On Whining On The Internet

Snark for me, but not for thee!

Disclaimer: I want to be clear that the people I’m criticizing here I presume are good faith, not intentionally hypocritical, and I hold no ill will toward any of them. Though I do find them occasionally annoying, I could have a beer with them or something, this is just the internet, it’s no big deal. Also, when I started this post, I thought I would have more screenshots and direct evidence of 1-2 claims I make here, but unfortunately, substack’s UI just doesn’t let me search for specific notes/comments. I totally understand if someone doesn’t believe me, but I am confident that my data points are not the only evidence in favor of my conclusion. Others have similar stories as mine.

One of the most frustrating things on substack nowadays is elitism. By elitism, I don’t mean preference for credential people, but the way that (some!) of the more credentialed people talk about non-credentialed people.

I’ll be extremely blunt here: Bentham’s Bulldog aka Bentham aka Matthew Adelstein’s whining in his recent post is hypocritical. Regularly, Bentham does this thing where he calls anyone who is short with him via notes snarky, even if it’s a valid criticism.

What’s more, he in turn is also snarky. To use a readily made example of my interactions with him, I recently criticized how he and other EAs on substack were completely silent on the recent congressional recissions package. More context in footnote¹

When I asked him about recissions, his response was snark, not engaging with the actual substance of the question/claim but a smug “Oh you think EAs don’t talk enough about foreign aid.”²

To be clear: I’m not going to pretend that I wasn’t being confrontational on that original interaction or a little annoying, but at the same time, BB is the one saying people shouldn’t be snarky about things they don’t know about while at the same time being snarky about things he doesn’t know about.

It’s hypocritical at best, and whiney at worst.

Having said that: I’m okay with people being a little annoying to each other on the internet! Snark is fine! It’s your choice to interact with snarky people or not! There is a block and mute button right there!

The problem is not the snark, it’s the whining and hypocrisy.³

But it gets a little worse.

In his post, BB talks about how much snark his friend Ethan Muse is receiving on his post about Fatima. I can’t help but feel like this is whining and selectively ignoring the many ways Muse invites it upon himself!

Muse’s comments on his original post are off-putting, snarky, and worthy of ridicule. To name one example, he went full zealot on Woolery, basically invoking hell fire upon him in their disagreement. Please note in the screenshot below that Woolery is being rather nice here, very mensch-y, and this man swoops in and invokes eternal conscious torment on him!

Very odd!

Earlier, in their conversation, Muse also made a weird psychologizing diagnosis on Woolery after one comment (I can’t get you receipts on the interaction because I’m blocked). Even if this isn’t per se snark, it’s extremely rude and off-putting. In normal social interactions, it invites retaliation of some sort. Snark is appropriate!

Coincidentally, Muse also crashed into the replies of one of my notes, when I posted about why I don’t buy Catholic explanations about Fatima. That note was inspired by his post, but not a response to it:

And I sort of elaborated upon this in two other places, if you care:

By any reasonable reading, I’m not really responding to Mr. Muse, just sort of putting my own stuff out there because people are talking about Fatima. In essence, even if something supernatural happened at Fatima, I don’t think that’s how God would communicate to us, and I’m less likely to believe that it proves Catholicism because I think Catholicism renders itself false in other ways.

Did Muse rebut that argument in the article? I neither know or care! I did not tag, I did not add snark, I openly did not engage with the article, just saying why I don’t care to engage with the argument. In my view, it was a note to the void to 100 or so followers, and if he didn’t like he could just mute or block me or try to productively discourse.

But instead Muse tried something…else? He zoomed into my replies basically assuming my argument was a rebuttal of his post when it wasn’t. We had what can only be described as a conversation where we talked past each other. He constantly attributed positions I did not claim, and I spent a lot of time trying to clarify that he got my positions wrong.

Again, I can’t post the receipts because he blocked me. But if you’re not blocked by either of us, you can track them at the note below and judge for yourself. I’ll admit that the opener is a little snarky, but I think it’s clear by the next few comments that I’m engaging in clear, good faith (but I can’t check them because they are buried under his comments, which are blocked).

All this time, it was quite clear that he was trying to go full debate bro when I already signaled I wasn’t debating him and that I was pretty sure he didn’t understand my position anyway. All throughout he made various unnecessary jabs that were annoying.⁴ He thought he knew my arguments before I said them, and rebutted them instead of communicating with me.

When I lost patience, that’s when I started being snarky. Yes, I called him a zealot, as I found his conversation indistinguishable from other zealots by his narrow-mindedness, inability to listen, smugness, and superiority. ⁵

This caused him to crash out, leaving me with this amazing note, which is clearly just cope on his part. Say what you want about me, maybe one of these things is true, but certainly not all of them. The grab bag insults is a clear sign of a crash out.

This raises the question: Hey fellas! Do you think the reason why people are snarky to you is because you are snarky to them?

People Are Snarky When You Are Snarky To Them, And An Education Does Not Protect You From It

I don’t mean to bring all of this up to relitigate specific Substack arguments, but just to point out that this is the internet, everyone is snarky, and it seems very weak of Bentham and his orbiters to whine about snark, rudeness, etc. when they themselves are just as guilty as anyone else.

As I’ve said before, I respect the fact that many of the writers on Substack are smarter than me, are more credentialed, and so on, but that does not mean that I have to be completely deferential to their opinion, just because they’re more of an expert on a specific area than I am.

When thinking about the smartest people I knew in real life, the thing that stuck out to me is that I disagreed with them about something fundamental. And that’s okay.

Put another way: Just because someone has a PhD in philosophy and believes (or doesn’t believe) in God, doesn’t mean you are obligated to agree or can’t disagree with that person and have good, lucid reasons, clearly expressed.

I’ll admit that the worst defense of a point of view is appealing to one’s right to hold it, but if we’re going to regulate norms of discourse, people are allowed to disagree with an argument, form a counter one, be snarky, and so on, no matter their education level. It’s probably not good to be snarky, but there’s mutual obligation to limit the snark, and the Bentham Orbiters don’t do themselves favors.

I mean, how am I supposed to react when I hear an argument repeated that I’ve heard for over 10 years and I’m still not convinced by it? Or when it’s constantly implied that I don’t understand it? Do I need a PhD to say I’m not convinced?⁶ These kind of comments, which are thrown around quite a bit by Bentham and his Christian Apologist orbiters, really invite snark because they themselves are snarky. A degree is not a shield!

There is Nothing New Under The Sun

Part of the challenge of a productive conversation is listening to your interlocutor. In my experience, many times Bentham and his orbiters lack the interest to do that minimum. They don’t see us non-expert little people as worthy interlocuters, but vessels to be filled by their knowledge. It’s a very juvenile and undergraduate way of looking at the world. Has it occurred to any of them that many of us have heard these arguments before, long before these early twenty-somethings learned how to write an essay?

I’ve said before that I hate appealing to age, but there is something to be said about the value of wisdom and knowing that none of these people (on both sides of religious debates) are saying anything that’s new.⁷

Sure, it may be new to them (hence their enthusiasm), but some of us have been around the block. The reason we’re not impressed is because we’ve heard this pitch before, during the first Obama administration. Some of us believe it, some of us don’t, some of us swing back and forth. In my experience, what changes people’s opinion is not the arguments themselves but the personality of the people contemplating them.

So much philosophy, especially on the internet, is just repeating the same things over and over again, or rephrasing it in different ways. The people who are annoying are the ones who haven’t been around long enough to recognize it, but instead say this time it’s different!

So, in parting words..

I guess what I’m trying to say here is, uh, stop whining about people being mean to you when you kind of have it coming? Stop presuming people lack the curiosity and intelligence you do, just because they don’t bite hook, line, and sinker into an argument that’s new to you?

I’m sorry that I will never have a PhD or even Master’s in Philosophy, but I do know some things, and it’s kind of annoying when it’s implied that I don’t.⁸

1. For those of you who don’t know, this was important because it basically legalized (likely) illegal USAID impoundments made by the president earlier this year. I was curious and a little annoyed why no one who posted like crazy about USAID in the spring was posting about recissions, even though arguably this was something readers could vaguely better influence via grassroots lobbying (you have much better odds of pushing your senator or congress person against recissions than you are to push President Trump of impounding funds). One could disagree about the efficacy of talking about recissions. It’s admittedly boring, and contacting your congress person isn’t a sure thing. I actually don’t blame people for not knowing about it.

2. Unfortunately, I can’t find my original screenshots on this stuff. If you don’t believe me, that’s fine, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has had a similar experience with BB. I know of at least one of my followers who witnessed this, but I’m not going to bother to tag him.

3. My personal solution to snark problems, is to employ a combination of feed regulation (kick off the people who annoy you) and adopting a sense of humor and irony to where you can forgive people for misreading you. It works for me. Don’t police beforehand, just be more forgiving afterward instead.

4. This is another problem I have with BB-aligned writers on here: they’re really bad at reading comprehension and exhibit the cognitive bias where they like to substitute harder or more specific arguments with easy general arguments and rebut them. At one point, I thought this was my fault, but I have way too many people who follow me who understand what I have to say and the same few big users on substack seem to be repeat offenders.

5. Was this mean? Eh, maybe? But on balance, he clearly had more of an aggressive twitch than me in this conversation.

6. I’m still a little mad that substack gaslit me for about a month into thinking that there was a new and improved fine tuning argument, when in reality, it was the same one I heard 15+ years ago.

7. To be blunt about Fatima specifically, I suspect Muse’s argument wasn’t going to be much different than the arguments I’ve seen before, and that key points of disagreements between Catholics and non-Catholics would not have been resolved. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that these are old problems that don’t seem to have a resolution. Maybe that’s wrong! But for the reasons already stated, I don’t care that much about Fatima, so I’m not wasting my time exploring the question.

8. In an original draft, I mentioned how one time BB basically called me a moron. To be honest with you, I think it’s a hilarious story because I take these things sufficiently seriously (which is not at all).