WTF is Happening to James Lindsay?

I used to follow James Lindsay and was appreciative of his work. I thought his pushback on the extreme manifestations of wokeness was worthwhile and often creative. The Grievance studies affair was overall very clever and funny.

But now I'm worried about James Lindsay's mental health. He seems to have been slowly floating through a downward spiral of increasingly paranoid and delusional thinking. I don't know him enough to make any solid conclusions, but what's for sure is that he's morphed into a rather predictable partisan pundit. Some people are even defending his antics as part of an elaborate piece of performance art, but his closest colleagues seem to be sincerely concerned. That concern was aired out around the same time that he claimed there is a worldwide plan to intentionally reduce the world's population to under 2 billion by 2030. He's so concerned about "Critical Race Theory" that he believed a Biden presidency would be an existential threat, and simultaneously claimed the excesses of the Democratic party forced him to vote for Trump. Not too long after that, he fully embraced the "election was stolen" hypothesis. He has some other odd beliefs, for example he seems to think that public health officials are intentionally ignoring hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, and he has very simplistic interpretations of Foucauldian philosophy.

Lindsay continues to produce content, including a nearly one hour primer on how an Italian Marxist philosopher is the reason we have wokeness today or whatever. None of what I mentioned above refutes anything he posts or writes about. But that’s because my time is naturally limited, and I have to necessarily rely on heuristics to ascertain what's worth my time. But in my opinion, Lindsay should not be viewed as a reliable source for anything, at least not on face value. He's become painfully predictable lately when it comes to holding partisan opinions. When I saw that he was pushing hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid, I guessed that he also believed the election was stolen and was able to quickly confirm that.

And arguments based on a reading of the historical record (such as his primer on Gramsci) are by far the ones that most require an assurance the presenter is operating from a position of good faith. This isn't like a mathematical proof you could potentially examine for yourself, or a logical argument you could poke holes in, or a straight-forward data investigation. Refuting claims made in a historical record require an astronomical amount of work. You could have literally hundreds of citations to support your claim, but then each citation must be ascertained in terms of its reliability. You can find any number of cranks or fringe theorists to support virtually any claim you want. It takes someone deeply familiar with the lore to identify whether your source is legitimate or not. So there's a higher risk of disinformation when it comes to claims supported by historical evidence.

This is a lot of words to say that I don't trust anything Lindsay says at face value, and I wouldn't be confident his analysis of any given topic is fair or adequate. His recent trajectory has evaporated my confidence in him, and it would take a significant turn-around for me to think of him as a reliable and trustworthy commentator on any topic.

It’s probably also fair to say that I have a nearly paralytic fear of misinformation. It’s true that I might pursue a cleanse with a greater zeal than most perhaps. I used to get extremely anxious whenever I watch a documentary because I have no method of double-checking the claims asserted on video, so I just stopped altogether unless it comes recommended from a reputable source. I used to have a broader internet video consumption diet, driven primarily by YouTube algorithm recommendations. A lot of it were well-produced segments explaining bits of history. I eventually cut them out completely, partly due to time constraints, but also because of a growing realization that I had no idea who these anonymous content creators are or what credentials they might have that would lead me to just accept their word.

I ended up cutting down my media consumption diet drastically, and now I basically only watch video essays about gaming (e.g. Ragnarox) or media critiques because that's a subject I can easily "fact-check" if I wanted to, but also because I don't care that much about being potentially mislead.

The risk of misinformation is high, especially on heated culture war topics. Lindsay has outed himself as an unreliable commentator on other similarly heated culture war topics, and I have serious concerns that he's either decompensating or engaging in an elaborate performance art piece. Given that, there is no world where I take any of his analysis or commentary at face value, and the amount of independent research I'd have to engage in to even start evaluating claims he makes in areas I'm unfamiliar with easily inflates into an unmanageable time sink. "Lindsay has crazy ideas in areas I know about" is enough for me to conclude "He's probably wrong on this area I know little about". Reality has time constraints which make these Bayesian evaluations necessary.