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.
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.”