When Neutrality Becomes Evasion

I don’t actively keep up with Astral Codex Ten anymore. I subscribed years ago, read it heavily for a while, and eventually drifted away. So when I recently read Scott Alexander’s two posts reflecting on Scott Adams —
The Dilbert Afterlife and
Highlights From the Comments on Scott Adams —
I came to them without much emotional investment.

That may be why my reaction caught me off guard.

What bothered me wasn’t disagreement. It wasn’t even the subject matter. It was the growing sense that I was watching someone who clearly understood the moral shape of the situation deliberately refuse to let that understanding do any real work.

The problem, as I see it, is not nuance, but rather where nuance is allowed to stop.

Manufactured Ambiguity Is Still a Choice

One example crystallizes the issue: the discussion of the phrase “It’s okay to be white.”

Alexander accurately describes why many people react negatively to it. He acknowledges that it originated as a 4chan slogan deliberately engineered to be maximally deniable — something that could be defended literally while functioning as racial provocation in context. In the follow-up, he even concedes that people responding to that context are often doing so rationally.

That concession matters.

But in the body text of the article, the framing repeatedly softens this reality. We’re asked to consider literal readings, ignorance of context, symbolic belief, and epistemic confusion. The ambiguity is treated as accidental, or at least unavoidable — something we should patiently reason through.

At one point, Alexander writes:

“It seems plausible to me that many of the respondents who disagreed meant they disagreed with the 4chan slogan version…”

That’s a fair observation — but once you’ve acknowledged that the slogan is designed to produce that exact ambiguity, continuing to treat it as an innocent interpretive puzzle stops being neutral. It becomes a choice.

When the strongest concession — that the ambiguity is engineered — lives in footnotes rather than shaping the main argument, it doesn’t feel like careful scholarship. It feels like load-bearing ambiguity: enough acknowledgment to say “this was addressed,” without letting it meaningfully affect the framing.

Intent Is Not a Moral Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

A recurring move across both posts is to reframe racially harmful statements primarily as epistemic failures rather than moral ones. Bad models. Overconfidence. Contrarianism. Confusion.

Explanation has value. I don’t dispute that.

But explanation becomes evasion when it consistently displaces accountability.

At some point, repeated public advocacy of racist claims becomes meaningfully racist regardless of intent or self-conception. If sincerity alone is sufficient to excuse behavior, then racism becomes unfalsifiable. Any claim — no matter how dehumanizing — can be laundered through ignorance and emerge as “pragmatic.”

Calling that out isn’t elitism. It’s ethical hygiene.

And this is where the posts repeatedly stumble: intent is foregrounded in a domain where outcomes and persistence matter more.

Where I Actually Agree With Him

It’s important to say this plainly: I don’t fundamentally disagree with many of Alexander’s personal observations.

I think he’s often perceptive about:

• how people slide into bad beliefs,
• how identity and contrarianism warp reasoning,
• how moral outrage can replace understanding,
• and how easy it is to caricature people rather than explain them.

In isolation, a lot of that analysis is sound.

What I object to is the complete divestment of accountability that seems to follow from it.

Understanding how someone arrives at harmful beliefs does not absolve them of responsibility for repeatedly broadcasting those beliefs. Explanation should inform judgment — not replace it. When the analysis stops short of saying “and therefore this behavior is wrong in a way that matters,” it stops being illuminating and starts being protective.

Dialogue Is a Tool, Not a Virtue

I understand the instinct to preserve dialogue. In many cases, it’s essential.

But dialogue only functions when both sides are operating in good faith. When one side is exploiting deniability, arguing semantics to avoid accountability, or insisting on literalism precisely because it shields them, continued “neutral” engagement doesn’t elevate discourse.

It provides cover.

At that point, restraint isn’t wisdom. It’s indulgence. And it disproportionately benefits the people already acting in bad faith.

This is where I think these posts misjudge the situation. The risk being minimized isn’t harm caused by confrontation; it’s harm caused by refusing to name what’s happening plainly.

Why This Broke Trust for Me

What ultimately pushed me from skepticism into frustration wasn’t the argument itself, but the response to criticism.

When I asked — politely and directly — why acknowledged manufactured ambiguity wasn’t allowed to shape the main argument, the response was not engagement but confusion: a claim not to understand “which side” I was asking him to be on.

That was revealing.

Because my question wasn’t about sides. It was about asymmetry. And the fact that multiple other readers immediately understood and restated the point made the confusion hard to take at face value.

At that moment, the disagreement stopped being analytical and became normative — not “what’s going on here?” but “how far are we willing to follow what we already see?”

Morality Trumps Neutrality

I don’t think neutrality is always wrong. But I do think it’s frequently mistaken for virtue long after it has ceased to be useful.

Once the context is clear, once the pattern is obvious, once the harm is no longer hypothetical, continuing to hedge isn’t humility. It’s abdication.

Calling that out doesn’t make someone radical. It just means believing that, at some point, moral clarity matters more than maintaining equilibrium — and that refusing to say so is itself a choice.

If these two posts were my introduction to Astral Codex Ten today, I wouldn’t be eager to catch up. Not because they’re unintelligent, but because they demonstrate a style of discourse that asks a lot of the reader while refusing to land where the analysis clearly points.

Expose the ambiguity. Examine it. Explain how it works.

But don’t pretend that recognizing a moral line obligates us to keep pretending it isn’t there.