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.
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.