Confessions of a Cringe Soy Redditor

On Scott Alexander's role in our current political crisis

Scott Alexander recently published a thoughtful and heartbreaking piece grappling with his role in the emergence of a tyrannical government in America.

Twilight Of The Edgelords

(Unattributed quotes below are from this piece.)

I’m going to pick on Scott a bit, for three reasons:

• First, because Scott is one of my favorite essayists, and I think he’s a good person who wants to help people

• Second, because it seems like Scott is in a sensitive place and actively trying to make sense of his cultural power

• Third, because one time he was kind of mean to me on Reddit

Outline

• Backstory

• Edging

• Feel Me?

• Rules for Thee

• Truth and Power

Backstory

For those who are out of the loop: Scott Alexander is a figurehead of the Rationalist movement (which I’ve been more or less adjacent to for over a decade). The Rationalists, to greatly oversimplify, believe that any subject—no matter how technical, controversial, or esoteric—can benefit from dispassionate study and candid open discourse. There’s a lot of meta-discussion about cognitive biases and logical fallacies and epistemology.

It’s a bustling marketplace of ideas, and often very good ones do bubble up to the top. The community does its best work around the center of the Overton Window, providing deep explorations of important-but-uncontroversial topics like housing policy, taxation schemes, the efficacy of various medical interventions, etc.

Thing is, this approach to discourse really thrives at the edges of the Overton window. Race, gender, mental health, politics, and moral philosophy are among the most tantalizing Rationalist subjects, because it provides a safe space for taboo ideas. Do you think that a particular conspiracy theory is somewhat plausible? That Identity Group A is inherently smarter than Identity Group B? That Technocratic Aristocracy is better than Democracy? The Rationalists want to hear from you! Come hawk your wares! The unregulated (ok fine, lightly regulated) marketplace will decide if they’re any good.

Rationalists’ big thing is that the natural human process of cognition is capable of reaching accurate results, but that’s not really the default mode. And rationalists are not just aware of this — they think it’s a big problem, and they try really hard to push back on it and develop better reasoning skills.

…But of course, there’s more to it than predicting…part of the practice of rationalism is that in order to do it effectively, you have to be willing to be impolite. Not necessarily 24 hours a day or anything, but when you’re in Rationalism Mode you can’t also “read the room.” A rationalist would say that human psychology is over-optimized for reading the room, and that to get at the truth you need to be willing to deliberately turn off the room-reading portion of your brain and just throw your idea out.

—Matthew Yglesias via Slow Boring, In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics

Edging

As the culture wars intensified, Scott’s ostensible Psychiatry blog became a gathering place for people with…let’s call them nuanced opinions. It attracted gay marriage supporters who are wary of having trans women in traditionally female spaces; politically literate people who think the government should operate more like a corporation; and—most notoriously—people empathetic to racial inequality who nonetheless think it’s more a product of genetics than institutionalized racism or systemic bias. The blog became increasingly concerned with the rise of Cancel Culture and Woke Ideology, and the perceived chilling effect on honest-but-controversial research.

We wanted people to question p-hacked psychology studies and TED talk experts telling them the Nine Ways That Science Proves Merit Is Fake

…We wanted a swift, lean government that stopped strangling innovation and infrastructure

…We wanted to be able to hold a job without reciting DEI shibboleths

…We wanted to be able to discuss commonsense facts about sex and race without getting called Hitler

…We wanted to be able to prevent biological men with testosterone-boosted muscles from competing in women’s sports leagues

The tone of Scott’s writing began to shift as well. The little hints of self-satisfied intellectualism that dotted his earlier essays grew into a bitter self-righteousness.

I can’t entirely blame him—the Left was starting to overreach, clamping down hard on the Right side of the Overton window. Well-intentioned professors were being fired because their scientific conclusions didn’t match the consensus liberal reality occupied by your average undergraduate. Scott himself was attacked as racist and sexist by The New York Times.

And so the Rationalists pushed back. Scott had gathered huge amounts of credibility, especially among the techie elite, and was now using it to bravely defend the rightmost edge of the Overton Window.

Now that fight is over, and it’s clear who won. But the Overton Window can’t sustain too wide a berth, and the erstwhile “free speech absolutists” are literally jailing people for Leftist political speech. Scott is understandably upset.

We’ve spent the past ten years pushing, you know, based heterodox edgy opinions. I still think our opinions were true and good. But…

All of our good ideas, the things the smug misinformation expert would have tried to get us cancelled for, have gotten perverted in the most depressing and horrifying way possible.

…Wasn’t it Kipling who said you needed to be prepared to “hear the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”?

What went wrong?

Feel Me?

Writing is effective to the degree that it pulls the reader into empathic resonance with the author. This is true of fiction and poetry, sure, but also of philosophy, news reporting, and mathematics¹.

Content thrives when it evokes feeling. Feeling is what gets content copied, clicked, shared, liked. The feeling can be joyous or angry or horny or sad—all that matters is its strength. Everything, from cat gifs to medieval literature, follows this rule.

Sometimes we like to think that nonfiction is somehow exempt. That documentaries and essays and newspapers thrive because of their informational content, and not because of the feelings they arouse in their audience. This is obviously silly.²

So the purpose of an essay is not to argue for a thesis. The purpose of an essay is what it does. The purpose of an essay is to evoke emotion.

When I read Scott’s Ivermectin essay, sure I learned a bunch about statistical analysis and worm infections. But mostly I felt very clever, because I was able to follow each plot twist in Scott’s Agatha Christie-esque investigation. I fantasized about all the WELL ACTUALLYs I’d be dropping the next time the topic of Ivermectin came up. I mentally rehearsed my lines in bed that night.

I write because I want you to feel what I feel. Sometimes getting you to believe what I believe is part of that, maybe even a necessary part. But it’s not the main point.

Sometimes the author is afraid, and infects you with their fear. Sometimes the author is optimistic, and infects you with their optimism. Sometimes the author is greedy, and infects you with greed. Sometimes the author is just really jazzed about a neat idea, and…you get the pattern.

The best Scott Alexander essays are the ones where Scott is feeling clever: in his wanderings he has stumbled upon a compelling idea, and the essay promises to guide you along the same magical journey. The next best are written by a perplexed Scott, and offer a tour through a delightfully interesting maze, where he points out the most intriguing dead ends (see e.g. his Gordian resolution of the Repugnant Conclusion).

But the worst essays, the ones that turned me off from reading his blog for a couple years, are the ones that come from a place of self-righteousness. The ones where Scott sees himself as fighting an important ideological battle, as a bastion of truth in a mad world. Because when I read those essays, I start to see myself as a soldier in the fight. My adrenaline rises. I can feel the threat emerging, just over the horizon. They’re coming for our free speech! For our academic rigor! They’ll make us choose between Truth and Justice!

A sample from one essay that made the rounds as Trump propaganda:

If you disagree with me, come up with a bet and see if I’ll take it.

And if you don’t, stop.

Stop fearmongering. Somewhere in America, there are still like three or four people who believe the media, and those people are cowering in their houses waiting for the death squads.

…Stop talking about dog whistles.

…Stop responding to everyone who worries about Wall Street or globalism or the elite with “I THINK YOU MEAN JEWS…”

…Stop turning everything into identity politics. The only thing the media has been able to do for the last five years is shout “IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS!” at everything, and then when the right wing finally says “Um, i…den-tity….poli-tics?” you freak out and figure that the only way they could have possibly learned that phrase is from the KKK.

…Stop making people suicidal. Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. Stop terrifying children. Stop giving racism free advertising. Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them. Stop. Stop. Stop.

This is great writing! It immediately draws us into Scott’s emotional state. His anger and frustration are infectious. The repetition is hypnotic.

And so it doesn’t matter that Scott is emphatically not a Trump supporter. The essay made Trump supporters feel good about themselves. And so, much to Scott’s and no one else’s surprise, it made the rounds in a bunch of Conservative spaces.

Scott’s essays are so compelling because of his skill at drawing—literally compelling—the reader into his own headspace. It’s just that sometimes it’s not a very good headspace.

Again, I’m picking on Scott for reasons. The same is true of every other essayist I love. Sam Kriss at his best provides catharsis; at his worst, a sense of jaded superiority. Ted Gioia at his best makes me fall in love with art and music as if for the first time; at his worst, like I’m part of a small culturally-literate elite in a crumbling world. Alex Dobrenko at his best makes me feel silly and whimsical; at his worst…well, actually, Alex is almost always silly and whimsical.

And of course, the same is true of me. My best essays come from a sense of wonder; the worst come from a place of frustration and despair. It doesn’t help that the latter tend to get more engagement. (Where this particular essay ranks is left as an exercise to the reader.)

Rules for Thee

We’ve always known that authors are unreliable. It’s been hammered into my head since middle school that there’s no such thing as unbiased writing, that every writer brings their personal experience and emotions and opinions into their work, no matter how hard they try to stay objective. Doesn’t matter if it’s The Associated Press or Breitbart—the difference is only ever a matter of degree.

The problem with Rationalism is that we really, desperately want to believe that we’ve found the magic formula, if not to be perfectly objective, then at least to be more objective than anyone else. That we’ve found antidotes for the passions, superstitions, insanities, and groupthink that plague other movements. That we, through our growing Rational superpowers, are capable of perfectly separating the subjective and objective, of evaluating reality as it is, without any contamination from our feelings about how it should be.

I would approve of [the Rationalist community] much more if they called themselves the irrationality community. Because it is just another kind of religion. A different set of ethoses. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but the notion that this is, like, the true, objective vantage point I find highly objectionable. And that pops up in some of those people more than others. But I think it needs to be realized it’s an extremely culturally specific way of viewing the world, and that’s one of the main things travel can teach you.

—Tyler Cowen, in an interview with Ezra Klein

Here’s what I wrote in Ayn Rand Will Kill Us All, the essay Scott took issue with:

…for many of us—including myself—the most insidiously sticky ideas are dressed up in scientific or logical rigor. The language of reason creates an illusion of certainty.

Sometimes we can uncover this trickery through rational discourse—e.g. the sections above make a rational argument that Rand is wrong. But too often the logic serves as armor for a belief that carries emotional appeal. We might listen to a counterargument, but we won’t hear it.

…When we dress our beliefs up in rational argument, we ironically end up constructing an iron-clad fantasy world. We convince ourselves that we’re immune to emotional appeal, that we alone have the pragmatic sobriety needed to see the situation clearly. But often all we’ve done is add a protective layer of reason around something that feels true.

And here’s the most salient part of Scott’s long response:

Mention that Reason exists, and they'll interpret it as a claim that you, the only rational person, are claiming to always be right and infallible. But (they retort) actually nobody knows anything, and the only wise people are the people like them who humbly admit this.

Look, I’m far from an anti-Rationalist. I really do believe in Reason, or at least that there are more and less effective methods for navigating the world. I believe Rationalism worth studying and learning from.

I just doubt the ability of any person—and especially any group of people—to grasp Reason for more than a fleeting moment. Worse, the more we try think of ourselves as rational and objective, the more we push our emotion, bias, and insanity into the shadows, where they can operate with impunity.

Scott’s sin was not, as he implies in Twilight of the Edgelords, merely speaking truth to an increasingly illiberal Leftist ideology. It was not in the facts he enumerated or in the opinions he offered. It certainly wasn’t in presenting ideas I and other Cringe Soy Redditors disagreed with.

His sin was indulging in that feeling of self-righteousness. It was in deploying that informal, hyperbolic, caps-ridden, repetitive style of rhetoric seen in the “Stop” passage above. It was the emotional affect—not the intellectual content!—that made his writing such a powerful weapon for the knaves.

Truth and Power

There’s a way to do this correctly. The ACLU has literally defended Nazis, but no one thinks they’re responsible for galvanizing the White Supremacy movement. You can defend without simultaneously attacking.

If you want to make the world a better place through writing, ask yourself—what emotion am I drawing people towards? Am I writing from a place of compassion, curiosity, excitement? Or am I writing from a place of anger, fear, and resentment?

I have two thoughts on how writers might learn from Scott’s experience, and become more responsible stewards of our collective cultural clout:

First, you can just not write things. Sometimes signal-boosting a particular truth creates negative utility. Maybe the “true, kind, and necessary” criterion isn’t something to be weakened. Don’t be Coria.

Coria: …I think you should say true things.

Beroe: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying too.

Coria: No, you think that saying true things happens to produce good consequences. I’m saying that you should say true things, regardless of the consequences.

Second, understand and acknowledge your own emotional state before putting hands on keyboard. Avoid writing out of resentment and anger, even when (especially when!) it feels justified.

Opposing evil is also a virtue, and I plan to exercise it. I think the coming years will provide us with no shortage of emergencies, and during emergencies I’ll focus my energies and commentary on triaging the emergency rather than backstabbing

I think Scott’s essays, in aggregate, have done more good than harm. They’ve introduced me and many others to new and powerful ways of thinking. More importantly, his writing has spawned several online spaces with slightly-less-than-average horribleness.

I’ll also point out that impossible to wield power without doing a proportional amount of harm. Well-intentioned CEOs sometimes need do layoffs; peaceful world leaders sometimes need to conduct wars. Every national policy, no matter how well thought out, hurts someone. It’d be shocking if Scott’s influence never had any negative effects on the world.

But we can’t overlook the fact that Scott’s writing had a substantial—and, as I and many other Cringe Soy Redditors tried to point out, predictable—role in creating an ideological foundation for the illiberal regime that currently occupies the seat of power in America.

The smug woke misinformation expert Redditors knew! They predicted, very clearly, “if you ever let people talk about how men have higher grip strength than women, then 5 - 10 years later America will be taken over by a cadre of frothing tyrant-bigots who will try to cancel the Constitution.” We laughed at them because it was so outlandish. But in retrospect they were the greatest superforecasters of all.

So I’ll try and make another prediction: Scott will continue his foray into post-Rationalist territory. He’ll recognize that Truth is always distorted by language, and choose his words more carefully. He’ll realize that he’s not just a purveyor of fine ideas; he’s a wizard who can draw millions of people into a synchronized emotional state.

And then we’ll see what an honest man can do with power.

1

There is strictly speaking no such thing as mathematical proof; we can in the last analysis, do nothing but point; …proofs are what Littlewood and I call gas, rhetorical flourishes designed to affect psychology, pictures on the board in the lecture, devices to stimulate the imagination of pupils.

—G.H. Hardy

2. The exception here is professional media: textbooks, academic journals, data feeds, documentation, etc. Media that people mostly get paid to consume, or consume in pursuit of an external objective.