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3 months ago
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I’ve been a fan of Scott Alexander for a long time and a subscriber to Astral Codex Ten for even longer. Scott has an unparalleled ability to persuade and inform, and I’m always happy to see an ACX post in my inbox—he’s the reason I started blogging in the first place! As such, I wanted to break down one of his older blog posts, All Debates are Bravery Debates, in an attempt to learn his tricks and become a better blogger myself.
Editor’s note: This post contains the necessary excerpts from All Debates are Bravery Debates—but if you read that post first, your reading experience will be enhanced!
Scott starts his post with an anecdote about Atlas Shrugged—in particular, his negative opinion of it. In just two paragraphs, Scott shows us his process of working through his thoughts, shows that he is not infallible, and shows that he is willing to update his views based on new information.
I read Atlas Shrugged probably about a decade ago, and felt turned off by its promotion of selfishness as a moral ideal. I thought that was basically just being a jerk. After all, if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need (I thought) it’s more selfishness.
Then I talked to a friend who told me Atlas Shrugged had changed his life. That he’d been raised in a really strict family that had told him that ever enjoying himself was selfish and made him a bad person, that he had to be working at every moment to make his family and other people happy or else let them shame him to pieces. And the revelation that it was sometimes okay to consider your own happiness gave him the strength to stand up to them and turn his life around, while still keeping the basic human instinct of helping others when he wanted to and he felt they deserved it (as, indeed, do Rand characters).
Immediately, Scott’s willingness to change his mind jumps out at us. This will come back later—for now, pay attention to his use of examples and anecdotes. The POVs that shine through are powerful: he doesn’t even state a point in this section, and he doesn’t have to.
In section II, Scott explains another anecdote about the subreddit r/atheism’s juvenile and polarizing early days.
Now that we’ve been primed by the first section, Scott is free to expand upon his observations in the second. He does so by introducing more nuance and perspective, explaining every side of the debate—how the moderators tried to tone down the childishness and mockery and memes, why some of the r/atheism users resisted (because they valued showing people that the heavens do not actually strike down heathens and apostates), and how the childishness and mockery would do a bad job of persuading Christians (and non-Christian religious people like Scott) to the side of atheism.
He closes that section by saying:
r/atheism is doing a bad job at being the sort of people who can convert Gilbert, and the new mods’ policy of “you should have more civil and intellectual discussions” might work better on him. I think it would work better on me too.
But there is – previously unappreciated by me – a large population of people for whom really dumb offensive strawmannish memes are exactly what they need.
In a wonderfully nuanced manner, Scott manages to express his disdain for childish mockery, while simultaneously acknowledging the contingent of people whom it rightfully benefits. Points this complex and fair can be frequently found in Scott Alexander articles. Indeed, Scott himself writes about this in his own nonfiction writing advice when he says to “Anticipate and defuse counterarguments”:
The moral of the story is that you sound a lot more credible, and your opponents a lot less persuasive, if you’re the one who brings the possible counterarguments up yourself. This is true regardless of how effective your countercounterarguments are.
But in my opinion, he’s doing something more than mere anticipation and defusal. He channels the platonic ideal of a LessWrong Rationalist by steelmanning the other side, and trying to make their points better than they do—so that when he argues his own case, you really understand why he’s right. As a friend of mine put it:
The beauty in Alexander’s writing is that he’s concise while also doing all of the intellectual labor for you.
Fighting a true steelman is really hard, because you actually have to figure out the strongest version of your opponent’s argument before you can try to defeat it. If you engage with a weakman or strawman instead of a steelman, your readers are liable to notice: your writing will lose credibility and persuasiveness.
Accordingly, true steelmanning requires a staggering amount of epistemic humility: in the process of trying to emulate this yourself, you may accidentally convince yourself that your argument doesn’t actually defeat the steelman, and be forced to change your mind.
However, if you’re in the process of steelmanning and realize you’re wrong,
DON’T THROW AWAY YOUR DRAFT.
Instead, consider doing what Scott did in section I: show the evolution in your thought by steelmanning your old position. In this process, you might change your mind again and go back to your old position—and it’s this very interplay of examining the evidence and changing your mind that both produces the strongest argument and the most interesting writing.
Being epistemically honest and humble is hard enough already. But, as my friend pointed out, the real magic of Scott’s writing is how he manages to do it so clearly.
In section I—a single section of just two paragraphs—he sets up his old mindset in a way you can agree with, and then immediately demolishes in such an incisive way that you can’t help but wonder why you agreed with the first position in the first place. He does so without even making an explicit claim—and in section II, he does basically the same thing!
But as we’ll see, he hasn’t even stated the main claim of his article yet. Scott is showing us another of the hidden writing virtues: restraint.
On to section III!
In this section, Scott discusses a friend’s experiences with the Landmark Forum’s self-improvement workshop. At this point, we already understand the point being made in sections one and two: depending on your background, worldview, and state of mind, different experiences or pieces of literature can have vastly different effects on people. Something that feels crude, offensive, or pointless to Alice might feel like a saving grace to Bob.
So this time, instead of presenting two perspectives on a single idea—“take responsibility for your actions”—he brings in a new and conflicting perspective: “Don’t be so hard on yourself. No one else is as hard on yourself as you are. You are your own worst critic.”
Instead of reiterating the original point, Scott chooses to home in on his true point by generalize even further. He notes that these two opposite claims are both useful pieces of information, gives even more examples of two different kinds of people who would benefit from these pieces of information—one person who should probably be less harsh on themself, and one group (well, company) that are real jerks and should probably be taking more responsibility on themselves.
At this point, one more facet of his writing has become clear: Scott Alexander loves anecdotes and examples. From his nonfiction writing advice post:
6. Use concrete examples
So if you want to convince someone of a meta-level principle, you need to build it up from examples that support it. And if you want the principle to be well-founded and stable under reflective equilibrium, you also need to present the examples that don’t support it and explain why you didn’t make your principle out of those instead.
Scott explains this further regarding Meditations on Moloch, which is in my opinion among the greatest blog posts ever written. He says
When I wrote Meditations on Moloch, probably the most complicated point I’ve ever tried to express on this blog, I began with fourteen different examples before I even started trying to express the underlying principle. I hoped that readers would be able to triangulate my point by finding what all fourteen examples had in common, and most of them did.
Scott doesn’t just use clear and concrete examples; he overwhelms you with a barrage of examples that highlight different aspects of his central point. And as we’ve discussed, his examples are so clear and pointed that he often doesn’t even bother to actually state the premise he’s arguing for. At no point in section I does Scott say something boorish like "While I didn’t benefit from being told to be more selfish, my friend did because he was raised in a strict family that punished selflessness”. All he does is tell both stories, his and his friend’s: the contrast jumps out naturally.
Scott trusts his readers to infer his points through the examples he chooses—and by doing so, he avoids making us feel patronized. This isn’t to say that Scott is careless with his examples. On the contrary, each of his anecdotes is meant to prove a very specific point. When read in order, they all build upon each other, and eventually lead to the true point of his post.
Now that Scott has walked us through one million examples, he finally states his real thesis.
It’s much easier to be charitable in political debates when you view the two participants as coming from two different cultures that err on opposite sides, each trying to propose advice that would help their own culture, each being tragically unaware that the other culture exists.
Surprisingly, this is a pretty basic idea. It’s an extension of the same principle that gives rise to steelmanning: treat your opponent’s argument with maximum charity so that you may learn from them if they happen to be right. This post wasn’t designed to convince you of some fancy or elaborate philosophical conclusion; it was written to make Scott’s point seep into your brain on an intuitive level. That’s why Scott relies so heavily on example and anecdote.
And, even more surprisingly, it’s also why he commits a cardinal sin of writing: not having a strong conclusion! Scott trusts in his writing, and ends abruptly when he feels like it. He doesn’t feel the need to end with some witticism or profound point that will leave his readers nodding their heads and looking around for the subscribe button so they can throw money and adoration at him: he knows we’ll get it, because we’ve just spent the last couple thousand words mulling over his examples and absorbing them directly into our brains.
Yes, this is partially a self-callout: I love the short and snarky conclusion paragraph perhaps a little too much. But to be honest, I often find myself wishing that Scott Alexander would end (or begin) his posts with a straight-up thesis: doing so would save me the trouble of combing through his writing in order to find the sentence that most closely resembles the main point, and would make grasping it much easier.
On the other hand, there's something to be said for not having a conclusion. If you can reduce your entire post into a single paragraph without losing any nuance, your post might be unnecessarily long: I suspect that Scott prefers to avoid reducing the complexity of his points. Accordingly, he leaves his readers to struggle a little bit instead of spoon-feeding them the thesis of the post. It’s an interesting choice, and one that I’ll be thinking about vis-à-vis my own blog.
There’s more to be said about Scott Alexander’s writing. He’s a master of writing in his own voice. He has an incredible ability to manage information flow and reader attention. He’s an expert at making his readers read between the lines. I could go on.
Take it from someone who was inspired to blog by Scott: trying to write like him is HARD. He’s probably the GOAT of blogging, and for good reason: the guy is like no other. I aspire to one day reach the bar he has set.
