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 empathize with my entire being. If I can drive one point home to you, it is this: don’t take it personally. The reason that your work is falling into the void without an echo is not evidence that you are wrong, unconvincing, or have what the kids call “a skill issue.” For what it’s worth, I’ve enjoyed it!
The audience here at a.s recognizes that the internet has slumped into a runny pile of garbage juice; the discovery mechanisms that once turned up interesting articles written by passionate folks…just don’t anymore; expert synthesis and actual experience just don’t activate people’s sympathetic nervous systems (and thus generate advertising impressions). The machine therefore will not surface that kind of article without great effort, and they aren’t read by lazy people who find them by accident.
Scooter can’t be accused of grabbing readers by the amygdala, he plays a different game. Scooter and his ilk are the latest in a long line of prostitutes who sell their reputations–rather than their bodies–in exchange for money. Scooter uses his reputation to paint portraits of the world’s weird nerds as world-striding collossi via the same kind of patron/client relationship that has existed since time immemorial. The only notable thing about him is that, in addition to ego-stroking absolute maniacs, SA is a world leader in misleading obscuritanims. BTW, I guarantee that no one looked as cool as they do painted on the walls of an Italian cathedral by a Renaissance master.
So yeah, the same historical forces that built weird lion-man-things in ancient Babylon, the Sistine Chapel, and the British Museum now corrupt the web and pay for Scooter’s new Tesla. I’m sure it’s cold comfort, but the fact that no one wants to pay you six figures to write a substack is not a bad thing, imho. It just means that you’re not a sellout.
Since you’re not willing to sell fear, tell the masses that their prejudices are justified, or compromise your integrity, you may have to find more intangible ways to judge your success, and maybe accept that the good guys have to, as pg would say, “do things that don’t scale.” dodges rotten fruit
I think it would be cool if you posted longer pieces here, though, and that that it would be rad af to see the morewrite board get more content, in general!
Regarding @pyrex 's point of people only taking away a tiny fragment of the point, the third to last paragraph has me imagining weird lion-man-things in the Sistine chapel and British museum now and my brain is auto replacing all great art with weird lion things to great effect. Weird Lion-Man-Things in place of the statue of Liberty. Andy Warhol’s weird lion-man-things. Weird Lion-Man-Thing with a Pearl Earring. A Portrait of the Artist as a Weird Lion-Man-Thing. Spike Lee’s Do The Right Weird Lion-Man-Thing.
I should probably get some sleep.
But apart from that this is exactly the kind of response I was trying to put together myself.
Actually, as a furry, I’m obligated not to hate this.
Hey! Thank you for liking the things I write!
I think you’re right that both early-stage and late-stage Scott aren’t doing the thing that I implied I should be doing. (exaggerated and hamfisted system-building arranged around eventual predictions of doom) A thing I didn’t mention: I wrote an article in this style on a throwaway on LessWrong years ago and they totally ignored it. So I still don’t know if they hated it or if it just wasn’t their deal.
Soupy vague praise of powerful people is a separate thing he also seems to do, which you have clearly noticed. I don’t think it’s the only thing he does.
(What does he do? I’m systematically responding to everyone here, so I won’t paraphrase other people’s comments on what he does and will instead respond to them directly as I get to their posts.)
Anyway: I refuse to act as if he’s bad at the thing he’s doing. Even the people who criticize him generally refuse to summarize him accurately, which is a behavior of people who have recognized that someone else’s rhetoric has power over them and they don’t like it.
I’m also not sure yet if I’m unwilling to do it myself. One: I’m the cofounder of a startup. Doing what he does means more money for me. Two: right now I’m chewing on 8 responses to my post, so I’m “hungry” but not starving. Ask me what I’m selling in a week and my catalogue may have changed.
(PS: It might interest you to know that the original draft of this OP was about Paul Graham! I switched the mentioned figure to Scott Alexander because I had more to say about him and everyone here hates him more.)
I hear ya!
You’re right that Scott is absolutely good at what he does. @YourNetworkIsHaunted does a great job of explaining his method (loved the explanation of “apophasis”), and I second the recommendation for Dr. Sandifer’s Biegeness article; it’s the GameFAQs guide for decoding modern techfash writing. Scooter’s oeuvre viewreminds me a bit of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, but with more phrenology, and no one can say that Fukuyama didn’t take in a whole lot of people.
I don’t doubt that you could copy that form, however…for what it’s worth, it’s my personal suspicion that this is a “dark side” power that doesn’t work unless it’s being used to reinforce or justify people’s baser instincts. I posit that you can’t use these techniques to attract people and trick them into supporting positive progress in just the same way as one can’t develop a positive fascism that supports equity and social justice. The tools themselves just tend too strongly toward corruption.
At this time, I can’t support this feeling with any hard data, but the fact that nothing good has ever come from people using something like Scooter’s rhetorical style is, I think, pretty telling.
The other day my landlord came over and ranted at me at about 60 decibels for about 10 minutes about the state of my apartment. Then she saw I had The Man Who Was Thursday on my bookshelf and asked “Oh, so you like Chesterton?” She was oddly polite and helpful for the rest of the visit, and only raised my rent by $400/mo.
I read Chesterton when I was like 15 and thought he was brilliant. I grew up a little and started meeting Catholic and Mormon philosophy kids, who were generally weird transhumanists in the same category as otherkin, except with the world’s worst aesthetic. (If you’re going to fantasize about transcending your physical body, at least fantasize about being a dragon while you’re at it.)
It’s not surprising to me that Scott Alexander likes him – I like him too, on the strength of his non-philosophical gifts. He was consistently writing for overtly classist rich people but also for the masses: speaking to the exploiters and the exploited at the same time meant he actually had to innovate new ways of expressing his classism. He had to write out of the internalized classism of his audience more than he had to write out of outright contempt, and he only ventilated his own contempt in very narrow cases where he had made it seem totally defensible to do so.
I kind of came away from him feeling like he was the perfect demagogue for an era that ended – so his rhetoric is somewhat defanged, but the exact tendencies that made it so marketable to institutions are made even more glaringly obvious. I also kind of came away with the impression that even in stereotypically conservative philosophical traditions like Mormonism, voices like his totally squash out the people who are looking for a radical form of self-expression. And that this isn’t an accident, but a function.
I can’t talk about the long term effects of Scott Alexander yet because they haven’t happened, he’s not as good at his thing as Chesterton was at his thing, and our system of media, while deeply flawed, is still more democratic now in our time than his was in his time.
But I’ve at least got a vague theory saying that someone like him has to exist in every right-shaped pocket of every universe.