As a former enthusiastic follower of SSC, I’ve been reading a lot of SneerClub recently and become a lot more critical of Scott’s writings. I figured it would be a fun exercise to reread some of the posts I remember endorsing enthusiastically at first but which also catch some of the most flak from SneerClub, and see what I think of them now. I’m talking about Radicalising the Romanceless and its follow-up, Untitled.
And in fact, a glaring problem immediately jumped out at me, a couple paragraphs into RtR. But perhaps it’s best summed up by a short but oh-so-revealing phrase in section III of Untitled: ‘So given that real-life nerds are like this…’
The concept of a “nerd”, to me, refers to a vaguely-defined set of interests, talents, and personality traits that loosely correlate. Someone who is “nerdy” in one sense may not at all be “nerdy” in another: think of the STEM major who’s also loud, extraverted and charismatic; the anime and comics aficionado who has no head for mathematics; and so on. On each axis of nerdiness there are gradations: someone who got an engineering degree and took a job in the financial sector is probably less nerdy than someone who got the same degree and took a job designing complex machinery, who is in turn less nerdy than a third person who got the degree and went on to do a PhD. Crucially, someone’s position on all axes of nerdiness can and does change throughout their lifetime.
The Scotts, by contrast – Aaronson extremely so, but Alexander too – believe in Nerds with a capital N: a fundamental, inescapable category as solid as a race or a sex, or perhaps even a species. I was already skeptical about this part on first reading, but I wrote it off as likely a transatlantic misunderstanding: I’m European, I didn’t have to go through American high school with its cheerleaders and pep rallies and rigid jock vs. nerd distinctions, maybe this nerd identity thing just makes more sense to Americans than it does to me.
This time around, I’ve changed my mind. Cultural differences cannot excuse the degree of nerd essentialism on display in those posts. Insofar as a solid category of Nerds exists to the degree the Scotts believe, then it is the effect of sitting around in isolated geek circles moping about those insufferable popular/neurotypical/normie kids, not the cause. A self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one.
And that brings me to the main problem with RtR and the whole Nice Guys/Poor Minorities comparison. I’ll hand it to Scott, the angry feminist blogs he quotes are missing the point: the difference is not “entitlement” or “structural oppression” or other SJ clichés for which you can dispute definitions and goalposts until the cows come home. The difference is the degree to which you can fix your problems yourself. ^1
A black guy who’s discriminated and bullied because of his skin colour can’t make his skin any lighter, or his tormentors less racist, by adopting a more positive mindset. A poor single mum can’t suddenly pay for healthcare and her kids’ education just by changing her worldview. But a shy lonely nerd complaining how no one can ever love him? That problem is almost always between his ears.
Mark Manson wrote Models to help straight men improve their dating lives by improving themselves. Jennifer Peepas writes Captain Awkward where she advises her 98% female readership on social and emotional questions. I’m sure they would disagree on many things, but both spend a lot of time ramming home one central point: dating success is almost entirely determined by your mindset.
The more I read, hear and see, the more I am convinced this is true. Sure, some people really have the deck stacked against them, like those with disabilities or deformities or whatever that poor guy Barry (quoted in RtR) was dealing with. But for the vast majority, if you’re confident in your own worth, honest about your preferences, and cool with rejection, you’ll get there eventually. People who are conventionally unattractive, or shy, or into really weird hobbies, or all of the above, end up in fulfilling relationships all the time. Scott “woe is me, a Nerd” Aaronson himself has a wife and children!
(Corollary: having lots of sex and/or relationships doesn’t have to mean you’re happy. In section VII of RtR, Scott looks at some statistics about virginity and numbers of sex partners and concludes: ‘If you’re smart, don’t drink much, stay out of fights, display a friendly personality, and have no criminal history – then you are the population most at risk of being miserable and alone.’ He assumes, without ever providing an argument, that there’s a 1-on-1 relation or at least a strong correlation between having lots of sex and not being ‘miserable and alone.’ Where is that written? There are plenty of people who use the thrill and validation of sex to drown out the crushing insecurity they feel inside – I should know, I’ve been one of them.)
I was mostly done composing this post when this quality sneer was posted. It’s a perfect example of what I mean: the writer of the linked comment can complain all he want about ‘Chads’ and ‘Stacys’ and being a ‘lonely beta guy’ but this whole fucked-up worldview is probably 99% of the reason he isn’t getting laid in the first place.
Any lonely nerd guys reading this: Stop obsessing over virginity statistics and evolutionary psychology and whatever other Red Pills you’ve taken. Unlike people struggling with poverty or racism, you can pull yourself out by your bootstraps, but only if you cut that shit out of your life.
^1 EDIT: /u/Fillanzea raises an excellent point. Besides “is this problem caused by external forces or can I fix it myself”, there’s another important distinction. Things like money, jobs, apartments, and not-getting-beaten-up can be demanded and redistributed; you can enforce laws and contracts around them. It doesn’t matter if your landlord grumbles about you privately, you just need him to fix your sink. It doesn’t matter if the bully still thinks you’re inferior scum in his heart of hearts, you just need him to leave you the fuck alone.
By contrast, love, sex and affection are given enthusiastically or they are meaningless. Trying to override that basic truth will just make everyone involved miserable. This is why another central theme of Captain Awkward (I’ve been reading her a lot) is: you’re allowed to reject people romantically for silly and unfair reasons, and anyone who complains about this has Not Gotten the Point. If you had to provide sound arguments for rejecting someone then the whole concept of consent would be moot.
Thanks for writing this. It’s more serious than usual for this sub, but I know it’s heartfelt.
I see a lot of myself in Scott Alexander. I’m just happy I got myself in order before these parts of the Internet turned toxic. Otherwise I might have been dragged into the self-destructive nerd supremacy thinking, and the constructed alternate relativity where the SJWs are always coming for you.
A good post. Though being able to fix your problems yourself is a sign of lacking structural oppression, so I would say the angry feminist blogs are 100% right about this. And feeling as though not getting everything you want in life is the same as structural oppression is a form of entitlement.
I want to highlight this:
Not only is this true, this is in some ways the best case scenario of unhappy sexual relationships, which include abusive, exploitative, or mutually toxic relationships. The most telling thing about the Nice Guy attitude to sexual partners is that they don’t think about this. They just think sex partner = happiness-object. They don’t think of a sex partner as a person with needs of their own, who will make demands of their own, who can easily make you miserable and alone depending on what their needs and demands are and how they express them. They’re so busy resenting those who reject them for having standards and preferences that they don’t even stop to think that having a relationship of necessity requires constantly having to try to meet another person’s standards and preferences. It’s not like acceptance gets you past that. Your SO is still a person.
I don’t think that “the degree to which you can fix your problems yourself” accounts for as much of the difference as you would argue. Most progressives are rightfully skeptical of religious discrimination, and it might well be easier to change religions than to free yourself from a decade of self-destructive thought patterns. Most progressives are skeptical of drug-testing people who receive government benefits, or denying people jobs on the basis of nonviolent drug convictions, even though using marijuana - if not harder drugs - is a problem you can fix yourself.
Dating and sex are fundamentally different from employment, housing, and other arenas where we treat discrimination as a problem we can remedy, because sex is not a resource controlled by women. Sex is (ideally) about mutual pleasure, and relationships are (ideally) about mutual growth and emotional support. And what you’re seeking isn’t a tenant or an employee but a person you could be sharing your bed and your long-term emotional life with. Romantic partners are not fungible in the way that employees or tenants are. And for that reason, you are allowed to discriminate even if your reasons are terrible. You are allowed to seek your own quirky and arbitrary bliss. Many of us would think badly of someone who refused to date black people, but a person who doesn’t want to date black people isn’t helping anyone by forcing themselves to date black people, or by being forced to date black people against their will. (It would be pretty awful for the black people they date as well!) And fat acceptance activists may well argue that the bias against fat people as dating partners is unfair, but they don’t want to date the guy with the “no fat chicks” sticker on his car!
Now, I agree with you about 99% of the rest: sitting around in isolated geek circles moping is likely to make a person unpleasant and misogynistic, and to weight the dice against them when it comes to dating. And most people can get dates if they put themselves out more and get better attitudes - heck, even the D&D weirdos I hung out with in high school had decent luck getting dates. But the poisonous thing about nerd-misogyny* is that red-pill and black-pill attitudes fundamentally see sex as a resource controlled by women, who are driven by evolution or stupidity to make awful decisions about allocating that resource. If you see sex as something freely and mutually chosen, then you can be disappointed if you’re not getting it, but you can’t feel entitled to it.
*And just so we’re clear, by nerd-misogyny I mean the misogyny of misogynistic nerds, which is not necessarily the attitude of nerds in general.
Maybe I grew up in an odd place, but I doubt nerd vs. jock distinctions are huge at most schools. There are popular kids and unpopular kids, but it doesn’t have much to do with a nerd/jock conflict. I was definitely more of classical “nerd” in high school, but I had several friends who were varsity athletes paying football on Friday night, then sitting at a table playing board games Saturday night.
Life would be simpler if they’d dedicate themselves to the celibate life and work ceaselessly to bring about me, the acausal robot god.
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As a teenage loner myself, I got where Alexander was coming from with those articles. What I found most jarring about them was that suddenly the deterministic, statistical and biological perspective is replaced with an emphasis on the importance of feelings and social phenomena.
Given these articles in addition to his most latest outburst, I think what he’s trying to communicate is the importance of self expression. Which I agree is important, and people should definitely be allowed to try and explore ways of expressing themselves that allow them to be accepted by others. But Alexander’s solutions seem to be more self serving and short sighted rather than pragmatic and fair.
If we’re re-reading Alexander’s old posts, I’d be curious to know other peoples thoughts are on his ‘Meditations on Moloch’. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something seemed wrong about that post. Besides the grandiose asides and the fact that he’s clearly on something.
This argument doesn’t usually work, because incels think nerdy or “beta” guys suffer from unyielding physical constraints, like being short or effeminate, or having a weak jaw, a small penis, bad pheromones, etc.