>Seriously: in comparison to, say, Scott Alexander, I don't see a single novel idea in Graham's Oeuvre.

The irony to me is that a lot of Scott Alexander's writing seems to build on singular concepts that have been around for a while in sociology or philosphy, or studied, just not by exactly that name. Other times, the concepts aren't novel at all, but there's a fun AI/tech spin to the story which doesn't really add much. A continuing ignorance of established work in the field (particularly when the Internet lets you get away with it, in "soft subjects" like philosophy, sociology, political theory and critical theory[3]) is par for the course in both PG and Scott's writings. If it's not published in a blog post or a trendy book written within the past 15 years, chances are that they'll think the concept is novel.

Sometimes reading Scott's articles I feel a strong sense of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: an article I know a little something on, and he's only done minimal background reading, to the point where any serious scholar would laugh at his authoritative tone. In another comment, continuing in the Scott-PG-rationalsphere tradition, I invented a term of my own, "the hacker blogger mindset"[0].

Valuable work to introduce people to an opinionated version of one concept or another (without any pointers so you can learn more about similar work)? Sure. Valuable work for someone willing to spend twenty minutes on Google Scholar or having already read primary literature? Not really.

A recent example, from one of Scott's posts on meritocracy[1]:

>The intuition behind meritocracy is this: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.

It's amazing how much this misses the point of the conversation on meritocracy - that critics of meritocracy do not have a problem with merit itself, but rather (1) how merit can be measured in more abstract ways, (2) the degree to which meritocracy can exist with current social relations, (3) the degree to which meritocracy really does exist, with respect to claims that it does (in a just-world hypothesis kind of way). A similar problem was pointed out in the comments[2]. And yet... in support of the position Scott is attacking, he cites one recent pop-phil book, and two blog posts. Where are the published journals? Where are the essays? What have domain experts (i.e. philosophers, political theorists, economists, and sociologists) said about meritocracy? Who knows.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101989

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/24/targeting-meritocracy/

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/24/targeting-meritocracy/...

[3] The fact is that when you state a technically incorrect opinion relating to computer science, engineering, physics, biology, etc. you'll have a hundred Internet users responding with citations and research. When you do the same with the other subjects, usually the people who would prove you wrong are either disinterested in another silly Interent debate that will hinge on ideological terms, or they think they can ignore it because it's not published in a popular journal. Whether that's wise or not remains to be seen.