Pedophilia categorically causes harm to children, so I think that comparing them to other reprehensible people is acceptable (and before you start blathering on about 19-year-olds and 17-year-olds- that's not what the average person means when they talk about pedophilia, I'm certain you know that, and that whole line of argument is deflection from the actual point).
Provided they do not act on their desires, avoid situations where they would be tempted to act on them, and get help, I don't think pedophiles should be, say, stoned in the public square. But I don't think they should be proudly touting their status as a "virped" or "NOMAP" or whatever the latest attempt to turn a mental disorder into a tribe is called unless they're fine with people judging them accordingly. Even if we divorce all moral compunction from it, it still viscerally sits on the same level as someone trying to make a proud, socially-acceptable identity out of the fact they can only be aroused by eating feces.
When I was young I read Eric S. Raymond's Hacker Jargon File and I remember him talking about the "larval stage" where new programmers manically write open-source code and looking forward to doing that myself. Now I've been a professional programmer for quite some time and the only code of mine in open-source is a tool I wrote that my employer abandoned (thus making it open-source) years after I left.
In terms of blogging, my early inspirations included people like Razib Khan for being so knowledgeable and Chip Smith for being cooler than everyone else. And yes, valuing "coolness" when it comes to taboo intellectual topics was a marker of my maturity at the time.
"Raw excitement is a secret ingredient" is I think a really good way to understand a lot of things that are similar to SSC/ACX—the first time you encounter an artist is often as they're first encountering... I don't know, some combination of "the muse" (their evolving skills and ideas) + self-confidence + an audience. It's a really charged moment for everybody concerned.
Sometimes this is the case even when you don't like the ideas, the music, etc. I remember the first time I saw a neocreactionary guy online—I wasn't convinced by 90 percent of what he blogged and blog-commented about, but I thought, "holy cow, people actually believe this!" and my brain cleared out some space for a new kind of person who was completely outside my experience.
First time I heard Soundcloud rap—the day XXXtentacion got killed, and i was suddenly confronted with this extremely famous guy I'd never heard of who made what sounded to me like music from another planet where I would mostly keep my earplugs in—same deal. Even if the actually encountering a new minority view or style with no antecedents you recognize isn't always pleasant, the *feeling* of having your world open up like that often still is. And even if you still love the thing that did that to you 10 years ago, it will lack the power to do that specific thing for you because it already has.
Because you're just barely too neurotic about your brilliance (mostly kidding, it's a wellspring of fruitful introspection at a high personal cost)
Edit for clarity, by mostly kidding I meant to imply the correct direction is to be less neurotic and own your brilliance, it's probably the only thing holding you back if anything is.
Edit 2: I sometimes over compliment, but since people are more sparing with praise than criticism I felt like hedging against that and don't feel at all abashed about describing you as brilliant.
Yeah, of course he’s brilliant. You are right about the personal cost of being a skosh too self aware and self critical too. But the result reveals a charmingly deep humanity.
Yeah, but "Scott does data journalism about a topic he just became interested in" is probably an endless goldmine. More broadly, I subscribe because whenever he learns about a new topic he generally finds interesting things to say about it.
Agree. It's a pity that the more important something is, the more likely Scott already heard about it a long time ago and got bored of it. I make a conscious effort to minimize my news consumption so that recent doesn't displace important, but then maybe I look like an idiot for not knowing about the latest tempest in a teacup. I figure if anything really important happens I'll probably hear about it from friends. But then also maybe I stay unaware of how awful the reporting is on the Newspaper of Record and lose opportunities to dunk on it and and motivate improvement in media. The NYT and WaPo are so horrible that I completely stopped listening to them ages ago.
As an urban planner, it was fun for me to read his take on why we stopped designing buildings people like. I've been researching that subject for years and he hit on stuff I had never thought of. His mind is quite the floodlight.
Yeah, I think I remember Bill Simmons saying something like that about why he gave up writing columns a few years ago: he only had so many original ideas in his head, and after 15 years or so as a regular columnist, he'd gotten them all out there.
this is very insightful and i'm curious to see what you do in the next phase. personally i really enjoyed Unsong, perhaps something in that direction. Encoding your worldview and insights into fictional worlds might be a reasonable next step, right?
There needs to be an index of Scott's posts, definitely covering the Substack and SSC, and maybe his longer posts on LessWrong and Livejournal. Then if you're interested in a topic he doesn't want to write about any more, you can look up what he said in the index and thoughts that are old to him, but new to you.
It seems like it's always going to be an ask to keep people quite as engaged and excited as they were at the beginning and I would expect almost all of the feeling has to result from 'point 1' sort of considerations. I felt bad reading that reddit thread and knowing you'd see it! I still think your thoughts are worth more than the price of a subscription and hope you know a lot of people still really enjoy your posts :'(
You are, in fact, using simulated annealing wrong. It's the complement of what you describe, which is a classic technique to find a local optimum. SA is adding noise to your small steps, so that you do not get stuck in a local optimum but have the chance to find a better one (even the global optimum) using the random jumps to luckily go over local barriers and fall in neighbor (hopefully better) optimums ;-)
So maybe you should use SA if you feel trapped in comfortable routine but suspect you could maybe do better: just do crazy things from time to time :-p
Could be...but I guess my advice hold: even if changing routine feels risky and really suck most of the time, do it anyway, even if rarely. Turn up the heat before letting it cool back again into a (hopefully better) routine :-)
ETA: Taking the metaphor more comprehensively, it's either a deliberate part of simulated annealing where the noise is specified to decrease over time, or just the natural decrease in step size from any iterative optimization strategy.
The gradient has both magnitude and direction. So the size of the jumps is proportional to the steepness of the error function. For a smooth function, the local extrema will get shallow near the peak, as opposed to a sharp corner, and thus the jumps naturally decrease in size as you get closer, without needing to explicitly build that in (though sometimes it's helpful to do that anyway)
Ah that makes sense. Still something that I'm unclear on: aren't the size of the jumps strictly controlled by the algorithm in gradient descent, and not just naively proportional to the length of the "gradient vector"?
Learning rate decay. Starting with a large learning rate to quickly converge 'near' good solutions, then decreasing the learning rate to settle into an optima.
I think your usage is fine. Greg Kai is talking about how machine learning engineers use simulated annealing to ensure that the neural network is not stuck in local minima by programming in large jumps in the solution space. You are describing how you were naturally using simulated annealing (because you were anyway bouncing around a lot, and didn't need to deliberately program it in), and then eventually started bouncing around much less.
No, I think we're talking about a different effect here. Whether the optimum that Scott is heading for is global or local, he's taking smaller and smaller steps as he gets closer to it.
In a totally different metaphor, you can just say "plucked all the low-hanging fruit already".
I disagree somewhat with Greg here, I think your use of the term is fine. It might be slightly inaccurate I suppose. the point is the cooling down effect you're pointing to, which simulated annealing also has. So depending on what you're emphasizing simulated annealing may be the best methaphor.
There are also (naturally) different forms of simulated annealing, but all simulated annealing over time lower the noise. So in the beginning it encourages big jumps and in the end it discourages big jumps. But the point of simulated annealing is to get closer to the global optimum, even if we're sacrificing some ability to approach the optima that are nearby (the local optima). So perhaps Greg was primarily responding to "you end up at some local optimum".
If you want another machine learning methaphor, you could use the idea of a gradient descent learning rate optimizer. Optimizers explicitly use the gradient to inform the step size of the gradient descent algorithm, so that when there is a steep gradient, the step size is high, and when there is a gentle slope the step size is low. This explicitly looks for the local optimum (which is less of a problem in higher dimensions). See this nice visualization from Sebastian Ruder: https://ruder.io/content/images/2016/09/saddle_point_evaluation_optimizers.gif
Of the two I'd say simulated annealing fits better.
> So perhaps Greg was primarily responding to "you end up at some local optimum".
Actually, I'd say the usage is fully correct. SA does not guarantee a global optimum - just a better chance of getting at it than naive gradient descent, and if not, a very good chance that you'll end up in a close-to-the-global optimum. Pretty much the same way that having exotic experiences and trying out many viewpoints while you're young gives you a better chance at having a more complete view of the world than if you just iterate on what your parents told you.
Agreed. although I do still think that that particular quote is somewhat incorrect as you don't end up at a local optimum in SA, and as you said the point is to get close-to-the-global. But really that's splitting hairs, and it's a good metaphor imho.
Just to add another voice, I think you used it entirely correctly and I'm a mathematician who uses similar optimization algorithms professionally (global optimization by intermittent diffusion most often).
Well, just iterative optimisation: almost all optimisation algorithms take smaller and smaller steps when they converge to an optimum, that's what you describe and indeed also part of the human way to improve at something over time : as you get better, the further improvements tend to become smaller /slower.
SA is the opposite : it's to deliberately add noise to the steps of the iterative optimisation in order to decrease the chances of being trapped in a local optimum. The amplitude of the noise is adapted, depending where we are (# and /or size of iterations) and indeed goes to zero at the end (else you would never converge)...
But it's really an update to what Scott describe (a classic optimisation, done by a human but similar to most algorithm in the sense that steps get smaller when you converge to your optimum): SA would be for Scott to deliberately change his way in non - optimal, random, directions... Mostly when he start to converge (early stages are big and semi random anyway, late stage are the final convergence), but maybe when he clearly has converged (do not see how he could improve) but is somehow dissatisfied with the result.
That woud be SA in a context of self - improvement (and it's indeed something people do, in sport training for exemple when trapped in bad habits (which are in fact local optimums)
I actually think you're mischaracterizing it when you say SA does "the opposite" of what other iterative optimization algorithms do. SA is itself of course an iterative optimization, but when we contrast it with a naive hill climber, the point is that SA can jump from one slope to another, which it does less and less as time goes on.
Yes, it does this in terms of noise, but this doesn't mean it does "the opposite" of a naive hill climber, in fact I'm unsure what that would mean exactly.
> SA would be for Scott to deliberately change his way in non - optimal, random, directions... Mostly when he start to converge
You made a similar point before, you seem to think that SA makes the temperature go up midway through the search , but this is not correct: the temperature always goes down.
But all of this is more regarding SA technical specifics, while Scott's point is aptly described by SA, in fact taking your description here: "to deliberately add noise to the steps of the iterative optimisation (...) indeed [the noise] goes to zero at the end" This perfectly fits with what the metaphor is intended to say, as far as I interpreted it.
I mean that local optimizers (basically all of them, baring some initial landscape sampling and interpolation), takes smaller and smaller steps in the optimal direction (the gradient, when you have it (or have a reasonable approx of it), or the best among a few tested choices.
SA will add noise to those steps, making them non optimal or even not the best among the possible choice (i.e. the opposite of classic optimisation, it's deliberately choosing to do something different even if it is worse). And you select noise amplitude so that it does it in a way that increase the chance of jumping to a better optimum, without slowing down total convergence time too much (that's all the subtlety of annealing (simulated or not), you have to heat up at the right time and cool down at the right rate to get what you want).
SA (to me, but I work in the field, not neural network but classic engineering optimisation) is not an optimization algorithm per se, it's an ingredient you add to a deterministic optimisation algorithm, that will slow it down but decrease the chance of being trapped in a (not so great) local optimum. Basically you add it to a NR/Steepest descent or variants of it.
In genetic algorithms, SA equivalent would be the mutation rate. While what Scott describe would be the fact that initially, the less fit variants to be removed will really be much less fit, while later on, most of the population will have similar fitness. Mutation is an orthogonal ingredient, needed to ensure that you explore more of the design landscape (and decrease the chance of converging to a poor local optimum) but slowing down convergence to a single design....
SA and mutation are really counter-intuitive in the sense that in order to increase your chance to converge to the global optimum (or a good local one), you need to decrease your chance of being trapped in a bad local optimum, and a way to do that is to avoid to systematically change in ways that improve your results the most. That's the only way to cross local barriers that trap you in bad local optimums. But you can't do that all the time or too much, else you end up not optimising anything and just drifting...
I agree with everything here, especially your last paragraph. And now I see what you mean by doing the opposite. You don't mean the entire algorithm is doing the opposite, you mean it does at some steps accept a non-optimal jump, opposite of what optimization algorithms normally do. That makes sense.
And reading over Scott's description again:
> the thing where if you’re doing an optimization problem, you start by making big jumps to explore the macro-landscape of the solution space, then as time goes make smaller and smaller jumps
That really only captures iterative optimization as you said, not SA. Nevertheless I'd still say that the idea of SA as you describe it here really captures the point Scott was going for.
Indeed...I was surprised that so many people disagreed somewhat with me, while also showing they knew what they were talking about. Looking at the english and french version of the Wikipedia page, I start to understand why (I am french speaking): the pages are certainly not incompatible, but there is a subtle langage difference: In English, SA seems to apply to the whole optimisation process. In French, "recuit simulé" apply more specifically to the modification of classic deterministic algo, as a parametrised added noise (T is the parameter).
It's subtle, but explain why I got the simultaneous impression of dissagreing on SA but agreeing of optimisation description.
I still think the french terminology is more useful, as it emphasize the specific of SA compared to purely deterministic optimisation approaches, and is closer to the metalurgic annealing (a way to go out of the local optimum just after quenching by adding thermal noise, but controlled thermal noise to keep quenching benefit and not be back the the completely non-optimal original state.)
But hey, i'm french(speaking) so it would be hard to not disagree with english terminology ;-p
So Scott is saying that his bouncing around between ideas was a demonstration of simulated annealing. He was jumping about a lot at first, and found the neighborhood of his sweet spot, and then started jumping around much less.
What you are saying is that simulated annealing is the process of pre-programming larger jumps early on in the process of finding the global minimum. In some sense, humans, like Scott, are already pre-programmed to do that. Neural networks are not. That is why simulated annealing has to be programmed in separately.
I think Scott is using the term 100% correctly. Annealing literally means "cooling down", and it comes from the idea that hot particles jump around in the energy landscape, while cold ones are stuck in their local optimum. Yes, SA uses noise (controlled by the parameter T, which stands for temperature). But the name-giving feature of the SA algorithm is that you lower the temperature over time, which is exactly as Scott uses the term.
No I think he’s mostly right: in simulated annealing you start with a high temperature (in your teens I guess) that corresponds to a large probability of going uphill to a higher energy state, and then as the temperature drops over time/Scott enters his 30s (this is the annealing part) you converge to always taking downhill steps that essentially behave like gradient descent. Source: I wrote a paper once that used simulated annealing as a gradient-free method.
The intuition here is annealing metal: if you quench hot metal by sticking it in cold water then all the individual molecules drop into whatever low energy state is closest, so you end up with a very chaotic crystal structure. If you instead let it cool slowly then it has lots of time in the high energy state where big non-local changes are possible and so it can converge to a more uniform low-energy crystal structure as it cools.
Exactly. In fact, AFAIK (but metallurgy is not my speciality), it's not only cooling it down slowly, it's also re-heating up and keeping it at a moderate temperature for a time, then cooling it down back to ambiant at the correct rate.
It's clearer in french, where annealing translate to recuit, meaning to cook again, or re-heat. The full heat treatment would be heat to T1, quench, heat to T2<T1, cool it down slowly (time at T2 and subsequent cooling rate is important).
T1 then more or less slow cool down is not (AFAIK) annealing, and convergence to an optimum (which is another way to say your update steps get smaller and smaller) is not simulated annealing in an optimisation context
Your second paragraph describes hardening (T1+quench) and tempering (T2). Annealing is in fact the process of holding metal above a critical temperature (T1), then cooling slowly enough to preserve the maximally unhardened condition, for ease of machining (source: am a machinist).
I don't think that's correct, or at least is off target. The reason it's called "simulated annealing" is that you are mimicking the process of real annealing (in metallurgy) by gradually reducing the temperature, id est you gradually turn down the amplitude of your noise as you settle into the valley that (hopefully) leads to your global optimum.
It would appear your are critiquing Scott's use of "taking smaller steps" because as you (correctly) point out often the individual Monte Carlo step size doesn't change, and doesn't need to. But what he's getting at is that the net excursions (of however many steps you want to average over) become smaller and smaller as you turn down the temperature, and that is both the feature he is describing about his idea of the evolution of his ideas, and also the most obvious feature of simulated annealing simulations.
Maybe there's an actual name for the phenomenon I'm about to describe. I call it "new vs best".
When you write a new post, people tend to compare it to the best work you've ever done (Moloch, or whatever). Statistically, the new post is almost always going to be worse. So it looks like you've fallen off in quality.
But that's an unfair comparison. A fairer one would be to put one of your newer posts against a random SSC post from 2015 - if you do that, I'm confident that your newer writing holds up, and has maybe gotten better.
Another factor is that (in my opinion) things were actually more interesting in 2015. Take neoreaction. Whether you agreed with it or not, that was a fascinating thing that was fun to talk about. It's hard to find an analog for it 2022.
We live in a media landscape where 80% of the air is sucked up by COVID and vaccines and Trump. It's actually boring as hell and I can't wait for it all to end.
I've been calling that effect "Time Distillation", particularly in the context of comparing popular media quality now to that of past eras. Namely, a lot of popular media is mediocre-to-poor and always has been. But it often feels like the new stuff is much much worse than older stuff because the dreck of past eras has been disproportionately discarded and forgotten, as the passage of time has boiled off the impurities and concentrated the timeless classics in our awareness, while the contemporary dreck hasn't yet been distilled away.
The "golden age" of sci-fi -- Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke -- all seem mediocre in comparison with the state of sci-fi in 2022. I can't imagine how bad the rest of the sci-fi must have been back then. But Orwell holds up. Michelangelo seems mediocre in comparison to corporate drones who build game levels today, so the masses of artists in his day must have been really atrocious.
I'm reading The Dispossessed now, having read The Martian Chronicles (and a greater amount of Heinlein) and seen 2001 but not having read Asimov or Clarke. How does Le Guin stack up compared to them?
"Asimov is good at ideas. Not so good at writing actual humans."
Hm, Liu Cixin and the Three Body Problem (actually the whole trilogy) seem relevant. Amazing ideas, but all major characters are variations of murderous sociopath, or else comic relief, and female characters are either inept, evil or ridiculously idealized supernatural beings of ineffable beauty, but zero of his women are human.
Maybe good scifi is written by shape rotators and good characters are written by wordcels, or to reference an older SSC which posits the same dichotomy in different words:
This may be the bottle of Riesling talking, but if scifi is a (or the) shape rotator genre, is fantasy a (the) wordcel genre? n=1, Tolkien invented several languages
It's really interesting to me that Andy Weir has become a well-known, high-profile sci fi author these days. I still remember him better from the days when he was still an aspiring author back when he was doing the webcomic Casey and Andy.
The final page of the comic ends with a joke based on the fact that an editor had rejected his manuscript for a story saying that it had "too few characters," and suggested that he add more to fill it out. He protested that it was a complete story without room to add more meaningful characters into the narrative, but joked about the possibility of adding another character named Bob to the story by occasionally finishing scenes with the line "Bob was there too."
Not that I don't think Weir is a good writer, I enjoyed his work before he was even published. But I do think his being catapulted to the limelight after years of writing as a relative unknown says a lot about how much that level of prominence owes to luck of the draw.
Asimov tends to write way too many characters, most of whom the reader neither knows nor cares anything about, and this is definitely a failure mode. JK Rowling seems to strike a good balance, with lots of characters but each character having sufficient backstory and feeling like a real person. Andy Weir goes deep with only a few characters. I don't mind the last two.
The Martian and Project Hail Mary are really really good. I don't think it's the luck of getting selected for attention by the media. I think they got selected for attention because they were that good. Same with Rowling. But when Rowling does Serious Adult Literary Shit, it doesn't seem that great. The coincidence is that Potter put her in the right mindspace to do her best work.
Agreed, golden age is still great to read because of nostalgia and founder effect (where new ideas are still plenty to grab and you get the originality bonus of being the first there. And not only bonus, the freshness coming from it is enjoyable ). But I prefer 1990-2010 for a more cynical approach, more complexity and much better literary quality (characterization, writing style,...).
Golden age I enjoyed Asimov, Herbert, Farmer, Pohl, VVogt,Silverberg,....
Later Banks, Stephenson, Varley, Powers, Simmons, King for example, and many others that do not immediately come to mind.
Lately, I do not read so much SF/fantasy...maybe because I get older, maybe because I have less time due to familial activities and so much access to video content, maybe because post 2010 authors sucks (for me). Not clear how much each factor is important, but given how much I enjoyed SF/fantasy before it would be nice to check if factor 3 could be corrected. Any modern author to suggest?
Same thing for me, I loved Asimov and co. as a teenagers but when I tried to reread them later I did not enjoy them that much, as the writing quality is not that great.
Amon recent SF novels, many people seemed to like the The Three-Body Problem trilogy of Liu Cixin. I Loved the Children of Time duology from A. Tchaikovsky and the Interdependency series from Scalzi (bonus, this one is quite funny!).
Thanks! the 3-body was on my to-read list, I didn't know about the others. In addition to the founder effect, there is also a deep resonance between the mood/obsessions of the time and SF/Fantasy. Quite apparent when you look at the golden age (fast tech progress, post WW2, cold war), and post golden age (hippie/drugs/sexual revolution, then early ecology and end of cold war). Maybe I have trouble with the current mood, which could be behind factor 3 (most of current SF sucks (for me))
I like Becky Chambers (Wayfarers series) and Max Gladstone (Craft Sequence). Becky is SF (rockets, aliens) but only as a background. The stories are very character driven, and, realistically, not much happens that is critical. I think there is some similarity with the Firefly TV series (character driven, not really aiming to 'overthrow the galactic empire' or anything else) and Becky's Wayfarers series. If you like that sort of thing then I'd give it a try.
Max Gladstore's Craft sequence is more fantasy. But neither Epic fantasy ala Tolkein nor modern fantasy (e.g. Harry Potter or "So You Want to be A Wizard") but something else. Which was refreshing for me, though maybe it isn't as different as I think -- I'm not really current with fantasy.
In any event, the basic premise behind the Craft sequence is that gods are real (think Zeus or Aztec gods rather than Y*wh) and about 100 years ago human academics figured out how to do what the gods did. And there was a war. And mostly but not entirely the gods lost and so now we have parts of Earth ruled by gods and parts of Earth ruled by the folks who overthrew them. And you can go to college and learn the techniques to be on the 'overthrew them' team. But magic works a lot like contract law, so you can easily wind up DEAD if things go poorly. Complications ensue ...
Ninefox Gambit was interesting and weird, but seemed very classic SF. The idea was explored. The characters ... not so much.
Thanks, I liked firefly (the movie more than the serie), thought it was a very good free "real-life" adaptation of cowboy bebop (all the more since i recently saw the real-life cowboy bebop - yuck) so certainly it's worth a try. Craft also seems interesting, makes me think of American Gods which I like a lot (both the book and the tv serie), although it tends to dilute a little bit with time "à la Lost"....
So yeah, it seems there are still interesting things lying around....maybe it's more factor 1 and 2 that are at play, and having to find new prolific authors I can trust to reliably output stuff I like ( because quite a few of my preferred ones are very unfortunately dead :-( ), and I can not start with time-sorted classics like I did when I discovered SF.
Assassin's Creed Unity (french revolution era) has some great art and architecture which is all based on real French stuff. It's not original but it's better than the Sistine chapel.
I think most of the individual paintings on the Sistine chapel are not great, but there are hundreds of them. Lots and lots of in-game character models look better. I also very often see stuff on deviantart or shutterstock that looks better than one of the extras at the Sistine Chapel.
If you manage to separate the historical\cultural baggage to make a purely aesthetics based comparison, It's not hard at all to find videogame art far superior to the Sistine Chapel. Just recently I was in awe of some of the stuff in Doom Eternal. I'm also a big fan of Halo's Forerunner architecture.
But I think most people aren't really willing to do that separation. Videogames are low status. Michelangelo is ultra status. Comparison is an insult in their minds.
While the greats of history were aiming for aesthetics rather than the sort of qualities that modern artists aim for, I think that measuring one work or another as "superior" has to account for the tools that the creator(s) had to work with.
Michelangelo had to work on his own, on his back, with physical paints dripping in his face, nearly causing him to go blind. The paints themselves also fade over time, and probably don't have the same color balance now that they had over 400 years ago.
It's not like he did things the hard way for extra credit, Michelangelo didn't even want to be pegged to paint the Sistine Chapel in his own lifetime. If he had been born in modern times, if he still decided to become an artist, he probably wouldn't have been a painter or a sculptor. He worked at the cutting edge of the media available to him at the time when he worked, and would probably have been happy to have toolsets with more expansive capacities which didn't get paint in his eyes.
On the other hand, the fact that it took years and nearly made him go blind probably has a lot to do with why the Sistine Chapel is so high status. Video game modelers don't put that kind of sacrifice into their work.
I agree with what you said(*), but I don’t think that Razorback was arguing that “Michelangelo is ultra status” is wrong, per se. I think he’s just pointing out that just because it’s ultra status doesn’t mean that relatively low-status stuff like videogames can’t contain better works of art, just as art. Yes, it’s “cheaper” art in a lot of ways (literally in the sense that many costs are less), but it can be better, and people really do sometimes confuse the two and even feel insulted.
I mean, Stonehenge is pretty fucking impressive, given who made it and how, and I really appreciate it, but it’d be silly to argue that you can’t find better works of architecture in low-status things today, including in stuff like Minecraft, or even public toilets or barns or something.
(*: well, I didn’t know the thing about nearly going blind, so “believe” rather than “agree” there.)
Old scifi is bad compared to new scifi, but old fantasy (Tolkien) is much better than new fantasy.
I'm sure I'm being mega selective, but as a simplified model, it's interesting that the genre that's supposed to take place in the future keeps getting better, while the stuff that's happening in the past apparently peaked in the past, and keeps getting worse.
How about "The Classic Rock" effect. Because that's why Classic Rock station playlists are always 90% the same as they were 25 years ago. The old art we remember is, by definition, a "best of" soundtrack.
I don't think that's it, because there is a common sentiment that the 2013-2016 range contains not just Scott's best post but *all* his best posts, a trend too strong to be pure coincidence.
Not a bad post by any means, but if you're into Scott more for his earnest insight than for his research the only section that really shines is the one about Martians.
The neoreactionaries were interesting when they were talking about bizarre game theoretic arguments for monarchism. But now they seem to have been seamlessly absorbed into the mainstream right, saying the same kind of vaguely racist stuff that any racist uncle will give you, but with longer words
The really interesting thing about Mencius Moldbug was that early on he was saying that the political right should just give up, because they can only be a phone opposition, thus forcing the left to act responsible. Then he changed gears and started talking about a "True Election" that could bring a President Palin to power. Less interesting, more conventional.
I think Moldbug and most of his neoreactionary buddies realized they could be ideologically-pure (and thus doomed to so much street-corner ranting) or they could be effective (compromising with the mainstream could give them a chance to try and steer the mainstream in a direction they like).
Is he really that effective? He's on a Substack now, and he has been cited by Greenwald, but I don't know that he can claim to have affected any policies (as Scott is saying with COVID above).
Well, I think it's fair to say that the Republican Party of 2016+ is a lot more Moldbuggian than the Republican Party of Mitt Romney or John McCain.
It's impossible to say how much credit (or blame, depending on your point of view) Moldbug personally gets for this, but I think it's fair to say he's been an important voice in a movement that for better or worse has opened a lot of young right-wingers' eyes to the idea that there might be more to right-wing politics than just "repeal Roe" and "tax cuts for the rich".
There has been a turn against the neocons (which Moldbug himself once supported). But I think that's more because GWB left a legacy of failure people no longer wanted to be associated with.
I think that trying to assert that the right-wing mainstream moving further towards Moldbug's worldview and Moldbug tacking further towards the right-wing mainstream as being wholly unrelated or purely just Moldbug "selling out" is a bit contrarian. Something doesn't have to be labeled "The Mencius Moldbug Bill for Installing the Monarch via Salami-Slicing" for it to be clearly influenced by the Dark Enlightenment he helped pioneer.
He's effectively monetized his bullshit, so there is that.
Dude should have just gotten cut a giant check for his Cathedral stuff and sent out into the internet to do more interesting shit, instead of having to pay bills.
After the election Moldbug was posting about how if the Republicans were *really* serious about winning an election, they would have had state legislatures overturn the results and install new electors while Trump used the military to seize power. Which definitely sounds "interesting" to me, but I suppose it's more conventional than "we should have a king who secures his power with cryptographically-locked guns."
Consider the midwit meme - neoreactionaries seem to reach the same conclusions as really stupid people, but for very sophisticated reasons.
My main problem with neoreactionaries is that they tend to be such habitual contrarians they can't admit that mainstream sometimes is, in fact, right, or a progressive position actually makes sense. A lot of Moldbug's posts seem like a purely intellectual exercise in Devil's advocacy.
"Better than the Beatles effect" is one name it's been given. In statistics terms, it's just a trivial order statistics fact: the probability of the next sample being the maximum out of the n samples so far is just going to be 1/(n+1).
I don't think you suck, or that you have gotten worse. I've been reading you since, I believe, "The Toxoplasma of Rage," and that has been awhile. You have your hobbyhorses (AI risk, prediction markets, predictive processing), but hey, who doesn't? Like you, I've thought about the big high-level stuff, and know those debates as deeply as I want to. Grand pronouncements aren't needed. I'm here for the insight porn--give me that on any topic, any level, and I'll be delighted to read it.
This is where I am as well, long-time reader, no sense you've gotten worse. Also very glad to hear about the community-oriented projects. But it's your writing around mental health stuff specifically that brought me and kept me here, and that's you writing from expertise grounded in practice (in addition to all your other good qualities), which is a somewhat different place you write from than the other pieces you write.
Same for me! I have been a great fan of SSC since 2017 and read most of the older posts, and I am now a great fan of ACX. Yes there is some evolution in the content, which is great, it would be kind of worrying if Scott did not change at all!- but It is still fascinating.
This is probably not a very central case, but: my now-husband introduced me to SSC in 2018. He and I used to read aloud SSC articles to each other while hanging out on a Sunday afternoon. We are definitely NOT grey tribe / rationalist folk, but sitting down to read one of your articles always felt very cozy, like just hanging out with a friend who was earnest, thoughtful, funny, and way smarter than us. I still get excited when I see a new AXC newsletter, but the impression I'm getting is that the content is growing more niche, and more and more I find both it and the community around it a little alienating. Still net positive for me though!
I could have written this same comment and consider myself solidly blue tribe (though perhaps with a greyer tinge than some of my peers, possibly in part due to the influence of this blog). For me the biggest decline in quality has been the comment section. I'm looking forward to an improvement now that there's a report function.
Scott, I sincerely admire your brilliance and your achievements. I'm only posting this in response to your direct question.
I learned from you, and now try to practice as a life principle : let what I say be truthful, necessary, and kind. On this basis, I was dismayed by your jokey headline, "My Ex is a Shit-eating Whore". It didn't seem very necessary or kind.
Thank you for clarifying, and I'm sorry for making the assumption. I guess I missed the attribution somewhere? I will delete my post, unless you feel there is some value?
Aella posted on twitter that she thought it was a "incredibly sweet ad" (or "very sweet" or something, not sure about the exact adjective). If she doesn't mind, I don't think there's much of a point complaining. Nate may have even asked her before posting it.
The attribution is confusing; the first instance of 'I' in the document links to the author's Twitter. (I thought it was better-attributed but that was because I already knew the context. Illusion of transparency, whoops!)
Also since it doesn't look like anyone else mentioned it, Aella is a sex worker and received a fecal transplant: hence, 'shit-eating whore'. I imagine all involved find it to be a cute joke, though I can totally see how it might seem in poor taste from the outside.
Hi George, it sounds like you're directing that question to me..? Yes of course, I did read through a couple of times in sheer disbelief, and cringing all the way through, in my mistaken belief that Scott had written that "review" of Aella.
Thank goodness this imaginary drama had a happy ending, so to speak.. ;)
One other factor you didn't mention but I think was a factor in my own perception of slowed insights was that when first reading ACX I got to consume your best written and most insightful posts of the last 7-8 years in 3-4 weeks. Twice per week I got to read one your top 10 posts. But now that I've caught up, these posts only come once a year which definitely feels slower by comparison.
On this point specifically, I wondered if there was any appetite for reposting some of your 'greatest hits' (maybe even from the pre-SSC days) here on ACX, so the community can enjoy reacting to them in real time
For what its worth I haven't noticed a decline in quality, and for example the ivermectin article was probably as good and more important as anything you wrote in the 2013-16 period you cite as being a high point.
I would greatly enjoy this - I found ACX in 2021 and giving some air time to the "Greatest Hits" dating back to pre-SSC would be wonderful. Please consider doing this, Scott, as you are so prolific I'm absolutely certain I've missed many gems.
In case you don't want to wait for Scott to do this, you can always browse some of the older compendiums of SSC +LW articles compiled by other people; my favorite is "The Library of Scott Alexandria", which attempts a categorization of sorts:
I would like that a lot. Especially if they were edited/updated, either throughout or with post-scripts, on how Scott's views have evolved since the article was first written.
Same for me. Falling down that particular rabbit hole ("The hammer and the dance" was my entry point) and seeing how much there was to discover, and how it resonated, was an intellectual rush. So, first crush, rose tinted glasses, lifelong hopeless romantic - or, if you prefer - the elusive chase for that feeling of the first high (not that I would know about that, though)
Interesting! I've been reading Scott's blog since it was a LiveJournal, so never got an intense rush of great posts - it's always been a slow drip. From my perspective, the quality hasn't dropped off at all; in fact, when I went back over his recent posts to pick my favourites for the ACX reader survey, I was amazed how many top-notch posts there had been since he started the new blog.
I wonder if many folks in your audience are at similar places on their developmental timelines as you, and are projecting changes (less excitement) they feel about themselves onto you.
A totally different theory, I wonder if the hiatus you took after the NYT brouhaha actually undid some optimizations, and you're finding your way back to the local minimum. (In other words, you were a bit rusty for a while.) But this doesn't match my impression of your writing.
Finally, you also have other things going on in your life. People famously get a bit more boring after they get married and have kids.
I'm blogging a lot less than I was when I started out (my first post was in September 2007), and I'm neither famous nor do I have interesting things going on in my life. On a related note, I went through a stretch where I wasn't reading nearly as many books as I used to, but now I'm trying to shift back (which is where the material for my blog posts comes from now that there's fewer other blogs to write about).
Remember the somewhat rambling post about the cliche where various colored pills gave superpowers and you fleshed out a world where certain people took those pills and that BRUTE STRENGTH won the day upon the heat death of the universe? That was such a fun thing to read, and the kind of thing I'd totally read more of even though it wasn't particularly intellectual. (I love the intellectual stuff too, but those fun posts are the kinds of things I think people are missing)
Googling “red pill” leads to FASCINATING OPINIONS. I liked how the story ends with galactic civilization being saved in the dumbest, rules breaking way possible
Perhaps this is tangential to what you're writing here, but... I have to actually write this out at some point, but while I've always had my issues with the rationalist community, when it was a smaller niche it was always rigorous. I could always expect real grappling with evidence and an acknowledgement of the complexity of the world. And while I can't say that any individual has changed for the worse (and am not accusing you of this), I think that as the community has grown it has become, for lack of a better term, a meme community. By that I mean that the larger rationalist community seems to me to be more and more defined by a collection of REFERENCES rather than a mode of thinking. So where once a reference to motte and bailey was taking advantage of a useful acrostic for beginning a conversation, one that recognized that there are limits to those kinds of metaphors for thinking, now that point is merely to say the term to indicate insider status. It's a devolution into magic words philosophy, where people launder incuriosity through these terms and ideas. The holy texts cease to be invitations to complicated conversations and become instead places in which to hide, intellectually.
The thing is... I don't think there's any way that an intellectual tradition like rationalism can grow without that happening. It's an inevitable artifact of getting more popular. There's still tons of great and stimulating conversations happening under the banner. But part of my reservations about Julia Galef's book lies in this seemingly unavoidable consequence of broadening the appeal, the tendency to fall into "one weird trick" approaches to critical inquiry.
For the record I don't think your work is any worse than it has been in the time I've been consuming it. I do think the commenting community reflects the meme philosophy I'm talking about, sometimes, though I can't pretend to be a very rigorous reader of the comments.
My own feeling is that this stuff was already in a pretty advanced state of memeification by 2015-2016 when I first become aware of it. Maybe one way of looking at it is that different corners of a movement will have different balances of memes and real content, and you have to be alert to that when you are deciding where to hang out.
What's your 'sampling method' for measuring "the rationalist community"? I don't think the commenters here are a representative sample. (I don't think there _is_ an easy way to find a representative sample anymore. The (original) 'community' dispersed years ago.)
Personally, I say (half-jokingly) the rationalist community died when I said that the bailey was not (as Alexander said) the good land around the castle. It was a fortified courtyard. No one ever had fields in a bailey. It was part of a defense in depth strategy. The motte was a high tower that was purely a defensive structure. You'd then have a bailey (or better a series of baileys) around it connected by defensible ramps or bridges. So while it was a cool metaphor it was not all that accurate.
The person responded it was a metaphor and I was being pedantic with a tone that I'm very familiar with. That high school tone that says: You may be right. But you're uncool for being right. Your rightness makes you not one of us. I wasn't upset but I was disappointed in how utterly uninteresting and predictable the response was. There is now a rationalist clique and I was being told that if I don't get on side I'm going to have to go sit at a different table.
I don't blame rationalists for being like this exactly. But it isn't what I come here for.
Thanks for clarifying, because the conflict between the internet-rationalist definition of a metaphorical "bailey" and the actual castle "bailey" had always confused me.
Yeah. To draw it out completely: Scott wrote a piece repeating a work by Nicholas Shackel. Shackel said that said the motte was the castle and the bailey was the valuable farmland around the castle. Old feudal lords would (according to him) have their peasants farm in the bailey. When raiders came by everyone would go hide in the motte and rain arrows down on them until they left. Then they could get back to farming.
Motte and bailey is when you claim a huge but useful field that's epistemologically indefensible. If someone challenges you then you retreat to a smaller but more defensible claim. Then once the confrontation is over you go back to the wider but indefensible claim that's useful.
It's a useful enough concept. But that's not what a motte or a bailey is.
Side note: I'm often surprised by how little people know about castles considering their gigantic cultural imprint.
"A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of land (the Bailey) which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier such as a ditch."
Now Scott, referencing Shackel,
"The writers of the paper compare this to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a *field* of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich."
Field here might mean farmland.
Now Wikipedia,
"The bailey would contain a wide number of buildings, including a hall, kitchens, a chapel, barracks, stores, stables, forges or workshops, and was the centre of the castle's economic activity."
Scott seems pretty close here, except maybe he intended the word field to imply farmland and that would be wrong? Although, see Carisbrooke Castle from the Wiki, where farming fields seem to be depicted as being inside the bailey.
Unfortunately the description of action (running away from raiders) firmly cements that in their minds the bailey was outside the wall. Otherwise they'd be implying the proper thing to do in an invasion was to run inside the walls then give up the outer layer of defenses and run further inside.
That said the metaphor isn't awful because, terms aside, it is an accurate description of the purpose of a castle (especially one with a large bailey) relative to the farmlands around it. It just gets the names wrong.
I agree that representing the bailey as farmland is not accurate (after all, walling in your farmland is known as "a border wall"), and low-intensity farming is obviously the vast majority of economic activity in mediaeval times. But I wouldn't say that the bailey's necessarily completely unproductive either; it *could* be in some castles, but AIUI frequently things like horticulture and markets were inside the bailey walls and those are certainly of high economic value *per acre* (as opposed to total).
I think the error was introduced by Scott - if Wikipedia’s page is to be believed, the original formulation was by Nicholas Shackel, and his definition seems to get the definitions of motte and bailey mostly right.
I think the metaphor works just as well if you use the correct definition of bailey - either way, it’s a broader, more useful, but harder to hold area than the “insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte”.
I think I knew what the bailey was from the beginning and it seemed to fit the metaphor, perhaps because I was thinking of it geometrically, the core and the area around it. If Scott at some point defined it as the good land I don't think I noticed.
The metaphor is directionally accurate. The motte is a purely defensive structure. It is surrounded by the bailey, which has a lot of actually useful and productive stuff and is less well defended than the motte. In the face of a sufficiently severe attack, you abandon the bailey and retreat to the motte until you've driven the attackers away.
Claiming that the bailey is farmland is technically incorrect. And if you're not e.g. using that technicality to derail a substantial debate over something else, you should get nerd credit for pointing out the technically correct version. Not some smug "go away troublesome outgrouper" response.
But, directionally accurate is about all you can expect from a metaphor, and once one is accepted into the language or jargon, meh, forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. Well, a few miles north of a Chinatown.
I find it a little odd that you let one person who said that to you in that manner, kill the rationalist community in your mind. There's always assholes everywhere which I assume you are aware of so I'm guessing I don't understand your point?
I did say half-jokingly. The non-joking half is that such a statement doesn't happen in a vacuum. The fact the person even tried implies the existence of the cliquishness I'm put off by. And I've not seen anything to change my view subsequently that, to use the in group language, the ideology is not the movement.
“That high school tone that says: You may be right. But you're uncool for being right. Your rightness makes you not one of us.”
Not saying that phenomenon doesn’t exist, but I don’t think that’s what happened here. What happened here is that you were technically correct but missing the point. You were letting pedantry wreck a useful metaphor without providing an alternative with the same level of utility.
Nobody likes a pedant - not because being correct is uncool, but because having someone constantly show off how smart they are by “well actually-ing” trivial points makes it harder to have productive/interesting conversations.
I think this depends a bit on Erusian's intention, if they simply wanted to convey a neat history fact, and then got slapped down I could see that being an unpleasant experience. If their point was that the metaphor was bad because of this detail, then that is literally pedantic. Even assuming the former though, I think it is possible that the person who replied to them assumed the latter.
So, this interaction doesn't move me much in either direction.
See, this is a cliquish attitude. The underlying assumptions here are:
1.) The tribal totems of the group (such as a specific metaphor) are more important than literal correctness. You're also inventing a scenario which makes me wrong. That is a somewhat defensive reaction and seems soldier-y.
2.) I deserve to be socially punished (someone "nobody likes") for challenging a commonly held but false belief among the group. (In this case, the definition of bailey.) If I am going to correct it I must leap through certain hoops to make the criticism acceptable, effectively requiring a loyalty test. ("providing an alternative with the same level of utility.")
3.) If I want to be part of the group I need to accept group policing on what is trivial and what is central. You're telling me that using a word in a wrong way (which confused at least three people) is unimportant. I don't think so. But you, as a member of the community, have decided against me.
These are all important things for maintaining group cohesion! But they're not rational. They make you more wrong, not less wrong, in the interest of collective wrongness creating group cohesion. That's literally true here: you're using a word wrong.
I agree that this is a cliquish attitude, but I'll disagree with your analysis of the use of 'motte and bailey'. Since it has become a standardized term of art (or a cliché, if you prefer) its meaning has shifted, and its etymology has become irrelevant. That's what happens in language. You bolster your arguments even without the use of a pillow, and you police language even without the use of a badge and a gun. Once something is metaphorical, it cuts itself loose from its original meaning and wanders off on its own. We may not like it, but we can't change it, and complaining about it will have no effect.
End of sermon. I agree that there's too much grumpiness on this blog at the moment, by the way, and I'm trying not to be grumpy about this.
I think the issue here is twofold: Firstly, people who are familiar with the normal definition word will be confused by the new definition. Secondly, it will misinform rationalists as to what the word means. Basically, it cuts off two linguistic communities by making them unable to communicate unless the full context is understood. But I have no objection to words changing per se.
Etymology may not matter for words, but I don't think etymology ever becomes irrelevant for a phrase that's a metaphor. For instance, think of the phrase "toe the line" -- it means to follow the rule precisely. The phrase means to metaphorically do the equivalent of what athletes do at the start of a race, when they bring their feet so close to the starting line that their toes touch it, but don't go over: they toe the line. Now some people write the phrase as "tow the line." Everybody still knows the phrase means follow the rule precisely, but the metaphor is lost, because the phrase is mostly senseless, and what sense it has has nothing to do with precision and rules. You could just as well declare that "blubbering turd" means to follow the rules precisely.
I want to first say that 1) I am not part of the rationalist community, and in fact probably someone who's about as far away from the rationalist community as possible in geography, mindset, and social class, and 2) I really want to phrase this in a way that's less confrontational but am having an extremely hard time doing that right now. With that said, this seems like a fully-general argument against engagement with any culture or social group or any language that does not have perfect and immutable sign-signifier linkage built into it (such that metaphor, analogy, terms of art, etc. are considered to be as severe a violation of grammar as me said this sentence). I'm not quite sure what a "non-cliquish" or "perfectly rational" interaction by your standards would look like. I'm not sure it would even be possible, even in Raikoth.
Not really. It's extremely simple. You have to define your terms. It's like the famous example: π < 2. Now, you can read this one of two ways. Obviously wrong if you take π to mean (as it commonly does) 3.14 etc. Or you can, in context of the equation, realize that π is being used as a variable that's about 1.3. And then someone can say, "You know, it's a little weird using π to mean anything other than 3.14." And the other person shrugs and says they like to use it. And everyone understands what's going on.
Now, if the person said, "No, it's the same π that is used to calculate circles and it's less than two." then they'd be incorrect. (Or have some mathematics above my pay grade to back it up.)
Yes, but if people need to engage in heavy circumlocution about every single word, you're going to end up setting the barrier for entry to communication so high that people (at least, the kind of people who exist here and now as opposed to some New Rationalist Human) just are going to not engage in it- at least, not with the people who insist on setting that barrier up. The important thing about communication is that the root idea is conveyed, not that every word perfectly aligns with what is written in a dictionary. That isn't a "cliquish definition", that's just how language actually works; cavemen didn't have dictionaries to point at when they needed to communicate the idea "A lion is coming, we need to leave or it will eat us." As others have pointed out, "motte-and-bailey" conveys a complex idea in three words, and does that regardless of whether bailey means exactly what the man who coined the term thinks it means, and in fact still works as an analogy even with the meaning of bailey you're insisting be acknowledged. The idea that the whole phrase is poisoned because of one minor factual error is, essentially, throwing the entire nature of language out with the bathwater.
1) You’re asserting your own totem here: literal exact correctness is the most important thing, and anyone who disagrees with you is “cliquey”. That’s a very weird attitude to have about a metaphor, of all things, and frankly pretty exclusionary on your own part.
2) I’m not saying you deserve to be punished, I’m saying you don’t deserve the praise you’re demanding for pointing out a correct, interesting, but not really relevant factoid. You accuse me of being “soldiery” but honestly you seem to be the confrontational one here. You seem to demand some sort of prize for superior intellect, and having failed to receive that, decided “you all are cliquey losers, I’m taking my ball and going home”.
As for hoops to jump through - no one is saying “you can’t be a rationalist if you don’t believe this incorrect definition of ‘bailey’” they are saying “motte-and-bailey is a useful metaphor for thinking about a common rhetorical strategy, this is true whether or not it gets ‘bailey’ exactly right, so we’re going to keep using it”.
3) Nobody is “policing” you out of the group. Nobody even really has that authority, least of all me. You’ve voluntarily decided to leave, because you can’t stand the fact that the name of a metaphor representing a rhetorical concept sort of relies on an incorrect definition of one of the words in the name of the metaphor.
I’ll add to that that even using the correct definition of “bailey” doesn’t change the metaphor - either way, the “bailey” is more generally useful, the “motte” is more defensible. That’s the only bit that’s relevant to the metaphor, the rest is just color.
So yes, I stand by my assertion that the distinction is trivial (for the purpose of discussing rhetoric. It clearly is not trivial for studying medieval settlement construction).
A key point from Erusian was that "you're also inventing a scenario which makes me wrong" and I'm inclined to agree. You did not witness the exchange; you are choosing to interpret Erusian's description of the exchange in a way that makes him look bad.
As an aspiring rationalist, I'm inclined to think you're hurting the reputation of rationalism with the approach you're taking. (even if you don't identify as rationalist.)
The bailey was kind of a fortified patio, but it was also a prison for serfs kept safe from bandits by the lord of the motte so he could profit from oppressing them. Um. I think of the metaphor as a polite way of saying 'bait and switch' without calling the other person a liar. And I think it works pretty well. It makes arguments more reasonable without harming any actual serfs or their lord's economic interests.
. . .
I don't think Scott's quality has changed much, but the comments section used to be a lot more right-left confrontational. If that comes back the place will probably be purged.
Scott gives his (or Shellack's) definition of bailey. It's "a field of desirable and economically productive land [around the motte] called a bailey." You go into the motte to avoid attacks and then go back to farming in the bailey when the raiders are gone. So it's clearly a mixup.
I'm just going to say it. Scott would make a bad feudal lord. Any lords looking for advice on how to run their fiefs should read someone else.
For years I thought that a "motte" was an olde Englische word for a "moat", and a bailey was either where the bailiff lived, or another old word for a "jail" or a dungeon. A bailiff is a kind of jailer or dungeon-keeper, right?
So when your warriors could no longer defend the water-filled "motte", they retreated to the strong stone "bailey" for a last-ditch defense. Which was precisely backwards.
Motte and moat actually were the same word. Motte literally means "hill" or "mound" but was extended to mean the earthworks (both hills and trenches) around a fortification. Eventually hills became less common and ditches filled with water became more common and so the motte came to refer mostly to a ditch filled with water. Now we say that a motte is the hill and the moat is the wet fosse. But they were the same word.
A bailiff is the person in charge of a bailiwick. A bailiwick is literally "a handed over/carried house." A bailiff is literally a carrier or bearer. Implicitly of something handed over. A porter in some cases. Wick means a home/house/village and therefore metaphorically an estate. So a bailiwick is a handed over estate. And a bailiff is the person in charge of it. But not the owner. This role as the person in charge but not the actual owner later created a royal class of officials as the king delegated various duties to the people he appointed bailiffs.
It's a false friend with bailey which probably derives from the Latin vallum meaning a type of wall (related to "poles, stakes" as in a palisade). A bailey is literally a walled area. Though some people think it might be related to the other word. However, bailiff is not the term for someone in charge of a bailey. It seems like in most of Europe the person in charge of a bailey was in charge of the gate that let people in and took something like that for their title. (Though, confusingly, sometimes bailiffs were in charge of what were called baileys! "Handed over things." And it wasn't uncommon for one person to hold two positions.)
Ok I know something about Marxism, and i think Cassander is right, but also your post does not in any way contradict this: "I don't think there's any way that an intellectual tradition like rationalism can grow without that happening. It's an inevitable artifact of getting more popular." The pot isn't calling the kettle black, the pot is pointing out that this problem is unavoidable....
Cassander is a rather prolific commenter in the rationalist community. My strongest association with Cassander is probably 'pro-capitalism' so I wouldn't be surprised if Freddie has read plenty of posts by Cassander about Marxism in the past.
This is such a pitch perfect response. Not even an attempt at an argument, just immediately lashing out with one of the oldest and laziest of ad hominem cliches. You've proven my point better than anything I could ever say.
And *your* attempt at an argument-that-was-definitely-not-an-ad-hominem-cliche was...what, exactly? What further response is called for when your comment was basically just "Says you, commie"?
He didn't "make a reasonable point," he just said "you're a communist, therefore a hypocrite, therefore I have verbally owned you by pointing these two things out." It's an anti-point.
Pointing out that communism is known for the same lack of curiosity that FdB is accusing rationalism of is interesting to me. I would have enjoyed a substantial response.
If Cassander made a point about the intellectual habits of communists, that would be one thing, but he didn't. He *implied* the existence of such a point as scaffold for a textbook ad hominem tu quoque ("you do X therefore your criticism of X is null").
Not saying Freddie's response was *ideal*, but Cassander's initial reply was definitely "coming in swinging".
Is it known for that though or just "known" for that. Despite being a bit left of the average reader of this blog (but definitely right of Freddie!) I'm actually not a fan of the reasoning style of most of the communists I've encountered. And whilst I've not read Marx, my prior that he is right on most of whatever claims divide him from the average academic economist right now is low. But just stating as a fact that your ideological enemies are especially group-thinky is both question-begging and not really very useful.
This isn't a reasonable or even a point at all. Just look at their next reaction, a classic "not even an attempt at an argument..." - When he started with a lazy "har gar communist is magic". A pot and a kettle indeed.
I think that Eliezer intentionally baked memification into his Sequences from the beginning. It's part of why I never actually managed to read them - I just couldn't stand the excessive appeal to pop-culture versions of martial arts and of Zen.
This isn't to say that you're wrong, but, well, the snake was in the garden from the beginning, you know?
Maybe Scott is good for reasons mostly unconnected with his liking for the sequences. And also maybe the sequences aren't quite as bad as you (or I) think.
Nah, I think the reasons actually are related. Scott's got a tiny ego, which both is why his writing is so much better than the Sequences and also why he doesn't balk at the Sequences (the content is decent; the problem is the egomaniacal tone Yudkowsky took).
The Sequences are fascinating and I learned many valuable things from them, but they're far too long and Eliezer's style is off-putting to many people. One of the rationalist community's failures, I think, is that the Sequences should have been rewritten in an equally comprehensive but more accessible form, so that the improved version could be recommended to newcomers.
On the other hand, the Bible is also too long and off-putting to many people, but Christianity met with some success. Maybe the real problem lies elsewhere.
Well, Yudkowsky wrote the sequences with the explicit purpose of making a case that work on "friendly AI" is literally the most urgent thing that humanity must be doing, while stuff like raising the sanity waterline was always secondary for him. Such an esoteric ideology in its pure form was never going to win broad appeal, it needed some normie-fication, which Scott turned out to be the best at.
If it was- mission failed, on several levels, starting with trying to use fanfiction to deliver polemic. It's hard enough for people to take original fiction that serves as the author's bully pulpit seriously (see: Atlas Shrugged, That Hideous Strength), but seizing the likeness of another's work to do it frequently enters the absurd.
> The thing is... I don't think there's any way that an intellectual tradition like rationalism can grow without that happening. It's an inevitable artifact of getting more popular.
It's a shame if that's the case, because it seems to me like this intellectual tradition specifically is _about_ not letting this kind of thing happen to your thinking. In a sense the community defined by references instead of a mode of thinking are necessarily missing the point of the whole thing. that kind of ruins the point of growing the intellectual tradition.
I don't have any deep thoughts on the issue, but perhaps the sequences and the rationality community has had a big focus in individual rationality, but not so much a focus on how to grow a movement of rationalists.
I don't think any tradition (not just intellectual) can grow without that happening. Christ, for instance, was the most Christian Christian in history. His first followers, the disciples and apostles and such, were known for applying the true rules of Christianity in the "right" way. As the community grew, less chaste and holy people began joining the order. People started killing and maiming and enslaving in the name of Christianity, although the Gospel can perhaps be said to strictly against any of these. Christianity was consequently bastardized to suit whatever un-holy whims dictate the actions of humans....similar to the bastardization of the motte and bailey fallacy to try and discredit any argument not to the motte-and-bailer's taste.
I would definitely agree that the commenting community here is 'worse' than at SSC along the lines you describe, along with the also unwelcome hurt feelings post whenever Scott makes an offhand joke about a political/cultural topic. I don't know how much that applies to the larger rational community as I don't really engage with it other than here, but I have the feeling that you're right about it being an inevitable side-effect of community growth (which is why I don't tend to 'join' them).
Another reason that you suck is just the winnowing effect of memory. People remember the most salient parts of the past, i.e. only your best posts from that time, and compare it to the present, which includes your median posts from now, and are disappointed by the comparison. This might have a larger effect on how your recent work is perceived than anything you mention!
This might lead to a sort of falling Shepard Tone effect, where the past Scott illusorily sounds better, as every year new people enter, slowly descend in pitch, and then complain about it. About a year or two after you got a lot of new readers, you'd start hearing more people at the point along this scale where they complain.
On top of that, new readers often catch up with your backlog *all at once*, so have a high opinion of you at the outset, and then read you at the pace of your output. So of course you suck compared to that!
2. If I had an ask congruent with the above, it'd be for more brain-breaking fiction pieces. Not a lot of them, mind you, but they are the bulgogi sauce on the beef.
3. I personally am fine with whatever you write. If I saw "I Replaced a Lightbulb," I'd assume it was 4,400 words of excellence before clicking on it.
4. You arsonist, you, putting periods outside quotation marks. This ought to be right, of course, and is consistent with the programmer vibe ACT emits, but is proscribed by US grammatical standards. (I felt this overall comment had insufficient hate given the topic is "Why Scott Sucks," so included it.)
Just like language is not bestowed by Merriam-Webster, but just documented by the organic use, so too I hope I can push forward grammar "rules" every time I disobey and "still put the periods outside of the quotation marks in any situation they can get away with it".
Yeah, it's been discussed and I do it too. My teacher said, "put the period inside them." But I think the appropriate period placement is "contextual". (And I have been known (though only very rarely) to nest parentheses.)
Re: it being tougher to explore random thoughts without having a good sense where they’ll end up.
This is one of many reasons that I've always enjoyed your book reviews. It seems to be a good format for asides or speculation, since you review such a diverse range of books. Some other big reasons I like your reviews are 1) the often-playful of tone combined with 2) cursory fact checking and 3) your ability to situate conceptual models within a landscape populated with ideas that might not be familiar to me. So, I'm in favor of more book reviews and you sharing random thoughts, even about your day-to-day life!
That said, I think you're great. No need to overthink things and risk paralysis by analysis.
+1 for the book reviews, they avoid a lot of the downsides of having a large audience. People offended that you're off your turf can take it up with the book author(s).
I subjectively enjoy the experience of reading this blog less than SSC, but I'm almost certain that's down to the font. It's very unpleasant to read, like a staircase with with a tread that's a liiiittle too deep.
Can confirm that switching the font of the blog instantly made my reading experience better. Something about the thinness of the lines in the Substack font feels stressful.
First time commenter here, so sorry if this is a tired old point, but I'm new to SSC/ACX and would love to see either a "Best Of" collection or a book which synthesises as much of your older ideas as possible. Does any such thing exist?
I think number 1 is big. The dictator stuff is a good example. It's interesting subject matter, and you're thoughtful about it, and overall I liked the posts, but simply due to not accumulating the thinking time and knowledge around the area, your content was a little weaker. (I hope you continue exploring that stuff, though, and maybe solve that problem.)
Counterpoint: I'm pretty hard on you, pretty often. But there's things you can do better than anyone else, and I'm not sure if you are weighting that correctly.
There's an aspect of "Oh, Freddie and Bari can write about that better" in some of this. And Freddie can write! But to the extent you tell me Scott Alexander and Freddie Deboer wrote, say, an article about some aspect of abortion or wokeness or something, I know what Freddie's conclusion is already (it's "more socialism"). But I don't know what yours is; I'm probably going to disagree with it but I'll have to *work* to disagree with it. There will be points in there I will have to think about and refute.
Your approach to topics is notably different from anyone elses, you tend to do more work on them, and you hit angles other people don't hit. That doesn't mean you MUST write about topic A, but it does mean that if you write about topic A you are going to bring added-value to it nobody else brings. It doesn't have to change your conclusions re: write about it or not, but it should be part of the calculation.
Definitely agree with this. I suppose the counterargument is that Scott writes well because he avoids topics he can't write well about, and so if he starts forcing himself to write then the quality will no longer be good. But I'd still rather see him give it a try instead of assume that it won't work out.
"There's an aspect of 'Oh, Freddie and Bari can write about that better' in some of this."
Right, and while Scott names several honest brokers (like Freddie), I wouldn't trust everyone Scott names to have Scott's intellectual honesty. If Scott were paying firsthand attention, rather than secondhand, I wonder whether he would have cited Rufo's City Journal article on this supposed Aztec worship craze. Because, while Bad Things Are Happening (you'll pry my allegiance to accelerated mathematics for children with the interest and aptitude for it out of my cold, dead hands!), Rufo's account is not honest, something I think Scott would know and mention if he weren't trusting others to do a better job.
I'm I the only person who hears about teaching kids to worship the Aztec sacrificial god, and thinks that that sounds a way more fun than average social studies hour?
You might be disappointed at what was really going on, then.
Ethnic studies curricula often use a short poem, "In Lak'Ech" by Chicano playwright Luis Valdez: "In Lak'ech / Tú eres mi otro yo. (You are my other me.) / Si te hago daño a ti, (If I do harm to you,) / Me hago daño a mi mismo. (I do harm to myself.) / Si te amo y respeto, (If I love and respect you,) / Me amo y respeto yo. (I love and respect myself.)"
Less frequently, invoking four Tezcatlipocas (Aztec gods) to personify four aspects of growth and development is also used. An activist promoting this practice wrote a long hip-hop riff on Valdez's "In Lak'Ech" personifying these aspects with four Tezcatlipocas and called it the “In Lak Ech Affirmation". The lyrics to this riff were included in the supplementary-materials section of one chapter of CA's ethnic-studies guide.
Valdez's brief "In Lak'Ech" sees considerable classroom use, including in ethnic-studies chants. Nobody produced evidence that the “In Lak Ech Affirmation", awkwardly long for classroom use, does, though. Videos circulating last year of students chanting the “In Lak Ech Affirmation" were videos of students doing chants incorporating the shorter, god-free "In Lak'Ech".
That's it. The whole controversy. Sadly, no actual Aztec ritual involved. It's the pre-Columbian equivalent of Western poets and old-timey prep schools invoking the Greek pantheon as mythic elements personifying certain principles (Wisdom! Rationality! Wildness! War! Sexystuff!...)
My own public school had some murals using Greek mythology to celebrate Western civ. Had someone objected to the murals as idolatry and demanded they be painted over, I'd expect laughter, plus outrage from the "uphold Western civ!" crowd, to result.
I just noticed I'm out of Athena-brand mineral water, though.
lol, I had somehow missed the Athena water story, until I read it a few days ago after seeing it on goodreads on a list of stories similar to HPMOR. I started actively reading SSC back in 2015, so it is surprising I missed it, though looking at the date, that was when I was hopping from hostel to airbnb to hostel through the Balkans with my new girlfriend/ now wife. So I suppose that might be how I missed it, I wonder if there is other stuff from that Jan/Feb/March that I didn't see.
This sort of thing has been the most annoying change I've noticed in Scott's writing (though i haven't checked to see whether it's actually a change or just something I've noticed more). Seems like he's falling for the bait more often.
I guess I'm still woke in the sense that I think teaching about structural racism is good and that sort of thing. Your anti-woke posts were never the thing I was around for and I'd be pretty disappointed if that's what people are desperate for, because frankly that all seems a bit preaching-to-the-choirey to me these days.
If there's anything I want more of it's just the super detailed deep dives on niche topics, which you still do sometimes but I guess could do more of? I don't really have a strong criticism here.
From reading this comment it occurs to me that there's still a lot of useful stuff to be written on racial issues that goes beyond "wokeness bad" vs "wokeness good". Like, the world doesn't need yet another take on why Critical Race Theory is bad, but it does need better ideas about ways to think about these sorts of issues that are actually _good_.
I feel like most of the writing and thinking about racial issues these days are so kindergarten-level that it's not difficut to be more sophisticated.
The "Critical Race Theory" issue seems like a particularly good fit for Scott's brand of deep dives into complex topics. Ignoring the fact that Critical Race Theory is absolutely the wrong name for the debate, it looks like a motte-and-baily situation where neither side can agree which is which.
The left is saying "We just want people to know the truth about American history, and the quite often brutal levels of racism involved in it" and accusing the right of trying to block the teaching of everything but the most cheerful whitewashed version of things.
The right is accusing the left of actually trying to berate children and make them feel bad about the color of their skin, and claims that they are just passing laws to make sure that doesn't happen.
Due to my personal views and friend group, I've heard a lot more of the left's side of the matter, but would appreciate a thorough analysis of the situation from someone I can trust to not be a white supremacist.
You don't know me very well, so you might not trust me, but "Critical Race Theory" is not synonymous with liberalism. Rather, it was conceived of as being critical of liberalism. So plenty of people were pro-civil rights liberals/progressives and even themselves African-American without embracing CRT. CRT is an offshoot of Critical Legal Studies, so it was a very niche thing. But what's actually being taught to kids is a heretical offshoot by people less bright than the originators of CRT.
Whether white children feel terrible about being white is kind of relevant, but the big conservative objection to teaching CRT in specific and SJ in general is a lot deeper and a lot fuzzier. Let's see if I can do it justice.
Social justice is, in all of its facets, essentially countercultural. It vehemently opposes the idea of "one right path", celebrates diversity rather than assimilation, and frequently sets up the West itself (in nebulous form) as the prime enemy. *As a counterculture* this is normal, reasonable, and probably a useful thing for society to have.
The problem is that SJ is *not* a counterculture anymore. It's become the West's primary culture. And as a primary culture it is *lousy*. SJ doesn't provide a beacon to rally around, because a key tenet is that having lots of different rallying points is fine; the "salad bowl" rather than the "melting pot". And an ideology praising opposing the status quo is a *terrible* thing to make societal dogma - you wind up in a war of all against all. Essentially, SJ replaces "e pluribus unum" with "e pluribus pluribus", and "pluribus" can't present a united front against external threats.
CRT in specific relates to both of the big disunifying issues - 1) it posits ongoing racial animus and the separation of "white" and "black" identities rather than a single "Western"/"American" identity, 2) "structural racism" very clearly sets up Western society itself as a near-perpetual enemy, enabling war of all against all.
Hopefully, this side of things doesn't need not-a-white-supremacist credentials, as it has little to do with race in particular.
What's impressive is that despite its cultural primacy wokeness still seems remarkably unified. Sure, there are some minor issues like TERFs and homophobic misogynistic rappers, but the cultural warriors on that side still seem to be pointed in roughly the same direction. Is that because the other side isn't sufficiently crushed yet and can still be painted as a mighty oppressor?
Terfs are dominant worldwide, of course, or rather gender criticism is. I don’t see critical theory as being all that unified - the basis of the theory creates new oppressor classes all the time.
You go to sleep one day as an oppressed black woman, you wake up to find you are a oppressor of the cis class.
'Cause "Don't be X-ist" is super easy to coordinate, and very hard to oppose.
There is some weird shit at the fringe (xenogenders and neopronouns what not), but nobody but terminally online weirdos give a shit about that in either direction.
The argument, at least as you present it, is self-defeating.
SJ self-evidently presents its adherents with "one right path" and a beacon to rally around. And how can it be called lousier than the earlier primary culture it displaced, after it has in fact successfully displaced it?
But the worst part is leaving oneself open to an obvious counter - SJ's enemy is not status quo, it's status quo ante. It unifies its adherents just fine, the problem is conservatives who cling to numerous remnants of the old system that unfairly benefited them, instead of the new one that's more just and more equal. If they actually support the idea of a primary culture and worry about disunity, maybe they should just get on with the times, because they're the ones causing the disunity in the first place.
Surely, this is just your description, but it does match my impression of the conservative position. Moreover, my description above matches my impression of the liberal response to conservatives. This... kind of demonstrates why the conservative opposition to SJ tended to be so ridiculously inefficient. (I use past tense because I think the tide is slowly, but visibly, turning. I'm not sure conservative's own efforts deserve much credit for that, though.)
>And how can it be called lousier than the earlier primary culture it displaced, after it has in fact successfully displaced it?
The appeal of a philosophy (which is not, of course, time-invariant) is not perfectly correlated with the strength it brings to a society, nor even with the happiness it brings to a society.
Rudyard Kipling's old poem "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" covers the general concern of the conservatives here and a lot of the specifics, although it's kind of hilariously smug.
>SJ's enemy is not status quo, it's status quo ante.
In theory, perhaps, but one can debate the practice. Some of its goals are commonly thought impossible; others incompatible. Even assuming all of the demands can be broadly met, SJ's anti-authority bent doesn't lend itself well to a concerted "mission accomplished" stand-down.
Note: my post concerned not theory, but rhetoric. It's irrelevant for the argument whether the movement's ideological foundations are coherent, realistic, compatible with each other or with practice. It's only relevant whether they're successful in advancing its (actual, not nominal) goals. (Otherwise, you'd have a lot of explaining to do about, e.g., conservative-approved Christianity.)
As for "The Gods of the Copybook Headings", the whole sentiment behind it is hilariously smug, the poem merely brings the problem to light. "My beliefs are timeless truths, yours are gimmicky delusions" just doesn't make an effective argument, no matter how well presented. Unless reality intervenes and proves it right, it's going to convince absolutely nobody. That, so far, didn't happen. (In large part, I suspect, because the god conservatives now find themselves beholden to is actually, quite literally, a God of the Market.)
What did happen is the spread of criticism from the left (as in, from left-wing principles, it's being adopted by people on the right as well) - not for rhetorical "anti-authority bent", but for actual authoritarianism, not for its demands being impossible or incoherent, but for being, essentially, a scam, useless if not harmful to the peoples and causes it claims to stand for.
>Unless reality intervenes and proves it right, it's going to convince absolutely nobody. That, so far, didn't happen.
I mean, "reality intervenes" has occurred a bunch of times throughout history. Conquest, War, Famine and Pestilence come calling every now and then, and being unprepared tends to come with a terrible cost.
But yes, you do get at one of the biggest debates; "is there any hope of being believed when you prophesy doom?". Indeed, GotCH directly addresses this in its last two verses. Religion apparently helps with maintaining hope.
I wouldn't say that comes close to the conservative position on SJ. A better statement would be that a conservative viewpoint finds SJ philosophy as widely actually deployed -- i.e. regardless of any pleasant-sounding bowdlerized rationalization -- to be as deeply and inherently wicked as "Aryan race science," and for fairly similar reasons: because it selects some people as inherently better than others, for absurd accidental reasons like the color of their skin or their sexual preferences, and it enforces an ideological conformity that brooks no questioning, no deviation, even in the most private circumstances, and the ultimate purpose of which seems to be so that the right people stay in power, regardless of their merit, and the wrong people cannot achieve it, regardless of their merit or effort. The practical distinction between this philosophy and any other of the many oppressive social philosophies over the past 10,000 years that demean human effort, liberty, and individual merit, and instead reduce everyone to a mere member of a class, and exalt knowing one's proper place (while of course always claiming to be all about justice and peace), is difficult to discern. I don't think a conservative would consider it valuable in counterculture any more than he would agree a certain amount of murder is good for society because it keeps the police on their toes.
I was impressed by how closely your description of the conservative view of SJ could be applied, word for word, to the liberal view of Trumpism. I guess this ratifies your point abour SJ being indistinguishable...
Quite right. Those two camps totally deserve each other, and the sad part is that there's no Golgrafrincham Ark B onto which those of who just need to pay the mortgage on time and get the kids through graduation without too much drama can herd them both.
A two parter of an explanation, here's the first. Posting the second as a reply to this one:
Some of the problems with woke thought start from their presumption that structural racism exists, is pervasive and the ordinary state of affairs, and that it is the primary cause of basically all disparity.
To explain more of the objection, it's really useful to differentiate between teaching subject matter, and the teaching attitude, mindset or assumptions.
To illustrate with two examples: Many people dislike the Common Core method of teaching math. They argue it is founded on mistaken assumptions and just plain does not work. If they wanted to ban teaching Common Core, they certainly wouldn't want to ban teaching math.
Another example, this time with ideology instead of bad methods. Imagine if a school's teachers suddenly started having every math problem be about calculating how much capitalists rip off workers, how many bullets you need to shoot what amount of capitalist pigs, how much molten metal and how many priests we need to entertain revolutionaries by letting them execute priests by pouring molten metal down their throats in a mockery of the priest's sacrament?
They'd teach perfectly valid math with good methods. I presume many would still have issues with these teachers, right? They are teaching math, yes, but teaching math *through* an explicitly ideological lens.
In the CRT case, both of these are at issue: The right believes the teachers are ideologues for an ideology they don't think is a good one, that the teachers prioritize ideological lessons and otherwise an ideological viewpoint *though which* the teaching is done, and sideline traditional teaching.
And they are right to do so: Critical theorists do not simply want to teach more stuff, or to just teach the historical facts.
Max Horkheimer who originally coined the term *critical theory* explicitly distinguishes it from what he calls *traditional theory*.
According to Horkheimer, *traditional theory* is that which seeks to understand, explain, model the world as it is. It's an agenda-less knowledge building exercise.
Critical theory, in contrast, is explicitly activist and normative. It posits that society should be a certain way, and critiques it for failing to live up to those pre-decided norms. It actively tries to make society be the way the Critical Theorist decided the world should be.
The "critical" part in the name is not about critical thinking. Critical thinking is questioning, but questioning in the sense of trying to be careful and accurate, and to minimize mistakes. It is a tool of traditional theory. The "critical" in critical theory is the critique and dismantling of that which has been decided as unfit, as that which shouldn't be.
Critical Theory is a *way* of teaching, and its structure is the problem, the structure is what's being objected to, in the same way people objecting to Common Core definitely want their kids taught math. Just not THAT way. CRT isn't "just teaching history" - adding more facts to the curriculum would simply be better traditional theory, by Horkheimer's definitions. People are objecting to the ideologization of teaching history (and pretty much everything else), not to the subject being taught.
More facts is fine, more than fine, and actually helps people to understand the nuance and messiness of reality: People and cultures of all walks of life aren't saints, and many people who do things objectionable today are usually way more interesting than just "evil person". Getting people to really drink in reality in full would be commendable. But that's not what the ideologues in teaching are trying to do, exactly the opposite.
Wokeness, to my understanding, is to have an *intersectional critical consciousness* and *a minoritarian moral intuition*. There can in principle be gay parades that are not woke (though there's a good chance they are feminist, and feminist thought is still critical theory/conflict theory driven and so a different strain of the same disease, which leads to gender critical feminists making hilarious claims about woke claims on womens' spaces). To be pro-minorities rights, or to be pro-gay or the like, is not being woke. There are a myriad of leftist and minoritarian positions that are not woke. It is somewhat like describing Christianity. Wokeness is like the Westboro Baptist Church, or Kenneth Copeland televangelism, if they managed to take over most Christian churches. I'll try to describe the Westboro faith.
The words *intersectional* and *critical consciousness* are technical terms derived from post-Marxist and neo-Marxist theory, and part of the foundation of feminism, critical race theory and all manner of somethingstudies.
To have a critical consciousness is to have a worldview: Marxism and Marxism-derived (hereafter: Marxism/st) theories see the world in terms of classes of people, some of which are oppressors and some of which are oppressed, and the task of the Marxist is to free the oppressed from the yoke of the oppressors. Depending on the theory, these classifications differ - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, women and men, blacks/minorities and whites, colonized and colonialists, queer and straight people, list goes on. In these societies, though, some of the oppressed are unaware of their status as such and willingly go along with the ruling ideology. Engels termed these people to possess a *false conciousness*, false because the class doesn't assert itself towards goals that would benefit it (these being, in Engels' opinion, obviously Marxist ones). To awaken to the oppressor-oppressed reality and adopt the Marxist worldview is to possess a *class consciousness*.
After some time and nasty news from the east, the later Marxist thinkers had a problem, though: Marx especially originally theorized that communist revolutions would occur in capitalist societies as part of history's move towards its end state, yet Marxist revolutions in capitalist societies failed to materialize, and happened mostly in agrarian societies. Like any theorists who don't want to abadon their conclusion, Marxist theorists came to adopt Engles' idea as the explanation for why they did not take place. This is part of the genesis of *the Long March through the Institutions* coined by Gramsci.
In the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer first defined *critical theory* (German: Kritische Theorie) in his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory", as a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to *traditional theory* oriented only toward understanding or explaining it. Wanting to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy, Horkheimer critiqued both the model of science put forward by logical positivism, and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism. He described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."[6] Critical theory involves a normative dimension, either by criticizing society in terms of some general theory of values or norms (oughts), or by criticizing society in terms of its own espoused values (i.e. immanent critique). The Frankfurt scholars also developed the concept of *Cultural hegemony* to describe the dominant group in society's way to be and think about the world.
These ideas were taken up in various forms of Western grievance politics, especially in feminism, where Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term *intersectionality* as a way to explore the oppression of black women - the idea is that black women face a kind of oppression that is different from that of the black man and the white woman, their oppressed identities intersect to produce a unique experience. How this develops into modern oppression olympics is probably not hard to see. It's why all kinds of activism nowadays seem cut from the same cloth: They are. Every single one is built on top of the Marxist/Marxian thought pattern and bundled up in one intersectional shitshow.
To possess a *critical consciousness*, then, is a broader, partially postmodern application of freeing people from *false consciousness*, and getting them to view the world through the lens of classes that are in an oppressor-oppressed relationship (or rather an oppression olympics pyramid), and to see culture for what it is, the dominant class asserting its preferences over the oppressed. Modern concepts such as *White fragility* are extensions of this thinking: If you defend yourself against accusations of racism, these necessarily come from one of two places: False consciousness, or the member of the dominant class exerting *privilege-preserving epistemic pushback* - in plain terms not wanting to give up on ill-gotten gains. Hence, genuine critique of *critical* materials is not possible, because authentic, genuine engagement should produce understanding and thus agreement. Criticism means the engagement wasn't genuine.
Most woke people, of course, do not think like this in active terms. But the rhetoric they stew in is created in large part from this kind of theoretical background, and it shows in their language and thinking patterns.
The second piece of the puzzle is more in the vein of Haidt: Wokeness is not liberal, or even egalitarian (it *is* equal-itarian however: Make people the same/believe they are the same rather than just treat all the same way), so why do people gobble it up so easily? Marinating in critical theory in the university is obviously part of it, but another is that the underlying moral intuition of the American formerly liberal left hasn't been Liberal or egalitarian for a while. At least after the 60s, it's surreptitiously switched to an actively *minoritarian* one. Thus, when an actively minoritarian politics like wokeness takes over, *there is no emotional break or fault line for most people*, because the surface rhetoric switches, the underlying moral intuition does not. This is why it's hard to speak for Liberal values and for egalitarian things, why they feel toothless. They are not the foundation anymore. Eric Kaufmann goes over the idea in his piece *Liberal Fundamentalism: A sociology of Wokeness* : https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/liberal-fundamentalism-a-sociology-of-wokeness/
To really drive home and underline this: Woke teachers are not liberals. Not in terms of their primary values, not in the looser sense of being tolerant of many things they dislike. Their morals are fundamentally different, and they're trying to install those for everyone as the unquestioned default. As someone else in another subthread noted, it is a disaster as a ruling ideology because it primarily seeks to destroy what is. It's an ideological solvent, not ideological bricks and mortar.
I'm not a Marxist, and I certainly don't think of myself as 'woke'--but I honestly *do* see quite a lot of history as being the story of oppressive elites trying to maintain their dominance and inventing ideological rationalizations for it after the fact.
It seems to me that conflict theory (although not always) is often *right* in how it sees political and social conflicts: that they're about different groups with fundamentally different interests, trying to benefit at the other's expense.
Do you think this is *never* an accurate analysis of things?
Not Rando, but I do think conflict theory, or the Marxist-Hegelian view, or the critical theory view has insights that are helpful to understanding the past and the present. It's what to do about those insights that is the big question.
Like, it's unquestionable that the US has had a segment of elites that used a racial system to oppress a lower class. It's also unquestionable that, despite many changes, there are racial disparities in wealth and other things today. One response to this is "Wow, we better double down on working towards the goal of eliminating race-based discrimination from our society." Another response is "Wow, race conflict will never end, we better double-down on elevating the oppressed races, even if it means entrenching racial identity and embracing race-based discrimination (in favor of our preferred races)."
Do I mind teachers teaching my child that the world has classes that are often in conflict with each other and that knowing this can be helpful in understanding the world? No.
Do I mind teachers teaching my child things that amount to "therefore we must lean into to the class conflict in favor of this or that group"? Yes, very much so.
I thought about it myself a few months ago (I love scott and his writing, but do feel that an arbitrary new post on ACX is less appealing to me than one from SSC), and my personal estimation was that it is mostly the "low hanging fruits have been picked" effect.
For me, a person who is way more excited by novel concepts and cognitive tools than facts of a particular subject matter (e.g. the idea of slack vs. all the posts on covid), this is doubly true.
Scott can probably write tons more book reviews or "much more than you wanted to know"s, but not endless valuable theoretical musings. And the subjects themselves, say super cool mind blowing books to review, also suffer from the same effect.
not to be a bastard wearing you down, but i found the old ssc a little uncomfortable to read at times because the distinction between 'contrarian by impulse' and 'contrarian because the minority idea is interesting' sometimes seemed blurred to me. but on the other hand articles like 'the categories were made for man, not man for the categories' have changed how i tackle so many issues at work - and frankly, have helped me ease transphobic tensions among my family. 'contrarian' framing of ideas that might at first glance belong in the 'woke' category are extremely useful.
anyways there are a couple examples like that from the old blog and this one, but my expectations are nothing more than to read some interesting ideas and talk to people about them. the old blog still exists, ACT hasn't subtracted from it.
adding guest authors to the substack could continue to be a good way to embrace the more incremental nature of your updated beliefs - outsource hot takes to others, then act as moderator/critic. some people don't like this idea of an 'agglomerator' but my favorite blog of old was roger eberts, and this is the blog that reminds me most of his. the hard part of a critic's job isn't the negative criticism, it's the defense of the new and beautiful. your posts defending the new always resonate most with me.
I don't think you suck. But I do read this less than the old blog.
I think you used to be more of a risk taker. More of a heretic. Now, after getting beaten up by the paper of record and during a time when the pressure for conformity is super high, you've become less of a risk taker and less of a heretic. To me that's disappointing.
But we have to act in the world for ourselves, not through our favorite blog writers.
feels like all these ideas (scott is less of a heretic because of being beaten up) were addressed. do you disagree with scott's self-analysis of why there is less 'heretical' writing here?
My impression from speaking to some people who said they prefer the classic SSC is that they are over-weighting certain classic posts and under-weighting the many posts from these years they've forgotten about. I share the view that disproportionately many of the 'all time best' posts are from the early years, but I don't think that the quality of the median post is lower than it was then (maybe the contrary).
As to the reason why so many of the 'all time great' posts are from earlier years. I think your post alluded to the things I think are the main two factors: i) many of them concerned identity politics/culture war issues, ii) many of these were covering pretty basic issues, not in the sense of being simple (although maybe they were that too), but of being foundational, and it's hard to keep generating foundational insights at the same rate year-on-year as the lowest hanging fruit gets picked.
This all rings true and matches my own experience of intellectually maturing as well. Fundamental questions do not seem interesting anymore. The frustrating thing, for me at least, is that with age comes additional responsibilities and the speed at which one can delve into the nifty nitty-gritty side-quests of industrial policy, or in my case the domain-dependence of literacy, I think also decreases. But maybe that is also having toddlers in the house!
And since we are doing confessions about why we suck, I think much of my suckiness is caused by impatience. I have an idea and want it to bloom quickly, so I leap into the idea for 24 hours, realize I don't have time to bring to fruition and then retreat, ego wounded, for a week; or I see a blog post which I think reinvents the wheel, and I critique it for such criminality when that critique is equivalent to being mad at someone for not having the same prior knowledge as me. What a waste.
Lastly, thank you for the idea that SJW is dead. I would love to see this idea explored more, because though it matches my experience, I just figured my bubble shifted its Overton Window.
Second for the "SJW has lost momentum" article. Matches my experience as well but I admit I'm judging more by higher-order derivatives and projecting based on that. I think lots of people would disagree and it would be nicely controversial.
I'm less certain. I can't find the Medium post discussing this, but since the young are much woker than the old it seems like the trajectory will be for wokeness to increase.
Firm disagree, there. My personal experience has been seeing the lefties in my age bracket go from hard-left radical communists about two bad days away from bombing someplace to more boring, reliable left-center people over about 10-15 years. Young people tend to be firebrands on either side, and then the real world grinds their edges off.
I've gotten significantly more progressive as I've aged. I'm 31 now, so hardly retirement age, but I was right-of-center at 20 and left-of-center at 25.
How has regression to the mean not been mentioned yet? If you like something a lot (say enough to subscribe to a blog and keep reading it for years ...), you're just naturally likely to start liking it less.
Pshaw, bunch of Johnny-come-latelys, I've thought you sucked since you switched from LiveJournal.
(j/k, you don't suck)
Is it possible that you are getting less insights from your new line of work than you did as an intern/in-person psychiatrist? I know one of my favorites from you was:
As a medical student who has now spent three years in hospitals including with palliative care teams etc, this post never quite matched my experience. It’s not that much of what he says is wrong (except I think Scott references a lot of screaming, which I feel like I don’t actually see that much of), but more that the way you interact with death and hospital environments will probably vary a lot depending on who you are. Sure, doctors don’t want to overdo the treatment as a rule etc, and I’m 100% on the side of getting palliative treatment the moment it’s offered to me, but I’ve never found hospitals to be as horrible as this.
I feel like the differing experiences are best explained by Scott’s idea of everyone having wildly different internal experiences. Maybe I’m a heartless psychopathic bastard, maybe I got to go to hospital when well rested and well fed and didn’t have the shittiness of being a resident weighing me down, maybe some other factors are at play. But I personally wouldn’t take Who By Very Slow Decay as a guide for dying will be. Sometimes it’s awful, sometimes it’s manageable, and I feel like it depends on who you are, how caring your doctors are (including in knowing how to treat eg breathlessness or pain or nausea at the end of life), and just other random life circumstances that are going on when you are at the end of life (eg not worrying about how your 10 year old child will cope without either parent or something)
I have no idea if this is relevant, but the post mentions seems to suggest that Catholic hospitals may be less enthusiastic about transitioning to palliative care. Could his being at a Catholic hospital explain the difference?
Interesting! What observations do you have about Catholic opposition to palliative care?
It doesn't seem like Catholicism would be morally opposed to palliative care. The Catechism, while condemning euthanasia, specifically states that "heroic measures" do not have to be taken to extend life.
This is interpreted as meaning that, while food and water must be supplied until the end, medical treatments can be rejected by patients if they would just cause additional suffering.
All the anti-euthanasia Catholic ethicists I've read have praised hospice and palliative care as a good alternative to euthanasia.
What you say is true, as far as it goes. But it kind of ignores the way that the assumption that suffering is good for the soul is baked into that particular pie. Or the pervasive belief that everyone is a sinner and deserves to suffer a little. As with all things, the devil is in the detail; the way in which the concept of 'care' is interpreted.
I'm sure it does vary by region a lot. But as writing it is an evocative piece, and I'm pretty sure it was influenced strongly by Scotts recent experience. Tele-medicine probably doesn't have the impact, useful as it may be.
Lucky you, regarding the lack of observed screaming.
I visit an old person in an aged care home pretty regularly and there is generally some resident - usually a different one each time - screaming there.
The screams are quite disturbing because of their absolute sincerity; they reflect a very high level of emotional distress from the people concerned.
I am confident this particular home provides a high level of care and is doing all it can to mitigate that distress, and so my own conclusion is that advanced age and the earlier stages of dying can indeed involve a certain amount of screaming and a high degree of emotional distress, if only due to the individual's lack of ability to orient themselves to their current reality.
> Some of the good ideas I came up with in my 20s now feel extremely basic, to the point where I’m surprised other people found them helpful. If the discourse wants ideas at that level of basic-ness, I’m no longer producing them - it would feel like talking down to people. I realize it’s self-serving to write a post on why you suck and transition to “maybe I’m just too good for everyone”. But I think I’m more sophisticated than I was ten years ago, and people ten years ago seemed to find me the right level of sophistication, so maybe lack of sophistication sells.
This seems to be a common pattern, especially in the "intellectual travelogue" mode of writing. The earlier audiences are mostly selected among folks who find the beginning explorations valuable, and as you say those tend to have a much wider focus and so can cast a larger net. 'Sophistication' comes with having working answers to the common questions, and a richer set of established ideas to work with that allows for easier detail work at the cost of an inferential gap for newcomers. But even if that means more powerful insights in less-explored questions, it also shuts the door on the fingers of anyone whose answers to those earlier questions are incompatible.
It's shades of 'This is not a 101 space' and the explore v. exploit dichotomy that lay under some of the Sequences. I don't think there's an *answer* per se since it's the result of an inevitable shift in focus (and the price of regression is stagnation, with even less path forward than now), but ISTM the healthiest strategy is to accept that one has found a set of hammers that fit their hand quite well, and keep checking that the nails are doing useful work.
This is DEFINITELY why you suck: This is my explanation for why so many smart intellectuals, upon being thrust into punditry superstardom, lose all their good qualities and turn into partisan hacks (many such cases!)
I really enjoyed the old "thinking out loud" posts. One of the articles that got me hooked was "Meditations on Slack".
You say you're worried about a general audience taking tentative conclusions without a grain of salt. But SSC used to have an "epistemic confidence" number at the top of each post (always too small a number IMHO); I'm not sure why you couldn't bring that back.
Studies on Slack was a counterpart and followup to Meditations on Moloch, but it felt less developed and left a lot of unanswered questions (like why does slack sometimes lead to innovation and success like the Japanese car industry but sometimes lead to stagnation and laziness like the Argentinian car industry?) It's something I think about a lot now, and I hope that one day Scott continues his meditations on Moloch vs Slack.
Isn't it a numbers thing? The more fans you have the more haters you have. I wonder if your 60% approval was the same at your old place, but even if you bothered to do a poll then, the haters wouldn't even bother taking the poll. But now that your audience is bigger, there's more haters in hard numbers even if the percentage is the same. AND there's more "clout" in hate reading you or anyone popular. So those haters have more incentive to hate actively. No?
> Who’s woke anymore? Are there really still woke people? Other than all corporations, every government agency, and all media properties, I mean. Those don’t count. Any real people? I guess I know one or two SJWs. But I also know one or two Catholics. Doesn’t mean they’re not the intellectual equivalent of out-of-place artifacts.
This seems like it might be selection bias on your acquaintances. I encounter what feels like more than ever right now.
Something something Lindy. Your best work is the stuff that people share (and that was listed on STC EDIT: I meant under "recommended reading"), the rest is just forgotten. But if you then follow you become the filter.
The NYT-thing had me already dig up the drums of war until you unfortunately called us back - reason is that I was waiting daily for articles to read while procrastinating on my shitty job back then. Well, there will be other willing targets for game-theories' pandaemonium, kek.
Also everyone sucks, it's normal. It's probably just something to do with Dunning-Krueger. I still read you and even started paying now (something I normally never do as long as it can be avoided, I'm not *that* financially illiterate).
This post makes me very sad but I'm glad you wrote it. It formalizes that this is no longer a space for me, and you are no longer writing things that I want to read. While I have a tinge of bitterness to this, I don't say this to disparage you. Nobody can be all things to all people, and you have chosen others over me. Many such cases.
I understand what you are saying, and I understand that you see it differently, but the essay I just read has three or four moments where you say something that simplifies to "I would rather spread lies than get criticized by important people". I get it. I not only _would_ do this, but I _have_ done this. I used to have a blog and I'm 90% sure you read it. One day I got doxxed, privately, by a coworker, who did not post it online, and within an hour of finding out, I removed every trace of my blogging identity from the internet. That's how I react to the situation you find yourself in, and so I want to say that I get it and I'm not judging you negatively for it.
That said, this bothers me greatly. First off, precisely because I come to your blog to get _unfiltered_ truth. I don't want people with lower IQs than me employed at news media pre-digesting things they don't understand for me. You, on the other hand, are clearly smarter than me and so when _you_ commentate, it's valuable. If you're intentionally no longer doing that, then the core value your blog delivers to me is no longer there
But this is made worse by the events of the past two years. For two fucking years, I have watched everyone around me go crazy. I have watched everyone around me do complete 180s on 'deeply held beliefs' multiple times per month, as the narrative changes. I have watched _**dozens**_ of doctors and public health officials say things that contradict basic public resources like biology textbooks, without any explanation or even acknowledgement of this (ie "I know usually this would be a bad sign but trust me this one is different").
And every time I would try to raise this to people, I'd get slandered as a conspiracy theorist, an anti-vaxxer, an evil Trump voter (I can't legally vote in the US). People who I KNOW know better would all suddenly go insane.
So when you post this
> A simple example: suppose I look over vaccine effectiveness data and find something that doesn’t make sense. In a personal diary or a small blog, I can easily write “today I was looking over the vaccine data, it didn’t make sense to me, yours, Scott”. In a large blog or newspaper of record, that speculation takes on aspects of a speech act: “Well-known blogger questions vaccine data!” if not “Local doctor says vaccine data is garbage!”. That makes it tougher to explore random thoughts without having a good sense where they’ll end up.
and this
> My blog had a very slight but nonzero influence on at least one country’s coronavirus policies. Once you know you can do that, you start optimizing pretty heavily for that, even if that means saying a lot of things which bore the majority of your readers. It could be worse. I once talked to a very prestigious journalist who said he sometimes knows exactly which Biden administration official he’s writing a particular article to catch the attention of
What I'm seeing is that you think your influence over people is more important than speaking honest truth when it's unpleasant.
Maybe it is! After all, I laid out above what I would do in your shoes. Your blog still exists, so you're braver and more principled than I.
But I read that, and you know what I hear? I hear a smart and influential person pretty much openly saying that they won't publish anything controversial, _even when it's the truth_, because they'll get in too much shit from corrupt evil leaders. Does anybody stop and think what happens if this generalizes? If every other public commentator runs the same program? It gets us to a world in which every single leader and 'expert' all echo trendy misinformation in unison while loudly and aggressively punishing all dissent. After all, if you say the wrong thing, you might fuck up your chance to influence the president. Not the false thing. The wrong thing.
I appreciate your honesty and self-reflection, but what I'm reading is the story of someone who has finally been welcomed into the halls of power and wealth, and has now decided that his popular and powerful friends are more important than the truth. So be it. I will continue to find truth elsewhere.
I wish you all the best, and should you ever be in Texas, I'll buy you a drink. I'm not going to any local meetups though; that's a long story for another time
Do you think that applies to Robin Hanson too? He seems to still piss people off, even without trying to. Of course, I always preferred him to Eliezer and never thought FOOM was likely. I would also like to add that Robin wiped the floor with Mencius Moldbug/Curtis Yarvin when they debated.
I do feel like my own enthusiasm for Scottish insights was strongly diminished by the apparent (bizarre) belief that "rationalists" were all pro-lockdowns, pro-masks, pro-mandates etc.
I mean, here is someone who was blogging about the replication crisis, bad science, the limits of rationality, why communism is bad etc for years, then suddenly a bunch of academics impose communism on the world via a deluge of crap papers far worse than the typical psych paper and .... it's all great? It's "rationalist"? Where is the response? What happened to all those insights? Feels like they were all suddenly forgotten and perhaps that meant they were never taken seriously to begin with.
That said, I still read (mostly) and I still enjoy (mostly).
Robin Hanson has been critical of lockdowns. I thought he was excessively critical of masks early on, but now that vaccines have been widely available for a while (with boosters, even!) I think they're no longer needed.
"Yes. I also notice there are two *different* logical formulations here, the 'taste of power' and the 'hard to contradict oneself' are being treated as the same when they're very different.
The real complaint here is that we're not reflexively anti-left like Glen or Yarvin."
Scott didn't say anything about him spreading lies. He says instead he's more reluctant to shoot his mouth off now that he's a well-respected big-name Substack writer.
I broadly agree with this sentiment, but then, Scott pretty much announced that this was going to do this, in his article on "Kolmogorov Complicity". I don't expect to read anything even remotely controversial on ACX anymore, but there's still hope that some up-and-coming blogger will pick up the baton that Scott dropped. There is, however, still a lot of value in the kinds of well-researched yet generally accessible articles on non-controversial yet interesting topics that Scott is writing nowadays.
It was a different Scott, Aaronson, who said that like Kolmogorov he was mostly going to silence himself on certain things. Scott Alexander criticized that by saying that self-censorship on any topic can inhibit free intellectual exploration in general.
I might be misremembering, but I thought that Scott Alexander agreed with Aaronson. He acknowledged that, as you say, "censorship on any topic can inhibit free intellectual exploration in general"; but he said that he was going to do that anyway -- because his life is more important to him than free intellectual expression in general.
I'm probably misreading this, but it sounds like you're saying you are no longer an atheist?
In this sentence: "I feel like whatever personality quirk of mine made that decision [(to not talk about atheism)] saved me a lot of retroactive embarrassment, and I want to nurture and encourage it." Also there's another reference to this.
Regarding 8 specifically, I think that these basic debates are the ones that have the biggest direct impact. You might think that you'd do a bad job covering them, but it certainly won't be worse than most of the others in this space. I considered your post on not voting for Trump very important and it was the strongest influence on my final vote out of anything else I read. I think the world will have a slightly improved perspective on any issues that you write about, and that's how you might have the largest positive impact on the world.
That said, your other points are convincing and I respect that you write about things that you find enjoyable first.
Well look, there's the simple fact that nothing blog-length that anyone writes will ever top the "Which Pill Do You Choose?" story. So of course everything since will seem downhill. That's ok, it's still pretty great.
I agree with the chorus of commenters who say "You don't suck!"
One thing I'd add to your list is the selection effects in your feedback. The community of Very Online Posters is enriched for contrarian temperaments and strong ideological priors. I suspect if you were able to do a longitudinal time series of your SSC/ACX community, you'd see a dropout of people as they age/have children/mellow, who are replaced by a younger cohort still high on the thrill of something being wrong on the Internet.
I also expect that this selection effect took a huge bump from the NYT controversy, which drew people primarily interested in Woke War Punditry and not a long series of guest posts on Georgist land taxes.
Someone asked me a similar question. (Why you, Scott Alexander, now suck. Not why I suck.) My answer was basically two things: Firstly, you're not really a fighter. And if you're prominent and not a fighter then the experience of fighting is just getting punched in the face a lot. This means you're less likely to say risky, truth to power things because they're more likely to get noticed and you don't want to spend your time in fights over that kind of thing.
Secondly, you've mined out your life experience and are now suffering from what I call Avril Lavigne Syndrome. Avril Lavigne got really big connecting with the experiences of a sort of average social outcast girl in her music. No doubt part of that was from her own experiences as the kind of girl who wears black makeup and looks kind of punk. But her success made her famous and then she wasn't like one of those girls anymore. She had no new relatable experiences to mine. The new experiences she was having were out of character for her brand. They were the experience of being rich and famous which isn't relatable to enough people. She was also just too big to be indie.
This put her on the horns of a dilemma. She could change her brand but this would cause her to lose a lot of her fandom and was further apart what she got into music to do. (A shift Taylor Swift succeeded at but Lavigne didn't.) Or she could try to connect with her old fanbase but have trouble with getting outflanked by artists with more genuine and recent experiences to mine. She tried the latter and it blew up in her face.
Your experiences have gone from the trenches of internet culture to being A Brand(tm). You're now a prominent coastal essayist. And your brand is not being a prominent coastal essayist or anything like that.
The solution is to do new things and to mine new veins. To understand who you are and synthesize that into your brand. Or to sell out if you want to sell out.
This is, in my opinion, why artists have periods. They find or make new rich veins from a variety of things. Breakups are a common one for songwriters. Orwell volunteered to fight in some wars. I bet ACX would get a lot better if you volunteered to fight in Ukraine.* You (sensibly) don't want to do that. But you should find some new source to mine. The old one is tapped out not just because you've already plumbed its depths but because it's about the you that you were a decade ago, not the you that you are now.
*For whatever prediction points are worth I mentioned Ukraine specifically and this conversation was all the way back in like March or April.
But then, why does creativity have to be driven by immediate life experience? You've also got the classical/formal approach, and the just plain weird approach .
Because the act of creating is always done in your immediate life. You can't escape the fact that you are always writing now. You were writing now in the past and you will be writing now in the future as well.
Unsong had all three, of course, the influence of Scott's relationship to the rationalist community , the cabalistic stuff, which is about as formal as it gets, and lots of weirdness.
For an example in fiction, consider Dick Francis. His early books leaned very heavily on his experience as a top jockey. His later books contained some link to that world as a trademark but were basically about worlds he presumably encountered as a result of being a successful novelist.
I’d say 8, the arrogant version, accounts for a lot. In particular, that your ACX tone has a tendency to *sound* more arrogant than you did at SSC. Being arrogant and full of yourself is part and parcel of blogging, but one needn’t come across that way.
You don’t suck in absolute terms, but your blind spots manifest themselves disturbingly frequently so the quality level here is volatile.
I won’t speculate about the reasons for them (too many reasons suggest themselves), but
1) you should be much more ruthless about ignoring mainstream puppets and parrots who have demonstrated their unreliability and bad faith; despite knowing all about Gell-Mann amnesia you still fall prey to it
2) avoiding partisan issues is fine, but you should write more about issues where BOTH parties, and most of the American mainstream, are wrong (related to point 1, hard to know about these if you have let media and tech companies filter your information a lot)
3) Get on the case for fluvoxamine for COVID right now, the agency foot-dragging is intolerable, can’t think of a better immediate use of your clout
I propose a variant of 1. Good ideas are hard to come by, and the conditions to come up with them are fragile, highly personal, poorly understood. So, this is a finite resource that at some point just... dries up. Tell me, do you think that compared to the past, you are mainly sharing your own ideas, or translating others? This isn't bad, you are an excellent translator and inventor of words (For me, the name and post about "epistemic minor leagues" is one of the highlights of ACX) ... Maybe you should try getting back to the part of you that disagrees with or is unrelated to the rationalists. Revisit some old post, and see whether the times have changed. Has lovecraftian fiction fallen to irony, or is authenticity in renaissance? What do advances in VR mean for micronationalism? What's up with Abraham Lincoln, anyway? Part of me maybe getting Unsong in a publishable state and starting to think about a sequel (or a fiction novel with a similar style).
I would strongly encourage you to find ways to test the even more basic hypothesis of, “I liked your posts back when they were in the old template on SSC, and this new template looks different, and most humans dislike change.” Call it the new box label hypothesis.
I don't remember seeing that question on the reader survey. If I had seen it, i would have said 'hell no, acx is great. I like it more than SSC'. I read every email you sent out, but i didn't see that question. Is it possible that you putting the question into that big survey biased the results towards people who are predisposed to take long reader surveys?
A friend sold me on your blog as "he looks at a big complex question, and instead of going HERE IS THE ANSWER IDIOTS, he comes up with a few theories, then compares them with data, and then generally just kind of shrugs." I feel like ACX has had many more posts like that. One of the main takeaways i get from your blog is like the opposite of 'this reinforces my priors' - it's more like, 'Geeze, this thing i thought i kind of understood is much more complicated than i imagined. I'm glad i don't need to have an opinion here.'
Scott, to be honest, I think you're writing has overall gotten better at communicating over the years, and has actually kinda followed my interests quite a bit. Maybe the sheer quantity has gone down, but I still love most of it (I generally skip your stuff about psychiatry because the field doesn't interest me much).
Though I find it interesting that you're surrounded by more anti-woke people than woke people these days. I feel like I didn't know nearly as many woke people 5-6 years ago as I do now. Right now, I can't avoid woke rhetoric in my company's meetings and chat rooms -- and my company is made up of mostly conservative but mild-mannered Christian mid-westerners. The loud minority is super-woke, and they've made a culture of fear. I'm part of nearly a dozen chat groups in Signal and other similar platforms that are just made up of co-workers that want the ability to talk candidly without being shouted down in public or reported to HR. And I never observed this level of fear prior to, say, 2014.
I don't think our observations conflict. If I'm (for some reason) at the top of the barberpole, and you're (for some reason) in the middle, we're both seeing the barberpole turn at the same rate. Presumably I'm higher in the barberpole than you because the Bay Area tech scene that provides most of my social contacts is "cooler" than the the Midwestern company scene that provides most of yours.
Every ideology has its subset of psychopaths, even liberalism. Those people are the Woke Posadists, and will come to the same level of success as the namesake.
Right now, a whole lot of people are biting their tongues- and even then, more people are "going woke" the other direction. To continue your analogy, if someone tries to jam a motor, it either unjams- or the motor blows up and drives metal splinters into everyone nearby. I really hope the former happens to America.
That sounds reasonable. I live in the NY metro area, but in NJ. I've noted that NJ businesses are less aggressively woke in their policy and cultures than the NYC area ones. Maybe the Bay area already went through this and is getting over it faster.
I wonder when corporations are going to start moving on from this crap. I hope sooner than later.
I work for a St. Louis-based company that has a small NJ office. And frankly, haven't been in the office in almost 2 years now. My team is geographically distributed across 3 time zones. I work in software, so remote work is the new and likely permanent normal.
For most of my career I worked alternatively for NJ- and NYC-based companies. But I've been in this one for 3 years now, and I don't think I'm going anywhere for the foreseeable future, especially if the the tiny but powerful woke mob eventually dies down.
But surely Bay Area tech is the wokest place on Earth? The few friends I have left at Google are all disgusted by what it's become, due to relentless delusional wokeness and desire to censor anyone who isn't. (the others have left already).
I feel like the debate around "wokeness" is mostly now around the actual word "wokeness" rather than the underlying concepts. People who were once "woke" no longer use the term, but they haven't necessarily changed their underlying opinions; meanwhile the "anti-woke" crowd is left attacking a tar baby.
I would posit that, for all of Substack's good qualities, the commenting experience is worse here. Which may be coloring commenters' overall impressions.
Huh. For me, Substack comments take too long to load, especially on mobile. And on mobile, they reload and lose my place whenever I switch tabs or apps, so if I'm trying to read through something, I have to find it all over again. I can't even look up a definition in another tab without having to reload all the comments and find my place again. Which makes me reluctant to do anything but skim on mobile.
Plus there's that thing where occasionally the tabs will consume memory and stop responding in my browser on desktop, if I leave them open.
(There's also low-hanging fruit like having better UX when collapsing and expanding, and adding notification control, and markup, but those seem fixable without serious backend work.)
> Do you suck because you moved to California, with its climate of conformist liberalism?
Related hypothesis: do you suck because more of the social needs you met through blogging you meet irl now? Or because you are so respected in your irl social group now you aren’t as motivated to do crack blogging?
It seems like there was a decrease in spicy culture war posts during the Trump administration. The culture war thread spun off halfway through it. Then ACX started the day after Biden's inauguration, and I doubted it was a coincidence.
I guess:
* You wouldn't want an anti-woke post to be construed as pro-Trump, so you sorta held back while Trump was in office.
* The haters of those sorts of posts were on extra high alert during the Trump administration, and sometimes the haters get to you.
* Book review contests facilitate taking discussions into spicy directions without taking so much heat from haters.
Re. "I’m not exactly in this for the money, but I’m in it for a lot of things that follow the same dynamics": That's a great summary of some complex correlations, with wide applicability.
I'm in the minority (apparently) that definitely prefers ACT. While I think you had some really eye-opening posts at SSC, I also never got into the blog qua blog nature of it. So the absence of "blogginess" in terms of the content is really satisfying to me. It seems like the better aspects of being a blog (freedom, audience capture, community) got kept, but personal details on the more trivial side, as well as half-formed thoughts, have been left behind.
Another "reason why you suck" (though you don't) is that you're no longer reporting from the front lines of absurd medical care. Because you're quite sensibly striking out on your own to make your specialty less absurd.
But it does mean we hear less about the bizarre freebies pharma reps try to woo hospitals with, the absurdities resulting from reasonable requests that don't fit into any Official Medical Slot, and so on.
I didn't think about that, that may be the case. I brought it up in case it was a mistake/typo, if it's intended to see if people will react or not I can delete my post.
This makes me want to visit your old blog. I have saved the link to 2 highly useful subjects you have written about thoroughly. One is on what eating healthy means. Another is on ADHD, which many kids I teach seem to think they have (is it real?!). These are big questions and you were thorough.
Maybe you're just running out of the big questions.
I was fascinated to hear you think the woke movement is not cool anymore. I don't see evidence of that. You mean we will soon go back to a time when most Americans want to seriously protect what they might personally see as hate speech?
I think abandoning woke doesn't require people to want to protect what they see as hate speech, although that would be a good thing. It would be sufficient that they oppose a definition of hate speech/racism/Nazi/... broad enough to cover almost anything the left orthodoxy disagrees with.
1 - (whole life first book) Probably has a lot to do with it. (Tho I haven't noticed a decline in quality.)
2 - (great rationalist community) I think this is a real effect. I've seen it in my own life - ideas that were new and wonderful when I was 30 are commonplaces now (I'm 60). This is a good thing - it represents progress.
3 - (things have gotten better) NO. Just NO. The media has NOT gotten better, and I don't think it will in the foreseeable future. If you preceive otherwise, the change is in you. (To be fair there may be an element of #2 here - to the extent media has caught some of the ideas that used to be new, you may perceive it as better. But it's not - media is just as bad at absorbing new ideas as ever.)
4 - (no longer need to criticize wokeness) That's maturity + rational response to changing circumstances. Hardly anybody who thinks supports wokeness now - the stupidity has become obvious - wasn't true 3 years ago.
5 - (illegitimi non carborundum) Maybe; I don't know you well enough to tell. Your overreaction (IMHO) to the NYT article makes me think maybe you're too sensitive here.
6 - (simulated annealing) Yes, I think so. That's maturity and wisdom growing over time. Ideas that you've proven to yourself as stupid are no longer interesting.
7 - (big vs little name bloggers) - Only you know. You say:
>realistically I’m going to do more good by funding important charities,
>highlighting new voices, and helping build strong communities than
>by posting yet another hot take"
I think you're probably wrong here. Lots of other people can do those things - only you can write the way you do. [This is the one that made me bother to post a reply.]
8 - (intellectual progress) I think you're confusing this with #6 (and maybe #1 and #2).
> Lots of other people can do those things - only you can write the way you do. [This is the one that made me bother to post a reply.]
Yeah. Like e.g., lot's of people wrote bad things about Trump to no effect, but Scott actually moved some Trump voters a bit towards Hillary without really trying.
Scott, seems like your recent review of "Don't Look Up" generated a lot of engagement and comments. Have you considered trying yourself as a media critic on the side? To stay relevant with the younger generation and to attract new audience, you could even give some thought to anime. "Psycho-Pass" is set in a futuristic society where people's minds are continuously monitored by AI and severe mental deviations (e.g. criminality) are grounds for termination. As someone interested in psychiatry and utilitarianism, I can see you being intrigued by what it has to say.
Scott seems somehow too cool for anime but I'll second the recommendation - Psycho-Pass is probably the most thought provoking series I've seen in a decade.
Just don't touch the second season with a ten foot pole.
While there haven't been as many "bangers" at ACX, I did enjoy Fussell on Class and the Erdogan biography review.
I definitely thought Bounded Distrust was a misstep though, it seems quite possible that there are cases where the actual truth cannot be gleaned from careful analysis of experts' biases.
I don't think Scott said it would never be the case that you can't glean the truth. He's just saying there are cases where he thinks he can whereas others would just dismiss it all.
Pretty brave post. My only gripe with you and most the rationalist community has been more or less going along with the official pandemic response/attitude. I thought I mostly shared your worldview but learned through this pandemic that I do not. Ditto for most the rationalist community. I feel pretty intellectually homeless today.
Yes, but CDC/FDA/official sources have all been completely irrational. A community that literally calls itself rationalist yet finds itself on the same side as those guys needs to be some really serious self reflection, because public health might as well be a random policy generating machine. It's the exact opposite of rationalism.
The main COVID writer on lesswrong and the general rationalist community have been highly critical of CDC/FDA/official sources during the whole pandemic.
FWIW There is Hackernews.com which has it's pro's and con's vis-a-vis rationalists and are less of a coherent worldview. But there is a good amount of research papers and other scientific debate in which some contingent is strongly opposed to the reigning institutional narrative (were lockdowns worth it? How effective are masks really? Natural immunity accruing evidence over years being stronger than full vax, generally just more aligned with some European policies). Good amount of tech and startup topics in the meantime though, so might want to use the search.
To be honest I most look forward to your book reviews these days. And pretty much anything economics! If I may point you to a potentially interesting topic it would be currently existing wars (why do they exist and how to end them).
When it comes to x-risk/AI I find my mind is too firmly made up about them now. For the increasing depths of psychology too esoteric for me to be interested. And of course all the community related posts.
When the good posts come they are still just as good but it's completely understandable why you can't produce them at the same rate. No-one could.
I'd LOVE it if you started a side-blog with less pressure on seriousness and you can freely write about the day you had and stuff. That'd really be a good complement to ACX.
One other thing I really miss about yesteryears is that you had posts about something you thought about psychology/psychiatry after some event/patient/etc at your workplace and you'd go to some place with that insight. Now that you're unanonymous (what's the correct word, nonymous? English is not my main language) you cannot do that anymore I guess. There's not much to do about this probably, unless you just cut out the part where you had the insight and directly start with the insight and beyond.
Anyway, keep up the good work man you're a bright spot in the internet landscape. And I hope you were a communist of sorts :)
I didn't know this until I looked it up just now, but apparently the opposite of "anonymous" is "onymous"... but even Google Chrome's spell-checker doesn't recognize that as a real word.
According to this article I found in the WashPost, most artists hit their creative peak in their late 30's or early 40's:
"And the numbers show a remarkable degree of uniformity across the three domains of art, music and literature. On average, Nobel Prize-winning writers produce their best work at age 45. Painters peak at age 42. And classical composers produce their most popular works at age 39."
Maybe you're just more like a rock star, Scott. You're approaching 40, so you're no longer "cool" to the kids anymore, because now you're their dad's age. On top of that, your fan base is getting older, getting married and buying houses, and you don't quite know how to keep their attention, now that they no longer want to rock and roll all night or party everyday. It happens to all of us, sooner or later (I'm the same age as you, actually, so I'm not cool anymore, either). Maybe it's time to try the blogging equivalent of putting out an acoustic album or collaborate with some younger musicians on a series of duets?
Note: this comment is entirely tongue-in-cheek. I think your stuff is still damn good.
> And the numbers show a remarkable degree of uniformity across the three domains of art, music and literature. On average, Nobel Prize-winning writers produce their best work at age 45. Painters peak at age 42. And classical composers produce their most popular works at age 39
If artists produced their greatest work at a completely random time in their adult life, you'd expect the average to be somewhere around 40. The average here seems much less meaningful than a distribution.
"They’ll feel it’s insulting for you to have opinions about a field when there are hundreds of experts who have written thousands of books about the field which you haven’t read."
My experience is that these are some of the most useful posts out there. Expert opinion, whatever else it has, is full of blind spots - fields get ossified, academics go down ever-narrowing rabbit holes, extraordinarily tight bubbles become echo chambers, etc.
One of the best examples of Scott's writing on this is "California, Water you Doing?" here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/ - as somebody with an advanced degree in Agricultural Economics, I can say that this article blows most of the "expert" commentary in the field out of the water, and I think it's precisely because Scott approaches it in a different way.
So for whatever it's worth, my one vote out of 40,000 is that there's tremendous value to the posts that might be avoided for reason #5.
Alternative explanation: you suck less, it’s just that people remember new stuff better. They remember all of ACX (because it’s recent) but only good parts of SSC (why would one remember old stuff which sucks?).
That’s similar to why modern movies suck (for me). For old stuff, I can just open https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time and each one of those is a carefully selected masterpiece. For modern movies, there are some great once as well, but, as I am exposed to an average, rather than to the best, they seem to suck more.
Not that it proves anything (other than my bad taste I guess), but looking over top 10 on that list, I've seen 9 movies and liked 2 of them. Modern movies which get the same level of critical acclaim do about as well for me, but of course they get released pretty infrequently, fewer than ten a year I'd guess.
Simple, reductive theory for why the posts have decreased in apparent significance: Scott's reading fewer weird/old/ultra-niche texts and more of-the-moment blogs, think pieces, etc. and so not experiencing the kind of disparate-ideas-from-diverse-domains synthesis that results in a high number of original and paradigm-shifting ideas.
I expect this is a major cause of many superstar pundit's intellectual stagnations. They simply become too busy to read widely, and in a sense 'riskily' in apparently unrelated and unfashionable domains.
I do think you and everyone else in the writing world is in a place where the average of debates in generated by "Aztec chanting guy". It doesn't make your writing worse but it does lower the amount of interesting things you can write because lots of the things you might want to write about IQ, Education, Crime, Immigration etc would end up with you debunking morons rather than actually making interesting points.
Maybe you should do more steelmanning so you actually have a competent case put forward to argue against.
I like the new stuff too! I miss your fun fiction posts, though. Like the one with the pills or the one with Greek gods. Those have stuck with me even when the ideas have become less cutting edge.
I'm in a similar phase of life as you and I look forward to ACX parenting content. Also life-advice-for-kids content. You could do that now - think about what life advice you'd give a hypothetical smart 12 year old or high school kid and write about it. You don't have to wait until your actual kids are actually of appropriate age.
I think the only one of these possible reasons that really holds water for me is the travelogue analogy. For my money, you've still been producing some outstanding posts in the past year, probably even at about the same rate as you ever used to. Not every one is a banger, but never was that the case. As you as a writer and I as a reader have both progressed, there are fewer exotic locations of note out there that one of us hasn't heard about, and digging further down into a problem is almost always less fun than witnessing it for the first time and being struck by its beauty.
One thing I do think has seriously gone downhill for me personally is the participation aspect, and that's just because the comments section has just gotten tooooo biiiiiig. Getting your comment noticed is hard, keeping up with the others is hard and lately I've just given up trying. The comments here used to feel a lot like an epistemic little league, and I adored that. I believe you asked at one point whether you could mirror people onto multiple smaller comments sections and I was very attracted to that idea. Maybe that's still something worth considering? It could be an opt-in option or something.
Honestly despite all the problems upvotes and upvote-sorting are the best answer here. I know this is been litigated to death on SSC and then here, and the battle has been lost, but I feel like the logic that applied to a 50-comment section doesn't apply as well to a 400-comment section. Your comment getting buried is the default now, so getting buried for an unpopular viewpoint is less of a concern.
Also I find Yglesias' comment section much more appealing to read despite getting almost the same comment volume and fewer interesting people posting. I feel assured I won't miss an insightful point due to lack of time to read everything. The upvote filter is imperfect but better than no filter at all.
Sure. Open Threads and culture war regularly broke 1000 comments, though articles on medicine or psychiatry would often be an order of magnitude lower.
The real issues with comments getting buried on SCC IMO were timing and depth. My data is rough and patchy, but to a first approximation the frequency of eyeballs on a comment could be expected to halve every few hours and drop by maybe a factor of 3 with every response in a chain. Extended back-and-forth was never really a thing.
Hard to say how strong posting order effects were, but I'd be astonished if there wasn't some flavor of 80/20 at play. Long story short, getting buried has always been the default.
> If you have a small blog, and you have a cool thought or insight, you can post your cool thought or insight. People will say “interesting, I never thought of that before” and have vaguely positive feelings about you. If you have a big blog, people will get angry. They’ll feel it’s insulting for you to have opinions about a field when there are hundreds of experts who have written thousands of books about the field which you haven’t read. Unless you cite a dozen sources, it will be “armchair speculation” and you’ll be “speaking over real academics”. If anyone has ever had the same thought before, you’re plagiarizing them, or “reinventing the wheel”, or acting like a “guru”, or claiming that all knowledge springs Athena-like from your head with no prior influences.
The best way to prevent this kind of pull-back is to practice wrongspeak early and often. Establish a pattern where people know you do this and it can't be used against you. Call it the Elon method. It's for the best of the world, since all other roads lead to the fallacy of thinking you can predict the full results of your writings, which nobody can. It will lead to pundit-level quality output though, as your utterances become more and more tactical. Practicing truth telling, come what may, seems to me the only long-term defensible strategy. It's a game with many turns, and you never know when people trusting you to say exactly what you think may come in handy. Keep it simple.
"Wrongspeak", I love this term. You've made me see Musk's comments in a new light (although this also seems to be related to the general trend of repudiation of truth more broadly, which is terrible, so hoping there's some kind of way to draw a line between the two.
There are utilitarian vegans (and others)* who say it's atrocious how many chickens we breed in order to eat, but I don't know what kind of balls they advocate.
In general your writing seems to have gotten better on many subjects. The topic selection might be an issue for readers like me that are used to reading backlog.
When I was still consuming SSC backlog I could just glance over "diatribe over wokeness" and carefully read "post on some facet of neruoscience", nowadays that's not possible. But it doesn't mean the blog is worst, it just means there's not enough content that interests me because there's no backlog... and that's fine. Replace those 2 with what other people prefer and you get the point, this generalizes to everyone (potentially)
Switching to substack may have caused more people to go from "read the backlog" to "follow new posts" and thus could have caused a spike.
As an aside, at the time of that survey I remember saying "SSC was better" because it came in the wake of (what seemed to me) to be a lot of US - politics posts (which I dislike), there might be some sort of recency bias going on, would be worth while at least aggregating the numbers from 2-3 of these posted at different times and seeing if the "SSC was better" overlap.
Just my two cents, for what it's worth I voted that SSC was better but in hindsight I'm wrong, I actually noticed some marked improvement in the last year of writing (and for what it's worth I voted with my money to keep that going)
Some of my favorite SSC posts were book reviews (Albion's Seed, Surfing Uncertainty). Perhaps you could start reading more controversial/challenging books?
I read a comment in the last post about you hitting yourself really hard as an experiment and I smiled widely and laughed abs felt genuine affection toward you for whatever that’s worth.
Scott blog posts are like any genre of writing. Anyone new gets a deluge of the best stuff first. All the old stuff that was forgettable is, properly, forgotten. Then new stuff is a similar quality but not filtered for only the absolute best stuff. Sometimes there is a gem for certain people that reads average to others. But the illusion is created of decline when that isn't the case.
I think "5: Sometimes the bastards do grind you down" is a huge societal problems. I've read takes from high-ranking politicians to semi-unknown youtubers and they all agree that having the mob against you is fucking terrible. Most likely, several of the top decision makers in your life right now spend half their waking time worrying about what journalists and internet randos will write about them next.
I think there's a very high impact opportunity available in solving this. (I've should have sent in for a grant proposal!) If we could decrease the impact of mob hate by 90%, a lot of important and high-impact people could be way more efficient. Hopefully, we can make an ML system that filters out the negativity: it would strengthen filter bubbles but I definitely think it's worth it. (I guess this is what the mainstream is talking about when they're talking about "online harassment" but the target is kind of off and the mainstream solutions all look bad.)
Scott (or anyone else famous enough to have this problem), do you have any ideas for how to make things better? Do you want me to go trough your mail and filter out hate?
This seems like something that is very important to know about the world. I have been assuming that Substack et al were relieving some of this pressure, but maybe not.
Ok, I've been lurking for a while, but I have to say: I don't think you suck. Your posts are interesting, and spark arguments and discussion among my weirdo "friends who like to argue" group. You have a good variety of topics, your commenting community remains excellent, and you're one of the few bloggers I continue to follow.
Scott decidedly does not suck. But his working hypotheses for why he might suck are all about him. Maybe some of his readers think he has gone downhill for their own subjective reasons. For example, they may miss the impossible-to-repeat golden nostalgic feeling of having first discovered his blog when they were younger . . . ah, the good old days. Or, maybe, there are just declining marginal benefits to rationalism. They have learned all they can learn about Bayes Theorem and now it's time for them to spread their wings and adjust their priors to new experience all on their own.
But just having a solid body of work behind you guarantees that some people will like the old stuff better. They will dis you for playing the single off your new album instead of their old favorites, and will stand in the back chanting "Freebird!"
Jeez Marie to live in the era of ubiquitous and infinite complaints and demands would exhaust a deity and I ain't one of those. What you do is just fine. If people don't like it they should change the channel
Still love the blog, definitely feel like it’s been pretty consistent. It does feel like that even as the blog is better known, I see far fewer ACX posts consistently linked. I do think regardless of content your writing style feels a bit less ambitious now. Always had the In-depth scientific summaries, book reviews, and short insightful blog posts, less multi-part extended analogies with mysticism and shocking twists and turns. Less emotion in general . There’s a tendency to mellow as well as mature with age so probably pretty natural and mostly related to what you’ve described. Also wonder if personal struggles in 2013-15 with residency, being isolated and romantically frustrated may have played into your writing.
In a society full of racists, nobody comments on racism; even if you aren't racist, you could go your entire life without once noticing a racist comment.
In a society full of anti-racists, everybody comments on racism; you will observe racist comments brought to the public attention constantly.
Same thing for wokeness. The fact that we see it everywhere means that peak wokeness has already passed.
That said, there is a meta-level thing I'd be curious to see a post about, which is the tendency of a movement, when it has passed that peak, to be full of people complaining when people accuse them of trying to do the stuff the movement tries to do, because it's somehow unfair to hold a movement responsible for the stuff it tries but fails to accomplish; like, as in wokeness, comedians who weren't successfully silenced talking about how people attempted to silence them (particularly when the people complaining about this also complain about the fact that the attempt was unsuccessful). And also the counterarguments, because, also, when a movement holds no power, overly public complaints about it trying to do stuff it has no power to do serve as kind of a tinman in public discourse.
"The only way to escape the double-bind is for someone to speak up and admit “Hey, I personally am a giant coward who is silencing himself out of fear in this specific way right now, but only after this message”. This is not a particularly noble role, but it’s one I’m well-positioned to play here, and I think it’s worth the awkwardness to provide at least one example that doesn’t fit the double-bind pattern."
100% honesty here, and probably something I should work on instead of just admitting it and moving on:
Your content is almost certainly much much better than it ever has been. But it's also about more niche/productive topics, and then about nitty-gritty specifics I need education on. It's very easy to read a post like https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust and say "oh neat, I kind of already knew this, I agree with it, and it makes me feel very intelligent to have that opinion validated."
This is a subject on which I have absolutely no information, where I'll have to think very hard about the information I'm being presented, and where nobody in my social circle will care if I have an opinion on it.
There seem to be many more of the latter recently. That's probably not a decline in quality, it's probably just not reaching for the low-hanging fruit. But my motivation for reading things like that has to come from a sincere desire to be more knowledgeable, instead of a desire to feel more knowledgeable, a desire to see a person I consider intelligent agree with me, or a desire to gather new arguments for things I already think. Probably you'd be much more successful if you went back to the culture wars well a lot, but I don't know that you'd be happier or that your output would be better.
As someone who just let their Substack subscription lapse with no immediate intention to re-up I can tell you that quality was never an issue for me. I was a longtime reader of the old blog and close follower of the new. What I perceived as changing was your tone. I used to see you as an individual voice with clarity on a variety of subjects and while I was not necessarily in agreement, I enjoyed looking at things through your eyes. However in the last year you seem to me to be more and more a voice of a particular community, speaking to the converted and dismissive of other points of view. (Maybe that is what you've been all along and I just became more immersed as a subscriber?)
Your occasional references to supporters with deep pockets, The recent grant giving and the traveling about for meet-ups you've organized all made me uncomfortable mostly because of the lack of transparency and unclear intent. Is this a club?
Finally, frankly a fair number of your subscribers scare me. I gave up reading the subscriber only comment threads in hopes of getting past the company I was keeping, alas it didn't work.
You say you're a longtime reader and a close follower, so i'm confused as to how you end up writing "because of the lack of transparency and unclear intent. Is this a club?"
It's quite clear that there has been a core IRL "rationalist" group circa Scott moving to the Bay Area ~2017. What's the rule about 1% makers, 9% editors, 90% lurkers? Obviously in a large group of online discussion, some will move it to meatspace to continue in a more personal setting. Transparency is another doozy because Scott is obviously very Effective Altruism (EA) and no doubt ponders how to have a positive impact on the world. Using some newfound money and help to boost people and projects indirectly seems par for him.
I think my single most favorite one of your posts is the Atomic Dog post from 2012:
"One solution is a pain auction. The artist puts all prospective buyers in a sauna, then gradually turns up the temperature until it is painfully, scaldingly hot. Prospective buyers may leave the sauna at any time, but the last person remaining in the sauna gets the painting. The person who wants the painting the most will stay in the sauna the longest and win (given the false assumption that everyone has the same heat tolerance).
Now this is a terrible idea. It shares two of the worst features of the dollar auction. First, everyone sacrifices, not just the final winner. Second, one may sacrifice much more than the prize is worth. Suppose the painting is worth 100 utils to you, and every minute in the sauna costs 10 utils. If you've been in the sauna ten minutes, and there's only one other person in, you may stay in the sauna an extra minute in the hope that he will drop out and you will win, ending up with -10 utils instead of -100.
But it does have some attraction for solving the dog problem. If being in the environment of screams and insults is painful just like being in the sauna, eventually whichever partner hates walking the dog less will break and go walk the dog.
If interpersonal utility comparison doesn't work, a pain auction might be a next-best (by which I mean vastly worse) alternative that solves the same problem."
Two other possible contributing factors that I didn't see suggested when I skimmed the comments:
1) You stand out less because there are many more people writing good stuff on the Internet in a related style. Certainly there seem to be more than when I started reading SSC about 6 years ago (others may disagree depending on
2) The readers (as individuals, not the cohort) have changed and shouldn't expect your new blog posts to have the same effect on them as the old ones. I remember finding SSC and binge reading loads of it (my job was boring and quiet at the time) and it's changed the way I think (for the better probably). That can't happen every time you publish something new. Or shouldn't anyway, that seems like it would be kind of weird.
I would lean towards 2 personally. I don't think you suck now (I'm still reading clearly), but even your best posts now aren't going to have the same impact as the first ones I read.
An obvious point, but as well as you growing older the people who liked your blog in 2013 have also grown older, and so everything seems worse. I tend to assume that most statements of the form “X has declined badly since 10 years ago” are proxies for “I have way less sex than I was having 10 years ago”.
To work out how much you actually suck, you need to ask them how they feel about their favourite sports team, restaurant / parent etc.
But whatever made you delete the "carthago delenda est" and Nick Land mentions from Meditations on Moloch, is probably a big part of the answer to your question.
I'm probably not the typical reader, but I read you mostly for the great jokes. The posts the past year have seemed less humorous, but I'm still a big fan!
I find it refreshing that the official no. 1 science blogger of substack shares his thoughts of why he may suck at writing.
I can relate very much, because I have also found my tiny niche (nothing big like science blogging) where I am probably better than every other person on earth, and I still have frequent doubts on whether I am good enough. I have learned to ignore these thoughts, so they are no more than a small itching, but they never go away completely. If you also feel them, let me tell you: you are doing fine! In fact, you happen to be the best science blogger that I know, but for you it should not matter whether you are the best. The important thing is that you are doing good, it's plain and simple as that.
For what it's worth, I've never commented on ACX or SSC, I don't follow other rationalists, I've hardly read LessWrong, and I gladly pay $100 for the unique experience of reading at least one person on earth who is prepared to approach most topics with impartiality and makes it fun. So, thank you.
As a non-paid subscriber take this with a grain of salt, but I prefer modern era to SSC. For years and years I've periodically read your work, but the ideas are more mature (smaller jumps?). Young SSC is great, but a lot of the time you're left shouting at the screen "but you missed 214234 other issues!", now the ideas (and writing) flow a lot better.
So where is Scott's secret small blog where he posts all the real juicy stuff? We all know he changed blogs twice in the past so that means probably along the way he made a backup. Scott is too talented to not accidentally grow in influence, so it must be a blog with quickly growing readership. I expect in 10 years or so most of the widely read blogs on the internet will be Scott's aliases.
I wrote a comment and then deleted it in favor of saying something different.
I think this social moment here in the US is like when the tsunami is drawing all the water out away from the shore. We are seeing a very low tide, Scott is seeing a low tide (nothing to fight with, nothing to fight about).
But that stage doesn't last. There's a subsequent stage, which is inundation. There's a feeling of artificial calm lately - and it correlates with a stage in Scott's life and artistic trajectory, so here we are looking for correlations and causations.
Maybe he's feeling the massive ebb. We're feeling the ebb. There's an ebb going on. Media-driven, US-election-driven.
When the tsunami comes, there will be more than enough to be contrary about. These issues that feel solved for a second - they're not. It's just a break from us being flogged with it.
Scott, I think you write very well, you think very carefully, you share your process, and this whole blog is invaluable in all its stages. The good old Grateful Dead "When life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door." Why aren't you fighting? Why aren't we all fighting? It doesn't feel like fight-time, right this minute. Probably, though, it will feel like fight-time again in the relatively near future. There have been no signs that things are actually "over." It's a lull.
You'll have plenty of new material by January 2023 - 85% confidence. Your experienced and nuanced approach to contrarianism will be necessary and in demand. I really think this. Rest up! And thank you for all of this.
I think I suck sometimes. I think there were too many times I was lazy about proofreading, organizing my thoughts, and digging up links to supporting evidence. Some people hate me for opinions I no longer have. Sometimes I bring up CW topics unnecessarily. My previous twitter career of google image searching for graphs of politically incorrect data and smugly replying to random celebrities who said something woke that contradicted the data, was kind of just preaching to the choir, rarely convincing anyone, probably causing blowback on the scientists who collected the data. (also it seemed to lead to google image search censoring graphs that show up on known thoughtcrime domains even if the same image is also on valid scholarly sources) I need more attention to the emotional side of things rather than just robotically tweeting graphical counterevidence at people who say incorrect things. People have to be in the right frame of mind to update on evidence, and "confronted by other-tribe on twitter" is not it. If they're not in the right state of mind when they first see the evidence, they likely develop cowpox-like immunity to it.
I’m still enjoying the blog. I have a few complaints. There seem to be too many open threads, not enough content coming from you, Scott. I like the idea of a book review contest but the last one had way too many contestants. Also I would be interested in seeing more book reviews written by you.
Funny though it would be if you were to spend the next decade on your equivalent of The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, I don't think we need to worry yet. As you say, you're more influential than you've ever been, your essays are consistently fascinating, and you're still better than anyone else. I would have thought you've got enough friends on the spectrum that people you trust will tell you if Nobel Syndrome has set in, you won't need to rely on internet commenters to do it.
My experience with your blog is that the quality per unit time has absolutely *increased* since you moved to substack. It seems like you post quite a bit more now so, while in the old days, it felt like a larger portion of your posts were super insightful gems they were also really frustratingly rare. I personally find that I'm getting a lot more overall value from your posts now than I was before.
A lot of the value you provide is in terms of filtering and explaining ideas from other people and I don't think other people are really generating ideas at a much different rate and, if anything, you are encountering them with equal frequency.
The only thing I would add is that I don't think it's a good use of your time to do much community management. Find someone who isn't famous in rationalist circles and have them do it. You have a really strong comparative advantage in explaining ideas in ways that both convey the arguments well and strongly but don't have the alienating qualities that most of us rationalists seem unable to avoid inserting when we argue and I'm not sure you have any comparative organizational ability (but maybe this is just because I don't live in CA or otherwise benefit from your organizing efforts but like the writing).
Though, I think your strongest comparative advantage is really psychological insight. It's frustratingly rare, even for people in mental health, but you seem to have a greater ability than most to both understand why other people feel the way they do and convey that to others.
I'd have to be one of the ones who agree with the change on tone, style, and how hard you bring down the logic hammer on ideas you reject. But your explanation makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't say 'you suck' and even an 80% as good personal experience of you is still 5 times better than almost anything else I read...so what can I complain about!
You've addressed the main points and the ones where you're simply getting older, have made up your mind about more things, and have shot your accumulated idea ammunition dry from well developed ideas all match up and are now on new voyages where more eyes are upon you.
I'd say one word which describes the change for me, and there is no reason to boil things down like that!....is struggle. Less struggle.
I feel like in the earlier articles you were deeply personally struggling with ideas that 'mattered' to you like many young people do. That energy natural fades, changes, matures, and your tone changes direction over time - there would probably be something wrong with you if you didn't mature or ever settle down on answers after struggling so much. This is quite natural and to be expected. I know I hardly care about most of the things I used to care about when I was younger.
All of that Jacob wrestling with god stuff kind of falls away as you give up the fight and land upon answers you can live with. That these long running issues of social dynamics, how we pass along and create knowledge, etc. have been around for many thousands of years and the intelligent though ignorant young people butt up against more and more of the scale, scope, and magnitude of 'the problem' which is more like 'the reality of human existence'..much more so than a 'problem' to be solved, improved, or optimised. Facing that huge world and knowing that the biggest change you could make, the latest impact, the most prominent of positions, and even then if you were a thought leader 1,000x times bigger...the small versions of impacts desired might still be far out of reach. And yet many minds and readers, such as myself, have greatly benefited from your efforts.
It is more of a rhythm to be lived and it changes you a lot more than you can ever change it.
Perhaps the writing doesn't have the same force as it once did with 'the great struggle' partially resolved for the life you're going to be living. The world isn't a huge unknown thing and it contains perhaps fewer brand new ideas to churn through where you're trying to develop your mental models from limited experiences of the process of developing other mental models for other aspects of life and the ideascape.
I'd note one thing too...some of it is that 'we suck' just as much. Anyone who can comment on your blog's changes, like I can as a long time reader going back into the early SSC days when you had links to your old live journal or whatever it was called....we've also changed too.
The audience is also 8 or 9 years older than they were back then. Sure while the culture has moved on, the ideas are more common, and there are other bloggers to read...we're different too.
Besides yourself changing and the media/cultural landscape changing....so have we as the audience...not just in that collective cultural way, but directly as individuals who went on our own journeys and on that journey and struggle with you when Less Wrong and Rationalist ideas and such were new to us too.
What is a far worse outcome than me having an 80% enjoyment level was the dark period when you were not writing at all between SSC and ACX! Please keep going!
Probably should should mention regression towards the mean. If you write the best blog in the world for a few years, you're never going to maintain that level indefinitely.
This is right. You've plucked your low-hanging fruit. None of us grow new ideas as fast as we can talk.
Of course it feels deeply weird. Superficially a "new post" looks like it's set up to have as much new value as an older post. It's the same form factor, so it must have the same value, right? ...nope.
I guess there might be ways you could adapt to spend more effort on hunting new ideas, or to signal when you're rehashing old ones.
But your diagnosis seems correct. You're not failing at your game; you're just on a different game mode now.
I'm going to embrace my inner autistic bitch, and suggest that part of the problem is mentioned in your very first paragraph:
>> I recently ran a subscriber-only AMA <<
Being paid changes incentives, which changes behaviour. The behaviour your SSC followers liked was produced while you were pretty much actively discouraging people from funding you. AFAIK, there was nothing produced exclusively for subscribers.
Also, and probably not coincidentally, the software platform was better than substack for running a blog with a large active commentariat. Substack is optimized for something much closer to a newspaper's regular feature, with commenting ability but far less opportunity for interaction among commenters.
Paying for something also changes people's evaluations. On the one hand, they don't want to feel like a chump, paying good money for something utterly worthless, so their "fast" system will rate you as better than rubbish. But on the other hand, the salient comparison group is now professionals, not amateurs. Worse, it's probably memorable professionals who they consider worthy of their hard earned money, not professionals they happily don't subscribe to.
Those of us who are free subscribers have a slightly different calculus, but our "fast" system automatically rates this blog as less good than whatever each of us pays for - otherwise we'd feel like chumps. Worse, we have a list in our head of what we'd like to subscribe to, budget permitting, and you have a specific place in that list, probably behind a few other public intellectuals.
Also, we may want to justify our decision not to subscribe - "the grapes were sour anyway". Or we may resent what appears to us to be inflated, unreasonable, 1% level renumeration - believe you should be paid, but not as much as you now are. $400 K per annum looks like a lot of money to many of us. When asked "is this guy any good", we may well answer instead "is this guy worth $400 K per annum" - and do so in the negative. (I suspect some quantity of paying subscribers may do the same.)
All this sets aside questions of whether you actually suck, or whether your writing has gotten worse since SSC. But works-for-hire have different incentives than works-for-love or works-to-influence-people, let alone works-for-a-few-friends. Some of those incentives encourage improvements, but others encourage replacing quality with quantity and timeliness.
Personally, I find the ACX experience less good than that of SSC, but I can't disentangle how much of that is the substandard user interface. You always posted some things that I regarded as essentially rubbish. You still do. But I never paid enough attention to figure out the proportions. Probably there are more of those now, since one of your regular features is in this category for me. But there are also more posts, so maybe the proportions are still the same.
Mostly, though, I now relate to you as a supplier, not a peer. I presume my opinion is only relevant to you in aggregate, and you probably don't read my comments. I don't expect you to be interested in my ideas. We aren't in this together - you re an Influencer (TM), and I'm a potential customer, and a potential source of referrals. Even though I've met you in person (at a local meetup), I don't have any kind of relationship with you. And for me that makes your work less interesting, less exciting, etc. etc.
Some of the things that are sometimes missed are the somewhat more abstract / experimental posts, ranging from Moloch to the small fiction ones. I have the feeling posts have slowly become more focused on concrete, "nuts and bolts/real world" stuff.
I don't think this effect comes from causes 3/4/5/7, because that kind of experimental post is not likely to trigger culture wars - it will probably elicit a "meh" from those looking for conflict. 1/2/6 may have a bit to do: maybe the more playful style was just a vehicle for that "simulated annealing", and now it is not useful anymore to converge. But 8 should not be it. It's true that going back to SSC one may find a few of them to be less "sophisticated", but normally best ideas come from having the playfulness to try and risk entering that thin zone between brilliance and cringe. I don't think sophistication has to stop one from going in there. If anything, it gives better tools to navigate it.
(That said, the old ones are not lost, and the reading the new remains as good a use of my time as ever.)
Also, I love you unreservedly. I know that's only got about one millihater's worth of weight to it, but I'm throwing it on the scale anyway. Please, please keep up the good work!
Since you bring up atheism and rationalism quite often, I thought I'd share this link about an ancient school of thought within Hinduism, called Carvaka, that sounds like rationalism to me. It is popular once again among well-educated Hindu youth nowadays, just as humanism is popular among American college kids nowadays :
Well now, since I"m a total newb to this place, I'm curious about the writings of Young Scott from Ages Gone By. But if I read those, maybe I'll end up thinking Current Day Scott sucks. Don't want that.
I'll just say that I only rarely read SSC, but regularly read ACX, I suppose because substack makes it easier to quickly read/comment. I think most claims of decline in quality is a rosy retrospective bias.
> It would be arrogant to say the reason I make fewer large updates now than I did at age 28 is because I’ve solved all the big problems. But I think I’ve found solutions for big problems that satisfy me. My jumps are smaller now, less “oh, I changed my mind about whether there’s a God” and more “let’s explore this sub-sub-cranny of utilitarianism”.
Might be fun and interesting every now and again to real delve into some topics as goatee-Scott, the mirrorverse version of you where you became, say, a virtue ethicist rather than a utilitarian. You often try to balance out your analysis in this way, but some deontological/virtue ethics pills can seem too hard to swallow if you're already committed to utilitarianism and you just back out. What if you swallowed those bitters pills and followed the rabbit hole all the way down?
I also had a funny thought: since you have more resources now, maybe find a volunteer or hire someone to train GPT-3 or other AI on your posts and see what AI-Scott would write about certain topics. Maybe even have a contest to see if the community can discern real-Scott from AI-Scott. It will probably have to be limited to short hot-takes for now, as anything longer will probably give the game away.
> It’s just no longer interesting. The same is true of religion vs. atheism, capitalism vs. communism, and a bunch of other things. I am bored of those debates.
Maybe an index of your position on various issues on your main page would be useful, particularly for newcomers?
"I felt like all my friends were social justice warriors, back when other people described barely knowing one or two.
[...]But it seems like I must still be near the top of the barberpole - because while everyone else is freaking out about wokeness, I’m starting to feel like all my friends are anti-woke."
Are these the same friends? Or did you lose the old ones and get new ones?
Damn, looks like Eliezer started posting the Sequences at age 28, too. I'm turning 26 this year, so I guess there are only two more years before I have to start publishing a series of world-altering blogposts. Better get on that.
Also, your #1 is the reason that resonates with me the most. There are only so many insights as big as Mediations on Moloch (felt to me at the time). But I think there's also a flipside to your story about you growing up and not being as interested in the basic debates, which is that when I discovered SSC at the age of 18, I was a lot dumber than I am now — and the same will surely be true for many readers who have been following you all this time. At 18 I was still pretty interested in the capitalism vs communism question, didn't really have a handle on the basics of philosophy, and had never had to exist in the world as an adult. With that context, a lot of your blogposts felt completely fucking earth-shattering in a way that nothing I encounter nowadays does. But is that a fact about you or a fact about me (and the passage of time)?
In this post you repeatedly suggest a general antipathy towards 'woke' and 'leftist' sections of the culture and political wars, and talk about how many of your views have settled since you were younger.
In the part of the world and circles where I currently find myself, much of the woke/sjw debate focuses around gender issues. When someone around me complains about woke people, then, it is generally in this context. I have a crowd shouting in one ear that groups of extremist transphobes backed by conservative media want to put queer folk back in their closets with all the implications for quality of life, suicide rates etc that this entails; and a crowd shouting in my other ear that crazed perverts want to cancel and censor ordinary right-thinking folk so they can hide in women's loos and convince little children to mutilate their genitalia.
My own opinions on the subject were in part informed by your 2014 post, "the categories were made for man" - which I still find a very compelling argument for treating people as they say they wish to be treated rather than as others think they should be.
Hence the question - has your position shifted much in the years since that essay was written?
The discourse has gotten dumber since then. For example, Jesse Singal would presumably agree with Scott about that old post, but he's regularly pilloried as "anti-trans".
Interesting and detailed, but I just don't find it as compelling as Scott's post. I'll not attempt a detailed rebuttal in a comment, but broadly:
* I am inclined to agree with people who want us to draw boundaries around what gender someone "really" is based on biology, but disagree with what they usually *mean* by that (which is rarely explicitly set out and generally requires specific questioning to pin down, but the unremediatedgender post actually does refer to what it intends by this multiple times) - i.e. the shape of genitalia and presence or absence of breasts - is the best biology to use: as we know brains are sexually dimorphic, and so when answering the question "who is it that inhabits the body", I suggest that the way their brain works is a more important feature than how bits of their body are shaped. We can't actually directly observe the former, but having the person themselves tell you what they are experiencing hardly seems like the worst proxy for learning what they are experiencing by examining their brain structure - certainly, for the purposes of deciding how best to treat them, it does not seem obviously worse a heuristic than observing their crotch.
* There is a general principle of charity. In any avenue other than gender, if someone tells me they find a way I act towards them hurtful and would like me to stop, I find a way to stop doing that thing; indeed, for most relationships - colleagues, shop staff etc, which must necessarily outnumber *close* relationships I am in - doing otherwise would count as harassment (imagine if I called a colleague by a nickname and didn't stop when they asked me to) and invite some form of escalation. For most people I interact with, I am neither their doctor nor do I have a close enough relationship with them for it to be appropriate for me to try to change deeply ingrained aspects of their character by causing them pain despite their expressed preference, even if I thought it a good idea, never mind the chances of such a thing actually *succeeding* in making their life better instead of worse; and, indeed, if I persist in acting in a manner that hurts them despite them asking me not to, this is unlikely to ever change. If I do not think it appropriate to harass people by using any other kind of word, then why should I behave differently when it comes to the fashionable subject of gender pronouns?
(I also have a separate and particular reaction to the concept of there being a tranche of people who aren't "really" gender dysphoric despite claiming they are, but just want to look like what they find attractive, which is that my life is full of family and close friends who are convinced they know what I feel and want better than I do, choose to ignore what I say to them in favour of their own beliefs and are always surprised in situations where actual outcomes end up proving yet again that the territory does in fact better match the map relayed to them by its observer than the map they made up in their own heads based on their preconceptions; I know how I react to such interactions, and see little reason to believe the result would be any different if I were to act that way towards someone else.)
We could theoretically try to get objective measurements of how people's brains work and classify them that way, but I don't think there's much interest in that.
The elephant in the room, of course, is that this will not help address the real objections that keep these conversations going or resolve the culture war. The author of the article Akiyama linked explicitly raised the concern of perverts entering bathrooms, and explained that Scott's article does not help address this; but no objective test can sensibly alleviate those concerns - we will no more mandate MRI machines at bathroom doors to check if someone is entering the bathroom with ill intent than we require people to pull down their underwear so some can check their genitalia shape matches the rest of their appearance right now, and so no decision we can take in this space can resolve the differences of those who don't feel safe in bathrooms when people whose appearance doesn't match expectation are permitted to enter them and those who look too weird to be permitted to enter those bathrooms they feel safe in.
This might be something you've addressed already, but I'll spell it out anyway.
Before being doxxed, your identity and hence your reputation in society weren't entangled with your writings. Hence, you could afford to be inflammatory/write artistically flamboyant pieces. Now your identity has gotten entangled with your writing, and hence you must preserve your reputation. You incentives have changed. And changed incentives get to everyone. It is possible that you're not conscious of some of these processes, although now I am hypothesizing about your unconscious brain.
Right. It’s hard to buy “this hasn’t affected my thinking” when we watched it affect SSC in real time! SSC went away. Before that, various bits of culture war were banned / spun off the SSC-sphere with the stated intent of keeping real-life heat off of Scott.
That doesn’t really jive with “this hasn’t affected me or my writing”
(4) I think is also true. "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" was apparently from 2014?!? Now it's a good way to put a target on your back, but it's OK to be a Democrat, even a liberal Democrat, but point at some of the woke excesses and say "guys, this is crazy." John McWhorter may well owe his position at the NYT to this.
I'll also agree with similar comments to the effect that if any public intellectual writes 2-3 superb pieces per year, 8-10 very good ones, 25-30 that are fine, and some number of misses...people will look at the current year's output vs. the greatest hits from 3-8 years ago and see a decline.
I know this is indefensible, but I'm fairly sure you've missed the main reason. I don't mean the main reason you suck (because, among other things, you don't) but the reason people might experience a diminution of that 'Wow, Scott blew me away with another addition to the rationalist armory" feeling.
An analogy I'd make is to one of my favorite Tai Chi teachers (Ian Sinclair, as it happens) who talks and teaches and demonstrates and investigates concepts to do with central equilibrium. He describes how many years can be usefully devoted to exploring and refining this integral part of the philosophy and practice of Tai Chi, through Zazen, standing meditation and Chi Gung.
Sooner or later, though, you have to 'Take it on the Road' - go out into life with whatever degree of central equilibrium you have attained and put it into practice in the hubbub of human experience and human interaction. Then you can become a Tai Chi creature.
I feel the same thing about your blogging, Scott. Less and less is it about the ways and means of thinking sensibly, techniques for navigating our bias-ridden cognitive apparatus; More and more it is you taking-on-the-road whatever skills you've developed and putting them into practice. Applying them in a real world environment, and to real world issues.
Inevitably there is less drama and wowness about it all now, but it could not be any other way. Out of the abstract intellectual dojo and into the world where things matter. A lot of us are disappointed with this because we want to stay in the dojo - or playground - forever.
Well, bully for you, and all continued power to your elbow. And while I'm at it, good luck with your marriage - I wish you well.
FWIW, I think you’re right that you said all there was to say about 2015 SJWs. But “wokism” has moved on from 2015 (hell, it wasn’t even called “woke” in 2015). So I think there is a genuine gap in “what does Scott Alexander think about these new developments?” The old stuff is still great, but it feels stale because di Angelo and Kendi are very different SJWs than the online feminists that were the main target of your older work. Trans issues are another area where there are some thematic similarities but also things have changed a ton since you last wrote a lot about it.
Like, I’d be interested in “Critical Race Theory in an Enormous Planet Sized Nutshell” or the “Anti-Anti Racist FAQ”.
Alternatively, you say your views have matured/evolved - I’d love to hear more! Like a series of “ACX revisits SSC’s greatest hits”. What held up? What’s obsolete? What would you write differently knowing what you now know?
IIRC my regard for your point of view significantly decreased when you repeated an idea common in pro-trump circles, that the idea that trump praised white nationalists after Charlottesville is a media lie (this was on ACX not SSC).
This relates to “anti-wokeness has gotten more popular” - I think to elaborate - “an anti-woke ‘tribe’ has evolved, and any such tribe has lazy half-baked ideas that get echo chamber’d until they seem incontrovertibly true to those inside it, and your original anti-woke thinking can get outsourced to that tribal anti-woke shit.”
I don’t think you of 2014 would have made that same mistake.
Well I don't think he ever reexamined it, at least publicly, so presumably not.
I've disagreed with plenty that Scott has said, including in that same post and the one it's following up on from. But that one bit stuck out to me as a repetition of a clearly misleading idea that IMO gained acceptance among people who got high on their anti-anti-trump, wokeness-is-the-real-problem supply, and that doesn't stand up to the sort of scrutiny that in the past Scott would have applied.
Kind of sounds like generic middle-age existential doubt. We all go through it. You put your head down in your youth to simultaneously preserve your own voice and also achieve some level of social recognition and approval, and then you *get there* and then...you start asking yourself: now what? And: is this enough? Life is painfully finite, do I want to continue doing this or something else? How did I get here, and does the answer to that point towards more of the same or change? And if change, how much, and in what direction?
Some people end up in plain despair, like Bruce Jenner trying to (metaphorically) get on the cover of Wheaties again by growing tits. Others develop sufficient obliviousness that they can just phone it in the rest of their lives, turn whatever got them their initial success into a shtick, and then take the cash, using it to do God knows what in their secret lives.
For what it's worth -- approximately what you're paying for it ha ha -- I would say I think part of the attraction of your style is that you have a knack for writing about your own struggles engagingly, regardless of whether your endpoints are agreeable to the reader or not. I'm reminded of some of the greatest men of religion I've known, who are very worth listening to, even for an atheist, because of the clear, honest, and sophisticated way in which they publically engage with their own doubt. It feels like this may be part of your talent, the wild thing God gave you in particular to set you apart from others.
That is, maybe you wrote well and interestingly about existential and self-growth problems that were salient in your late 20s, and maybe if you just continue to do so in your late 30s -- even as the problems themselves change -- you will remain both interesting to others (although maybe not the same others) and the work will remain interesting to you.
The major change might be that fewer of the problems have good solutions or even satisfying waypoints. There may be more of "well, this is how I thought about the problem, and I learned a lot about how to think about it, but...solutions, nope. Got nothing. Not even a plausible way forward." I think that's OK and quite probably deeply interesting. It *is* about the journey, not the destination -- it kind of has to be, given our brief allotment of awareness.
I discovered Slatestarcodex about a year ago and read through it more or less in reverse order. I agree with the analysis that you peaked in 2013-2017, with most of the very best articles and then started to get a little stale. Not sure I can give much helpful feedback on why or clearly explain what makes me think that. Still a very good blog and some really good posts though.
I wonder if it is because you are not in the same mental place. You are older and more settled in life and in your thinking, so there is less bright, novel insight-making going on. If so, may be hard to bring back glory days, since that is an inherent life-cycle thing. I do think you have less really controversial takes these days, though as you mentioned your blog is institutionalizing over time. With a larger following, comes responsibility, its one thing to say nutty things as a blogger getting started out and another when you are buttressing an important community.
By the way, your protest that you don't interact with other people enough runs into the counter that you live in a group home setting and have regular get-togethers with rationalists. Don't actually know you, but really get impression your interaction with other people is if anything above-average.
It's actually hard for me to tell whether the quality of posts has gone down, because I only started following ssc maybe 4 years ago, so at beginning I could read the greatest hits posts accumulated over a number of years and it was amazing, but dont really expect that level of quality to come up on weekly basis. Wonder how much this effect applies to other readers as well - some may be og readers but by definition lots must be of latter day variety.
Is meditation on muloch too basic of an idea? I suppose on some ways, it almost definitionally is, but on the other hand, I feel that one of the best things ssc did for me was to really hammer that, and the idea of coordination problems in.
All the best SSC essays have been the ones that took something I already fuzzily understood in the back of my mind, and expressed it clearly in actual words so I could think about it more clearly.
The post lays out the kinds of articles from the past that you aren't interested in persuing, But while it might be a bit counter-theme, maybe mention a few of the articles/themes/flourishes from that time that you would still consider fresh and worth emulating? Are there any?
Or maybe you don't suck. I remember really good posts more than other posts because they stick with me. I also remember recent posts more than other posts because they're recent. So the average quality of recent posts that I remember is automatically less than the average quality of all the posts I remember.
There might be a selection effect where when people go back read your old stuff, they're reading the very best highlights of your old stuff (Meditations on Moloch, etc). And then when they read your new stuff, they're reading every post, so it doesn't seem as good by comparison.
It's like how people say "Music sucks so much now compared to the 1960s!" Well, there were bands that sucked in the 1960s too, it's just that they've been forgotten, and only the very best music from the 1960s is still listened to, so it seems way better than today's music.
I think there really has been a shift in music. The big sales are now catalogs from the past. Artists can't make much money off streaming services vs the Beatles being able to just release albums and stop playing live shows.
Amusing how this is posted just one week after my annual subscription renewal! What a vote of confidence. I assume several others are in the same boat since I started mine shortly after ACX went up. I demand a refund!
(1) For me personally, "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning" was the sign that the end of days were coming. The Vox post that followed Kolmogorov Complicity(chronologically AND thematically) was the inflection point, not the NYT.
(2) Your best posts aren't about concrete things. They are about abstract principles. As I see it, any hypothesis related to posts about current events (i.e anti SJW) doesn't explain the phenomenon.
When I think of Scott's "Best of", everything with the possible exception of Friston is about abstractions. Off the top of my head,
Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor
The parable of the talents
Asches to Asches
I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup
The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories
Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning
People seem to love Meditations on Moloch
God help us understand Friston[...]
With the exception of Friston every single one of those posts could be shared with pretty much anyone. The writing just melted in your mouth.
The same holds true for Yvain (and the Jackdaws posts that I liked).
IN FAVOR OF MY CLAIM THAT I CAN TO SOME DEGREE MAKE ACCURATE CONSISTENT JUDGMENTS ABOUT YOUR WRITING: there was a period where Yvain was my favorite writer, some guy Scott Alexander was my third favorite writer. I didn't know that Yvain and Scott were the same person. I didn't have a 4th favorite writer. You were two of the three writers I loved; something about the way write stood out enough that you were my fave under two different names. There was some quality of your writing that stood out. That quality is gone.
"Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning" seemed, at the time, to be the coming of the end and implicit warning that the Vox post was coming. I see those as the inflection point, not the NYT article. As I saw it"Kolmogorov Complicity" and "God help us understand Friston..." we the last prime Scott posts. I don't know how the time matches up. After Kolmogorov Complicity your writing about abstract concepts isn't up to par ( a par all your own).
So, in my opinion, it was all a matter of social incentives.
I'm going to pay for a subscription indefinitely because when you were good you were the best. But I'm subscribing in appreciation for your previous writing. You probably still are awesome, how could you not be? But prime SSC and Yvain is a pretty high bar.
This is way back in, say, 2013. I figured out Scott and Yvain were the same person.
By 2014-2015, Scott was number one, absolute king of the mountain, and no writer came close. Prime Scott was just. Wow.
Scott is still great. But he writes about concrete things. He used to write about abstractions and ideas. His recent post about "there is no scientific proof for x" was a return to form.
On reflection, the last time I checked in a month or two ago I was surprised to see a couple of classic Scott pieces. So maybe I should start paying attention again.
It's very possible that there was just a drop off after"Kolmogorov Complicity" and Scott is now returning to form. I should start paying more attention again.
The bastards don’t just want to grind you down, they will also accept putting you in a box. Once you’re in a box, categorized, you can be stuck up on a shelf or tossed out back (on the midden heap). I think it’s the what do you call them, the subroutines in your mind that want efficiency (forget the name), that make people so relentless about putting people in boxes. Brain just looking to survive, not bask in the multidimensional splendor of independent thinkers. Either way they have shut you up (for their purposes).
How to rediscover the old form, not the topics / beliefs, but “the voice.” Seems like it’s back! Whatever it was, worked. (Not that I’m an expert… just discovered you when the NYTimes decided to dox you).
The thing about blogging over time is that, in addition to growing as a person and a writer, your style and focus will probably also change based on your life particulars and the atmosphere of the world around you. At different times, your writing will most appeal to different people. And those people are always changing as well, so even if you somehow never changed, you still couldn't optimally please all the people all the time. Anyway, of course some of my favorite SSC posts were from years ago, that's how I got here in the first place! For what it's worth, 'There's a Time for Everyone' is now one of my favorite posts as well :)
I think that the first virtue is self-improvement, not curiosity. Without self-improvement, you cannot curb the natural tendency for curiosity to decline with age. Having said that, I'm over the whole "eternal September" pattern, and I love how the blog has evolved with the community.
First of all, you don’t suck. Your writing is a gift. Thank you.
“I am bored of those debates.”
I’d like to suggest a new type of post: a collection of links to essays you’ve written which are relevant to, or which might help people think through, the topic of the day. If you think your old essays lack sophistication or if your opinions have changed, perhaps you could also include this as a caveat or include a paragraph about how your views have changed.
Hopefully, this type of post would be low effort enough that you wouldn’t incur much cost of boredom.
As someone who reads your work sporadically, I would value all three: 1) a guide through your body of work, 2) a guide to how your past ideas relate to current events/the zeitgeist, and 3) your thoughts on how your current views differ from when you first wrote them down.
I’m a fan of the direction the posts have gone, and I’ve been consistently enjoying them more than I did on SSC. Part of this is because I feel the comments sections of ACX have been better than those on SSC—maybe as a function of you avoiding the “basic” questions.
Also, people that have read both SSC and ACT are a biased sample of people that like the exact point in writespace (?) of SSC. Move from that point and most likely a reader poll from long time readers will suggest on avg you got worse, even if for a random person (or even a random current reader) you got better.
5.) Dang, now I can't praise you. That's not good. Embrace the hate, and if you can convince 1% their hate is wrong it's maybe more than 1k.. yeah though being too popular is a trap.
6.) As an old man, I've come to believe in a meta-god. Which is that living life as if god exists, is mostly a good thing. Regardless of underling belief.
7.) Community good!
8.) We should figure out how to make science work better.
Scott: "In the same way, I see fewer people outright denying the existence of genetics, totally failing to understand AI risk, or utterly bungling basic concepts in risk and probability.
(Is this just a function of my media consumption? Maybe I learned how to find better sources and now I never read anyone stupid enough to need correcting. Genuinely not sure!)"
> Third of all, do I really want to spend my life reminding other unwoke people that dumbing down math classes and using the extra time to force kids into classes where they chant prayers to the Aztec gods instead is actually bad? Don’t get me wrong, it is bad.
My understanding is that students were lightly encouraged to chant along to an Aztec ritual. It had nothing to do with human sacrifice (except to the extent that Aztec's *practiced* human sacrifice, but Americans also *practiced* slavery, yet we don't need to bring that up incessantly whenever someone chants something American). Instead of being a good example of wokeism gone awry, this sounds like a better example of wokeism being exaggerated.
Americans banned slavery in many states soon after independence. Aztecs did not ban human sacrifice, rather it was a core part of their culture which is very hard to separate from it. The comparison is of course unfair since the conquistadores ended both Aztec civilization & human sacrifice at the same time.
I've never heard of this controversy before today, but Snopes is disingenuous here.
>references to “tezkatlipoka” and “huitzilopochtli,” which were translated as “self reflection” and “the will to act,” respectively
Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli were major-league gods. These guys were getting blood sacrifices at festivals. I'm not up enough on classical Aztec religion to know who received the most sacrifices, but these words don't connote vague feel-good New Age concepts. These words are the names of gods. It's not like you put these names in a kid's mouth and they become an old-school Aztec priest splitting thoraxes with obsidian, it's not like most kids will remember these names. It's certainly not a problem that kids might come to know about pantheons of badass gods. (Greek and Norse mythology are all over the place in kids' books, so it'd be a double standard too.) But this blatant error makes me think the Snopes writer is doing some real motivated reasoning.
Snopes is a clown posse dancing in a burning circus, though.
Rating: Mixture
What's True
Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.
What's Undetermined
In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
Yeah, she's just a member of bombing organizations that commit armed robberies and in possession of hundreds of pounds of explosives. But not a terrorist, no sir.
Fact-checking organizations police narrative, not factual accuracy.
Okay, *technically*... she was convicted, and she was a terrorist, but she is not a "convicted terrorist", because *technically* she was only charged with a possession of explosives, which *technically* is not the same as terrorism. Technically.
But of course, if we had a right-wing terrorist in the same situation, I strongly doubt that Snopes would pay so much attention to all these technicalities.
Over more than a decade you've written hundreds of blog posts. Now, when there is a new blog post, people compare the quality of the new one to the quality of the best posts from the last decade. Even if the proportion of awesome posts remained constant, people would remember much fewer awesome posts in the past year than in the rest of the decade. The question people should ask themselves is: was there more awesome posts in 2021, or in 2013?
EDIT: Coagulopath and many others have made the same point. Sorry for plagiarizing :P
Your posts seem on average less interesting than on SSC but that may well be the combined effect of your having already published so many of your good ideas and my comparing the current average to the past high. They are still worth reading. And, of course, I may be getting old.
A lot of what I liked about SSC was the commenting community, and I find the comments here less interesting than they were on SSC, fewer interesting arguments, which is probably why I spend more time on DSL than on ACX.
Covid and climate are two areas where there is a lot to criticize about the current orthodoxy. If you are willing to risk it they might be worth looking into.
I agree about the commenting community, but in this, David, you are not blameless! My noticing that the comments were less interesting here than at SSC occurred AFTER you and 20 or so of the other best commenters jumped ship.
I fear Scott's sources (Vox etc) have led to an acceptance of orthodoxy on climate, and expecting a major re-think is going to lead to our disappointment.
Agree 100% about the comments. My proposed solution for this -- perhaps at the expense of vast tracts of my free time -- is: bring back the like button! I consistently spent more time commenting, both reading and writing comments, and I felt like the comment section in general was much easier to navigate.
I get the impression that the charges of conformism have been disproportionately coming from advocates of alternative Covid treatments, who believe that the only reason Ivermectin et al. aren't accepted in the mainstream is the morally bankrupt authorities. The conformism stuff is coming from their disappointed hopes and dreams that they were so very close to having a reputable champion in you. They're so invested in their advocacy that they can't accept that you honestly assessed their evidence and found it lacking; they have to believe that you're more of dishonest conformist than they first thought.
Your email inbox might be full of messages that reflect a different picture than the substack comments.
I don't think you suck. You are still an incredibly talented writer. That said, I do definitely have the sense that you are some combination of uninterested, unwilling, or incapable of engaging with some topics the way you used to on SSC.
I'm not thrilled that while there is still better cross-pollination, the ACX and DSL and sub-reddit populations seem to have diverged and all seem narrower than SSC's commentariat was. I don't have a solution for that beyond the observation that whatever strange attractors and combination of circumstances allowed for that dynamic does not appear to have survived the migration to Substack.
Don’t discount that people seem to be biased to measure against the highest of highs. The first time you read a blog entry that changes the way you see the world… sure, that can set you on a path, but its like the first time you got stoned at 16 and listened to Your favorite band. You’ll likely not reach that level of seeming profundity again. Patriots fans habituated to Tom Brady’s GOAT level play. What have you done for me lately is baked into audiences. Idea: why not occasionally republish SSC classics, with new commentary?
You also haven't written as many frivolous/silly/humour posts lately. I get that you're optimising for the Important People who read your blog and put nonzero weight on your opinions, and I don't think anyone begrudges you that, but at the same time, I think many people would enjoy seeing a few posts in that category each month.
I think a large part of why I enjoyed your writing more years ago is because I was new to your work - the main things I learned were not new insights into big topics (though those were there too), but how to approach an idea or domain with your combination of curiosity, common sense and ability to research and evaluate. This suffers a lot from you taking less risks, because I, and I think many others, enjoy reading about your opinions on some niche field or piece of research (or even big fields like abortion) not so much because we care about that field a lot, but because of the higher level ideas we can take from your approach to it.
If there's anything we as readers can do to help make it less risky, or make it more rewarding, to blog about things you're not a domain expert on, please tell us. Defend you on twitter? Help form epistemic confidence level estimations based on some assumptions? Buy you a coffee for every 5% lower you go in epistemic confidence on a post? Jut let us know :)
Do you actually suck now? Have you done an RCT, showing a random selection of essays to readers and having them rate them?
It might be true, but I think you are missing the one explanation here: you don't suck, and your readers are wrong.
I enjoyed the blog more in the first year that I read it (~2017). Why? Maybe because I had an enormous back catalog to go through. I would go through the 'best of,' then find recommendation lists others had made, then read random ones and follow the embedded links around. It was six months of digging through an enormous treasure trove.
Once I had caught up with the archive, the new posts could never compare. I reckon something similar is going on with your feedback, and if you did a proper RCT you'd find a smaller difference than you think, lingering just for the reasons you stated.
I started reading right at the start of ACX, but have since read a great deal of old SSC stuff... Honestly, there is an obvious progression in style, but I definitely wouldn't say the quality's going downhill. Personally, I'm much fonder of later (and looonger) SSC stuff and more recent ACX stuff than the stuff Scott was writing more than 5ish years ago. I feel the style has visibly matured, and so have the ideas. And the book reviews in particular have seemed to me better in ACX on average! In conclusion, I'm not concerned about the quality of the blog, and Scott certainly does not suck.
Personally, I find that the best way to deal with haters is to stomp on them. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.) This not only feels good but it encourages them to be less hateful to others, so it's a good deed that accrues positive karma.
Whenever I find myself thinking "Why do I suck?" it invariably turns out that I need a coffee and a sandwich. I bet if you included a coffee and sandwich in each of your posts the audience's attitude would improve and all of a sudden they'd be able to do the dishes and sweep the floors and clean up all the pine needles left over from the Christmas tree, even though it seemed completely impossible thirty minutes ago.
on another note - i wouldn't discount that there was something deeply cool and esoteric about the design of your own hosted website that defo played a role in making the reader feel they were onto something original. some personalization and style goes a long way!
E: Have you considered the idea that your internal experience might be wrong or at least misguided or self-deluding, being formulated as it is, by possibly the single least objective person possible on the subject of Scott Alexander on the entire planet?
Put plainly: There are some statuses you cannot award yourself. Ex: You can't call yourself cool, that is something that has to be awarded by others.
Plus, sometimes you don't notice you've lost weight until you run into someone you haven't seen in the better part of a year and they remark on how slim you're looking. The day to day difference is never noticeable to you, but the sum total difference of 9 months is stark to that person.
I am just happy that we have access to an absolutely brilliant mind that we can trust will analyse important problems that the world faces. Like what you did with corona in early 2020.
No pressure to put out stellar content all the time. We know you we can count on you when new important issues and problems arise.
(Furhtermore, I consider that Substack must implement comment upvotes and sorting.)
This level of introspection is at least part of why you don’t suck. Also, I personally thought the book review on class and the follow up about the Republican Party were especially excellent, though I personally would have enjoyed some more back and forth on the nature of class and elitism beyond those two.
I think you have every likelihood of going big again, by focusing on the flow of new information thrown up by events, research, and your own life course. Stay on it.
You're still brilliant and even indispensible. But I admit I had the same thought as you and other readers, and I did not even know my thoughts were mainstream here: that you had a peak some years back. Then at some point, SSC already became somewhat less... uniquely sparkling / enlightening. I also recall one specific article of the later period when you talked about evolution that I found distinctly un-enlightening because I knew about the subject and could spot your fallacies easily. Basically my own Gell-Mann amnesia failed that one time. I'm older than you (54 now) and I noticed around 40 or so my creative intelligence really did start to decrease. So maybe it has to do with aging. Sorry. On the bright side with aging, your guile tends to go up and also your ability to cooperate with others socially. Best of luck. Please don't block me for saying this, still enjoying to read you!
Interesting question, fascinating answers. Another take: Compare reading Scott with making love: Is it really "always like the first time"*?! - Does it have to be? Should it be? It can not be.
After 500** posts on SSC we can not help to wish for another text that sweeps us of our feet. And even when it does (and not a few ACX-post do!) - hey, we got used to that sweep - no unexpected astonishing surprise anymore. So, maybe it is us - not Scott - though he matured all right - .
*( The first time seldom is. But even the 876th time with a good partner is very much worth it. J. Peterson: "One of the few intrinsically rewarding activities" - Me: right on top with reading this blog. )
**(felt like only 300 - and only 30 or so made me kneel down and shout Hallelujah!)
Pedophilia categorically causes harm to children, so I think that comparing them to other reprehensible people is acceptable (and before you start blathering on about 19-year-olds and 17-year-olds- that's not what the average person means when they talk about pedophilia, I'm certain you know that, and that whole line of argument is deflection from the actual point).
Provided they do not act on their desires, avoid situations where they would be tempted to act on them, and get help, I don't think pedophiles should be, say, stoned in the public square. But I don't think they should be proudly touting their status as a "virped" or "NOMAP" or whatever the latest attempt to turn a mental disorder into a tribe is called unless they're fine with people judging them accordingly. Even if we divorce all moral compunction from it, it still viscerally sits on the same level as someone trying to make a proud, socially-acceptable identity out of the fact they can only be aroused by eating feces.
When I was young I read Eric S. Raymond's Hacker Jargon File and I remember him talking about the "larval stage" where new programmers manically write open-source code and looking forward to doing that myself. Now I've been a professional programmer for quite some time and the only code of mine in open-source is a tool I wrote that my employer abandoned (thus making it open-source) years after I left.
In terms of blogging, my early inspirations included people like Razib Khan for being so knowledgeable and Chip Smith for being cooler than everyone else. And yes, valuing "coolness" when it comes to taboo intellectual topics was a marker of my maturity at the time.
"Raw excitement is a secret ingredient" is I think a really good way to understand a lot of things that are similar to SSC/ACX—the first time you encounter an artist is often as they're first encountering... I don't know, some combination of "the muse" (their evolving skills and ideas) + self-confidence + an audience. It's a really charged moment for everybody concerned.
Sometimes this is the case even when you don't like the ideas, the music, etc. I remember the first time I saw a neocreactionary guy online—I wasn't convinced by 90 percent of what he blogged and blog-commented about, but I thought, "holy cow, people actually believe this!" and my brain cleared out some space for a new kind of person who was completely outside my experience.
First time I heard Soundcloud rap—the day XXXtentacion got killed, and i was suddenly confronted with this extremely famous guy I'd never heard of who made what sounded to me like music from another planet where I would mostly keep my earplugs in—same deal. Even if the actually encountering a new minority view or style with no antecedents you recognize isn't always pleasant, the *feeling* of having your world open up like that often still is. And even if you still love the thing that did that to you 10 years ago, it will lack the power to do that specific thing for you because it already has.
Scott did say he wanted to push them away from monarchism specifically!
Because you're just barely too neurotic about your brilliance (mostly kidding, it's a wellspring of fruitful introspection at a high personal cost)
Edit for clarity, by mostly kidding I meant to imply the correct direction is to be less neurotic and own your brilliance, it's probably the only thing holding you back if anything is.
Edit 2: I sometimes over compliment, but since people are more sparing with praise than criticism I felt like hedging against that and don't feel at all abashed about describing you as brilliant.
REPORT
Yeah, of course he’s brilliant. You are right about the personal cost of being a skosh too self aware and self critical too. But the result reveals a charmingly deep humanity.
Well there are only so many good ideas out there
Hmm I think someone needs to reread the Fun Theory Sequence ;)
Yeah, but "Scott does data journalism about a topic he just became interested in" is probably an endless goldmine. More broadly, I subscribe because whenever he learns about a new topic he generally finds interesting things to say about it.
Agree. It's a pity that the more important something is, the more likely Scott already heard about it a long time ago and got bored of it. I make a conscious effort to minimize my news consumption so that recent doesn't displace important, but then maybe I look like an idiot for not knowing about the latest tempest in a teacup. I figure if anything really important happens I'll probably hear about it from friends. But then also maybe I stay unaware of how awful the reporting is on the Newspaper of Record and lose opportunities to dunk on it and and motivate improvement in media. The NYT and WaPo are so horrible that I completely stopped listening to them ages ago.
As an urban planner, it was fun for me to read his take on why we stopped designing buildings people like. I've been researching that subject for years and he hit on stuff I had never thought of. His mind is quite the floodlight.
Yeah, I think I remember Bill Simmons saying something like that about why he gave up writing columns a few years ago: he only had so many original ideas in his head, and after 15 years or so as a regular columnist, he'd gotten them all out there.
I don't think Scott even made a dent in the amount of potential good ideas.
The links on "I continue to post some vaguely anti-woke stuff (1, 2, 3)," seem to be partly incorrect: both 2 & 3 go to https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three .
Yeah I noticed that, then tried to figure out if it was some subtle joke about that post (if it is I don't really get it).
this is very insightful and i'm curious to see what you do in the next phase. personally i really enjoyed Unsong, perhaps something in that direction. Encoding your worldview and insights into fictional worlds might be a reasonable next step, right?
I may be young at 31, but I'd still greatly, greatly enjoy you writing new blog posts about religion, abortion, etc
Seconded.
I think that's his point. These things matter when you're younger and those ideas seem fresh. He's no longer there
There needs to be an index of Scott's posts, definitely covering the Substack and SSC, and maybe his longer posts on LessWrong and Livejournal. Then if you're interested in a topic he doesn't want to write about any more, you can look up what he said in the index and thoughts that are old to him, but new to you.
I'd consult that
It seems like it's always going to be an ask to keep people quite as engaged and excited as they were at the beginning and I would expect almost all of the feeling has to result from 'point 1' sort of considerations. I felt bad reading that reddit thread and knowing you'd see it! I still think your thoughts are worth more than the price of a subscription and hope you know a lot of people still really enjoy your posts :'(
You are, in fact, using simulated annealing wrong. It's the complement of what you describe, which is a classic technique to find a local optimum. SA is adding noise to your small steps, so that you do not get stuck in a local optimum but have the chance to find a better one (even the global optimum) using the random jumps to luckily go over local barriers and fall in neighbor (hopefully better) optimums ;-)
So maybe you should use SA if you feel trapped in comfortable routine but suspect you could maybe do better: just do crazy things from time to time :-p
I guess the idea is that he started out with a lot of noise, and now he's settled into a end-stages of the annealing.
Could be...but I guess my advice hold: even if changing routine feels risky and really suck most of the time, do it anyway, even if rarely. Turn up the heat before letting it cool back again into a (hopefully better) routine :-)
What would the right term for the thing I'm talking about be?
Gradient descent?
ETA: Taking the metaphor more comprehensively, it's either a deliberate part of simulated annealing where the noise is specified to decrease over time, or just the natural decrease in step size from any iterative optimization strategy.
Isn't that just moving in the opposite direction of the gradient of the error function, without taking the size of the jumps into account?
The gradient has both magnitude and direction. So the size of the jumps is proportional to the steepness of the error function. For a smooth function, the local extrema will get shallow near the peak, as opposed to a sharp corner, and thus the jumps naturally decrease in size as you get closer, without needing to explicitly build that in (though sometimes it's helpful to do that anyway)
Ah that makes sense. Still something that I'm unclear on: aren't the size of the jumps strictly controlled by the algorithm in gradient descent, and not just naively proportional to the length of the "gradient vector"?
Learning rate decay. Starting with a large learning rate to quickly converge 'near' good solutions, then decreasing the learning rate to settle into an optima.
I think your usage is fine. Greg Kai is talking about how machine learning engineers use simulated annealing to ensure that the neural network is not stuck in local minima by programming in large jumps in the solution space. You are describing how you were naturally using simulated annealing (because you were anyway bouncing around a lot, and didn't need to deliberately program it in), and then eventually started bouncing around much less.
Trapped in a local optimum?
No, I think we're talking about a different effect here. Whether the optimum that Scott is heading for is global or local, he's taking smaller and smaller steps as he gets closer to it.
In a totally different metaphor, you can just say "plucked all the low-hanging fruit already".
I disagree somewhat with Greg here, I think your use of the term is fine. It might be slightly inaccurate I suppose. the point is the cooling down effect you're pointing to, which simulated annealing also has. So depending on what you're emphasizing simulated annealing may be the best methaphor.
There are also (naturally) different forms of simulated annealing, but all simulated annealing over time lower the noise. So in the beginning it encourages big jumps and in the end it discourages big jumps. But the point of simulated annealing is to get closer to the global optimum, even if we're sacrificing some ability to approach the optima that are nearby (the local optima). So perhaps Greg was primarily responding to "you end up at some local optimum".
If you want another machine learning methaphor, you could use the idea of a gradient descent learning rate optimizer. Optimizers explicitly use the gradient to inform the step size of the gradient descent algorithm, so that when there is a steep gradient, the step size is high, and when there is a gentle slope the step size is low. This explicitly looks for the local optimum (which is less of a problem in higher dimensions). See this nice visualization from Sebastian Ruder: https://ruder.io/content/images/2016/09/saddle_point_evaluation_optimizers.gif
Of the two I'd say simulated annealing fits better.
> So perhaps Greg was primarily responding to "you end up at some local optimum".
Actually, I'd say the usage is fully correct. SA does not guarantee a global optimum - just a better chance of getting at it than naive gradient descent, and if not, a very good chance that you'll end up in a close-to-the-global optimum. Pretty much the same way that having exotic experiences and trying out many viewpoints while you're young gives you a better chance at having a more complete view of the world than if you just iterate on what your parents told you.
Agreed. although I do still think that that particular quote is somewhat incorrect as you don't end up at a local optimum in SA, and as you said the point is to get close-to-the-global. But really that's splitting hairs, and it's a good metaphor imho.
Just to add another voice, I think you used it entirely correctly and I'm a mathematician who uses similar optimization algorithms professionally (global optimization by intermittent diffusion most often).
I use the same exact example you used (figuring out your identity) when I teach SA, so I think your use was fine.
I disagree with Greg - simulated annealing is a fine analogy for the exploration processs you described
Well, just iterative optimisation: almost all optimisation algorithms take smaller and smaller steps when they converge to an optimum, that's what you describe and indeed also part of the human way to improve at something over time : as you get better, the further improvements tend to become smaller /slower.
SA is the opposite : it's to deliberately add noise to the steps of the iterative optimisation in order to decrease the chances of being trapped in a local optimum. The amplitude of the noise is adapted, depending where we are (# and /or size of iterations) and indeed goes to zero at the end (else you would never converge)...
But it's really an update to what Scott describe (a classic optimisation, done by a human but similar to most algorithm in the sense that steps get smaller when you converge to your optimum): SA would be for Scott to deliberately change his way in non - optimal, random, directions... Mostly when he start to converge (early stages are big and semi random anyway, late stage are the final convergence), but maybe when he clearly has converged (do not see how he could improve) but is somehow dissatisfied with the result.
That woud be SA in a context of self - improvement (and it's indeed something people do, in sport training for exemple when trapped in bad habits (which are in fact local optimums)
I actually think you're mischaracterizing it when you say SA does "the opposite" of what other iterative optimization algorithms do. SA is itself of course an iterative optimization, but when we contrast it with a naive hill climber, the point is that SA can jump from one slope to another, which it does less and less as time goes on.
Yes, it does this in terms of noise, but this doesn't mean it does "the opposite" of a naive hill climber, in fact I'm unsure what that would mean exactly.
> SA would be for Scott to deliberately change his way in non - optimal, random, directions... Mostly when he start to converge
You made a similar point before, you seem to think that SA makes the temperature go up midway through the search , but this is not correct: the temperature always goes down.
But all of this is more regarding SA technical specifics, while Scott's point is aptly described by SA, in fact taking your description here: "to deliberately add noise to the steps of the iterative optimisation (...) indeed [the noise] goes to zero at the end" This perfectly fits with what the metaphor is intended to say, as far as I interpreted it.
I mean that local optimizers (basically all of them, baring some initial landscape sampling and interpolation), takes smaller and smaller steps in the optimal direction (the gradient, when you have it (or have a reasonable approx of it), or the best among a few tested choices.
SA will add noise to those steps, making them non optimal or even not the best among the possible choice (i.e. the opposite of classic optimisation, it's deliberately choosing to do something different even if it is worse). And you select noise amplitude so that it does it in a way that increase the chance of jumping to a better optimum, without slowing down total convergence time too much (that's all the subtlety of annealing (simulated or not), you have to heat up at the right time and cool down at the right rate to get what you want).
SA (to me, but I work in the field, not neural network but classic engineering optimisation) is not an optimization algorithm per se, it's an ingredient you add to a deterministic optimisation algorithm, that will slow it down but decrease the chance of being trapped in a (not so great) local optimum. Basically you add it to a NR/Steepest descent or variants of it.
In genetic algorithms, SA equivalent would be the mutation rate. While what Scott describe would be the fact that initially, the less fit variants to be removed will really be much less fit, while later on, most of the population will have similar fitness. Mutation is an orthogonal ingredient, needed to ensure that you explore more of the design landscape (and decrease the chance of converging to a poor local optimum) but slowing down convergence to a single design....
SA and mutation are really counter-intuitive in the sense that in order to increase your chance to converge to the global optimum (or a good local one), you need to decrease your chance of being trapped in a bad local optimum, and a way to do that is to avoid to systematically change in ways that improve your results the most. That's the only way to cross local barriers that trap you in bad local optimums. But you can't do that all the time or too much, else you end up not optimising anything and just drifting...
I agree with everything here, especially your last paragraph. And now I see what you mean by doing the opposite. You don't mean the entire algorithm is doing the opposite, you mean it does at some steps accept a non-optimal jump, opposite of what optimization algorithms normally do. That makes sense.
And reading over Scott's description again:
> the thing where if you’re doing an optimization problem, you start by making big jumps to explore the macro-landscape of the solution space, then as time goes make smaller and smaller jumps
That really only captures iterative optimization as you said, not SA. Nevertheless I'd still say that the idea of SA as you describe it here really captures the point Scott was going for.
Indeed...I was surprised that so many people disagreed somewhat with me, while also showing they knew what they were talking about. Looking at the english and french version of the Wikipedia page, I start to understand why (I am french speaking): the pages are certainly not incompatible, but there is a subtle langage difference: In English, SA seems to apply to the whole optimisation process. In French, "recuit simulé" apply more specifically to the modification of classic deterministic algo, as a parametrised added noise (T is the parameter).
It's subtle, but explain why I got the simultaneous impression of dissagreing on SA but agreeing of optimisation description.
I still think the french terminology is more useful, as it emphasize the specific of SA compared to purely deterministic optimisation approaches, and is closer to the metalurgic annealing (a way to go out of the local optimum just after quenching by adding thermal noise, but controlled thermal noise to keep quenching benefit and not be back the the completely non-optimal original state.)
But hey, i'm french(speaking) so it would be hard to not disagree with english terminology ;-p
I just wanted to point out that SA may stand for both Simulated Annealing and Scott Alexander.
So Scott is saying that his bouncing around between ideas was a demonstration of simulated annealing. He was jumping about a lot at first, and found the neighborhood of his sweet spot, and then started jumping around much less.
What you are saying is that simulated annealing is the process of pre-programming larger jumps early on in the process of finding the global minimum. In some sense, humans, like Scott, are already pre-programmed to do that. Neural networks are not. That is why simulated annealing has to be programmed in separately.
I think Scott is using the term 100% correctly. Annealing literally means "cooling down", and it comes from the idea that hot particles jump around in the energy landscape, while cold ones are stuck in their local optimum. Yes, SA uses noise (controlled by the parameter T, which stands for temperature). But the name-giving feature of the SA algorithm is that you lower the temperature over time, which is exactly as Scott uses the term.
+
No I think he’s mostly right: in simulated annealing you start with a high temperature (in your teens I guess) that corresponds to a large probability of going uphill to a higher energy state, and then as the temperature drops over time/Scott enters his 30s (this is the annealing part) you converge to always taking downhill steps that essentially behave like gradient descent. Source: I wrote a paper once that used simulated annealing as a gradient-free method.
The intuition here is annealing metal: if you quench hot metal by sticking it in cold water then all the individual molecules drop into whatever low energy state is closest, so you end up with a very chaotic crystal structure. If you instead let it cool slowly then it has lots of time in the high energy state where big non-local changes are possible and so it can converge to a more uniform low-energy crystal structure as it cools.
Exactly. In fact, AFAIK (but metallurgy is not my speciality), it's not only cooling it down slowly, it's also re-heating up and keeping it at a moderate temperature for a time, then cooling it down back to ambiant at the correct rate.
It's clearer in french, where annealing translate to recuit, meaning to cook again, or re-heat. The full heat treatment would be heat to T1, quench, heat to T2<T1, cool it down slowly (time at T2 and subsequent cooling rate is important).
T1 then more or less slow cool down is not (AFAIK) annealing, and convergence to an optimum (which is another way to say your update steps get smaller and smaller) is not simulated annealing in an optimisation context
Your second paragraph describes hardening (T1+quench) and tempering (T2). Annealing is in fact the process of holding metal above a critical temperature (T1), then cooling slowly enough to preserve the maximally unhardened condition, for ease of machining (source: am a machinist).
I don't think that's correct, or at least is off target. The reason it's called "simulated annealing" is that you are mimicking the process of real annealing (in metallurgy) by gradually reducing the temperature, id est you gradually turn down the amplitude of your noise as you settle into the valley that (hopefully) leads to your global optimum.
It would appear your are critiquing Scott's use of "taking smaller steps" because as you (correctly) point out often the individual Monte Carlo step size doesn't change, and doesn't need to. But what he's getting at is that the net excursions (of however many steps you want to average over) become smaller and smaller as you turn down the temperature, and that is both the feature he is describing about his idea of the evolution of his ideas, and also the most obvious feature of simulated annealing simulations.
typically in simulated annealing, the noise decreases in volume as you approach the optimum, so what he said fits
Since you live in a rationalist group-home, I'm skeptical of your claim that not interacting much means you won't be affected much.
Maybe there's an actual name for the phenomenon I'm about to describe. I call it "new vs best".
When you write a new post, people tend to compare it to the best work you've ever done (Moloch, or whatever). Statistically, the new post is almost always going to be worse. So it looks like you've fallen off in quality.
But that's an unfair comparison. A fairer one would be to put one of your newer posts against a random SSC post from 2015 - if you do that, I'm confident that your newer writing holds up, and has maybe gotten better.
Another factor is that (in my opinion) things were actually more interesting in 2015. Take neoreaction. Whether you agreed with it or not, that was a fascinating thing that was fun to talk about. It's hard to find an analog for it 2022.
We live in a media landscape where 80% of the air is sucked up by COVID and vaccines and Trump. It's actually boring as hell and I can't wait for it all to end.
I've been calling that effect "Time Distillation", particularly in the context of comparing popular media quality now to that of past eras. Namely, a lot of popular media is mediocre-to-poor and always has been. But it often feels like the new stuff is much much worse than older stuff because the dreck of past eras has been disproportionately discarded and forgotten, as the passage of time has boiled off the impurities and concentrated the timeless classics in our awareness, while the contemporary dreck hasn't yet been distilled away.
Time distillation, that's an excellent and succinct way to name that phenomenon.
yeah that's a good one
The "golden age" of sci-fi -- Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke -- all seem mediocre in comparison with the state of sci-fi in 2022. I can't imagine how bad the rest of the sci-fi must have been back then. But Orwell holds up. Michelangelo seems mediocre in comparison to corporate drones who build game levels today, so the masses of artists in his day must have been really atrocious.
The golden age of sci fi seems amazing comparing to the dumpster fire of 2022 era sci fi.
Mind you, relatively recent (1990-2010) stuff is still good.
Andy Weir and Neal Stephenson are making good stuff. Better than Asimov's robot/empire series at least. I'm just starting Foundation.
I suspect being better than one's contemporaries can start a happy death spiral that leads to seeming better than one actually is.
"Andy Weir and Neal Stephenson are making good stuff. Better than Asimov's robot/empire series at least. I'm just starting Foundation."
The Robot/Empire series is/was sorta retro-fitted. For early Asimov I'd go with:
*) Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation (then stop)
*) I, Robot (short stories)
*) Caves of Steel
*) End of Eternity
Asimov is good at ideas. Not so good at writing actual humans.
Also, the "big three" of the golden age of SF are usually: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein.
Bradbury is good, but only sporadically wrote Science Fiction.
The best Stephenson is better than Asimov ... Stephenson is better at actually crafting sentences and paragraphs and characters.
I'm reading The Dispossessed now, having read The Martian Chronicles (and a greater amount of Heinlein) and seen 2001 but not having read Asimov or Clarke. How does Le Guin stack up compared to them?
"Asimov is good at ideas. Not so good at writing actual humans."
Hm, Liu Cixin and the Three Body Problem (actually the whole trilogy) seem relevant. Amazing ideas, but all major characters are variations of murderous sociopath, or else comic relief, and female characters are either inept, evil or ridiculously idealized supernatural beings of ineffable beauty, but zero of his women are human.
Maybe good scifi is written by shape rotators and good characters are written by wordcels, or to reference an older SSC which posits the same dichotomy in different words:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-autism-and-schizophrenia/
This may be the bottle of Riesling talking, but if scifi is a (or the) shape rotator genre, is fantasy a (the) wordcel genre? n=1, Tolkien invented several languages
It's really interesting to me that Andy Weir has become a well-known, high-profile sci fi author these days. I still remember him better from the days when he was still an aspiring author back when he was doing the webcomic Casey and Andy.
The final page of the comic ends with a joke based on the fact that an editor had rejected his manuscript for a story saying that it had "too few characters," and suggested that he add more to fill it out. He protested that it was a complete story without room to add more meaningful characters into the narrative, but joked about the possibility of adding another character named Bob to the story by occasionally finishing scenes with the line "Bob was there too."
Not that I don't think Weir is a good writer, I enjoyed his work before he was even published. But I do think his being catapulted to the limelight after years of writing as a relative unknown says a lot about how much that level of prominence owes to luck of the draw.
Asimov tends to write way too many characters, most of whom the reader neither knows nor cares anything about, and this is definitely a failure mode. JK Rowling seems to strike a good balance, with lots of characters but each character having sufficient backstory and feeling like a real person. Andy Weir goes deep with only a few characters. I don't mind the last two.
The Martian and Project Hail Mary are really really good. I don't think it's the luck of getting selected for attention by the media. I think they got selected for attention because they were that good. Same with Rowling. But when Rowling does Serious Adult Literary Shit, it doesn't seem that great. The coincidence is that Potter put her in the right mindspace to do her best work.
Agreed, golden age is still great to read because of nostalgia and founder effect (where new ideas are still plenty to grab and you get the originality bonus of being the first there. And not only bonus, the freshness coming from it is enjoyable ). But I prefer 1990-2010 for a more cynical approach, more complexity and much better literary quality (characterization, writing style,...).
Golden age I enjoyed Asimov, Herbert, Farmer, Pohl, VVogt,Silverberg,....
Later Banks, Stephenson, Varley, Powers, Simmons, King for example, and many others that do not immediately come to mind.
Lately, I do not read so much SF/fantasy...maybe because I get older, maybe because I have less time due to familial activities and so much access to video content, maybe because post 2010 authors sucks (for me). Not clear how much each factor is important, but given how much I enjoyed SF/fantasy before it would be nice to check if factor 3 could be corrected. Any modern author to suggest?
Same thing for me, I loved Asimov and co. as a teenagers but when I tried to reread them later I did not enjoy them that much, as the writing quality is not that great.
Amon recent SF novels, many people seemed to like the The Three-Body Problem trilogy of Liu Cixin. I Loved the Children of Time duology from A. Tchaikovsky and the Interdependency series from Scalzi (bonus, this one is quite funny!).
Thanks! the 3-body was on my to-read list, I didn't know about the others. In addition to the founder effect, there is also a deep resonance between the mood/obsessions of the time and SF/Fantasy. Quite apparent when you look at the golden age (fast tech progress, post WW2, cold war), and post golden age (hippie/drugs/sexual revolution, then early ecology and end of cold war). Maybe I have trouble with the current mood, which could be behind factor 3 (most of current SF sucks (for me))
"Any modern author to suggest?"
I like Becky Chambers (Wayfarers series) and Max Gladstone (Craft Sequence). Becky is SF (rockets, aliens) but only as a background. The stories are very character driven, and, realistically, not much happens that is critical. I think there is some similarity with the Firefly TV series (character driven, not really aiming to 'overthrow the galactic empire' or anything else) and Becky's Wayfarers series. If you like that sort of thing then I'd give it a try.
Max Gladstore's Craft sequence is more fantasy. But neither Epic fantasy ala Tolkein nor modern fantasy (e.g. Harry Potter or "So You Want to be A Wizard") but something else. Which was refreshing for me, though maybe it isn't as different as I think -- I'm not really current with fantasy.
In any event, the basic premise behind the Craft sequence is that gods are real (think Zeus or Aztec gods rather than Y*wh) and about 100 years ago human academics figured out how to do what the gods did. And there was a war. And mostly but not entirely the gods lost and so now we have parts of Earth ruled by gods and parts of Earth ruled by the folks who overthrew them. And you can go to college and learn the techniques to be on the 'overthrew them' team. But magic works a lot like contract law, so you can easily wind up DEAD if things go poorly. Complications ensue ...
Ninefox Gambit was interesting and weird, but seemed very classic SF. The idea was explored. The characters ... not so much.
Thanks, I liked firefly (the movie more than the serie), thought it was a very good free "real-life" adaptation of cowboy bebop (all the more since i recently saw the real-life cowboy bebop - yuck) so certainly it's worth a try. Craft also seems interesting, makes me think of American Gods which I like a lot (both the book and the tv serie), although it tends to dilute a little bit with time "à la Lost"....
So yeah, it seems there are still interesting things lying around....maybe it's more factor 1 and 2 that are at play, and having to find new prolific authors I can trust to reliably output stuff I like ( because quite a few of my preferred ones are very unfortunately dead :-( ), and I can not start with time-sorted classics like I did when I discovered SF.
I...wha...how....
Okay, what's an example of a video game level that's the equal of the Sistine Chapel as a work of art?
Assassin's Creed Unity (french revolution era) has some great art and architecture which is all based on real French stuff. It's not original but it's better than the Sistine chapel.
I think most of the individual paintings on the Sistine chapel are not great, but there are hundreds of them. Lots and lots of in-game character models look better. I also very often see stuff on deviantart or shutterstock that looks better than one of the extras at the Sistine Chapel.
If you manage to separate the historical\cultural baggage to make a purely aesthetics based comparison, It's not hard at all to find videogame art far superior to the Sistine Chapel. Just recently I was in awe of some of the stuff in Doom Eternal. I'm also a big fan of Halo's Forerunner architecture.
But I think most people aren't really willing to do that separation. Videogames are low status. Michelangelo is ultra status. Comparison is an insult in their minds.
While the greats of history were aiming for aesthetics rather than the sort of qualities that modern artists aim for, I think that measuring one work or another as "superior" has to account for the tools that the creator(s) had to work with.
Michelangelo had to work on his own, on his back, with physical paints dripping in his face, nearly causing him to go blind. The paints themselves also fade over time, and probably don't have the same color balance now that they had over 400 years ago.
It's not like he did things the hard way for extra credit, Michelangelo didn't even want to be pegged to paint the Sistine Chapel in his own lifetime. If he had been born in modern times, if he still decided to become an artist, he probably wouldn't have been a painter or a sculptor. He worked at the cutting edge of the media available to him at the time when he worked, and would probably have been happy to have toolsets with more expansive capacities which didn't get paint in his eyes.
On the other hand, the fact that it took years and nearly made him go blind probably has a lot to do with why the Sistine Chapel is so high status. Video game modelers don't put that kind of sacrifice into their work.
I agree with what you said(*), but I don’t think that Razorback was arguing that “Michelangelo is ultra status” is wrong, per se. I think he’s just pointing out that just because it’s ultra status doesn’t mean that relatively low-status stuff like videogames can’t contain better works of art, just as art. Yes, it’s “cheaper” art in a lot of ways (literally in the sense that many costs are less), but it can be better, and people really do sometimes confuse the two and even feel insulted.
I mean, Stonehenge is pretty fucking impressive, given who made it and how, and I really appreciate it, but it’d be silly to argue that you can’t find better works of architecture in low-status things today, including in stuff like Minecraft, or even public toilets or barns or something.
(*: well, I didn’t know the thing about nearly going blind, so “believe” rather than “agree” there.)
Most of Trine 2, when played in stereoscopic 3D on a 10-foot screen with popout.
Old scifi is bad compared to new scifi, but old fantasy (Tolkien) is much better than new fantasy.
I'm sure I'm being mega selective, but as a simplified model, it's interesting that the genre that's supposed to take place in the future keeps getting better, while the stuff that's happening in the past apparently peaked in the past, and keeps getting worse.
…speak for yourself
How about "The Classic Rock" effect. Because that's why Classic Rock station playlists are always 90% the same as they were 25 years ago. The old art we remember is, by definition, a "best of" soundtrack.
I’ve tried to explain this effect to people not nearly as elegantly. I’ll be using your term from now on!
Thank you for sharing this. I also will be using this term going forward
I don't think that's it, because there is a common sentiment that the 2013-2016 range contains not just Scott's best post but *all* his best posts, a trend too strong to be pure coincidence.
Don't you think the ivermectin one is up there?
I was thinking of including "(or nearly all)" to hedge against this kind of response and cut it for brevity.
Not a bad post by any means, but if you're into Scott more for his earnest insight than for his research the only section that really shines is the one about Martians.
When it comes to "hot takes" this may be true, but I'd say that his book reviews stayed consistently great.
The neoreactionaries were interesting when they were talking about bizarre game theoretic arguments for monarchism. But now they seem to have been seamlessly absorbed into the mainstream right, saying the same kind of vaguely racist stuff that any racist uncle will give you, but with longer words
The really interesting thing about Mencius Moldbug was that early on he was saying that the political right should just give up, because they can only be a phone opposition, thus forcing the left to act responsible. Then he changed gears and started talking about a "True Election" that could bring a President Palin to power. Less interesting, more conventional.
I think Moldbug and most of his neoreactionary buddies realized they could be ideologically-pure (and thus doomed to so much street-corner ranting) or they could be effective (compromising with the mainstream could give them a chance to try and steer the mainstream in a direction they like).
Is he really that effective? He's on a Substack now, and he has been cited by Greenwald, but I don't know that he can claim to have affected any policies (as Scott is saying with COVID above).
Well, I think it's fair to say that the Republican Party of 2016+ is a lot more Moldbuggian than the Republican Party of Mitt Romney or John McCain.
It's impossible to say how much credit (or blame, depending on your point of view) Moldbug personally gets for this, but I think it's fair to say he's been an important voice in a movement that for better or worse has opened a lot of young right-wingers' eyes to the idea that there might be more to right-wing politics than just "repeal Roe" and "tax cuts for the rich".
There has been a turn against the neocons (which Moldbug himself once supported). But I think that's more because GWB left a legacy of failure people no longer wanted to be associated with.
I think that trying to assert that the right-wing mainstream moving further towards Moldbug's worldview and Moldbug tacking further towards the right-wing mainstream as being wholly unrelated or purely just Moldbug "selling out" is a bit contrarian. Something doesn't have to be labeled "The Mencius Moldbug Bill for Installing the Monarch via Salami-Slicing" for it to be clearly influenced by the Dark Enlightenment he helped pioneer.
I don't think Donald Trump is familiar with any sort of Enlightenment. He just ditched unpopular Republican stances.
He's effectively monetized his bullshit, so there is that.
Dude should have just gotten cut a giant check for his Cathedral stuff and sent out into the internet to do more interesting shit, instead of having to pay bills.
I think Urbit was supposed to be his other interesting thing.
After the election Moldbug was posting about how if the Republicans were *really* serious about winning an election, they would have had state legislatures overturn the results and install new electors while Trump used the military to seize power. Which definitely sounds "interesting" to me, but I suppose it's more conventional than "we should have a king who secures his power with cryptographically-locked guns."
Consider the midwit meme - neoreactionaries seem to reach the same conclusions as really stupid people, but for very sophisticated reasons.
My main problem with neoreactionaries is that they tend to be such habitual contrarians they can't admit that mainstream sometimes is, in fact, right, or a progressive position actually makes sense. A lot of Moldbug's posts seem like a purely intellectual exercise in Devil's advocacy.
"Better than the Beatles effect" is one name it's been given. In statistics terms, it's just a trivial order statistics fact: the probability of the next sample being the maximum out of the n samples so far is just going to be 1/(n+1).
Since no one else mentioned it isn't this called regression to the mean.
It's more likely that anything new is going to be average rather than better than the current best ever
I don't think you suck, or that you have gotten worse. I've been reading you since, I believe, "The Toxoplasma of Rage," and that has been awhile. You have your hobbyhorses (AI risk, prediction markets, predictive processing), but hey, who doesn't? Like you, I've thought about the big high-level stuff, and know those debates as deeply as I want to. Grand pronouncements aren't needed. I'm here for the insight porn--give me that on any topic, any level, and I'll be delighted to read it.
This is where I am as well, long-time reader, no sense you've gotten worse. Also very glad to hear about the community-oriented projects. But it's your writing around mental health stuff specifically that brought me and kept me here, and that's you writing from expertise grounded in practice (in addition to all your other good qualities), which is a somewhat different place you write from than the other pieces you write.
Same for me! I have been a great fan of SSC since 2017 and read most of the older posts, and I am now a great fan of ACX. Yes there is some evolution in the content, which is great, it would be kind of worrying if Scott did not change at all!- but It is still fascinating.
This is probably not a very central case, but: my now-husband introduced me to SSC in 2018. He and I used to read aloud SSC articles to each other while hanging out on a Sunday afternoon. We are definitely NOT grey tribe / rationalist folk, but sitting down to read one of your articles always felt very cozy, like just hanging out with a friend who was earnest, thoughtful, funny, and way smarter than us. I still get excited when I see a new AXC newsletter, but the impression I'm getting is that the content is growing more niche, and more and more I find both it and the community around it a little alienating. Still net positive for me though!
> We are definitely NOT grey tribe
I am curious ... which tribe enjoys reading grey tribe in this case?
Bible-believing Christian, so red-tribe is probably the closest, though not a perfect, match (insofar as these categories apply to Canadians!)
I could have written this same comment and consider myself solidly blue tribe (though perhaps with a greyer tinge than some of my peers, possibly in part due to the influence of this blog). For me the biggest decline in quality has been the comment section. I'm looking forward to an improvement now that there's a report function.
Scott, I sincerely admire your brilliance and your achievements. I'm only posting this in response to your direct question.
I learned from you, and now try to practice as a life principle : let what I say be truthful, necessary, and kind. On this basis, I was dismayed by your jokey headline, "My Ex is a Shit-eating Whore". It didn't seem very necessary or kind.
I didn't write that document, Aella's ex did. Aella sent it to me, so I assume she's in favor.
Thank you for clarifying, and I'm sorry for making the assumption. I guess I missed the attribution somewhere? I will delete my post, unless you feel there is some value?
I was unaware of that headline, which was funny, so I vote don't delete.
additionally, if you delete it, these comments will become incomprehensible to future readers, and that would be annoying for them
From how it was presented, I also thought that Scott wrote that document, so I think it is good to have this clarification.
Thank you for the +1, I'm glad this has turned out to be a comedy of errors ;)
First everyone thought Scott married Aella. Then everyone thought Scott had previous dated Aella and called her a shit eating whore. What’s next?
... All I'm saying is, have you ever seen Scott and Aella in the same room?
Aella posted on twitter that she thought it was a "incredibly sweet ad" (or "very sweet" or something, not sure about the exact adjective). If she doesn't mind, I don't think there's much of a point complaining. Nate may have even asked her before posting it.
The attribution is confusing; the first instance of 'I' in the document links to the author's Twitter. (I thought it was better-attributed but that was because I already knew the context. Illusion of transparency, whoops!)
Also since it doesn't look like anyone else mentioned it, Aella is a sex worker and received a fecal transplant: hence, 'shit-eating whore'. I imagine all involved find it to be a cute joke, though I can totally see how it might seem in poor taste from the outside.
I thought it's yours and wasn't even surprised. I'm pretty sure everyone was low key shipping you with Aella for years.
For anyone else wondering, it was posted on the most recent Classifieds thread, and originates from here: https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1477784870822764547
It was funny and complimentary. Did you read it?
Hi George, it sounds like you're directing that question to me..? Yes of course, I did read through a couple of times in sheer disbelief, and cringing all the way through, in my mistaken belief that Scott had written that "review" of Aella.
Thank goodness this imaginary drama had a happy ending, so to speak.. ;)
You're great, your blog is great. People just want more and better of every good thing.
One other factor you didn't mention but I think was a factor in my own perception of slowed insights was that when first reading ACX I got to consume your best written and most insightful posts of the last 7-8 years in 3-4 weeks. Twice per week I got to read one your top 10 posts. But now that I've caught up, these posts only come once a year which definitely feels slower by comparison.
On this point specifically, I wondered if there was any appetite for reposting some of your 'greatest hits' (maybe even from the pre-SSC days) here on ACX, so the community can enjoy reacting to them in real time
For what its worth I haven't noticed a decline in quality, and for example the ivermectin article was probably as good and more important as anything you wrote in the 2013-16 period you cite as being a high point.
I would greatly enjoy this - I found ACX in 2021 and giving some air time to the "Greatest Hits" dating back to pre-SSC would be wonderful. Please consider doing this, Scott, as you are so prolific I'm absolutely certain I've missed many gems.
In case you don't want to wait for Scott to do this, you can always browse some of the older compendiums of SSC +LW articles compiled by other people; my favorite is "The Library of Scott Alexandria", which attempts a categorization of sorts:
https://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/
I would like that a lot. Especially if they were edited/updated, either throughout or with post-scripts, on how Scott's views have evolved since the article was first written.
Same! Maybe we could call that ‘the netflix effect’? Or perhaps the reverse of the writing quote scott mentions
Same for me. Falling down that particular rabbit hole ("The hammer and the dance" was my entry point) and seeing how much there was to discover, and how it resonated, was an intellectual rush. So, first crush, rose tinted glasses, lifelong hopeless romantic - or, if you prefer - the elusive chase for that feeling of the first high (not that I would know about that, though)
Interesting! I've been reading Scott's blog since it was a LiveJournal, so never got an intense rush of great posts - it's always been a slow drip. From my perspective, the quality hasn't dropped off at all; in fact, when I went back over his recent posts to pick my favourites for the ACX reader survey, I was amazed how many top-notch posts there had been since he started the new blog.
I wonder if many folks in your audience are at similar places on their developmental timelines as you, and are projecting changes (less excitement) they feel about themselves onto you.
A totally different theory, I wonder if the hiatus you took after the NYT brouhaha actually undid some optimizations, and you're finding your way back to the local minimum. (In other words, you were a bit rusty for a while.) But this doesn't match my impression of your writing.
Finally, you also have other things going on in your life. People famously get a bit more boring after they get married and have kids.
I'm blogging a lot less than I was when I started out (my first post was in September 2007), and I'm neither famous nor do I have interesting things going on in my life. On a related note, I went through a stretch where I wasn't reading nearly as many books as I used to, but now I'm trying to shift back (which is where the material for my blog posts comes from now that there's fewer other blogs to write about).
I found out about you from the NYTimes brouhaha. I don't think you suck. For example, I really like the use of the word 'brouhaha' there.
haha...bro(u?)
Remember the somewhat rambling post about the cliche where various colored pills gave superpowers and you fleshed out a world where certain people took those pills and that BRUTE STRENGTH won the day upon the heat death of the universe? That was such a fun thing to read, and the kind of thing I'd totally read more of even though it wasn't particularly intellectual. (I love the intellectual stuff too, but those fun posts are the kinds of things I think people are missing)
+1
Anglophysics was also good. Love me some Weird Scott Fiction
+1
I also greatly enjoy the Scott Fiction, and would appreciate more of it.
(In the spirit of recommendation, I found In The Balance to be a very fun one)
+1
Googling “red pill” leads to FASCINATING OPINIONS. I liked how the story ends with galactic civilization being saved in the dumbest, rules breaking way possible
I think about Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person probably...2-3 week, every week, so smart and silly and delightful
+1
+1 Loved Unsong. Just pivot to writing a web serial.
Oh yeah
+1 these were actually the posts that I enjoyed the most and it feels to me that they have gotten less frequent
what was the title?
It was "...And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-goes/
Perhaps this is tangential to what you're writing here, but... I have to actually write this out at some point, but while I've always had my issues with the rationalist community, when it was a smaller niche it was always rigorous. I could always expect real grappling with evidence and an acknowledgement of the complexity of the world. And while I can't say that any individual has changed for the worse (and am not accusing you of this), I think that as the community has grown it has become, for lack of a better term, a meme community. By that I mean that the larger rationalist community seems to me to be more and more defined by a collection of REFERENCES rather than a mode of thinking. So where once a reference to motte and bailey was taking advantage of a useful acrostic for beginning a conversation, one that recognized that there are limits to those kinds of metaphors for thinking, now that point is merely to say the term to indicate insider status. It's a devolution into magic words philosophy, where people launder incuriosity through these terms and ideas. The holy texts cease to be invitations to complicated conversations and become instead places in which to hide, intellectually.
The thing is... I don't think there's any way that an intellectual tradition like rationalism can grow without that happening. It's an inevitable artifact of getting more popular. There's still tons of great and stimulating conversations happening under the banner. But part of my reservations about Julia Galef's book lies in this seemingly unavoidable consequence of broadening the appeal, the tendency to fall into "one weird trick" approaches to critical inquiry.
For the record I don't think your work is any worse than it has been in the time I've been consuming it. I do think the commenting community reflects the meme philosophy I'm talking about, sometimes, though I can't pretend to be a very rigorous reader of the comments.
My own feeling is that this stuff was already in a pretty advanced state of memeification by 2015-2016 when I first become aware of it. Maybe one way of looking at it is that different corners of a movement will have different balances of memes and real content, and you have to be alert to that when you are deciding where to hang out.
What's your 'sampling method' for measuring "the rationalist community"? I don't think the commenters here are a representative sample. (I don't think there _is_ an easy way to find a representative sample anymore. The (original) 'community' dispersed years ago.)
Personally, I say (half-jokingly) the rationalist community died when I said that the bailey was not (as Alexander said) the good land around the castle. It was a fortified courtyard. No one ever had fields in a bailey. It was part of a defense in depth strategy. The motte was a high tower that was purely a defensive structure. You'd then have a bailey (or better a series of baileys) around it connected by defensible ramps or bridges. So while it was a cool metaphor it was not all that accurate.
The person responded it was a metaphor and I was being pedantic with a tone that I'm very familiar with. That high school tone that says: You may be right. But you're uncool for being right. Your rightness makes you not one of us. I wasn't upset but I was disappointed in how utterly uninteresting and predictable the response was. There is now a rationalist clique and I was being told that if I don't get on side I'm going to have to go sit at a different table.
I don't blame rationalists for being like this exactly. But it isn't what I come here for.
Thanks for clarifying, because the conflict between the internet-rationalist definition of a metaphorical "bailey" and the actual castle "bailey" had always confused me.
Me too!
Me three!
Yeah. To draw it out completely: Scott wrote a piece repeating a work by Nicholas Shackel. Shackel said that said the motte was the castle and the bailey was the valuable farmland around the castle. Old feudal lords would (according to him) have their peasants farm in the bailey. When raiders came by everyone would go hide in the motte and rain arrows down on them until they left. Then they could get back to farming.
Motte and bailey is when you claim a huge but useful field that's epistemologically indefensible. If someone challenges you then you retreat to a smaller but more defensible claim. Then once the confrontation is over you go back to the wider but indefensible claim that's useful.
It's a useful enough concept. But that's not what a motte or a bailey is.
Side note: I'm often surprised by how little people know about castles considering their gigantic cultural imprint.
I wanted to dig into this a bit more.
First let's look at Shackel,
"A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of land (the Bailey) which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier such as a ditch."
Now Scott, referencing Shackel,
"The writers of the paper compare this to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a *field* of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich."
Field here might mean farmland.
Now Wikipedia,
"The bailey would contain a wide number of buildings, including a hall, kitchens, a chapel, barracks, stores, stables, forges or workshops, and was the centre of the castle's economic activity."
Scott seems pretty close here, except maybe he intended the word field to imply farmland and that would be wrong? Although, see Carisbrooke Castle from the Wiki, where farming fields seem to be depicted as being inside the bailey.
Unfortunately the description of action (running away from raiders) firmly cements that in their minds the bailey was outside the wall. Otherwise they'd be implying the proper thing to do in an invasion was to run inside the walls then give up the outer layer of defenses and run further inside.
That said the metaphor isn't awful because, terms aside, it is an accurate description of the purpose of a castle (especially one with a large bailey) relative to the farmlands around it. It just gets the names wrong.
I agree that representing the bailey as farmland is not accurate (after all, walling in your farmland is known as "a border wall"), and low-intensity farming is obviously the vast majority of economic activity in mediaeval times. But I wouldn't say that the bailey's necessarily completely unproductive either; it *could* be in some castles, but AIUI frequently things like horticulture and markets were inside the bailey walls and those are certainly of high economic value *per acre* (as opposed to total).
I think the error was introduced by Scott - if Wikipedia’s page is to be believed, the original formulation was by Nicholas Shackel, and his definition seems to get the definitions of motte and bailey mostly right.
I think the metaphor works just as well if you use the correct definition of bailey - either way, it’s a broader, more useful, but harder to hold area than the “insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte”.
I think I knew what the bailey was from the beginning and it seemed to fit the metaphor, perhaps because I was thinking of it geometrically, the core and the area around it. If Scott at some point defined it as the good land I don't think I noticed.
The metaphor is directionally accurate. The motte is a purely defensive structure. It is surrounded by the bailey, which has a lot of actually useful and productive stuff and is less well defended than the motte. In the face of a sufficiently severe attack, you abandon the bailey and retreat to the motte until you've driven the attackers away.
Claiming that the bailey is farmland is technically incorrect. And if you're not e.g. using that technicality to derail a substantial debate over something else, you should get nerd credit for pointing out the technically correct version. Not some smug "go away troublesome outgrouper" response.
But, directionally accurate is about all you can expect from a metaphor, and once one is accepted into the language or jargon, meh, forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. Well, a few miles north of a Chinatown.
I find it a little odd that you let one person who said that to you in that manner, kill the rationalist community in your mind. There's always assholes everywhere which I assume you are aware of so I'm guessing I don't understand your point?
I did say half-jokingly. The non-joking half is that such a statement doesn't happen in a vacuum. The fact the person even tried implies the existence of the cliquishness I'm put off by. And I've not seen anything to change my view subsequently that, to use the in group language, the ideology is not the movement.
“That high school tone that says: You may be right. But you're uncool for being right. Your rightness makes you not one of us.”
Not saying that phenomenon doesn’t exist, but I don’t think that’s what happened here. What happened here is that you were technically correct but missing the point. You were letting pedantry wreck a useful metaphor without providing an alternative with the same level of utility.
Nobody likes a pedant - not because being correct is uncool, but because having someone constantly show off how smart they are by “well actually-ing” trivial points makes it harder to have productive/interesting conversations.
I think this depends a bit on Erusian's intention, if they simply wanted to convey a neat history fact, and then got slapped down I could see that being an unpleasant experience. If their point was that the metaphor was bad because of this detail, then that is literally pedantic. Even assuming the former though, I think it is possible that the person who replied to them assumed the latter.
So, this interaction doesn't move me much in either direction.
See, this is a cliquish attitude. The underlying assumptions here are:
1.) The tribal totems of the group (such as a specific metaphor) are more important than literal correctness. You're also inventing a scenario which makes me wrong. That is a somewhat defensive reaction and seems soldier-y.
2.) I deserve to be socially punished (someone "nobody likes") for challenging a commonly held but false belief among the group. (In this case, the definition of bailey.) If I am going to correct it I must leap through certain hoops to make the criticism acceptable, effectively requiring a loyalty test. ("providing an alternative with the same level of utility.")
3.) If I want to be part of the group I need to accept group policing on what is trivial and what is central. You're telling me that using a word in a wrong way (which confused at least three people) is unimportant. I don't think so. But you, as a member of the community, have decided against me.
These are all important things for maintaining group cohesion! But they're not rational. They make you more wrong, not less wrong, in the interest of collective wrongness creating group cohesion. That's literally true here: you're using a word wrong.
I agree that this is a cliquish attitude, but I'll disagree with your analysis of the use of 'motte and bailey'. Since it has become a standardized term of art (or a cliché, if you prefer) its meaning has shifted, and its etymology has become irrelevant. That's what happens in language. You bolster your arguments even without the use of a pillow, and you police language even without the use of a badge and a gun. Once something is metaphorical, it cuts itself loose from its original meaning and wanders off on its own. We may not like it, but we can't change it, and complaining about it will have no effect.
End of sermon. I agree that there's too much grumpiness on this blog at the moment, by the way, and I'm trying not to be grumpy about this.
I think the issue here is twofold: Firstly, people who are familiar with the normal definition word will be confused by the new definition. Secondly, it will misinform rationalists as to what the word means. Basically, it cuts off two linguistic communities by making them unable to communicate unless the full context is understood. But I have no objection to words changing per se.
Etymology may not matter for words, but I don't think etymology ever becomes irrelevant for a phrase that's a metaphor. For instance, think of the phrase "toe the line" -- it means to follow the rule precisely. The phrase means to metaphorically do the equivalent of what athletes do at the start of a race, when they bring their feet so close to the starting line that their toes touch it, but don't go over: they toe the line. Now some people write the phrase as "tow the line." Everybody still knows the phrase means follow the rule precisely, but the metaphor is lost, because the phrase is mostly senseless, and what sense it has has nothing to do with precision and rules. You could just as well declare that "blubbering turd" means to follow the rules precisely.
I want to first say that 1) I am not part of the rationalist community, and in fact probably someone who's about as far away from the rationalist community as possible in geography, mindset, and social class, and 2) I really want to phrase this in a way that's less confrontational but am having an extremely hard time doing that right now. With that said, this seems like a fully-general argument against engagement with any culture or social group or any language that does not have perfect and immutable sign-signifier linkage built into it (such that metaphor, analogy, terms of art, etc. are considered to be as severe a violation of grammar as me said this sentence). I'm not quite sure what a "non-cliquish" or "perfectly rational" interaction by your standards would look like. I'm not sure it would even be possible, even in Raikoth.
Not really. It's extremely simple. You have to define your terms. It's like the famous example: π < 2. Now, you can read this one of two ways. Obviously wrong if you take π to mean (as it commonly does) 3.14 etc. Or you can, in context of the equation, realize that π is being used as a variable that's about 1.3. And then someone can say, "You know, it's a little weird using π to mean anything other than 3.14." And the other person shrugs and says they like to use it. And everyone understands what's going on.
Now, if the person said, "No, it's the same π that is used to calculate circles and it's less than two." then they'd be incorrect. (Or have some mathematics above my pay grade to back it up.)
Yes, but if people need to engage in heavy circumlocution about every single word, you're going to end up setting the barrier for entry to communication so high that people (at least, the kind of people who exist here and now as opposed to some New Rationalist Human) just are going to not engage in it- at least, not with the people who insist on setting that barrier up. The important thing about communication is that the root idea is conveyed, not that every word perfectly aligns with what is written in a dictionary. That isn't a "cliquish definition", that's just how language actually works; cavemen didn't have dictionaries to point at when they needed to communicate the idea "A lion is coming, we need to leave or it will eat us." As others have pointed out, "motte-and-bailey" conveys a complex idea in three words, and does that regardless of whether bailey means exactly what the man who coined the term thinks it means, and in fact still works as an analogy even with the meaning of bailey you're insisting be acknowledged. The idea that the whole phrase is poisoned because of one minor factual error is, essentially, throwing the entire nature of language out with the bathwater.
1) You’re asserting your own totem here: literal exact correctness is the most important thing, and anyone who disagrees with you is “cliquey”. That’s a very weird attitude to have about a metaphor, of all things, and frankly pretty exclusionary on your own part.
2) I’m not saying you deserve to be punished, I’m saying you don’t deserve the praise you’re demanding for pointing out a correct, interesting, but not really relevant factoid. You accuse me of being “soldiery” but honestly you seem to be the confrontational one here. You seem to demand some sort of prize for superior intellect, and having failed to receive that, decided “you all are cliquey losers, I’m taking my ball and going home”.
As for hoops to jump through - no one is saying “you can’t be a rationalist if you don’t believe this incorrect definition of ‘bailey’” they are saying “motte-and-bailey is a useful metaphor for thinking about a common rhetorical strategy, this is true whether or not it gets ‘bailey’ exactly right, so we’re going to keep using it”.
3) Nobody is “policing” you out of the group. Nobody even really has that authority, least of all me. You’ve voluntarily decided to leave, because you can’t stand the fact that the name of a metaphor representing a rhetorical concept sort of relies on an incorrect definition of one of the words in the name of the metaphor.
I’ll add to that that even using the correct definition of “bailey” doesn’t change the metaphor - either way, the “bailey” is more generally useful, the “motte” is more defensible. That’s the only bit that’s relevant to the metaphor, the rest is just color.
So yes, I stand by my assertion that the distinction is trivial (for the purpose of discussing rhetoric. It clearly is not trivial for studying medieval settlement construction).
A key point from Erusian was that "you're also inventing a scenario which makes me wrong" and I'm inclined to agree. You did not witness the exchange; you are choosing to interpret Erusian's description of the exchange in a way that makes him look bad.
As an aspiring rationalist, I'm inclined to think you're hurting the reputation of rationalism with the approach you're taking. (even if you don't identify as rationalist.)
> Nobody likes a pedant
Hmm, I think I like pedants.
The bailey was kind of a fortified patio, but it was also a prison for serfs kept safe from bandits by the lord of the motte so he could profit from oppressing them. Um. I think of the metaphor as a polite way of saying 'bait and switch' without calling the other person a liar. And I think it works pretty well. It makes arguments more reasonable without harming any actual serfs or their lord's economic interests.
. . .
I don't think Scott's quality has changed much, but the comments section used to be a lot more right-left confrontational. If that comes back the place will probably be purged.
Scott gives his (or Shellack's) definition of bailey. It's "a field of desirable and economically productive land [around the motte] called a bailey." You go into the motte to avoid attacks and then go back to farming in the bailey when the raiders are gone. So it's clearly a mixup.
I'm just going to say it. Scott would make a bad feudal lord. Any lords looking for advice on how to run their fiefs should read someone else.
For years I thought that a "motte" was an olde Englische word for a "moat", and a bailey was either where the bailiff lived, or another old word for a "jail" or a dungeon. A bailiff is a kind of jailer or dungeon-keeper, right?
So when your warriors could no longer defend the water-filled "motte", they retreated to the strong stone "bailey" for a last-ditch defense. Which was precisely backwards.
False friends everywhere!
Motte and moat actually were the same word. Motte literally means "hill" or "mound" but was extended to mean the earthworks (both hills and trenches) around a fortification. Eventually hills became less common and ditches filled with water became more common and so the motte came to refer mostly to a ditch filled with water. Now we say that a motte is the hill and the moat is the wet fosse. But they were the same word.
A bailiff is the person in charge of a bailiwick. A bailiwick is literally "a handed over/carried house." A bailiff is literally a carrier or bearer. Implicitly of something handed over. A porter in some cases. Wick means a home/house/village and therefore metaphorically an estate. So a bailiwick is a handed over estate. And a bailiff is the person in charge of it. But not the owner. This role as the person in charge but not the actual owner later created a royal class of officials as the king delegated various duties to the people he appointed bailiffs.
It's a false friend with bailey which probably derives from the Latin vallum meaning a type of wall (related to "poles, stakes" as in a palisade). A bailey is literally a walled area. Though some people think it might be related to the other word. However, bailiff is not the term for someone in charge of a bailey. It seems like in most of Europe the person in charge of a bailey was in charge of the gate that let people in and took something like that for their title. (Though, confusingly, sometimes bailiffs were in charge of what were called baileys! "Handed over things." And it wasn't uncommon for one person to hold two positions.)
great explanation, thanks
I've always found the motte and bailey notion opaque. Which one is more valuable? You could argue either way.
It seems more like a symbol of group membership than a useful concept.
Steve is working on a riff about getting your bait-and-switch switched to bait you.
I've seen people refer to it as field and fortress.
> It's a devolution into magic words philosophy, where people launder incuriosity through these terms and ideas.
Aren't you a literal communist? Pot, this is kettle, I've got some news...
you know nothing about Marxism, and thus have no basis for making the comparison
Ok I know something about Marxism, and i think Cassander is right, but also your post does not in any way contradict this: "I don't think there's any way that an intellectual tradition like rationalism can grow without that happening. It's an inevitable artifact of getting more popular." The pot isn't calling the kettle black, the pot is pointing out that this problem is unavoidable....
How do you know Cassander doesn't know anything about Marxism?
Cassander is a rather prolific commenter in the rationalist community. My strongest association with Cassander is probably 'pro-capitalism' so I wouldn't be surprised if Freddie has read plenty of posts by Cassander about Marxism in the past.
This is such a pitch perfect response. Not even an attempt at an argument, just immediately lashing out with one of the oldest and laziest of ad hominem cliches. You've proven my point better than anything I could ever say.
And *your* attempt at an argument-that-was-definitely-not-an-ad-hominem-cliche was...what, exactly? What further response is called for when your comment was basically just "Says you, commie"?
> you know nothing about Marxism, and thus have no basis for making the comparison
He made a reasonable point, and... what did you even do here? Is this just a personal attack?
He didn't "make a reasonable point," he just said "you're a communist, therefore a hypocrite, therefore I have verbally owned you by pointing these two things out." It's an anti-point.
Pointing out that communism is known for the same lack of curiosity that FdB is accusing rationalism of is interesting to me. I would have enjoyed a substantial response.
If Cassander made a point about the intellectual habits of communists, that would be one thing, but he didn't. He *implied* the existence of such a point as scaffold for a textbook ad hominem tu quoque ("you do X therefore your criticism of X is null").
Not saying Freddie's response was *ideal*, but Cassander's initial reply was definitely "coming in swinging".
Is it known for that though or just "known" for that. Despite being a bit left of the average reader of this blog (but definitely right of Freddie!) I'm actually not a fan of the reasoning style of most of the communists I've encountered. And whilst I've not read Marx, my prior that he is right on most of whatever claims divide him from the average academic economist right now is low. But just stating as a fact that your ideological enemies are especially group-thinky is both question-begging and not really very useful.
This isn't a reasonable or even a point at all. Just look at their next reaction, a classic "not even an attempt at an argument..." - When he started with a lazy "har gar communist is magic". A pot and a kettle indeed.
This comment may seem rude, but in Freddie's defense Cassander's comment was equally uncharitable.
Trivial warning for this, no ban in site but please try to be less confrontational in the future.
I think that Eliezer intentionally baked memification into his Sequences from the beginning. It's part of why I never actually managed to read them - I just couldn't stand the excessive appeal to pop-culture versions of martial arts and of Zen.
This isn't to say that you're wrong, but, well, the snake was in the garden from the beginning, you know?
The “Sequences” are so bad and Scott is so good and Scott loves the “Sequences.” I can never quite wrap my head around this recursive inconsistency.
Maybe Scott is good for reasons mostly unconnected with his liking for the sequences. And also maybe the sequences aren't quite as bad as you (or I) think.
Nah, I think the reasons actually are related. Scott's got a tiny ego, which both is why his writing is so much better than the Sequences and also why he doesn't balk at the Sequences (the content is decent; the problem is the egomaniacal tone Yudkowsky took).
Yes, fair points.
I found the Sequences pretty interesting, but I also really appreciated I don't have to suffer through these topics with the author in real life.
I think the sequences have fantastic content, although they're perhaps not as well-written as Scott's posts.
The Sequences are fascinating and I learned many valuable things from them, but they're far too long and Eliezer's style is off-putting to many people. One of the rationalist community's failures, I think, is that the Sequences should have been rewritten in an equally comprehensive but more accessible form, so that the improved version could be recommended to newcomers.
On the other hand, the Bible is also too long and off-putting to many people, but Christianity met with some success. Maybe the real problem lies elsewhere.
Well, Yudkowsky wrote the sequences with the explicit purpose of making a case that work on "friendly AI" is literally the most urgent thing that humanity must be doing, while stuff like raising the sanity waterline was always secondary for him. Such an esoteric ideology in its pure form was never going to win broad appeal, it needed some normie-fication, which Scott turned out to be the best at.
I thought HPMOR was literally Eliezer rewriting the Sequences in a more accessible form to be more recommendable to newcomers?
If it was- mission failed, on several levels, starting with trying to use fanfiction to deliver polemic. It's hard enough for people to take original fiction that serves as the author's bully pulpit seriously (see: Atlas Shrugged, That Hideous Strength), but seizing the likeness of another's work to do it frequently enters the absurd.
> The thing is... I don't think there's any way that an intellectual tradition like rationalism can grow without that happening. It's an inevitable artifact of getting more popular.
It's a shame if that's the case, because it seems to me like this intellectual tradition specifically is _about_ not letting this kind of thing happen to your thinking. In a sense the community defined by references instead of a mode of thinking are necessarily missing the point of the whole thing. that kind of ruins the point of growing the intellectual tradition.
I don't have any deep thoughts on the issue, but perhaps the sequences and the rationality community has had a big focus in individual rationality, but not so much a focus on how to grow a movement of rationalists.
I don't think any tradition (not just intellectual) can grow without that happening. Christ, for instance, was the most Christian Christian in history. His first followers, the disciples and apostles and such, were known for applying the true rules of Christianity in the "right" way. As the community grew, less chaste and holy people began joining the order. People started killing and maiming and enslaving in the name of Christianity, although the Gospel can perhaps be said to strictly against any of these. Christianity was consequently bastardized to suit whatever un-holy whims dictate the actions of humans....similar to the bastardization of the motte and bailey fallacy to try and discredit any argument not to the motte-and-bailer's taste.
I would definitely agree that the commenting community here is 'worse' than at SSC along the lines you describe, along with the also unwelcome hurt feelings post whenever Scott makes an offhand joke about a political/cultural topic. I don't know how much that applies to the larger rational community as I don't really engage with it other than here, but I have the feeling that you're right about it being an inevitable side-effect of community growth (which is why I don't tend to 'join' them).
Another reason that you suck is just the winnowing effect of memory. People remember the most salient parts of the past, i.e. only your best posts from that time, and compare it to the present, which includes your median posts from now, and are disappointed by the comparison. This might have a larger effect on how your recent work is perceived than anything you mention!
This might lead to a sort of falling Shepard Tone effect, where the past Scott illusorily sounds better, as every year new people enter, slowly descend in pitch, and then complain about it. About a year or two after you got a lot of new readers, you'd start hearing more people at the point along this scale where they complain.
On top of that, new readers often catch up with your backlog *all at once*, so have a high opinion of you at the outset, and then read you at the pace of your output. So of course you suck compared to that!
Rosy retrospective bias FTW!
Random thoughts:
1. I think you're the best blogger out there.
2. If I had an ask congruent with the above, it'd be for more brain-breaking fiction pieces. Not a lot of them, mind you, but they are the bulgogi sauce on the beef.
3. I personally am fine with whatever you write. If I saw "I Replaced a Lightbulb," I'd assume it was 4,400 words of excellence before clicking on it.
4. You arsonist, you, putting periods outside quotation marks. This ought to be right, of course, and is consistent with the programmer vibe ACT emits, but is proscribed by US grammatical standards. (I felt this overall comment had insufficient hate given the topic is "Why Scott Sucks," so included it.)
Just like language is not bestowed by Merriam-Webster, but just documented by the organic use, so too I hope I can push forward grammar "rules" every time I disobey and "still put the periods outside of the quotation marks in any situation they can get away with it".
Yeah, it's been discussed and I do it too. My teacher said, "put the period inside them." But I think the appropriate period placement is "contextual". (And I have been known (though only very rarely) to nest parentheses.)
+1 to approximately all of this, except maybe point 4, which I don't feel strongly about. ;)
Of course the article "I Replaced a Lightbulb" is guaranteed to be excellent. The countersignalling is clear.
Dammit. Now I really, really want to read that post, but it doesn't exist!
Now I really want to read Scott’s “I Replaced a Lightbulb” essay. I’m sure it’s brilliant.
1.5. He is probably the most influential blogger out there, too. Someone who enlightened most people and changed most minds.
Moloch the illogical punctuation that defeats the whole point of quotations as verbatim replications of source material!
Re: it being tougher to explore random thoughts without having a good sense where they’ll end up.
This is one of many reasons that I've always enjoyed your book reviews. It seems to be a good format for asides or speculation, since you review such a diverse range of books. Some other big reasons I like your reviews are 1) the often-playful of tone combined with 2) cursory fact checking and 3) your ability to situate conceptual models within a landscape populated with ideas that might not be familiar to me. So, I'm in favor of more book reviews and you sharing random thoughts, even about your day-to-day life!
That said, I think you're great. No need to overthink things and risk paralysis by analysis.
+1 for the book reviews, they avoid a lot of the downsides of having a large audience. People offended that you're off your turf can take it up with the book author(s).
I subjectively enjoy the experience of reading this blog less than SSC, but I'm almost certain that's down to the font. It's very unpleasant to read, like a staircase with with a tread that's a liiiittle too deep.
I think there are browser plugins that change fonts
Stylus can do this (and a lot of other stuff). One could probably write a theme that makes ACX look like SSC.
<thought: someone should do that>
<thought: ...I am someone. Hrm.>
There is something like this already, but I don't remember what it is called.
ACX Tweaks has an option for that: https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
Can confirm that switching the font of the blog instantly made my reading experience better. Something about the thinness of the lines in the Substack font feels stressful.
SSC's blue and grey were pleasant. Here we are just staring at the boring white page.
Conversely, I used a plugin to make SSC more readable, but I'm fine with the ACX default!
"A Bokoninist!" - KVJ & Kilgore Trout are in the house. Represent!
Busy, busy, busy!
Hi ho!
I wondered if this was a Vonnegut reference, but didn't check. Thanks!
First time commenter here, so sorry if this is a tired old point, but I'm new to SSC/ACX and would love to see either a "Best Of" collection or a book which synthesises as much of your older ideas as possible. Does any such thing exist?
Also I very much liked this particular post!
The best starting point I know of is to go to SSC, open both "About / Top Posts" and "Top Posts" in separate tabs, and read all the links in each one.
This is a nice collection of somebody's favorite posts: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/.
Another one: https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate-star-codex. Not quite comprehensive imo (it's missing Meditations on Moloch!!) but it mentions a bunch of good ones with a nice description of the individual posts.
Also maybe this: https://www.lesswrong.com/codex
I like Alexey Guzey's compendium of best SSC posts: https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwqLfDfsHmiavFAGP/the-library-of-scott-alexandria
Having seen the other collections in the responses to your query, I still prefer and recommend https://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/
I think number 1 is big. The dictator stuff is a good example. It's interesting subject matter, and you're thoughtful about it, and overall I liked the posts, but simply due to not accumulating the thinking time and knowledge around the area, your content was a little weaker. (I hope you continue exploring that stuff, though, and maybe solve that problem.)
Counterpoint: I'm pretty hard on you, pretty often. But there's things you can do better than anyone else, and I'm not sure if you are weighting that correctly.
There's an aspect of "Oh, Freddie and Bari can write about that better" in some of this. And Freddie can write! But to the extent you tell me Scott Alexander and Freddie Deboer wrote, say, an article about some aspect of abortion or wokeness or something, I know what Freddie's conclusion is already (it's "more socialism"). But I don't know what yours is; I'm probably going to disagree with it but I'll have to *work* to disagree with it. There will be points in there I will have to think about and refute.
Your approach to topics is notably different from anyone elses, you tend to do more work on them, and you hit angles other people don't hit. That doesn't mean you MUST write about topic A, but it does mean that if you write about topic A you are going to bring added-value to it nobody else brings. It doesn't have to change your conclusions re: write about it or not, but it should be part of the calculation.
Definitely agree with this. I suppose the counterargument is that Scott writes well because he avoids topics he can't write well about, and so if he starts forcing himself to write then the quality will no longer be good. But I'd still rather see him give it a try instead of assume that it won't work out.
"There's an aspect of 'Oh, Freddie and Bari can write about that better' in some of this."
Right, and while Scott names several honest brokers (like Freddie), I wouldn't trust everyone Scott names to have Scott's intellectual honesty. If Scott were paying firsthand attention, rather than secondhand, I wonder whether he would have cited Rufo's City Journal article on this supposed Aztec worship craze. Because, while Bad Things Are Happening (you'll pry my allegiance to accelerated mathematics for children with the interest and aptitude for it out of my cold, dead hands!), Rufo's account is not honest, something I think Scott would know and mention if he weren't trusting others to do a better job.
I'm I the only person who hears about teaching kids to worship the Aztec sacrificial god, and thinks that that sounds a way more fun than average social studies hour?
Heh!
You might be disappointed at what was really going on, then.
Ethnic studies curricula often use a short poem, "In Lak'Ech" by Chicano playwright Luis Valdez: "In Lak'ech / Tú eres mi otro yo. (You are my other me.) / Si te hago daño a ti, (If I do harm to you,) / Me hago daño a mi mismo. (I do harm to myself.) / Si te amo y respeto, (If I love and respect you,) / Me amo y respeto yo. (I love and respect myself.)"
Less frequently, invoking four Tezcatlipocas (Aztec gods) to personify four aspects of growth and development is also used. An activist promoting this practice wrote a long hip-hop riff on Valdez's "In Lak'Ech" personifying these aspects with four Tezcatlipocas and called it the “In Lak Ech Affirmation". The lyrics to this riff were included in the supplementary-materials section of one chapter of CA's ethnic-studies guide.
Valdez's brief "In Lak'Ech" sees considerable classroom use, including in ethnic-studies chants. Nobody produced evidence that the “In Lak Ech Affirmation", awkwardly long for classroom use, does, though. Videos circulating last year of students chanting the “In Lak Ech Affirmation" were videos of students doing chants incorporating the shorter, god-free "In Lak'Ech".
That's it. The whole controversy. Sadly, no actual Aztec ritual involved. It's the pre-Columbian equivalent of Western poets and old-timey prep schools invoking the Greek pantheon as mythic elements personifying certain principles (Wisdom! Rationality! Wildness! War! Sexystuff!...)
My own public school had some murals using Greek mythology to celebrate Western civ. Had someone objected to the murals as idolatry and demanded they be painted over, I'd expect laughter, plus outrage from the "uphold Western civ!" crowd, to result.
I just noticed I'm out of Athena-brand mineral water, though.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-modern-myth/
lol, I had somehow missed the Athena water story, until I read it a few days ago after seeing it on goodreads on a list of stories similar to HPMOR. I started actively reading SSC back in 2015, so it is surprising I missed it, though looking at the date, that was when I was hopping from hostel to airbnb to hostel through the Balkans with my new girlfriend/ now wife. So I suppose that might be how I missed it, I wonder if there is other stuff from that Jan/Feb/March that I didn't see.
This sort of thing has been the most annoying change I've noticed in Scott's writing (though i haven't checked to see whether it's actually a change or just something I've noticed more). Seems like he's falling for the bait more often.
I guess I'm still woke in the sense that I think teaching about structural racism is good and that sort of thing. Your anti-woke posts were never the thing I was around for and I'd be pretty disappointed if that's what people are desperate for, because frankly that all seems a bit preaching-to-the-choirey to me these days.
If there's anything I want more of it's just the super detailed deep dives on niche topics, which you still do sometimes but I guess could do more of? I don't really have a strong criticism here.
From reading this comment it occurs to me that there's still a lot of useful stuff to be written on racial issues that goes beyond "wokeness bad" vs "wokeness good". Like, the world doesn't need yet another take on why Critical Race Theory is bad, but it does need better ideas about ways to think about these sorts of issues that are actually _good_.
I feel like most of the writing and thinking about racial issues these days are so kindergarten-level that it's not difficut to be more sophisticated.
The "Parable of the Talents" post is so good
The "Critical Race Theory" issue seems like a particularly good fit for Scott's brand of deep dives into complex topics. Ignoring the fact that Critical Race Theory is absolutely the wrong name for the debate, it looks like a motte-and-baily situation where neither side can agree which is which.
The left is saying "We just want people to know the truth about American history, and the quite often brutal levels of racism involved in it" and accusing the right of trying to block the teaching of everything but the most cheerful whitewashed version of things.
The right is accusing the left of actually trying to berate children and make them feel bad about the color of their skin, and claims that they are just passing laws to make sure that doesn't happen.
Due to my personal views and friend group, I've heard a lot more of the left's side of the matter, but would appreciate a thorough analysis of the situation from someone I can trust to not be a white supremacist.
You don't know me very well, so you might not trust me, but "Critical Race Theory" is not synonymous with liberalism. Rather, it was conceived of as being critical of liberalism. So plenty of people were pro-civil rights liberals/progressives and even themselves African-American without embracing CRT. CRT is an offshoot of Critical Legal Studies, so it was a very niche thing. But what's actually being taught to kids is a heretical offshoot by people less bright than the originators of CRT.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/12/10/heresy/
Whether white children feel terrible about being white is kind of relevant, but the big conservative objection to teaching CRT in specific and SJ in general is a lot deeper and a lot fuzzier. Let's see if I can do it justice.
Social justice is, in all of its facets, essentially countercultural. It vehemently opposes the idea of "one right path", celebrates diversity rather than assimilation, and frequently sets up the West itself (in nebulous form) as the prime enemy. *As a counterculture* this is normal, reasonable, and probably a useful thing for society to have.
The problem is that SJ is *not* a counterculture anymore. It's become the West's primary culture. And as a primary culture it is *lousy*. SJ doesn't provide a beacon to rally around, because a key tenet is that having lots of different rallying points is fine; the "salad bowl" rather than the "melting pot". And an ideology praising opposing the status quo is a *terrible* thing to make societal dogma - you wind up in a war of all against all. Essentially, SJ replaces "e pluribus unum" with "e pluribus pluribus", and "pluribus" can't present a united front against external threats.
CRT in specific relates to both of the big disunifying issues - 1) it posits ongoing racial animus and the separation of "white" and "black" identities rather than a single "Western"/"American" identity, 2) "structural racism" very clearly sets up Western society itself as a near-perpetual enemy, enabling war of all against all.
Hopefully, this side of things doesn't need not-a-white-supremacist credentials, as it has little to do with race in particular.
What's impressive is that despite its cultural primacy wokeness still seems remarkably unified. Sure, there are some minor issues like TERFs and homophobic misogynistic rappers, but the cultural warriors on that side still seem to be pointed in roughly the same direction. Is that because the other side isn't sufficiently crushed yet and can still be painted as a mighty oppressor?
Terfs are dominant worldwide, of course, or rather gender criticism is. I don’t see critical theory as being all that unified - the basis of the theory creates new oppressor classes all the time.
You go to sleep one day as an oppressed black woman, you wake up to find you are a oppressor of the cis class.
'Cause "Don't be X-ist" is super easy to coordinate, and very hard to oppose.
There is some weird shit at the fringe (xenogenders and neopronouns what not), but nobody but terminally online weirdos give a shit about that in either direction.
The argument, at least as you present it, is self-defeating.
SJ self-evidently presents its adherents with "one right path" and a beacon to rally around. And how can it be called lousier than the earlier primary culture it displaced, after it has in fact successfully displaced it?
But the worst part is leaving oneself open to an obvious counter - SJ's enemy is not status quo, it's status quo ante. It unifies its adherents just fine, the problem is conservatives who cling to numerous remnants of the old system that unfairly benefited them, instead of the new one that's more just and more equal. If they actually support the idea of a primary culture and worry about disunity, maybe they should just get on with the times, because they're the ones causing the disunity in the first place.
Surely, this is just your description, but it does match my impression of the conservative position. Moreover, my description above matches my impression of the liberal response to conservatives. This... kind of demonstrates why the conservative opposition to SJ tended to be so ridiculously inefficient. (I use past tense because I think the tide is slowly, but visibly, turning. I'm not sure conservative's own efforts deserve much credit for that, though.)
>And how can it be called lousier than the earlier primary culture it displaced, after it has in fact successfully displaced it?
The appeal of a philosophy (which is not, of course, time-invariant) is not perfectly correlated with the strength it brings to a society, nor even with the happiness it brings to a society.
Rudyard Kipling's old poem "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" covers the general concern of the conservatives here and a lot of the specifics, although it's kind of hilariously smug.
>SJ's enemy is not status quo, it's status quo ante.
In theory, perhaps, but one can debate the practice. Some of its goals are commonly thought impossible; others incompatible. Even assuming all of the demands can be broadly met, SJ's anti-authority bent doesn't lend itself well to a concerted "mission accomplished" stand-down.
Note: my post concerned not theory, but rhetoric. It's irrelevant for the argument whether the movement's ideological foundations are coherent, realistic, compatible with each other or with practice. It's only relevant whether they're successful in advancing its (actual, not nominal) goals. (Otherwise, you'd have a lot of explaining to do about, e.g., conservative-approved Christianity.)
As for "The Gods of the Copybook Headings", the whole sentiment behind it is hilariously smug, the poem merely brings the problem to light. "My beliefs are timeless truths, yours are gimmicky delusions" just doesn't make an effective argument, no matter how well presented. Unless reality intervenes and proves it right, it's going to convince absolutely nobody. That, so far, didn't happen. (In large part, I suspect, because the god conservatives now find themselves beholden to is actually, quite literally, a God of the Market.)
What did happen is the spread of criticism from the left (as in, from left-wing principles, it's being adopted by people on the right as well) - not for rhetorical "anti-authority bent", but for actual authoritarianism, not for its demands being impossible or incoherent, but for being, essentially, a scam, useless if not harmful to the peoples and causes it claims to stand for.
>Unless reality intervenes and proves it right, it's going to convince absolutely nobody. That, so far, didn't happen.
I mean, "reality intervenes" has occurred a bunch of times throughout history. Conquest, War, Famine and Pestilence come calling every now and then, and being unprepared tends to come with a terrible cost.
But yes, you do get at one of the biggest debates; "is there any hope of being believed when you prophesy doom?". Indeed, GotCH directly addresses this in its last two verses. Religion apparently helps with maintaining hope.
I wouldn't say that comes close to the conservative position on SJ. A better statement would be that a conservative viewpoint finds SJ philosophy as widely actually deployed -- i.e. regardless of any pleasant-sounding bowdlerized rationalization -- to be as deeply and inherently wicked as "Aryan race science," and for fairly similar reasons: because it selects some people as inherently better than others, for absurd accidental reasons like the color of their skin or their sexual preferences, and it enforces an ideological conformity that brooks no questioning, no deviation, even in the most private circumstances, and the ultimate purpose of which seems to be so that the right people stay in power, regardless of their merit, and the wrong people cannot achieve it, regardless of their merit or effort. The practical distinction between this philosophy and any other of the many oppressive social philosophies over the past 10,000 years that demean human effort, liberty, and individual merit, and instead reduce everyone to a mere member of a class, and exalt knowing one's proper place (while of course always claiming to be all about justice and peace), is difficult to discern. I don't think a conservative would consider it valuable in counterculture any more than he would agree a certain amount of murder is good for society because it keeps the police on their toes.
I was impressed by how closely your description of the conservative view of SJ could be applied, word for word, to the liberal view of Trumpism. I guess this ratifies your point abour SJ being indistinguishable...
Quite right. Those two camps totally deserve each other, and the sad part is that there's no Golgrafrincham Ark B onto which those of who just need to pay the mortgage on time and get the kids through graduation without too much drama can herd them both.
How do you distinguish this argument from "unity and/or strength require conformity"?
I'm not sure I do. Is there some need to?
Ditto.
A two parter of an explanation, here's the first. Posting the second as a reply to this one:
Some of the problems with woke thought start from their presumption that structural racism exists, is pervasive and the ordinary state of affairs, and that it is the primary cause of basically all disparity.
To explain more of the objection, it's really useful to differentiate between teaching subject matter, and the teaching attitude, mindset or assumptions.
To illustrate with two examples: Many people dislike the Common Core method of teaching math. They argue it is founded on mistaken assumptions and just plain does not work. If they wanted to ban teaching Common Core, they certainly wouldn't want to ban teaching math.
Another example, this time with ideology instead of bad methods. Imagine if a school's teachers suddenly started having every math problem be about calculating how much capitalists rip off workers, how many bullets you need to shoot what amount of capitalist pigs, how much molten metal and how many priests we need to entertain revolutionaries by letting them execute priests by pouring molten metal down their throats in a mockery of the priest's sacrament?
They'd teach perfectly valid math with good methods. I presume many would still have issues with these teachers, right? They are teaching math, yes, but teaching math *through* an explicitly ideological lens.
In the CRT case, both of these are at issue: The right believes the teachers are ideologues for an ideology they don't think is a good one, that the teachers prioritize ideological lessons and otherwise an ideological viewpoint *though which* the teaching is done, and sideline traditional teaching.
And they are right to do so: Critical theorists do not simply want to teach more stuff, or to just teach the historical facts.
Max Horkheimer who originally coined the term *critical theory* explicitly distinguishes it from what he calls *traditional theory*.
According to Horkheimer, *traditional theory* is that which seeks to understand, explain, model the world as it is. It's an agenda-less knowledge building exercise.
Critical theory, in contrast, is explicitly activist and normative. It posits that society should be a certain way, and critiques it for failing to live up to those pre-decided norms. It actively tries to make society be the way the Critical Theorist decided the world should be.
The "critical" part in the name is not about critical thinking. Critical thinking is questioning, but questioning in the sense of trying to be careful and accurate, and to minimize mistakes. It is a tool of traditional theory. The "critical" in critical theory is the critique and dismantling of that which has been decided as unfit, as that which shouldn't be.
Critical Theory is a *way* of teaching, and its structure is the problem, the structure is what's being objected to, in the same way people objecting to Common Core definitely want their kids taught math. Just not THAT way. CRT isn't "just teaching history" - adding more facts to the curriculum would simply be better traditional theory, by Horkheimer's definitions. People are objecting to the ideologization of teaching history (and pretty much everything else), not to the subject being taught.
More facts is fine, more than fine, and actually helps people to understand the nuance and messiness of reality: People and cultures of all walks of life aren't saints, and many people who do things objectionable today are usually way more interesting than just "evil person". Getting people to really drink in reality in full would be commendable. But that's not what the ideologues in teaching are trying to do, exactly the opposite.
Wokeness, to my understanding, is to have an *intersectional critical consciousness* and *a minoritarian moral intuition*. There can in principle be gay parades that are not woke (though there's a good chance they are feminist, and feminist thought is still critical theory/conflict theory driven and so a different strain of the same disease, which leads to gender critical feminists making hilarious claims about woke claims on womens' spaces). To be pro-minorities rights, or to be pro-gay or the like, is not being woke. There are a myriad of leftist and minoritarian positions that are not woke. It is somewhat like describing Christianity. Wokeness is like the Westboro Baptist Church, or Kenneth Copeland televangelism, if they managed to take over most Christian churches. I'll try to describe the Westboro faith.
The words *intersectional* and *critical consciousness* are technical terms derived from post-Marxist and neo-Marxist theory, and part of the foundation of feminism, critical race theory and all manner of somethingstudies.
To have a critical consciousness is to have a worldview: Marxism and Marxism-derived (hereafter: Marxism/st) theories see the world in terms of classes of people, some of which are oppressors and some of which are oppressed, and the task of the Marxist is to free the oppressed from the yoke of the oppressors. Depending on the theory, these classifications differ - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, women and men, blacks/minorities and whites, colonized and colonialists, queer and straight people, list goes on. In these societies, though, some of the oppressed are unaware of their status as such and willingly go along with the ruling ideology. Engels termed these people to possess a *false conciousness*, false because the class doesn't assert itself towards goals that would benefit it (these being, in Engels' opinion, obviously Marxist ones). To awaken to the oppressor-oppressed reality and adopt the Marxist worldview is to possess a *class consciousness*.
After some time and nasty news from the east, the later Marxist thinkers had a problem, though: Marx especially originally theorized that communist revolutions would occur in capitalist societies as part of history's move towards its end state, yet Marxist revolutions in capitalist societies failed to materialize, and happened mostly in agrarian societies. Like any theorists who don't want to abadon their conclusion, Marxist theorists came to adopt Engles' idea as the explanation for why they did not take place. This is part of the genesis of *the Long March through the Institutions* coined by Gramsci.
In the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer first defined *critical theory* (German: Kritische Theorie) in his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory", as a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to *traditional theory* oriented only toward understanding or explaining it. Wanting to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy, Horkheimer critiqued both the model of science put forward by logical positivism, and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism. He described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."[6] Critical theory involves a normative dimension, either by criticizing society in terms of some general theory of values or norms (oughts), or by criticizing society in terms of its own espoused values (i.e. immanent critique). The Frankfurt scholars also developed the concept of *Cultural hegemony* to describe the dominant group in society's way to be and think about the world.
These ideas were taken up in various forms of Western grievance politics, especially in feminism, where Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term *intersectionality* as a way to explore the oppression of black women - the idea is that black women face a kind of oppression that is different from that of the black man and the white woman, their oppressed identities intersect to produce a unique experience. How this develops into modern oppression olympics is probably not hard to see. It's why all kinds of activism nowadays seem cut from the same cloth: They are. Every single one is built on top of the Marxist/Marxian thought pattern and bundled up in one intersectional shitshow.
To possess a *critical consciousness*, then, is a broader, partially postmodern application of freeing people from *false consciousness*, and getting them to view the world through the lens of classes that are in an oppressor-oppressed relationship (or rather an oppression olympics pyramid), and to see culture for what it is, the dominant class asserting its preferences over the oppressed. Modern concepts such as *White fragility* are extensions of this thinking: If you defend yourself against accusations of racism, these necessarily come from one of two places: False consciousness, or the member of the dominant class exerting *privilege-preserving epistemic pushback* - in plain terms not wanting to give up on ill-gotten gains. Hence, genuine critique of *critical* materials is not possible, because authentic, genuine engagement should produce understanding and thus agreement. Criticism means the engagement wasn't genuine.
Most woke people, of course, do not think like this in active terms. But the rhetoric they stew in is created in large part from this kind of theoretical background, and it shows in their language and thinking patterns.
The second piece of the puzzle is more in the vein of Haidt: Wokeness is not liberal, or even egalitarian (it *is* equal-itarian however: Make people the same/believe they are the same rather than just treat all the same way), so why do people gobble it up so easily? Marinating in critical theory in the university is obviously part of it, but another is that the underlying moral intuition of the American formerly liberal left hasn't been Liberal or egalitarian for a while. At least after the 60s, it's surreptitiously switched to an actively *minoritarian* one. Thus, when an actively minoritarian politics like wokeness takes over, *there is no emotional break or fault line for most people*, because the surface rhetoric switches, the underlying moral intuition does not. This is why it's hard to speak for Liberal values and for egalitarian things, why they feel toothless. They are not the foundation anymore. Eric Kaufmann goes over the idea in his piece *Liberal Fundamentalism: A sociology of Wokeness* : https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/liberal-fundamentalism-a-sociology-of-wokeness/
To really drive home and underline this: Woke teachers are not liberals. Not in terms of their primary values, not in the looser sense of being tolerant of many things they dislike. Their morals are fundamentally different, and they're trying to install those for everyone as the unquestioned default. As someone else in another subthread noted, it is a disaster as a ruling ideology because it primarily seeks to destroy what is. It's an ideological solvent, not ideological bricks and mortar.
This was all very helpful. Thank you.
I'm not a Marxist, and I certainly don't think of myself as 'woke'--but I honestly *do* see quite a lot of history as being the story of oppressive elites trying to maintain their dominance and inventing ideological rationalizations for it after the fact.
It seems to me that conflict theory (although not always) is often *right* in how it sees political and social conflicts: that they're about different groups with fundamentally different interests, trying to benefit at the other's expense.
Do you think this is *never* an accurate analysis of things?
Not Rando, but I do think conflict theory, or the Marxist-Hegelian view, or the critical theory view has insights that are helpful to understanding the past and the present. It's what to do about those insights that is the big question.
Like, it's unquestionable that the US has had a segment of elites that used a racial system to oppress a lower class. It's also unquestionable that, despite many changes, there are racial disparities in wealth and other things today. One response to this is "Wow, we better double down on working towards the goal of eliminating race-based discrimination from our society." Another response is "Wow, race conflict will never end, we better double-down on elevating the oppressed races, even if it means entrenching racial identity and embracing race-based discrimination (in favor of our preferred races)."
Do I mind teachers teaching my child that the world has classes that are often in conflict with each other and that knowing this can be helpful in understanding the world? No.
Do I mind teachers teaching my child things that amount to "therefore we must lean into to the class conflict in favor of this or that group"? Yes, very much so.
I thought about it myself a few months ago (I love scott and his writing, but do feel that an arbitrary new post on ACX is less appealing to me than one from SSC), and my personal estimation was that it is mostly the "low hanging fruits have been picked" effect.
For me, a person who is way more excited by novel concepts and cognitive tools than facts of a particular subject matter (e.g. the idea of slack vs. all the posts on covid), this is doubly true.
Scott can probably write tons more book reviews or "much more than you wanted to know"s, but not endless valuable theoretical musings. And the subjects themselves, say super cool mind blowing books to review, also suffer from the same effect.
not to be a bastard wearing you down, but i found the old ssc a little uncomfortable to read at times because the distinction between 'contrarian by impulse' and 'contrarian because the minority idea is interesting' sometimes seemed blurred to me. but on the other hand articles like 'the categories were made for man, not man for the categories' have changed how i tackle so many issues at work - and frankly, have helped me ease transphobic tensions among my family. 'contrarian' framing of ideas that might at first glance belong in the 'woke' category are extremely useful.
anyways there are a couple examples like that from the old blog and this one, but my expectations are nothing more than to read some interesting ideas and talk to people about them. the old blog still exists, ACT hasn't subtracted from it.
adding guest authors to the substack could continue to be a good way to embrace the more incremental nature of your updated beliefs - outsource hot takes to others, then act as moderator/critic. some people don't like this idea of an 'agglomerator' but my favorite blog of old was roger eberts, and this is the blog that reminds me most of his. the hard part of a critic's job isn't the negative criticism, it's the defense of the new and beautiful. your posts defending the new always resonate most with me.
I don't think you suck. But I do read this less than the old blog.
I think you used to be more of a risk taker. More of a heretic. Now, after getting beaten up by the paper of record and during a time when the pressure for conformity is super high, you've become less of a risk taker and less of a heretic. To me that's disappointing.
But we have to act in the world for ourselves, not through our favorite blog writers.
feels like all these ideas (scott is less of a heretic because of being beaten up) were addressed. do you disagree with scott's self-analysis of why there is less 'heretical' writing here?
It may not be the reason Scott toned down his writing, but it's the reason I feel sad about Scott toning down his writing.
My impression from speaking to some people who said they prefer the classic SSC is that they are over-weighting certain classic posts and under-weighting the many posts from these years they've forgotten about. I share the view that disproportionately many of the 'all time best' posts are from the early years, but I don't think that the quality of the median post is lower than it was then (maybe the contrary).
As to the reason why so many of the 'all time great' posts are from earlier years. I think your post alluded to the things I think are the main two factors: i) many of them concerned identity politics/culture war issues, ii) many of these were covering pretty basic issues, not in the sense of being simple (although maybe they were that too), but of being foundational, and it's hard to keep generating foundational insights at the same rate year-on-year as the lowest hanging fruit gets picked.
This all rings true and matches my own experience of intellectually maturing as well. Fundamental questions do not seem interesting anymore. The frustrating thing, for me at least, is that with age comes additional responsibilities and the speed at which one can delve into the nifty nitty-gritty side-quests of industrial policy, or in my case the domain-dependence of literacy, I think also decreases. But maybe that is also having toddlers in the house!
And since we are doing confessions about why we suck, I think much of my suckiness is caused by impatience. I have an idea and want it to bloom quickly, so I leap into the idea for 24 hours, realize I don't have time to bring to fruition and then retreat, ego wounded, for a week; or I see a blog post which I think reinvents the wheel, and I critique it for such criminality when that critique is equivalent to being mad at someone for not having the same prior knowledge as me. What a waste.
Lastly, thank you for the idea that SJW is dead. I would love to see this idea explored more, because though it matches my experience, I just figured my bubble shifted its Overton Window.
Second for the "SJW has lost momentum" article. Matches my experience as well but I admit I'm judging more by higher-order derivatives and projecting based on that. I think lots of people would disagree and it would be nicely controversial.
I'm less certain. I can't find the Medium post discussing this, but since the young are much woker than the old it seems like the trajectory will be for wokeness to increase.
What about the idea that the young will get less woke as they age? People seem to become more conservative as they age, no?
Relative to the even more leftist younger generation, perhaps.
Firm disagree, there. My personal experience has been seeing the lefties in my age bracket go from hard-left radical communists about two bad days away from bombing someplace to more boring, reliable left-center people over about 10-15 years. Young people tend to be firebrands on either side, and then the real world grinds their edges off.
I've gotten significantly more progressive as I've aged. I'm 31 now, so hardly retirement age, but I was right-of-center at 20 and left-of-center at 25.
Same here. I'm in my mid 40s and went through a similar progression.
However, I don't think it's typical.
Not the post you're referring to but perhaps similar:
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over
I think that might be it. I just misremembered where it was hosted.
How has regression to the mean not been mentioned yet? If you like something a lot (say enough to subscribe to a blog and keep reading it for years ...), you're just naturally likely to start liking it less.
Pshaw, bunch of Johnny-come-latelys, I've thought you sucked since you switched from LiveJournal.
(j/k, you don't suck)
Is it possible that you are getting less insights from your new line of work than you did as an intern/in-person psychiatrist? I know one of my favorites from you was:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
As a medical student who has now spent three years in hospitals including with palliative care teams etc, this post never quite matched my experience. It’s not that much of what he says is wrong (except I think Scott references a lot of screaming, which I feel like I don’t actually see that much of), but more that the way you interact with death and hospital environments will probably vary a lot depending on who you are. Sure, doctors don’t want to overdo the treatment as a rule etc, and I’m 100% on the side of getting palliative treatment the moment it’s offered to me, but I’ve never found hospitals to be as horrible as this.
I feel like the differing experiences are best explained by Scott’s idea of everyone having wildly different internal experiences. Maybe I’m a heartless psychopathic bastard, maybe I got to go to hospital when well rested and well fed and didn’t have the shittiness of being a resident weighing me down, maybe some other factors are at play. But I personally wouldn’t take Who By Very Slow Decay as a guide for dying will be. Sometimes it’s awful, sometimes it’s manageable, and I feel like it depends on who you are, how caring your doctors are (including in knowing how to treat eg breathlessness or pain or nausea at the end of life), and just other random life circumstances that are going on when you are at the end of life (eg not worrying about how your 10 year old child will cope without either parent or something)
I have no idea if this is relevant, but the post mentions seems to suggest that Catholic hospitals may be less enthusiastic about transitioning to palliative care. Could his being at a Catholic hospital explain the difference?
From my observations, I suspect this is a very relevant point indeed.
Interesting! What observations do you have about Catholic opposition to palliative care?
It doesn't seem like Catholicism would be morally opposed to palliative care. The Catechism, while condemning euthanasia, specifically states that "heroic measures" do not have to be taken to extend life.
This is interpreted as meaning that, while food and water must be supplied until the end, medical treatments can be rejected by patients if they would just cause additional suffering.
All the anti-euthanasia Catholic ethicists I've read have praised hospice and palliative care as a good alternative to euthanasia.
What you say is true, as far as it goes. But it kind of ignores the way that the assumption that suffering is good for the soul is baked into that particular pie. Or the pervasive belief that everyone is a sinner and deserves to suffer a little. As with all things, the devil is in the detail; the way in which the concept of 'care' is interpreted.
I'm sure it does vary by region a lot. But as writing it is an evocative piece, and I'm pretty sure it was influenced strongly by Scotts recent experience. Tele-medicine probably doesn't have the impact, useful as it may be.
Lucky you, regarding the lack of observed screaming.
I visit an old person in an aged care home pretty regularly and there is generally some resident - usually a different one each time - screaming there.
The screams are quite disturbing because of their absolute sincerity; they reflect a very high level of emotional distress from the people concerned.
I am confident this particular home provides a high level of care and is doing all it can to mitigate that distress, and so my own conclusion is that advanced age and the earlier stages of dying can indeed involve a certain amount of screaming and a high degree of emotional distress, if only due to the individual's lack of ability to orient themselves to their current reality.
> Some of the good ideas I came up with in my 20s now feel extremely basic, to the point where I’m surprised other people found them helpful. If the discourse wants ideas at that level of basic-ness, I’m no longer producing them - it would feel like talking down to people. I realize it’s self-serving to write a post on why you suck and transition to “maybe I’m just too good for everyone”. But I think I’m more sophisticated than I was ten years ago, and people ten years ago seemed to find me the right level of sophistication, so maybe lack of sophistication sells.
This seems to be a common pattern, especially in the "intellectual travelogue" mode of writing. The earlier audiences are mostly selected among folks who find the beginning explorations valuable, and as you say those tend to have a much wider focus and so can cast a larger net. 'Sophistication' comes with having working answers to the common questions, and a richer set of established ideas to work with that allows for easier detail work at the cost of an inferential gap for newcomers. But even if that means more powerful insights in less-explored questions, it also shuts the door on the fingers of anyone whose answers to those earlier questions are incompatible.
It's shades of 'This is not a 101 space' and the explore v. exploit dichotomy that lay under some of the Sequences. I don't think there's an *answer* per se since it's the result of an inevitable shift in focus (and the price of regression is stagnation, with even less path forward than now), but ISTM the healthiest strategy is to accept that one has found a set of hammers that fit their hand quite well, and keep checking that the nails are doing useful work.
The main thing I miss from SSC is your occasional short fiction. I think your nonfiction posts here are similar in quality to the older ones.
I agree regarding the original short fiction. You (Scott, that is) suck because you're not posting enough of it :-/
He writes fiction, but it's behind the paywall.
This is DEFINITELY why you suck: This is my explanation for why so many smart intellectuals, upon being thrust into punditry superstardom, lose all their good qualities and turn into partisan hacks (many such cases!)
I really enjoyed the old "thinking out loud" posts. One of the articles that got me hooked was "Meditations on Slack".
You say you're worried about a general audience taking tentative conclusions without a grain of salt. But SSC used to have an "epistemic confidence" number at the top of each post (always too small a number IMHO); I'm not sure why you couldn't bring that back.
Studies on Slack?
Studies on Slack was a counterpart and followup to Meditations on Moloch, but it felt less developed and left a lot of unanswered questions (like why does slack sometimes lead to innovation and success like the Japanese car industry but sometimes lead to stagnation and laziness like the Argentinian car industry?) It's something I think about a lot now, and I hope that one day Scott continues his meditations on Moloch vs Slack.
Isn't it a numbers thing? The more fans you have the more haters you have. I wonder if your 60% approval was the same at your old place, but even if you bothered to do a poll then, the haters wouldn't even bother taking the poll. But now that your audience is bigger, there's more haters in hard numbers even if the percentage is the same. AND there's more "clout" in hate reading you or anyone popular. So those haters have more incentive to hate actively. No?
> Who’s woke anymore? Are there really still woke people? Other than all corporations, every government agency, and all media properties, I mean. Those don’t count. Any real people? I guess I know one or two SJWs. But I also know one or two Catholics. Doesn’t mean they’re not the intellectual equivalent of out-of-place artifacts.
This seems like it might be selection bias on your acquaintances. I encounter what feels like more than ever right now.
Something something Lindy. Your best work is the stuff that people share (and that was listed on STC EDIT: I meant under "recommended reading"), the rest is just forgotten. But if you then follow you become the filter.
The NYT-thing had me already dig up the drums of war until you unfortunately called us back - reason is that I was waiting daily for articles to read while procrastinating on my shitty job back then. Well, there will be other willing targets for game-theories' pandaemonium, kek.
Also everyone sucks, it's normal. It's probably just something to do with Dunning-Krueger. I still read you and even started paying now (something I normally never do as long as it can be avoided, I'm not *that* financially illiterate).
This post makes me very sad but I'm glad you wrote it. It formalizes that this is no longer a space for me, and you are no longer writing things that I want to read. While I have a tinge of bitterness to this, I don't say this to disparage you. Nobody can be all things to all people, and you have chosen others over me. Many such cases.
I understand what you are saying, and I understand that you see it differently, but the essay I just read has three or four moments where you say something that simplifies to "I would rather spread lies than get criticized by important people". I get it. I not only _would_ do this, but I _have_ done this. I used to have a blog and I'm 90% sure you read it. One day I got doxxed, privately, by a coworker, who did not post it online, and within an hour of finding out, I removed every trace of my blogging identity from the internet. That's how I react to the situation you find yourself in, and so I want to say that I get it and I'm not judging you negatively for it.
That said, this bothers me greatly. First off, precisely because I come to your blog to get _unfiltered_ truth. I don't want people with lower IQs than me employed at news media pre-digesting things they don't understand for me. You, on the other hand, are clearly smarter than me and so when _you_ commentate, it's valuable. If you're intentionally no longer doing that, then the core value your blog delivers to me is no longer there
But this is made worse by the events of the past two years. For two fucking years, I have watched everyone around me go crazy. I have watched everyone around me do complete 180s on 'deeply held beliefs' multiple times per month, as the narrative changes. I have watched _**dozens**_ of doctors and public health officials say things that contradict basic public resources like biology textbooks, without any explanation or even acknowledgement of this (ie "I know usually this would be a bad sign but trust me this one is different").
And every time I would try to raise this to people, I'd get slandered as a conspiracy theorist, an anti-vaxxer, an evil Trump voter (I can't legally vote in the US). People who I KNOW know better would all suddenly go insane.
So when you post this
> A simple example: suppose I look over vaccine effectiveness data and find something that doesn’t make sense. In a personal diary or a small blog, I can easily write “today I was looking over the vaccine data, it didn’t make sense to me, yours, Scott”. In a large blog or newspaper of record, that speculation takes on aspects of a speech act: “Well-known blogger questions vaccine data!” if not “Local doctor says vaccine data is garbage!”. That makes it tougher to explore random thoughts without having a good sense where they’ll end up.
and this
> My blog had a very slight but nonzero influence on at least one country’s coronavirus policies. Once you know you can do that, you start optimizing pretty heavily for that, even if that means saying a lot of things which bore the majority of your readers. It could be worse. I once talked to a very prestigious journalist who said he sometimes knows exactly which Biden administration official he’s writing a particular article to catch the attention of
What I'm seeing is that you think your influence over people is more important than speaking honest truth when it's unpleasant.
Maybe it is! After all, I laid out above what I would do in your shoes. Your blog still exists, so you're braver and more principled than I.
But I read that, and you know what I hear? I hear a smart and influential person pretty much openly saying that they won't publish anything controversial, _even when it's the truth_, because they'll get in too much shit from corrupt evil leaders. Does anybody stop and think what happens if this generalizes? If every other public commentator runs the same program? It gets us to a world in which every single leader and 'expert' all echo trendy misinformation in unison while loudly and aggressively punishing all dissent. After all, if you say the wrong thing, you might fuck up your chance to influence the president. Not the false thing. The wrong thing.
I appreciate your honesty and self-reflection, but what I'm reading is the story of someone who has finally been welcomed into the halls of power and wealth, and has now decided that his popular and powerful friends are more important than the truth. So be it. I will continue to find truth elsewhere.
I wish you all the best, and should you ever be in Texas, I'll buy you a drink. I'm not going to any local meetups though; that's a long story for another time
Do you think that applies to Robin Hanson too? He seems to still piss people off, even without trying to. Of course, I always preferred him to Eliezer and never thought FOOM was likely. I would also like to add that Robin wiped the floor with Mencius Moldbug/Curtis Yarvin when they debated.
I do feel like my own enthusiasm for Scottish insights was strongly diminished by the apparent (bizarre) belief that "rationalists" were all pro-lockdowns, pro-masks, pro-mandates etc.
I mean, here is someone who was blogging about the replication crisis, bad science, the limits of rationality, why communism is bad etc for years, then suddenly a bunch of academics impose communism on the world via a deluge of crap papers far worse than the typical psych paper and .... it's all great? It's "rationalist"? Where is the response? What happened to all those insights? Feels like they were all suddenly forgotten and perhaps that meant they were never taken seriously to begin with.
That said, I still read (mostly) and I still enjoy (mostly).
Robin Hanson has been critical of lockdowns. I thought he was excessively critical of masks early on, but now that vaccines have been widely available for a while (with boosters, even!) I think they're no longer needed.
I don't know Robin Hanson, is he a writer like Scott? And when did he start being critical of lockdowns?
AN: if u don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/the-pandemic-monkey-trap.html
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/26/my-immortal-as-alchemical-allegory/
Do you really think we live in a post-insane world?
Reposting some replies from elsewhere:
"@TheZvi is actively screaming 'let my people go' as we speak though?"
https://twitter.com/Baytowner/status/1489607684303163401
"Yes. I also notice there are two *different* logical formulations here, the 'taste of power' and the 'hard to contradict oneself' are being treated as the same when they're very different.
The real complaint here is that we're not reflexively anti-left like Glen or Yarvin."
https://twitter.com/TheZvi/status/1489614365842100224
Scott didn't say anything about him spreading lies. He says instead he's more reluctant to shoot his mouth off now that he's a well-respected big-name Substack writer.
I broadly agree with this sentiment, but then, Scott pretty much announced that this was going to do this, in his article on "Kolmogorov Complicity". I don't expect to read anything even remotely controversial on ACX anymore, but there's still hope that some up-and-coming blogger will pick up the baton that Scott dropped. There is, however, still a lot of value in the kinds of well-researched yet generally accessible articles on non-controversial yet interesting topics that Scott is writing nowadays.
It was a different Scott, Aaronson, who said that like Kolmogorov he was mostly going to silence himself on certain things. Scott Alexander criticized that by saying that self-censorship on any topic can inhibit free intellectual exploration in general.
I might be misremembering, but I thought that Scott Alexander agreed with Aaronson. He acknowledged that, as you say, "censorship on any topic can inhibit free intellectual exploration in general"; but he said that he was going to do that anyway -- because his life is more important to him than free intellectual expression in general.
Perhaps we should both reread his post then:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
I'm probably misreading this, but it sounds like you're saying you are no longer an atheist?
In this sentence: "I feel like whatever personality quirk of mine made that decision [(to not talk about atheism)] saved me a lot of retroactive embarrassment, and I want to nurture and encourage it." Also there's another reference to this.
Am I misreading or did I miss something?
No, it's not that he's not an atheist, but that internet atheism became uncool long ago. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/
I thought that (and the other comment about changing his mind on big issues like whether God exists) might be deliberately ambiguous.
Regarding 8 specifically, I think that these basic debates are the ones that have the biggest direct impact. You might think that you'd do a bad job covering them, but it certainly won't be worse than most of the others in this space. I considered your post on not voting for Trump very important and it was the strongest influence on my final vote out of anything else I read. I think the world will have a slightly improved perspective on any issues that you write about, and that's how you might have the largest positive impact on the world.
That said, your other points are convincing and I respect that you write about things that you find enjoyable first.
There is one criticism/request that I strongly agree with: please, right more fiction.
Well look, there's the simple fact that nothing blog-length that anyone writes will ever top the "Which Pill Do You Choose?" story. So of course everything since will seem downhill. That's ok, it's still pretty great.
"Which pill do you choose" should be turned into a graphic novel.
Now all we need is some grant money to make this dream come true.
I agree with the chorus of commenters who say "You don't suck!"
One thing I'd add to your list is the selection effects in your feedback. The community of Very Online Posters is enriched for contrarian temperaments and strong ideological priors. I suspect if you were able to do a longitudinal time series of your SSC/ACX community, you'd see a dropout of people as they age/have children/mellow, who are replaced by a younger cohort still high on the thrill of something being wrong on the Internet.
I also expect that this selection effect took a huge bump from the NYT controversy, which drew people primarily interested in Woke War Punditry and not a long series of guest posts on Georgist land taxes.
Someone asked me a similar question. (Why you, Scott Alexander, now suck. Not why I suck.) My answer was basically two things: Firstly, you're not really a fighter. And if you're prominent and not a fighter then the experience of fighting is just getting punched in the face a lot. This means you're less likely to say risky, truth to power things because they're more likely to get noticed and you don't want to spend your time in fights over that kind of thing.
Secondly, you've mined out your life experience and are now suffering from what I call Avril Lavigne Syndrome. Avril Lavigne got really big connecting with the experiences of a sort of average social outcast girl in her music. No doubt part of that was from her own experiences as the kind of girl who wears black makeup and looks kind of punk. But her success made her famous and then she wasn't like one of those girls anymore. She had no new relatable experiences to mine. The new experiences she was having were out of character for her brand. They were the experience of being rich and famous which isn't relatable to enough people. She was also just too big to be indie.
This put her on the horns of a dilemma. She could change her brand but this would cause her to lose a lot of her fandom and was further apart what she got into music to do. (A shift Taylor Swift succeeded at but Lavigne didn't.) Or she could try to connect with her old fanbase but have trouble with getting outflanked by artists with more genuine and recent experiences to mine. She tried the latter and it blew up in her face.
Your experiences have gone from the trenches of internet culture to being A Brand(tm). You're now a prominent coastal essayist. And your brand is not being a prominent coastal essayist or anything like that.
The solution is to do new things and to mine new veins. To understand who you are and synthesize that into your brand. Or to sell out if you want to sell out.
This is, in my opinion, why artists have periods. They find or make new rich veins from a variety of things. Breakups are a common one for songwriters. Orwell volunteered to fight in some wars. I bet ACX would get a lot better if you volunteered to fight in Ukraine.* You (sensibly) don't want to do that. But you should find some new source to mine. The old one is tapped out not just because you've already plumbed its depths but because it's about the you that you were a decade ago, not the you that you are now.
*For whatever prediction points are worth I mentioned Ukraine specifically and this conversation was all the way back in like March or April.
How about marriage!
If he wants to do a rationalist take on marriage I think that'd be a good piece. Though it does seem like the coming of dad joke rationalism.
But then, why does creativity have to be driven by immediate life experience? You've also got the classical/formal approach, and the just plain weird approach .
Because the act of creating is always done in your immediate life. You can't escape the fact that you are always writing now. You were writing now in the past and you will be writing now in the future as well.
"happens at time X" doesn't imply "influenced by time X" , or "could only happen at time X"
It absolutely implies "influenced by time X."
Unsong had all three, of course, the influence of Scott's relationship to the rationalist community , the cabalistic stuff, which is about as formal as it gets, and lots of weirdness.
For an example in fiction, consider Dick Francis. His early books leaned very heavily on his experience as a top jockey. His later books contained some link to that world as a trademark but were basically about worlds he presumably encountered as a result of being a successful novelist.
I’d say 8, the arrogant version, accounts for a lot. In particular, that your ACX tone has a tendency to *sound* more arrogant than you did at SSC. Being arrogant and full of yourself is part and parcel of blogging, but one needn’t come across that way.
Interesting. IMO, he seems as humble as ever.
You don’t suck in absolute terms, but your blind spots manifest themselves disturbingly frequently so the quality level here is volatile.
I won’t speculate about the reasons for them (too many reasons suggest themselves), but
1) you should be much more ruthless about ignoring mainstream puppets and parrots who have demonstrated their unreliability and bad faith; despite knowing all about Gell-Mann amnesia you still fall prey to it
2) avoiding partisan issues is fine, but you should write more about issues where BOTH parties, and most of the American mainstream, are wrong (related to point 1, hard to know about these if you have let media and tech companies filter your information a lot)
3) Get on the case for fluvoxamine for COVID right now, the agency foot-dragging is intolerable, can’t think of a better immediate use of your clout
This - " you should write more about issues where BOTH parties, and most of the American mainstream, are wrong"
Ironically, considering the topic of this post, this post is one of your best I've read in a while
Maybe has something to do with a soother phase
What does that mean?
I propose a variant of 1. Good ideas are hard to come by, and the conditions to come up with them are fragile, highly personal, poorly understood. So, this is a finite resource that at some point just... dries up. Tell me, do you think that compared to the past, you are mainly sharing your own ideas, or translating others? This isn't bad, you are an excellent translator and inventor of words (For me, the name and post about "epistemic minor leagues" is one of the highlights of ACX) ... Maybe you should try getting back to the part of you that disagrees with or is unrelated to the rationalists. Revisit some old post, and see whether the times have changed. Has lovecraftian fiction fallen to irony, or is authenticity in renaissance? What do advances in VR mean for micronationalism? What's up with Abraham Lincoln, anyway? Part of me maybe getting Unsong in a publishable state and starting to think about a sequel (or a fiction novel with a similar style).
I would strongly encourage you to find ways to test the even more basic hypothesis of, “I liked your posts back when they were in the old template on SSC, and this new template looks different, and most humans dislike change.” Call it the new box label hypothesis.
I don't remember seeing that question on the reader survey. If I had seen it, i would have said 'hell no, acx is great. I like it more than SSC'. I read every email you sent out, but i didn't see that question. Is it possible that you putting the question into that big survey biased the results towards people who are predisposed to take long reader surveys?
A friend sold me on your blog as "he looks at a big complex question, and instead of going HERE IS THE ANSWER IDIOTS, he comes up with a few theories, then compares them with data, and then generally just kind of shrugs." I feel like ACX has had many more posts like that. One of the main takeaways i get from your blog is like the opposite of 'this reinforces my priors' - it's more like, 'Geeze, this thing i thought i kind of understood is much more complicated than i imagined. I'm glad i don't need to have an opinion here.'
I wasn't aware of your sucktitude. Thank you for letting us know.
You are awesome. Literally. Your writing literally inspires awe.
And challenging yourself by suggesting that you suck, as you full well know, is fundamental to being awesome.
Perfect.
Scott, to be honest, I think you're writing has overall gotten better at communicating over the years, and has actually kinda followed my interests quite a bit. Maybe the sheer quantity has gone down, but I still love most of it (I generally skip your stuff about psychiatry because the field doesn't interest me much).
Though I find it interesting that you're surrounded by more anti-woke people than woke people these days. I feel like I didn't know nearly as many woke people 5-6 years ago as I do now. Right now, I can't avoid woke rhetoric in my company's meetings and chat rooms -- and my company is made up of mostly conservative but mild-mannered Christian mid-westerners. The loud minority is super-woke, and they've made a culture of fear. I'm part of nearly a dozen chat groups in Signal and other similar platforms that are just made up of co-workers that want the ability to talk candidly without being shouted down in public or reported to HR. And I never observed this level of fear prior to, say, 2014.
I don't think our observations conflict. If I'm (for some reason) at the top of the barberpole, and you're (for some reason) in the middle, we're both seeing the barberpole turn at the same rate. Presumably I'm higher in the barberpole than you because the Bay Area tech scene that provides most of my social contacts is "cooler" than the the Midwestern company scene that provides most of yours.
It's possible that some of the people you know are hiding, too.
Not extreme, but I noticed a couple of people expressing moderate doubt about wokeness to me....after Biden was elected.
Every ideology has its subset of psychopaths, even liberalism. Those people are the Woke Posadists, and will come to the same level of success as the namesake.
Right now, a whole lot of people are biting their tongues- and even then, more people are "going woke" the other direction. To continue your analogy, if someone tries to jam a motor, it either unjams- or the motor blows up and drives metal splinters into everyone nearby. I really hope the former happens to America.
That sounds reasonable. I live in the NY metro area, but in NJ. I've noted that NJ businesses are less aggressively woke in their policy and cultures than the NYC area ones. Maybe the Bay area already went through this and is getting over it faster.
I wonder when corporations are going to start moving on from this crap. I hope sooner than later.
I didn't think an NJ-based company would have so many Christian mid-westerners.
I work for a St. Louis-based company that has a small NJ office. And frankly, haven't been in the office in almost 2 years now. My team is geographically distributed across 3 time zones. I work in software, so remote work is the new and likely permanent normal.
For most of my career I worked alternatively for NJ- and NYC-based companies. But I've been in this one for 3 years now, and I don't think I'm going anywhere for the foreseeable future, especially if the the tiny but powerful woke mob eventually dies down.
But surely Bay Area tech is the wokest place on Earth? The few friends I have left at Google are all disgusted by what it's become, due to relentless delusional wokeness and desire to censor anyone who isn't. (the others have left already).
The “the the” belongs in the main post, not hidden away in a comment reply.
I feel like the debate around "wokeness" is mostly now around the actual word "wokeness" rather than the underlying concepts. People who were once "woke" no longer use the term, but they haven't necessarily changed their underlying opinions; meanwhile the "anti-woke" crowd is left attacking a tar baby.
I would posit that, for all of Substack's good qualities, the commenting experience is worse here. Which may be coloring commenters' overall impressions.
Seconded. At least they added an edit button recently, which twitter still lacks.
I mostly avoided the comments on SSC because the UI was so terrible. Despite lots of bad parts, I find commenting far more bearable on Substack.
Huh. For me, Substack comments take too long to load, especially on mobile. And on mobile, they reload and lose my place whenever I switch tabs or apps, so if I'm trying to read through something, I have to find it all over again. I can't even look up a definition in another tab without having to reload all the comments and find my place again. Which makes me reluctant to do anything but skim on mobile.
Plus there's that thing where occasionally the tabs will consume memory and stop responding in my browser on desktop, if I leave them open.
(There's also low-hanging fruit like having better UX when collapsing and expanding, and adding notification control, and markup, but those seem fixable without serious backend work.)
> Do you suck because you moved to California, with its climate of conformist liberalism?
Related hypothesis: do you suck because more of the social needs you met through blogging you meet irl now? Or because you are so respected in your irl social group now you aren’t as motivated to do crack blogging?
Still my favorite blogger :)
It seems like there was a decrease in spicy culture war posts during the Trump administration. The culture war thread spun off halfway through it. Then ACX started the day after Biden's inauguration, and I doubted it was a coincidence.
I guess:
* You wouldn't want an anti-woke post to be construed as pro-Trump, so you sorta held back while Trump was in office.
* The haters of those sorts of posts were on extra high alert during the Trump administration, and sometimes the haters get to you.
* Book review contests facilitate taking discussions into spicy directions without taking so much heat from haters.
From reading "RIP Culture War Thread" I definitely think that there was a phase when Scott felt like he was attracting too many fans from Those Sorts Of People, and that since then he's probably tweaked his writing to attract Those Sorts Of People a whole lot less. So I don't think you'll find Scott writing something like https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ or https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/ again.
Which is a shame, because the writings which did attract Those Sorts Of People were some of his most interesting.
Re. "I’m not exactly in this for the money, but I’m in it for a lot of things that follow the same dynamics": That's a great summary of some complex correlations, with wide applicability.
I'm in the minority (apparently) that definitely prefers ACT. While I think you had some really eye-opening posts at SSC, I also never got into the blog qua blog nature of it. So the absence of "blogginess" in terms of the content is really satisfying to me. It seems like the better aspects of being a blog (freedom, audience capture, community) got kept, but personal details on the more trivial side, as well as half-formed thoughts, have been left behind.
Another "reason why you suck" (though you don't) is that you're no longer reporting from the front lines of absurd medical care. Because you're quite sensibly striking out on your own to make your specialty less absurd.
But it does mean we hear less about the bizarre freebies pharma reps try to woo hospitals with, the absurdities resulting from reasonable requests that don't fit into any Official Medical Slot, and so on.
> I continue to post some vaguely anti-woke stuff (1, 2, 3),
Link 2 and 3 redirect to the same article, https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three.
the joke here being that the claim that he's posted 3 vaguely anti-woke articles is too good to check 😏
I didn't think about that, that may be the case. I brought it up in case it was a mistake/typo, if it's intended to see if people will react or not I can delete my post.
I _think_ it was probably not intentional but also it'd be funny if it was.
Huh! that's great! Thx.
This makes me want to visit your old blog. I have saved the link to 2 highly useful subjects you have written about thoroughly. One is on what eating healthy means. Another is on ADHD, which many kids I teach seem to think they have (is it real?!). These are big questions and you were thorough.
Maybe you're just running out of the big questions.
I was fascinated to hear you think the woke movement is not cool anymore. I don't see evidence of that. You mean we will soon go back to a time when most Americans want to seriously protect what they might personally see as hate speech?
I think abandoning woke doesn't require people to want to protect what they see as hate speech, although that would be a good thing. It would be sufficient that they oppose a definition of hate speech/racism/Nazi/... broad enough to cover almost anything the left orthodoxy disagrees with.
Were the symptoms similar during the McCarthy era? How did America get out of it?
Which posts? https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/04/book-review-the-perfect-health-diet/ and https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ ? I'm interested in both of those and couldn't find much more
1 - (whole life first book) Probably has a lot to do with it. (Tho I haven't noticed a decline in quality.)
2 - (great rationalist community) I think this is a real effect. I've seen it in my own life - ideas that were new and wonderful when I was 30 are commonplaces now (I'm 60). This is a good thing - it represents progress.
3 - (things have gotten better) NO. Just NO. The media has NOT gotten better, and I don't think it will in the foreseeable future. If you preceive otherwise, the change is in you. (To be fair there may be an element of #2 here - to the extent media has caught some of the ideas that used to be new, you may perceive it as better. But it's not - media is just as bad at absorbing new ideas as ever.)
4 - (no longer need to criticize wokeness) That's maturity + rational response to changing circumstances. Hardly anybody who thinks supports wokeness now - the stupidity has become obvious - wasn't true 3 years ago.
5 - (illegitimi non carborundum) Maybe; I don't know you well enough to tell. Your overreaction (IMHO) to the NYT article makes me think maybe you're too sensitive here.
6 - (simulated annealing) Yes, I think so. That's maturity and wisdom growing over time. Ideas that you've proven to yourself as stupid are no longer interesting.
7 - (big vs little name bloggers) - Only you know. You say:
>realistically I’m going to do more good by funding important charities,
>highlighting new voices, and helping build strong communities than
>by posting yet another hot take"
I think you're probably wrong here. Lots of other people can do those things - only you can write the way you do. [This is the one that made me bother to post a reply.]
8 - (intellectual progress) I think you're confusing this with #6 (and maybe #1 and #2).
> by posting yet another hot take"
> Lots of other people can do those things - only you can write the way you do. [This is the one that made me bother to post a reply.]
Yeah. Like e.g., lot's of people wrote bad things about Trump to no effect, but Scott actually moved some Trump voters a bit towards Hillary without really trying.
Scott, seems like your recent review of "Don't Look Up" generated a lot of engagement and comments. Have you considered trying yourself as a media critic on the side? To stay relevant with the younger generation and to attract new audience, you could even give some thought to anime. "Psycho-Pass" is set in a futuristic society where people's minds are continuously monitored by AI and severe mental deviations (e.g. criminality) are grounds for termination. As someone interested in psychiatry and utilitarianism, I can see you being intrigued by what it has to say.
Scott seems somehow too cool for anime but I'll second the recommendation - Psycho-Pass is probably the most thought provoking series I've seen in a decade.
Just don't touch the second season with a ten foot pole.
My take is that "Scott Alexander" missed the boat with regard to COVID and Russiagate.
While there haven't been as many "bangers" at ACX, I did enjoy Fussell on Class and the Erdogan biography review.
I definitely thought Bounded Distrust was a misstep though, it seems quite possible that there are cases where the actual truth cannot be gleaned from careful analysis of experts' biases.
I don't think Scott said it would never be the case that you can't glean the truth. He's just saying there are cases where he thinks he can whereas others would just dismiss it all.
Pretty brave post. My only gripe with you and most the rationalist community has been more or less going along with the official pandemic response/attitude. I thought I mostly shared your worldview but learned through this pandemic that I do not. Ditto for most the rationalist community. I feel pretty intellectually homeless today.
I don't think it counts as going along with someone if you do things first. Pre hoc ergo propter hoc.
FWIW, the rationalist community was AHEAD of CDC/FDA/OFFICIALSOURCES on pandemic stuff.
Yes, but CDC/FDA/official sources have all been completely irrational. A community that literally calls itself rationalist yet finds itself on the same side as those guys needs to be some really serious self reflection, because public health might as well be a random policy generating machine. It's the exact opposite of rationalism.
If they randomly generate policy, then by chance they should wind up on the right side some of the time :)
If there are n policies, right 1/n of the time. Not much of a selling point.
Some people impressively manage to be wrong more often than chance!
You mean they're biased? Maybe there should be some blogs, or even a community about dealing with that.
Har har, yes yes. I know. Obviously "random" here doesn't mean literally random.
The main COVID writer on lesswrong and the general rationalist community have been highly critical of CDC/FDA/official sources during the whole pandemic.
In the beginning. They've passed the baton unwittingly as it doesn't seem to be a primary focus.
FWIW There is Hackernews.com which has it's pro's and con's vis-a-vis rationalists and are less of a coherent worldview. But there is a good amount of research papers and other scientific debate in which some contingent is strongly opposed to the reigning institutional narrative (were lockdowns worth it? How effective are masks really? Natural immunity accruing evidence over years being stronger than full vax, generally just more aligned with some European policies). Good amount of tech and startup topics in the meantime though, so might want to use the search.
Sample:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167436
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30065007
To be honest I most look forward to your book reviews these days. And pretty much anything economics! If I may point you to a potentially interesting topic it would be currently existing wars (why do they exist and how to end them).
When it comes to x-risk/AI I find my mind is too firmly made up about them now. For the increasing depths of psychology too esoteric for me to be interested. And of course all the community related posts.
When the good posts come they are still just as good but it's completely understandable why you can't produce them at the same rate. No-one could.
I'd LOVE it if you started a side-blog with less pressure on seriousness and you can freely write about the day you had and stuff. That'd really be a good complement to ACX.
One other thing I really miss about yesteryears is that you had posts about something you thought about psychology/psychiatry after some event/patient/etc at your workplace and you'd go to some place with that insight. Now that you're unanonymous (what's the correct word, nonymous? English is not my main language) you cannot do that anymore I guess. There's not much to do about this probably, unless you just cut out the part where you had the insight and directly start with the insight and beyond.
Anyway, keep up the good work man you're a bright spot in the internet landscape. And I hope you were a communist of sorts :)
I didn't know this until I looked it up just now, but apparently the opposite of "anonymous" is "onymous"... but even Google Chrome's spell-checker doesn't recognize that as a real word.
ahh of course, makes sense
Noted LessWrong poster Yvain should make a comeback.
was he like early-SSC Scott?
Almost *too* similar...
oh, then I wholeheartedly agree that user should make a comeback
Imagine if Scott had an unpublicised side-blog on tumblr that would be so weird
that one doesn't have long posts though, but you're right it exists maybe it can be utilized.
According to this article I found in the WashPost, most artists hit their creative peak in their late 30's or early 40's:
"And the numbers show a remarkable degree of uniformity across the three domains of art, music and literature. On average, Nobel Prize-winning writers produce their best work at age 45. Painters peak at age 42. And classical composers produce their most popular works at age 39."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/23/when-you-will-most-likely-hit-your-creative-peak-according-to-science/
Maybe you're just more like a rock star, Scott. You're approaching 40, so you're no longer "cool" to the kids anymore, because now you're their dad's age. On top of that, your fan base is getting older, getting married and buying houses, and you don't quite know how to keep their attention, now that they no longer want to rock and roll all night or party everyday. It happens to all of us, sooner or later (I'm the same age as you, actually, so I'm not cool anymore, either). Maybe it's time to try the blogging equivalent of putting out an acoustic album or collaborate with some younger musicians on a series of duets?
Note: this comment is entirely tongue-in-cheek. I think your stuff is still damn good.
> And the numbers show a remarkable degree of uniformity across the three domains of art, music and literature. On average, Nobel Prize-winning writers produce their best work at age 45. Painters peak at age 42. And classical composers produce their most popular works at age 39
If artists produced their greatest work at a completely random time in their adult life, you'd expect the average to be somewhere around 40. The average here seems much less meaningful than a distribution.
Speaking of not cool.
"They’ll feel it’s insulting for you to have opinions about a field when there are hundreds of experts who have written thousands of books about the field which you haven’t read."
My experience is that these are some of the most useful posts out there. Expert opinion, whatever else it has, is full of blind spots - fields get ossified, academics go down ever-narrowing rabbit holes, extraordinarily tight bubbles become echo chambers, etc.
One of the best examples of Scott's writing on this is "California, Water you Doing?" here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/ - as somebody with an advanced degree in Agricultural Economics, I can say that this article blows most of the "expert" commentary in the field out of the water, and I think it's precisely because Scott approaches it in a different way.
So for whatever it's worth, my one vote out of 40,000 is that there's tremendous value to the posts that might be avoided for reason #5.
Alternative explanation: you suck less, it’s just that people remember new stuff better. They remember all of ACX (because it’s recent) but only good parts of SSC (why would one remember old stuff which sucks?).
That’s similar to why modern movies suck (for me). For old stuff, I can just open https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time and each one of those is a carefully selected masterpiece. For modern movies, there are some great once as well, but, as I am exposed to an average, rather than to the best, they seem to suck more.
Not that it proves anything (other than my bad taste I guess), but looking over top 10 on that list, I've seen 9 movies and liked 2 of them. Modern movies which get the same level of critical acclaim do about as well for me, but of course they get released pretty infrequently, fewer than ten a year I'd guess.
Simple, reductive theory for why the posts have decreased in apparent significance: Scott's reading fewer weird/old/ultra-niche texts and more of-the-moment blogs, think pieces, etc. and so not experiencing the kind of disparate-ideas-from-diverse-domains synthesis that results in a high number of original and paradigm-shifting ideas.
I expect this is a major cause of many superstar pundit's intellectual stagnations. They simply become too busy to read widely, and in a sense 'riskily' in apparently unrelated and unfashionable domains.
I do think you and everyone else in the writing world is in a place where the average of debates in generated by "Aztec chanting guy". It doesn't make your writing worse but it does lower the amount of interesting things you can write because lots of the things you might want to write about IQ, Education, Crime, Immigration etc would end up with you debunking morons rather than actually making interesting points.
Maybe you should do more steelmanning so you actually have a competent case put forward to argue against.
I like the new stuff too! I miss your fun fiction posts, though. Like the one with the pills or the one with Greek gods. Those have stuck with me even when the ideas have become less cutting edge.
I'm in a similar phase of life as you and I look forward to ACX parenting content. Also life-advice-for-kids content. You could do that now - think about what life advice you'd give a hypothetical smart 12 year old or high school kid and write about it. You don't have to wait until your actual kids are actually of appropriate age.
I think the only one of these possible reasons that really holds water for me is the travelogue analogy. For my money, you've still been producing some outstanding posts in the past year, probably even at about the same rate as you ever used to. Not every one is a banger, but never was that the case. As you as a writer and I as a reader have both progressed, there are fewer exotic locations of note out there that one of us hasn't heard about, and digging further down into a problem is almost always less fun than witnessing it for the first time and being struck by its beauty.
One thing I do think has seriously gone downhill for me personally is the participation aspect, and that's just because the comments section has just gotten tooooo biiiiiig. Getting your comment noticed is hard, keeping up with the others is hard and lately I've just given up trying. The comments here used to feel a lot like an epistemic little league, and I adored that. I believe you asked at one point whether you could mirror people onto multiple smaller comments sections and I was very attracted to that idea. Maybe that's still something worth considering? It could be an opt-in option or something.
This already exists to some extent given that you can comment: here, on data secrets lox, on the discord server, or on the subreddit
Honestly despite all the problems upvotes and upvote-sorting are the best answer here. I know this is been litigated to death on SSC and then here, and the battle has been lost, but I feel like the logic that applied to a 50-comment section doesn't apply as well to a 400-comment section. Your comment getting buried is the default now, so getting buried for an unpopular viewpoint is less of a concern.
Also I find Yglesias' comment section much more appealing to read despite getting almost the same comment volume and fewer interesting people posting. I feel assured I won't miss an insightful point due to lack of time to read everything. The upvote filter is imperfect but better than no filter at all.
" I feel like the logic that applied to a 50-comment section doesn't apply as well to a 400-comment section. "
My memory of SSC is that there were rarely as few as 400 comments, almost never as few as 50.
Sure. Open Threads and culture war regularly broke 1000 comments, though articles on medicine or psychiatry would often be an order of magnitude lower.
The real issues with comments getting buried on SCC IMO were timing and depth. My data is rough and patchy, but to a first approximation the frequency of eyeballs on a comment could be expected to halve every few hours and drop by maybe a factor of 3 with every response in a chain. Extended back-and-forth was never really a thing.
Hard to say how strong posting order effects were, but I'd be astonished if there wasn't some flavor of 80/20 at play. Long story short, getting buried has always been the default.
> If you have a small blog, and you have a cool thought or insight, you can post your cool thought or insight. People will say “interesting, I never thought of that before” and have vaguely positive feelings about you. If you have a big blog, people will get angry. They’ll feel it’s insulting for you to have opinions about a field when there are hundreds of experts who have written thousands of books about the field which you haven’t read. Unless you cite a dozen sources, it will be “armchair speculation” and you’ll be “speaking over real academics”. If anyone has ever had the same thought before, you’re plagiarizing them, or “reinventing the wheel”, or acting like a “guru”, or claiming that all knowledge springs Athena-like from your head with no prior influences.
The best way to prevent this kind of pull-back is to practice wrongspeak early and often. Establish a pattern where people know you do this and it can't be used against you. Call it the Elon method. It's for the best of the world, since all other roads lead to the fallacy of thinking you can predict the full results of your writings, which nobody can. It will lead to pundit-level quality output though, as your utterances become more and more tactical. Practicing truth telling, come what may, seems to me the only long-term defensible strategy. It's a game with many turns, and you never know when people trusting you to say exactly what you think may come in handy. Keep it simple.
"Wrongspeak", I love this term. You've made me see Musk's comments in a new light (although this also seems to be related to the general trend of repudiation of truth more broadly, which is terrible, so hoping there's some kind of way to draw a line between the two.
Too much cock, not enough balls?
Thanks for the laugh!
There are utilitarian vegans (and others)* who say it's atrocious how many chickens we breed in order to eat, but I don't know what kind of balls they advocate.
* https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-domestication-of-people-and-animals
In general your writing seems to have gotten better on many subjects. The topic selection might be an issue for readers like me that are used to reading backlog.
When I was still consuming SSC backlog I could just glance over "diatribe over wokeness" and carefully read "post on some facet of neruoscience", nowadays that's not possible. But it doesn't mean the blog is worst, it just means there's not enough content that interests me because there's no backlog... and that's fine. Replace those 2 with what other people prefer and you get the point, this generalizes to everyone (potentially)
Switching to substack may have caused more people to go from "read the backlog" to "follow new posts" and thus could have caused a spike.
As an aside, at the time of that survey I remember saying "SSC was better" because it came in the wake of (what seemed to me) to be a lot of US - politics posts (which I dislike), there might be some sort of recency bias going on, would be worth while at least aggregating the numbers from 2-3 of these posted at different times and seeing if the "SSC was better" overlap.
Just my two cents, for what it's worth I voted that SSC was better but in hindsight I'm wrong, I actually noticed some marked improvement in the last year of writing (and for what it's worth I voted with my money to keep that going)
"My blog had a very slight but nonzero influence on at least one country’s coronavirus policies." - ooh? I'm curious about this
Unless I’m v much mistaken it’s the UK and Dominic Cummings would
be the vector for that
Some of my favorite SSC posts were book reviews (Albion's Seed, Surfing Uncertainty). Perhaps you could start reading more controversial/challenging books?
I for one would love to read Scott's review of Bronze Age Mindset.
I read a comment in the last post about you hitting yourself really hard as an experiment and I smiled widely and laughed abs felt genuine affection toward you for whatever that’s worth.
Scott blog posts are like any genre of writing. Anyone new gets a deluge of the best stuff first. All the old stuff that was forgettable is, properly, forgotten. Then new stuff is a similar quality but not filtered for only the absolute best stuff. Sometimes there is a gem for certain people that reads average to others. But the illusion is created of decline when that isn't the case.
I think "5: Sometimes the bastards do grind you down" is a huge societal problems. I've read takes from high-ranking politicians to semi-unknown youtubers and they all agree that having the mob against you is fucking terrible. Most likely, several of the top decision makers in your life right now spend half their waking time worrying about what journalists and internet randos will write about them next.
I think there's a very high impact opportunity available in solving this. (I've should have sent in for a grant proposal!) If we could decrease the impact of mob hate by 90%, a lot of important and high-impact people could be way more efficient. Hopefully, we can make an ML system that filters out the negativity: it would strengthen filter bubbles but I definitely think it's worth it. (I guess this is what the mainstream is talking about when they're talking about "online harassment" but the target is kind of off and the mainstream solutions all look bad.)
Scott (or anyone else famous enough to have this problem), do you have any ideas for how to make things better? Do you want me to go trough your mail and filter out hate?
Robin Hanson has been writing about that kind of thing:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/10/a-call-for-cancel-courts.html
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/05/why-not-thought-crime.html
I'm less keen than him on the idea of formalizing mobs, but it's some kind of attempt.
This seems like something that is very important to know about the world. I have been assuming that Substack et al were relieving some of this pressure, but maybe not.
I think you're great.
But surely, if you think you've gotten into a bit of a rut, there are plenty of things a person can do to get more exploratory.
Just my opinion, but I don't think people get more set in their ways as they get older. I don't think they make smaller jumps.
Ok, I've been lurking for a while, but I have to say: I don't think you suck. Your posts are interesting, and spark arguments and discussion among my weirdo "friends who like to argue" group. You have a good variety of topics, your commenting community remains excellent, and you're one of the few bloggers I continue to follow.
You're a timesuck, but you do not suck!
The headline should have been "Why Do I Suck More Than I Used To?", as it's all about relative rather than absolute sucking.
Scott decidedly does not suck. But his working hypotheses for why he might suck are all about him. Maybe some of his readers think he has gone downhill for their own subjective reasons. For example, they may miss the impossible-to-repeat golden nostalgic feeling of having first discovered his blog when they were younger . . . ah, the good old days. Or, maybe, there are just declining marginal benefits to rationalism. They have learned all they can learn about Bayes Theorem and now it's time for them to spread their wings and adjust their priors to new experience all on their own.
But just having a solid body of work behind you guarantees that some people will like the old stuff better. They will dis you for playing the single off your new album instead of their old favorites, and will stand in the back chanting "Freebird!"
Jeez Marie to live in the era of ubiquitous and infinite complaints and demands would exhaust a deity and I ain't one of those. What you do is just fine. If people don't like it they should change the channel
Still love the blog, definitely feel like it’s been pretty consistent. It does feel like that even as the blog is better known, I see far fewer ACX posts consistently linked. I do think regardless of content your writing style feels a bit less ambitious now. Always had the In-depth scientific summaries, book reviews, and short insightful blog posts, less multi-part extended analogies with mysticism and shocking twists and turns. Less emotion in general . There’s a tendency to mellow as well as mature with age so probably pretty natural and mostly related to what you’ve described. Also wonder if personal struggles in 2013-15 with residency, being isolated and romantically frustrated may have played into your writing.
Same. You're probably too happy and less appalled by the world to have the burning desire to point out its flaws now.
Same. You're probably too happy and less appalled by the world to have the burning desire to point out its flaws now.
In a society full of racists, nobody comments on racism; even if you aren't racist, you could go your entire life without once noticing a racist comment.
In a society full of anti-racists, everybody comments on racism; you will observe racist comments brought to the public attention constantly.
Same thing for wokeness. The fact that we see it everywhere means that peak wokeness has already passed.
That said, there is a meta-level thing I'd be curious to see a post about, which is the tendency of a movement, when it has passed that peak, to be full of people complaining when people accuse them of trying to do the stuff the movement tries to do, because it's somehow unfair to hold a movement responsible for the stuff it tries but fails to accomplish; like, as in wokeness, comedians who weren't successfully silenced talking about how people attempted to silence them (particularly when the people complaining about this also complain about the fact that the attempt was unsuccessful). And also the counterarguments, because, also, when a movement holds no power, overly public complaints about it trying to do stuff it has no power to do serve as kind of a tinman in public discourse.
"The only way to escape the double-bind is for someone to speak up and admit “Hey, I personally am a giant coward who is silencing himself out of fear in this specific way right now, but only after this message”. This is not a particularly noble role, but it’s one I’m well-positioned to play here, and I think it’s worth the awkwardness to provide at least one example that doesn’t fit the double-bind pattern."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
Ha, I forgot about that one, I guess partially because, at the time, I wasn't seeing a lot of people making those complaints.
Social bubbles probably matter a lot here.
100% honesty here, and probably something I should work on instead of just admitting it and moving on:
Your content is almost certainly much much better than it ever has been. But it's also about more niche/productive topics, and then about nitty-gritty specifics I need education on. It's very easy to read a post like https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust and say "oh neat, I kind of already knew this, I agree with it, and it makes me feel very intelligent to have that opinion validated."
It's much more difficult to read something like: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ancient-plagues
This is a subject on which I have absolutely no information, where I'll have to think very hard about the information I'm being presented, and where nobody in my social circle will care if I have an opinion on it.
There seem to be many more of the latter recently. That's probably not a decline in quality, it's probably just not reaching for the low-hanging fruit. But my motivation for reading things like that has to come from a sincere desire to be more knowledgeable, instead of a desire to feel more knowledgeable, a desire to see a person I consider intelligent agree with me, or a desire to gather new arguments for things I already think. Probably you'd be much more successful if you went back to the culture wars well a lot, but I don't know that you'd be happier or that your output would be better.
For what it's worth, your book reviews are as good as ever.
As someone who just let their Substack subscription lapse with no immediate intention to re-up I can tell you that quality was never an issue for me. I was a longtime reader of the old blog and close follower of the new. What I perceived as changing was your tone. I used to see you as an individual voice with clarity on a variety of subjects and while I was not necessarily in agreement, I enjoyed looking at things through your eyes. However in the last year you seem to me to be more and more a voice of a particular community, speaking to the converted and dismissive of other points of view. (Maybe that is what you've been all along and I just became more immersed as a subscriber?)
Your occasional references to supporters with deep pockets, The recent grant giving and the traveling about for meet-ups you've organized all made me uncomfortable mostly because of the lack of transparency and unclear intent. Is this a club?
Finally, frankly a fair number of your subscribers scare me. I gave up reading the subscriber only comment threads in hopes of getting past the company I was keeping, alas it didn't work.
So, who changed? You or me? Probably both.
You say you're a longtime reader and a close follower, so i'm confused as to how you end up writing "because of the lack of transparency and unclear intent. Is this a club?"
It's quite clear that there has been a core IRL "rationalist" group circa Scott moving to the Bay Area ~2017. What's the rule about 1% makers, 9% editors, 90% lurkers? Obviously in a large group of online discussion, some will move it to meatspace to continue in a more personal setting. Transparency is another doozy because Scott is obviously very Effective Altruism (EA) and no doubt ponders how to have a positive impact on the world. Using some newfound money and help to boost people and projects indirectly seems par for him.
It seems minor but tbh this site isnt nearly as pleasant on the eyes as your old site.
I think my single most favorite one of your posts is the Atomic Dog post from 2012:
"One solution is a pain auction. The artist puts all prospective buyers in a sauna, then gradually turns up the temperature until it is painfully, scaldingly hot. Prospective buyers may leave the sauna at any time, but the last person remaining in the sauna gets the painting. The person who wants the painting the most will stay in the sauna the longest and win (given the false assumption that everyone has the same heat tolerance).
Now this is a terrible idea. It shares two of the worst features of the dollar auction. First, everyone sacrifices, not just the final winner. Second, one may sacrifice much more than the prize is worth. Suppose the painting is worth 100 utils to you, and every minute in the sauna costs 10 utils. If you've been in the sauna ten minutes, and there's only one other person in, you may stay in the sauna an extra minute in the hope that he will drop out and you will win, ending up with -10 utils instead of -100.
But it does have some attraction for solving the dog problem. If being in the environment of screams and insults is painful just like being in the sauna, eventually whichever partner hates walking the dog less will break and go walk the dog.
If interpersonal utility comparison doesn't work, a pain auction might be a next-best (by which I mean vastly worse) alternative that solves the same problem."
Is that from his LiveJournal?
Yeah, though I think it might not be online anymore, which is a shame. I remember that the 2011/2012 stuff was amazingly insightful.
Two other possible contributing factors that I didn't see suggested when I skimmed the comments:
1) You stand out less because there are many more people writing good stuff on the Internet in a related style. Certainly there seem to be more than when I started reading SSC about 6 years ago (others may disagree depending on
2) The readers (as individuals, not the cohort) have changed and shouldn't expect your new blog posts to have the same effect on them as the old ones. I remember finding SSC and binge reading loads of it (my job was boring and quiet at the time) and it's changed the way I think (for the better probably). That can't happen every time you publish something new. Or shouldn't anyway, that seems like it would be kind of weird.
I would lean towards 2 personally. I don't think you suck now (I'm still reading clearly), but even your best posts now aren't going to have the same impact as the first ones I read.
An obvious point, but as well as you growing older the people who liked your blog in 2013 have also grown older, and so everything seems worse. I tend to assume that most statements of the form “X has declined badly since 10 years ago” are proxies for “I have way less sex than I was having 10 years ago”.
To work out how much you actually suck, you need to ask them how they feel about their favourite sports team, restaurant / parent etc.
Hey, speak for yourself.
Oh I was...
That statement isn't true of me, but the internet has gotten worse with the smartphone-enabled rise of social media.
Still love you a lot.
But whatever made you delete the "carthago delenda est" and Nick Land mentions from Meditations on Moloch, is probably a big part of the answer to your question.
The Nick Land mentions are still there.
I'm probably not the typical reader, but I read you mostly for the great jokes. The posts the past year have seemed less humorous, but I'm still a big fan!
I find it refreshing that the official no. 1 science blogger of substack shares his thoughts of why he may suck at writing.
I can relate very much, because I have also found my tiny niche (nothing big like science blogging) where I am probably better than every other person on earth, and I still have frequent doubts on whether I am good enough. I have learned to ignore these thoughts, so they are no more than a small itching, but they never go away completely. If you also feel them, let me tell you: you are doing fine! In fact, you happen to be the best science blogger that I know, but for you it should not matter whether you are the best. The important thing is that you are doing good, it's plain and simple as that.
For what it's worth, I've never commented on ACX or SSC, I don't follow other rationalists, I've hardly read LessWrong, and I gladly pay $100 for the unique experience of reading at least one person on earth who is prepared to approach most topics with impartiality and makes it fun. So, thank you.
Crikey - well said!
You're better than ever, I don't know what people want but you should ignore them.
Hey! I’m a Bokonist! We’re all one big happy Karass, reaching for that big ol’ ice-nine pie in the sky.
As a non-paid subscriber take this with a grain of salt, but I prefer modern era to SSC. For years and years I've periodically read your work, but the ideas are more mature (smaller jumps?). Young SSC is great, but a lot of the time you're left shouting at the screen "but you missed 214234 other issues!", now the ideas (and writing) flow a lot better.
So where is Scott's secret small blog where he posts all the real juicy stuff? We all know he changed blogs twice in the past so that means probably along the way he made a backup. Scott is too talented to not accidentally grow in influence, so it must be a blog with quickly growing readership. I expect in 10 years or so most of the widely read blogs on the internet will be Scott's aliases.
I wrote a comment and then deleted it in favor of saying something different.
I think this social moment here in the US is like when the tsunami is drawing all the water out away from the shore. We are seeing a very low tide, Scott is seeing a low tide (nothing to fight with, nothing to fight about).
But that stage doesn't last. There's a subsequent stage, which is inundation. There's a feeling of artificial calm lately - and it correlates with a stage in Scott's life and artistic trajectory, so here we are looking for correlations and causations.
Maybe he's feeling the massive ebb. We're feeling the ebb. There's an ebb going on. Media-driven, US-election-driven.
When the tsunami comes, there will be more than enough to be contrary about. These issues that feel solved for a second - they're not. It's just a break from us being flogged with it.
Scott, I think you write very well, you think very carefully, you share your process, and this whole blog is invaluable in all its stages. The good old Grateful Dead "When life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door." Why aren't you fighting? Why aren't we all fighting? It doesn't feel like fight-time, right this minute. Probably, though, it will feel like fight-time again in the relatively near future. There have been no signs that things are actually "over." It's a lull.
You'll have plenty of new material by January 2023 - 85% confidence. Your experienced and nuanced approach to contrarianism will be necessary and in demand. I really think this. Rest up! And thank you for all of this.
I think I suck sometimes. I think there were too many times I was lazy about proofreading, organizing my thoughts, and digging up links to supporting evidence. Some people hate me for opinions I no longer have. Sometimes I bring up CW topics unnecessarily. My previous twitter career of google image searching for graphs of politically incorrect data and smugly replying to random celebrities who said something woke that contradicted the data, was kind of just preaching to the choir, rarely convincing anyone, probably causing blowback on the scientists who collected the data. (also it seemed to lead to google image search censoring graphs that show up on known thoughtcrime domains even if the same image is also on valid scholarly sources) I need more attention to the emotional side of things rather than just robotically tweeting graphical counterevidence at people who say incorrect things. People have to be in the right frame of mind to update on evidence, and "confronted by other-tribe on twitter" is not it. If they're not in the right state of mind when they first see the evidence, they likely develop cowpox-like immunity to it.
I’m still enjoying the blog. I have a few complaints. There seem to be too many open threads, not enough content coming from you, Scott. I like the idea of a book review contest but the last one had way too many contestants. Also I would be interested in seeing more book reviews written by you.
Agree. I'd rather read one book review from Scott than ten that Scott has spent his time vetting.
Well, I don't think you suck.
However, I will add that I don't read the majority of what you have put out.
Most of it is either stuff that I don't care about (a la Biden and American voters),
or esoteric stuff that I care little about (also a la Biden and American voters),
or PMC stuff like the vast majority of book reviews.
I like what you do with the big topics that I care about: COVID, Georgism etc.
This isn't a complaint - it is your blog and you do what you want to do.
But it is feedback.
I'm glad you referenced Bokononism.
Lets' all sing along with Bokonon, in one of the two songs Kurt Vonnegut quotes in full:
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly,
Man got to sit and wonder why, why, why?
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land,
Man got to tell himself he understand.
Funny though it would be if you were to spend the next decade on your equivalent of The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, I don't think we need to worry yet. As you say, you're more influential than you've ever been, your essays are consistently fascinating, and you're still better than anyone else. I would have thought you've got enough friends on the spectrum that people you trust will tell you if Nobel Syndrome has set in, you won't need to rely on internet commenters to do it.
My experience with your blog is that the quality per unit time has absolutely *increased* since you moved to substack. It seems like you post quite a bit more now so, while in the old days, it felt like a larger portion of your posts were super insightful gems they were also really frustratingly rare. I personally find that I'm getting a lot more overall value from your posts now than I was before.
A lot of the value you provide is in terms of filtering and explaining ideas from other people and I don't think other people are really generating ideas at a much different rate and, if anything, you are encountering them with equal frequency.
The only thing I would add is that I don't think it's a good use of your time to do much community management. Find someone who isn't famous in rationalist circles and have them do it. You have a really strong comparative advantage in explaining ideas in ways that both convey the arguments well and strongly but don't have the alienating qualities that most of us rationalists seem unable to avoid inserting when we argue and I'm not sure you have any comparative organizational ability (but maybe this is just because I don't live in CA or otherwise benefit from your organizing efforts but like the writing).
Though, I think your strongest comparative advantage is really psychological insight. It's frustratingly rare, even for people in mental health, but you seem to have a greater ability than most to both understand why other people feel the way they do and convey that to others.
I'd have to be one of the ones who agree with the change on tone, style, and how hard you bring down the logic hammer on ideas you reject. But your explanation makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't say 'you suck' and even an 80% as good personal experience of you is still 5 times better than almost anything else I read...so what can I complain about!
You've addressed the main points and the ones where you're simply getting older, have made up your mind about more things, and have shot your accumulated idea ammunition dry from well developed ideas all match up and are now on new voyages where more eyes are upon you.
I'd say one word which describes the change for me, and there is no reason to boil things down like that!....is struggle. Less struggle.
I feel like in the earlier articles you were deeply personally struggling with ideas that 'mattered' to you like many young people do. That energy natural fades, changes, matures, and your tone changes direction over time - there would probably be something wrong with you if you didn't mature or ever settle down on answers after struggling so much. This is quite natural and to be expected. I know I hardly care about most of the things I used to care about when I was younger.
All of that Jacob wrestling with god stuff kind of falls away as you give up the fight and land upon answers you can live with. That these long running issues of social dynamics, how we pass along and create knowledge, etc. have been around for many thousands of years and the intelligent though ignorant young people butt up against more and more of the scale, scope, and magnitude of 'the problem' which is more like 'the reality of human existence'..much more so than a 'problem' to be solved, improved, or optimised. Facing that huge world and knowing that the biggest change you could make, the latest impact, the most prominent of positions, and even then if you were a thought leader 1,000x times bigger...the small versions of impacts desired might still be far out of reach. And yet many minds and readers, such as myself, have greatly benefited from your efforts.
It is more of a rhythm to be lived and it changes you a lot more than you can ever change it.
Perhaps the writing doesn't have the same force as it once did with 'the great struggle' partially resolved for the life you're going to be living. The world isn't a huge unknown thing and it contains perhaps fewer brand new ideas to churn through where you're trying to develop your mental models from limited experiences of the process of developing other mental models for other aspects of life and the ideascape.
I'd note one thing too...some of it is that 'we suck' just as much. Anyone who can comment on your blog's changes, like I can as a long time reader going back into the early SSC days when you had links to your old live journal or whatever it was called....we've also changed too.
The audience is also 8 or 9 years older than they were back then. Sure while the culture has moved on, the ideas are more common, and there are other bloggers to read...we're different too.
Besides yourself changing and the media/cultural landscape changing....so have we as the audience...not just in that collective cultural way, but directly as individuals who went on our own journeys and on that journey and struggle with you when Less Wrong and Rationalist ideas and such were new to us too.
What is a far worse outcome than me having an 80% enjoyment level was the dark period when you were not writing at all between SSC and ACX! Please keep going!
Probably should should mention regression towards the mean. If you write the best blog in the world for a few years, you're never going to maintain that level indefinitely.
This is right. You've plucked your low-hanging fruit. None of us grow new ideas as fast as we can talk.
Of course it feels deeply weird. Superficially a "new post" looks like it's set up to have as much new value as an older post. It's the same form factor, so it must have the same value, right? ...nope.
I guess there might be ways you could adapt to spend more effort on hunting new ideas, or to signal when you're rehashing old ones.
But your diagnosis seems correct. You're not failing at your game; you're just on a different game mode now.
A line that never made the final folio of Hamlet.
I'm going to embrace my inner autistic bitch, and suggest that part of the problem is mentioned in your very first paragraph:
>> I recently ran a subscriber-only AMA <<
Being paid changes incentives, which changes behaviour. The behaviour your SSC followers liked was produced while you were pretty much actively discouraging people from funding you. AFAIK, there was nothing produced exclusively for subscribers.
Also, and probably not coincidentally, the software platform was better than substack for running a blog with a large active commentariat. Substack is optimized for something much closer to a newspaper's regular feature, with commenting ability but far less opportunity for interaction among commenters.
Paying for something also changes people's evaluations. On the one hand, they don't want to feel like a chump, paying good money for something utterly worthless, so their "fast" system will rate you as better than rubbish. But on the other hand, the salient comparison group is now professionals, not amateurs. Worse, it's probably memorable professionals who they consider worthy of their hard earned money, not professionals they happily don't subscribe to.
Those of us who are free subscribers have a slightly different calculus, but our "fast" system automatically rates this blog as less good than whatever each of us pays for - otherwise we'd feel like chumps. Worse, we have a list in our head of what we'd like to subscribe to, budget permitting, and you have a specific place in that list, probably behind a few other public intellectuals.
Also, we may want to justify our decision not to subscribe - "the grapes were sour anyway". Or we may resent what appears to us to be inflated, unreasonable, 1% level renumeration - believe you should be paid, but not as much as you now are. $400 K per annum looks like a lot of money to many of us. When asked "is this guy any good", we may well answer instead "is this guy worth $400 K per annum" - and do so in the negative. (I suspect some quantity of paying subscribers may do the same.)
All this sets aside questions of whether you actually suck, or whether your writing has gotten worse since SSC. But works-for-hire have different incentives than works-for-love or works-to-influence-people, let alone works-for-a-few-friends. Some of those incentives encourage improvements, but others encourage replacing quality with quantity and timeliness.
Personally, I find the ACX experience less good than that of SSC, but I can't disentangle how much of that is the substandard user interface. You always posted some things that I regarded as essentially rubbish. You still do. But I never paid enough attention to figure out the proportions. Probably there are more of those now, since one of your regular features is in this category for me. But there are also more posts, so maybe the proportions are still the same.
Mostly, though, I now relate to you as a supplier, not a peer. I presume my opinion is only relevant to you in aggregate, and you probably don't read my comments. I don't expect you to be interested in my ideas. We aren't in this together - you re an Influencer (TM), and I'm a potential customer, and a potential source of referrals. Even though I've met you in person (at a local meetup), I don't have any kind of relationship with you. And for me that makes your work less interesting, less exciting, etc. etc.
Some of the things that are sometimes missed are the somewhat more abstract / experimental posts, ranging from Moloch to the small fiction ones. I have the feeling posts have slowly become more focused on concrete, "nuts and bolts/real world" stuff.
I don't think this effect comes from causes 3/4/5/7, because that kind of experimental post is not likely to trigger culture wars - it will probably elicit a "meh" from those looking for conflict. 1/2/6 may have a bit to do: maybe the more playful style was just a vehicle for that "simulated annealing", and now it is not useful anymore to converge. But 8 should not be it. It's true that going back to SSC one may find a few of them to be less "sophisticated", but normally best ideas come from having the playfulness to try and risk entering that thin zone between brilliance and cringe. I don't think sophistication has to stop one from going in there. If anything, it gives better tools to navigate it.
(That said, the old ones are not lost, and the reading the new remains as good a use of my time as ever.)
When you wrote "bokoninist" did you mean "bokononist"? Busy, busy, busy!
Also, I love you unreservedly. I know that's only got about one millihater's worth of weight to it, but I'm throwing it on the scale anyway. Please, please keep up the good work!
> Are there really still woke people?
I think this is the first time I feel envy because of someone's social bubble.
Since you bring up atheism and rationalism quite often, I thought I'd share this link about an ancient school of thought within Hinduism, called Carvaka, that sounds like rationalism to me. It is popular once again among well-educated Hindu youth nowadays, just as humanism is popular among American college kids nowadays :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka
Well now, since I"m a total newb to this place, I'm curious about the writings of Young Scott from Ages Gone By. But if I read those, maybe I'll end up thinking Current Day Scott sucks. Don't want that.
I'll just say that I only rarely read SSC, but regularly read ACX, I suppose because substack makes it easier to quickly read/comment. I think most claims of decline in quality is a rosy retrospective bias.
> It would be arrogant to say the reason I make fewer large updates now than I did at age 28 is because I’ve solved all the big problems. But I think I’ve found solutions for big problems that satisfy me. My jumps are smaller now, less “oh, I changed my mind about whether there’s a God” and more “let’s explore this sub-sub-cranny of utilitarianism”.
Might be fun and interesting every now and again to real delve into some topics as goatee-Scott, the mirrorverse version of you where you became, say, a virtue ethicist rather than a utilitarian. You often try to balance out your analysis in this way, but some deontological/virtue ethics pills can seem too hard to swallow if you're already committed to utilitarianism and you just back out. What if you swallowed those bitters pills and followed the rabbit hole all the way down?
I also had a funny thought: since you have more resources now, maybe find a volunteer or hire someone to train GPT-3 or other AI on your posts and see what AI-Scott would write about certain topics. Maybe even have a contest to see if the community can discern real-Scott from AI-Scott. It will probably have to be limited to short hot-takes for now, as anything longer will probably give the game away.
> It’s just no longer interesting. The same is true of religion vs. atheism, capitalism vs. communism, and a bunch of other things. I am bored of those debates.
Maybe an index of your position on various issues on your main page would be useful, particularly for newcomers?
"I felt like all my friends were social justice warriors, back when other people described barely knowing one or two.
[...]But it seems like I must still be near the top of the barberpole - because while everyone else is freaking out about wokeness, I’m starting to feel like all my friends are anti-woke."
Are these the same friends? Or did you lose the old ones and get new ones?
Damn, looks like Eliezer started posting the Sequences at age 28, too. I'm turning 26 this year, so I guess there are only two more years before I have to start publishing a series of world-altering blogposts. Better get on that.
Also, your #1 is the reason that resonates with me the most. There are only so many insights as big as Mediations on Moloch (felt to me at the time). But I think there's also a flipside to your story about you growing up and not being as interested in the basic debates, which is that when I discovered SSC at the age of 18, I was a lot dumber than I am now — and the same will surely be true for many readers who have been following you all this time. At 18 I was still pretty interested in the capitalism vs communism question, didn't really have a handle on the basics of philosophy, and had never had to exist in the world as an adult. With that context, a lot of your blogposts felt completely fucking earth-shattering in a way that nothing I encounter nowadays does. But is that a fact about you or a fact about me (and the passage of time)?
In this post you repeatedly suggest a general antipathy towards 'woke' and 'leftist' sections of the culture and political wars, and talk about how many of your views have settled since you were younger.
In the part of the world and circles where I currently find myself, much of the woke/sjw debate focuses around gender issues. When someone around me complains about woke people, then, it is generally in this context. I have a crowd shouting in one ear that groups of extremist transphobes backed by conservative media want to put queer folk back in their closets with all the implications for quality of life, suicide rates etc that this entails; and a crowd shouting in my other ear that crazed perverts want to cancel and censor ordinary right-thinking folk so they can hide in women's loos and convince little children to mutilate their genitalia.
My own opinions on the subject were in part informed by your 2014 post, "the categories were made for man" - which I still find a very compelling argument for treating people as they say they wish to be treated rather than as others think they should be.
Hence the question - has your position shifted much in the years since that essay was written?
The discourse has gotten dumber since then. For example, Jesse Singal would presumably agree with Scott about that old post, but he's regularly pilloried as "anti-trans".
Someone wrote a long response to that post here:
http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/
Interesting and detailed, but I just don't find it as compelling as Scott's post. I'll not attempt a detailed rebuttal in a comment, but broadly:
* I am inclined to agree with people who want us to draw boundaries around what gender someone "really" is based on biology, but disagree with what they usually *mean* by that (which is rarely explicitly set out and generally requires specific questioning to pin down, but the unremediatedgender post actually does refer to what it intends by this multiple times) - i.e. the shape of genitalia and presence or absence of breasts - is the best biology to use: as we know brains are sexually dimorphic, and so when answering the question "who is it that inhabits the body", I suggest that the way their brain works is a more important feature than how bits of their body are shaped. We can't actually directly observe the former, but having the person themselves tell you what they are experiencing hardly seems like the worst proxy for learning what they are experiencing by examining their brain structure - certainly, for the purposes of deciding how best to treat them, it does not seem obviously worse a heuristic than observing their crotch.
* There is a general principle of charity. In any avenue other than gender, if someone tells me they find a way I act towards them hurtful and would like me to stop, I find a way to stop doing that thing; indeed, for most relationships - colleagues, shop staff etc, which must necessarily outnumber *close* relationships I am in - doing otherwise would count as harassment (imagine if I called a colleague by a nickname and didn't stop when they asked me to) and invite some form of escalation. For most people I interact with, I am neither their doctor nor do I have a close enough relationship with them for it to be appropriate for me to try to change deeply ingrained aspects of their character by causing them pain despite their expressed preference, even if I thought it a good idea, never mind the chances of such a thing actually *succeeding* in making their life better instead of worse; and, indeed, if I persist in acting in a manner that hurts them despite them asking me not to, this is unlikely to ever change. If I do not think it appropriate to harass people by using any other kind of word, then why should I behave differently when it comes to the fashionable subject of gender pronouns?
(I also have a separate and particular reaction to the concept of there being a tranche of people who aren't "really" gender dysphoric despite claiming they are, but just want to look like what they find attractive, which is that my life is full of family and close friends who are convinced they know what I feel and want better than I do, choose to ignore what I say to them in favour of their own beliefs and are always surprised in situations where actual outcomes end up proving yet again that the territory does in fact better match the map relayed to them by its observer than the map they made up in their own heads based on their preconceptions; I know how I react to such interactions, and see little reason to believe the result would be any different if I were to act that way towards someone else.)
We could theoretically try to get objective measurements of how people's brains work and classify them that way, but I don't think there's much interest in that.
The elephant in the room, of course, is that this will not help address the real objections that keep these conversations going or resolve the culture war. The author of the article Akiyama linked explicitly raised the concern of perverts entering bathrooms, and explained that Scott's article does not help address this; but no objective test can sensibly alleviate those concerns - we will no more mandate MRI machines at bathroom doors to check if someone is entering the bathroom with ill intent than we require people to pull down their underwear so some can check their genitalia shape matches the rest of their appearance right now, and so no decision we can take in this space can resolve the differences of those who don't feel safe in bathrooms when people whose appearance doesn't match expectation are permitted to enter them and those who look too weird to be permitted to enter those bathrooms they feel safe in.
This might be something you've addressed already, but I'll spell it out anyway.
Before being doxxed, your identity and hence your reputation in society weren't entangled with your writings. Hence, you could afford to be inflammatory/write artistically flamboyant pieces. Now your identity has gotten entangled with your writing, and hence you must preserve your reputation. You incentives have changed. And changed incentives get to everyone. It is possible that you're not conscious of some of these processes, although now I am hypothesizing about your unconscious brain.
Right. It’s hard to buy “this hasn’t affected my thinking” when we watched it affect SSC in real time! SSC went away. Before that, various bits of culture war were banned / spun off the SSC-sphere with the stated intent of keeping real-life heat off of Scott.
That doesn’t really jive with “this hasn’t affected me or my writing”
Although to be fair, I will continue to pay for ACX from my measly grad student scrapings. This is the best corner of the internet right here.
I think a lot of it is (1), and link to this piece that works through similar ideas, maybe a bit grimly (though probably at least as grimly for commenters). https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/
(4) I think is also true. "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" was apparently from 2014?!? Now it's a good way to put a target on your back, but it's OK to be a Democrat, even a liberal Democrat, but point at some of the woke excesses and say "guys, this is crazy." John McWhorter may well owe his position at the NYT to this.
I'll also agree with similar comments to the effect that if any public intellectual writes 2-3 superb pieces per year, 8-10 very good ones, 25-30 that are fine, and some number of misses...people will look at the current year's output vs. the greatest hits from 3-8 years ago and see a decline.
I know this is indefensible, but I'm fairly sure you've missed the main reason. I don't mean the main reason you suck (because, among other things, you don't) but the reason people might experience a diminution of that 'Wow, Scott blew me away with another addition to the rationalist armory" feeling.
An analogy I'd make is to one of my favorite Tai Chi teachers (Ian Sinclair, as it happens) who talks and teaches and demonstrates and investigates concepts to do with central equilibrium. He describes how many years can be usefully devoted to exploring and refining this integral part of the philosophy and practice of Tai Chi, through Zazen, standing meditation and Chi Gung.
Sooner or later, though, you have to 'Take it on the Road' - go out into life with whatever degree of central equilibrium you have attained and put it into practice in the hubbub of human experience and human interaction. Then you can become a Tai Chi creature.
I feel the same thing about your blogging, Scott. Less and less is it about the ways and means of thinking sensibly, techniques for navigating our bias-ridden cognitive apparatus; More and more it is you taking-on-the-road whatever skills you've developed and putting them into practice. Applying them in a real world environment, and to real world issues.
Inevitably there is less drama and wowness about it all now, but it could not be any other way. Out of the abstract intellectual dojo and into the world where things matter. A lot of us are disappointed with this because we want to stay in the dojo - or playground - forever.
Well, bully for you, and all continued power to your elbow. And while I'm at it, good luck with your marriage - I wish you well.
Running things like book review contests is far from eating seed corn. It's paying it forward.
Or at the very least, eating regular corn. Using the credibility printer responsibly.
FWIW, I think you’re right that you said all there was to say about 2015 SJWs. But “wokism” has moved on from 2015 (hell, it wasn’t even called “woke” in 2015). So I think there is a genuine gap in “what does Scott Alexander think about these new developments?” The old stuff is still great, but it feels stale because di Angelo and Kendi are very different SJWs than the online feminists that were the main target of your older work. Trans issues are another area where there are some thematic similarities but also things have changed a ton since you last wrote a lot about it.
Like, I’d be interested in “Critical Race Theory in an Enormous Planet Sized Nutshell” or the “Anti-Anti Racist FAQ”.
Alternatively, you say your views have matured/evolved - I’d love to hear more! Like a series of “ACX revisits SSC’s greatest hits”. What held up? What’s obsolete? What would you write differently knowing what you now know?
Seconded.
IIRC my regard for your point of view significantly decreased when you repeated an idea common in pro-trump circles, that the idea that trump praised white nationalists after Charlottesville is a media lie (this was on ACX not SSC).
This relates to “anti-wokeness has gotten more popular” - I think to elaborate - “an anti-woke ‘tribe’ has evolved, and any such tribe has lazy half-baked ideas that get echo chamber’d until they seem incontrovertibly true to those inside it, and your original anti-woke thinking can get outsourced to that tribal anti-woke shit.”
I don’t think you of 2014 would have made that same mistake.
I don't think Scott believes he was mistaken.
Well I don't think he ever reexamined it, at least publicly, so presumably not.
I've disagreed with plenty that Scott has said, including in that same post and the one it's following up on from. But that one bit stuck out to me as a repetition of a clearly misleading idea that IMO gained acceptance among people who got high on their anti-anti-trump, wokeness-is-the-real-problem supply, and that doesn't stand up to the sort of scrutiny that in the past Scott would have applied.
Kind of sounds like generic middle-age existential doubt. We all go through it. You put your head down in your youth to simultaneously preserve your own voice and also achieve some level of social recognition and approval, and then you *get there* and then...you start asking yourself: now what? And: is this enough? Life is painfully finite, do I want to continue doing this or something else? How did I get here, and does the answer to that point towards more of the same or change? And if change, how much, and in what direction?
Some people end up in plain despair, like Bruce Jenner trying to (metaphorically) get on the cover of Wheaties again by growing tits. Others develop sufficient obliviousness that they can just phone it in the rest of their lives, turn whatever got them their initial success into a shtick, and then take the cash, using it to do God knows what in their secret lives.
For what it's worth -- approximately what you're paying for it ha ha -- I would say I think part of the attraction of your style is that you have a knack for writing about your own struggles engagingly, regardless of whether your endpoints are agreeable to the reader or not. I'm reminded of some of the greatest men of religion I've known, who are very worth listening to, even for an atheist, because of the clear, honest, and sophisticated way in which they publically engage with their own doubt. It feels like this may be part of your talent, the wild thing God gave you in particular to set you apart from others.
That is, maybe you wrote well and interestingly about existential and self-growth problems that were salient in your late 20s, and maybe if you just continue to do so in your late 30s -- even as the problems themselves change -- you will remain both interesting to others (although maybe not the same others) and the work will remain interesting to you.
The major change might be that fewer of the problems have good solutions or even satisfying waypoints. There may be more of "well, this is how I thought about the problem, and I learned a lot about how to think about it, but...solutions, nope. Got nothing. Not even a plausible way forward." I think that's OK and quite probably deeply interesting. It *is* about the journey, not the destination -- it kind of has to be, given our brief allotment of awareness.
I discovered Slatestarcodex about a year ago and read through it more or less in reverse order. I agree with the analysis that you peaked in 2013-2017, with most of the very best articles and then started to get a little stale. Not sure I can give much helpful feedback on why or clearly explain what makes me think that. Still a very good blog and some really good posts though.
I wonder if it is because you are not in the same mental place. You are older and more settled in life and in your thinking, so there is less bright, novel insight-making going on. If so, may be hard to bring back glory days, since that is an inherent life-cycle thing. I do think you have less really controversial takes these days, though as you mentioned your blog is institutionalizing over time. With a larger following, comes responsibility, its one thing to say nutty things as a blogger getting started out and another when you are buttressing an important community.
By the way, your protest that you don't interact with other people enough runs into the counter that you live in a group home setting and have regular get-togethers with rationalists. Don't actually know you, but really get impression your interaction with other people is if anything above-average.
It's actually hard for me to tell whether the quality of posts has gone down, because I only started following ssc maybe 4 years ago, so at beginning I could read the greatest hits posts accumulated over a number of years and it was amazing, but dont really expect that level of quality to come up on weekly basis. Wonder how much this effect applies to other readers as well - some may be og readers but by definition lots must be of latter day variety.
Is meditation on muloch too basic of an idea? I suppose on some ways, it almost definitionally is, but on the other hand, I feel that one of the best things ssc did for me was to really hammer that, and the idea of coordination problems in.
All the best SSC essays have been the ones that took something I already fuzzily understood in the back of my mind, and expressed it clearly in actual words so I could think about it more clearly.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics was an example of that for me:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2015/07/17/you-said-it-better-than-my-years-of-attempts/
The post lays out the kinds of articles from the past that you aren't interested in persuing, But while it might be a bit counter-theme, maybe mention a few of the articles/themes/flourishes from that time that you would still consider fresh and worth emulating? Are there any?
The quality of your writing, always quite good, has markably improved. No small feat this.
Almost all the high-ranking-in-search articles about the Aztec prayer controversy don't show the actual full text of the thing being debated. In case anyone's curious: It's currently hosted at https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21182321/ethnicstudies-approved-0321-chap-5.pdf, and linked by https://edsource.org/updates/state-settles-lawsuit-over-ethnic-studies-curriculum-to-remove-two-disputed-chants.
Or maybe you don't suck. I remember really good posts more than other posts because they stick with me. I also remember recent posts more than other posts because they're recent. So the average quality of recent posts that I remember is automatically less than the average quality of all the posts I remember.
I just assumed the decline in poasting frequency was because you were in a happy relationship.
There might be a selection effect where when people go back read your old stuff, they're reading the very best highlights of your old stuff (Meditations on Moloch, etc). And then when they read your new stuff, they're reading every post, so it doesn't seem as good by comparison.
It's like how people say "Music sucks so much now compared to the 1960s!" Well, there were bands that sucked in the 1960s too, it's just that they've been forgotten, and only the very best music from the 1960s is still listened to, so it seems way better than today's music.
I think there really has been a shift in music. The big sales are now catalogs from the past. Artists can't make much money off streaming services vs the Beatles being able to just release albums and stop playing live shows.
Amusing how this is posted just one week after my annual subscription renewal! What a vote of confidence. I assume several others are in the same boat since I started mine shortly after ACX went up. I demand a refund!
(Just kidding. Great blog etc etc...)
(1) For me personally, "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning" was the sign that the end of days were coming. The Vox post that followed Kolmogorov Complicity(chronologically AND thematically) was the inflection point, not the NYT.
(2) Your best posts aren't about concrete things. They are about abstract principles. As I see it, any hypothesis related to posts about current events (i.e anti SJW) doesn't explain the phenomenon.
When I think of Scott's "Best of", everything with the possible exception of Friston is about abstractions. Off the top of my head,
Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor
The parable of the talents
Asches to Asches
I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup
The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories
Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning
People seem to love Meditations on Moloch
God help us understand Friston[...]
With the exception of Friston every single one of those posts could be shared with pretty much anyone. The writing just melted in your mouth.
The same holds true for Yvain (and the Jackdaws posts that I liked).
IN FAVOR OF MY CLAIM THAT I CAN TO SOME DEGREE MAKE ACCURATE CONSISTENT JUDGMENTS ABOUT YOUR WRITING: there was a period where Yvain was my favorite writer, some guy Scott Alexander was my third favorite writer. I didn't know that Yvain and Scott were the same person. I didn't have a 4th favorite writer. You were two of the three writers I loved; something about the way write stood out enough that you were my fave under two different names. There was some quality of your writing that stood out. That quality is gone.
"Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning" seemed, at the time, to be the coming of the end and implicit warning that the Vox post was coming. I see those as the inflection point, not the NYT article. As I saw it"Kolmogorov Complicity" and "God help us understand Friston..." we the last prime Scott posts. I don't know how the time matches up. After Kolmogorov Complicity your writing about abstract concepts isn't up to par ( a par all your own).
So, in my opinion, it was all a matter of social incentives.
I'm going to pay for a subscription indefinitely because when you were good you were the best. But I'm subscribing in appreciation for your previous writing. You probably still are awesome, how could you not be? But prime SSC and Yvain is a pretty high bar.
Who was #2 in between Yvain & Scott Alexander?
Eliezer Yudkowsky.
This is way back in, say, 2013. I figured out Scott and Yvain were the same person.
By 2014-2015, Scott was number one, absolute king of the mountain, and no writer came close. Prime Scott was just. Wow.
Scott is still great. But he writes about concrete things. He used to write about abstractions and ideas. His recent post about "there is no scientific proof for x" was a return to form.
On reflection, the last time I checked in a month or two ago I was surprised to see a couple of classic Scott pieces. So maybe I should start paying attention again.
It's very possible that there was just a drop off after"Kolmogorov Complicity" and Scott is now returning to form. I should start paying more attention again.
Still favorite writer ever. Probs always will be.
The bastards don’t just want to grind you down, they will also accept putting you in a box. Once you’re in a box, categorized, you can be stuck up on a shelf or tossed out back (on the midden heap). I think it’s the what do you call them, the subroutines in your mind that want efficiency (forget the name), that make people so relentless about putting people in boxes. Brain just looking to survive, not bask in the multidimensional splendor of independent thinkers. Either way they have shut you up (for their purposes).
How to rediscover the old form, not the topics / beliefs, but “the voice.” Seems like it’s back! Whatever it was, worked. (Not that I’m an expert… just discovered you when the NYTimes decided to dox you).
Thank you.
The thing about blogging over time is that, in addition to growing as a person and a writer, your style and focus will probably also change based on your life particulars and the atmosphere of the world around you. At different times, your writing will most appeal to different people. And those people are always changing as well, so even if you somehow never changed, you still couldn't optimally please all the people all the time. Anyway, of course some of my favorite SSC posts were from years ago, that's how I got here in the first place! For what it's worth, 'There's a Time for Everyone' is now one of my favorite posts as well :)
I think that the first virtue is self-improvement, not curiosity. Without self-improvement, you cannot curb the natural tendency for curiosity to decline with age. Having said that, I'm over the whole "eternal September" pattern, and I love how the blog has evolved with the community.
First of all, you don’t suck. Your writing is a gift. Thank you.
“I am bored of those debates.”
I’d like to suggest a new type of post: a collection of links to essays you’ve written which are relevant to, or which might help people think through, the topic of the day. If you think your old essays lack sophistication or if your opinions have changed, perhaps you could also include this as a caveat or include a paragraph about how your views have changed.
Hopefully, this type of post would be low effort enough that you wouldn’t incur much cost of boredom.
As someone who reads your work sporadically, I would value all three: 1) a guide through your body of work, 2) a guide to how your past ideas relate to current events/the zeitgeist, and 3) your thoughts on how your current views differ from when you first wrote them down.
I feel this.
Illegitimi non carborundum.
Nevermind youthful ideas, I'd like another "Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person".
Time for Act 3 (TLP) My Friend
I've been pretty content with your recent posts, but this one was real snooze-worthy! I wish you'd go back to your January 2022 style.
I’m a fan of the direction the posts have gone, and I’ve been consistently enjoying them more than I did on SSC. Part of this is because I feel the comments sections of ACX have been better than those on SSC—maybe as a function of you avoiding the “basic” questions.
Also, people that have read both SSC and ACT are a biased sample of people that like the exact point in writespace (?) of SSC. Move from that point and most likely a reader poll from long time readers will suggest on avg you got worse, even if for a random person (or even a random current reader) you got better.
Wow! Yeah sure. I started making notes at point 5
5.) Dang, now I can't praise you. That's not good. Embrace the hate, and if you can convince 1% their hate is wrong it's maybe more than 1k.. yeah though being too popular is a trap.
6.) As an old man, I've come to believe in a meta-god. Which is that living life as if god exists, is mostly a good thing. Regardless of underling belief.
7.) Community good!
8.) We should figure out how to make science work better.
Scott: "In the same way, I see fewer people outright denying the existence of genetics, totally failing to understand AI risk, or utterly bungling basic concepts in risk and probability.
(Is this just a function of my media consumption? Maybe I learned how to find better sources and now I never read anyone stupid enough to need correcting. Genuinely not sure!)"
Me: it's the finding better sources one
> Third of all, do I really want to spend my life reminding other unwoke people that dumbing down math classes and using the extra time to force kids into classes where they chant prayers to the Aztec gods instead is actually bad? Don’t get me wrong, it is bad.
Snopes disputes much of Christopher F. Rufo's characterization of this incident. See here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/california-ethnic-studies-genocide/
My understanding is that students were lightly encouraged to chant along to an Aztec ritual. It had nothing to do with human sacrifice (except to the extent that Aztec's *practiced* human sacrifice, but Americans also *practiced* slavery, yet we don't need to bring that up incessantly whenever someone chants something American). Instead of being a good example of wokeism gone awry, this sounds like a better example of wokeism being exaggerated.
Americans banned slavery in many states soon after independence. Aztecs did not ban human sacrifice, rather it was a core part of their culture which is very hard to separate from it. The comparison is of course unfair since the conquistadores ended both Aztec civilization & human sacrifice at the same time.
Also, if you are discussing the pre-civil war South you pretty much do have to mention slavery.
I've never heard of this controversy before today, but Snopes is disingenuous here.
>references to “tezkatlipoka” and “huitzilopochtli,” which were translated as “self reflection” and “the will to act,” respectively
Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli were major-league gods. These guys were getting blood sacrifices at festivals. I'm not up enough on classical Aztec religion to know who received the most sacrifices, but these words don't connote vague feel-good New Age concepts. These words are the names of gods. It's not like you put these names in a kid's mouth and they become an old-school Aztec priest splitting thoraxes with obsidian, it's not like most kids will remember these names. It's certainly not a problem that kids might come to know about pantheons of badass gods. (Greek and Norse mythology are all over the place in kids' books, so it'd be a double standard too.) But this blatant error makes me think the Snopes writer is doing some real motivated reasoning.
Huitzilopochtli is such an awful invention it would be less evil for kids be taught the Horst Wessel song.
Snopes is a clown posse dancing in a burning circus, though.
Rating: Mixture
What's True
Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.
What's Undetermined
In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/
Yeah, she's just a member of bombing organizations that commit armed robberies and in possession of hundreds of pounds of explosives. But not a terrorist, no sir.
Fact-checking organizations police narrative, not factual accuracy.
No wonder Snopes has become corrupted. It's a fool's errand to try and raise the sanity waterline of clown posses.
Okay, *technically*... she was convicted, and she was a terrorist, but she is not a "convicted terrorist", because *technically* she was only charged with a possession of explosives, which *technically* is not the same as terrorism. Technically.
But of course, if we had a right-wing terrorist in the same situation, I strongly doubt that Snopes would pay so much attention to all these technicalities.
Over more than a decade you've written hundreds of blog posts. Now, when there is a new blog post, people compare the quality of the new one to the quality of the best posts from the last decade. Even if the proportion of awesome posts remained constant, people would remember much fewer awesome posts in the past year than in the rest of the decade. The question people should ask themselves is: was there more awesome posts in 2021, or in 2013?
EDIT: Coagulopath and many others have made the same point. Sorry for plagiarizing :P
Your posts seem on average less interesting than on SSC but that may well be the combined effect of your having already published so many of your good ideas and my comparing the current average to the past high. They are still worth reading. And, of course, I may be getting old.
A lot of what I liked about SSC was the commenting community, and I find the comments here less interesting than they were on SSC, fewer interesting arguments, which is probably why I spend more time on DSL than on ACX.
Covid and climate are two areas where there is a lot to criticize about the current orthodoxy. If you are willing to risk it they might be worth looking into.
I think you were already old by "rationalist" standards when SSC started.
I agree about the commenting community, but in this, David, you are not blameless! My noticing that the comments were less interesting here than at SSC occurred AFTER you and 20 or so of the other best commenters jumped ship.
I fear Scott's sources (Vox etc) have led to an acceptance of orthodoxy on climate, and expecting a major re-think is going to lead to our disappointment.
Agree 100% about the comments. My proposed solution for this -- perhaps at the expense of vast tracts of my free time -- is: bring back the like button! I consistently spent more time commenting, both reading and writing comments, and I felt like the comment section in general was much easier to navigate.
What is DSL?
Data Secrets Lox?
Thanks!
I get the impression that the charges of conformism have been disproportionately coming from advocates of alternative Covid treatments, who believe that the only reason Ivermectin et al. aren't accepted in the mainstream is the morally bankrupt authorities. The conformism stuff is coming from their disappointed hopes and dreams that they were so very close to having a reputable champion in you. They're so invested in their advocacy that they can't accept that you honestly assessed their evidence and found it lacking; they have to believe that you're more of dishonest conformist than they first thought.
Your email inbox might be full of messages that reflect a different picture than the substack comments.
I don't think you suck. You are still an incredibly talented writer. That said, I do definitely have the sense that you are some combination of uninterested, unwilling, or incapable of engaging with some topics the way you used to on SSC.
I'm not thrilled that while there is still better cross-pollination, the ACX and DSL and sub-reddit populations seem to have diverged and all seem narrower than SSC's commentariat was. I don't have a solution for that beyond the observation that whatever strange attractors and combination of circumstances allowed for that dynamic does not appear to have survived the migration to Substack.
I am going to truncate this here.
Don’t discount that people seem to be biased to measure against the highest of highs. The first time you read a blog entry that changes the way you see the world… sure, that can set you on a path, but its like the first time you got stoned at 16 and listened to Your favorite band. You’ll likely not reach that level of seeming profundity again. Patriots fans habituated to Tom Brady’s GOAT level play. What have you done for me lately is baked into audiences. Idea: why not occasionally republish SSC classics, with new commentary?
You also haven't written as many frivolous/silly/humour posts lately. I get that you're optimising for the Important People who read your blog and put nonzero weight on your opinions, and I don't think anyone begrudges you that, but at the same time, I think many people would enjoy seeing a few posts in that category each month.
I think a large part of why I enjoyed your writing more years ago is because I was new to your work - the main things I learned were not new insights into big topics (though those were there too), but how to approach an idea or domain with your combination of curiosity, common sense and ability to research and evaluate. This suffers a lot from you taking less risks, because I, and I think many others, enjoy reading about your opinions on some niche field or piece of research (or even big fields like abortion) not so much because we care about that field a lot, but because of the higher level ideas we can take from your approach to it.
If there's anything we as readers can do to help make it less risky, or make it more rewarding, to blog about things you're not a domain expert on, please tell us. Defend you on twitter? Help form epistemic confidence level estimations based on some assumptions? Buy you a coffee for every 5% lower you go in epistemic confidence on a post? Jut let us know :)
Do you actually suck now? Have you done an RCT, showing a random selection of essays to readers and having them rate them?
It might be true, but I think you are missing the one explanation here: you don't suck, and your readers are wrong.
I enjoyed the blog more in the first year that I read it (~2017). Why? Maybe because I had an enormous back catalog to go through. I would go through the 'best of,' then find recommendation lists others had made, then read random ones and follow the embedded links around. It was six months of digging through an enormous treasure trove.
Once I had caught up with the archive, the new posts could never compare. I reckon something similar is going on with your feedback, and if you did a proper RCT you'd find a smaller difference than you think, lingering just for the reasons you stated.
Yikes! I can't possibly digest your post and all the enthralling comments it provokes.
So let me just write stuff:
Competing with your younger self is futile. Compete with your future self.
Fashionable followers of fashion frequently refashion fashion. You eat what you are. Few do either. So it goes.
Edit:
The above sounds vaguely mystical (Hello Kahlil Gibran or something).
Let me put it another way:
Scott: you're good. Keep questioning and betting!
Theo
I started reading right at the start of ACX, but have since read a great deal of old SSC stuff... Honestly, there is an obvious progression in style, but I definitely wouldn't say the quality's going downhill. Personally, I'm much fonder of later (and looonger) SSC stuff and more recent ACX stuff than the stuff Scott was writing more than 5ish years ago. I feel the style has visibly matured, and so have the ideas. And the book reviews in particular have seemed to me better in ACX on average! In conclusion, I'm not concerned about the quality of the blog, and Scott certainly does not suck.
Personally, I find that the best way to deal with haters is to stomp on them. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.) This not only feels good but it encourages them to be less hateful to others, so it's a good deed that accrues positive karma.
Whenever I find myself thinking "Why do I suck?" it invariably turns out that I need a coffee and a sandwich. I bet if you included a coffee and sandwich in each of your posts the audience's attitude would improve and all of a sudden they'd be able to do the dishes and sweep the floors and clean up all the pine needles left over from the Christmas tree, even though it seemed completely impossible thirty minutes ago.
on another note - i wouldn't discount that there was something deeply cool and esoteric about the design of your own hosted website that defo played a role in making the reader feel they were onto something original. some personalization and style goes a long way!
E: Have you considered the idea that your internal experience might be wrong or at least misguided or self-deluding, being formulated as it is, by possibly the single least objective person possible on the subject of Scott Alexander on the entire planet?
Put plainly: There are some statuses you cannot award yourself. Ex: You can't call yourself cool, that is something that has to be awarded by others.
Plus, sometimes you don't notice you've lost weight until you run into someone you haven't seen in the better part of a year and they remark on how slim you're looking. The day to day difference is never noticeable to you, but the sum total difference of 9 months is stark to that person.
I am just happy that we have access to an absolutely brilliant mind that we can trust will analyse important problems that the world faces. Like what you did with corona in early 2020.
No pressure to put out stellar content all the time. We know you we can count on you when new important issues and problems arise.
(Furhtermore, I consider that Substack must implement comment upvotes and sorting.)
iiuc likes were specifically removed in the ACT substack per Scott and the community's request.
Aha I didn't know. I would read the top comments but don't want to wade through hundreds for the gold
This level of introspection is at least part of why you don’t suck. Also, I personally thought the book review on class and the follow up about the Republican Party were especially excellent, though I personally would have enjoyed some more back and forth on the nature of class and elitism beyond those two.
I think you have every likelihood of going big again, by focusing on the flow of new information thrown up by events, research, and your own life course. Stay on it.
You're still brilliant and even indispensible. But I admit I had the same thought as you and other readers, and I did not even know my thoughts were mainstream here: that you had a peak some years back. Then at some point, SSC already became somewhat less... uniquely sparkling / enlightening. I also recall one specific article of the later period when you talked about evolution that I found distinctly un-enlightening because I knew about the subject and could spot your fallacies easily. Basically my own Gell-Mann amnesia failed that one time. I'm older than you (54 now) and I noticed around 40 or so my creative intelligence really did start to decrease. So maybe it has to do with aging. Sorry. On the bright side with aging, your guile tends to go up and also your ability to cooperate with others socially. Best of luck. Please don't block me for saying this, still enjoying to read you!
Wait, are you saying you believe in God now?
If so, I am *extremely* curious about what made you switch.
No he's just glad he didn't end up being a "cringe sneering 2014 new atheist redditor" type
Interesting question, fascinating answers. Another take: Compare reading Scott with making love: Is it really "always like the first time"*?! - Does it have to be? Should it be? It can not be.
After 500** posts on SSC we can not help to wish for another text that sweeps us of our feet. And even when it does (and not a few ACX-post do!) - hey, we got used to that sweep - no unexpected astonishing surprise anymore. So, maybe it is us - not Scott - though he matured all right - .
*( The first time seldom is. But even the 876th time with a good partner is very much worth it. J. Peterson: "One of the few intrinsically rewarding activities" - Me: right on top with reading this blog. )
**(felt like only 300 - and only 30 or so made me kneel down and shout Hallelujah!)
p.s. really sorry, for all the bootlicking Try this one from Scott 2008 and tell me I am wrong to https://web.archive.org/web/20131230005050/http://squid314.livejournal.com/2008/04/28/
Too bad. I'd probably enjoy reading about your day.