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Anyone else get that impression? A year ago, SSC had some incisive commentary, and approached a lot of the culture war topics with the sensitivity of someone who deeply understood the nation’s hinterland.

Now, it’s spun into a whole lot of techno-utopianism that I just can’t get on board with, and adopted much in the way of the region’s well-known blinders.

nah, it was bad a year ago too

I don’t think he’s ever been what I’d call a good writer. He does occasionally stumble onto the truth by sheer stubbornness and word volume. But virtually everything he’s ever written on politics or culture is terrible. He is constantly walking into debates seemingly with no understanding of the players or past arguments and then explaining with self-satisfaction why everyone who has discussed this in the past is wrong but he, amazingly, has the insight of Real Truth. And his Real Truths are generally either barely disguised reactionary apologetics, or just something really obviously false.

>And his Real Truths are generally either barely disguised reactionary apologetics, or just something really obviously false There's a third category: Sometimes they're extremely banal.
Yeah, half of all rationalist writing is an exercise in unravelling relatively simple complex into giant, overly verbose word mountains to make them seem more complex than they really are.

I don’t think so. This isn’t the first time he’s lived in the SF area; he was there before he did his residency too.

This is total armchair psychology ass-pulling, but if I had to guess, I would say it’s that he’s no longer surrounded by worshippers. For a long time pretty much everyone interacting with him bowed low, but especially in the last year there are more people than ever pushing back against his dumb shit (here, on Twitter, etc.). A lot of people who get used to uncritical devotion can’t handle it when it ends, and respond with defensive anger and more identification with the remaining loyal followers. See also fellow-traveler-in-technoutopianism Paul Graham, who lapped it up while the media worshipped Silicon Valley unconditionally, and then had a freakout once the love affair ended and had to let someone else run YC.

See also our current President

Scott has a great ability to seem reasonable until you actually look closer at what hes tries to imply with his posts. Hes the master of motte and baily tactics, which is ironic considering he popularised the term. You probably just learnt to look closer once he posted stuff you disagreed with.

Scott’s been bad way longer than a year. Slate Star Codex was never good.

He got noticeably worse when he gave up the LiveJournal and launched his own brand, but that was quite a few years ago.

I suggest instead that you are growing as a person. I suggest going back to random old stuff and seeing how it actually measures up.

(and in particular lol at him having any useful contribution on culture wars)

[removed]
@santaincarnate how does it feel to be an obnoxious nuisance who no one will ever love? How often does it keep you up at night? How often do you consider suicide?
only when bitcoin crashes

No, Scott’s basically the same. There’s a few things that could be going on here.

  1. In the last year you might have gotten smarter. Most people grow and change, learn in the period of a year. Scott doesn’t, he just follows the same incestuous blog ring that he has for years.

  2. Scott’s strain of techno-libertarianism or techno-utopianism has grown old and the cracks are already appearing. Many of the “unicorns” of Silicon Valley optimism have slowed their growth or gone bust. Tesla looks shakey. Steve Jobs is dead. Marx’s falling rate of profit still haunts. Finance capital looks towards schemes like ICOs and rent-seeking. Those who would criticise that Silicon Valley optimism in the popular press (Jacobin, Current Affairs Magazine, Viewpoint, etc) have found something of a voice in the last couple years and an intellectual midget like Scott can’t really compete.

  3. Similarly the political project that would most align with this techno-utopianism, neoliberalism, has suffered a series of setbacks. Financial crisis in 2007. Trump defeated Clinton. Brexit. Endless war in the Middle East. This leads Scott to the strange position of mildly supporting Sanders even though Scott cannot actually provide a coherent affirmative case for Sanders (not saying there isn’t one, I’m saying Scott doesn’t have the intellectual ability to verbalise it and is still chained to old ideology).

I'm gonna do something that's probably stupid, and defend Scott Alexander in /r/sneerclub, cause I think some of this criticism is unwarranted. >Most people grow and change, learn in the period of a year. Scott doesn't, he just follows the same incestuous blog ring that he has for years. I can't recall which ones, but I have seen him occasionally start reading new blogs. More importantly, he seems to have been [reading a lot of books](http://slatestarcodex.com/tag/book-review/) over the last year. The *Mistakes* and the *Predictions and Bets* show at least a token effort at increasing his own knowledge. I sorta see what you mean about libertarianism and techno-optimism looking less appealing in recent years. I'm about ready to go Sanders 2020 myself. However, I think you may be applying general trends too much to Scott in particular. I mean, he's just a psychiatrist who's optimistic about technological progress in the long term, which in general has been borne out by impressive advancements in self driving cars and machine learning over the last several years. He also wrote a very long anti-libertarianism FAQ. It's not like he's a tech employee or investor or something, and I don't see why the fact that a CEO of a company that Scott has never worked for or particularly cared about getting cancer discredits his entire worldview. Scott is also not especially pro-war. It's not like I come here to defend rationality, I come here to sneer at the parts that deserve to be sneered at, like everyone else. But I don't necessarily want to agree with any and all criticism of ssc just because I agree with some of it.
> I mean, he's just a psychiatrist who's optimistic about technological progress in the long term, which in general has been borne out by impressive advancements in self driving cars and machine learning over the last several years. And Richard Spencer is just a blogger looking for common ground with people he happens to like, what's wrong with all that?
I'll take "Ridiculous analogies" for $300, Alex
You can slice out all context and externalities to paint a rosy picture of anyone. This "gosh oh golly gee" tone is menacing in its duplicity. Smarm is the enemy of discourse, and "hey guys let's hear these racists out, surely rational laissez-faire discussion will bear out the Objective Autistic Truth^TM" *is as or more sinister than the guy telling you get in the gas van, because it pretends to care.
If you really think Scott, the polyamorous SanFran lefty infatuated with the sound of his own voice, is secretly fuelling up the racewar van then I don't know what to tell you.
[You can tell me I'm right](http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977), but you don't have to.
???
Normally I'm all about people who are some combination boring, combative and ignorant, but today is just an off day for some reason.
Honest question: Do your thoughts make sense to yourself, when you hear them in your head?
Most uncharitable, goodly sir.
\*tips fedora\*
The dude you are replying to is a literal Marxist. There's a lot of people he's unhappy with. Pretty close to all of us, actually. There are like six Marxists left, and four of them are octogenarians in villages in China that don't realize they are now supposed to believe in Socialism with Chinese characteristics. Bernie Sanders isn't even a real socialist, much less a Marxist. One can certainly be unhappy with the reactionary and libertarian elements of the self declared Rationalists without rejecting capitalism wholesale.
It's the end of history bro!
I'm not even the only Marxist in this thread, judging by usernames lol.
I can't figure out the typical representation of subscribers to this subreddit. Apparently there are several Marxists and other leftists who hang around to sneer to SSC and the like. But there is also redpilled_by_moldbug, whose comments often receive the most upvotes. Not only are they not a leftist, that they receive so many upvotes means there are many subscribers who share the same perspective. So that would seem to imply there are lots of rightists and leftists on this subreddit.
My point with that post was to show the waning prestige of Scott's ideology, not to show that a specific thing Scott said was wrong (that's been done in a myriad of other threads here). The failure of the US in the middle east is not some failure of being "pro-war" or "anti-war", it's a failure of liberalism more generally, a failure of the kind of technical management that Scott Alexander promotes. Scott may not have praised Steve Jobs in particular, but you have to see Scott as just one extremely dull celestial body in an entire galaxy of dumbasses. So yes, prominent people no longer being around to provide comfort to this ideology can indeed affect the overall cultural outlook. This ideology, The Californian Ideology as it has been called, is looking more and more wobbly. When big daddy finance capital has the bottle taken away you're gonna see a lot of people's bubbles bursting. Technical progress under capitalism can not be a smooth process, Scott's optimism will turn to pessimism once these same technical improvements lead to falling rate of profits or are seized by proletarians. Self-driving cars replace living labor with dead labor in an industry that's margins are already extremely low. Long term they are digging their own grave, as Marx said. And come on, don't make me laugh, the predictions section has nothing to do with increasing his own knowledge.
>Similarly the political project that would most align with this techno-utopianism, neoliberalism, has suffered a series of setbacks. Not sure why you think techno-utopianism is specifically associated with neoliberalism, the [Fully Automated Luxury Communism](https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/18/fully-automated-luxury-communism-robots-employment) idea has a long history on the left, for example in Oscar Wilde's [The Soul of Man Under Socialism](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/), or even Marx's own [fragment on machines](http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf) where he imagined that increasing development of technology would lead to a breakdown of the capitalist mode of production and "The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labor, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them."
Utopian Socialism and Scientific Socialism (aka Marxism) are two entirely different political beliefs. Engels has a very good piece on it; "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" which I highly recommend.
Best I can do when I'm drunk
The important thing is you get up every day and try, narc.
Thank you, the older I get the longer my hangovers are.

Scott was always bad

I agree