Hi!

I can’t claim to be a good (or even average) writer myself. I mainly hang around here to dish out the occasional one-line sneer, to lean on the writing/knowledge of others in a series of desperate attempts to make sense of wtf is going on, and generally for the nice lil’ community vibes.

If you’re only looking for advice on how to improve your writing from experienced writers, you can stop reading here lol. Otherwise, if you’re open to some positive feedback and springboards for reflection, read on!

Let me switch back from fantasy to reality. My most common experience when I write is that people latch onto things I said that weren’t my point, interpret me in bizarre and frivolous ways, or outright ignore me.

(I hope I’m not that person lol, please let me know if I’ve entirely missed the point here).

I read over your recent post: A modest proposal for OpenAI employees and enjoyed it! I hadn’t thought much about the parallels between sales folks and LLMs, nor why they’d be particularly likely to take to LLMs, so I appreciate you sharing these ideas. I found your writing here clear, easy to follow and engaging, thanks to both the sneers littered throughout and the earnest tone.

When I look at my prose I feel like the writer is flailing on the page. I see the teenage kid I was ten years ago, dying without being able to make his point. If I wrote exactly like I do now and got a Scott-sized response each time, I’d hate my writing less and myself less too.

Nothing to say here except I know how this feels!

When I imagine what success feels like, that’s what I imagine… So I guess I want to get better at writing.

Why do you want to get better at writing? How does that tie in with what you see as “success”?

If I’m understanding correctly, it sounds like you broadly view gaining an audience and influencing them as “success”, but to what end(s)?

The broad question: what the hell am I supposed to be doing?

What is anyone ‘supposed’ to be doing ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ More seriously though, I’m not sure anyone will be able to give you a good answer to this without understanding what you’re trying to achieve, so it might help others provided more pointed feedback if you expanded on this?

Before I was posting about tech on the internet I was posting about philosophy. I don’t know enough about philosophy to be good at it – I’ve read almost nothing – but I noticed you could get pretty far by saying “Kant probably didn’t have anything valuable to say – he was a massive racist.” A balm for people who are looking for an excuse not to have read Kant.

My bleak theory is that to be convincing I’d have to switch to calculatedly mediocre text deliberately orchestrated to be unsurprising. My experience is that when an extremely successful article contains genuine insight, it separately contains an absolutely mediocre take that is the real explanation for why it went viral.

Let’s start with “Scott is a bigot” as an example claim. That’s true, but the evidence is basically just a bland admission of “yeah.” Nobody can spin that into a detailed and personal story about how Scott got mindhacked, which is the single part of Scott Alexander’s bigotry that can be discussed at a level interesting to bored idiots. Discussing his bigotry directly would make it obvious – he hasn’t stated any takes that aren’t incredibly commonplace for tech-adjacent eugenics losers, and has waffled publicly about whether or not to disavow even those stances.

What options are left? I could write a history of the ideas involved and risk boring people to sleep: such a story would contain basically zero concrete events, because we only have his distant past-tense account of how he came to his current conclusions. Or I could write something wildly speculative and commit defamation: “here’s how it might have happened: a fictionalized account of how a mediocre person became racist.” Or I could go into hyperbole: Eliezer Yudkowsky is Scott Alexander is Mencius Moldbug is George Lincoln Rockwell.

Would the latter post do OK? I’m afraid to try it: one because I’m afraid it wouldn’t and I’d feel like more of a failure, and two because I’m afraid it would.

These are the opinions I don’t like having about other people, but they also feel increasingly vindicated when I look at what text performs well on Reddit, and when I observe the basically-zero correlation between the topic of an article and the text of its responses. I’ve seen an enormous number of successful posts that can be summarized as “the author presents their grand unifying theory of X, with the understanding that the reader will never attempt to apply it to examples outside the post.”

At this point I’ve put a lot of points into “being right” and it hasn’t gotten anywhere. My most common experience when I write is that people latch onto things I said that weren’t my point

Let me introduce you to the biological source of creative confabulation! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_tie_(biology)

Complex systems that relate in robust manners do not do so by trying to be right, or even minimizing error, per say. It’s about, economically confabulating between two distinct spaces!

The written form is usefully incapable of fully capturing the experience you put in (fan in), and usefully capable of producing unrelated and novel experiences of the audience (fan out).

Where possible, I focus my attention on being economical, and leaving control of the reaction out of it. Have fun. Don’t take the work, the audience, or oneself, too seriously.

I empathize with my entire being. If I can drive one point home to you, it is this: don’t take it personally. The reason that your work is falling into the void without an echo is not evidence that you are wrong, unconvincing, or have what the kids call “a skill issue.” For what it’s worth, I’ve enjoyed it!

The audience here at a.s recognizes that the internet has slumped into a runny pile of garbage juice; the discovery mechanisms that once turned up interesting articles written by passionate folks…just don’t anymore; expert synthesis and actual experience just don’t activate people’s sympathetic nervous systems (and thus generate advertising impressions). The machine therefore will not surface that kind of article without great effort, and they aren’t read by lazy people who find them by accident.

Scooter can’t be accused of grabbing readers by the amygdala, he plays a different game. Scooter and his ilk are the latest in a long line of prostitutes who sell their reputations–rather than their bodies–in exchange for money. Scooter uses his reputation to paint portraits of the world’s weird nerds as world-striding collossi via the same kind of patron/client relationship that has existed since time immemorial. The only notable thing about him is that, in addition to ego-stroking absolute maniacs, SA is a world leader in misleading obscuritanims. BTW, I guarantee that no one looked as cool as they do painted on the walls of an Italian cathedral by a Renaissance master.

So yeah, the same historical forces that built weird lion-man-things in ancient Babylon, the Sistine Chapel, and the British Museum now corrupt the web and pay for Scooter’s new Tesla. I’m sure it’s cold comfort, but the fact that no one wants to pay you six figures to write a substack is not a bad thing, imho. It just means that you’re not a sellout.

Since you’re not willing to sell fear, tell the masses that their prejudices are justified, or compromise your integrity, you may have to find more intangible ways to judge your success, and maybe accept that the good guys have to, as pg would say, “do things that don’t scale.” dodges rotten fruit

I think it would be cool if you posted longer pieces here, though, and that that it would be rad af to see the morewrite board get more content, in general!

I may have posted this on another thread of yours somewhere, but I think Elizabeth Sandifer wrote the best analysis of Scott’s rhetoric and writing style. Her assessment is, basically, that he doesn’t persuasively or effectively argue for his conclusions as much as he implies them through metaphor, negative space, and allegory. This lack of clarity serves to obscure how weak the underlying arguments actually are, particularly the degree to which he completely ignores any context (historical, statistical, philosophical, etc) of one of his reference points that would complicate the picture by making it actually accurate and complete.

This beigeness is the heart of how his despicable politics were able to float under the radar for so many people, myself included. I would add to El’s analysis two things. The first is that Scott is a master of apophasis, the art of talking about something by explicitly not talking about it. He frequently draws to a repugnant conclusion regarding race science or gender relations and ends up spending the last paragraph quickly disavowing the obvious implication of the rest of his piece. He is also very skilled at performing intelligence. He builds his non-arguments from elements of multiple fields across history, science, philosophy (often using the jump to move from implying his conclusion to assuming it) and has a good vocabulary that lets him sound vaguely academic but without being as dry and detailed as actual academic work.

The combination there is very useful for telling Important People the things that they want to believe anyways or that flatter them, but not great for actually communicating. I don’t know how well those techniques can be adapted to less bastardly ends.

I think you are overestimating how much of SlateScott’s success comes from his brilliance, and how much even his dedicated readers understand (or even properly read) of each post. He’s a poster in a tight knit network of posters, many of whom know each other socially, and all of whom heap praise on the leading lights as high IQ geniuses. Being influenced by SlateScott is self-flattering to a certain type, so you get many testimonials.

This may be a bit of a stretch, but I really liked this essay on Matt Iglesias, but really it’s about the banality of posting success: https://maxread.substack.com/p/matt-yglesias-and-the-secret-of-blogging

There are all kinds of things you can do to develop and retain an audience – break news, loudly talk about your own independence, make your Twitter avatar a photo of a cute girl – but the single most important thing you can do is post regularly and never stop.

…it’s the best time there’s ever been to be somebody who can write something coherent quickly. Put things out. Let people yell at you. Write again the next day.

I’m sorry if this one seems like I’ve painted with too broad a brush or gotten it completely wrong.

What you’re saying roughly conforms to this pattern: “This guy’s writing sucks; why is he more successful than me?” I imagine it’s a question writers ask themselves all the time. I won’t be the one to solve that question for anyone else, but in my case, I think about what successful writing is for me. I try to understand what I’m trying to achieve with my writing. The bare minimum is getting my point across, though most of the time, that’s all I aim for. Sometimes, I want to make people laugh or react, but usually, I’ll feel successful as long as we’ve achieved mutual understanding.

As a follow-up to the above, I remind myself that writing is communication, and communication is difficult. You’re trying to take some abstract thought inside your brain and implant it in someone else’s! It’s a miracle that we can do that at all. And so, to that end, I am sceptical of Scott’s success.

On the one hand, I have not learned much of the common language between Scott and his ilk. His audience can read his writing and extract the profound knowledge otherwise impenetrable to other folk. But on the other hand, and this speaks more to the crowd of “thought leaders” and “very powerful people”, his writing is long and tedious. It would be surprising if any of these high-powered people you speak of actually have the time or energy to filter for whatever grains of thought are embedded in the river of mud that Scott conjures.

As others have pointed out, I think it’s far more likely that they’re coming in with preconceived notions and beliefs that they are trying to rationalise. Scott’s blog is the hearth with which they nurture their terrible ideas. He is an enabling psychiatrist who is happy to overmedicate his patients. You may have seen memes about bad people learning therapy terms to manipulate people (e.g. Jonah Hill). He’s essentially the therapist who is teaching them.

If it means anything to you, I read your post beginning to end without flinching. I’m riddled with ADHD, so that’s rare.

I can see plenty of others agreeing with you, and I do too. I feel it all the time and I don’t really have an answer, sorry.

I am obsessed with breaking through the hesitations and anxieties to just write shit and publish it. I see David and Amy posting more frequently than my bowel movements (sorry) and I spend a month or two lamenting over it. I almost went a year between posts and I’m already a few months since my last one.

The only thing I can say is that comparing yourself to someone else’s success (as in audience size) and analysing their style for clues on how to emulate their popularity is only going to hold you back. I’ve read two of your things this afternoon and, perhaps because you’re letting off steam, you’re very entertaining to read.

I was really happy when @self@awful.systems proposed we create this MoreWrite community because I hoped it would help people like you and us to get ideas out there.

I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong other than not swallowing your pride every now and again and publishing something and banging your drum so hard you can’t hear your inner voice saying it’s stupid.

as a writer, I have no idea how to supply an answer that would be useful to you, but feel like noting my own approach might help? I write best when I’m angry at something, the summary is always “And then THESE FUCKERS …”

also I try to be good at sentences and wit and jokes people will remember along the way, but the point is it’s nothing without a strong moral core

as it happens Scott gave us his secret decoder ring in the leaked email to Topher Brennan: SSC was created to promote reaction and race science, exactly as obviously as it has achieved doing, and ultimately rests on an ecosystem of astroturf started by Thiel.

Sorry, I read this and it is really an heartfelt outpouring but I just don’t know what to say (Esp as im not a writer myself), still wanted to reply but didn’t know what to say before. Hope the replies helped.