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.
Sorry, I read this and it is really an heartfelt outpouring but I just don’t know what to say (Esp as im not a writer myself), still wanted to reply but didn’t know what to say before. Hope the replies helped.
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.
The first is that Scott is a master of apophasis, the art of talking about something by explicitly not talking about it.
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).
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:
- He’s not being evil in every post. Some of the posts are OK.
- [Elizabeth Sandifer observes this.] He tends to compare a bad argument to a very bad argument, and he’s usually willing to invite snark or ridicule.
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.
At this point I’ve put a lot of points into “being right” and it hasn’t gotten anywhere. My most common experience when I write is that people latch onto things I said that weren’t my point
Let me introduce you to the biological source of creative confabulation! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_tie_(biology)
Complex systems that relate in robust manners do not do so by trying to be right, or even minimizing error, per say. It’s about, economically confabulating between two distinct spaces!
The written form is usefully incapable of fully capturing the experience you put in (fan in), and usefully capable of producing unrelated and novel experiences of the audience (fan out).
Where possible, I focus my attention on being economical, and leaving control of the reaction out of it. Have fun. Don’t take the work, the audience, or oneself, too seriously.
This seems bleak but not inaccurate. Not a big fan of it. I’ll be economical by not explaining why.
Maybe another way of thinking about “being economical” is thinking of writing as a relationship. Half the work is yours. But half of the work is, the audience.
I just hope that whatever you do, you find peace and a bit of fun of it. And broadly that means letting go of some things so that you can focus on others.
I can’t think of a non-metaphorical expansion of your take that isn’t (1) deeply insensitive to my stated needs (2) a generally poor reading of the original post (3) at odds with basic understanding of what the function of language is.
I don’t know exactly what you think I want. I want to be understood and I want to be seen as good based on that understanding. I’m not asking for a Spock-level mind-meld with the opposing party. I’m not asking that every single person in the world understand me exactly as intended the first time they read it. I’m asking for an end to smug, self-satisfactory, nitpicking interpretations ultimately designed to draw me into shaming-based social rituals that I refuse to be a part of.
Maybe it would be helpful for me to clarify a specific example of what I’m so pissed about. It appeared in the original post but I could have been clearer. The thing I’m pissed about in this case is that you can’t mention Scott Alexander here without performatively mocking him or explaining why you didn’t performatively mock him, which I know because I’ve watched other people try it. (The only reason you didn’t see a henpecking response in this case is that in my original post, I spent two paragraphs heading it off.)
The general pattern of my existence online is that whenever I acknowledge a political position that’s unpopular, or the existence of a political figure that’s unpopular, even if I’m taking great pains to indicate that I disagree with it, people will arrive to specifically accuse me of believing the exact opposite of what I said I believed. It’s entirely possible that the inadequacy of language plays some role here, but the apparent reason the communication fails is that something about me seems to have caused the other person to decide they want to force me into the conceptual category of “people they hate.”
I am not a particularly pleasant person! I often try to be, but like, I actually have to try. I think it is common for people to decide that they dislike me before they have a clear reason why. But I also think a lot of people engage with online content in a way that is purely based on skimming takes off the top, analyzing them for their badness, and announcing personal superiority to the people who had the gall to post bad takes.
None of this falls into the territory covered by your impossibility result from systems biology regarding language. (although I doubt the impossibility result to begin with) This is mostly accounted for by pernicious cultiness of advanced online communities, and the futile and self-negating way I have to struggle to correct for it.
The uncharitable interpretation of your comment is that you think communication is impossible. If you really, sincerely think one person communicating an idea to another person successfully is impossible, burn all the textbooks and also most of the professors. If it takes equivocating over “full” communication and you’re willing to concede the point as far as other stuff goes then fine, my red may be your blue. I’m at peace with that.
If you think there are some things that could be communicated linguistically but generally aren’t, for a reason that is not the fault of the speaker or the hearer, I agree. It doesn’t cause me distress when someone still assumes good faith about me but also misunderstands me – I’ve talked about what causes me distress. If it’s not obvious to you that people who post takes that go beyond the superficial attract way more of that distress – I mean, the sealioning and tedium I’m usually met with – then I want to post on whatever internet you grew up on, because mine is defective.
You have added, as a consolation prize, “maybe writing is good for peace and a bit of fun.” Great, I’ll keep that in mind when those are what I want. Language is not a dance I am intermittently doing, it is how I exist. There’s not another thing for me to be doing when this thing isn’t working.
I will propose a theory in alternative to yours: My metaphorical gut may not be entirely wrong for screaming that it wants to be filled. Getting the attention (even maladaptively) may make some progress towards solving my problem.
This is an option that few people will actually consider. Desiring attention is so incredibly stigmatized that the idea of a legitimate need for attention, even in the suboxone-level form of “being understood and having one’s ideas acknowledged,” is openly ridiculed.
(In this comment thread I have openly attempted to reclaim “narcissism” as a dimension of personality rather than a slur against the mentally ill and I have done so with the expectation that these efforts will be read by many people as pure invective. So far my expectation has been validated and, even worse, I’ve fallen into the pattern of periodically using that word in a way I hate.)
This ridicule serves the ends of powerful people and is likely the result of an accidental conspiracy. All the social systems in the world exist to sell back attention – feeling loved, respected and valued for free is completely incompatible with the business model of every advertiser and every social media platform. As with every social rule, all the social power accrues in the hands of the people who don’t respect that social rule.
In the near future and far future I’m going to attempt to express what I mean clearly enough that it will be obvious who is interpreting me in a frivolous and senseless way, with the expectation that they will still do it.
I don’t know exactly what you think I want.
I don’t know precisely what, you want, and I never will. It was practical advice about writing grounded in an analogy, mostly because they are two things I like. If it’s not helpful, you are free to not, internalize it.
Getting the attention (even maladaptively) may make some progress towards solving my problem.
Ok.