Scott Alexander

The first was my elegy for John McCain, which failed much worse.

Basically everyone thought it was unfairly negative to him and inappropriate just after his death.

That was eight years ago.

I don't think I've done any more posts, positive or negative, on people's deaths since then, and I felt ready to try again.

For what it's worth, I still like the elegy, and I'm glad I memorialised McCain in some way.

This became more awkward after I found out that Adams had said several nice things about me.

Sandeep writes, quote, Among the numerous intellectual gifts I have received from reading Scott Adams is that I started reading Slate Star Codex on his recommendation, which then had a huge influence on me.

I'd known about Slate Star Codex even before, but it was Adams' recommendation that gave me the energy to overcome my reading inertia and start pouring through long articles of Alexander.

End quote.

Scott writes, I think I'd heard that Adams recommended me at one point, but forgotten by the time I wrote this post.

Here's one of his articles saying nice things about me, Lincoln Post.

Someone else dug up a kind tweet, though it was in response to someone else's deleted message and I couldn't see exactly what he was praising.

I don't want to have a blanket policy of never criticising anyone who's nice to me.

It seems corrupt in the sense of replacing my journalistic judgement with a policy of praising anyone who gives me favours.

On the other hand, the deepest circle of hell is supposedly reserved for people who betray their benefactors, and this makes game theoretic sense.

Without having a general solution to this problem, in this situation, I mainly considered the point above.

I don't think this was a fully hostile article, and so I didn't run my full is-it-appropriate-to-write-a-hostile-article-about-this-person check.

But secondarily, I think Adams linked my blog post as part of the usual blogosphere activity of recommending interesting links, not as a specific attempt to kindle a friendship with mutual obligations.

If I were his friend, then I hope I would understand him well enough to know whether he would want a mixed memorial like this.

And if not, I wouldn't do it.