Astral Codex Ten

Alex Jones

11 min read

Alex Jones

Article

Alex Jones is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 03, 2021 and December 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “For example, Alex Jones – the conspiracy theory guy who says school shootings are fake - is “irrational””; “a condemnation of Alex Jones as “irrational” isn’t just an ideological act”; “You’re admitting there are people worse than you - Alex Jones, the fossil fuel lobby, etc”. It most often appears alongside NYC, Obama, Scott.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: May 03, 2021
  • Last seen: December 29, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

If You Can Be Bad, You Can Also Be Good
May 03, 2021 · Original source
It’s easy to find people who are especially bad on all these axes. For example, Alex Jones – the conspiracy theory guy who says school shootings are fake - is “irrational”. I strongly believe this. I believe he’s less rational than pretty much whatever comparison group you choose – scientists, the average joe, me personally. I believe this is an important fact to know about him. That it reflects badly on him. That if you try to approach the study of Alex Jones without considering the fact that he’s irrational, you’ll be missing an important piece of information. Or: when some fossil-fuel-industry lobby group says their internal fossil-fuel-lobby-funded studies prove global warming is fake or irrelevant – probably they’re doing biased, politicized science. I believe this is a meaningful, important statement, beyond just "well, everyone does biased science, so this group is exactly as good or bad as everyone else studying climate change". I believe there's an important, specific criticism to make of this group, and that "they are doing biased, political science" is the most natural and accurate way to make this criticism. I think most people would agree with me about these examples (and many more). You can definitely be bad at rationality, objectivity, and staying unbiased. But if you can be bad, you can also be good. You've admitted there's a spectrum from better to worse, you've admitted that the worse end deserves terms like "irrational" - so shouldn't the natural term for the better end be "rational"? Doesn’t that suggest rationality is a “real thing”? Maybe even a real thing “free from ideology”? At least free enough that a condemnation of Alex Jones as “irrational” isn’t just an ideological act, not just “from my perspective he’s bad, but from his perspective I’m bad, so I guess in the end we’re even”? Possible counterargument: might it be that we can talk about "relatively more rational" or "relatively less rational", but saying "rational" is making a strong claim (eliminating all irrationality!) which probably nobody actually achieves? I agree nobody's perfect, but we usually don't demand perfection before awarding someone a vaguely positive adjective. Many people are "kind" without being perfectly kind, "thoughtful" without being infinitely thoughtful, or "intelligent" without being an omni-brilliant polymath. We’re happy to grant that people are fighting for justice" without certainty that complete justice can ever be acheived, or that there can be a "security community" even when nothing can be 100% secure. It's only when people say they're striving for objectivity, or concerned about things getting politicized, that these objections get brought up. It’s an isolated demand for rigor. Or to look at it a different way - you need to be very self-confident to think you're hitting against fundamental limits. If your track coach tells you to run faster, and you answer with something about e=mc^2 and the light speed barrier, you're making a pretty strong claim about your current abilities. Talking about the impossibility of true rationality or objectivity might feel humble - you're admitting you can't do this difficult thing. But analyzed more carefully, it becomes really arrogant. You're admitting there are people worse than you - Alex Jones, the fossil fuel lobby, etc. You're just saying it's impossible to do better. You personally - or maybe your society, or some existing group who you trust - are butting up against the light speed limit of rationality and objectivity. I try not to be this arrogant. I think I’m better at rationality than some people - Alex Jones, for example. But I'm worse than other people. Even in the vanishingly unlikely chance that I’m the best person in the world, I still don't think I'm hitting up against the limit of what's possible. I can't always resist the temptation to gloat about the people who are worse than me. But I’d much rather spend my time and energy to learn from the people who are better. Statements like "there’s no such thing as rationality" risk concealing the fact that anyone can be better at all. Statements like “it can’t be separated from ideology” risk putting everyone on so relative a footing that Alex Jones’ version of rationality is no worse than anyone else’s. Perfect rationality is probably impossible, just like perfect anything else. Luckily, we're all far enough from perfection that we don't need to worry about this - and we can go on trying to improve regardless.
Inline links: Alex Jones, isolated demand for rigor
Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
May 18, 2021 · Original source
People like Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones used to be huge on YouTube. Now they're both gone, as is Milo himself. Often, the most extreme figures serve as a kind of vanguard and give energy to a movement. If the far right gets its most extreme elements purged every once in a while, the natural process from which you go "edgy -> slightly less edgy -> mainstream -> lame" gets interrupted. If you look at the most shared posts on Facebook today, data that's collected on a daily basis, it's dominated by Ben Shapiro, who is pretty much the edgiest right wing person allowed a Facebook account. And Ben Shapiro can never be cool.
Your Book Review: Viral
July 30, 2022 · Original source
This is especially frustrating when the random guy on the internet turns out to be right. When people talk about “trusting the experts”, I think they mean trusting people with technical expertise over people without technical expertise. This makes sense a lot of the time. Probably almost all the time. If you need your car fixed, have a weird rash on your skin, or have a leaking pipe in your house, you consult a mechanic, a dermatologist, or a plumber because they have the technical expertise you need on those issues. You don’t ask a random guy on Twitter for help. But what if you have a question about investment banking on Wall Street, and how it should be regulated. Should you put the question to a bunch of investment bankers? After all, they do have the most technical expertise on this subject, right? They probably know more about investment banking than you or me, or a lot of the people pushing for more financial regulations. Now we’ve run into an issue: they do have technical expertise, but it’s bundled together and intertwined with a bunch of incentives that could lead to biased judgment, so we can’t take what they’re saying as some pure, objective truth. Of course, their technical expertise is still valuable, so we shouldn’t necessarily throw out everything they say either. The proper response is to listen to what they’re saying and weigh the information accordingly after considering the incentives they’re facing, and possible biases. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that scientific institutions, though probably not as bad as Wall Street, are still made up of human beings who are susceptible to all kinds of cognitive biases, including group think, confirmation bias, and the good ol’ Not Wanting To Be Wrong. So what should we do about this? Well, the easy option is to just become an insane person, like Alex Jones, and assume the experts are lying all the time about everything. This strategy has the advantage of letting us feel edgy and rebellious, but it’s not very helpful if we actually want to figure these issues out. On the other hand, if we want to seriously try to discern truth from expert claims on controversial topics, that’s a messy challenge that involves considering their technical expertise, as well as potential biases they might have, as well as our own potential biases. Conclusion 3: Some optimism about science I know this has probably been a bit of a depressing post to read, but my final conclusion is actually one of optimism about the state of science. What differentiates science from other ways of knowing is its self-correction mechanisms. It’s all about changing our minds and reevaluating our beliefs based on new evidence and clearer understanding of things. This is basically what we’ve seen in the way the scientific community has changed positions on the lab leak hypothesis. Harsh critics might refer to this as a “flip flop”, or point out that the lab leak hypothesis never should have been dismissed in the first place, but I see it as a commendable error correction. What’s even cooler is that much of this reevaluation was the result of amateurs and semi-amateurs making discoveries based on freely accessible genomic sequence data, and open source online sequence analysis tools. Plus the fact that, despite their lack of official credentials, their analysis was taken seriously (eventually), when it became evident that they were making good points. This is a credit to the scientific community. Further sources to check out Natural Origins Proponents The most comprehensive post I’ve found making the case for natural origins is Philipp Markolin’s Substack post, which attempts to apply Bayesian reasoning to the question. Definitely recommend.
Inline links: The most comprehensive post I’ve found making the case for natural origins is Philipp Markolin’s Substack post
Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
December 29, 2022 · Original source
I assume there was some right-wing misinformation about this at some point in between the establishment misinformation and the point where it became true-ish, but I can’t find it on a quick search. 4: Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theory Ron writes:
Inline links: writes
Your analysis of InfoWars is itself lacking a key piece of context: you are reading its web site after it has declared bankruptcy following a $965 million verdict for defamation for claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax and the bereaved parents were all professional actors. (Alex Jones, who runs InfoWars, also recently declared bankruptcy after a separate $473M verdict against himself personally.)
Many other people also brought up Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook theory as an example of a media source literally making something up.