The mind-set of logical serenity, for all of the rationalists’ talk of “skin in the game” and their inclination to heighten every argument with a proposition bet, only obtains as long as their discussions feel safely confined to the realm of what they regard, consciously or otherwise, as sport. The sheer volume of Alexander’s output can make it hard to say anything overly categorical (epistemic status: treading carefully), but there is some evidence to support the idea that he, like anyone, is wont to sacrifice rigor in moments of passion. (The rationalists might describe the relationship as inversely proportional.) One of Alexander’s most notorious essays was a thirteen-thousand-word screed called “Untitled,” a defense of Scott Aaronson, the Austin computer scientist and rationalist fellow-traveller. Aaronson had written that the charge of “male privilege” obscures and demeans the suffering of nerds in the sexual marketplace, and had been subject to online scorn by some Internet feminists. Alexander, moved to anger by Aaronson’s plight, rebukes the feminists. Although he claims at various points to be largely sympathetic to some of the women he mentions, he mostly deploys the term “feminism” as a tendentious umbrella term for the work of a small handful of online writers with whom he takes particular issue in one discrete instance. Later, Alexander apparently came to a similar conclusion and appended a disclaimer to the top of the post: “EDIT: This is the most controversial post I have ever written in ten years of blogging. I wrote it because I was very angry at a specific incident. I stand by a lot of it, but if somebody links you here saying ‘HERE’S THE SORT OF GUY THIS SCOTT ALEXANDER PERSON IS, READ THIS SO YOU KNOW WHAT HIS BLOG IS REALLY ABOUT’, please read any other post instead.”
Since the 2016 Presidential election, a contingent of the media has been increasingly critical of Silicon Valley, charging tech founders, C.E.O.s, venture capitalists, and other technology boosters with an arrogant, naïve, and reckless attitude toward the institutions of a functional democracy, noting their tendency to disguise anticompetitive, extractive behavior as disruptive innovation. Many technologists and their investors believe that media coverage of their domain has become histrionic and punitive, scapegoating tech companies for their inability to solve extremely difficult problems, such as political polarization, that are neither of their own devising nor within their ability to solve. The Valley’s most injured, aggrieved, and single-minded partisans don’t want to be judged by the absurdity of Juicero, the much-ridiculed luxury-juicing startup, or the fraud of Theranos, or the depredations of Uber. As Paul Graham pointed out, in a 2017 tweet, it was unfair to condemn the entirety of the tech sector based on a few bad actors. “Criticizing Juicero is fine,” he wrote. “What’s intellectually dishonest is criticizing SV by claiming Juicero is typical of it.” (The obvious irony—that people like Graham nevertheless feel free to write off the entirety of “the media” on a similarly invidious basis—seems lost on many of them.)
Graham’s tweet linked to a Slate Star Codex piece, also from 2017, called “Silicon Valley: A Reality Check,” in which Alexander had collated the most triumphalist dismissals of Juicero and paired them with his own views of what actual technological innovation looked like. “While Deadspin was busy calling Silicon Valley ‘awful nightmare trash parasites’, my girlfriend in Silicon Valley was working for a company developing a structured-light optical engine to manipulate single cells and speed up high-precision biological research,” he writes. Alexander goes on, in the post, to allow that Silicon Valley is not above reproach, acknowledging that “anything remotely good in the world gets invaded by rent-seeking parasites and empty suits,” but argues that journalists at publications such as the former Deadspin do not understand that the “spirit of Silicon Valley” is “a precious thing that needs to be protected.” (Deadspin, in its original form, did not survive the aftermath of Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against its former parent company, Gawker Media; the lawsuit was underwritten by Peter Thiel, which complicates the issue of who, exactly, needs protection from whom.) He continues, “At its worst, some of their criticism sounds more like a worry that there might still be some weird nerds who think they can climb out of the crab-bucket, and they need to be beaten into submission by empty suits before they can get away.”
By then, six months after the election, Alexander had emerged as one of the keenest observers of technologists as a full-fledged social cadre, and of their sharpening class antagonism with an older order—the institutions in New York, Boston, D.C., and Los Angeles that Balaji Srinivasan has disparaged as “the Paper Belt.” (Srinivasan’s Twitter bio reads “not big on credentialism,” a common posture in a place that likes to present itself as the world’s most successful meritocracy, although he provides a link that itemizes his connections to Stanford and M.I.T. “if deemed relevant.”) This new group, Alexander suggested in an earlier beloved essay, “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup,” published in 2014, sits at an odd angle to America’s extant tensions. In the essay, he describes our tendency to conceal the degree to which our beliefs and actions are determined by tribal attitudes. It is obvious, Alexander writes, that America is split in recognizable ways. “The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting ‘USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!’, and listening to country music.” He notes that he himself knows basically none of these people, a sign of how comprehensive our national sorting project has become. “The Blue Tribe,” by contrast, “is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to ‘everything except country’.” What’s crucial, he emphasizes, is that these are cultural differences rather than political ones—an Ivy League professor might hold right-leaning beliefs, for example, but is nevertheless almost certainly a member of the Blue Tribe.
These are caricatures, of course, but Alexander’s crude reductionism is part of his argument, which is that these categories are drawn and redrawn in bad faith, as a way to disavow tribalistic rancor without actually giving it up. When, for example, members of the Blue Tribe censure “America,” they are purporting to implicate themselves in their criticism; in reality, however, they are simply using “America” to mean “Red” America, without making that distinction explicit. What may sound like humility and self-scrutiny is, in fact, actually just a form of thinly disguised tribal retrenchment.
He introduces the idea of a third cohort in an aside: “(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football ‘sportsball’, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk—but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time.)” This is clearly meant as a teasing description of the S.S.C. reader—and, by extension, the Silicon Valley intellectual. Since the post was published, “Grey Tribe” has become a shorthand compliment paid to thinkers who float free of the polarized fiasco of American discourse. But “Except the Outgroup” is not an encomium to the Grey Tribe; it is his gentle reminder that most of its members, most of the time, share a vast portion of their political commitments with the Blue Tribe that they so often censure. He has been very upfront about this in his own case; last year, he wrote, lest there was any confusion, “I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat.” Any sense of rivalry, he suggests, is likely reducible to the narcissism of minor differences.
The division between the Grey and Blue tribes is often rendered in the simplistic terms of a demographic encounter between white, nerdily entitled men in hoodies on one side and diverse, effete, artistic snobs on the other. On this account, one side is generally associated with quantification, libertarianism, speed, scale, automation, science, and unrestricted speech; the other is generally associated with quality, progressivism, precaution, craft, workmanship, the humanities, and respectful language. Alexander, in another widely circulated essay, published in 2018, has popularized an alternative heuristic—a partition between what he calls “mistake theorists” and “conflict theorists.” Mistake theorists, he writes, look at any difference of opinion and conclude that someone must be making an error. They reckon that when the source of the mistake is identified—with more data, more debate, more intelligence, more technical insight—the resolution will be obvious. Conflict theorists are likely to look at the same difference of opinion and assume that no mechanism will provide for a settlement until incompatible desires are brought into alignment. The former tend to believe that after we sort out the problem of means, the question of ends can be left to take care of itself. The latter tend to believe that the preoccupation with means can serve to obscure the real issue of ends. Mistake theorists default to the hope that we just need to fix the bugs in the system. Conflict theorists default to the worry that what look like bugs might be features—and that it’s the system that has to be updated.