Really? Weird. Very different experience.

(Maybe crypto is less deteriorative than business?)

The last time I met a person who had done deeply reprehensible, highly publicized tech fraud (FTX executive) he kind of just came off as a dude, and I liked him.

That kind of makes me feel bad when I think about it.

I haven't met a high-profile fraudster lately, but my first impression of bad guys is usually pretty positive. As far as I can tell, people keep their ambient personalities when they break bad, but they compartmentalize and they develop supermassive appetites for praise. This long-run increases their suggestibility because they have to be more and more gullible to not hate themselves. I think this hollows them out -- when you live a double life for long enough, you kind of stop observing the reality-fiction boundary at all.

Not clear how to stop the cycle. There's just too much money involved for me to dive off the train right now.

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

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

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

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

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

You've pegged me OK! I know how I want to feel about my writing. Well, wanting it hasn't made it happen. Telling myself "Well, this is the emotion I should have" hasn't changed the emotions I do have. Telling myself "Time to not eat" doesn't make me starve less.

In the past I've tried to mutilate the impulse out of my own brain, but I think it mostly made me hate myself. Right now I'm doing the experiment of admitting -- I'm probably going to crave adoration until I die -- and asking "OK, what happens next?"

On Scott -- as far as I can tell, Scott's playing a version of the "debate in good faith" game. The rules are that you only say things you believe, and when someone convinces you of something, you admit it.

Every philosopher in the world, good or bad, plays a version of this game. A third secret rule of this game is always implicit, taking the form of the answer to this question: "When do I become convinced of something?"

How Scott answers this question is clearly part of his success and a key commonality with his audience. Scott is clearly willing to state strong belief in things he has not thought very much about, and Scott is clearly unusually easy to convince. I assume that whatever rules are etched in his brain, similar rules are etched in his audience's brains.

Based on how he plays the game how he likes it, and other people move, and I don't move, the particular rules in his head clearly aren't the same ones in mine. Or at least I've decided not to be moved by this particular guy. I also think people say they've moved when they haven't, as a rhetorical strategy -- Marc Andreessen says he's just now becoming a Republican. Scott's commentors act as if they've just now considered that eugenics might be the answer.

In other responses I've offered some opinions on why he would choose to play this particular game: I think the way he happens to play the game is a second-order phenomenon of "the extreme ambivalence of wanting to hold terrible social attitudes and strong belief in your own personal virtue at the same time." I think you observe this: "enabling psychiatrist [...] happy to overmedicate his patients" is a good figurative characterization.

(Actually, is it literally true? It feels like it would be invasive to check.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey! Thank you for liking the things I write!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll think about whether I can treat "explaining the evidence I experienced that led me to conclude they love LLMs so much" with a little more sincerity.

What vision of the world do you have? Maybe ChatGPT should advocate that.

This man's blog is intense, but I am not sure he comes off well! I clicked around and it seems like "wants to be at all the fascist parties, courts acts of violence to complain about on his blog" is, at least in 2024, a really accurate summary of his behavior.

Or, in his words:

I tell them that I’m actually pretty hated and feared by most of these people, and I can only stay around because I criticize particular influential figures in this counterculture so well that they want to fuck me, and so they keep me around to flatter them, to reflect their true hideousness back at them by elevating it to the status of myth, and then they lash out at me like the maenads devouring Orpheus.

I read a few of the guy's other blog posts and they follow a general theme:

• He's pretty resourceful! Surprisingly often, when he's feeling comfortable, he resorts to sensible troubleshooting steps.
• Despite that, when confronted with code, it seems like he often just kind of guesses at what things mean without verifying it.
• When he's decided he doesn't understand a thing, he WILL NOT DIG INTO THE THING.

He seems totally hireable as a junior, but he absolutely needs the adult supervision.

The LLM Revolution seems really really bad for this guy specifically -- it promises that he can keep working in this ineffective way without changing anything.