensive they would cause Walt to piss himself is a boring thinker? The difference between analytics and others is not that analytics write in a boring, dry way—Huemer certainly doesn’t, for example, and is plenty willing to say offensive things. The difference is that analytics think clearly—unlike most people, and certainly unlike Walt.

2 How artistic is Walt

(This is a cheap shot but I couldn’t help myself).