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I've been frustrated by his writing in the past few years. He asks big questions, but is surprisingly small-minded with the answers.

Feels like he found a formula for churning out thinkpieces:

- find an interesting topic

- make a simplified model of the issue

- solve the simplified model

- discover reality conflicts with the model (optional)

- ignore reality

- declare victory

There is a certain style of libertarian writing, and I include the author as well as the mercatus center posse as often using this syle, that I find quite off putting. It often feels like the primary purpose of most of their writing is to show how they are smarter than everyone else. This manifests in a writing style that is extremely confident and declarative which is an effective mask for the hollowness and one sidedness of their ideas.

I'll cherry pick just one example from this article. The author in one sentence dismisses the entire field of psychoanalysis. Yet I can't help but notice that his entire blog sure looks like he is unconsciously carrying out his own psychoanalysis in public. You can also see it in the grievances against the medical profession where he has to use his blog to guard against feelings of inadequacy because he didn't get into a top medical school or residency. But he gets to play it both ways because the fact that he writes these outrageously long, fluff filled pieces, that draw a large following he can then use as proof that he is actually in fact smarter than the people who previously rejected him.

I have some similar chips on my shoulder so I quickly recognize these patterns of behaviors in others. And perhaps I am misinterpreting him, but every single time I read one of his posts I am left with the main takeaway being that I am supposed to be impressed by his intelligence.

Other red flags in this piece include the references to the stupidity of the average person (again in implicit contrast to his penetrating intellect) as well as the lazy generalizations and vacuous statements about amorphous concepts such as wokeness along with the bizarre suggestion that wokeness somehow conquered most priesthoods even though the counterexamples are far, far too long to list. I'll leave it with one though: actual priests in the US can hardly be said to be woke even though their own sacred texts are far more aligned with progressive economics than consumer capitalism.

You're not merely supposed to be impressed by his intelligence but in his virtue as a purely rational, unbiased mind absolutely free from any corrupting ideology.

He's an insecure like you said and a coward. Too afraid to say what he actually believes (or maybe too spiritually weak to actually commit to any), he hides his goals and motivations behind this pseudo-academic prose style.

> He's an insecure like you said and a coward

Aren't we all, to some degree?

Sure but it is the degree that's notable here.

> Too afraid to say what he actually believes

I think this would sound very unlikely to any regular reader of SSC/ACX. Many articles, including this one, are explanations of what he believes and why.

(Is it possible that you just find his explanations difficult to believe?)

> (Is it possible that you just find his explanations difficult to believe?)

Correct, I don't believe he's honest about his beliefs, their sources, and his motivation.

> I'll cherry pick just one example from this article. The author in one sentence dismisses the entire field of psychoanalysis.

Properly. The issues with psychoanalysis are extensive, well known, and he has discussed them in the past, like the dodo bird verdict. If you are somehow still a fan of psychoanalysis after everything, then you are not going to be convinced by two sentences of criticism, or even three, and there is no point in trying when that is not the primary topic; dismissing it in 1 sentence is correct. (And this is your slamdunk criticism you lead with?)

Wow, you seem to have taken my comment personally.

Dismissing psychoanalysis in one sentence is a lazy power move that elevates the author by putting down others, much like your comment. I picked that example in part because I find it interesting and personally helpful in a way that things like cbt are not (and believe it or not, I'm not a moron). And also I know that rationalists hate psychoanalysis in part because it refuses to elevate pure rationality above all other forms of knowledge. It is thus threatening to the current order and must be insulted and diminished. If it had no power or validity, there would be no reason to attack it anyway.

Your response is exactly in the spirit I was critiquing. You pointed out one thing, which I did not lead with, but provided as an example and added another arrogant and vacuous dismissal of my criticism.

But perhaps this is only evident to me because I have actually read a good bit of Jung and wrestled with it instead of relying on some authority to tell me that it is dumb and wrong. Read Answer to Job and come back to me and tell me with a straight face that Scott Alexander is an intellect on par with Carl Jung. Even Freud for all of his problems, had deep insights about the human condition that most people still don't grasp.

I think he just grew up, frankly. I've never had a blog, but I'm fairly similar intellectually and dispositionally to Scott and have followed him a long time and I've seen the same thing happen to me. When I was younger and in school, I'd go deep into rabbit holes and investigate them very thoroughly, mostly dispassionately, trying to have as little bias as possible, maybe come to conclusions, maybe not. But having a full-time job I'm reasonably senior in, a family, and needing to stick to some regular exercise routine to stay functional and healthy as middle age otherwise ravishes me, there is simply not the time or mental energy to do those things any more.

My reponse has been different, though. I just don't care any more. I have had no personal interaction with any person or institution that seemed woke in nearly a decade and I have no opinion about it, probably because I'm not in school and stay off the Internet except for Hacker News every few days. I haven't voted in two decades and avoid culture war nonsense.

But Scott is a terminally online person, has built a brand, and is being paid lots of money by Substack to keep churning out these think pieces. So he has to keep doing it, but he's also a middle-aged man running a private psychiatry practice with a wife and two young kids. There is no way he has the time or mental energy to devote to this stuff that he had 15 years ago. He has accumulated knowledge and wisdom and is still a hell of a writer with a very good understanding of how to present statistics to a lay audience, but he's probably also forever going to be mentally stuck in 2007 when Ron Paul seemed to every professional-managerial class 25 year-old man in America to be the most intellectual honest, exciting thing we'd ever get. He's becoming the poor man's version of Andrew Sullivan or Megan McArdle for the kind of people who only listen to bands that aren't popular.

Suffering from success, DJ Khaled-style! Better to die a hero...

I suggest you could simplify that to:

- find an interesting topic

- ignore reality

- declare victory

Or possibly to:

- ignore reality

- declare victory

> "wokeness" is not well characterised through out the piece and instead it is used in a "we all know what wokeness is" fashion

In comments, Scott explains: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods/comment/8506...

On their face a lot of these might be bad things, but my criticism is precisely that this "brand" of wokeness that he describes is an oversimplification on a lot of issues.

For example, let's take the claim that COVID vaccines were being prioritized by race instead of age. This is a big claim, in Australia for example I remember people from ethnic groups were considered priority; I don't recall them being prioritized over old people however so it's definitely an argument that I think needs to be treated with seriousness. Where was this, what were the reasons given for it, etc. I do recall certain races being more likely to have more serious reactions to the virus than others; there's socio-economic factors to consider as well (for example, black people tend to live in poorer neighborhoods, we could look at number of people per household, etc.).

So, although I appreciate the effort of actually giving some examples, my main point stands. We ought to contextualize and give a fair reading as to why these decisions are being made, provided that these examples are a fair representation of the modern scenario to begin with. Instead of simply labeling them as "woke".

I think there's a big reaction against diversity that fails to account the reasons, logical, philosophical, ethical that are behind it and why these people think we should have more of it.

I feel like if you want to have these kind of discussions it's more helpful for everyone to actually give proper respect to the opponent's arguments and strong-man their arguments when you take them down. As other posters have pointed out, it seems as though he is making a strawman and then writing a whole essay about it.

> It's definitely not a monolith and I think treating it as such is disrespectful to other people and bad for the public discourse.

It definitely is and the priests deterministicly produce this. The only one who could ever teach me..

"Inequality in our world is definitely tearing society apart..."

This is a false narrative that is not supported by the data or by economic realities. Allow me to get on my soap box for a moment...

Inequality is a concept that is economically (not psychologically, unfortunately) inconsequential to a world that has seen a dramatic DECREASE in poverty in the past 50 years. We live in the best of times.

https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...

The ratio of one person's "wealth" to another's (inequality) has little or no bearing on anyone's wellbeing unless the person of less wealth chooses to make it so.

In other words, Elon Musk (for example) is not keeping anyone from being able to afford things just because he has great wealth. That wealth was created out of enterprise value--it was not stolen from anyone.

There is no great "source of wealth" that only certain people have or can control access to. Wealth is created, not hoarded. This forum is ostensibly about this very topic: commercialization of technologies and value creation.

In a free society and economy, individuals are capable of building ventures that have enterprise values that are "invented" out of thin air through economic contracts.

LeBron James, for example, is very wealthy because he has a contract to get paid for his talent. That contract was valued through economic negotiations. He grew up in poverty, and now he is wealthy.

This is where wealth comes from: the creation and monetization of something of value. It happens in the stock market every minute of every trading day.