Edmund Wilson was a mid-twentieth-century literary critic and all-around intellectual authority. He wrote for moderate-circulation magazines like the New Republic and the New Yorker, and he also wrote several influential books. I’m interested in him, and people like him, partly because they’re the sort of expert we don’t see so much of anymore. They were autodidacts who achieved intellectual and worldly success through their writing ability. Other examples of that ere are George Orwell, the so-called New York Intellectuals, and, a bit later, people like Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Clive James. What they had in common was an ability to write well, a willingness to write publicly on all sorts of topics not limited to whatever might have been their nominal expertise, and a cultural impact that reflected that they had interesting things to say and said these things well. The interesting things they had to say were not always so innovative (yeah, Tom Wolfe hated lots of modern art; so do I, but I don’t write a whole book about it) but they were distinctive enough to stand out, and their essays and books were interesting to read. Sometimes they took pretty goofy political stances and sometimes they were more mainstream; either way, they were worth reading. One of my favorites from that mid-twentieth-century era is the now-mostly-forgotten Dwight Macdonald.
For a writer to be a public intellectual was a choice, and a choice that not every writer made. Robert Penn Warren and John Updike wrote some public-intellectual sorts of things that were trifles compared to their fiction; T. S. Eliot wrote some essays but they weren’t so readable, perhaps no surprise given that his poetry is pretty tangled too! Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer became more celebrated for their nonfiction than for their fiction, which may well have annoyed them.
But who are the public intellectuals of today? Not the authors. Lorrie Moore, Jonathan Franzen, etc., write the occasional essay but they don’t have the moral or intellectual authority of Wilson or Orwell or even a lesser light such as Clive James. Paul Krugman and, formerly, Steven Levitt, have had some influence but they are coming from academia; their authority doesn’t come from their ability to put words together, in the manner of a Mencken, Didion, etc. The literary critic Jackson Lears writes about politics for the London Review of Books, but he seems to me more of a well-connected bullshitter than anything else, and not readable enough to be worth reading for style alone, as was sometimes the case with Wolfe.
OK, so one thing is that literary fiction is much less important in our culture as an arts and entertainment medium. But it’s not like filmmakers or the equivalent have picked up the slack. Tarentino or Scorsese might make the occasional pronouncement, but they’re not all-purpose expert. David Mamet might like to be an all-purpose expert, but he’s just a playwright and screenwriter with a side gig as a loud opinionator: you see lots of people like that on the internet and, sure, Mamet and Joyce Carol Oates and J. K. Rowling and all the rest have every right to try to transfer their literary fame into political influence, but really they’re acting like celebrities here, not thinkers of the order of Mary McCarthy or, yes, Gore Vidal.
Another direction to look among modern writers would be political pundits like Josh Marshall or David Brooks, commentators who have reached wide influence through their ability to say interesting or provocative things (even if, in the case of Brooks, they sometimes get their facts wrong and don’t seem to care) in a direct and clear style. But I’d say that Marshall and Brooks correspond not to Edmund Wilson but rather to other news pundits of the past, like Walter Lippman or Joseph Alsop: they weren’t promulgating theories in the manner of Wilson, Orwell, Sontag, Wolfe, etc., but rather reporting on ideas that are out there. Which is valuable too, just not quite the same thing.
OK, my answer to the “Who’s the modern-day Edmund Wilson?” question is no secret–it’s in the title of this post. Scott Alexander is, like Wilson and those others, a prolific writer with strong political opinions, who feels comfortable opining about–and gets respect for his opinions on–all sorts of things. Like Wilson, he’s an autodidact and a bit of an outsider. Alexander’s topics are different from Wilson’s–more on science, less on literature–but he has the same feeling of well-earned authority. And a fun writing style. Bloggy rather than magaziney–times have changed–but a distinctive and readable style in any case.
Alexander and Wilson also share an interesting balance between political extremism and curmudgeonly centrism. Wilson was heavily influenced by communism–no surprise for a New York writer in those days–and you see in a lot of his writing a pushing back and forth among different ideologies. He was cranky but no ideologue. Alexander has been heavily influenced by far-right internet writings–no surprise for a tech-adjacent blogger in the past decade or so–but doesn’t strongly identify with the far right (indeed, he unequivocally recommended voting against Donald Trump); you can see the influence still there even as it battles with others. Just as Wilson was always writing under the auspices of communism, as it were, even–indeed, especially when–he was arguing against it, similarly, Alexander is always writing under the auspices of the far right, operating on that playing field, as it were, even when he has his differences.
Wilson and Alexander are people with eccentric personas (I don’t mean “eccentric” in a bad way here), and I think this is to the benefit of their writing, even if sometimes it leads them into places they might not have intended to go.
I don’t want to make too much of this. Neither Wilson nor Alexander are unique literary figures; as noted above, Wilson was part of a long tradition of writers who were public intellectuals, and Alexander’s not the only blogger out there. Other influential bloggers include Josh Marshall (mentioned above), Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, and others. Actually not so many others anymore. Now we’re seeing another kind of thought leader, which is people who are loud on twitter, and I guess they’re important too, but I think of their role more as spreading ideas, not in the mode of writers like Orwell or Didion who express new thoughts and for whom the way that the thought is expressed is as important as its content.
P.S. Another way that Scott Alexander is a public intellectual is that people care about his positions; he has some intellectual and moral authority. You can see this in the comments: some people like Alexander, some people don’t, but there’s a sense that he’s an important figure and that his opinions matter.
I had never heard of Wilson, so perhaps this is the most apt comparison: Alexander will be forgotten except to members of a niche subculture.
See this link: https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method
Also this comment:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/16/dont-get-any-on-you/#comment-2408715
Oof, that first link is oozing with envy and sour grapes.
The first link could have made its point better. But it is stating that one of his most famous posts has no substantive argument, just rhetoric.
It is unconvincing and, again, comes off as little more than envy and sour grapes. It is odd to use an article that itself has little substance as a critique of that same thing. It would have been more persuasive had the author just come clean about not liking Alexander’s ideological take and dropped the other pretenses.
Jessica Hullman was convinced by it, see the second link and the other comments on that post. Different strokes for different folks. I also don’t see it as envious.
Jessica Hullman didn’t write that she was “convinced by” that link. She wrote “This is interesting, thanks for posting it” as well as “it seems a little unfair to categorically critique the writer based mostly on a piece they wrote seven years ago” and “I haven’t read enough of his older stuff (or of his newer stuff for that matter) to have a strong opinion”. And since we could easily follow the link and scroll up to see what Jessica actually wrote, I’m puzzled why you decided to characterize her that way.
Wonks:
She also said “But I also accept that some of his stuff is sloppy, like this critique points out, and maybe this correlates with the topics he’s writing about”.
She accepts what the critique points out…what word would you use to describe that?
She also says “Though I’m not trying to defend Alexander specifically” right before “I haven’t read enough of his older stuff (or of his newer stuff for that matter) to have a strong opinion.”
I’m puzzled at your very selective quotes.
“some of his stuff is sloppy” is a very low bar. Who does that not apply to? As she also wrote “I would expect this to be true to some extent for all writers”.
I’m glad you have now supplied some quotes. “Though I’m not trying to defend Scott Alexander specifically” is there because otherwise one might have gotten that impression, since she writes generally about writers improving with time and (as I quoted) called it unfair to put so much weight on one post from years ago. Oddly enough, you appeared to be more aware that Jessica wasn’t convinced back in January, since you replied to her comment asserting that your knowledge of Scott was based on more posts than that and that you (unlike her) no longer considered Scott to be insightful.
Wonks:
I wanted to give her more evidence to go on. She was convinced by the argument of the link, about that specific post, while not having a strong opinion about Scott in general.
Maybe I did remember her tone being a little more positive than it actually was, but your quotes seem to be designed to give the conclusion that she was less convinced than she actually was.
Wonks:
I realized what you are doing: trying to pull me into the weeds over something minor and irrelevant to the main point. I fell into your trap. Won’t do so again. I won’t respond except to substantive comments on the original point.
My quotes were of things Jessica actually wrote, they were “designed” by Jessica (my discretion was in choosing what bits to quote, and adding my own text describing those quotes). You didn’t give any quotes to the effect of her being “convinced”. And it’s odd that you misremembered, since you were the one who linked that in the first place!
The second link is no better!
Why?
Because both are fundamentally intended to *dismiss*, rather than *discuss*, Scott Alexander. And the problem with dismissive writing is that is it clearly rooted in motivated reasoning. If you are prone to the same motivations, you might find it convincing. Otherwise, unless the dismissal is profound (what you have posted is certainly not), it only comes across as a sign of weakness: unable to discuss ideas, instead just throw a Hail Mary and see if the author can be dismissed outright, and then hopefully the need to discuss is consequently obviated like a bunch of dominoes getting knocked down.
Perhaps I’m too young to appreciate what this genre of writing like historically, but this dismissive style of writing strikes me as a very internet thing in the worst way possible.
It honestly sounds to me that you’re motivated in the opposite direction as the original anonymous commenter.
Will:
OG anon here. It’s funny that you say you want substance, and yet give none in your comments. The only thing you have is vague assertions and claims of motivated reasoning and bad intentions. Can you back this up with concrete examples and counter arguments? My guess is that you can’t.
I got a bad first impression of Scott. I started to like him, and then I realized my first impression was correct. In the original link, I have given concrete examples of what I did not like, which are basically examples of the “far-right influence” that Andrew refers to. If you agree with those odious claims that Scott made, say that. If you think that he has been misrepresented, provide a concrete counter.
Scott himself claims that he does not like the far-right, but he is much more charitable to them and platforms their claims far more than he does to left-wing claims (e.g. the “Anti-Reactionary FAQ.”) That is his strategy of plausible deniability.
For a more clinical dissection of Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten I recommend the Reflective Altruism blog by a philosopher who knew their kind in England https://reflectivealtruism.com/
“Their kind”? Is Scott Alexander multiple people, some of whom live in England?
@Wonks: Alexander is a major figure the rationalist and effective altruism movements (the two are closely intertwined), and explicitly identifies as a member of both. The author of the Reflective Altruism blog used to work at an effective altruism think tank in Oxford, which is a major hub for such organizations. The blog discusses the effective altruism movement from the perspective of someone deeply familiar with their ideas, culture, and leading figures, including Alexander.
Sean’s comment was, perhaps, slightly grammatically awkward, but your reply seemed unnecessarily snarky. In any case, I second the recommendation fof Reflective Altruism for anyone interested in these topics.
That author just instantly dismisses any claim outside the overton window with no discussion. He’ll say “the science says X” with no citation to support his claim about “the science”. If you look at actual scientific authorities the picture tends to be more mixed than he claims.
Sandifer (quoted in the first link of the above anonymous comment) says that Alexander is a bad writer, but her real beef seems to be with Alexander’s politics.
I think we’re all more tolerant of awkward writing when we agree with the general position being taken by the author. And I think this makes sense; it’s not just “mood affiliation” or whatever. It goes like this: writing can be a way of working through a difficult topic, and such writing will typically not be so smooth. As Alexander might say, when we blog we are optimizing for understanding, not for style. Or, you could say, the style we use is a lumpy working-through. As I’ve said before, I take Orwell as a model here.
So I think Sandifer is missing the point by calling Alexander a bad writer. What she’s picked up on is that Alexander is addressing different audiences, simultaneously sending messages to the left and right, and that does create some difficulties in his writing.
I don’t see Sandifer as being “envious” of Alexander; I think she just disagrees with him politically and his bothered that he’s influential.
Very, very few people have their influence outlive their years. There’s no shame in that. Andrew in fact has posted on this.
And Scott Alexander has his flaws and blind spots as a public intellectual. But the other side is that there’s been a vicious campaign of harassment against him. See, for example:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin
Gore Vidal used gender-neutral pronouns?
Gain:
Fixed; thanks.
“Alexander has been heavily influenced by far-right internet writings”
I don’t think so… He’s commented on things from neoreactionaries before but ‘heavily influenced’ seems like an overstatement.
Clovis:
It’s my impression that Alexander is writing within a context defined by the internet far right of the 2010s, in the same way that Wilson was writing within a context defined by NYC communists of the 1930s. The “heavily influenced” is not a slam on either Alexander or Wilson; it’s just recognizing the communities that they’re part of.
To say it another way: Alexander expresses a range of political positions and I would not characterize him as being on the far right. For one thing, he directly recommended his readers vote against Donald Trump. The “heavily influenced” thing is that, when expressing positions on the center or left, Alexander often seems to be pushing against the far right, addressing far-right positions that circulate within the online world of which he is a part.
There’s also quite a bit of evidence that his true views are farther to the right, at least on race, than his stated ones: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lm36nk/old_scott_siskind_emails_which_link_him_to_the/
See also SE Geyges: https://segyges.leaflet.pub/3m4yn4yf2lk2d
Anon:
Thanks for the link. This is useful. Here’s a key quote, coming from Alexander in 2014:
This is consistent with what I wrote above about Alexander using the far right as a reference point, even when he disagrees with them. It’s related to what I said a couple years ago in my post on why I’m skeptical of “steelmanning”: By bending over backward to see things from the other person’s point of view, he’s implicitly dismissing other perspectives.
To put it another way, just as useful insights may be obtained by close reading of the far right, useful insights may also be obtained by close reading of the far left. It’s a sign of the times that Alexander does the former and not the latter.
Andrew, yes that excerpt that you quoted might be considered an example of the “just asking” fallacy. Someone genuinely interested in the subject should have a tiny bit of interest in the voluminous evidence that counters Behe’s “arguments”. By saying (paraphrasing) “there might be something interesting there”, the onus is thrown back on everyone else to shed (once again) appropriate light on the subject.
The judge at the Dover trial all those years ago admonished Behe for doing something similar.; i.e. raising fallacious arguments while not acknowledging that there was lots of scientific literature that already countered the points Behe was making.
It’s a way of keeping discredited “scientific” notions in view. Sean and Charles on this thread referred to Alexander’s support for Richard Lynn’s discredited views on IQ and race, and it seems to be tempting in some quarters to attempt to sanitise this. A recent example relates to a retracted paper from a gentleman called Bo Winegard who tries to get some of this stuff into mainstream journals. Here’s part of the retraction notice from the editor of Psychological Science:
“Critiques of Lynn and Vanhanen’s (2012) National IQ data were available in the literature prior to the publication of Clark et al. (2020) [That’s Winegard’s retracted paper]. It is unfortunate that these critiques were not consulted, thereby potentially avoiding publication and the necessity for retraction.” Patricia J. Bauer (Editor in Chief, Psychological Science)
“It’s related to what I said a couple years ago in my post on why I’m skeptical of “steelmanning”: By bending over backward to see things from the other person’s point of view, he’s implicitly dismissing other perspectives.”
The whole discourse around “steelmanning” is very strange, as if everyone supposedly knows which side is which, maybe not in terms of correctness, but in terms of which side unthinking people will take and which side most people have an obligation to be confronted with.
Would Scott Alexander’s recent post on the Frankfurt School count as close reading of the far left, or not since he’s reading a book about them rather than the primary sources they wrote?
Wonks, thanks for the link to Alexander’s piece on the Frankfurt School. It’s written ostensibly as a book review but I have to say (on a superficial reading!) that it’s not straightforward to seperate out Alexander’s thoughts from those of Martin Jay (who wrote the book Alexander is “reviewing”).
It seems mostly to be Alexander’s thoughts though, e.g. after lots of weird stuff about mysticism in religious and Buddhist thought he says “I’ve used a lot of mysticism and Zen analogies here…” so presumably that’s all Alexander’s (and not Jay’s or the Frankfurt School thought); annoyingly in almost every case, Alexander includes quotes without indicating who is being quoted (only the quotes in the section on Jazz are clearly from Jay’s book).
Anyway, you asked whether Alexander’s piece constitutes a close reading of the far left. I don’t think so. Martin Jay’s book is about the Frankfurt School in the period up to 1950 so it’s an historical account and that’s also how Alexander pitches it mostly as far as I can see (on a superficial read!).
Something very interesting though. Alexander makes much of (and mocks) Theodor Adorno’s notion of “Negative Dialectics” which (Wikipedia tells me) “emphasized non-identity thinking – allowing objects and experiences to remain unique without forcing them into predefined categories.” That’s a very prescient idea it seems to me, especially in relation to contemporary discourse especially in the US where defining things as “Left” or “Right” seems to be obsessively pursued (I live in the UK and I have never heard the term “Leftist” used here). So when you ask elsewhere on this thread “What is the defining feature of being right vs left?” Adorno might say – “what does it matter whether something is “left” or “right” – better simply to address it on its own terms.
Alexander is rightish, but it seems to me that his real center is rationalism, that is, the contemporary movement associated with effective altruism and worry about AI as an existential threat. Here’s the subtitle of his blog, Astral Codex Ten: “P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.” That’s his ideological center.
Bill: The problem is that “Internet” Rationalism is a very right-wing ideology. It’s difficult to discuss this, because they’re also basically nerds (I say this with affection and similar identity), thus they make “good” targets for the sort of left-wing smear campaigns which are a blight on progressivism. The effect is then anyone critiquing that right-wing framework can be viewed as giving aid and comfort to the smearers. Worse, the smearers can decide they should go after the critic too, for having any charity.
One problem here is the Rationalists tend to define “right-wing” as being an uneducated religious fundamentalist. And thus since they aren’t uneducated religious fundamentalists, in their minds, they can’t be “right-wing”. But it’s basically the old joke about “Libertarians are Republicans who want to smoke marijuana” (which doesn’t work so well these days, but bear with me). Rationalists are Republicans who want to be in polyamorous throuple relationships.
What is the defining feature of being right vs left? As our host has noted, Scott explicitly tells people to vote against Donald Trump, so if Trump defines what being right/Republican is, then Scott isn’t that.
Wonks: I think it’s more productively viewed as clusters, and there can be different clusters, rather than one single defining feature. It’s a bit like a question which has come up recently, “Are Mormons Christians?”. Under your definition, the “Never Trump” conservatives can’t be called right-wing, because no matter how extreme their political views, they explicitly tell people to vote against Donald Trump.
With Scott, and “Internet” Rationalism in general, for example, there’s an absolute identification with capital against labor, a willingness to be extraordinarily charitable towards and steelman to the point of rewriting far-right views like NeoReaction while snidely strawmanning the left, and as many people have pointed out, an awful lot of pseudo-scientific racism.
Now, again, I think well of Scott as a person, enjoy many (not all) of his posts, and have a large amount of cultural closeness to Rationalist-types. However, the politics is what it is, and it’s quite right-wing if you don’t get misled by the not-religious-fundamentalist defense.
It’s something of a problem that Trump has been the Republican nominee for the past 3 Presidential elections, and so the last one where he wasn’t on the ballot was 2012, and Slate Star Codex didn’t exist. Since Trump got a majority of the two-party vote in the most recent one, we can simplify and say that he won the median voter. The next question is whether anyone who votes against Trump can thus be considered left of the median. Since there parties other than the main two, one could take a stance of being right of Trump and voting for a more rightwing party. However, Scott has actually endorsed Democrats rather than just rightwing third parties. One could also argue (as many Never Trump conservatives do) that Trump himself doesn’t adhere to what used to be considered conservative principles, but then there isn’t really an objective way to determine whether they or Trump should represent the “right”, and the left vs right terminology can start to seem meaningless. They can say that their version of the right doesn’t include Trump, and you can say that your version of the left doesn’t include Scott and the Never Trump conservatives, but then the political majority is going to disregard you while arguing over the issues actually salient to them.
Because Scott was doxed and we know his last name, we can look up his political donations on Open Secrets. When I do that, they are all to Democrats. You can argue that people can exclusively support Democrats yet still be on the political right, but again it seems like you aren’t defining relative positions based on the median voter, which raises the question of on what other basis we should define it.
>One problem here is the Rationalists tend to define “right-wing” as being an uneducated religious fundamentalist.
That isn’t specific to rationalists, that’s what Left and Right mean in the current political context. Politics largely revolves around race/gender/religion issues rather than a political battle between Capital and Labor.
>an awful lot of pseudo-scientific racism
You probably underestimate the number of prominent and powerful people who privately share those views.
Wonks: I believe you have introduced a subtle fallacy in your chain when you dismiss “… Trump himself doesn’t adhere to what used to be considered conservative principles, but then there isn’t really an objective way …”. This is a key area where I believe Rationalist-types go into complete disconnection from reality. The real world is just full of messy, complicated, my god – subjective – concepts, like “racism” and “justice” and “freedom” and so on. One reaction to this is often to create an absolutely trivial model – like “voted for Trump” – and proclaim that simple model to be the one they’ll use, often reeking of self-justification. If you cannot deal with a very obvious idea of “Never Trump” conservatives voting for a institutional Democrat over a completely unqualified Republican, yet still being very right-wing – then your framework is too simplistic to be useful.
I explained how I was using my terms. While it’s possible to be too broad, it’s also possible to be too narrow. I think my usages are reasonable in that they gesture at important intellectual concepts. Making this about Democrat/Republican obscures those very concepts.
Do you think any of the following description is inaccurate?
“With Scott, and “Internet” Rationalism in general, for example, there’s an absolute identification with capital against labor, a willingness to be extraordinarily charitable towards and steelman to the point of rewriting far-right views like NeoReaction while snidely strawmanning the left, and as many people have pointed out, an awful lot of pseudo-scientific racism.”
I think Alexander represents first and foremost himself, not an ideology. Not following predictable opinion patterns must be a characteristic of any serious (well-read) public intellectual; otherwise they won’t be interesting.
But yes, he is a defining figure of rationalism. A friend who is in those circles tells me there’s a lot of overlap, but that in general rationalists lean more right while EA leans left. And he says the whole left-right axis is a poor description here, which I agree with.
Looking at all this from a relatively remote perspective, both EA and rationalism are descendants of the Californian counterculture. There are strains of libertarianism, (techno-)optimism and so on that don’t sit well with the current US left in particular (social justice, climate doomerism) — which, as we know, is quite popular in certain parts of academia. There’s a lot of prejudice there, and writers like Alexander are seen as The Other: if not positioned as far right by major commentators like Andrew here, then at least quickly projected onto the far right by the commenters. The comment thread here has some unbelievable characterizations, and argumentation that makes me smile when I read it. (Like: “he came out with his racial beliefs [which to me sound at least partly fabricated] five days before Trump’s inauguration, so he must be a Trumpist.” Can an argument be any weaker?)
Both EA and rationalism are major cultural forces now, and they, or people close to them, will get a large new dose of funding from the forthcoming IPOs, mainly Anthropic’s. I’ve heard EA is now somewhat split as well, so as usual the ideological landscape is more diverse on closer inspection. But as a broad stroke, this counterculture is becoming a major one, and it has global reach. They run free educational retreats for selected young technical people here in Europe too.
Left vs. right doesn’t describe the landscape well at all, and people mostly do these movements a disservice when they try to project everything onto a single axis. I think one key to rationalists, and maybe even EA folks, looking far right to some people is that they break the taboos of leftist academic liberalism. Alexander doesn’t recommend “crank medical treatments” as far as I can see, but the culture is open to self-experimentation, which includes supplements, illegal substances, and grey-area things like peptides. And probably mostly out of curiosity, they want to talk about the inheritance and genetics of psychological characteristics, including cognitive ability, temperament and so on. I find all this somewhat refreshing, or at least I did a decade ago.
And finally: the best way to arrive at an approximation of the truth on many of the issues discussed here is now to ask a good LLM. How about doing that instead of writing out your prejudices here? It’d be healthier for both the ecosystem and yourself.
JSi: Not everyone is careful and nuanced in describing politics, and I’ve mentioned, Scott Alexander gets a lot of hate. Still, accounting for all the flaws and weaknesses, I think there’s a valid analysis and critique to be made. I actually find it rather frustrating, as the right-wing nature of the community means it won’t be heard, and it’s true that many leftists just want to give him grief.
His rac(ial)(ist) beliefs are NOT a secret! I don’t feel that he’s particularly notable here, but at the same time, I don’t feel any obligation to cover them up.
I think left vs right is a description that’s reasonable, once you get past the not-a-religious-fundamentalist objection. There’s this self-indulgent streak that they’re special, they transcend the ordinary categories of politics, floating above it all with the Power Of Bayes. Nah, it’s pretty much standard right-wing views of people of their income, race, gender, education. And they’d know this if they actually deigned to read leftist material instead of believing that bloviators like Curtis Yarvin/Moldbug are deep political philosophers.
“Crank medical treatments” is probably a reference to a supposed anti-tooth-decay bacteria making the rounds a while back. That was amazing, in that as far as I know, not a single one of these supposedly Trained Rational Minds tried to organize any sort of even rudimentary scientific recording and testing. I’m not asking for Double-Blind Randomized Control Trial, I mean, just do the best you can to make a *systematic effort* to see if the stuff works or not. Nope, it was (being a little rhetorical here) those repressive government regulations were stopping the heroic technological entrepreneurs from making this world-changing product, and now due to the ability to sell unapproved treatments they can escape the restrictions of the Nanny State. Yes, “right-wing” is a reasonable phrase.
“And probably mostly out of curiosity, …”. Well, strictly written, I can’t disprove that. But … even if so … isn’t it very naive for highly educated people to be asking “Hey, I’m curious, are dark-skinned people really genetically inferior as group to light-skinned people?” Now, I know where this goes, there’s an immediate scream about suppressing supposedly forbidden knowledge (again, “right-wing”). But not to have any sense of the massive amount of pseudo-scientific justification of racism, and when people attempt to explain it, to refuse to take it into account … well once more, “right-wing” seems like a relatively polite word.
Seth –
“With Scott, and Internet Rationalism in general, there’s an absolute identification with capital against labor, a willingness to be extraordinarily charitable towards and steelman to the point of rewriting far right views like NeoReaction while snidely strawmanning the left, and as many people have pointed out, an awful lot of pseudo-scientific racism.”
I’m not extremely familiar with Alexander’s writing, but I’ve read him on and off for years. I think that “far right” isn’t the best label for him. I don’t think he endorses authoritarianism or nativism, as examples.
But I also think you’re right that there is a consistent pattern in how he approaches political arguments. He overlaps with parts of the far right ecosystem on topics like race realism, and more importantly there is a clear affective asymmetry in how he treats the left and the right. Andrew actually linked above to his earlier post on steelmanning, where he quoted my comment about Alexander’s steel-manning of ivermectin advocates – where Alexander bent over backward to steelman the ivermectin advocates, and in doing so he swallowed their framing and ended up strawmanning the entire public health establishment. That is the kind of asymmetry I see.
I have a lot of criticisms of the left/right matrix as a way to describe political ideology, but as a way to describe affective and identity alignment I think it has some utility. From that angle, my impression is that Alexander aligns *affectively* with the right and even with parts of the far right in his consistent antipathy and otherizing of the left. For all of the Less Wrong rhetoric, which I think is epistemically strong in theory, he consistently seems to treat the right as less, less wrong.
That may not put him on the far right of a political matrix, but he is running with the far right affectively, and he is accountable for that, at least because it undermines the Less Wrong project of symmetrical skepticism.
Joshua:
Yes, as I said in my post, it’s not that Alexander is far right, it’s that he’s taking the far right as a starting point. In the same way that Wilson took communism as a starting point, even when he was expressing disagreement with it.
Andrew:
Yeah. I didn’t quite get what you meant the first time, but I see it more clearly now. It’s not that he’s “far right,” it’s that his baseline isn’t neutral. If your starting point is shaped by the far‑right online ecosystem, then even if you reach out toward the right and the left with equal intellectual effort (granting him charity), the result is still asymmetric. His center of gravity starts in a non‑neutral place, and that initial orientation sets the trajectory of the analysis.
In that ivermectin example, the steelmanning wasn’t happening from a neutral midpoint. It was happening from inside a worldview where the far right is taken more seriously, as interesting and rigorous thinkers who deserve to be the reference point. And the left are silly fanatics who scream “horse dewormer” at anyone who’s intellectually curious. Once that’s the starting orientation, the asymmetry propagates through what follows.
Scott has surveyed his readers on their political leanings. I can’t find posts presenting breakdowns now (as opposed to row CSV files), but Google provides these results:
Social Liberal: 36.6%
Libertarian: 16.2%
Social Democrat: 14.1%
Classical Liberal: 11.2%
Progressive: 7.3%
Conservative: 2.4%
Marxist/Socialist/Anarchist: 2.1%
Neoreactionary (NRx) / Alt-Right: 0.8%
Other / No Label: ~9.3%
Every ideology that could be labeled rightwing has a more popular left wing option above it.
Another breakdown from Google was the following:
Left-Leaning / Liberal Plurality: Roughly 55% to 60% of the reader base falls into broader left-of-center spaces (Social Liberal, Social Democrat, Progressive).
Libertarian / Right-Leaning Space: Around 25% to 30% cluster under Libertarian or Classical Liberal frameworks.
Traditional Conservatives: Remain a small minority, hovering consistently around 2% to 4% of the total response base.
The impression that the community is overall rightwing could be the result of a rightwing minority commenting more (I have heard this is the case for many newspaper websites that allow comments), or the mere presence of some rightwingers there being deemed sufficient to categorize the site as rightwing.
In terms of Scott identifying with labor vs capital, I don’t really recall him writing about that.
I also don’t think I would agree that Scott is taking the people he’s responding to as a “starting point”. I think his implicit assumption for cases like ivermectin (which isn’t a matter of political ideology, but just an empirical issue about one specific treatment) is that most of his readers won’t agree with the person he’s responding to, but he will give a thorough analysis that his readers can then point to in order to justify rejecting the claim without having to “do their own research”. He has said he is “against fideisim“, so he actually makes arguments against things that seem obviously wrong (and has an argument in that link for why he thinks that is the right thing for him to do).
Wonks –
I also don’t think I would agree that Scott is taking the people he’s responding to as a ‘starting point’… he’s just giving a thorough analysis that his readers can point to.”
In the ivermectin post, Scott doesn’t just avoid taking the activists as a starting point – he treats them as the epitome of careful, assumption‑free analysis, the kind of people who deserve a long Bayesian reconstruction of their worldview, even though the actual ivermectin movement was conspiratorial, politically motivated, and thus epistemically unsound at its core.
That contrast becomes even sharper when you look at how he characterized the mainstream public‑health response at the time as people “screaming horse dewormer” and refusing to engage.
That’s the structural asymmetry I’m referring to – and I think it tracks better as a propagation of a starting imbalance than as the result of a skewed analytical process.
(Trying not to get lost in the threading again.)
The breakdown posted by WA is interesting, especially the high proportion of people who answered “social liberal.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen that as a political category without a second part, as in “social liberal, economic conservative.” It suggests not really thinking about economics or political structure (authoritarianism vs. democracy, hierarchy vs. egalitarianism) much, and it also suggests not wanting to be associated with “liberals” in general or with the left.
I followed a recommendation to Alexander once but after reading him for a couple of weeks, something put me off and I stopped.
Wonks –
I went back and reread Scott’s original ivermectin post and I need to correct the way I framed my earlier point. I overstated it when I said he treated the ivermectin activists as the “epitome of careful, assumption free analysis.” That was inaccurate and hyperbolic.
Still, in the post, Scott frames the mainstream public health side as intolerant of investigation, the “screaming horse dewormer” crowd, while framing the pro ivermectin side as the people who were at least trying to do the investigation, even if there were methodological problems and sometimes fraud. I think that reflects an asymmetry in how the two sides are treated. There were plenty of people who didn’t support using ivermectin but who absolutely did thorough investigation. Scott talks about those analyses but doesn’t bring them back into the overall picture.
I’m pointing at the political and conspiratorial context around the pro ivermectin movement, the implausible narrative about a massive suppression effort, the strong overlap with anti vaccine and anti establishment communities, and the way those priors should have sharply lowered the credibility of the activist driven case from the start. Scott mentions this overlap, but the way he handles it seems to discount how central it was to the movement’s epistemic posture. He treats it largely as a complicating side issue rather than a core prior lowering factor. He models the distrust motivations sympathetically (via the hostile aliens metaphor) but largely subordinates the movement’s central conspiratorial and politically motivated elements.
I’d add to what Chris says, if in 2026 you wanted to learn about the Frankfurt School, you’d go to the most recent, most comprehensive, and most scholarly book that you had enough background to wade through, and that isn’t Jay. In the 1990s it would have been. A very good book, Grand Hotel Abyss, was published ten years ago. Some time between now and then Jay gave interviews stating that he wrote the book largely as an act of publicity for the Frankfurt School, as they weren’t yet well known. It wouldn’t be surprising if the book was as much about his own theories as theirs. Lots more people have weighed in since then.
Scott self-identifies as a libertarian, and his views on Effective Altruism show pretty clearly that’s he’s on the bleeding heart side of that category.
He’s spent an immense amount of time and effort arguing against the reactionary right, as well as the progressive left. It’s a little bit like saying McCarthy was influenced by communists and is therefore part of that community.
Overall, his social milieu is among progressive-leaning types of the Bay Area. I don’t know that he’s ever voted for a Republican.
Anon:
I don’t have much of a sense of Alexander’s social milieu and, as I noted above, he recommended that his readers vote against Donald Trump. So I’m not saying he has right-wing policy preferences. What I’m saying is that he seems to take far-right positions as a starting point. Even when he disagrees with far-right positions, they’re his standard of reference.
I do not think that Joe McCarthy and communism is a good comparison here, for two reasons. First McCarthy was not an intellectual; he was just a shameless liar. A much better analogue to McCarthy is Donald Trump. Second, McCarthy didn’t argue against any communist positions, he just made things up and used communism as a sort of swear word.
If you want an analogy to Scott Alexander and the far right, I’d go with what I wrote in my above post, and that’s Edmund Wilson and communism. Wilson argued against communism within a community that was sympathetic to communist ideas. Communism was his standard of reference, even while he pushed against it.
Clovis, Alexander celebrated the inauguration by saying that Richard Lynn’s views on race and IQ were obviously correct. In 2014, he wrote to a friend that a purpose of his blog was to spread “nuggets of pure gold” from bloggers like Curtis Yarvin and HBDChick. Peddling racist lies is as popular in his subculture as Tolkien references.
He seems to have changed his views on the current US president, and literary figures often have sordid politics or private lives, but his views that the same genes cause race and IQ are clear.
I don’t believe Scott ever endorsed Trump. Indeed, when I got back to what he wrote during Trump’s first election, he endorsed Hillary Clinton & Jill Stein over Trump. Thus, he does not appear to have “changed his views on the current US president”, rather he consistently opposed Trump.
I neglected to note there he also endorsed Gary Johnson over Trump in 2016. If I had an edit button, I would add that.
Wonks Anonymous, compare his 2015 and 2016 essays like “You are Still Crying Wolf” and his long battle with Internet feminism. I think that at one point Scott Alexander thought POTUS would be less destructive than he actually is, and would empower some of the “grey tribe” figures he admired. Many of his essays in 2025 and 2026 are about how his coalition got what they wanted and it is bad and is that their fault?
I remember You Are Still Crying Wolf. It was not an endorsement of Trump! It’s possible that Scott did underestimate Trump (though the update on that post says “Overall I think the predictions here have been borne out. Trump has proven himself an awful president”), a well-calibrated estimator will do that roughly half the time. It certainly wasn’t any celebration of Trump’s inauguration either. You are free to link to such a “celebration”.
Wonks Anonymous, after years of hinting that he was scared of sharing some of his beliefs, Scott Alexander openly endorsed Richard Lynn’s views on race and IQ on 15 January 2025. The new president was inaugurated on the 20th. It is certainly conceivable that this was a coincidence, just like it is conceivable that a Nazi might visit Wunsiedel Friedhof on 17 August to enjoy the flowers, but I would not bet on either.
Sean’s behavior here is typical of critics of Scott Alexander. Start with an easily-debunked claim (that Scott “celebrated the inauguration”) and then when challenged move to “well sure he condemned Trump but he didn’t condemn him as hard as he condemned feminism.”
The specific post on Lynn was saying that his data on the gap between African-Americans & Africans disproves any attempt to chalk up all IQ gaps to genetics rather than environment. It had nothing to do with Trump. Turok is right: the claim that he did any kind of celebration is easily debunked. Now that it has been debunked, you can simply admit you were wrong about that and write a criticism of his post on Lynn without dragging Trump into it.
Wonks: That Lynn-data post was execrable. It was a pure “mask-off” moment. Now, we again have the problem that not everyone is super-careful with criticism, and it’s easy to get carried away with angry rhetoric on these topics. How much was it related to Trump’s re-election? Who can say? I think “celebration” is not the correct word. But a feeling that the political winds have changed, and now he was able to freely advocate pseudo-scientific racism, where he felt the need to be more circumspect before? Could be, sounds plausible, but I don’t know what’s in his mind.
However, on the specifics, he was knocking down the weakest of weakmen, and then using that to try to get progressives to buy into pseudo-scientific racism. It was such a wildly disconnected and historically ignorant argument, that only a Rationalist could have made it (what they call in their jargon “high decoupling”, aka entirely ignoring the actual world). Though it did continue to convince me that’s he sincere in his views, because it was such a poor attempt at persuading anyone outside his audience.
Scott: “But it does suggest that the genetic component is less than 100%.”
That is, they are willing to grant that in extremes, people who grow up poor and starving and environmentally poisoned, may not achieve their full genetic potential. However, that pseudo-scientific racists will admit this, is not a good argument for progressives to embrace their data and framework.
I feel like there’s a gulf where it’s enormously difficult to convey what an insane post this was. On reflection, I think it’s a good example of the point that he writes from a perspective where the far-right is to be treated with charity and as intellectual explorers, while leftists are viewed as persecuting them out of close-minded enforcement of ideological dogma. And he’s doing this here with a whole bunch of people where “racist” is an accurate and proper description.
Seth:
I think you’re underselling the appeal of racism as a framework for understanding the social world, especially for people who are near the top of the racial heap. Lots of smart people have racism at the core of their model of the world: not just smart people on the alt-right today, but also going back to people like Francis Galton and just about everyone in the pre-modern era. Racism is often used to justify existing social, economic, legal, and political inequalities, so it makes sense that it’s often linked to conservative politics, but the overall framework is appealing enough that you’ll see lots of people with liberal political views who also find a lot of value in a racial understanding of the world. One could say the same of gender essentialism.
My guess is that the reaction of Alexander etc. to the discredited work of Lynn is similar to what any biologist’s reaction would be to, say, the famously suspicious numbers of Gregor Mendel. If Mendel or his assistant faked the numbers, that wouldn’t make you doubt the theory of evolution; it would at most just remind you that the real world is kinda complicated. Similarly, finding out that there are shady characters in the world of race science would just be an indication that there are shady characters in race science, not that the underlying premises are flawed.
Right after the part you quoted he explained why anti-racists should embrace the finding: “On the other hand, if we doubt Lynn and insist Malawi must have a true IQ in the 80s, then the environmentalist argument falls apart and we should insist on a genetic one.” which is why “If you take anti-racism seriously, this should make you breath a sigh of relief!” Scott isn’t there comparing Lynn to Mendel (though my understanding is that Lynn is indeed known for the numerical unreliability Andrew refers to), he’s saying that specific finding is more favorable to one side of the argument than the other.
Seth, you are indeed failing to communicate the problem with the post. I suppose data that would be even MORE favorable to the environmentalist position would be if Malawi had even LOWER scores (since you appear to agree that their environment would indeed lower their performance below their potential), but I’m not aware of anyone who’s actually making that argument so I don’t see why Scott would be dinged for preferring Lynn’s findings to this hypothetical-lower-than-Lynn. Hopefully you can provide an explanation so I don’t have to imagine such arguments you could hypothetically make.
Wonks: Indeed, I see the failure problem, but I just don’t know how to deal with it. There’s an entire perspective difference. To step back again, if someone wants to tackle a complex real world problem, they must, absolutely must, deal with it being messy and complicated and having all sort things which are mostly true but not completely so, and full of phenomena which are logical paradoxes at the limit but nonetheless empirically good models, and so on. Rationalists seem to have self-inflicted bad brain damage on themselves here, deeming that in their jargon as “low decoupling”, to be absolutely avoided as mind-killer, and taken their highest value as proceeding only from the most trivial models and abstract theorizing (“high decoupling”). And this also interacts badly cognitively with the race/class background they usually have.
Pseudo-scientific racism exists as an argument to justify oppression as genetically determined. There’s literally *hundreds of years* of this, encompassing the US Civil War and conflicts not quite of the same magnitude. It literally tore the country apart once, and the repercussions are still being fought over.
And we have Scott writing about how there’s this shoddy racist data generated by a notorious racist, but it has been somewhat replicated by some other more modern racists (I am using that word advisedly and deliberately), but why aren’t anti-racists eagerly leaping into the racists’ rhetorical trap? He can’t understand this, it must be because progressives are repressive closed-minded dogmatists, as opposed to the supposed brave intellectual explorers of racial genetic inferiority.
[N.b.: The trap is: “Even you yourself explain it as 100% environmental, don’t we need to have an Institute of Race Science for those who explain it as “partially” genetic?”]
I think well of Scott. I enjoy many of his writings. I’m at a loss with this stuff.
As in: “On the other hand, if we doubt Lynn and insist Malawi must have a true IQ in the 80s, then the environmentalist argument falls apart and we should insist on a genetic one.”
No, we can say “It’s not worthwhile to deal with this junk at all. It rests on extremely dubious theory, it’s infested with frauds and hacks, it’s pushed by bad-faith actors. We don’t have to respect it or theorize about it.”
And the Rationalist replies “Oh, horrors, that’s Ad-Hominem Argument. It’s Low-Decoupling! It’s politics – Lysenko!”. I grasp this. But the alternative is being steamrollered by the worst liars around.
SF “low” and “high coupling”
That’s fascinating. It’s as if Rationalists believe moral human beings are required to think like “analytic” (Anglosphere-style) philosophers 24/7 regardless of the subject matter. Is there a book on Rationalism, or would I have to wade through the LessWrong archives? Or is it a IYKYK kind of thing?
I was going to post on this but found Alexander’s effort so wrong-headed that I couldn’t think how to formulate a sensible response. Seth has made the pertinent point:
”No, we can say “It’s not worthwhile to deal with this junk at all. It rests on extremely dubious theory, it’s infested with frauds and hacks, it’s pushed by bad-faith actors. We don’t have to respect it or theorize about it.”
Really, someone with some integrity and interest in exploring this issue might be expected to look at the long history of Lynn’s outwardly racist garbage, consider some of the abundant critiques and realize that it’s probably not a suitable topic for expressing how clever one’s writing can be.
Elsewhere on this thread it was pointed out that Alexander effectively set his “median” towards the extreme of the topic he was writing on and that’s the case here. Alexander seems not to have engaged with any source on Lynn’s “research” other than Aporia – one of the mouthpieces of the Human Diversity Fund (HDF). The Aporia editor is Bo Winegard who I referred to earlier on this thread (paper retracted for using Lynn’s flawed data), the head of the HDF is Emil Kirkegaard who created the organization from what was the Pioneer Fund headed by Richard Lynn until Lynn’s death I believe. Alexander in his article thanks Kirkegaard for clarifying a point of misunderstanding. Anyway, the Pioneer Fund, HD and Kirkegaard are worth Googling – it’s pseudo “race” “science” all the way down.
Alexander is effectively engaging in normalizing this dismal rubbish, which is in fact a significant aim of the HDF and Aporia.
J: I don’t know of any good book on Rationalism, but maybe I’m not the best person to recommend one. It’s really very niche. And there’s a lot of what I call “Ick – NERDS!” attacks on them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m culturally close to them, and I think their hearts are in the right place. My critiques are more in sorrow than in anger, as I believe their intellectual project failed miserably. And it’s hardly the first time idealistic intellectuals had that happen. Many early intellectual supporters of Communism were very sincere, but that didn’t end well at all.
FYI, here’s a very old thread talking about the “decouplers” (sigh, same topic):
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8fnch2/high_decouplers_and_low_decouplers/
SF:
Thanks. I had just found some long articles examining the concept of decoupling, and at this point what is most striking to me is how different Alexander’s approach to the topic is. I can only speculate as to why he prefers that approach.
I think there ought to be a way of distinguishing Rationalism as a set of ideas, which can be examined and debated, from Rationalism as a story about why a certain educational path carried out by a set of very online people (with no relevant training) transforms an ordinary person into a highly moral superhero, but I guess we all can wish, can’t we?
J, not that one, if you want a journalistic book on the Rationalists and Effective Altruists and related movements, Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever is just fine. If you want an academic analysis by a philosopher, the reflective altruism blog is book-length.
Seth, indeed you don’t “know how to deal with it”. You point out that the real world is messy and complicated and people must grapple with its details, but you don’t seem willing to do that yourself. From my perspective, it is you have inflicted “damage” on your own ability to do so.
You say that Lynn’s data is shoddy. Fine, I have read him described as a “notorious number bumbler”. Then you say the newer data replicating some findings is also shoddy. Maybe it is or isn’t, I’ve heard less about that than Lynn’s. So I ask you: whose data is NOT shoddy? What can you use as a basis of comparison to say their data is less accurate? Is it a “hypothetical lower-than-Lynn” I mentioned? I don’t see you responding at all to the point about which side of the argument is supported by gaps between Africans & African-Americans, even though the poor environment of Africa is precisely what environmentalists would emphasize and has motivated much in the way of charitable giving (including my own, to this day).
Scott’s low-decoupling approach does not result in him being “steamrollered”. In cases like his ivermectin post he was able to go through and explain why studies don’t support it as being effective against Covid. In his separate posts on Covid itself, he was able to explain why we can be confident it did indeed kill over a million Americans, and how this can’t be attributed to misclassification or the effects of the vaccine itself. You might think this is a waste of Scott’s time, but in his post on fideism he explained why he thinks of himself as being like the college student who is the appropriate debater for creationists. Afterward, anyone encountering such arguments can link to Scott’s posts rather than doing some “It’s not my job to enlighten you” schtick that leaves the field to people who actually are willing to discuss such things (even if they do so dishonestly).
Calling Lynn’s work shoddy and Lynn a bumbler doesn’t quite hit the spot Wonks. It’s nasty garbage and someone writing based on it might be expected to know this. Anyway, what about the Malawi result that Alexander refers to (Lynn assigns an IQ for Malawi of 60)
This comes from:
Schooling and basic aspects of intelligence: A natural quasi-experiment in Malawi by Fons J.R. Van de Vijver and Symen A. Brouwers (2008) J. Appl. Develop. Psychol.
IQ’s weren’t measured in this study. They used the so-called Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices (RCPM) test. Raven who devised the test stated that it couldn’t be used to calculate IQ values. Anyway, 268 youngsters aged between 7 and 14 were tested. 20 had never attended school, 209 were at school and 39 were dropouts.
Here’s a quote from the paper to give some context:
Participants were recruited from five villages in the Ntcheu district, a rural area in Malawi, approximately 200 km south of the capital Lilongwe and bordering on Mozambique. Ntcheu District has a population of 370,757 (Government of Malawi, n.d.). About 76.1% of the population lives below the poverty line (defined as living below$2 a day; Rural Poverty Portal, 2007). The main source of income is subsistence farming. Children in this area spend much time carrying out various family survival tasks. In particular unschooled children and dropouts usually help their parents in farming and the household.
So the children were tested and the results from the Raven’s test scores were converted to IQ’s in a manner that Lynn doesn’t properly document (maybe someone can help here). This number (60) from 268 youngsters now becomes the National IQ for Malawi (population around 20 million). Similarly, Lynn’s National “IQ” data for Angola is based on 19 individuals; Republic of Congo 88.. and so on.
This is obviously garbage of the highest order but Alexander doesn’t question it.
One of the creepy things that Lynn does is to take data from studies with respectable aims (assessing whether individuals perform better once they have had some experience with taking tests; assessing whether a particular testing method is suitable for inter-group comparisons etc.) and then extract inappropriate results for “converting” to his “IQ”. One example of each:
One: Wober 1969 in a paper entitled: “Meaning and Stability of Raven’s Matrices test among Africans” tested 86 factory workers in Nigeria to assess use of a particular test of “eductive” reasoning. The workers were tested initially and then 6 months later. The mean score in the first test was 15.9; second test 18.73. Wober stated that “a strong case can be made that the second testing gave a distinctly more valid measure of whatever abilities the Matrices and EFT involve.”
Lynn ignored the second test result and “converted” the first test result to an “IQ” (64)
Two: Owen 1989: “Test and Item Bias: The suitability of the junior aptitude test as a common test battery for white, Indian and black pupils in Standard 7.” From the abstract: “This study was undertaken to shed light on problems concerning the construction and use of a common test battery for various South African population groups.” The black cohort was restricted to the KwaZulu region of Natal (English second language) due to unrest in SA as a result of growing resistance against apartheid.
Lynn called this study: “the single best study of the Negxoid intelligence” (I inserted the “x”). In fact due to a number of serious biases highlighted by Owen (details are quite funny but this post is too long) – Owen stated that significant parts of the test were “virtually unusable”. That didn’t deter Lynn – he used the “unusable” results to manufacture an IQ value of 69 for the Black students..
Another thing Lynn does is to disregard data he doesn’t like. A paper by Crawford-Nutt – referring to a study by someone called Pons reported that Black male and female students from forms IV and V in a good school in residential area of Soweto (students more highly motivated and dedicated to scholastic achievement) had a mean score slightly higher than the equivalent age group of white students on which the test was normalised. Lynn knew of this study but chose to ignore it.
Likewise if I may quote somewhat haphazardly from a 2010 paper by Whicherts et al: “The dangers of unsystematic selection methods and the representativeness of 46 samples of African test-takers”, referring to Lynn’s weird data selection choices:
“… they” (i.e. Lynn) “rejected as unrepresentative data from the standardization of WAIS-III among English-speaking South Africans (Claassen, Krynauw, Paterson & Mathe, 2001), because it was “a well-educated sample”.” (IQ values well above 80 so not to Lynn’s liking)
“… another sample (average IQ of 96) was considered unrepresentative by Lynn and Meisenberg because the children were from a “fee-paying school in Nigeria [which] is evidently an elite sample”.”
“…Lynn and Meisenberg rejected a sample (average IQ of 91) in Ohuche and Ohuche (1973) as problematic in part because “the ages of the children are unknown”.” [n.b that might have some validity except that doesn’t normally stop Lynn]
Summing up Whicherts et al say: “In the examples given above, the exclusion rule was applied only to samples that averaged relatively high IQs, but not to samples that averaged IQs near or below 70.”
Lynn (and his Aporia chums) want to insinuate that his garbage data says something about innate intelligence in sub-Saharan Black Africa. Going back to the original data suggests some different (but obvious, I would have thought) interpretations, e.g.:
a) sub poverty line children unfamiliar with testing are likely to score poorly on tests of aptitude. It’s not clever to assign an IQ score for an entire country of 20 million based on the manufactured scores from 268 children in a single location.
b) allowing testees to become familiar with the aims and procedures yields considerably improved test results.
c) obvious biases (cultural and language as in the Natal student study) results in reduced test scores.
d) where cohorts are appropriately matched in terms of scholastic motivation and achievement black students in SA were able to do as well as whites.
The reference to Lynn being a number bumbler was not a matter of discretion in which studies should be considered “representative”, I mean that some of his stuff was just objectively wrong because he did a bad job of data analysis and later work doesn’t have such errors.
You agree that sub-poverty line children should be expected to score lower on aptitude tests. This is the key thing Scott was harping on: the lower the scores in such countries, then the larger the gap between them and other countries where there is less poverty, and thus the more that poverty appears to be the cause of such low scores. This is the case even if Lynn himself was too stupid to understand that point and decided to stack the deck full of low scores under the belief that would make the opposite point. The alternate results vs Lynn that you present are all higher-than-Lynn, whereas I have been saying that more environmentalist ones would be lower-than-Lynn. Thus, the alternate higher scores would favor hereditarianism over environmentalism. Perhaps you believe that actually is the case and Scott is wrong to trust data supporting his more environmentalist position.
Wonks Anonymous, Lynn didn’t do “a bad job of data analysis” – he more or less concocted his numbers to suit his racist views. The fact that his “IQ” scores (which are not IQ scores in fact) are garbage is the reason that several of his papers have been retracted or are being considered for retraction and that papers based on his garbage data by others have been retracted (this is excellent news for the pseudo “race” “scientists” who can whine about suppression of free speech).
I’m not going to engage with the “argument” that Alexander uses other than to say, since you raised it, that the higher test scores that others have found likely reinforce (i) that Lynn, as we know, concocted numbers to suit his preconceptions (I tried to give some example in my annoyingly long post above) and (ii) that where individuals have an appropriate educational and motivational background they can do well on tests of aptitude. That’s consistent with a large environmental component to apparent group differences in abilities to do well in these sorts of tests, but we’re not going to come to any conclusion on this based on Alexander’s sophistry.
What’s more interesting to me is Alexander’s motivations. Alexander locates his writing on this topic firmly within the pseudo “race” “science” sphere. He “normalizes” Lynn’s work with the “maybe Lynn’s methods worked, maybe they didn’t; my friends at the pseudo “race” “science” organizations thinks they’re fine so it’s all up in the air right now” (paraphrasing, of course). Elsewhere on this thread it’s been pointed out that he uses this approach with creationism (“we can learn something from that Behe chap”) and conspiracy theorising (invermectin). Who knows whether he really believes this stuff or whether it’s useful for accumulating an audience.
Wonks: I’m actually amused when you say “From my perspective, it is you have inflicted “damage” on your own ability to do so.”. One of things I think about regarding this topic is the Civil War “Cornerstone Speech” by the Vice-President of the Confederacy, partially devoted to justifying slavery. I’m amazed that there’s parts of that speech about *scientific* racism which seem like they could be written today.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech
“The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.”
Basically, a slaver telling an abolitionist, “No, *you’re* the one who has intellectual reasoning blinded by your political ideology”.
It’s disheartening to see how far back this goes. And how little it changes.
Which brings me to my failure of communication. It’s as if you did not grasp what I was saying. Not that you disagree, but it “bounces off” as I think of it. I believe *in some cases* it’s completely reasonable not to engage with the minutia of junk data pushed by bad-faith actors, and to point out the politics of it. It’s like you keep asking “Why won’t you leap into the rhetorical trap?” (which is again that since there *could* be a genetic explanation, then “race science” and its purveyors should be treated with intellectual respect, and the extreme charity verging on sanewashing applied to some right-wing views). I don’t think this is a hard concept. And once more, I know it can go wrong, but that’s the point of things being complicated in the real world.
Kudos to Chris for the detailed refutation. I have no patience for it nowadays, and it’s exactly the sort of material that I believe Scott Alexander improperly ignores.
Chris, the examples you gave are not “concocting” numbers, like Gino or Ariely have been accused of doing. They are of taking data from studies done by others, including some as “representative” and others as not. It’s my understanding that there are cases where Lynn had no data for some countries, so he treated their neighbors as representative and came up with estimates via that. That could be called “concocting”, and as time went on and more data was gathered there would be no point in using such concoctions from an unreliable writer (the Aporia post links to Nathan Cofnas saying that applies to Lynn’s estimates generally).
You agree with me (and Scott) that environmental effects can raise or lower scores, and that this applies in Africa. Africans are known to be significantly more impoverished than African-Americans, more malnourished, more subject to parasitic infections, have less funding for schools etc. Thus a theory in which environmental effects on IQ scores dominate predicts significantly lower scores for Africans than African-Americans. This is the point Scott was making. He mentions the methodological problems with Lynn’s work up top, but the rest of his post isn’t about that at all and instead what the implications of such data would be. Thus it applies even if the data is completely made up and Scott is cynically advocating for its acceptance as more favorable to environmentalism vs hereditarianism. If you want to be a bold truth-teller and say we should reject such nonsense and prefer higher scores as more representative of such countries, you can do so, but be aware that scores closer to African-Americans favor hereditarianism over environmentalism (at least versions of environmentalism I’m aware of where greater poverty etc should have accordingly greater effects, but perhaps not some version where all the effect comes from a smaller degree of poverty and beyond that it doesn’t make a difference).
Scott’s take on Behe and ivermectin aren’t taking that approach. His argument there isn’t based on whose-ox-is-gored. What he said of Behe is that grappling with his arguments helped firm up Scott’s understanding of his own position. This is akin to John Stuart Mill’s quote that “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that”. In the ivermectin case, he does what he pointedly does NOT do for the Lynn controversy (he doesn’t even mention Jelte Wicherts, unlike the Noah Carl post he links to) by actually going over lots of different studies on a topic and reasoning about which are more vs less reliable, ultimately concluding that the geographically variable factor of parasitic worm infections was causing different results (ok, I guess there is a connection to the African IQ post, and Scott did mention the percentage of the Malawi population infected by worms).
Seth, whether it’s worth engaging with certain actors depends on a number of things, including how much you value your own time. I’ve been willing to spend my time arguing with complete nobodies who have approximately no influence on anything for “someone is wrong on the internet” reasons, but others will vary on that. One thing I agree with Scott on in his “fideism” posts is that abandoning the field to your opponents is a terrible idea. Other people are going to be curious about controversies, and if the only people making arguments are those opponents, they have the advantage even if they’re wrong. There is the complicating factor of Brandolini’s law in which an honest analyst can have all their time wasted by someone who easily generates nonsense faster than it can be refuted, which was why it was concluded that smart college students should be the ones debating creationists rather than actual scientists. Additionally, after an initial engagement one can conclude that there are diminishing marginal returns to further engagement, which is why Scott has (I believe) only had two follow-ups to his ivermectin post, in which he responded to both his own commenters and then to Alexandros Contra (the person he was initially responding to). Such an approach is fit for a generalist who doesn’t focus on one topic to master, which would be a shortcoming in some scientific debates (such as fundamental physics) but seems appropriate for a more marginal figure like Contra.
Wonks –
Is he really (still?) a fan of Yarvin?
Joshua, Alexander keeps most of his beliefs esoteric, but Yarvin is part of his Bay Area nerd subculture, and he keeps talking about Yarvin on topics as different as dating and the political situation in the USA. As Seth and our host say, Alexander starts from the premise that far-right bloggers are important contributors to the conversation, like someone else would keep bringing up Chomsky or a centrist paper like the Globe and Mail. The problem with this is that you end up in a committee room arguing to send the Kulaks to Siberia not liquidate them.
Nothing about that link indicates that Curtis Yarvin is an “important contributor to the conversation”. Instead, it was a satirical post which mocked the attention Yarvin receives from journalists. In the full post linked form there, the Yarvin impersonator is spouting streams of complete nonsense without people realizing he’s a phony.
As for Scott’s current opinion on Yarvin, thankfully he has a post explicitly calling him a sellout to the populist right.
Wonks –
Wonks —
he has a post explicitly calling him a sellout
A quick read of that post (there’s too much inside‑baseball for me to follow in detail) shows someone who is very deliberately *not* criticizing Yarvin on his long-standing, underlying worldview. The “sellout” part is not about the core anti‑democratic ideological structure that seems to have attracted Alexander to Yarvin in the first place
I’ll rephrase my question: Is Alexander (still?) a fan of Yarvin’s core ideological worldview, the neoreactionary philosophy, even if he criticizes Yarvin’s more recent turn.
Maybe you should do a less quick and more thorough read of the post, which is explaining how Cathy Young’s current criticism of Yarvin is correct, which would of course be most relevant to whether he is currently a fan of Yarvin (the question Joshua asked). If you want Scott’s views on neo-reaction, fortunately he also wrote an Anti-Reactionary FAQ.
Wonks –
OK. I took your advice and read it more carefully. And yes, Scott thinks Yarvin sold out, or didn’t sell out but feels duty-bound to support Trump anyway. To me that seems a pretty incoherent juxtaposition, but it does show he is not a fan of Yarvin as a rightwing populist. That part is answered.
What I am still left with, though, is the impression that Scott treats Yarvin’s underlying worldview, the neoreactionary frame he thinks Yarvin either did or did not sell out on, as a legitimate right wing philosophy that merits respectful steelmanning even if he disagrees with it in substance. Whereas he does not seem to extend that same level of charitable steelmanning to left wing worldviews he thinks have gone too far.
Do you agree with that assessment?
Again, I would point to his anti-reactionary FAQ. There he specifically addresses the arguments of both Yarvin and Michael Anissimov as prominent representatives of neo-reaction, claiming that his earlier post on neo-reaction did “too good a job of steelmanning” without acknowledging the arguments that Scott regarded as dumbest from actual reactionaries. As for whether he thinks people on the left deserve steelmanning, a quick search on SSC for the term “steelman” turns up this where he tries to apply that to Simon Sarris’ advocacy of a jobs guarantee over Scott’s preference for an income guarantee. As it happens, this is relevant to the point made elsewhere about him siding with capital vs labor, because Scott’s argument depends on capitalism being to some extent “awful” and causing “misery”, hence him regarding an income guarantee as being superior and not requiring people to participate in work.
You refer to it as an “incoherent juxtaposition”, but Scott ends his post by saying “I think it’s more likely he feels genuine despair about the state of the country, his faux cheerfulness has finally cracked, and he’s decided it’s worth compromising his principles for a long shot at getting some of what he wants”. So he doubts the possibility that Yarvin hasn’t sold out his principles and is instead trying to adhere to them by supporting any Presidential administration regardless of party (which in the case of Biden would make him more interesting than your typical right-winger, though Scott dismisses those as “tongue-in-cheek” and “ironic”).
As for whether Scott regards any of Yarvin’s earlier writings with respect, indeed he does (“deserves a similar level of respect [to Sam Altman for setting up OpenAI as a non-profit]”)… specifically because those writings contain indictments of the sort of populism typified by Trump and can now be wielded against Yarvin’s current stance. Scott writes that he hoped Yarvin would discard his dumbest ideas in order to focus on better ones (although since Scott presents some of them as laughable, as with “I swear I’m not making this up”, you might need to have “better” mean “less harmful” rather than practical/plausible), but concludes he has done the opposite.
Wonks –
“Scott regarded his earlier post on neo‑reaction as doing ‘too good a job of steelmanning’ without acknowledging the arguments he thought were dumbest from actual reactionaries.”
This convo is getting a little unwieldy, so I’m going to try to wrap it up with a concluding comment. I’m not going to ask more direct questions because the ones I did ask didn’t really get direct answers, and that’s fine, but I’ll just be a little more explicit about what I was trying to get at.
My main interest here was in vetting my sense that Scott isn’t “biased” in any simple way, but that his writing ends up uneven because of what I called a propagation of his baseline orientation. I came across a quote on the RationalWiki where he says he doesn’t get raving mad at right wing extremism in the same way he does at left wing extremism, and that seemed related to what I was trying to articulate. I don’t want to make too much out of that one quote, and I’m not going to take the time to get a comprehensive understanding of his whole body of work, but it did fit the general shape of the impression I was exploring.
I’m trying to understand a comparative pattern, and specific examples of him steelmanning something on the left or criticizing something on the right don’t really answer that question, because those kinds of examples could still exist even if my basic concept were applicable. You seem to have a very comprehensive understanding of his output, so if you wanted to weigh in on that specific question directly, that would be helpful.
I did get a little closer to clarity on the more narrow issue about whether he’s a “fan” of Yarvin. Where I land on that is that he seems largely sympathetic to some of the underlying concepts in Yarvin’s worldview. That’s not an indictment; I can find good things in Trump’s beliefs too, as an analogy. But I would only very cautiously look at Trump’s beliefs outside the context in which he expresses them(e.g.,he lies about his beliefs constantly), and with Yarvin it feels like Scott is more willing to feel less constrained to ground Yarvin’s world view in a full context. I can’t say that’s inherently wrong. It just seems like the kind of thing that might reflect an underlying orientation or a shift in how he brackets context, and that’s part of what I’m trying to understand.
What I was trying to ask is whether Scott does something similar with left wing views he thinks have gone too far. With Yarvin and some right wing extremism, he seems to approach it in a kind of intellectually curious “just asking questions” mode, and I don’t mean that in a cynical way. I’m not opposed to that mode in general; I just think it always has to be balanced with context. When the bracketing becomes too complete, it can function as a kind of epistemic red flag or at least a sign of an underlying orientation, and that’s part of what I’m trying to understand here. My sense is that he brackets context less with the left than with the right, but I’m not certain, and that’s the uncertainty I was trying to explore.
If you want to directly tell me I’m wrong about that, that’s fine. If you’d rather not respond at all, that’s also fine. I won’t take your word as definitive either way, but I will treat it as something to factor into how I think about the probabilities. I’m not making a normative claim about what he should do; I’m just trying to understand the shape of his epistemic posture.
Joshua, I haven’t seen that quote, as I don’t read RationalWiki (I only know of it that a deranged former neo-Nazi was responsible for much of their content, and even after his banning there still is). I also don’t think that your subjective impression of an asymmetry between left vs right is good enough. Elsewhere in these comments I posted survey results showing that Scott’s readers identify more with the left than the right, even though many people have the subjective impression that it’s the other way around. In order to establish a “pattern” I think you need actual data.
Wonks –
Someone linked the RationalWiki. Not sure how the contributions of a former neo-Nazi are relevant to a quote of Scott, especially (ironically?) since in part I was talking about what Scott may have gained from looking past distasteful elements of Yarvin to see what Scott thinks are nuggets of gold amidst the fascistic elements.
Yes, I agree that my subjective impressions of asymmetry are not “good enough.” That was core to my responses to you. I was asking about *your* impression because you apparently have spent a lot of energy following the details of Scott’s output.
Surveys of his readers are only indirectly useful for evaluating the potential asymmetries in Scott’s output. Referencing them is kind of similar to pointing to isolated examples of criticism of Yarvin and steelmanning of left-wing views.
Of course “actual data” would be useful for assessing the big picture to the extent they’re calibrated to be representative. Short of that, we’re left with subjective evaluations of patterns (not sure why you put that in quote marks). I asked you for yours because you seem to be unusually familiar with his output. When you don’t have great data that’s sometimes better than the impressions of people who are far less familiar with the evidence.
My subjective impression is that Scott’s variation is not based on right vs left. Some things he’s willing to dive into, and other things he’s less interested in will get a brief dismissal. In cases like Covid/ivermectin there’s an obvious reason why he would do that. In a case where he compared notorious fan-fiction “My Immortal” to Faust’s Goethe Part 2, it’s the opposite. In many of the former cases it seems like Scott already had his conclusion and all the effort is just to show that he is still justified in holding that conclusion. But there are also cases where he doesn’t really come to any conclusion but still wants to share his steps leading up to that.
Wonks:
In my post from a few years ago, Why I’m skeptical of “steelmanning”: By bending over backward to see things from the other person’s point of view, you’re implicitly dismissing other perspectives I discussed a problem I have with Alexander’s approach.
I admire Alexander’s questing perspective and his willingness to keep writing to help himself figure things out. This is a strategy I use too!
My problem discussed in the above-linked post was that, in his attempt to be open and steelmanning, Alexander wrote:
and
The first bit is ridiculous, as is the second. Pharma executives are just people, and, yeah, I’m sure some of them are bad people, and they’re in a business that’s all about making money. But to say that it’s “extremely plausible” that “elites” are “covering up ivermectin” . . . c’mon. Also ridiculous is the claim that “health officials” are not “good doctors.” As I wrote earlier, if, as a health official, you’re a “good doctor” and “your only goal is to save your patient,” one of the steps you will do to save your patient is to convince him or her to take a vaccine when it is available, and one step along this way is to speak out against vaccine deniers and people who hype dubious cures.
Ok, nobody’s perfect. I’m sure I have some flawed posts in this blog’s history too. My point is not that Alexander had a post including some silly things. My point is that, in (what I see as) his attempt to “steelman” the ivermectin conspiracy position, he uncritically accepted various ridiculous positions. The result is, even if he ends up saying that ivermectin is not an effective covid treatment, he’s sandwiched this in support for stupid conspiracy theories. And I think this is a problem with what he’s using as reference points for his arguments.
To summarize:
Steelmanning is presented as an approach to logical thinking and open-mindedness. But I think it can also end up being a replacement for these things.
Wonks –
“My subjective impression is that Scott’s variation is not based on right vs left.”
I can’t tell from that whether I made my perspective clear. I’m not speculating that his variation is based on left vs right per se. I’m suggesting that there’s an asymmetry because of his [baseline orientation., which shows up in outcomes like the strange steelmanning Andrew keeps pointing to – where Scott was effectively saying it’s entirely plausible that there’s a vast conspiracy among public health officials all over the world to suppress an effective treatment for a disease killing millions because Big Pharma, groupthink, and a completely unscientific intolerance for any alternative point of view.
“Some things he’s willing to dive into, and other things he’s less interested in will get a brief dismissal.”
Sure. And then the question is whether there’s a pattern that emerges from his baseline, not a pattern about ideology or topic‑direction. For example, is there anything relevant about why he’s willing to spend so much time digging through the views of Yarvin – someone whose worldview is, at minimum, authoritarian‑adjacent, to find nuggets of gold? That’s the kind of asymmetric interpretive charity I’m trying to understand.
“In cases like Covid/ivermectin there’s an obvious reason why he would do that.”
Of course. I’m not suggesting there wouldn’t be (and I found his work on that useful). It’s not that he dove into that topic. That alone wouldn’t reflect an asymmetry – but how he did it, including the aforementioned steelman. That’s where the potential asymmetric epistemic depth comes in, again as a manifestation of the baseline rather than a standalone pattern.
“In many of the former cases it seems like Scott already had his conclusion and all the effort is just to show that he is still justified in holding that conclusion. But there are also cases where he doesn’t really come to any conclusion but still wants to share his steps leading up to that.”
That seems orthogonal to the issue I’m exploring. I’m not focused on whether he pre‑decides conclusions or wanders through them. I’m trying to understand whether there’s a [pattern in his epistemic posture that flows from his baseline – a pattern that shapes how he brackets context, how he allocates depth, and how he distributes interpretive charity.
Andrew:
In the very next sentence after saying the theory is “extremely plausible”, Scott then discusses pharmaceutical companies pushing their branded drugs over generics (including a paper on ketamine he wrote), which your commenter Joshua agreed was plausible. Joshua said it was not plausible for the rest of the medical field to do so… which was Scott said in the very next paragraph! “If you have a lot of experience with pharma, you know who lies and who doesn’t, and you know what lies they’re willing to tell and which ones they shrink back from.” Scott thinks that he’s an insider who knows from experience that the dishonesty of pharma companies is not shared by everyone in the field who has commented on ivermectin, but he knows that outsiders won’t be as good at distinguishing them so to them it would seem “plausible” based on that financial incentive.
As for the other paragraph you quoted, I think that’s some excessive hyperbole which, unlike the previous example, is not fixed by the larger context of the post. However, I will note that the paragraph itself is not a matter of “health officials” not being “good doctors”. It’s about how a good doctor will behave in that context he characterized hyperbolically (which is to do what helps the patient regardless of social pressure, and in this case ivermectin doesn’t help). Scott doesn’t at all disagree on encouraging people to take vaccines, in in the section where he discusses the link between vaccine denialism and ivermectin boosterism he said the evidence against the former is much more solid than the latter (and has discussed how Covid vaccines help rather than harm in his other posts on Covid deaths).
Joshua:
See my response to Andrew on what Scott was saying when he referred to that as “plausible”.
You claim there is an asymmetry. An asymmetry between what and what? You say you’re not speculating it’s based on left vs right, so would populist/crank/marginal vs establishment be the axis? I could see something like that: Scott sees himself as akin to the smart college student fit to debate creationists, so he does deep dives on ivermectin etc. He’s not criticizing vaccines, so there’s no need for him to “steelman” them the way he did ivermectin. The closest thing might be that Scott expressed surprised that there were so many vocal opponents of the amyloid hypothesis for alzheimers vs proponents that he asked if anyone representing the orthodox position would argue in its favor (after an entry in the book review contest presented the opponents’ case), resulting in this guest post, but again that’s someone who actually agrees with the position being argued for rather than steelmanning what they oppose (with Scott himself not appearing to take a position either way, but perhaps implicitly endorsing the orthodox one).
Wonks –
“In the very next sentence after saying the theory is ‘extremely plausible’…”
Like Scott, you’re bracketing the context in a way that looks to me reflective of a non‑neutral baseline (him within the political spectrum, you within the spectrum of views on Scott).
You’re echoing Scott’s narrowing the notion of “it’s possible that a drug company might push a patented drug over an effective generic” and treating it as if it’s interchangeable with the actualclaim circulating in the ivermectin ecosystem: that drug companies, in cahoots with public‑health officials all over the globe, along with thousands of medical and biological researchers, virologists, immunologists, and the entire ecosystem of drug companies (including their own researchers), hid from the public an incredibly safe, miraculously efficacious treatment at the cost of millions of lives.
When I spoke of what is “extremely plausible,” I was referring to the first and not the second. And this is why Scott’s steelman was ridiculous: it conflated the two. What Scott ignored was how those two claims were being blurred together, and how a counter‑industry cynically exploited that conflation for fun and profit.
Here’s what else Scott said: “But the experts have beclowned themselves again and again throughout this pandemic, from the first stirrings of ‘anyone who worries about coronavirus reaching the US is dog‑whistling anti‑Chinese racism’…” He puts that in quotes, ignoring the actual context of the early‑pandemic China‑bashing, and presents the most extreme version possible. So he’s bracketing context to make one side look ridiculously positive and strawmanning the other to make it look ridiculously negative. The question is what explains this kind of product. One might say he’s deliberately creating a frame to confirm a bias. I’m suggesting that in his case it’s more complicated than that.
The article is rife with more similarly “bracketed” context — for example, the Surgeon General tweet and the “HEPA filters? What are those?” aside.
And he wraps up the problem with: “People would notice how often the experts were wrong, and your public awareness campaign would come to naught.” There, he ignores the influence of pro‑ivermectin zealots who pumped out misleading nonsense, and the medical‑freedom activists pushing a political agenda, to conclude that any lack of confidence in public‑health officials would be fully attributable to the officials’ own errors. Nowhere in his causal chain is there recognition that expecting *no* errors is unrealistic – and that this unrealistic expectation is inevitably exploited by advocates (as we see in so many issues, like climate change).
And Wonks –
Read again what Andrew wrote. The abstracted notion of steelmanning is one thing, but in practice it can have the opposite of the intended effect. In this case, portraying ivermectin activists in an unrealistically best‑possible light and contrasting that with a worst‑possible, strawmanned portrayal of their counterparts undercuts the point of steelmanning. It merely reinforces the existing “talking past each other” dynamic by over‑privileging one side and under‑privileging the other – a dynamic that’s already ubiquitous. And unlike the real value of Scott’s deep dive into the ivermectin science, this aspect of the piece adds no value. The intersting question is why he perceives otherwise.
2014 was a long time ago. Human beings are known for their inconsistency.
I find the use of “autodidact” a little odd to describe folk from the upper middle class (or lower upper middle class for Orwell!) who received expensive (i.e. not free, state-provided) educations. Sure, they are amongst the most intelligent and talented writers of their generation, but it’s not clear to me that they were self-taught in some important way that wasn’t covered by their cultural background, education and innate talent.
Anon:
To me, Wilson and Alexander seem like autodidacts in that they’re working things through based on their readings rather than as part of the academic literature. Sometimes this is a real strength because they can have a perspective you won’t find elsewhere; other times it can lead to crankiness. But I get your point that the term “autodidact” isn’t so clear here.
Edmund Wilson went to Princeton undergrad, so I guess autodidact can only mean he didn’t have a PhD? I’ve never heard of Alexander–until today.
Wilson was self-taught in the sense that he wrote in-depth studies of subjects beyond his expertise (e.g. Dead Sea Scrolls, Russian literature, Civil War History) by independently studying the literature (and often the primary sources themselves). He’s the classic example of the ultracrepidarian critic.
Also, if I’m not mistaken I believe he taught himself to read Russian?
I think it’s fair enough if “autodidact” is used in relation to some specific topic area; it’s just that when used an overall descriptor of someone, it implies (at least to me) that they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and started from somewhere near a den of wolves.
Anon:
Yes, I was referring to Wilson as being an autodidact in the sense of immersing himself in depth into one topic after another. I’m not saying he was some kind of working class hero!
I fear you are right about this, even though I wish you weren’t … how about Luke Menand though?
I do want to press a bit on the distinction between authority “coming from academia” and “coming from their ability to put words together.” It seems to me that Wilson, Alexander, and pundits like Pinker get their authority because their general-audience writing (words-put-together) convinced people they were broadly smart, and worth listening to about a range of subjects. Pinker is a scientist whose general-audience writing interested a wide audience; Wilson was a literary critic whose general-audience writing had a similar effect. Your blogging did something similar for you!
As it happens I am reading Pinker on music right now, and I feel quite comfortable asserting that he knows no more about music than Wilson or Alexander know about anything. Guy is just bloviating like nobody’s business. He got his bloviator’s license because he wrote popular books about subjects closer to his area of expertise. Once he “built his brand” as a popular author he could widen his subject matter.
Dmitri:
Indeed, there are many literary figures who write general essays. On the academic end, there are Louis Menand, Jill Lepore, and various others who regularly write for the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, etc. Outside academia, there are authors such as Zadie Smith, Geoff Dyer, Lauren Oyler, etc., who publish interesting essays on a broad range of topics. And then there are the Ted-talk writers such as Steven Pinker who will sometimes range beyond their comfort zones and be all-purpose pundits.
Scott Alexander and Edmund Wilson seem different from all the above in that they seem to be putting in the extra effort to tool up on what they’re writing. Don’t get me wrong–Menand is an expert on twentieth-century culture and philosophy, and when he leaves that turf he still has lots of interesting things to say, but he doesn’t give off those same intense autodidact vibes I get from Wilson and Alexander.
Speaking as a fellow long-time reader of Alexander’s, I think you have the correct sense of ~2010s Alexander, but not the current era’s Alexander, who seems to have declined quite a bit (with respect to doing his homework). As quick evidence for this: his recent post encouraging his readership to use LLMs to vote was filled with errors; he’s also repeatedly defended Lynn’s national IQ estimates, which a cursory googling reveals are deeply untrustworthy, and lastly he keeps recommending crank medical treatments to his readership. I think he’s nowadays way less trustworthy when he’s not writing in his narrow area of expertise.
Charles:
I haven’t been following Alexander’s blog recently so I can’t comment on your examples, but yeah, it’s a temptation for pundits to just bloviate. One thing I admire about Nate Silver is that he continues to put in the work to think things through. Not always–I wasn’t so impressed with his river-and-village theory of U.S. politics–but usually he seems to be thoughtful. In contrast, say, to the Freakonomics team, who seem to have given up on seriousness a couple decades ago.
Charles – which crank medical treatments has he recommended?
Bernard Levin (deceased) is another to put alongside your list (from wiki: Among Levin’s many topics – top Eldridge Cleaver, Wagner; below Field Marshal Montgomery and a Death watch beetle) !
Also Clive James, who’s one of my favorites. Someone should write a biography of him!
Is this based on the New York Times piece? He’s disputed the accuracy of that.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article
I don’t think his engagement with the far-right is more extensive than is engagement with feminists or with social justice.
No offence but I’m doubting your familiarity with the online far right here, to me the influence seems very minor.
Clovis:
No, my above post is not based on that news article. It’s based on reading a bunch of Alexander’s posts over the years.
Anonymous wrote, “I had never heard of Wilson”.
I had never heard of Scott Alexander. Googling suggests the most prominent Scott Alexander is an aging minor league. “Scott Alexander writer” gets a screenwriter, but I don’t suppose that’s the guy.
I have heard of Edmund Wilson.
“… aging minor league pitcher.”
For those who are not familiar with Scott Alexander and want some first-hand exposure to the issues raised here, I recommend as a starting point his recent appreciation of Scott Adams:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife
Aside from being an enjoyable trip down memory lane for those of us who read Dilbert, it also touches upon Adams’ right-wing politics and Alexander’s conscious attempt to craft his writing style.
Right now, on Astral Codex Ten, we’re in the book review contest time of year. Anyone who wants submits a book review (except for last year when it was a review of anything but a book), typically in a style (intellectual, linguistic, or both) that would appeal to blog’s readership (which is self-selected to enjoy Alexander’s style), anyone who wants reads a handful (or more) of the entries and rates them, and the highest-rated move on to the finals. One of the dozen or so finalists is posted each week; I find it essential to set aside a couple of hours every week during the summer to read the new entries and the comments, which invariably include assessments from two or three people who know more about the book or its subject than the book review writer.
Inevitably there’s some controversy. Right now it’s Richard Hanania encouraging randos to upvote the review of his book so that it makes the finals. Surprisingly, given the nature of the blog and its readership, the issue of AI-generated reviews has not yet emerged.
Edit for clarity: “…than the book review writer did.”
If inspiring intellectualism is the mark of a good public intellectual, Alexander fits the bill.
John:
Indeed, that long post on Scott Adams is an example of the way in which far-right internet politics serves as a kind of baseline to Alexander, even (or especially) when he’s expressing disagreement with far-right positions.
It’s interesting that in that post Adams blames the idea of “work-life balance” on something he calls “a Bohemian turn.”
It’s also interesting to think about what kinds of readers would or wouldn’t get pulled up short at that statement.
Maybe the reason for the decline in widely recognized public intellectuals is a variant of Gresham’s law: bad ideas drive out good. We all have access to the whole world and can promulgate our ideas to everyone via the internet. There are so many commentators on every topic who are totally uninformed that they suck up all the oxygen that is required for thinkers to thrive and influence us. There are probably some good arguments for and against various topics, the Iran war for instance, but there are a thousand ignorant people making similar arguments that cause us to disregard the whole topic. This site has better commenters than most.
Quote from above: “There are so many commentators on every topic who are totally uninformed that they suck up all the oxygen that is required for thinkers to thrive and influence us.”
And, I would like to add, perhaps another (more fundamental?) factor that plays a role is the possible lack of logic and reasoning skills and education. Or perhaps (even more fundamental?) a lack of even being aware of the possible importance of logic and reasoning skills and education and acknowledging this.
To use your words, “for thinkers to thrive and influence us” it might not only be important to “hear” them, but also to “understand” them. For that, it’s perhaps not just necessary to hear a sound amongst many other sounds, but to also recognize the sound might actually be a rhyme or a song or a melody and not just a sound.
Again, I wonder why I wasn’t taught anything about logic and reasoning and argumentation in school if I remember correctly. Not even at university. And why does it seem to me that not that many people seem to argue for the usefulness and even necessity to teach this in schools, and definitely at universities. Here are some quotes from “Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking” by Mulnix (2012):
“Critical thinking is an attempt to understand what it is for a belief to be rationally justified. As such, critical thinking techniques evaluate some beliefs in light of others.” (p. 471)
“Critical thinking just is that mode of thinking that seeks to justify beliefs on the evidential relations that hold between statements.” (p. 472)
“Still, in order to give reasons that actually favor one’s beliefs, a thinker must have acquired the ability to recognize inferential connections holding between statements. In other words, reasoning well, or thinking critically, consists first in the ability to grasp inferential connections holding between statements in order to see a progression of evidence in the form of an argument to a specified conclusion.” (pp. 472-473)
Not to weigh in on the main topic, but reading this I was reminded of a line in Walker Percy’s 1971 foray into science fiction, Love in the Ruins, that sums up the state of intellectualism in the future by explaining that Gore Vidal has become the grand old man of American letters.
Percy meant it as a joke, but a google search of “the grand old man of American letters” now put Vidal close to the top of the list.
Media consumption is so much more diffuse these days I wonder if it’s just impossible to build up comparable audience shares. I definitely think of Scott Alexander as a niche Internet personality.
And this might just be a consequence of my particular media consumption niche but Ted Chiang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang) strikes me as a contemporary, thoughtful, literary opinionator analogous to the historical figures described in the post.
Oh, and maybe Rebecca Solnit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Solnit) as well? Apologies if I’m missing the mark. All the post’s examples are outside my frame of reference though I still find the prompt interesting.
I agree with you. When I try to explain what I enjoy when I read Scott, I focus on a few refreshing things that I think make Scott stand out. (1) A committment to listen and react openly to those who disagree with him, giving them prominent space; (2) A sense that while you know his general attitude and orientation, a committment to following the data where it goes — he’s no Bill James, but there is a certain Jamesian respect for data over intuition; (3) in commmon with other great personal essayists (I would say he is closer to Montesquieu than Wilson, though it is no tribute to our age to say he falls far short of both) his essays seem to me less an attempt to convince others than to convince himself — he;s just nice enough to bring us along for the ride; (4) But most of all (and in this he is indeed like Wilson) he writes well enough to make you appreciate the time you spent in his company even when you completely disagree with his conclusion.
Jonathan:
Even Bill James is sometimes no Bill James! See here. And I have a horrible feeling that I have some imperfections too.
James is imperfect. Scott Alexander is imperfect. I am inperfect. You once purportedly proved a false theorem. (I enjoy your blog posts even when i disagree with them as well…) As I thought about this, i came up with another name. Just as when André Gide was asked baout the greatest French novelist and replied “Victor Hugo, hélas,” I suspect the answer to your question is: Alas, Malcolm Gladwell. Another possibility: Michael Lewis
Another aspect of Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten is that they created something like a Viennese coffee house before the Nazis (there are even meetups). What was left of the American prestige media was withdrawing to an older, wealthier readership in the North-East and there was an opening for a place for young, contrarian people in California and Texas to talk about ideas. If it were just talk I could have a certain amount of sympathy but I don’t want to spend my 40s relitigating eugenics and deterring another War of 1812.
How about a podcaster like Sam Harris? Not as big as Tyler Cowen and co, but with a sizeable following. I’ve even suggested he have you as a guest :) He’s a centrist – appalled by both the current right and left extremes.
Eoin:
I’ve been on some podcasts over the years, most recently here, but I’ve never heard from Sam Harris. Maybe I’m too academic in style to appear to a mainstream audience?
There are some science-adjacent podcasts that promote junk science: I’m thinking here of Freakonomics and Sean Carroll. I’ve been hoping that they’d invite a “data thug” such as Nick Brown on their podcasts to push back, but this doesn’t seem to have happened. I’m guessing that Freakonomics, Carroll, etc., build their audiences based on positivity, so interviewing a skeptic would spoil the mood.
On the other hand, there are some skeptical podcasts, such as the above-linked Clear Thinking, where I indeed was interviewed. Also there’s If Books Could Kill, which we’ve discussed on this blog, but they’re entertaining enough just talking with each other; they don’t need to bring in outside experts to interview.
Anyway, yeah, I’d be happy to go on Harris’s podcast. Awhile ago a friend of mine told me about Tyler Cowen’s podcast, so I emailed Cowen saying I’d be happy to do his too, but I guess he’s more interested in interviewing non-academics. Which makes sense. I have a lot to say but there are lots of other people who are probably more sparkling on-air conversationalists.
Right, I think that most intellectual opining is now to be found on podcasts. Although with ongoing media diffusion/fragmentation, it is difficult to know whether anyone has a wide reach in society. I would have suggested Ezra Klein as someone whose shows span a wide variety of topics and ideologies.
I was also thinking of the set of journalists that are recurring guests across multiple podcasts, though they all seem to be writers from the New Yorker and the Atlantic. In the world I live in, those two magazines seem to be the basis for 90% of intellectual discussion.
Speaking of Sam Harris and Ezra Klein, check out this episode where Harris flat-out lies about what Klein said. That’s really annoying. I hate when people attribute something to me that I’ve never said.
So maybe I wouldn’t be such a good guest for Harris’s show.
So putting aside his politics (which are documented on RationalWiki and elsewhere) I agree that Scott Alexander wanted to be a bohemian literary intellectual. He did not want the responsibilities of even someone writing for glossy magazines like his friend Kelsey Piper. Another career to compare is Isaac Asimov’s who spent the post-Sputnik era as a living encyclopedia. Both of them got the white-collar credentialed jobs their parents approved of, then dropped the job to write, keeping a token connection (Asimov gave one lecture a year to keep the title Professor, Alexander treats the occasional patient). Both returned to their childhood religions as mid-life intellectuals to write things like Asimov’s Guide to the Bible and Unsong. Asimov had to stick with a middle-brow style because he never found a single wealthy patron like Alexander’s friend at Substack.
A young Scott Alexander wrote an essay on epistemic learned helplessness where he noted that he was easily convinced by intellectual-sounding nonsense, and should probably stick to mainstream views outside one or two areas of expertise. He could not resist reading the far-right bloggers he discovered in medical school or his first visit to San Francisco and into darkness fell his star. But I am struck that hiding his convictions on topics like race and IQ has poisoned his ability to make a clear, logical argument. He is clearly brainy and can memorize enough to get a MD, but his writing style is fuzzy and literary and sophistic. That works for the reader on a commuter train who is not paying close attention, but it means that most readers come away with catchphrases like grey tribe not with a clear understanding of his argument and whether or not they agree.
Scott didn’t just decide to stop treating (new) patients. The NYT deciding to dox him interfered with his ability to do that. He didn’t think he would make much money on Substack and wouldn’t have made that his primary income if it had been up to him.
No, since 2022 Scott Alexander has his own psychiatric clinic. He just can’t be bothered to run it like a business (“We are not taking new patients at this time”) because his friends at Substack subsidize his writing (“Substack has made me an extremely generous offer … extremely generous”). He was very fearful that his boss might fire him if his views on race became publicly known, but in 2025 he came out, and I have no idea if his fears were justified.
I know Scott has his own clinic, when he set it up he said he wanted to continue treating his old patients (“I also worry that my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care”), but did not want new patients who know of him as a public figure rather than just their doctor (“I’m a psychiatrist, and psychiatrists are kind of obsessive about preventing their patients from knowing anything about who they are outside of work”).
You are incorrect to say that “his friends at Substack subsidize his writing”. Substack got a great deal from Scott because he horribly underestimated how much revenue his blog would make, and thus took a guaranteed initial amount in exchange for a lower percentage of that revenue. That deal is now over however, so he’s now making more money from that larger percentage. In the linked post, Scott cites Yglesias & Taibbi as confirming this being generally true of prominent writers who switched to Substack.
Wonks Anonymous, I would love to hear if other psychiatrists in California feel the same taboo and whether anyone enforces it beyond being rude at cocktail parties. When interpreting stories about how much money people make on Substack, keep in mind that they are still spending lots of Other People’s Money and have many ways to put their thumbs on the scales aside from direct subsidies. One year of guaranteed income really helps when launching a new business!
In the SSC post where I got that post about psychiatrists, he links to this from Scientific American about that norm in the profession.
Wonks Anonymous: thanks for the link. It does not mention any penalty for being too open except that your supervisors in residence might not approve, and it actually mentions that smartphones make it harder and harder for a psychiatrist to keep himself private from patients. I think Alexander was overgeneralizing from a painful experience when he had less leverage and norms were different. Psychiatrists with ten years of experience do not grow on trees.
Thus far, no mention of John Dos Passos, someone, decades ago, I have actually conversed with, face to face. His USA trilogy was enormously influential in his Left-wing heyday. Decades later, by the time I met him, he had moved way, way over to the Right, and in fact was “in his cups” in my brief encounter with him and William F. Buckley. I have yet to come across an individual who has actually read his famous works. Nevertheless, I assume much has been written about him but hardly any current interest in that trilogy, which is far from light, bed-time reading. Given the wide-ranging interests expressed in this blog, I assume some Dos Passos experts are out there.
Isn’t the Left/Right binary quite unhelpful as a framing of contemporary political reality? Of course it’s useful for politicians as a way to capture support within an environment where realities are hidden behind ultimately pointless argumentation involving “Leftists” and “Rightists”; the Right/Left labelling is all that’s required to keep this churning and it allows people to feel like they have their fingers on the pulse by taking sides and then parroting second hand ideas in support of their position. But all this Left/Right dichotomisation is a bit of a smokescreen for the issue that underlies what seems to be (from a UK perspective but this is happening over here too) the degradation of the sociopolitical.
I read the Scott Alexander book review of Martin Jay’s book about the Frankfurt School (Wonks posted the link above – June 8, 2026 11:37 AM) again this morning. It’s a book review but my overwhelming conclusion was one of pointlessness. Alexander seems to be in love with his writing and likes showing how clever he is – he can wrap in trite observations about Marxism, “primitive” inhabitants of Papua New Guinea, Jazz, Feminism, Religious Philosophy, Kuhn and Scientific Revolutions but if there is a coherent theme there, I can’t find it – perhaps I’m not smart enough.
Anyway, it seems to me that the enveloping of all aspects of society by the corporate sector underlies much of what’s problematic now. The ultimate success falls to those who are the most proficient manipulators and misrepresenters. This has a long history, has occurred during both Republican and Democratic governments and has the consequence of shifting wealth remorselessly from ordinary people to the already rich, associated with a general enshittification right through our societal hierarchies, corruption of electoral processes and degradation of discourse. There’s the obvious widely-reported enshittification in mega-corporations but this also happens when veterinary and care home practices are bought by corporations to turn what were independent practitioners into overworked employees. The financial wheezes where corporate value is hyped to raise stock value which are then sold off to purchase real things in the real world to acquire ridiculous amounts of ownership (e.g. of valuable land). The current administration has pretty much decided to trash US expertise in Space exploration by shifting funds from NASA to the gloriously overhyped SpaceX not to mention denuding scientific expertise across the board.
It’s difficult to write about these things without also sounding trite, but this seem to be the real issue for which Right/Left dichotomising looks like a smokescreen to me. It’s not Right and Left, but something else (Populism might be the best term or maybe “corporatocracy”) and what remains of the Left once it long ago gave up its role of attempting to limit corporate intrusion (this is not to discount the efforts of people like Bernie Sanders but it’s not obvious how the traditional left can make much headway right now). The populists have the best tunes since they’re accomplished liars and the opposition doesn’t seem to have anywhere to go – appeals to decency, the value of collective efforts, the principles of truth, rationality and honesty don’t cut it, and the parts of their programs involving support of feminism, racial minorities, more equal access to education, developing green economies, LGBT rights and so on are easily mocked as being “woke”.
Clicking around Alexander’s Substack I feel like the big difference between him and Wilson is that Wilson was a professional writer, who was chosen by editors and edited by them. A big part of the reading he did was because he had assignments to write about them for his job. A big part of his job was talking to other people about their opinions (not only surveying his audience for what they thought they wanted). I don’t see the result of anything like that kind of discipline at Astral Codex Ten. Wilson was also presumably aware of the difference between reporting, history, and essay as genres. Alexander strikes me as someone who confuses journalism with the personal essay.
Claiming Horkheimer and Adorno influenced Derrida is a hugely sloppy mistake that serves only to show how much charity he expects the reader to grant him.
He didn’t say they “influenced” Derrida, he said “Their weird mystical art criticism was a forerunner of Derrida’s deconstruction”. A forerunner isn’t required to have any influence. Scott could still be wrong in their work being so unrelated it’s not even a precursor.
In context he is defending the right wing claim that H&A are responsible for something called “cultural Marxism” which he thinks can be equated with something called “postmodernism.” Even to split hairs is to create an appearance (out of whole cloth) that there’s something to this whole thing. It’s deceptive rhetoric.
The whole premise of the post presupposes “cultural Marxism” is what the right says it is. “Cultural Marxism” isn’t even a thing. He’s saying “what if cultural Marxism was a thing, and what if it really was founded by H&A, then we can see what it is by reading H&A (or a crib), and just slotting what we find into the right’s bad-faith argument.” And the result of that is useless. It’s mush. It’s based on no acquaintance with the material. It has no more value than speculations by someone who never heard of “cultural Marxism.” In fact it has less, because it puts the person who knows the material on the defensive to disprove this elaborate thesis.
I don’t trust Scott Alexander not to make up facts, and I don’t trust him to argue in good faith, and I’m not going to engage with that nonsense.
Alexander calls cultural Marxism a “story”. A story is defined by who tells it, in this case the right. At no time in the review does he assume that the story is true, let alone that details about its reality can be discerned from H&A.
He doesn’t think it can be equated with postmodernism, he explicitly said: “The Frankfurters themselves weren’t postmodernists. They thought there was something like an objective good: that which unjammed the wheels of history and manifested God correctly. But you can see how their negative dialectics, wielded by less careful hands, could degenerate into postmodernist meaninglessness.” He also said that the one Frankfurter to resemble the common description of Cultural Marxists (in terms of being political activists marching through the institutions) was Marcuse in his post-Frankfurt days (rather than H&A), but he’s not said to be a post-modernist either. You talk about being “deceptive”, and then you put a claim in his mouth that he explicitly rejected in that post. And rather than just slotting that into the right’s argument he ends with “In conclusion, the Frankfurt School probably did not single-handedly cause everything you hate.”
WA:
Your responses to my comments are such wild overreactions that don’t limit themselves to what I actually said, but add in all kinds of attributions to me that are too ridiculous even to respond to, that I’m really not interested. But I’ll go back to my first comment. By “in context” I mean that he wrote:
“But it would be an exaggeration to call the Frankfurt School sterile and unrelated to later leftist movements. Their weird mystical art criticism was a forerunner of Derrida’s deconstruction and the whole postmodernist movement.”
That statement is obviously in service of an argument that postmodernism wouldn’t exist without H&A. The second sentence is obviously a statement that H&A, Derrida, and postmodernism do the same thing, which SA likes to call “weird mystical art criticism” and by which I suppose he means something like “Kabbalah,” but which I’d just call “poetry.” In other words, they’re all writing literature: essays. This is hardly a strong claim in terms of historical causation.
The obvious *implication* is that SA thinks all literary critics before the Frankfurt School, naive of something like the Frankfurt School, were doing something else. This is obviously false, and I doubt he actually believes that. So we’ve circled back around to a completely empty statement, a process that taught us nothing (and if it taught any reader anything, what it taught is probably erroneous and misleading), and which I would fully expect him (and I admit in this last I may be being “unfair”) to say “negative rhetoric, Kabbalah, whatever.”
And given your other replies to me, I expect you also to reply to this with plausible falsehoods that I’ll have to work hard to extract myself from, to your doubtless amusement but with only annoyance for me.
Scott didn’t make a but-for causal argument. Nor is your “in other words” at all an accurate rephrasing of what he said. Montaigne wrote essays, Scott isn’t saying they were like Montaigne. He doesn’t discuss Montaigne and other essayists, but he does try to discuss what made the Frankfurt school distinctive. His argument is that the thing was “negative dialectics”, and said that such an approach could degenerate into postmodernism (as well as “slacktivism”), but not that such a destination requires starting with Frankfurt’s approach. Similarly, slacktivism could emerge from people just being lazy.
Back to my original point, I think we have accumulated a lot of evidence that Alexander is better at sounding clever than communicating a specific argument, given that people can read the same post differently. He told an acquaintance back in 2014 some of the ideas which he was trying to share while pretending to criticize them, and the more you practice hiding your real argument, the harder it is to be direct. An editor would definitely help him!
Scott Alexander and his so-called “rationalist” followers are rather like Mensa. They are obsessed with their own IQ scores because they have no real achievements to point to.
Scott does a regular survey where he asks for IQ/standardized test scores, among other things, and then emphasizes how high the responses are when analyzing the data. Once he seriously claimed the reader average was three standard deviations above the population average. No selection bias in who reports them, no sir…
Anon:
It’s ridiculous to say that Alexander has “no real achievements to point to”! He’s created this influential blog with thousands of readers. There’s an entire online community that’s devoted to him. That by itself is a big achievement.
It would be great if all the “anons” used their actual names and pointed to their “real achievements.”
I pointed this out last time, but Scott Alexander is not his real name and he was only deanonymized unwillingly. It’s really odd how much you like to rail against anonymity when anons criticize Scott Alexander.
I’m ok with pseudonymous people who (under their pseudonymous handle) produce things that others find valuable. Anonymous commenters don’t fall into that category, and just look like cowards.
“Anonymous commenters don’t fall into that category, and just look like cowards.”
I hope to achieve something with this little rhyme
It’s just a thought, it’s just a view that is mine
An anonymous commenter may look like a coward to some
But just like achievements, that ain’t what I’m focused on
I read, and try and understand, what it is they might have to say
That’s what I’m focused on, that’s the aim, that’s what’s on display
That was a slight misphrasing-Scott’s followers are like that. He himself is also obsessed with IQ, but he has the achievement of the blog following to point to.
I am a tenured math prof at the University of Toronto and a big fan of Scott Alexander’s writing (“Unsong” is among my favourite novels, “Meditations on Moloch” among my favourite essays). I do fill out Scott’s surveys, but i do not know my iq, never took a test, so I leave that blank. The point of the survey is usually to test some psychological or psychiatric quirks (like whether analysts eat corn differently from algebraists); they have a lot of questions.
Brecht in 1935 in passing satirizes a certain type in his typology of social-critic “…they pretend that the cannons are pointed at them; in fact it’s only opera-glasses”. Let us hope for the good academician’s sake it’s indeed only opera-glasses! Brecht contrariwise in 1936 was canny and slippery enough to get out before they actually did come knocking at his door. Here we have the ethereal opposite; i.e. “it’s only opera-glasses!”. Then too there’s the sardonic joke of Kharms who writes, “Kvilischevskii ate raw cranberries, trying not to wince. He thought everyone would say ‘what strength of character’ — but no one said anything at all.”
FYI: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1uj2arw/scott_alexander_as_a_modernday_edmund_wilson/
Professor Gelman, sorry for being one of SSC bots overriding your comment section.
I’ve been reading Scott Alexander’s blogs for over a decade (every post, some a few times), which I guess makes me a bit more of an “expert” than some of the other commenters.
My impression has always been the opposite – that even when Scott critisizes the American left he does it within the left-wing worldview, like Orwell. I don’t live in the US, so I may be missing subtleties. But from the outside this discussion looks like your society grew so polarized that anyone engaging with the two sides looks tainted to both.
Scott has had a surprisingly large influence on my life. If I try to list the most important life decisions where Scott’s writing significantly affected me, they would be: becoming vegetarian, starting to donate a chunk of my salary to the Against Malaria Foundation, pivoting my career to AI safety research. I did not donate a kidney to a stranger, but I do fantasize about it sometimes.
I am a bit confused why these things are consider far-right these days, but if so, sure, I’m far-right then.
Lyg:
Thanks for commenting. I appreciate comments from all perspectives.
Regarding your last paragraph: I’m not saying that Alexander’s positions are far right; I’m saying that for many topics he’s using the far right as his baseline. This was particularly clear in his post that I discussed regarding steelmanning.
But you’ve read many more of Alexander’s posts than I have, and I believe you that sometimes he is using the left as a baseline.
Again, the statement that he uses certain positions as a baseline is a comment on where he’s coming from and, I guess, who he hangs out with or who he reads. It’s not a comment on the political positions he takes.
Absolutely, you were quite clear in the post that you are not commenting on Alexander’s actual positions, but his baseline. (My last paragraph was addressed to some of the commenters here, not you, sorry I did not make that clear).
Scott has written a lot of stuff. He often likes to address people’s arguments within their worldview. Because of this, one can easily collect many essays that fit perfectly within, say, religious or ant-capitalist worldview and claim that he’s using that baseline even when he disagrees. And it’s not that his core philosophical positions changed much overtime, it’s more of a feature of his writing style and this immersive aspect of it is what I enjoy.
Lyg:
Thanks for clarifying. I like Alexander’s writing too, which is one reason that I get frustrated when I think he could do better.
lyg: I really don’t want to be making The Case Against Scott Alexander. I think he’s a very good person, and some of his most vociferous critics are very bad people indeed. But again and again, there’s this objection: He (and the Rationalists overall) are not uneducated blue-collar religious fundamentalist theocrats, they’re urban professional intellectuals with libertine sexual views – how can they be called “right-wing”? They don’t vote for Trump! It’s like the worldview is so narrow and blinkered that the phrase “right-wing Democrat” would be deemed an oxymoron, much less “right-wing (secular) intellectual”.
As I said above: it’s basically the old joke about “Libertarians are Republicans who want to smoke marijuana” (which doesn’t work so well these days, but bear with me). Rationalists are Republicans who want to be in polyamorous throuple relationships.
You’re right-wing if “for example, there’s an absolute identification with capital against labor, a willingness to be extraordinarily charitable towards and steelman to the point of rewriting far-right views like NeoReaction while snidely strawmanning the left, and as many people have pointed out, an awful lot of pseudo-scientific racism.”. Let me put it this way – this proposition is as deserving of charity and steelmanning as Moldbug/Yarvin’s blathering Fascism for technologists (a word I use very intentionally and deliberately). The difference in treatment is the proof.