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’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.)
The truth is, there is no way for me to confirm or deny that characterization as fact. I could link to some of his writing that I’ve seen on Adderall and other amphetamines, but I don’t think those contain anything particularly damning (other than the subtext that his audience should try lying their way into getting an Adderall prescription).
I think most people would see higher performance on general tasks on Adderall. Not sure if this is actually a good reason to put everyone on Adderall.
Side effects can be pretty brutal, although people who abuse caffeine to get the same level of stimulation are going to probably have them a lot worse.