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I want to think critically about who gets attention on the non-mainstream political internet.
There's a few models we can imagine for how this works. One is a perfect meritocracy. The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like. This is the naive view and it's what I imagined for a long time. I'm betting most people imagine that it works like this.
I don't think it works like this. When you try to compare the merit of big attention getters vs. smaller attention getters, you get weird, even creepy results. It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.
The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you. They are allowed to recieve attention by people with more traditional forms of power and lower forms of attention, the kind that isn't paid by consumers but rather is of a nature such that they are willing to buy it. This means their takes aren't really real. They're kind of fake, permitted, virtual, simulated; what are you not seeing that allowed attention getters can't say? Most obviously, they can't criticize their allowers. More than that, they can't disagree with their allowers fundamentally. On a deep level, they just can't be honest. They're not honest. Honesty is not allowed. Keep this in mind -- I think if people were more critical about how establishment their favorite commentors are, the equation would tilt a little bit more toward a pure meritocracy.
When I don't have energy for cooking and go to eat out, 9 out of 10 times it's a cafeteria with a small fixed menu. They serve a soup, a few bread buns, a fresh salad, and a dish with decent amount of chicken (12 options, realistically 5), all for something like $4,8. Right now I'm feeling cheeky so I'm in a mid-tier Iranian restaurant where Fesenjan and other delicious things can be had – for about 300% more. It leaves a better sensation after the fact, more giddy lightness than stuffed stomach; might just be saffron. Maybe I'll come here once more in my life.
Admittedly, this is unsolicited blogging and the moral of the story could as well be conveyed with McDonalds vs. fancy burgers, or with Scott's own musings on Coca-Cola in How The West
HWas Won. I much prefer Wyclif's commentary. But there's no mystery in why Scott is a star of greater magnitude than Wyclif.I've also wondered about prominence of rationalist thought leaders. But after all is said and done – this is cope, sorry. We know Scott's history and we know Eliezer's, it's all in the open, and many of us have been there for much, or all, of the way, long before they received any establishment attention. What makes those guys special is that they are, indeed, that good. Or rather – they're good at this niche public nerd-intellectual schtick. Good enough to have reasonably long shelf lives.
The first virtue of a public intellectual is productivity. The output must be consistent, voluminous, topical, wide-ranging, and ideally give the impression of effortlessness. A proper PI must be able to write about anything and, perhaps, write anything – from poetry to meta-analysis to an alchemical treatise; all in the same recognizable but immensely varied voice, a one-man magazine. It's a bit of a sports performance – namely, verbal gymnastics. Like Andrey Plakhov says:
Adding to that, Scott had his Annus Mirabilis of 2014, writing an entire book's worth of important articles! And they are all very accessible. That's the second virtue: clarity. Or put another way, being able to distinguish the job of a public intellectual and an academic performer. There is a niche for obscurantism, as Moldbug has demonstrated, but it is not large. People who'll read you are mostly not geniuses, but neither are they fools who can be intimidated and amazed by big words. Many of them just want an entertaining, clear narration and commentary of ideas they could as well write about themselves, had they more time.
Plakhov then proceeds to criticize Eliezer. I won't touch Eliezer beyond saying that he has essentially cultivated the community and intellectual culture where Scott got promoted, wrote an entire mini-Talmud of rationality and a very voluminous, popular work of fiction with the intention to peddle his ideas to the masses – an accomplishment that's harder than it might look. And this is the third virtue of a public intellectual – working in the context of a public-facing intellectual tradition, and molding it, and contributing to its growth. You can't get far on your own; nobody will care about a loquacious manifesto-shitting crank, even if by some miracle your manifestos are actually great so long as one looks past the inevitable lack of polish. So you've got to live in a society. It's not different from what aspiring artists (or sex workers) do, reposting and boosting each other. But these two have done more than others.
The fourth virtue is letting your personality shine through your texts - and better if it's a likeable personality for a wide enough audience. Author-clientele relationships are parasocial. Many very smart people would rather keep their identity small; so it takes reading 20x as much to get a good feeling for who Gwern is. It's perhaps a more authentic impression than one you get with a single note by Scott – but people like the latter more, and they like that it happens so naturally. But you mustn't be larger than life – that's the turf of life coaches, and it's nauseating for the target audience of intellectual commentary.
And only the fifth virtue, I'd say, is sticking to the confines of the Overton window, and thus preventing the loss of people who feel uncomfortable outside.
By the way, why do I know what Plakhov says? Because sometimes I get engrossed, perhaps infatuated, studying a hitherto ignored smartass, amazed that something so good, so obviously beyond my ken, was so readily available; and in a few days I skim his entire output, and in a few days+1 I am disappointed and see what should have been done and said better. But I did not. Because I'm not that productive and not that good.
There may be some factors loosely along the lines you hint at. Bluntly, they both are cult leader figures («rightful caliph» jokes are not just jokes), or perhaps intuitively exploiting the Learned Rabbi archetype of their ancestral culture. When I saw people debating Sequences IRL, it was hard to distinguish from a chavruta following a Shiur; or from an underground Marxist circle, acolytes diligently inspecting the complex wisdom in teacher's words. That's funny to see. That could contribute to the resiliency of their fame. That can be at most a part of it.
It may not be a perfect meritocracy. But it does select for the fittest.
Speaking of - when are you posting something on your substack, you lazy bum? I wanted to sponsor my favorite Russkie-in-exile, but you just won't let me.
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