Who’s Scott Alexander? He’s a blogger. He has real-life credentials but they’re not direct reasons for his success as a blogger.
Out of everyone in the world Scott Alexander is the best at getting a particular kind of adulation that I want. He’s phenomenal at getting a “you’ve convinced me” out of very powerful people. Some agreed already, some moved towards his viewpoints, but they say it. And they talk about him with the preeminence of a genius, as if the fact that he wrote something gives it some extra credibility.
(If he got stupider over time, it would take a while to notice.)
When I imagine what success feels like, that’s what I imagine. It’s the same thing that many stupid people and Thought Leaders imagine. I’ve hardcoded myself to feel very negative about people who want the exact same things I want. Like, make no mistake, the mental health effects I’m experiencing come from being ignored and treated like an idiot for thirty years. I do myself no favors by treating it as grift and narcissism, even though I share the fears and insecurities that motivate grifters and narcissists.
When I look at my prose I feel like the writer is flailing on the page. I see the teenage kid I was ten years ago, dying without being able to make his point. If I wrote exactly like I do now and got a Scott-sized response each time, I’d hate my writing less and myself less too.
That’s not an ideal solution to my problem, but to my starving ass it sure does seem like one.
Let me switch back from fantasy to reality. My most common experience when I write is that people latch onto things I said that weren’t my point, interpret me in bizarre and frivolous ways, or outright ignore me. My expectation is that when you scroll down to the end of this post you will see an upvoted comment from someone who ignored everything else to go reply with a link to David Gerard’s Twitter thread about why Scott Alexander is a bigot.
(Such a comment will have ignored the obvious, which I’m footnoting now: I agonize over him because I don’t like him.)
So I guess I want to get better at writing. At this point I’ve put a lot of points into “being right” and it hasn’t gotten anywhere. How do I put points into “being more convincing?” Is there a place where I can go buy a cult following? Or are these unchangeable parts of being an autistic adult on the internet? I hope not.
There are people here who write well. Some of you are even professionals. You can read my post history here if you want to rip into what I’m doing wrong. The broad question: what the hell am I supposed to be doing?
This post is kind of invective, but I’m increasingly tempted to just open up my Google drafts folder so people can hint me in a better direction.
I may have posted this on another thread of yours somewhere, but I think Elizabeth Sandifer wrote the best analysis of Scott’s rhetoric and writing style. Her assessment is, basically, that he doesn’t persuasively or effectively argue for his conclusions as much as he implies them through metaphor, negative space, and allegory. This lack of clarity serves to obscure how weak the underlying arguments actually are, particularly the degree to which he completely ignores any context (historical, statistical, philosophical, etc) of one of his reference points that would complicate the picture by making it actually accurate and complete.
This beigeness is the heart of how his despicable politics were able to float under the radar for so many people, myself included. I would add to El’s analysis two things. The first is that Scott is a master of apophasis, the art of talking about something by explicitly not talking about it. He frequently draws to a repugnant conclusion regarding race science or gender relations and ends up spending the last paragraph quickly disavowing the obvious implication of the rest of his piece. He is also very skilled at performing intelligence. He builds his non-arguments from elements of multiple fields across history, science, philosophy (often using the jump to move from implying his conclusion to assuming it) and has a good vocabulary that lets him sound vaguely academic but without being as dry and detailed as actual academic work.
The combination there is very useful for telling Important People the things that they want to believe anyways or that flatter them, but not great for actually communicating. I don’t know how well those techniques can be adapted to less bastardly ends.
I don’t think you sent this to me personally, but it has been sent to me. I still like it quite a bit. I reread it now to make sure of that!
I think your summary (and additional analysis) is pretty accurate. I think I would add a few things:
There’s a crunchy systemic thing I want to add. I’m sure Elizabeth Sandifer gets this, it’s just not rhetorically spotlit in her post –
A lot of people who analyze Scott Alexander have difficulty assigning emotional needs to his viewers. Scott Alexander decides to align himself with Gamergate supporters in his feminism post: Gamergate isn’t a thing you do when you’re in a psychologically normal place.
An old Startup Guy proverb says that you should “sell painkillers, not vitamins” – you want people to lurch for your thing when they’re doing badly because you’re the only thing that will actually solve their problem. When people treat Scott Alexander’s viewers as if they’re smug, psychologically healthy startup twits, they typically take his viewers’ engagement with Scott Alexander and make it into this supererogatory thing that his audience could give up or substitute at any time. His influence by this account is vitamin-like.
This makes the tech narcissists seem oddly stronger than normal people, who are totally distorted by their need for approval. We kind of treat them like permanent twisted reflections of normal people and therefore act as if there’s no need for funhouse mirrors to distort them. We make the even more fundamental error of treating them like they know who they are.
This is how I think it actually works: the narcissists you meet are not completely different from you. They’re not unmoored from ethics or extremely sadistic. They’re often extremely ambivalent – there’s a clash of attitudes in their heads that prevents them from taking all the contradictory feelings inside them and reifying them as an actual opinion.
From what I can tell, Scott is actually extremely effective at solving the problem of “temporarily feeling like a horrible person.” He’s specifically good at performing virtue and kindness when advocating for especially horrible views. He’s good at making the thing you wanted to do anyway feel like the difficult last resort in a field of bad options.
I’ll admit – as a person with these traits, this is another place where the basis for my analysis seems completely obvious to me, yet I see an endless dogpile of nerds who seem as if they willfully do not engage with it. I assume they thought of it, find it convincing on some level and therefore they make significant effort to repress it. If I’m going to be conceited for a moment, though, this is probably simultaneously expecting too much intelligence and too much conventionally narcissistic behavior from my audience, who are, demographically, the same people who thought Scott was brilliant in the first place.
That’s actually a really good point re: Scott’s audience and the role he fills. Especially when we’re talking about the influential or high-profile folks in the Ratosphere it’s ironically easy to take them at their word and act as though they’re inhuman utility-maximizers with an abhorrent utility function, rather than as actual people with squishy human needs and feelings and all that.
I think a lot of the challenge in reaching these people is that they tend to meet those emotional needs largely by rejecting the parts of the world that don’t comport to their self-image. That fits with the emphasis on race science, for example. Rather than acknowledge that they’re beneficiaries of systemic injustice it’s easier to model a world where those inequalities are an inevitable result of natural processes. I think we got introduced just yesterday to a sociologist interested in the topic who has done much more background reading on the kind of worldview a lot of the silicon valley/tech industry bubble has ended up in and how it got there. I think that despite their repetition of mantras about the relationship between maps and territories it’s pretty clear that Scott and Co’s version of Rationalism is still focused on making more abstracted maps. It’s a flight from ambiguity and responsibility that honestly I can’t describe without slipping into sounding dismissive and callous towards those who take it, even though (or maybe because) I definitely started down that same rabbit hole and if I hadn’t hit a completely unrelated road block that stopped me from moving to San Francisco and joining the same rat race I very likely would have ended up in the same kind of ideology.
But I think you’re spot on that a lot of the reason Scott connects with that audience is because he makes them feel good about doing the things they want to do anyways, which usually means enjoying structural advantages and disproportionate wealth compared to the people they presumably know are out there buy don’t have to seriously engage with often.
The various Rationalist tools he created (like the meta/context level thing) also help him a lot. Esp with the implied ‘meta is better’ thing. It basically primes people to ignore a lot of the actual context matter. Like comparing feminists worried about incels/neckbeards/annoying nerds with actual nazis. (In Untitled, oddly this usage of Superweapon (Scotts livejournal) is fine. Ow wait, perhaps the talk about superweapons isn’t about superweapons, it is actually just an attack on feminists, and comparing feminists to anti-Semites is a pattern).