Silicon Valley Is Weird, A Continuing Series

The other day, I clicked through to the profile of a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook. This individual is a Silicon Valley dweller, and arguably a stereotypical one. At least, that’s how it appeared to me.


This individual had cast an early ballot in the mid-term election, and had posted a status update that revealed and invited discussion about everything he had voted on. Every senator, ballot initiative, judge, etc. This behavior – revealing in a public forum exactly how he voted and attempting to discuss it publicly with all comers – struck me as being incredibly odd. For one thing, I’m a big fan of the anonymous ballot. It’s a privilege that protects us from suffering any number of negative consequences for voting our beliefs. (Clearly, this guy wasn’t worried about the negative consequences.)


But the other thing about it is that it’s a socially awkward way to have a discussion about politics. If you get to know me (or read my blog), you’ll soon discover what my politics are. That’s mostly a function of the fact that I talk about the things I believe, I try to learn more about the issues, I try to share what I’ve learned, and I hope to learn from others. Announcing where I stand on every ballot issue on a particular election doesn’t provide a format for conversation. It’s a declaration: Look at me, look how I vote. I’m not typically very warm to the “signaling” theory of human behavior, but what else could such a thing be? Especially since, I should note, this person voted precisely along party lines.


Well, it looked like really weird behavior to me, but I just set it aside in my mind under the belief that this just happened to be a weird guy.


But then this morning I happened to be reading through the first few posts of Slate Star Codex and noticed that “Scott Alexander” had done precisely the same thing. Okay, Alexander’s blog post was a little better, since he actually provided reasoning for each one of his votes, and critical discussion in the comments section of his blog is a well-established norm. That makes this behavior much more conversant, but it doesn’t make it any less weird. I’ll happily discuss the issues with anyone; but I don’t want to go point-by-point through your ballot. WTF. It’s self-absorbed.


There are, of course, many weird things about Slate Star Codex. The most recent post is about ketamine, why the literature thinks it works to treat depression, and reasons we once thought it worked but now know to be wrong. The post itself is actually fine and even a little interesting, if you have a pharmaceutical or medical background. The comments section, though, turned into a shit-show of self-reporting on how people felt when they recreationally tried ketamine, heroin, etc., themselves.


That’s Silicon Valley culture for you, though. They do a lot of drugs and they post their election ballots on social media. If it were just some odd sub-culture, we could scratch our chin anthropologically for a moment and then go back to our lives. But this is a sub-culture with deep pockets, who have the collective ear of politicians, and who have a stated objective of nudging society toward their beliefs. We all have our own view of what we want society to be like; I don’t happen to think that making society more like an odd collection of drug-abusing swingers is a step in the right direction.


I have a lot more to say about Silicon Valley culture, but I’ll save it for future posts, as I continue to report on the trend.

Some Links

Sorry, guys. I've been getting some blog hits from this old EconLog comment I wrote back in 2011. That was not my best era of blog commentary, and if I had it to do over again, I would rephrase the comment to something much nicer. I hereby publicly apologize to Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan, and Lauren Landsburg for having written that comment.

My recent post at Sweet Talk Conversation, a response to Paul Crider on the definition of "rape culture," is by contrast much more charitable, or so I believe.

Speaking of EconLog, David Henderson urges us not to view politicians in a vacuum.

I was linked to this Slate Star Codex post about the irresistible urge to argue on the internet. In my comment, I argue that the solution is to grow up and walk away. Months ago, David Friedman had a much different take on the problem.

This article was number one on my Google News feed, despite the fact that I have no interest in the presidential debates. The article actually says, "It all seems a bit light on substance." No kidding. I guess the media has decided to manufacture interest in the other half of the POTUS side-show?

Photographic evidence, however boring, that Deepika Padukone is in the upcoming XXX sequel. Not quite as good a gig as Priyanka Chopra on Quantico, but you gotta start somewhere. And note that Padukone is a much better actress than Chopra.

The push to force edible insects on the unsuspecting public continues - four million dollars richer.

A Peaceful Solution To Knaves (A Response To Scott Alexander)

I hardly ever read the blog Slate Star Codex, but today I happened to do so. I was going to leave the following thought as a comment under his post, but I happened to notice that there are already over three hundred comments under that post. Maybe it's just my vanity talking, but I don't want my thoughts to get lost. So SSC's loss is Stationary Waves' gain.

In his most recent blog post, author "Scott Alexander" (scare-quotes because it is an admitted pseudonym) writes:

...the representation of weirdoes [sic] and [consumers of deviant and borderline-illegal pornography] is no higher [on Reddit] than any other part of the population. But that’s not zero. And a disproportionate number of those people became interested in the new site [Voat]. 

Already, we see why the typical answer “If you don’t like your community, just leave and start a new one” is an oversimplification. A community run on Voat’s rules with Reddit userbase would probably be a pretty nice place. A community run on Voat’s rules with the subsection of Reddit’s userbase who will leave Reddit when you create it is…a very different community.

When very smart people start thinking about very big ideas, they occasionally fall victim to the mouse that roared. In other words, "Scott Alexander" is speaking so enthusiastically about the problems of hardline libertarianism that a practical solution to the Reddit-Voat thing (and consequently also to the libertarian thing) is sitting right under his nose.

In short, "Alexander" suggests that the problem with "go start your own community then" is that it will soon attract knaves. I say that's not a problem, because so long as the knaves are there, then they're not here. 

On a small scale, what if Voat was started by a bunch of Reddit people pretending not to be Reddit people, who wanted to attract all the knaves to a "holding space" where they could be knaves to their hearts' content, without adversely affecting the experiences of non-knaves? And what if it worked?

On a large scale, what if a peaceful society designated a sort of "holding space" to deviants who wanted to be deviants, without adversely affecting the lives of everyone else?

There are illiberal ways to accomplish this, of course. Prison, for example, or nefarious and corrupt zoning policies.

But there are also highly libertarian ways of doing this: night clubs, for example, are often places where risk-seeking people can seek out risks (e.g. drug use, casual sex, etc.) while being essentially isolated from the rest of a city's nightlife (e.g. theaters, restaurants, date spots, and pubs).

The two populations can mingle if they wish to do so, or avoid each other if they wish to do so. Nobody has to outlaw anyone else. Nobody has to ban anyone else. Life goes on.

So, in attempting to argue in favor of necessary rules, "Scott Alexander" has actually missed the simplest solution to his problem.

Even If These Are Better Days, You Might Still Learn From Your Elders

Because music is omnipresent today, it's hard for people in this day and age to imagine what a music lover's life might have been like in, say, the 19th century. Back then, if people wanted to hear music, they had to make music. They wouldn't hear it otherwise.

The downside of that was that it was difficult to hear the music one loved the most back then. The upside was that those who loved music knew how to play it, often learning it from sheet music or by ear, and thus loved it on a much deeper level - as a musician - than the lower-key appreciation of casual "music fans" today.

Given the choice, no one would choose to turn back the clock and make music so hard to come by as it was two hundred years ago; but there's also no denying that the scarcity of music facilitated a more profound relationship with that music. 

Maybe we don't want to go back in time, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from the past.

*        *        *

At Slate Star Codex, Scott Whoever has written a post about what appears to be an actual married couple he's counselling. It seems one of them wants to be poly-amorous and the other doesn't want to be poly-amored-upon. Ordinarily, this would be great fodder for a scathing Stationary Waves indictment of moral reasoning. But I really am trying to be a better person, so instead of going there, I wanted to explore something else.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that monogamy was a bit like music prevalence: whatever might have been the case in 1850, times have changed. We have internet radio, electric guitars, and the freedom to pursue as many casual sexual partners as we please. Hold your disagreements for a moment, just hear me out.

In that case, there may be an important parallel between music appreciation and marriage. Maybe the people who want to be poly-amorous don't want to turn the clock back and live the socially conservative version of marriage that existed in the 1800s - but maybe they also won't ever get to experience the kind of emotional connectivity, the level of cooperation and conflict resolution, and the benefits of lifelong commitment, that the average 19th Century spouses (in healthy marriages) got to enjoy.

Here the poly-amorous people will object. They'll say that their relationships are every bit as deep and meaningful and emotionally connected as a good marriage in the 1800s would have been. But how would they know? I know a lot of people who claim that they love music as much as I do, despite the fact that they can't read a note of music and have no idea what's going on conceptually in Beethoven's 9th Symphony, even if they like it. Of course I can't compare my level of enjoyment to theirs, but I can compare my level of music appreciation before I studied music to my level of music appreciation after I studied music. (Spoiler alert: I appreciate it more since having learned about it.)

I also don't know anyone who has learned about music who now appreciates music less than they did before. It stands to reason, and is as self-evident as anything can be, that learning to play music means you will love music all the more. So I actually can say with confidence that the same piece of music means more to me than it does to someone who loves the same piece, but who doesn't play music.

And while I can't say much about the alleged benefits of poly-amory, I can say with complete and utter confidence that no one who has been in the kind of committed marriage that a true, life-long, monogamous bond produces understands the depth of emotional connection involved here. Even those poly-amorers who claim to have experience with that kind of monogamy don't actually have the experience they're claiming - their poly-amory proves it. They can't have it both ways.

Anyway, maybe they don't want to be monogamous, and maybe society will never turn back the clock and go back to a one-spouse, lifetime commitment social norm. And maybe - I say, for the sake of argument - life is better that way in exactly the same sense that life is better now that music is everywhere. But if so, modern lovers have much to learn about the vast and profound emotional potential of a committed, monogamous marriage the likes of which used to be the norm a long time ago.

Blogging Is A Good Habit

Because I have comments enabled on my blog, and because no one actually communicates with each other as real people anymore, I occasionally receive emails notifying me that a spam bot has left a comment on my blog. I don't bother to delete these comments because, who knows, perhaps they somehow drive traffic to me on their way to driving traffic to whatever it is they're selling. (I have no idea what they're selling, because I don't click the links in their comments.)

Against my better judgement, I do still read all the comments I get here, so feel free to post one any time you're moved to communicate to a real person. I'm here, I'm paying attention. It seems crazy, I know, but it's true. 

I take that back. It doesn't seem crazy, it seems antiquated. Remember back at the Turn of the Century, when people wrote blog posts and others commented? Remember when communication was still relatively fun, still something people looked for opportunities to do? Remember when social media wasn't always some combination of broken and infuriating? Or do things just seem better in hindsight.

Anyway, when I receive these spam-bot comments, I sometimes click through to the old blog post upon which they appear and re-read what I wrote. It's a trip down memory lane. Sometimes I've written about something that was going on in my life; sometimes it's just a thought I had; sometimes it's a diatribe. In short, it's a collection of thoughts I really had on real days of my life that I really decided to write about. Reading it back again is actually quite nice. I seldom read a post and think to myself, "Oh God, I was such an asshole/idiot/whatever." It's encouraging to know that the things I spent some time thinking about in the past produced good thoughts that I generally still agree with. 

I'd say I've never kept a journal, but I suppose this is it. I've finally discovered what generations of my forefathers had known: journalling is a worthwhile activity. Indeed, blogging is a good habit. 

Over the years, I've fallen out of practice. Immersed in a daily commitment to blogging can be a little stressful, especially as it was in the early days, when people actually read my blog and responded. I felt a responsibility to write to my audience and provide them with something worth reading. But stress wasn't the only reason I stopped blogging. Like many other former bloggers, I sometimes had the sense that there wasn't any point, that I had "said it all before" and didn't want to repeat myself. And of course, all the other bloggers who actually made money doing this moved on to Medium and then to Substack and now, I can't believe it, people pay a monthly subscription to read stuff like this. And then they use AI graphics and post their stuff on X and it's this whole marketing thing for them. 

When I go back and read someone else's blog, I seldom feel as good about their old blog posts as I feel about mine. That's not a criticism; there's nothing wrong with their posts. I think it speaks to their motivation and authenticity, though. David Henderson's blog never gets old. He writes authentically. But Slate Star Codex guy's posts are stale within a week of having been written. Clearly these two example bloggers are writing different kinds of posts for different reasons.

And then there's me, writing for a third reason, which is mostly that I just like it. There are other potential benefits, such as having a record of my personality for posterity, assuming this blog doesn't end up getting deleted at some point. Writing advice to my kids for when they need to read it and I'm not there to say it to them. I've written about all that before.

Well, anyway, I hope I re-develop the blogging habit. It's good. It's productive for me. I think I'll try to keep it going. 

In closing, I'd like to set down a list of things that have happened to me that readers of this blog may not have been aware of, given that I've been quite out of touch for a while. Here it is:

• My band released an album. Listen to it here and elsewhere.
• I converted to Orthodox Christianity. Long story. Maybe I'll write about it some time.
• I started learning Greek - not really related to the Orthodox thing, but kind of.
• I'm still running and riding bikes like a fiend, so that's not really an update.
• For some reason, I can't think of anything else right now. I'll blog about things as I go.

Anyway, here's hoping I can reestablish this great habit.

The Two Key Rules For Moral Behavior

Inspired by a comment I left at Slate Star Codex, I’d like to present two rules that a robust moral system must satisfy. Let me begin by stating that I am under no illusion that these rules are original to me. The philosophical literature has already dealt with both of these rules in depth. Unfortunately, basic moral philosophy appears to be a set of narratives that human beings need to reinvent and re-state again and again across each generation. This probably serves a good purpose, namely that “no one ought to deprive you of your right to life” sounds a lot better to modern ears than “thou shalt not kill,” even though they articulate the same basic moral theory. Humanity thrives on the stories we tell ourselves, especially the moral stories we tell ourselves, and so it is our destiny to repeat our moral tenets over and over again, in evolving contemporary language, throughout time unto infinity.

But back to what I was saying. Every robust moral system must satisfy two rules: (1) Be a better person, and (2) Don’t be an evil person.

It’s easy to see how these two rules differ from each other. While (1) is primarily about elevating your moral standards and holding yourself to a higher sense of purpose, (2) is primarily above avoiding acts and behaviors that are almost universally understood to be terrible. Thus, a good example of (1) might be “spend more time with your kids,” while a good example of (2) might be “don’t ever physically hurt your children, neither intentionally nor through neglect.” We can see how spending more time with your kids would help us avoid hurting them through neglect, but neither statement on its own is enough to get us to a moral relationship with our children. By contrast, living both statements to the greatest extent possible gets us a lot closer to having a moral parent-child relationship.

I could provide additional examples, but I won’t.

Some moralists are very off-putting people. They scorn everyone who fails to live up to their moral preferences. I believe that people like this have a tendency to turn every moral guideline into some version of rule (2). Instead of advising caution and modesty in romantic relationships, they decry fornication. Rather than advocating for a reduced carbon footprint, they criticize anyone who drives an SUV. For such people, no one is moral unless they avoid the major prohibitions. It’s not about being honest, it’s about not lying; it’s not about being generous, it’s about not being greedy. Wherever such people go, shame and damnation follows them. No wonder we find such people off-putting.

But there are some people who have the opposite problem: they never apply rule (2) to their moral system, and thus everything becomes some version of rule (1). For them “I did the best that I could” shall be the whole of the law. These are the folks who are always rationalizing their clearly moral behavior. If they cut someone off in traffic, they figure that they either had no choice, or that everyone else was doing it, too. If they tell a lie, it’s always because they had a very good reason to do it. If they fail to save a drowning baby, it’s because they didn’t want to put themselves at risk since they have children of their own to worry about. Without any definite moral wrongs to avoid, they are free to engage in any behavior and, as long as someone out there is doing worse, they can reason that they never went too far.

A robust moral system – one that consistently guides you toward doing the right thing – will have a good blend of recommendations for being a better person, and recommendations for not being an evil person. A robust moral system will command you not to engage in that which is clearly harmful, and you will obey; but it will also inspire you to make small moral improvements every day throughout your life. In this way, it sets out the limits of moral behavior, and then asks us to improve our average behavior.

Living by a system that incorporates both rules will make you a moral person indeed.

Slate Star CoDoxxed

Get it? Because he says they're "doxxing" him.

"Doxxing" is a type of cyber-bullying in which the bully publicly reveals private information about the target, such as their home phone number or address, their employer's information, photos of the target's children, and so on. This is considered to be extremely threatening. Imagine that someone publicly posts a photo of your small child playing at the park, along with the Google Maps link to the park and a comment to the effect of, "This is where that racist Joe plays with his kids." That's doxxing. Yes, it's bad.

But that's not what's happening to Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So. Let's dive in.

First, The Back-Story

Go ahead and cruise on over to slatestarcodex.com to get Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So's version of the story. It goes something like this: A writer from The New York Times wanted to write a story about a popular blog that generates a lot of interest and that maybe got some things right about COVID-19 early on. That was fine with Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So until the journalist said, "By the way, I've been able to figure out what the So-and-So stands for, and I'm going to put that into my story." Dr. Scott freaks out a little and says no, don't do that. The journalist says it's company policy.

So, Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So deleted his whole blog, saying that The New York Times was trying to endanger him by doxxing him "for clicks."

Before I go on, I would like to remind my readers of my previous posts about Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So. Here's a link. You will see from what I've written before that I consider the guy to be really weird. It's not just that I dislike his blog - and I do - it's that he seems emblematic of a very bizarre strain of Silicon Valley culture, and the deeper you get into this crowd, the heebier the jeebies, if you catch my drift. 

His blog rose to prominance when some well-regarded bloggers started linking to his posts. They all seemed to consider him very smart and thoughtful. Soon enough, "everyone" was reading him. Over time, his posts have become more performative. He started out writing like a self-conscious nerd, and now he writes as though he is playing the part of a self-conscious nerd who thinks he is a really smart and funny guy. That's fine. Fame changes you. I don't care.

What I do care about is the content of his blog. Each post tackles any number of topics. He's written on climate science and economics and technology and artificial intelligence and psychiatry and biology and sociology and anything else. He always presents his views as though he is an expert, but quite often it's painfully obvious that he's just done a couple of hours of internet research. There's no shame in doing some casual research and blogging about it, but when everyone starts calling you an expert, and you keep doing light research and presenting it as Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So Presents The Answer To A Problem That People Have Been Trying To Solve For Decades, then it starts to get on my nerves.

I mean, it's dorky to do what effectively amounts to college homework assignments as an adult passing the time. But it's problematic to be taken seriously for it.

An "Anonymous" Blogger

Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So openly admits that his name is a pseudonym. First question: Why is he using a pseudonym? Maybe it's like a stage name. Lots of people have stage names. Stage names can be a lot of fun. But that's not why Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So says he uses a pseudonym. Instead, he says it's because he wants to remain anonymous.

But Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So also says that Scott Alexander is his real-life first and last middle name. That sure is an odd choice of pseudonyms for someone who wishes to remain anonymous. The legendary whistleblower "Deep Throat" wasn't a guy named Deep Throat McInnis, and if he was, going by "Deep Throat" wouldn't exactly be a cloak of anonymity. "Deep Throat" was not a pseudonym that resembled his or her real name at all. It was an obviously made-up moniker; it was intended to be obviously made up, because if everyone knows that Deep Throat's real name is nothing whatsoever resembling Deep Throat, then no one has any idea what Deep Throat's real name is. That's true anonymity. That's not what Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So wanted, obviously. If he wanted that kind of anonymity, then he would have chosen a pseudonym more like "Deep Throat," or "Alone" (the pseudonym of the writer of The Last Psychiatrist blog), or "Slate Star Codex Guy" or something.

Pretty much everyone knows that Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens. Samuel Clemens didn't choose "Mark Twain" as a pen name because he wanted to be anonymous. He chose it because he thought he could sell more books under the name "Mark Twain" than under the name "Samuel Clemens," and he was probably right. Mark Twain sounds way better. But when the press discovered his real name, Samuel Clemens didn't delete all his books and complain about being doxxed. He just did what any normal person using a pen name would do: He said, yep, but I write books under the name Mark Twain. And there was no issue.

The matter was slightly different with "Publius," or "Publicus," or whatever name they were using to write The Federalist Papers. In that case, they had to be anonymous because they could have been killed for treason. Notice again how "Publius" bears scant resemblance to "John Jay" or "John Adams."

It gets worse, of course. Not only did Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So choose a "pseudonym" that was actually just his real name, he published many old links to all his old blog posts, in which he discussed personal details of his life. He discussed the experiences of the patients he saw in his clinical psychiatric practice. He held public meet-ups, advertised on his blog and on his social media accounts, where he agreed to meet with pretty much any old person who happened to read his blog or follow him on Twitter. He didn't meet strangers with a cloak and a mask, either. He met them using his real face and his real name and as his own, real, self. In short, he presented himself publicly as Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So, Please Don't Use My Last Name Because I Want To Be Anonymous, Honest.

Not exactly the behavior of a man who seeks anonymity, is it?

Playing At Being Famous

But okay, maybe he was just naive about the matter. That could be the explanation, right?

Still, fifteen years of naivete over the course of progressively building internet fame seems to strain credulity. Once you start getting calls from The Times, wouldn't you reconsider your willy-nilly attitude toward divulging personal details? I mean, if it mattered to you that you remain anonymous, and you started to become famous, wouldn't you then quietly cull your blog of all references to your real life and real identity, and then just stick to publishing bi-weekly homework essays? Wouldn't you cool it with the public meet-ups and stuff?

You would indeed, if you cared about anonymity.

So, another possible explanation here is that Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So liked being famous and well-regarded for publishing homework essays on the internet. He liked being able to organize meet-ups and watch strangers show up, wanting to meet him. He got a taste for fame, and decided he wanted to keep up with it. That's find and dandy, too. I don't fault a man for wanting to be famous. Lots of people want that. 

Then, this feature in the New York Times should be his big break, right? Finally he gets his big spotlight in the press. Finally he can divulge his true identity, set up a Patreon account, publish a book, and maybe secure a regular writing spot at Slate Magazine, or Vox, or The Atlantic or something. If you wanted to be a famous public intellectual, isn't that what you'd do? That's what I would do. I would work hard for my big break, and when it finally came, I would try to make the most of it. I'd try to capitalize.

But that's not what Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So would do. What would he do? Delete his whole blog and complain that he's being persecuted. Weird, right?

Another Possibility

I'm just going to float this theory. I have no idea if it's true, and no skin in the game one way or the other. But it's a theory that makes sense to me.

Imagine you did homework essays for fun. Imagine you were kind of a nerd who lived with ten other people in the same house, you've gone on record saying that you don't have much luck with women, and you're basically just a clinical psychiatrist somewhere. Then imagine one day a lot of genuinely smart public intellectuals start reading your homework and say, "Hey, look at this guy. He seems smart."

So then imagine that you decide to keep up with the homework. People are reading your posts. You feel well-regarded. Heck, you are well-regarded. You get a taste of fame, and you decide you enjoy it and you want more of it. So you keep at your homework, and people keep reading you and linking to you.

And it's all pretty nice because it comes easy to you. You can do a couple of hours of internet research and write about it, no problem. So that's what you do. But at the bottom of it all, you know you're not really solving any problems. You know that your lengthy essays aren't really all that meritorious. You don't think you're all that smart, but everyone keeps saying that you are anyway. Thus, you enjoy the position you're in, you love the fame and the accolades, you like the meet-ups, maybe you even get more romantic attention than you did before.

But you don't have what it takes to capitalize on your fame because, at the bottom of it, you only have the willingness to do a couple hours' internet research per week. You know that people who write books - people like Malcolm Gladwell and James Altucher - actually spend a lot of time and money on research and interviews and collecting information. You know that it's their full-time job. And you know that, while you'd love to give a TED Talk and be interviewed by Tyler Cowen, you don't actually want to spend all your time researching the information you write about.

You know that because you've done enough internet research to understand that there is a HUGE difference between really knowing something and just sounding like you know something. And you know that your expertise is in the latter, not the former.

So things are going well. You have lots of readers, including some incredibly smart people who say nice things about you. When occasional readers point out the flaws in your arguments, you now have a legion of fans to do the additional legwork for you. All you have to do is sound kind of plausible, and there will be enough grains of truth in what you write that your fans can fill in the blanks on their own. In this way, you get them to do the legwork on your most controversial claims, and you get credit for it without having to do the hard work.

Well, that sounds a bit phony, doesn't it? Isn't that what fakers in the business world do? They get really good at sounding good, and then they pass off all their work to underlings, taking all the credit for themselves, and scaling the corporate ladder without ever having to do the hard work. This is classic charlatan behavior.

And when charlatans in the business world get caught, what happens next? They usually quit the job in a blaze of glory, finding a way to spin it such that they get a similar job elsewhere, hopping from job to job until they either get promoted or outed as a fake. And the story is always the same: "I did this amazing thing and that amazing thing, and then someone tried to take credit for my work, so I left." It's always that somebody set them up or something.

So, if you were a faker, if you were this kind of charlatan, only instead of being in the business world, you were in the world of internet blogging... imagine this. Imagine that a real reporter, a real professional writer, asked you for an interview and hit you with some hard-hitting questions that you couldn't answer because, let's face it, you're not who everyone says you are. Imagine that these hardball questions were difficult enough that you started to fear that if your fans got to read your poor responses, the veil would come off and you'd no longer be seen as Mr. Smart Well-Regarded Blogger.

What would you do?

Some people might delete the whole blog, in a blaze of glory, and claim that the reporter was trying to cause you personal harm.

I've seen similar things in the business world. I won't say for sure that this is what happened to Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So, but it's a story that is consistent with a particular and plausible set of circumstances.

We shall see how it pans out.