Really? Weird. Very different experience.

(Maybe crypto is less deteriorative than business?)

I've spent a lot of time trying to write without any intentional exercise of style! I think I've read far too much text generated by people on the psychotic spectrum to actually manage this.

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.

Ack, that makes me want to reappraise him. It's likely there's a version of him who exists in my head who writes a little better than the version who writes on the page. I'm definitely guilty of skimreading him a lot.

Hey, I find that pretty reassuring! I'll keep dumping words on the internet, maybe a lot faster.

I write a lot more than I post. I don't like my style, but I've developed two authorial voices. Sometimes I play the fake academic, who I hate. Sometimes I play the tech troll and rant freely, which I hate. I would kind of describe my current style as a conscious attempt to not write like Mike Masnick, which creates an odd set of tensions the same way as pointing your horse the way you don't want it to go.

(I like Mike Masnick. We care about similar issues and have similarly declarative styles. That's the reason I have to try not to imitate him.)

I've occasionally tried to write posts in the style of people who stand out as effective bloggers. (Xe Iaso, Dan Luu, Soatok, Paul Graham) I didn't produce anything I thought was good, so those remain deep in the filing cabinet. I've occasionally posted throwaways on websites where people seem susceptible to rhetoric I hate, and they've mostly been ignored when I've done this, which suggests I'm not nailing it or I don't have the existing clout, or probably both.

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.)

I don't think you sent this to me personally, but it has been sent to me. I still like it quite a bit. I reread it now to make sure of that!

I think your summary (and additional analysis) is pretty accurate. I think I would add a few things:

• He's not being evil in every post. Some of the posts are OK.
• [Elizabeth Sandifer observes this.] He tends to compare a bad argument to a very bad argument, and he's usually willing to invite snark or ridicule.

There's a crunchy systemic thing I want to add. I'm sure Elizabeth Sandifer gets this, it's just not rhetorically spotlit in her post --

A lot of people who analyze Scott Alexander have difficulty assigning emotional needs to his viewers. Scott Alexander decides to align himself with Gamergate supporters in his feminism post: Gamergate isn't a thing you do when you're in a psychologically normal place.

An old Startup Guy proverb says that you should "sell painkillers, not vitamins" -- you want people to lurch for your thing when they're doing badly because you're the only thing that will actually solve their problem. When people treat Scott Alexander's viewers as if they're smug, psychologically healthy startup twits, they typically take his viewers' engagement with Scott Alexander and make it into this supererogatory thing that his audience could give up or substitute at any time. His influence by this account is vitamin-like.

This makes the tech narcissists seem oddly stronger than normal people, who are totally distorted by their need for approval. We kind of treat them like permanent twisted reflections of normal people and therefore act as if there's no need for funhouse mirrors to distort them. We make the even more fundamental error of treating them like they know who they are.

This is how I think it actually works: the narcissists you meet are not completely different from you. They're not unmoored from ethics or extremely sadistic. They're often extremely ambivalent -- there's a clash of attitudes in their heads that prevents them from taking all the contradictory feelings inside them and reifying them as an actual opinion.

From what I can tell, Scott is actually extremely effective at solving the problem of "temporarily feeling like a horrible person." He's specifically good at performing virtue and kindness when advocating for especially horrible views. He's good at making the thing you wanted to do anyway feel like the difficult last resort in a field of bad options.

I'll admit -- as a person with these traits, this is another place where the basis for my analysis seems completely obvious to me, yet I see an endless dogpile of nerds who seem as if they willfully do not engage with it. I assume they thought of it, find it convincing on some level and therefore they make significant effort to repress it. If I'm going to be conceited for a moment, though, this is probably simultaneously expecting too much intelligence and too much conventionally narcissistic behavior from my audience, who are, demographically, the same people who thought Scott was brilliant in the first place.

Hey, thank you! Actually, as a person who can produce extremely large amounts of coherent text really fast, I find this oddly reassuring. I have a limited number of things to say but I can certainly say them a lot.

I might be overestimating how much of his success is him, but look at the situation as you've drawn it: he's not in a fishbowl with 40 million readers, he's in a fishbowl with 40 similar fish. He's the biggest one. Well, how did that happen? 39 other fish would like to know.

Hey! Thank you for liking the things I write!

I think you're right that both early-stage and late-stage Scott aren't doing the thing that I implied I should be doing. (exaggerated and hamfisted system-building arranged around eventual predictions of doom) A thing I didn't mention: I wrote an article in this style on a throwaway on LessWrong years ago and they totally ignored it. So I still don't know if they hated it or if it just wasn't their deal.

Soupy vague praise of powerful people is a separate thing he also seems to do, which you have clearly noticed. I don't think it's the only thing he does.

(What does he do? I'm systematically responding to everyone here, so I won't paraphrase other people's comments on what he does and will instead respond to them directly as I get to their posts.)

Anyway: I refuse to act as if he's bad at the thing he's doing. Even the people who criticize him generally refuse to summarize him accurately, which is a behavior of people who have recognized that someone else's rhetoric has power over them and they don't like it.

I'm also not sure yet if I'm unwilling to do it myself. One: I'm the cofounder of a startup. Doing what he does means more money for me. Two: right now I'm chewing on 8 responses to my post, so I'm "hungry" but not starving. Ask me what I'm selling in a week and my catalogue may have changed.

(PS: It might interest you to know that the original draft of this OP was about Paul Graham! I switched the mentioned figure to Scott Alexander because I had more to say about him and everyone here hates him more.)

I need to think about this more. I think there's a category of engineer who adapts very closely to the expectations of execs -- it's kind of "pick me"-adjacent and it's more commonly a behavior of otherwise unskilled engineers. "Resembling an engineer" is certainly a behavior sales guys can adopt.

I think there's some engineers who actually see productivity gains from LLMs, which is often a factor of the kinds of problems they solve, but I distrust people who don't caveat this.

(I see that it's recommended that I say what kind of feedback I want. Reply with anything you like! I don't mind it. This probably won't be posted anywhere else, I just wanted to get it out of my head.)

New developments -- someone proposes "OK, what if we're in irreconcilable difference with the racists?" and two people pile on to say (respectively) "Well, we'll have to find (vaguely specified) 'workarounds'" and "Well, we can't kick them out, that would be a disaster."

A third person points out that some of the people in the thread are opposed to quotas but implied they would support quotas if we made an applicant list first (and allowed for the possibility that only white men would appear on the list, rendering the quota system moot) -- so we should do that.

Specifically -- nat418 sez:

I believe that we live in a society in which some classes of people are exploited by others, and that the acknowledgement of this reality—let alone measures to remediate it—are often percieved as "unfair" or "conflictual" by members of the exploiting classes. I think the real conflict is already ongoing, we are enmeshed within it, and that if we want to live as honorable and dignfied persons we must take up the cause of justice and the common good.

nim65s:

I personally agree with @nat-418 here, but I acknowledge some others do not, and I don't think one side could convince the other. I also don't think we can compromise: this is a boolean question. Therefore, to find a consensus, I think we should explore workarounds.

nat418 sez:

What workarounds? Seems like if we can't agree on basic matters like "marginalized groups should be represented" then we should simply part ways.

tmarkov:

This is a very non-obvious statement.

The goal of the mix community is ultimately to make nix and NisOS as good as possible.

Parting ways is a huge negative for the ecosystem overall. If it is unavoidable, I guess I'll personally leave all other consideration aside and advocate for whatever would cause the least amount of people splitting off whatever it might be.

Colin:

i'm not confident that's pinpointing a hard disagreement. my read of this thread is:

1. marginalized individuals should be represented.
2. representation is better maximized by composing a diverse assembly from available applicants, rather than within the process by which we obtain applicants.
3. uncertainty around how "hard" this requirement is; how critical is representation within assembly composition to ensuring representation in its downstream processes; hypotheticals in what to do if there aren't enough applicants with which to form a diverse assembly.