Astral Codex NaN: The Scott Alexander Persona

Addressing Culture War Content in ACT Head On

I recently wrote that Scott Alexander was playing up an us-vs-them, culture war mentality in his description of a disagreement between Steven Pinker and Howard Gardner. I was frustrated, and I pursued the argument aggressively. In seeing some of the responses to it by Alexander himself and other fans of his, I started to doubt my framing. (But not before writing a lengthy response!) Maybe I came on too strong? Maybe implying that he was a culture warrior in disguise wasn’t fair. He’s written lots of other essays I’ve read that have been good and unrelated to culture war issues. Then I saw his latest Astral Codex Ten post, and I thought “no, I think I got him right.”

In Alexander’s latest ACT post, he describes a private conversation he had with an academic, where the person sought advice on how best to combat wokeness. Alexander gave him strategic, wokeness fighting advice, then decided to write up and publish that wokeness fighting advice so it could reach a wider audience. As a prominent blogger, that’s fine. Everyone can take a stand on the left-right divide or the culture wars. But for someone who just argued that I was wrong for accusing him of “smuggling” in culture war talking points, it’s frustrating. If he was the type of person who tried to be purely neutral and logical in addressing issues, and avoided taking sides on the culture war, he wouldn’t be writing an article called “Advice for Unwoke Academic?” on the same week he was arguing that he isn’t a culture war commentator.

What I was doing with my earlier piece, and what I’m trying to do here, is to refine my understanding of who the Scott Alexander persona is. Is he someone who is a brilliant, logical thinker who takes each issue as it comes, or is he in the business of combating left-wing thought with a more sophisticated and subtle branding than other anti-left commentators? The short answer is: he’s both. The longer answer is that I think he’s pursuing a particular strategy for anti-left content. But that argument comes later.

Where I Thought I Went Too Far

This is probably the most inflammatory bit of my recent piece:

“Now that we’ve seen how Alexander describes his opponents, it should be more clear that this piece is really about defining groups the same way that traditional culture warriors do. By defining himself as part of the ‘Grey Tribe,’ Alexander is able to brand himself a bit differently from a Fox News commentator. But basically what he’s doing is creating an ingroup that rejects liberal or left-wing thought, and brands that decision as principled and ‘rational.’” 

It certainly seemed to inflame Alexander and his fans on reddit. One fan wrote “The quality of discussion I'm seeing here is way lower than I've come to expect from this community. … If you just accuse someone like Scott of being motivated by a CW affiliation, you can make all sorts of uncharitable and unsupported attributions” and another wrote “that's a radioactively bad take” and followed up by suggesting I consider apologizing to Alexander for my essay. I thought by writing 5,000 words across two essays, a reader would have been able to pull out some of the reasons why I believe Alexander is motivated by his CW affiliation, and criticize those—use the rationalist toolbox to show where my arguments are wrong. 

But instead I found strenuous push-back against the idea of Alexander himself having a position in the culture wars. That seemed strange to me, given Alexander’s own writings. I mean, here is his writing about how hard he would find it to criticize his tribe:

“I’m pretty sure I’m not Red, but I did talk about the Grey Tribe above, and I show all the risk factors for being one of them. That means that, although my critique of the Blue Tribe may be right or wrong, in terms of motivation it comes from the same place as a Red Tribe member talking about how much they hate al-Qaeda or a Blue Tribe member talking about how much they hate ignorant bigots. And when I boast of being able to tolerate Christians and Southerners whom the Blue Tribe is mean to, I’m not being tolerant at all, just noticing people so far away from me they wouldn’t make a good outgroup anyway.

“I had fun writing this article [criticizing the Blue Tribe]. People do not have fun writing articles savagely criticizing their in-group. People can criticize their in-group, it’s not humanly impossible, but it takes nerves of steel, it makes your blood boil, you should sweat blood. It shouldn’t be fun.

…

“I can think of criticisms of my own tribe. Important criticisms, true ones. But the thought of writing them makes my blood boil.”

He clearly has a dog in the culture war fight, and he’s written what I think is a great essay explaining his position. His position is that he is part of the grey tribe, that he hates criticizing them, and that he enjoys criticizing the blue tribe. This is bold, authentic, and introspective, and exemplifies the best of his writing. From what I can see, the grey tribe tends to be largely libertarians who tend to be more excited by and interested in vigorously critiquing the blue tribe–even though there are specific policy issues (e.g., marijuana legalization, defense of same-sex marriage)--where they could find themselves allied with and cheering for the blue tribe. For whatever reason, that doesn’t tend to be central to the libertarian agenda. Instead, it’s more of a concern that people arguing about the biology of gender or the heritability of IQ aren’t being given a fair hearing in universities. 

So I’m not “accusing” Alexander of being motivated by a CW affiliation. I’m paying attention to what he says about his own “tribal” affiliation, and taking it seriously. From there, I’m trying to support the arguments I make using differing sections, with extensive quotes, and a step-by-step numbered argument walking through my logic. There certainly could be issues with my reasoning, but I don’t see the online fans trying to poke holes in that. Instead, the accusation is that it’s unsupported. I might have offered poor support (although I don’t think I did), but to say I offered no support is wrong.

Alexander’s response was, as expected, more thoughtful and nuanced. However, his main contention seems to be that it was unfair of me to “smuggle in” the culture war narrative. Given his recent guide to combating wokeness, I don’t think that’s an unfair place to take the discussion. I also don’t think he’s successfully addressed the main point I made, which is that the Rationalist group isn’t defined by a particular way of arguing, processing information, or learning about the world, but about a specific set of values that they hold. As I said in my reply, I think that is actually the fleshiest part of my argument, and I’m sure that someone motivated to do a bit more research could come up with some thoughtful counter-examples that might change my mind.

All that said, I think the comparison of Alexander to Fox News was too uncharitable. Fox News under the Trump administration really jumped the shark as a credible news organization, and became basically a propaganda outlet in favor of one political party that repeated false claims. Their most egregious move was to spread the anti-democratic lie that we did not have a free and fair election in the U.S. in 2020. They are currently being sued by Dominion Voting over spreading false information about their voting machines, and will likely face a multi-million dollar penalty. More broadly, their coverage tends to undermine Americans’ confidence in our own system of government, and promote authoritarian, anti-democratic attitudes. Scott Alexander is not doing anything nearly as bad as that. 

If I were to rewrite that essay today, I would probably change the comparison to a less problematic culture war figure. Maybe he’s more like a Joe Rogan, who mixes anti-left content with non-culture war content. Maybe he’s more like Bari Weiss, who is biased but not promoting the stronger anti-democratic line that Fox is. Clearly the Fox comparison was a bit of a trigger for the readership. (Which is fair. A senior academic once compared my advocacy for open science to being a Trump fan, and I felt pretty offended.) So how would I characterize the Scott Alexander persona?

The Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook Technique

Gary Vaynerchuk has a book on sales called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. The one line summary is that if you want to sell something, you need to give lots of small hits of value for free (the jabs in the title) and then eventually you can ask for a sale in return for a lot of value (the right hook). The idea is that sales involves building a long-term relationship with an audience. You do this through free content that they appreciate. Eventually you get to a point where you can convince them to do something for you.

In addition to a good sales technique, this JJJRH approach is also a very effective way to slowly bring an audience over to one particular political or cultural ideology. The way you would implement it is by providing lots of interesting and intelligent commentary on non-ideological topics. You might write about problems with psychology statistics, treating psychiatric patients, and marijuana legalization. Every once in a while, you’d slip in commentary on your ideological position. It would be mixed both within and between articles. So one famous piece on argumentation styles might use problems with feminist arguments as a prominent example. That’s a small hit within an article. On the other hand, you might have a few extended articles on why you dislike social justice advocacy, and how “toxic” people who do that are. 

Over time, you’d build an audience who thought “wow, this person has a lot of interesting and intelligent opinions!” (which you would! You could only succeed at this if there really was something smart in there). They’d also start to say “I used to think that advocating for more fair treatment of black people compared to white was an obviously good position to take, but now I’m questioning it a bit more. I’m hearing about people going a bit overboard in the way they want to change things.” Or they might say “I used to think it was pretty obvious that feminism was normal and good, but now I’m worried that feminism is actually about controversial ideas that don’t make sense and no one really likes.” They might know that some of these positions come specifically from being a fan of this smart person, but they might not realize how far they’ve drifted from their old ideology until they bring up a topic with a friend who reacts with surprise–and judgment–about their position.

My contention is that there are online commentators who are in rationalist communities who do this with right wing thought. My further contention is that Scott Alexander is on the borderline of doing this kind of right wing promotion via his blog and newsletter.

Is this a bad or unfair thing to do? No, not necessarily. If you follow a thinker closely and respect them, it’s normal and healthy to have your general opinions on things shaped by them. What is a problem is when you don’t realize that the thinker has a strong ideological position, and that over time you’re going to be getting a dose of the ideology mixed in with the random smart thoughts. If I follow Ben Shapiro, I know what I’m getting into. He’s not going to act as if he isn’t dedicated to tearing down whatever people on the left say, and you’ll never be surprised about which side of an issue he will fall on. Ben Shapiro tells you who he is.

Scott Alexander has also told us all who he is. In the quotes above, he says who he identifies with, and who he likes criticizing. That’s fine, but I think it means that it’s fair game to look for instances of that bias in his writing, and to push back on it. Outside commentators who aren’t in his tribe would be adding value by illustrating what his content looks like from a different perspective. They might provide a counterbalance or warning to readers: FYI, this particular piece I’m commenting on is actually one of the ideologically skewed ones. Keep your eyes open when evaluating the arguments.

Yet it seems like Alexander also wants to deny that he’s an ideological operator. He gets frustrated when someone brings up that one of his pieces exhibits the bias he told us all he had. From my perspective, that’s the problem. It’s trying to both be authentic and upfront about biases, and then later not wanting people to re-examine his thoughts in light of those biases.

Could I Persuade Better?

So what am I doing here? Well, ordinarily I write about methodological issues in psychology research. I focus on open science, replication, and philosophy of science issues. More recently, I’ve mixed in a few more explicitly political pieces. So am I doing the same naughty bad boy thing I accuse Alexander of? Kind of. I would argue that I’m reasonably transparent about where my ideology lies (definitely somewhere on the left, still reading more to find out where exactly in the kaleidoscope). So I’m trying to avoid the claim that I’m not making points that come from a particular ideology. You should be aware of my perspective (and reddit seems to be very aware).

I also haven’t really built a big, consistent audience on this newsletter. My last piece about academic research reached about 300 people. My last piece about ACT reached about 200 people. Random pieces I’ve written and not promoted as much have often reached many fewer. Some of my stuff on metascience was only read by about 25 people. So I still think that I’m early enough in the “brand building” of writing that injecting politics isn’t some new wrinkle. I also don’t really matter that much, in the grand scheme of things. I was flattered that Scott Alexander took the time to respond to me, because he’s very influential and I most definitely am not.

That said, the response I got to my piece on ACT did make me rethink some of my approach to writing. Given that I know that Scott Alexander might respond to my writing, I would want to make it more appealing for him to read. That means softening my tone, in the hopes of opening a more interesting dialogue with an intelligent and interesting person. Given the mixed responses I got on reddit, I think softening my tone might also help my position be better appreciated by readers there. If I post there again (and don’t end up getting kicked off the subreddit!), then I’d want my writing not to trigger people’s frustration too much for them to engage with the ideas.

I’m a random guy on the internet arguing about how another guy on the internet is wrong. I get that the style is a bit confrontational and obnoxious. Maybe there’s a better way to approach things, but I’ll have to reflect more on what that might be. I do want to say “hey, maybe we can get a bit of a check on this anti-left ACT content,” and that’s probably never going to be an easy sell… but it doesn’t have to be quite as aggressive.

Long story short, I’d like to reiterate that it’s been really helpful to get feedback (even aggressive, frustrated feedback) from the reddit community. I do have a particular view of ACT as pushing a particular ideological position in the culture war, and I stand behind my take that the Pinker / Howard essay was a good example of how that plays out in everyday writing. Seeing a recent piece on how to create a successful long-term anti-woke strategy on ACT just reinforces this perception for me. If there are things I’m missing here, though, I’m happy to talk and think more about them.