Skip Navigation

ITT Pyrex's self-loathing and request for practical advice

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.

42
42 comments
  • 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:

      • 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.

    • 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).

  • If it means anything to you, I read your post beginning to end without flinching. I'm riddled with ADHD, so that's rare.

    I can see plenty of others agreeing with you, and I do too. I feel it all the time and I don't really have an answer, sorry.

    I am obsessed with breaking through the hesitations and anxieties to just write shit and publish it. I see David and Amy posting more frequently than my bowel movements (sorry) and I spend a month or two lamenting over it. I almost went a year between posts and I'm already a few months since my last one.

    The only thing I can say is that comparing yourself to someone else's success (as in audience size) and analysing their style for clues on how to emulate their popularity is only going to hold you back. I've read two of your things this afternoon and, perhaps because you're letting off steam, you're very entertaining to read.

    I was really happy when @[email protected] proposed we create this MoreWrite community because I hoped it would help people like you and us to get ideas out there.

    I don't think you're doing anything wrong other than not swallowing your pride every now and again and publishing something and banging your drum so hard you can't hear your inner voice saying it's stupid.

    • Hey, I find that pretty reassuring! I'll keep dumping words on the internet, maybe a lot faster.

      I write a lot more than I post. I don't like my style, but I've developed two authorial voices. Sometimes I play the fake academic, who I hate. Sometimes I play the tech troll and rant freely, which I hate. I would kind of describe my current style as a conscious attempt to not write like Mike Masnick, which creates an odd set of tensions the same way as pointing your horse the way you don't want it to go.

      (I like Mike Masnick. We care about similar issues and have similarly declarative styles. That's the reason I have to try not to imitate him.)

      I've occasionally tried to write posts in the style of people who stand out as effective bloggers. (Xe Iaso, Dan Luu, Soatok, Paul Graham) I didn't produce anything I thought was good, so those remain deep in the filing cabinet. I've occasionally posted throwaways on websites where people seem susceptible to rhetoric I hate, and they've mostly been ignored when I've done this, which suggests I'm not nailing it or I don't have the existing clout, or probably both.

  • as a writer, I have no idea how to supply an answer that would be useful to you, but feel like noting my own approach might help? I write best when I'm angry at something, the summary is always "And then THESE FUCKERS ..."

    also I try to be good at sentences and wit and jokes people will remember along the way, but the point is it's nothing without a strong moral core

    as it happens Scott gave us his secret decoder ring in the leaked email to Topher Brennan: SSC was created to promote reaction and race science, exactly as obviously as it has achieved doing, and ultimately rests on an ecosystem of astroturf started by Thiel.

    • Last paragraph first: Grudgingly, yeah, that's a pretty good literal answer to the question. Peter Thiel won't sell just anyone a cult following, and you're not paying for it in cash, but he will sell you one if you're lucky.

      Writing advice: I like your writing. I haven't tried to emulate you because I haven't read enough of your writing, and because when I made my first brush with you (which was like a year ago) I was spending a lot less time emulating people in general.

      It's a little distressing to me because, well, I'm way too anxious to play the game of moral righteousness straight-facedly. It takes a very different personality from mine to say "Those are the bad people, fuck them" and not see the obvious similarities between me and the people I hate.

      Some level of this is actual, real-world hypocrisy: I'm the cofounder of an AI startup and at the same time I deeply dislike AI. I went here because one, there was money, and two, I didn't want a way worse person than me to take the same job. It has not been what I hoped for -- it has been deeply destructive to my personality -- it has taught me a lot and made me much more cynical -- it has definitely made me stupider.

      I don't really know how to do a hypocrisy purge. (I hear this is what ayahuasca is for, but Catholicism also works, and I'm considering getting my brain tattooed with a laser gun.) I think until I do one I have to temper all my moral righteousness by saying "I think I know why this person is doing the thing they're doing, and if you want their (bad) motives, here's my guess."

      • yeah. good people don't change bad systems, bad systems change good people.

        i have only vague advice (we had our monthly in-office day today and i am in full body pain right now and can't think) but i'm vaguely picturing a book I have here by a guy, writing as Jake Donoghue, who used to be a crypto marketer and has written an "and then THESE FUCKERS" about basically himself now that he's gotten out of that racket, and finance writers with not a good word for crypto think it's awesome. So it can be done.

  • I think you are overestimating how much of SlateScott's success comes from his brilliance, and how much even his dedicated readers understand (or even properly read) of each post. He's a poster in a tight knit network of posters, many of whom know each other socially, and all of whom heap praise on the leading lights as high IQ geniuses. Being influenced by SlateScott is self-flattering to a certain type, so you get many testimonials.

    This may be a bit of a stretch, but I really liked this essay on Matt Iglesias, but really it's about the banality of posting success: https://maxread.substack.com/p/matt-yglesias-and-the-secret-of-blogging

    There are all kinds of things you can do to develop and retain an audience -- break news, loudly talk about your own independence, make your Twitter avatar a photo of a cute girl -- but the single most important thing you can do is post regularly and never stop.

    ...it's the best time there’s ever been to be somebody who can write something coherent quickly. Put things out. Let people yell at you. Write again the next day.

  • Before I was posting about tech on the internet I was posting about philosophy. I don't know enough about philosophy to be good at it -- I've read almost nothing -- but I noticed you could get pretty far by saying "Kant probably didn't have anything valuable to say -- he was a massive racist." A balm for people who are looking for an excuse not to have read Kant.

    My bleak theory is that to be convincing I'd have to switch to calculatedly mediocre text deliberately orchestrated to be unsurprising. My experience is that when an extremely successful article contains genuine insight, it separately contains an absolutely mediocre take that is the real explanation for why it went viral.

    Let's start with "Scott is a bigot" as an example claim. That's true, but the evidence is basically just a bland admission of "yeah." Nobody can spin that into a detailed and personal story about how Scott got mindhacked, which is the single part of Scott Alexander's bigotry that can be discussed at a level interesting to bored idiots. Discussing his bigotry directly would make it obvious -- he hasn't stated any takes that aren't incredibly commonplace for tech-adjacent eugenics losers, and has waffled publicly about whether or not to disavow even those stances.

    What options are left? I could write a history of the ideas involved and risk boring people to sleep: such a story would contain basically zero concrete events, because we only have his distant past-tense account of how he came to his current conclusions. Or I could write something wildly speculative and commit defamation: "here's how it might have happened: a fictionalized account of how a mediocre person became racist." Or I could go into hyperbole: Eliezer Yudkowsky is Scott Alexander is Mencius Moldbug is George Lincoln Rockwell.

    Would the latter post do OK? I'm afraid to try it: one because I'm afraid it wouldn't and I'd feel like more of a failure, and two because I'm afraid it would.

    These are the opinions I don't like having about other people, but they also feel increasingly vindicated when I look at what text performs well on Reddit, and when I observe the basically-zero correlation between the topic of an article and the text of its responses. I've seen an enormous number of successful posts that can be summarized as "the author presents their grand unifying theory of X, with the understanding that the reader will never attempt to apply it to examples outside the post."

  • 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.

  • I'm sorry if this one seems like I've painted with too broad a brush or gotten it completely wrong.

    What you're saying roughly conforms to this pattern: "This guy's writing sucks; why is he more successful than me?" I imagine it's a question writers ask themselves all the time. I won't be the one to solve that question for anyone else, but in my case, I think about what successful writing is for me. I try to understand what I'm trying to achieve with my writing. The bare minimum is getting my point across, though most of the time, that's all I aim for. Sometimes, I want to make people laugh or react, but usually, I'll feel successful as long as we've achieved mutual understanding.

    As a follow-up to the above, I remind myself that writing is communication, and communication is difficult. You're trying to take some abstract thought inside your brain and implant it in someone else's! It's a miracle that we can do that at all. And so, to that end, I am sceptical of Scott's success.

    On the one hand, I have not learned much of the common language between Scott and his ilk. His audience can read his writing and extract the profound knowledge otherwise impenetrable to other folk. But on the other hand, and this speaks more to the crowd of "thought leaders" and "very powerful people", his writing is long and tedious. It would be surprising if any of these high-powered people you speak of actually have the time or energy to filter for whatever grains of thought are embedded in the river of mud that Scott conjures.

    As others have pointed out, I think it's far more likely that they're coming in with preconceived notions and beliefs that they are trying to rationalise. Scott's blog is the hearth with which they nurture their terrible ideas. He is an enabling psychiatrist who is happy to overmedicate his patients. You may have seen memes about bad people learning therapy terms to manipulate people (e.g. Jonah Hill). He's essentially the therapist who is teaching them.

    • You've pegged me OK! I know how I want to feel about my writing. Well, wanting it hasn't made it happen. Telling myself "Well, this is the emotion I should have" hasn't changed the emotions I do have. Telling myself "Time to not eat" doesn't make me starve less.

      In the past I've tried to mutilate the impulse out of my own brain, but I think it mostly made me hate myself. Right now I'm doing the experiment of admitting -- I'm probably going to crave adoration until I die -- and asking "OK, what happens next?"

      On Scott -- as far as I can tell, Scott's playing a version of the "debate in good faith" game. The rules are that you only say things you believe, and when someone convinces you of something, you admit it.

      Every philosopher in the world, good or bad, plays a version of this game. A third secret rule of this game is always implicit, taking the form of the answer to this question: "When do I become convinced of something?"

      How Scott answers this question is clearly part of his success and a key commonality with his audience. Scott is clearly willing to state strong belief in things he has not thought very much about, and Scott is clearly unusually easy to convince. I assume that whatever rules are etched in his brain, similar rules are etched in his audience's brains.

      Based on how he plays the game how he likes it, and other people move, and I don't move, the particular rules in his head clearly aren't the same ones in mine. Or at least I've decided not to be moved by this particular guy. I also think people say they've moved when they haven't, as a rhetorical strategy -- Marc Andreessen says he's just now becoming a Republican. Scott's commentors act as if they've just now considered that eugenics might be the answer.

      In other responses I've offered some opinions on why he would choose to play this particular game: I think the way he happens to play the game is a second-order phenomenon of "the extreme ambivalence of wanting to hold terrible social attitudes and strong belief in your own personal virtue at the same time." I think you observe this: "enabling psychiatrist [...] happy to overmedicate his patients" is a good figurative characterization.

      (Actually, is it literally true? It feels like it would be invasive to check.)

  • 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!

  • 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.

42 comments