Scott Alexander is Wrong About the Sociopaths

Status Obsession is a Marker of Narcissism

For better or for worse, the Internet is absolutely brimming with ideas. Most of these ideas are pretty terrible, for reasons you would naturally expect: Everybody’s trying to come up with something new, but reality is only the way that it is, so the space of bad and wrong ideas is greater—arguably, infinitely greater—than the space of ideas that match the real world.

The irony is, of course, that in writing this I have become the Internet.¹ And what I’m telling you now is that what I’m telling you now is extremely unlikely to be correct. But OK, just look at what the situation was like on Mount Olympus before the Internet came around, and ask yourself whether things are really any different today:

• Aphrodite (trying to appear philosophical): “I think pi is equal to one.”

• Boreas (trying to get Aphrodite to pay attention to him): “Actually pi is two.”

• Cronus: “No, since the dawn of time pi has been a manifestation of the number three.”

• Dionysus: “Pi is too wild to be counted among the orderly list of integers; it could only be some fraction in between.”

• Eros: “You’re getting warmer, though I think you’ll find pi isn’t even a number at all, but rather a representation of romantic desire.”

• Artemis: “Pi is the last glorious drop of rain that falls in a spring shower.”

• Hephaestus: “Pi marks the dividing line between things that are a heap, and things that aren’t a heap.”

• Loki (crashing the party): “Nobody even knows what pi is!”

Being fair, some of these answers are probably better than others.² Cronus is doing all right if you’re willing to round the value of a non-terminating decimal to a single significant digit, and Dionysus is getting warm when he says pi isn’t an integer. These notions might be worth discussing, at least. But none of the entire list of answers really gets at pi’s status as an irrational number slightly over three.

Regrettably, whenever gods or mortals gather, this is often the situation: amidst a cacophony of voices, the truth may never even be mentioned.³

My time on this Internet is finite. I can’t respond to everything out there. So when I tell you that Scott Alexander was wrong about something—as he occasionally was—what I mean is that he had an idea that was at least worth discussing. His post about the cyclic nature of subcultures is one such idea.

A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures

Never mind Scott’s informal use of the term theory; his idea is based on David Chapman’s original Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution which I’m assuming you’re familiar with.⁴ (If not, well hey, the entirety of Meaningness is another thing to read.) Where Scott diverges from Chapman’s original idea is in claiming that there are “no sociopaths required.” To paraphrase Scott’s formulation of this idea on Astral Codex Ten:

1. People start a movement around a weird thing they love, without caring about status.

2. This thing catches on, becoming successful and popular. Membership increases, causing early adopters to gain status within the group. Others notice this, and, eager for status themselves, jump onto the movement.

3. The movement becomes established, and room starts to run out—partly room runs out for expansion of the ideas and values of the movement. But also room for more members to join and reap rewards of social status runs out as well.

4. People realize there’s no more status to be had, and the movement falls apart.

Scott is very explicit about saying there are “No Sociopaths Required.” This is his main departure from Chapman’s original idea:

David Chapman’s Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution is rightfully a classic, but it doesn’t match my own experience. Either through good luck or poor observational skills, I’ve never seen a lot of sociopath takeovers. Instead, I’ve seen a gradual process of declining asabiyyah. Good people start out working together, then work together a little less, then turn on each other, all while staying good people and thinking they alone embody the true spirit of the movement.

But he’s also quite explicit that the decay is centered around striving for status. His entire essay is only 2050 words, but it mentions status 22 times. The weirdest part was when he said:

All subcultures are, in a sense, status Ponzi schemes.

So… What? Am I the only one who thinks this is very strange? My understanding of humanity is that it regularly forms subcultures, but equally, that most people are really not concerned with status. Is status really this important?

Seriously, Who Cares About Status?

It actually turns out that it’s a very specific sort of personality who cares about status—a very specific person who says things like:

• “I think that I am entitled to more respect than the average person is,” and

• “I want people to know that I am an important person of high status.”

And they disagree with statements like:

• “I am an ordinary person who is no better than others,” and

• “I wouldn’t want people to treat me as though I were superior to them.”

And—in a big reveal that will be totally unsurprising to long term readers of this blog—the kind of person we’re talking about here is someone low in Honesty. My meaning here is very direct: those are four questions Ashton and Lee use to measure the H-factor of personality, a trait which discriminates ethical people from—wait for it—Narcissists and sociopaths.⁵

OK, but the groups Scott hangs out with aren’t riddled with Narcissists and Sociopaths.

Well that may be! On the other hand, Scott does mention Feminism and New Atheism as groups that drew people in and then imploded. But Feminism is a movement on the left, and New Atheism is also a movement on the left, and as I’ve shown before, the left has a problem with low levels of Honesty; or, expressed in reverse, the left has a problem with high numbers of Narcissists and sociopaths. In fact New Atheism is a movement on the realistic left, which is particularly cursed in this regard.

So let’s review here. Scott’s telling us that the groups he has personal experiences with—subcultures that followed this pattern of boom and bust—were all obsessed with status, and ran into trouble because of status obsession, and this is so ubiquitous in his experience that he considers all subcultures to be basically status Ponzi schemes. But there were no sociopaths there, or at least not really, or if there were then that wasn’t the problem.

What I’m Not Saying

I’m not making a specific claim about Scott’s experience, because that would be basically impossible.

I’m not even trying to make a specific claim that David Chapman is right and Scott Alexander is wrong, because I just lectured you about how the specific claims you read on the Internet are unlikely to be true, and frankly I don’t feel like being that much of a schmuck today.

I’m not even saying that Scott’s position has nothing to recommend it. It’s simpler than Chapman’s argument, for one thing.

But I am saying that the argument Scott makes should seriously make anyone with even a passing understanding of human nature, the psychological literature, or this blog extremely suspicious. Because it basically looks like, “No, these groups don’t implode because of sociopaths; they implode because they’re riddled with status-seekers,” and status-seeker is basically a term for soft-core sociopath.

Maybe the key to successful subcultures lies in getting rid of the sociopaths?

The cycle of boom and bust is something that people have been talking about a lot lately. My sense is that if you want to avoid a bust, you should stay away from the boom. (Why? Sheesh, because Taoism, because The Cycle of Empires, because I said so, and because I’ll explain later).

But maybe the problem is, literally, status? Maybe the problem is status-seeking? Maybe the problem is that if you get enough people around in your nerdy subculture who care about status more than they care abut The Really Great Thing the subculture is all about, then IDK, maybe it’ll devolve into a giant mess of dysfunctional, Narcissistic status games?

Because if we’re going to speak from my experience, that’s what I’ve observed—not that organizations and subcultures fail due to burnout, or the space being filled, or the low hanging fruit being picked, or the ideas running out, but rather, because of what nobody can ever stomach about living in Santa Carla: all the damn vampires.

1. Since I am the Internet, I’m relegating my real argument to a footnote, because it’s not as entertaining as some comedic, handwavey claim about gods and parties. The real argument that the space of wrong ideas is greater than right ideas is that A) some ideas will be specific, and B) some ideas will be general.

Among specific ideas, like “Pi has a certain value,” there’s only one right answer amidst an infinite number of wrong answers. So specific ideas are obviously unlikely to be right. But what about the general ideas? Well, among general ideas, there’s more chance to be right—you can just say something like “Pi is less than a thousand” and be correct. But you can also say something like “Pi is a wavelength of light longer than yellow-green” and be totally wrong, and the space of those kinds of nonsensical answers is still vast.

Now add to this the fact that some ideas can be C) a compound of other, more basic ideas—like, “Pi is the cadence of the heart as love becomes the Empire State building,” and the chance for any random idea to make sense is vanishingly small.

2. Even though none of them mentioned apples

3. Again, none of them mentioned apples

4. Chapman, D. (n.d.). Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution. Meaningness. Retrieved December 28, 2023, from https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

5. Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2005). Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism in the Five-Factor Model and the HEXACO model of personality structure. Personality and Individual differences, 38(7), 1571-1582.