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
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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?)
Correct, I don't believe he's honest about his beliefs, their sources, and his motivation.
Aren't we all, to some degree?
- find an interesting topic
- ignore reality
- declare victory
Or possibly to:
- ignore reality
- declare victory