The edgelords were right: a response to Scott Alexander

We should aim for better elites

Edit: I assumed at first that Scott takes the view of the character Adraste. I am less certain now.

Edit 2: many ppl have pointed out that actual edgelords are bad. I agree! I only refer to these people as edgelords because Scott, through his character Adraste, does so. I certainly don't consider Scott or Nate or myself actual edgelords.

Edit 3: There is an important question as to whom SA, through the voice of Adraste, refers to when he thinks of “centrist edgelords”. He clearly includes Scott himself there, but Brett Weinstein would probably consider himself a centrist too, and there is an ocean of difference between Scott and Brett.

Scott Alexander has a recent post that I actually recommend everyone reads, called “Twilight of the edgelords”. It’s written as a dialogue between two fictional characters and it’s basically a debate of the piece’s subtitle: “Should edgy heterodox centrists accept some of the blame for Trump?”. Its conclusion is somewhat left to the reader (which is why this piece is titled “a response to Scott Alexander” as opposed to “contra Scott Alexander”).

The argument debated here is whether what one might call “centrist edgelords”¹, while motivated by good intentions, have been partially responsible for unleashing a catastrophic wave of populism madness that will tear the US apart. They did so by criticizing what one might call “liberal elites” in a rational way, hoping that we would reach a sort of middle-ground, rational consensus. Instead, we got disaster. Although Scott never explicitly states a definitive conclusion, my hunch is he is siding more with Adraste, whose viewpoint is effectively encapsulated by the following paragraph²:

We wanted to be able to hold a job without reciting DEI shibboleths or filling in multiple-choice exams about how white people cause earthquakes. Instead we got a thousand scientific studies cancelled because they used the string “trans-” in a sentence on transmembrane proteins.

We wanted to be able to prevent biological men with testosterone-boosted muscles from competing in women’s sports leagues. And somehow that morphed into a world where whenever someone with more subtlety than Attila the Hun tries to stake out a position on anything, roving bands of dead-eyed reply guys interject “HOW MANY GENDERS ARE THERE? BET YOU CAN’T ANSWER THAT HAR HAR HAR!”

Firstly, it feels like Scott has been reading a lot of

Richard Hanania

, whom I agree with on a lot of points, but who I also believe is catastrophizing the situation (something I told him personally). I totally agree that a wave of unimaginable stupidity, racism, anti-semitism, hate against transgender people, misogyny and all the other stuff Scott talks about has been unleashed on X. It is very bad that so many people feel this way. But I have reason to believe, and this will become more evident towards the end of this post, that these sentiments will not become dominant among so-called “elites”. My prediction is that in the long term, they will remain confined to the moral gutters of society.

But, even assuming things do become bad, I do not think “edgelords” like Scott are to blame for this. It’s clear to me that if anyone is to actually be assigned indirect responsibility for future negative consequences, those would be previously miscalibrated “establishment elites”, who should have listened to the likes of Scott Alexander,

Nate Silver

and other “edgelords” sooner. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who are no Trump supporters, have said as much in thier latest book, Abundance:

California’s problems are often distinct but not in their structure. The same dynamics are present in other blue states and cities. In this era of rising right-wing populism, there is pressure among liberals to focus only on the sins of the MAGA right. But this misses the contribution that liberal governance made to the rise of Trumpism.

My specialty is not politics/the kind of policies Derek and Ezra discuss in their book, but I have been writing about elite culture, especially as reflected in academia a lot over the past year or so. My overall opinion is that the elite consensus pre 2024 had gone wrong in important ways and that this is what is to be blamed for populism. I will go more into this in the next section, but first I want to make some very technical points about Trump getting elected that go against Scott’s theory. The first one is that most of the shift to Republicans has happened among politically disengaged voters. I do not mean to downplay the influence that Scott has, but I highly doubt these people have even heard of his name or other “edgelords”. These are normal people who were feeling something was going wrong.

It is true that the shift of tech billionaires towards the right probably had an actual electoral impact, and that can be partially blamed on “edgelords”. However, it was not edgelords who led to the extreme wing of the liberal elite (e.g. Taylor Lorenz) alienating tech through constant attacks — an extreme self-own from the liberal coalition. It is worth noting, however, that despite tech billionaires donating more to the right, Democrats still amassed more money in total donations. So, overall, they had resources *and* the main establishment institutions on their side. To me, it clearly looks like something had gone wrong among classical establishment elites, or what

Nate Silver

calls “The Village”. To blame the “edgelords” instead seems incorrect and not in line with the data we have.

Elites have a higher responsibility than most people

---

What I described above are to some extent technicalities that avoid the meat of the subject. Before getting into it, however, I want to sketch a bit what my views on elites are. Firstly, I am not a populist or an anti-elitist. I think domain experts and strong institutions that foster such experts and enable them to be in charge of key parts of running a good society are very important. I also take the view that some would consider cynical, which was articulated very well by

Philippe Lemoine

, that democracy is in many ways a form of regulating intra-elite competition and not quite “direct power of the people”.

I simply believe elites have a higher responsibility than the rest of people and I think the health of a society depends in large part on their behaviour. I guess in some sense, I have a vision of old-school honour, where people who have any sort of influence or hold power also have more responsibility, because their decisions are more consequential. The choice of the header image for this post is that of Sansa Stark — whom I think George RR Martin intended to turn into a character that would embody such an elite³: combining the moral backbone and deep sense of honour of the Starks with the pragmatism she gained through her experiences in King’s Landing. This is why, although I am more disgusted by groyper twitter anons, I focus more on discussing and criticizing the behaviour of people who actually run institutions.

This broad view is reflected in my writings: on one hand, I have repeatedly criticized academics when they got things wrong, for example their reaction to the plagiarism scandal in which the former Harvard president Dr Claudine Gay was involved. I have warned that people like Dr. Holden Thorp, who was the Chief Editor of Science, one of the most prestigious science publications, were doing a lot of harm by using their positions to make explicitly political/policy related statements. This is back when it was highly unpopular to do so, especially from within academia. My warnings came true in a way that was worse than I expected (recent science cuts). While this makes me feel good about my predictive validity, which is ultimately all that a take-haver has to defend their honor, it does not make me happy about the state of science.

Post from me — 2 years ago

At the same time, I also counteracted populist and over-simplistic critiques of elites that aim to paint them as these cartoonish villains, through pieces like: “Shut up about luxury beliefs” or “Elites are mostly lazily well-intentioned”.

Such articles aimed to reflect that I believe when elites go wrong, it’s often due to ignorance/social-conformism, and the right way to approach this is to slowly goad them towards better views (e.g. by starting a new movement or writing edgelord blogs, which is what Scott himself does⁴), instead of taking a “burn it all” attitude that throws the baby out with the bathwater.

Having established this framework, I want to explain, point-by-point, why the “edgelords” were right to criticize existing elites:

1) It is axiomatically true that what Richard Hanania would call “Elite Human Capital” (EHC) will generally be better at governance than the masses.

2) It is also true that you will always have a normal distribution of EHCness in the population, which can be shifted to some extent via culture and good institutions (mostly influenced by the top EHC people, so here we have feedback loops).

3) At the same time, it's clear you can have better or worse elites and that the outcome of a civilization depends on their quality. They are the rate limiting step to things happening/how things happen! Assuming a constant EHC distribution across countries, some will be better than others, and I think that is largely due to how well these elite run institutions are designed and how well their purpose is executed.

4) Following from 3, having better elites should be a priority. So I do not think criticizing elites should be avoided, simply because there is a risk of populism taking over. This would suggest that we can never hope to advance in our thinking or better our institutions: we just have to take them for granted as they are, no matter how flawed, because the alternative is chaos and rule by uninformed people. Permanent stasis. And stasis actually equates to decay. So, if we take Adraste’s thesis seriously, we would end up with a progressively decaying elite that we never criticize for fear that something worse might take over.

5) It is also clear to me that elites and many institutions have become slightly lower quality in the last decade or so, due to a multitude of reasons. Western elites and institutions are still better than Eastern European ones and probably most other elites (I know this from personal experience), but that does not mean we should just allow them to become progressively worse.

6) Misinformation experts, blatantly political activists at the helm of scientific publications like Holden Thorpe and the like, did not "predict" Trump or populism. Rather, they caused these phenomena to some extent, through their smugness and by being fundamentally wrong. They gave ammunition to the braindead anti-wokes that Scott describes (the “HOW MANY GENDERS ARE THERE? BET YOU CAN’T ANSWER THAT HAR HAR HAR!” people).

TLDR: Honest intellectuals and others who can influence culture indirectly (e.g. via philanthropy) cannot simply sit still and allow elites to become progressively worse for fear that any criticism might lead to populism. In some way I see this as a form of extreme cowardice and defeatism. The spirit of the West is Faustian, which means it are seeking continuous betterment. Breaking some things is part of it. Of course, it should be followed by rebuilding. And rebuilding we shall do! In the next section I explain that what has happened recently in the culture has created a unique opportunity for a better elite, one that aims to build, both figuratively and literally.

The future

---

Now, the question is: what does the future hold? There are two possible narratives that can be envisioned starting from here:

1) a pessimistic one: maybe a slow influencing of elites to better views, or the middle-ground that I and other “edgelords” propose has been made impossible by social media. Maybe in the past elites policed each other behind more closed doors, so that only people who could understand the nuances of "Elites are mostly lazily well intentioned" had a say in the conversation. Social media may have become the equivalent of elites airing their dirty laundry in public and grifters taking advantage of it. So before someone like Scott can actually make elites better by convincing them, 100 populist writers will take advantage of the situation, spout some misinformation and move us irremediably towards populism.

Another force contributing to a pessimistic view is that it is highly possible intellectual elites today are lower quality, via expansion of higher education on one hand, and flight of very capable people to the private sector on the other. However, this latter problem is solvable by raising the pay/status of high-caliber intellectuals through concerted effort by individuals who understand this and can support it.

2) the optimistic one: populism serves as a "shock" to the elite system, without a catastrophic blow to democracy itself. My opinion is that now the Overton window has been expanded such that views like those held by so-called “edgelords” have become "normal" and "moderate". Ezra Klein and many Democratic figureheads have changed their tune in response to the Trump election. I suspect they were always more moderate than they seemed, but they have been emboldened in actually spelling out things they would not have said pre-Trump. They have become explicitly critical of the more extreme members of their coalition and it feels like individuals like Jeet Heer or Taylor Lorenz have become sidelined and proven wrong.

It might be the optimism of youth, but I personally believe much more in option 2. I think books like “Abundance”, which takes a pragmatic view to progressive issues and aims to convince liberals that virtue signalling and cancellation campaigns are poor substitutes for engaging with real problems like housing and climate change represent signals in this direction. This fits nicely with the emergence of the “progress studies” movement. I see a way towards a coalition of true liberalism that is focused both on building a better culture and dismantling the institutional barriers to creating material progress at the same time. In any case, there is an element of self-fulfilling prophecy to all of this: if “edgelords” meekly accept defeat, we might as well get 1. The future is ours for the making, and we might as well start working towards the second option.

1. Scott clearly considers himself part of this “edgelord” contingent, and which I also probably belong to, since I have been criticizing parts of the “elite establishment” for some time now on my blog. Others that could be included are: Nate Silver, Cathy Young, Jesse Singal, Claire Lehmann, The GMU Econ Department, Tracing Woodgrains, Richard Hanania (although he started as a complete rightist).

2. I could be wrong on this one. Maybe this is simply an internal monologue where Scott himself is trying to figure things out. Anyway, this piece can be considered a “Contra Adraste” piece.

3. but we might never find out…

4. arguably he has also started a movement, willingly or not.