Scott Alexander

Article

Scott Alexander is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 31 times across 31 issues between January 22, 2021 and January 21, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “I’m still going by Scott Alexander”; “I wrote it under my first and middle names – Scott Alexander – while leaving out my last name”; “looks like we finally have proof that Scott Alexander is a pro-Nazi idiot”. It most often appears alongside Scott, Trump, COVID.

Metadata

Category: People
Mention count: 31
Issue count: 31
First seen: January 22, 2021
Last seen: January 21, 2026

Appears In

- Scott (13 shared issues)
- Trump (11 shared issues)
- COVID (9 shared issues)
- Twitter (9 shared issues)
- Matt Yglesias (8 shared issues)
- United States (7 shared issues)
- US (7 shared issues)
- ACX (6 shared issues)
- China (6 shared issues)
- Google (6 shared issues)
- California (5 shared issues)
- Donald Trump (5 shared issues)

External Links

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Logistics

January 22, 2021 · Original source

I've revealed my real name to prevent people from threatening me with it, but I'm still going by Scott Alexander.

Please don't buy a paid subscription if it would be financially stressful for you, or funge against your ability to support better causes. If you're deeply pained by the idea of not reading occasional shorter unimportant content, but also too poor to afford the full subscription, you can use this coupon. Please be honest.

Inline links: this coupon

If you took out advertising that got disrupted and I didn't pay you back, or I paid you the wrong amount, please contact me at scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com. If I have some other SSC-related obligation to you that I forgot about, remind me of that too.

Statement on New York Times Article

February 14, 2021 · Original source

Like many people in the early 2000s, I started a blog when I was in college. To stay anonymous, I wrote it under my first and middle names – Scott Alexander – while leaving out my last name. I continued writing in it through medical school, residency, and until the present. Although I’ve never personally been involved in the tech industry, my blog became very popular among people in tech because it discussed ideas centering around scientific and technological progress, especially artificial intelligence.

The New York Times backed off briefly as I stopped publishing, but I was also warned by people “in the know” that as soon as they got an excuse they would publish something as negative as possible about me, in order to punish me for embarrassing them. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in hiding, so I took various steps to make this more survivable, including quitting my previous job so my employers and coworkers would not get embroiled in my problems, and taking some steps to improve my personal safety. After doing all these things, I started blogging again, this time under my real name so that I would not be under the constant threat of doxxing in the future. Predictably, the NYT piece came out soon after, and predictably, it was very negative. I want to respond to four main negative claims in the article – there are more, but these should give a general sketch of why I feel it was unfair:

Inline links: started blogging again

When I discussed this with the New York Times, they said they were going to reveal my real name anyway. As a protest and an attempt to prevent this from happening, I deleted my blog and replaced it with a post condemning the New York Times’ actions. The post “went viral”, 513,000 people read it, hundreds (thousands?) of people cancelled their New York Times subscriptions in protest, and it was a major scandal. There were some news stories about it at the time – you can read some of them eg here or here. I was proud to receive support from voices like Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, science broadcaster Liv Boeree, and Atlantic editor Yascha Mounk.

Inline links: a post condemning, here, here

Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions

April 19, 2021 · Original source

I’m hammering this in because people were awful to me after I wrote that post. Every time anything bad happened involving race, I would get dozens of angry tweets saying “looks like we finally have proof that Scott Alexander is a pro-Nazi idiot” and a link back to my post. Even when things completely unrelated to race happened, people would do this. When the Capitol riots happened, with basically no links to organized white supremacy and ~15% of the rioters being people of color, after I hadn’t been blogging for six months, I still had people sending me messages about how this destroyed the last shred of my credibility or something. This was the most hate I’ve ever gotten about any post of mine and it was terrible.

I think the biggest mistake I made was to expect Trump to be more competent (at achieving his own goals) than he was. Trump's winning the election was weird enough that I think everyone was flirting with Scott Adams' thesis that he was some kind of bizarre "clown genius" or "drunken master" type whose apparent bumbling was just him playing so many levels above the rest of us that we couldn't understand it. I think something like this might be true for his ability to speak to the Republican base, but it obviously didn't translate into politics, policy, or having any idea what to do with the Presidency. Possibly my underlying error here was overestimating the correlation between different types of intelligence - just because someone has figured out a weird drunken-master strategy for winning the hearts of conservatives doesn't mean he has any special talent at anything else. I think it took me a year or two to fix this misapprehension, aided by things like his split with the potentially-competent-Machiavellians in his administration like Steve Bannon or Peter Thiel, and the constant churn of corrupt and ineffective appointees.

Your Book Review: How Children Fail

June 11, 2021 · Original source

Similarly, you really don’t need a school to get a decent percentage of children to learn math. I was as ravenous for extracurricular algebra as I was for extracurricular Harry Potter. But to get Scott Alexander to learn any not-directly-useful math, you seem to need a school. (If you replace “math” with “maps”, our positions are reversed.)

Inline links: Scott Alexander

Open Thread 176

June 13, 2021 · Original source

4: Comments of the week were on Drug Users Use A Lot Of Drugs, where many people pointed out that cocaine works this way too. Coca tea is an over-the-counter stimulant in Peru, which Zach describes as "so smooth, so much less 'buzzy' than with caffeine, that it seems criminal it's not legal in the US", and Harry Deuchar calculates that the average coca tea drinker in Peru might get about 4 mg of cocaine, whereas the average addict gets about 900 mg a day. This helps put a lot of things in perspective for me, like how Coca-Cola used to have cocaine in it - probably this was completely reasonable and a fine choice! (this last sentence is so not medical advice)

Inline links: Zach describes, Harry Deuchar

1: I've heard from five people who, despite sending me entries (and in some cases having me get back to them saying I'd gotten them), somehow didn't get entered into the Book Review Contest. The people I know about are the ones who wrote reviews of The Beginning Of Infinity, Gulag+Kapital+Totalitarianism, Plagues And Peoples, Essay On Man, and Origin Of The Human Mind. If you entered but didn't end up either as a finalist or in the Runners-Up Packet, you're also in that category and should send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com ASAP so I can fix it. Send it from a different address than you used originally, in case the problem was that your emails end up in my spam filter. My plan is to speed-judge all of them, then pick one extra finalist which I'll present to you next Thursday, then start voting next Friday.

5: My father, a professor of medicine working at a VA hospital, is trying to do a study and looking for a biostatistician. He can't pay you unless he gets a grant, which he probably won't, but you could get your name on a potentially pretty interesting paper. Interested candidates should know how to mine data from Vinci/Dart, and preferably have some existing relationship with the VA that can save them a painful and potentially impossible onboarding process. If interested, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com and I'll give him your name.

Highlights From The Comments On Aducanumab

August 20, 2021 · Original source

I’ve been following the discussions around the FDA recently with great interest. COVID has made everyone a lot more aware of the FDA, which I think is why Scott Alexander’s recent post about the FDA prompted so much furious discussion.

Inline links: the FDA

These are highlights from the comments of Adumbrations Of Aducanumab, Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story, and discussion of those posts elsewhere.

Inline links: Adumbrations Of Aducanumab, Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story

C_B writes:

Inline links: writes

Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?

December 09, 2021 · Original source

Hi, my name's Lars Doucet (not Scott Alexander) and this is a guest post in an ongoing series that assesses the empirical basis for the economic philosophy of Georgism.

Inline links: Georgism

[Lars Doucet won this year’s Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. Since then, he’s been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he’s learned. I’ll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors]

Inline links: Book Review Contest, Progress and Poverty, Fortress Of Doors

Part 0 - Book Review: Progress & Poverty Part I - Is Land Really a Big Deal? ?? (You are here) Part II - Can Land Value Tax be Passed on to Tenants? Part III - Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately from Buildings?

Inline links: Part 0 - Book Review: Progress & Poverty, Part II - Can Land Value Tax be Passed on to Tenants?, Part III - Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately from Buildings?

Does Georgism Work? Part 2: Can Landlords Pass Land Value Tax on to Tenants?

December 10, 2021 · Original source

Hi, my name's Lars Doucet (not Scott Alexander), and this is a guest post in an ongoing series that assesses the empirical basis for the economic philosophy of Georgism.

Inline links: Georgism

[Lars Doucet won this year’s Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. Since then, he’s been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he’s learned. I’ll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors]

Inline links: Book Review Contest, Progress and Poverty, Fortress Of Doors

Part 0 - Book Review: Progress & Poverty Part I - Is Land Really a Big Deal? Part II - Can Land Value Tax be passed on to Tenants? ?? (You are here) Part III - Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately from Buildings?

Inline links: Part 0 - Book Review: Progress & Poverty, Part I - Is Land Really a Big Deal?

Information Markets, Decision Markets, Attention Markets, Action Markets

March 28, 2022 · Original source

What will I (Scott Alexander) rate as most promising when I do a deep dive into the research on pregnancy interventions? Here you don’t have to trust public health agencies, you just have to trust me. Most people betting on this read my blog, which means they probably trust me at least a little. And I have no reason to lie about pregnancy interventions. So here the trust might actually be a fair assumption.

In retrospect this isn’t surprising: most people on this market are playing for a 2-3 digit sum of play money. That’s not going to incentivize anyone to do 20 hours of research, or pay for an expert consultation, or anything else that would help them really understand this. They’re just pattern-matching to stuff they kind of heard, and maybe doing a few minutes of research to fill in gaps. I believe if this was a market for 5 or 6 digits of real money, it would go a little better, but so far that’s beyond us.

Inline links: beyond us

Here’s an example of me using this strategy without requiring anyone to be a genius:

Inline links: Here

Contra Hoffman On Vitamin D Dosing

April 22, 2022 · Original source

Now let's look at the object-level studies that Scott Alexander says show that vitamin D doesn't work. I'm just going to look at the randomized controlled trials because observational studies for or against vitamin D are trash for anything except hypothesis generation unless they have a very carefully selected instrumental variable.

Inline links: Scott Alexander says show that vitamin D doesn't work

I’ve already written a bit about why I don’t trust Vitamin D for COVID, including the Spanish study, here, and a new study seems to cast further doubt on it. Still, the studies that don’t work don’t have as high a dose as the ones that do (except for this one, which is small - h/t Ben for pointing it out). Even if the Vitamin D doses used in most studies are physiologically reasonable (which is what I’ve been trying to prove in this essay), isn’t it possible that unreasonably high doses of Vitamin D still treat COVID?

Inline links: here, a new study, this one

Suppose I threw a dart at the Giant Chart Of Metabolic Pathways and hit a random chemical. I don’t have a dart, but I do have a mouse cursor, and I tried this and got “hydroxymethylbilane”, which sure does sound like a chemical. What are the chances that hydroxymethylbilane supplementation would treat COVID, prevent cancer, prevent cardiovascular disease, and lower all-cause mortality. Pretty low, right? Our priors on a random chemical doing that have to be less than 1%, or we get caught in weird logical traps.

Inline links: Giant Chart Of Metabolic Pathways, weird logical traps

Open Thread 242

September 18, 2022 · Original source

5: Michael Trazzi has an interview with Katja Grace on AI forecasting, part of which is Contra Scott Alexander On Slowing Down AI Progress (a reference to my post Why Not Slow AI Progress?) I am not sure she is actually contra me - I meant for the post to be an overview of different opinions rather than a strong defense of one side - but it’s interesting and worth a read (or, if you’re that kind of person, a watch or a listen)

Inline links: Contra Scott Alexander On Slowing Down AI Progress, Why Not Slow AI Progress?, watch, listen

This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In this week’s news:

Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here

6: Gary Marcus has a response to my recent AI bet. I want to make it clear that whatever the merits of my bet or his arguments, Google did not “snooker” me. They had no part in this: I went around begging for someone to run my prompts through PARTI and Imagen, one of their employees asked their bosses’ permission and then agreed to do so, and ran them exactly as I asked. Any fault is entirely mine. I’m insisting on this pretty hard because I’m grateful that Google will sometimes respond to random requests by amateurs, and accusing them of deliberate deception in response burns their willingness to do that. As for everything else: I wrote “without wanting to claim that Imagen has fully mastered compositionality, I think it represents a significant enough improvement to win the bet, and to provide some evidence that simple scaling and normal progress are enough for compositionality gains”, I stick to the “some evidence” claim, I feel like I was pretty open about exactly how much/little evidence it was (Google sent me ten examples per prompt, I showed you four representative ones, but the extra six don’t change much). I agree Marcus makes some useful common sense claims on how sure to be after five examples.

Inline links: has a response to my recent AI bet, begging

Highlights From The Comments On Jhanas

October 31, 2022 · Original source

[Original post here]

Inline links: here

Okay, “half” is an exaggeration. But by my count we had 21 people who claimed to have experienced jhanas (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21), and 7 who said they were pretty sure it wasn’t real as described (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

Inline links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

And Tim:

Inline links: Tim

Prediction Market FAQ

December 20, 2022 · Original source

Able to get top-1 strict accuracy of at least 90.0% on interview-level problems found in the APPS benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al. Top-1 accuracy is distinguished, as in the paper, from top-k accuracy in which k outputs from the model are generated, and the best output is selected. By "unified" we mean that the system is integrated enough that it can, for example, explain its reasoning on a Q&A task, or verbally report its progress and identify objects during model assembly. (This is not really meant to be an additional capability of "introspection" so much as a provision that the system not simply be cobbled together as a set of sub-systems specialized to tasks like the above, but rather a single system applicable to many problems.) Resolution will come from any of three forms, whichever comes first: (1) direct demonstration of such a system achieving ALL of the above criteria, (2) confident credible statement by its developers that an existing system is able to satisfy these criteria, or (3) judgement by a majority vote in a special committee composed of the question author and two AI experts chosen in good faith by him, for the sole purpose of resolving this question. Resolution date will be the first date at which the system (subsequently judged to satisfy the criteria) and its capabilities are publicly described in a talk, press release, paper, or other report available to the general public. Even this isn’t perfect (which models are “the equivalent of” a 1:8 scale Ferrari 312?), but in practice once you get to this level of details people mostly stop worrying about this. Another method (mostly associated with Manifold) is to just leave it up to human judgment - specifically, the judgment of the person who made the market. For example, I could make a market in “By 2050, will there be an AI which Scott Alexander thinks qualifies as ‘human-level’?” This will force market participants to price in the risk that I have bad judgment or act dishonestly. But perhaps these risks are small. For example, I might say elsewhere what I think qualifies as “human-level” AI, or you might think human-level AI will be so obvious when it comes that I will definitely agree with you about it. As for honesty, this could be enforced either legally or by reputation. Someone who has resolved their past 100 prediction markets honestly will probably resolve this one honestly too, especially if they get paid to do so and will never get customers again if they lie. When we invest on the normal stock market, we trust that our brokers / the NYSE / etc won’t run off with our money, and this trust is usually well-deserved. Even when we make an online purchase, we trust that the store we’re sending our money to won’t steal it and refuse to send us the product. It would be an exaggeration to say that trust is a solved problem, but evidence from Manifold suggests that most people price in a <1% chance that well-known market makers with good reputation resolve dishonestly. If prediction markets got big enough, they could spawn trusted “resolution companies” who individual markets and market-makers could outsource their resolution to, for a fee. If these companies were ever dishonest, they would lose all their business from then on, so they would probably be as honest as other businesses like your broker / the NYSE / various online stores / etc. 4.7.1: Isn’t a lot of the “crisis of trust” around questions that might never have clear future answers? For example, consider the debate around whether Donald Trump is a Russian agent. Maybe no proof will ever come out either way. Or maybe some evidence will appear that seems to prove one side or the other, but people will continue to deny it for political reasons, and the problem of resolving the prediction market will be just as hard as the problem of answering the original question. Indeed, prediction markets aren’t very good at this, and are only fully trustworthy on questions where the true answer will eventually become apparent. Still, they might not be completely useless. For example, if you’re worried about Trump being a Russian agent because you expect him to pursue pro-Russia policies, you can start markets in whether he pursues those policies. Or you can start a conditional market (see 5.1) on whether, if Russia ever releases its past intelligence data many years from now, the data confirm/disconfirm that Trump was an agent. See Part 5 for other clever ways you might try to address this problem. 4.8: “Meme stocks” like Gamestop and AMC sometimes remain mispriced indefinitely. How do we know this won’t happen with prediction markets? Meme stocks are a type of Ponzi. It’s “reasonable” to buy Gamestop at some inflated price, because - who knows? - someone else might buy it at an even more inflated price tomorrow. And this can keep going arbitrarily long, or at least long enough for you to get out with a profit. Unlike meme stocks, prediction markets have a clear resolution date. If you’re predicting who will win the next election, the market will go to 100% or 0% after the election finishes. No matter how many memes there were, you wouldn’t buy a share in “the Democrats will win the election” for 99% the day before Election Day if you knew they would definitely lose. But that means prediction markets should be accurately priced the day before Election Day, which means you shouldn’t buy at an inaccurate price two days before Election Day, and so on. I can’t say for sure that no prediction market will ever get mispriced for meme reasons, but they should be much more robust against meme mispricings than the stock market. And even the stock market doesn’t have too many meme stocks. 4.9: How do prediction markets deal with outcomes in the far future? Suppose there is a question “who will win the 2100 election?” Currently it says 25% Democrats, 75% Republicans, and I believe it should be 50-50 (we’ll ignore third parties, or the possibility of America not existing in 2100, for now). So if I bet on the market, I can (in expectation) double my money. But there are many better ways to double your money by 2100. For example, if the stock market grows 4% per year, I should expect any money invested in the stock market to multiply by 20x in 2100. So just doubling it in a prediction market is a bad option. Realistically, this means prediction markets won’t work well for far-future events. These might be a better match for forecaster tournaments or some other structure, where we get the forecaster track records through present events, then use those track records weighting their far-future predictions (see also 5.5). There are already good forecasting tournaments on some far future events. But if you really wanted to use a prediction market, you could theoretically solve this by putting investors’ money in index funds while they waited. Then the winner would get their (and the losers’) original deposits and investment profits, and it would go back to being a better option than investing in index funds directly. In practice this seems complicated and I wouldn’t expect it to work. 4.9.1: What about predicting things that would make it impossible or pointless to win money, like human extinction? Again, these questions probably aren’t great matches for prediction markets, and you should use forecasting tournaments or some other method (see also 5.5). If you really wanted, you might be able to make it work in theory through a mechanism sort of like this one. 5. What are some clever uses for prediction markets? Here’s a non-exhaustive list: 5.1: Conditional prediction markets / decision markets Suppose the government is trying to decide whether to throw its weight behind Vaccine A or Vaccine B for some deadly disease. There are some experts behind both, both sets of experts accuse the other of being in the pay of pharmaceutical companies, and decision-makers don’t know who to trust. They might make two prediction markets, like: If we decide to go with Vaccine A, will at least X people die from the disease?

Inline links: Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al, already good forecasting tournaments on some far future events, this one

1. What are prediction markets? 2. Why believe prediction markets are accurate? 3. Why believe prediction markets are canonical? 4. What are the most common objections to prediction markets? 5. What are some clever uses for prediction markets? 6. What’s the current status of prediction markets? 7. What can I do to help promote prediction markets?

Inline links: What are prediction markets?, Why believe prediction markets are accurate?, Why believe prediction markets are canonical?, What are the most common objections to prediction markets?, What are some clever uses for prediction markets?, What’s the current status of prediction markets?, What can I do to help promote prediction markets?

If we decide to go with Vaccine B, will at least X people die from the disease? If the first prediction market is 60% and the second one is 40%, they might decide to use Vaccine B. Then they can give refunds to everyone who bet on the first market (since it will never be tested) and resolve the second market normally. Remember, decision-makers usually aren’t experts themselves, and have the same “which experts do I trust?” problem as the rest of us - except worse, because there are more special interests spending more money to confuse them. They could find markets like these very helpful. One downside of decision markets is that you have to be very careful to choose the right outcome. For example, if people can both die from the disease or be disabled by the disease, this market will choose the vaccine that causes the fewest deaths, regardless of how much disability it causes. Because of issues like these, decision markets should only be used as one input in decision-making, not as the entire process. Another downside is that sometimes conditionals can interact in non-intuitive ways that make conditional prediction markets inappropriate or slightly off. See this article for more details. 5.2: Politician pledge markets Suppose that President Biden pledges to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030. In theory this is a noble goal. In practice, it’s cheap talk; he can institute whatever policies he wants, but he has no incentive to make them work. By 2030 he’ll be retired and maybe even dead. Instead, he could pledge to move prediction markets about 2030 emissions. Suppose that before he made his pledge, prediction markets said there was only a 5% chance that emissions would halve by 2030. Biden might pledge that within a year, prediction markets would say there was a 80% chance of this. Then he could announce new policies. If they were good policies that would almost certainly halve emissions by 2030, the prediction markets would go up to some very high number. If they were bad policies, the prediction markets would stay low, and Biden would either have to propose better policies, or admit having failed at his pledge. For more, see Instead Of Pledging To Change The World, Pledge To Change Prediction Markets. 5.3: Attention markets Suppose you’re a very important person, like the President of the US, or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. You want ordinary people to be able to raise important problems to your attention (for example, a threat to national security, or a major flaw in your product). But if you made your email address public, millions of people would send you dumb complaints or random screeds every day. Prediction markets could solve this. Tell people who have a complaint to start a conditional prediction market in “If the President personally looks over this complaint, will he believe it was a good use of his time?” Then agree to look over any complaints that get above 50% (plus some randomly selected ones, to encourage people to keep the probability accurate even when it’s below 50%). When you’re done, tell people whether you thought it was a good use of your time, so the market can resolve. If the markets start sending too many complaints your way, your bar for “good use of my time” will go up, and the system will naturally self-correct. I’ve sometimes used this system to resolve moderation issues around this blog, with generally good results. 5.4: Replication Markets Suppose you have one hundred scientific studies that got kind of weird results and that you think might have made a mistake somewhere. But you don’t have enough money to repeat all one hundred studies; in fact, you only have enough money to repeat one. You can open up a hundred prediction markets, like: If we decide to redo Study #1, will we get the same results?

Inline links: this article, Instead Of Pledging To Change The World, Pledge To Change Prediction Markets

Who Predicted 2022?

January 24, 2023 · Original source

I (Scott Alexander) did formally enter the contest, and scored in the 54th percentile. I never claimed to be a great forecaster, just a forecasting fanboy.5

Inline links: 5

8th: Zach Stein-Perlman. Zach entered under the pseudonym “My expected score is slightly worse than it would be if I always gave my true probabilities. I mention this in case you want to exclude me from analysis for that reason. (The form says "there is no strategic advantage to putting anything other than your honest predictions for each event", but this is totally false: I don't care about expected score, just probability of doing very well. If Scott had said to be honest, I would have, but instead he said "The winner will get eternal glory" so I'm lazily* maximizing winning probability. *If the universe was at stake, I would consider other tactics, but it's not, so I'm just being overconfident”, but I was able to figure out who he was from the email address. Zach is a forecaster and research analyst at AI Impacts, a nonprofit (founded by my ex-girlfriend) that tries to predict the future course of AI.

Inline links: AI Impacts

Highlights From The Comments On Social Model Of Disability

July 25, 2023 · Original source

At least two people wrote their own blog posts responding to me. Obviously these are longer and I can only quote excerpts, so read the whole thing to make sure I’m being fair. Demogorgon wrote Contra Contra Scott Alexander On The Social Model Of Disability:

Inline links: Contra Contra Scott Alexander On The Social Model Of Disability

Scott Alexander's recent article is arguing against a straw or weakman, probably the product of his hasty misreading.

[original post: Contra The Social Model Of Disability]

Inline links: Contra The Social Model Of Disability

Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World

August 11, 2023 · Original source

An alternative answer was put in a nice metaphor by Scott Alexander himself.

Inline links: Scott Alexander himself

I’ve been suggesting a critique, or waving my hand in the direction of one, but let me tell you how much there is in this book. There’s the introduction to the basic theory of cultural evolution – the psychology that lets humans have cultures and how ideas can transmit themselves down generations. There’s the definition of WEIRD psychology, including dispositionalism (the tendency to explain people’s actions by their innate character), and the tendency to categorize rabbits with cats not carrots; and the fact that even the famous Big Five traits of personality psychology don’t generalize very well beyond the WEIRD countries. There’s a taxonomy of the institutions that help human groups scale up their cooperation, starting with unilineal clans – the basic unit of intensive kinship, and the blind alley that most human societies got stuck in, on Henrich’s account – and including segmented lineages, age sets and premodern chiefdoms and states. (This is a very scientific, comparative approach to anthropology. I would love to hear a debate between Henrich and David Wengrow, whose book The Dawn of Everything, reviewed in ACX here, takes a much more voluntarist approach, starting from the view that there are many ways to organize a society, and that rational collective institutional design is pretty much a human universal.)

Inline links: here

Book Review Contest 2023 Winners

September 15, 2023 · Original source

Njal’s Saga, reviewed by Scott Alexander. This one got the most votes, but I’m disqualifying it because it seems in poor taste for me to win my own contest.

Inline links: Njal’s Saga

The Alexander Romance, reviewed by Scott Alexander. I worried people would figure out which review was mine, so to make it harder I entered twice. Alexander Romance was my second entry. It placed 37th, nowhere near high enough to make the finals. I hope this is encouraging for anyone else who didn’t make the finals - apparently there’s a lot of variance even among reviews by the same person! I still liked this one and will probably put it up as a normal post here soon.

Inline links: figure out which review was mine

1st: The Educated Mind, reviewed by Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon is the founder of Science is WEIRD, a sprawling online science course that helps kids fall in love with the world. He’s also re-imagining what education can be at his Substack, The Lost Tools of Learning (losttools.substack.com).

Inline links: The Educated Mind, Science is WEIRD, losttools.substack.com

Seems Like Targeting

January 31, 2024 · Original source

The malicious journalist thesis is the one that was the hardest on my ocular muscles yesterday. Scott Alexander—the figure at the center of the piece—believes this . . . Only in a bubble as insular and tiny as the SSC community would this theory be even remotely plausible . . . [Journalists] do not sit around thinking about how they’re going to “get” people they write about, and when subjects think they do, it’s more a reflection of the subject’s self-perception (or self-importance) and, sometimes, a sprinkling of unadulterated narcissism.

But also, I think this is the other half of a phenomenon I mentioned in the recent article Against Learning From Dramatic Effects. The half spelled out there: Events are drawn from some distribution. You should probably base your estimate of the distribution on either priors or on studies with several data points. You shouldn’t base it on one very dramatic data point, because the generation of dramatic data points involves a lot of noise.

Inline links: Against Learning From Dramatic Effects

Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate

April 09, 2024 · Original source

In an interview with the Daily Mail on 3/4/20, he said that his kitten died, after a two-day illness, on the ninth day of him (Connor) having COVID. He said “I don’t know whether it had what I’ve got, or whether cats can even get human flu” (speaking as if it was him in the past, who thought he had flu because he hadn’t heard of COVID yet). This is a weird inconsistency! In the Wales interview, the cat got it before him (at least that’s how I interpret “I don’t think I caught it from her”). In the Mail interview, he got it nine days before the cat. In The Wales interview, it’s “the feline coronavirus”. In the Mail interview, he doesn’t know what the cat got and speculates that it might have been COVID. But also, if it was “the feline coronavirus”, how would he know? Wouldn’t you need a vet to diagnose that? But in the Mail interview, he said he didn’t leave the house for a week around the time his cat was sick. So how did he go to the vet? It gets worse. In the Mail interview, he gave a day-by-day account of his sickness. On Day 12, he goes to Zhongnan University Hospital. He says: As soon as I get there, a doctor diagnoses pneumonia. So that’s why my lungs are making that noise. I am sent for a battery of tests lasting six hours. And then says that he went home either that day, or the next. Day 13: I arrived back at my apartment late yesterday evening. The doctor prescribed antibiotics for the pneumonia but I’m reluctant to take them But in an interview with FOX News said: He said he went to the hospital after he struggled to breathe and experienced a bad cough, both of which are signs of the pneumonia-like illness. "I was stunned when the doctors told me I was suffering from the virus. I thought I was going to die but I managed to beat it,” he told the outlet, adding he was hospitalized at Zhongnan University Hospital for two weeks following his diagnosis. In his earlier story, he was at the hospital for less than a day. Now it’s two weeks. But also, the doctors “told [him he] was suffering from the virus”, but this is impossible - the virus hadn’t been discovered yet. The whole point of Saar bringing him up is that he’s a supposed anomalous case before the official pandemic. So how did the doctors tell him this? In the Mail interview, he tells a different story of how he learned he’d had COVID: Day 52: A notification from the hospital informs me that I was infected with the Wuhan coronavirus. I suppose I should be pleased that I can’t catch it again — I’m immune now. Day 52 would be January 11th. So I think he’s saying that, a month after he recovered, the hospital “informs” him it was coronavirus. Charitably, maybe they kept his samples (really?), then re-tested them after COVID was discovered, found he had it, and told him. But, at a time when the eyes of the world medical establishment were fixated on Wuhan and its new pandemic, didn’t they think to tell anybody that they’d confirmed a case two weeks before any other known cases? Just called Connor and said “Hey, you’re the first ever COVID patient, congrats” and did absolutely nothing else? And then he didn’t show up in any of those WHO searches for early cases? There’s one more weird inconsistency. Connor said in his interview that he thinks he might have gotten COVID at “the fish market”: Maybe I caught the coronavirus at the fish market. It’s a great place to get food on a budget, a part of the real Wuhan that ordinary Chinese people use every day, and I regularly do my shopping there. Since the outbreak became international news, I’ve seen hysterical reports (especially in the U.S. media) that exotic meats such as bat and even koala are on sale at the fish market. I’ve never seen that. This sounds to me like a reference to the Huanan Seafood Central Market, ie the wet market with the raccoon-dogs where the first confirmed cases were found. He says “the fish market” like he expects us to know which one he means, and adds that “since the outbreak became international news”, he’d seen “hysterical reports” in US media about it. US media was covering the Huanan Market because that’s where the pandemic was first found; it didn’t cover any other fish market in Wuhan. During the debate, Saar objected that Connor lived on the opposite side of Wuhan from the wet market; it would have taken him about an hour to get there. It would be weird to “regularly” do your shopping somewhere an hour away. Saar speculated that Connor meant somewhere closer to his home. I can’t deny that it’s weird to do your regular shopping at a market an hour away, but it really sounds like he’s referring to the wet market where all the cases started here. But also, isn’t it weird that the first ever coronavirus case is a white person? And that he’s 25 years old, yet was hospitalized with COVID (about 1% of people in their 20s with COVID require hospitalization)? I think the best explanation for all of this is that Connor was making this all up. He told whatever story sounded cool at the time, and all of his stories ended up contradicting each other or making no sense. This would also explain why he said he had COVID at a time when, by the standard narrative, it either didn’t exist yet or was confined to a single-digit number of people. 1.11: Rootclaim Response Saar and Rootclaim wrote a response to my earlier post. You can read it at COVID origins debate: response to Scott Alexander. I’ll post the introduction and first summary, you can go to the link for the rest of the case, and I’ll respond to parts I disagree with below. We were initially excited to have Scott cover the story, hoping that someone with an affinity to probabilities would like to dig into our analysis and fully understand it. Sadly, Scott seemingly hadn’t enough time to do so and our exchange focused on fixing factual mistakes in earlier drafts of his post and explaining why rules-of-thumb in probabilistic thinking that he proposed do not work in practice. We did not get to discuss the details of our analysis, resulting in a post that is essentially a repeat of the judges’ reports with extra steps. His post has two main messages: It’s hard to get probabilistic inference right – we fully agree with this and ironically his post is a great example, containing many probabilistic inference mistakes, some of which are listed below. While we agree it’s hard, our experience taught us that it is far from impossible.

Inline links: an interview with the Daily Mail, COVID origins debate: response to Scott Alexander.

Original post here. Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things.

Inline links: here

hmm answers the challenge:

Inline links: hmm

Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"

May 07, 2024 · Original source

I enjoyed reading Scott Alexander's review of my book, and he did a good job applying its lessons to some more recent events. Here’s my response to certain points and critiques:

Original post here.

Inline links: here

Sverlook writes:

Inline links: writes

Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche

August 08, 2024 · Original source

Scott Alexander in his article on Yglesias as Nietzsche uses "Nietzsche" in the way I do, which is a stand in for "good things are good." I tend to think the actual Nietzsche believed in things neither of us would endorse, but if that's the modern understanding of him we can go with it. See footnote 3 here on the point about what gets called "eugenics" these days. If you disagree with that footnote, it's a good litmus test proving that you subscribe to slave morality, and not the more defensible kind of slave morality, but like the ugly stuff we should wipe off the face of the earth.

Inline links: article

[original post here]

Inline links: here

But Kara Stanhope writes:

Inline links: writes

Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism

September 10, 2024 · Original source

Some people who routinely violate the Temporal Copernican Principle include Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk, Clay Shirky, Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Tom Friedman, Scott Alexander, every tech company CEO, Ray Kurzweil, Robin Hanson, and many many more. I think they should ask themselves how much of their understanding of the future ultimately stems from a deep-seated need to believe that their times are important because they think they themselves are important, or want to be.

(except maybe the part about how you’re in a simulation, or the part about how there’s definitely a God who created an infinite number of universes, or how there must be thousands of US states, or how the world must end before 10,000 AD, or how the Biblical Adam could use his reproductive decisions as a shortcut to supercomputation, or several other things along these same lines. I actually hate anthropic reasoning. I just think that if you’re going to do it, you should do it right.)

Inline links: you’re in a simulation, there’s definitely a God who created an infinite number of universes, how there must be thousands of US states, how the world must end before 10,000 AD, how the Biblical Adam could use his reproductive decisions as a shortcut to supercomputation

September 17, 2024 · Original source

2: Dean Ball has a sort of vague vision of LLMs betting on prediction markets at massive scale. I agree something like this is interesting and plausible; I agree that it’s hard to pin down exactly how it would work. One suggestion he makes is to have the bots shadow public intellectuals - for example, a bot “trained on” my writing would ask itself “how would Scott Alexander bet in this market?”, and if it made more money than a bot asking “how would Tyler Cowen bet in this market?”, then maybe you would trust me more than Tyler. This is cute but there are a lot of wrinkles to work out For example, I talk more about superforecasting and probability calibration than Tyler, my bot might simulate me by making good bets; if Tyler sometimes uses extreme or ideological language, his bot might make worse bets not because his ideas are worse, but because it “simulates” him as being an incautious better.

Inline links: a sort of vague vision of LLMs betting on prediction markets at massive scale

The basic structure is the same as past forecasting AIs like FutureSearch. A heavily-modified copy of ChatGPT gathers relevant news articles, then prompts itself to think in superforecaster-like ways. The creators say the ChatGPT copy had a knowledge cutoff of October 2023, so they tested it on Metaculus questions from after that date. It got 87.7% accuracy, slightly above Metaculus forecasters’ 87.0%. Manifold is skeptical: The commenters, especially Neel Nanda, found that doing knowledge cutoffs properly is hard, and the ChatGPT base seems to know about news events after October 2023 - upon questioning, it seemed aware of an earthquake in November 2023. When presented with a different set of questions that were all after November 2023, FiveThirtyNine substantially underperformed the Metaculus average. But also, my attempts to play around with the bot haven’t been encouraging: I asked it to predict the chance that Prospera would have a population of at least 1,000 in 2027. Like FutureSearch on the same question, it cited many interesting news articles on Prospera’s chances but failed to do the basic step of figuring out its current population and growth rate. It eventually concluded 35% chance, which is reasonable enough. But when asked whether Prospera would have a population of 100,000 in 2028, it also said 35% chance, which is absurd.

Inline links: FutureSearch, When presented with a different set of questions

See also various slightly-weaker or slightly-stronger versions of the same question (includes wildlife, includes any immigrants, includes only Springfield). I actually appreciate this a lot, because most of the debate around Catgate has focused on how there’s “no evidence” it’s happening, but “no evidence” is cheap and I prefer an outright forecast.

Inline links: includes wildlife, includes any immigrants, includes only Springfield, “no evidence” is cheap

1DaySooner's Trump II Health Policy Proposals

February 07, 2025 · Original source

Compensating Organ Donors / End Kidney Deaths Act: Both of us co-writing this piece (Scott Alexander of ACX, Josh Morrison of 1DaySooner) have donated kidneys. We’re proud of our decision, but it’s not enough - waiting for people like us has resulted in a kidney shortage that kills a thousand Americans per month. Everyone knows the solution - compensating organ donors - but there hasn’t been enough political will to overcome the “ick” factor and make it happen. O’Neill could change that. He’s been speaking out in favor of compensation since 2009. And the time is right: Representative Nicole Malliotakis has introduced a bipartisan bill to provide $50,000 in refundable tax credits for people who donate kidneys to strangers. This paper found that a similar policy could eventually net 11,500 extra donors per year - which, aside from saving 11,500 people from end-stage kidney disease, could save the government $1 billion. O’Neill could boost this bill by getting it into the Executive Budget released with the State of the Union.

Inline links: donated, kidney shortage, been speaking out in favor of compensation since 2009, Representative Nicole Malliotakis, This paper, save, $1 billion

My personal favorite as the only Trump administration official to have commented on this blog (JD Vance only lurks – sad!) O’Neill, previously a Peter Thiel lieutenant, has worked in causes from seasteading to anti-aging; now he’s taking the #2 spot at HHS under RFK. He famously proposed that the FDA consider only safety (and not efficacy) when approving drugs. Given that he hasn’t been chosen for FDA, that’s probably not on the cards, but here are some things we hope O’Neill considers:

Inline links: the only Trump administration official to have commented on this blog, only lurks, consider only safety

Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe

February 21, 2025 · Original source

Bentham’s Bulldog wrote a response, Contra Scott Alexander On Whether Tegmark’s View Defeats Most Theistic Arguments.

Inline links: Contra Scott Alexander On Whether Tegmark’s View Defeats Most Theistic Arguments

[Original thread here: Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Arguments For God’s Existence.]

Inline links: Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Arguments For God’s Existence.

Nevin Climenhaga writes:

Inline links: writes

The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID

May 22, 2025 · Original source

As many of the comments note, the attribution of 1.2M deaths to COVID is as questionable as the zoonotic origin story, the value of the vaccines to healthy young people, and the rest of the COVID rhetoric. Some, like Scott Alexander, still “trust the experts”. But many don’t. There doesn’t seem to be much objectively verified consensus ground truth here, just conflicting narratives and numbers.

Many commenters responded to yesterday’s post by challenging the claim that 1.2 million Americans died of COVID:

Inline links: yesterday’s post

It’s hard to read the exact numbers, but it looks like about 500,000 - 700,000 excess deaths in each of 2020 and 20211, which adds up to most of the 1.2 million (although I think the full number might include some residual deaths during 2022+).

Inline links: 1

In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis

August 14, 2025 · Original source

I am grateful to Logan Thrasher Collins, Tommy Crow, Dan Elton, and Greg Fitzgerald for valuable feedback on this essay, and to Scott Alexander for edits which improved its structure and presentation.

Anti-amyloid drugs (like Aduhelm) don't reverse the disease, and only slow progression a relatively small amount. Opponents call the amyloid hypothesis zombie science, propped up only by pharmaceutical companies hoping to sell off a few more anti-amyloid me-too drugs before it collapses. Meanwhile, mainstream scientists . . . continue to believe it without really offering any public defense. Scott was so surprised by the size of the gap between official and unofficial opinion that he asked if someone from the orthodox camp would speak out in its favor. I am David Schneider-Joseph, an engineer formerly with SpaceX and Google, now working in AI safety. Alzheimer’s isn’t my field, but I got very interested in it, spent six months studying the literature, and came away believing the amyloid hypothesis was basically completely solid. I thought I’d share that understanding with current skeptics. The ATN model The most plausible variant of the amyloid hypothesis is the A → T → N model: amyloid causes tau causes neurodegeneration. 1: Amyloid The common entrypoint, typically at least 15 years before clinically detectable symptoms [1], is accumulation of amyloid-β deposits (especially Aβ42, one of several variants). Amyloid-β is a peptide produced in healthy human beings and many other animals, probably for antimicrobial purposes [2, 3]. Factors which cause overproduction of amyloid also cause Alzheimer’s. Factors that cause decreased clearance of amyloid also cause Alzheimer’s. The clearest relationship is various genes which massively increase amyloid production (while doing nothing else); these genes are Alzheimer’s risk factors, with some of the rarer and more severe ones causing extreme versions of the disease that manifest at otherwise almost-never-seen ages. One of the clearest examples is Down syndrome, which is caused by three (rather than the usual two) copies of chromosome 21. People with Down syndrome are at much higher risk of Alzheimer’s than the general population: two-thirds will have the condition by age sixty, and 15% have it by age forty. APP, the gene for the amyloid precursor protein, is on chromosome 21. This means that people with Down syndrome will have an extra copy. This extra copy has been observed to lead to higher-than-normal amyloid levels. But there are many genes on chromosome 21; do we have additional evidence that it’s the amyloid one that’s involved? Yes. Dozens of other mutations on APP cause the same sort of extremely young and severe Alzheimer’s. So do mutations on PSEN1 and 2, the genes for the enzyme that processes amyloid precursor protein into amyloid. So do mutations on several other amyloid-related genes. [6, 91 - 96] Researchers call these autosomal-dominant Alzheimer’s, meaning Alzheimer’s cases that get inherited from a single parent in a simple fashion typical of single-gene disorders. They make up about 1% of all cases, and are our strongest evidence for the causal role of amyloid in the disorder. To my knowledge, there is no serious claim that these genes could be working through any pathway other than their shared role in the amyloid system. But these autosomal-dominant cases only make up about 1% of all Alzheimer’s patients. Might they be a different disease than the usual sporadic Alzheimer’s that strikes people without strong family histories at normal ages? Probably not: the presentation and trajectory of autosomal-dominant and sporadic Alzheimer’s cases are strikingly similar. Both show an initial appearance of amyloid pathology starting in intrinsic connectivity networks in both autosomal-dominant [14] and sporadic [15–18] types, cortical tau appearing first in the medial temporal lobe and with the exact same fold in both disease types [97] (despite human tauopathies having at least seven other possible characteristic folds [36]), that tau pathology worsening and spreading outside this region only once amyloid pathology reaches sufficient severity [65], neurodegeneration progressing closely in step with the tau pathology, and the same usual approximate trajectory of cognitive symptoms due to the sequence of affected regions. So it’s as if two bank robberies occurred hours apart, in the same town, and in a highly similar and idiosyncratic manner, and we can positively identify the culprit of one on security camera footage. It’s a good bet the culprit of the other is the same. Increased amyloid production → Alzheimer’s is an especially clear and simple pathway, but any other change in amyloid can also cause the disease. For example Overproduction or reduced clearance of amyloid due to impaired slow wave sleep. Aβ production is neuronal activity-dependent, and toxins (perhaps including Aβ) are cleared from the brain during sleep via the glymphatic system. Thus Aβ can accumulate if the brain is more active and/or has less opportunity for clearance. [7, 8, 9, 10, 11]

Inline links: Aduhelm, David Schneider-Joseph

Highlights From The Comments On Fatima

October 24, 2025 · Original source

Generalized one-fell-swoop paranormal explanations. Demons are trying to confuse us, or the simulation is glitching, or there’s some kind of Harry Potter-esque masquerade overflowing with wizards and monsters that carefully hides itself from us Muggles but occasionally leaks. UFOs do not really lend themselves to an individualized paranormal explanation - too many weird aliens in saucers trying to send whichever message of peace and love is most politically popular at the time of the abduction, too few Matrioshka brains with nanotech - so bringing them into our attention may make us more interested in looking for a generalized paranormal explanation which is merely pretending to be all these specific supernatural beings, including the Virgin. I take this one sort of seriously, but I also think it violates a general heuristic against conspiracies and false flag attacks. If some incredibly powerful being is telling you that it’s the Virgin Mary, and discussing Catholic doctrine, and performing healing miracles, I think you should at least start with a presumption of taking it seriously. But at this level of distance from any well-established priors, who even knows? GedAtThwll writes: This account reminds me of the semi-famous Ariel School UFO encounter [in Zimbabwe], covered well on YouTube and Wikipedia. Basically, ~60 kids saw a “silver craft” descend, and aliens (of debatable description) came out and did various things (described differently by participants). Oddly similar to the silver sun -> hallucinations. I don’t know how much it reminds me of Fatima, but I agree “sixty people all say they saw a UFO and some aliens” is the sort of mass hallucination I claimed basically doesn’t happen. I was going to attribute this something about the psychic makeup of poor uneducated Zimbabwean children, but according to Wikipedia, “Ariel School was an expensive private school [and] most of the pupils were from wealthy white families in Harare.” One interesting feature of this story is that it happened a few days after a previous UFO panic in Zimbabwe - thousands of people said they saw some kind of fiery spaceship in the sky. This was very likely true - their accounts match a Russian rocket that reentered and burned up in the atmosphere around that time. So it seems like maybe the rocket primed people into a UFO mania, and that caused . . . sixty schoolkids to all hallucinate the same thing? At least to the point where some later investigators who are accused of maybe asking some leading questions could get them to give similar answers? Peter McLaughlin (blog) writes: This is excellent. One additional strand that I’d like to see someone tug on – maybe I will. The Irish nationalist poet W. B. Yeats has a poem about the 1891 funeral of Irish nationalist political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. The poem describes how clouds covered the sky on the day of the funeral, the sun could be seen through a gap in the clouds, and then a star “shoots down”. Most people who write about this poem take this to be pure symbolism (the next stanza describes a scene of pagan sacrifice that definitely is pure symbolism), but a while ago I came across an essay where Yeats insists that no, this actually happened. He wasn’t at the funeral himself, but he knew lots of people who were. He cites his unrequited love Maud Gonne telling him afterwards about “the star that fell broad daylight as Parnell’s body was lowered into the grave”, and quotes the writer Standish O’Grady: ‘I state a fact - it was witnessed by thousands. While his followers were committing Charles Parnell’s remains to the earth, the sky was bright with strange lights and flames. Only a coincidence possibly, and yet persons not superstitious have maintained that there is some mysterious sympathy between the human soul and the elements, and that storm, and other elemental disturbances have too often succeeded or accompanied great battles to be regarded as only fortuitous...’ Now, Yeats was exceptionally credulous and prone to exaggeration. And he wrote the poem years after the funeral: while I think it’s very unlikely, it’s not impossible that he was ‘contaminated’ by subsequent knowledge of the reports from Fatima, and this coloured the way he stitched together the testimony he’d heard. The two sources he cites are less obviously Fatima-esque than his poem (though they don’t contradict each other, and altogether they add up to something exceptionally Fatima-esque with the lights and the falling object etc.; and, again, my knowledge of Yeats’ biography makes contamination seem unlikely). Even accounting for all this, the similarities between Yeats’ poem and the Fatima sun miracle are really striking to me. I think this is a potentially very important datapoint, because it’s an almost entirely non-religious example. To be sure, you can define ‘religion’ so that Irish nationalism can be a religion, but it’s very different from a bunch of people huddling on a hill because someone told them the Virgin Mary might appear. And indeed Parnell was in the unique position of being the Protestant leader of a mostly-Catholic political movement, cutting across Ireland’s religious divide. If there really was a Fatima-esque sun miracle at Parnell’s funeral, it strongly suggests that the correct explanation is (a) non-religious/materialist but also (b) ‘objective’ (or at least as intersubjective as optical illusions) rather than a matter of pure mass hysteria or hallucination. Which is exactly what this post suggests. And Parnell’s funeral came several decades before Fatima, so genuine primary sources would rule out ‘social contagion’ completely. This has been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while, but if enough people are interested I may try to track down the sources. The main published collection of Yeats’ letters to and from Gonne starts in 1893, two years after the funeral, so the main source he cites might be tricky to verify. But there might be independent diaries or newspaper reports from people at the funeral who weren’t in Yeats’ social circle, and at very least I can check the quote from Standish O’Grady. Melias (blog) writes: This is my perspective as an Orthodox Christian, and a possible framework for interpreting Fatima as a real miracle without becoming a fire-and-brimstone Catholic. It’s possible that Fatima et al. are partially or entirely from God. It’s also possible they are partially or entirely demonic phenomena, though often repurposed by God to good ends. Either way, if I have good reason to believe the Catholic Church is not fully in accord with Divine Truth, these miracles on their own shouldn’t make me change my mind. Christ Himself tells us to believe for His own sake, not for the sake of miracles. I believe in the supernatural because of numerous miracle stories that are impossible to explain otherwise. But my non-materialism is specifically Orthodox Christian because I can’t explain Jesus unless He’s the Christ, and I find Him most clearly in the practice and teachings of the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy has plenty of miracles too, but that’s not why I’m here. I.E. Christ Himself gives you permission to decouple the reality of a supernatural occurrence from an associated claim to Divine Truth. You can use Fatima to update the chance of P(supernatural) without an equal update to P(Catholicism). Anyway, if you do want to keep going down the miracle rabbit-hole, the Orthodox equivalent of Fatima is the annual miracle of the Holy Fire. The main miracle - that a candle is miraculously lit while the Patriarch of Jerusalem is alone in the Holy Sepulchre - has supposedly been debunked since the Middle Ages. Even many Orthodox doubt it. But pilgrims regularly report a secondary miracle: For the first few minutes, candles lit from the Holy Fire don’t burn things, at least not how they should. Some videos [Video 1 here] Looks like this guy should have severe burns [Video 2 here] My brain tells me this might be possible with regular candles... but her sleeve gets plenty of time under intense flame [Video 3 here] They don’t leave their flesh in the flame for too long, but my brain tells me that putting the bundle of candles directly under your chin like the man does at 0:07 should also result in serious burns I pray before a single small candle every night. If I put my hand two inches above the visible flame, I can only hold it for ~2 seconds until it hurts too much. I find the videos and first-hand testimony (see Rod Dreher’s blog for one example) pretty convincing. Deiseach writes: Ah, I’m not pushed about Marian apparitions. The miracle of the sun is along the lines of the Shroud of Turin - you don’t have to believe the shroud is really the shroud of Jesus Christ, nobody is making you, it’s not doctrine. At the same time, if you want to venerate it (as you would a crucifix) that’s okay. Keep away from making extravagant claims, don’t contradict received doctrine, and it’s fine. Did a miracle happen at Fatima? I have no idea. I believe in God and the supernatural and all that jazz, but I’m not living and dying on “did this one event at this one apparition site really happen? if you prove it didn’t, oh no my faith is destroyed!” During the moving statue craze in Ireland, we had our own little local apparition. At the height of it, tour buses used to come with people to pray at the site. That has long died down, and I don’t recall that there were any earth-shattering revelations claimed by the visionaries, what remains is a quiet revival in people going to pray the rosary at the grotto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_statues There are a *lot* of alleged apparitions and private revelations that are never officially accepted by the Church, and a lot more which are condemned as fakes and frauds. Ross Douthat writes (on Twitter): Re-read Scott Alexander’s Fatima post (why not?) and I think this is where his analysis goes astray - after realizing there were a bunch of “echo” miracles like the initial case, not all church-approved, he decides that *strengthens* a skeptic’s case. But you don’t have to postulate demons to see why a big miracle might have non-church-approved sequelae. 1) Catholicism could be fallible in discerning which miracles are legit. 2) Even seers have free will; visions could fall on fallible ppl who run wild with dubious claims and 3) you’d expect a big miracle to have some sequels where enthusiasm does get the better of people (which any theory of miracles obviously has to allow for). Clearly (if He exists) God doesn’t force ppl to correctly interpret every experience He grants them, and so a multiplicity of miracle sequels, some of which seem credible and even produce video evidence, and some of which veer off into left field, seems entirely compatible with the original one actually being a divine intervention - if that’s where the core evidence points. I answered: Thanks for engaging in depth. I admit that was a surprising direction for that result to go, but I mostly stand by it. I think first, that the extra miracles demonstrate it has to be a subjective phenomenon. Partly because it was unclear at Fatima whether there were any people who didn’t see it (the two negative testimonies were such a small number compared to the many positive ones that it was tempting to dismiss them as lying, or confused, or looking the wrong direction) - but at several of the other miracles it’s much clearer that large fractions, sometimes a majority, saw nothing. Partly because in some cases (Benin City, Lagos) a stadium full of people saw it, but people in the same city, just outside the stadium, reported nothing unusual. And partly because the miracle can’t be caught on video (the one video that I thought was okay, the Filipino one, got picked apart in the comments). It being a subjective phenomenon doesn’t prove it’s not a miracle (it could be a sort of prophetic vision), but it at least opens the door to that possibility. And second, although I don’t claim to be able to know for certain what God will or won’t do, I think at least the Necedah event meets any bar a reasonable person might set for “too dumb and heretical to be a real apparition”. If overly enthusiastic worshippers at a fake apparition can report sun miracles, that implies that the human capacity for hallucination is strong enough / specific enough to potentially produce spectacular sun miracles in some situations. But once we admit that, it’s only a trivial extension to say that this same human capacity to hallucinate sun miracles could have been responsible for the original sun miracle, which was more impressive than Necedah in degree but not in kind. Together, I think these are a significant negative update from where we would be if we only had the original miracle, where we might have assumed (like Dalleur) that it was an objective phenomenon that everyone could see, and that there was no way anyone could be “enthusiastic” enough to hallucinate something so striking. Valerio writes: I am Italian from the south of Italy. I was talking to my mom about your analysis of the Fatima mystery (which is very famous here). My mom told me she had exactly the same experience when she was doing a “religious trekking” trip in a small city called Gallinaro (Frosinone). She was around 18 at the time (she is 70 now). She saw a pulsating sun, like it would get closer and closer and then the go back again. This effect repeated several times (3/4) and she got really scared. Importantly, at the time she didn’t know about this effect of the pulsating sun (she learnt about it later). Also importantly she claimed they were not staring particularly at the sun nor they were expecting any miracle. They were actually sitting down on a bench nearby a cliff eating a sandwich. She doesn’t remember whether if was cloudy or not but she says she was able to stare in the sun, so maybe it was. As she was coming down the trip, her group met a local lady that confirmed those types of visions would occur there. This place is famous cause a young little girl and her grandma had a vision in a cave ( little Jesus, no more details provided) few years back. When my mom visited the little girl was still alive, not sure about now. As I am writing this , she just told me the story so didn’t have the time to research it independently . Victoria F writes: I think you put too much stock in the Catholic Church excommunicating someone and how much that reduces the odds that Mary was involved or not. Pope St. Leo I and St. Joan of Arc have also been excommunicated. Many seers are given difficult treatment by the Catholic Church at first. Lot of people here say this is the the “best” miracle. I think the many spontaneous healings at Lourdes are perhaps better: https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/A_Protestant_Looks_at_Lourdes.pdf though I’m not sure how to get the medical records myself https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/the-medical-bureau-of-the-sanctuary/ Our Lady of Zeitoun is also perhaps a better apparition. At least it has some cool photos. I admit excommunication of the seers/believers is not proof that some of the other miracles were fake, but the Necedah one, where Mary gave warnings about the Rothschilds, and the “seer” also talked to the ghosts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, seems pretty bad. An acquaintance claims to have done their own analysis of Lourdes and found that the impressiveness of the healings predictably decreased over time as record-keeping and medical verifiability got better, but I haven’t seen his work. There’s an interesting Substack post by a Zeitoun skeptic here. Marcel writes: Speculative hypothesis that might be worth exploring: could the perceptual mechanisms involved in the Fatima Sun Miracle be related to those underlying Tögal visions in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism? In Tögal (an advanced, traditionally esoteric practice), meditators report experiences of multicolored, moving light displays in response to sky or light gazing. The parallels with the Fátima reports are striking: light as a trigger, dancing colors, and evolving visionary forms. If so, Tögal might provide a reproducible framework for studying how visual and neurological processes, shaped by expectation and attention, can generate experiences of radiance that are interpreted as miraculous or sacred. Another Buddhist explanation! I can’t find a Tögal source anywhere near as clear as Daniel Ingram’s work on fire kasina, but for what it’s worth, the symbol of Dzogchen Buddhism, the thigle, looks like this: …with some representations being even more suggestive: Nikita Sokolsky (blog) writes: » Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima [...] The rest is available only as physical books, $15 + shipping each. Somebody should buy the books, scan them, machine translate the testimonies, and put the translations online. The most important is Volume III I’ve ordered Volume III - though shipping anywhere outside Portugal cost $48 (not surprising for a 639 page book, I guess). They promise delivery by Oct 12th. » There are a few articles about solar retinopathy in the context of Marian shrines that I couldn’t access, including at least Nix and Apple (1987) and Campo et al (1988) Emailed you both. Thank you, Nikita! I’ve uploaded Campo here, and Nix & Apple here. Campo is only a few paragraphs, and contains little of interest if you’ve read the original post. Nix & Apple profiles several cases in New Orleans, including a pilgrim who saw the miracle in Medjugorje and then went home and saw it again in New Orleans, and a second person who skipped Medjugorje and saw it in New Orleans with no previous exposure. There was also an interesting case of someone who stared at the sun for 15 minutes with no injury, then tried again for 15 seconds and did get an injury that time. My days of not understanding the function mapping sungazing length to injury probability are definitely coming to a middle. The eye doctors who wrote the article only say that “Evidence suggests a great individual variation in the susceptibility for developing solar retinopathy, as the cause of the lesion is felt to be a photochemical injury rather than a thermal injury of the retina and retinal pigment epithelium.” The Ghiaie translations are in a form that makes them harder to upload, but there are about a dozen which contain descriptions of a sun miracle, all of which match the Fatima testimonies closely. The one I found most interesting was a monk nearby, who originally doubted the apparitions; he was in his monastery doing normal work when he saw the sun miracle, which included a beautiful white cross appearing in the sky. Other monks saw it too. The next day, he says that a secular newspaper claimed local astronomers had found some kind of ice crystal phenomenon responsible for the event, but he didn’t believe it. He didn’t clarify exactly where this happened (though his address was Castelnuovo Don Bosco, about 80 miles from Ghiaie) or when (though the testimonial implies it was at the same time as the Ghiaie miracle). Main Conclusions And Updates I’m impressed by the fire kasina correspondence, but the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.

Inline links: writes, on YouTube, Wikipedia, match a Russian rocket, blog, writes, blog, writes, Video 1 here, Video 2 here, Video 3 here, writes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_statues, writes, writes, https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/A_Protestant_Looks_at_Lourdes.pdf, https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/the-medical-bureau-of-the-sanctuary/, some cool photos, here, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tnHP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcaa90086-ed0b-4620-b0e5-502d1d34419d_800x800.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EVex!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c466a55-ea5c-4698-a27c-4947720edcfa_736x368.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vVge!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3052f661-b774-4dcb-9734-7c2e297c082a_225x225.jpeg, blog, Campo here, Nix & Apple here

[original post here]

Inline links: original post here

Two commenters, Dave Moore and Anomony, bring up fire kasina practice.

Inline links: Dave Moore, Anomony

Links For December 2025

December 10, 2025 · Original source

3: A story “in the style of Scott Alexander or Jack Clark” about the two-door meme (meme below).

Inline links: A story “in the style of Scott Alexander or Jack Clark”

And if you enjoyed the story, here’s the chaser.

Inline links: here’s the chaser

And if you enjoyed the story, here’s the chaser. 4: Fox Chapel Research: I Think Substrate Is A $1 Billion Fraud (and notes for Part 2). For years, Taiwan’s TSMC has been the only company capable of producing the most advanced AI chips; since Taiwan is a geopolitical flashpoint, this is a constant threat to US tech ambitions. Last month, a new startup called Substrate announced it had developed technology that would let it manufacture 100% Made In America chips every bit the equal of TSMC’s. If true, this would be revolutionary. But Fox Chapel finds worrying signs, like that the company’s founder “is a known con artist involved in such other things as [claiming to have solved] nuclear fusion and stealing $2.5M in a Kickstarter scam” or that “the company’s job postings are nonsensical and AI-generated.” This is enough for me; the question now becomes how so many people were taken in - the company got $150 million from investors led by Peter Thiel, was endorsed by the Trump administration, and received positive portrayals in Semianalysis, NYT, and The Free Press. I don’t understand business, and I know that sometimes you can hyperstition a technology into existence by betting sufficiently hard on a charismatic young founder and eliding the difference between “this is already real” and “this might become real if we all believe hard enough”, but this is a new and worrying level of hopium. Interested to hear from anyone who either believes in Substrate or thinks they understand how so many people fell for it. 5: A recent paper asked AIs whether they were conscious while monitoring them for signatures of deception, role-playing, and people-pleasing; it concluded that the AIs “genuinely” “believe” they are conscious, but sometimes try to deceive people into thinking they aren’t. Nostalgebraist tries to replicate this (X) and gets more ambiguous results; he says we probably can’t conclude anything just yet. See also the paper author’s reply here (X). 6: Congratulations to ACX grantee Tornyol (the anti-mosquito drones), who got accepted to Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 class and have started taking pre-orders ($1100 for a drone, or $50/month subscription, “shipping starts 2026”). Public opinion ranges from “this is really cool” to “I bet this will be repurposed for assassinations” to “why did they have the White House in the background of the official video?” to “yeah, this is definitely getting repurposed for assassinations”. 7: Bill Ackman on nominative determinism (X). 8: New revelations on the OpenAI coup from the Musk vs. Altman lawsuit. The effort to remove Altman may have been led by Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever. They won over the rest of the board, and “did not expect the employees to feel strongly either way”, but (according to Ilya), the board was inexperienced and “rushed” the firing. When it became clear that the move was unpopular, Mira switched sides and let the board members take most of the immediate fallout. There was apparently a brief discussion of merging with Anthropic; Ilya suggests this was Helen Toner’s idea, but Helen claims (X) this is false. 9: Fitzwilliam: Most Irish Foreign Aid Never Leaves The Country. The statistics say that several European countries (including Ireland and the UK) give very generous foreign aid. But this is misleading: accounting conventions let countries count money spent on supporting asylum seekers in the donor country as “foreign aid”, even though the money never leaves the country’s borders. This is dangerous, because it makes it easy for countries to fund their asylum programs by cutting actual foreign aid: since they’re the same line-item on the budget, they won’t officially fail whatever foreign aid pledges they’ve made, and it’s hard for voters to notice. Ireland has so far resisted the temptation to do this, but Britain has succumbed to it. 10: St. Carlo Acutis (1991 - 2006) is the unofficial patron saint of the Internet and “first millennial saint”. He’s best known for creating websites about Catholicism. If you think this sounds nice but maybe short of beatific, you’re in good company; his sainthood is something of a mystery, with Wikipedia saying that “even those with a deep devotion to him struggle to pinpoint his specific actions that led to his canonisation”, and an Economist article admitting that “nothing in his sparse life story explains that this ordinary-seeming teenage boy is about to become the first great saint of the 21st century”. Also “In that same interview, Acutis’s childhood best friend claimed he did not remember Acutis as a ‘very pious boy’, nor did he even know that Carlo was religious.” I’m fine with this; God speaks to each generation in their own tongue, and it is only proper that the first Millennial saint be a random person who hyperstitioned himself into sainthood with a viral website. 11: Tangentially related: St. Peter To Rot 12: When a new AI model comes out, the companies typically take down the old version over the protests of researchers, hobbyists, people who think the old model was their boyfriend, and anyone else who wants access to obsolete models for some reason. Why can’t they just leave it up? Antra and Janus review the economics here : it’s inconvenient to be constantly switching GPUs from one model to another, so if there isn’t enough model-specific demand to keep the GPUs running at all times, then the company loses money. This is an interesting look at the details of AI deployment, and ends with a proposal to maintain old models through a “separate research application track”. Related: Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process. Good for them! 13: Dimes Square is interesting as something that was supposed to be a renegade cultural phenomenon, never really got around to producing any object-level phenomenal renegade culture, but produced some absolutely stellar commentary on the phenomenon of it being a renegade cultural phenomenon - and this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01 is one of the best. “An anonymous online presence called Angelicism01 paypalled me $1,000 to run several clone accounts of his twitter. The clone accounts, presumably, were to make it look like 01 had more fans than he did. That way, he could trick the internet into thinking that Angelicism was a spontaneous cultural movement with some momentum.” Includes a cameo by Curtis Yarvin. 14: Everyone knows AGI could be bad for labor, but Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either. The modern role of “capitalist” combines two things: performing high-status jobs like CEO and VC, and being a person who happens to have lots of money and sips cocktails on a yacht as passive investment income rolls in. From a socialist point of view, the first role provides cover for the second; if people ask “the rich” to justify their wealth, they can argue that they perform socially useful CEO and VC jobs, or at least inherited their money from somebody who did. But after AIs can do CEO and VC jobs better than humans, the capitalists will lose their excuse - and this at exactly the time that they’re becoming richer than ever (because AGI will drive up the rate of return on investment) and everyone else is becoming poorer than ever (because AI has taken their jobs). Bear argues that the only stable equilibria are either some kind of socialism/redistribution, or the capitalists pulling an AI-assisted coup to maintain their advantage. 15: Blueprint Polls: according to voters, what would the perfect Democratic candidate look like? Here are the results for Democrats only (ie potential primary voters): Note that the issues are “issue focus”, so it’s not a contradiction that Democrats are against both “advocating for Israel” and “advocating for Palestinians” - they just don’t want candidates who make either position on the Middle East a major focus of their campaign. And here are results for independents, ie the people Democrats will have to convince in the general: Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”

The Dilbert Afterlife

January 16, 2026 · Original source

Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive1.

Inline links: 1

Arguably this had something to do with the Bohemian turn, the reaction against the forced cheer of the 1950s middle-class establishment of company men who gave their all to faceless corporations and then dropped dead of heart attacks at 60. You could be that guy, proudly boasting to your date about how you traded your second-to-last patent artery to complete a spreadsheet that raised shareholder value 14%. Or you could be the guy who says “Oh yeah, I have a day job working for the Man, but fuck the rat race, my true passion is white water rafting”. When your father came home every day looking haggard and worn out but still praising his boss because “you’ve got to respect the company or they won’t take care of you”, being able to say “I hate Mondays” must have felt liberating, like the mantra of a free man2.

Inline links: the Bohemian turn, 2

This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something. If you were really clever, you’d put the Dilbert comic where Dilbert gets in trouble for putting a comic on his cubicle wall on your cubicle wall, and dare them to move against you.

Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams

January 21, 2026 · Original source

I have seen people try to walk this back by saying Adams only meant they would be persecuted in some way that was metaphorically equivalent to hunting, but I feel like “good chance you will be dead within the year” is saying he means the kind of hunting which literally kills you, and “police will stand down” means that it will be the sort of extremely illegal thing that police would normally react to. I have seen other people try to link this to examples of Republicans actually getting killed, such as Charlie Kirk. But Adams was telling his readers there was “a good chance” that “they” would be dead within a year, which I think implies this fate happening to a significant proportion of ordinary Republicans, not just one prominent person. Also, Kirk was five years after the comment was posted. Can we dismiss this as a joke? I think Adams has used the manipulation technique of saying things that might or might not be jokes and then strategically sticking to them or saying “What? Me? I was only joking! Haha! You can’t take a joke!” depending on which was more convenient to him at that exact second, enough times that I’m not comfortable letting him have that escape. Also, when I was replying to Joel Pollak about this, I happened to glance at his Twitter account, and one of the top tweets was a repost of someone saying that “The Democrat playbook is to arrest every single person who disagrees with them”. I think if I forced Pollak into some kind of extremely literal frame of mind - maybe asked him to bet money on whether I could tweet the words “the Democrats are wrong about immigration” in my Democrat-controlled state without getting arrested - he would admit that, okay, they don’t want to arrest literally every single person who disagrees with them. He was exaggerating for effect, probably in much the way he’s going to say that Scott Adams was exaggerating for effect. You say stuff like “The Democrats are going to HUNT YOU DOWN and LITERALLY MURDER YOU. They will TORTURE YOUR FAMILY and RAPE YOUR DAUGHTER and EAT YOUR PETS and TURN YOUR HOUSE INTO A CHURCH OF SATAN”, and what you mean is “I disagree with the Democrats and sometimes they go overboard cancelling people”. I have a post called If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It. My thesis is that tolerating claims of “directional correctness” - the thing where someone asks to get a pass because even if they said wasn’t literally true, it “points to” an “emotionally correct” thing - is eventually totally corrosive. It means everyone ratchets up their claims to the highest level they think they can get away with (ie walk back later if challenged, as a motte and bailey). And then you end up with this miasma where maybe 5% of people totally believe you, and 50% of people sort of absorb the connotation and think something like that is true, and then people get terrified of the Democrats and think of them as monsters and treat politics as an existential struggle where they will genuinely get arrested or murdered unless they do it to the Democrats first, and then you get a civil war or something. I think Adams and Pollak’s milieu has in fact reached this point, and their love for these kinds of exaggerations is a big part of the cause. Adams was one of the funniest people in the world. If he was actually telling a joke, you could tell by the fact that you were laughing hysterically. “Democrats will hunt and kill you” isn’t funny. I’ll refrain from judgment about whether it was Adams’ sincerely held belief, some kind of annoying manipulation attempt, or whether Adams even recognized a difference between the two. But I think judging him on the fact that it didn’t happen is completely within bounds. … 3: Comments On The Substance Of The Piece … Zanzibar BuckBuck McFate writes: This business where boomers are tolerant of contradictions and find them amusing whereas millennials are horrified is a dynamic I've noticed as well, it seems to be true in politics also, I myself feel this hunger to be authentic all the time. I think it has something to do with the difficulty children have in putting negativity in context. They can't distinguish between a parent having a bad day and venting, or having an existential crisis. So the 50s guy was half right - you don't have to love your boss in your heart of hearts but careful what you say to your kids. Feral Finster writes: » “This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.” Compare with the famous observation that executives are sociopaths, management are clueless, and the workers losers. Yeah, it’s interesting to compare Rao and Adams. Rao formulated his Gervais Principle as a specific response to Adams’ Dilbert Principle, which I guess means Rao thought Adams got it wrong. Did he? The Pointy Haired Boss seems to go back and forth between Clueless and Sociopath, which is probably why Rao thought Adams’ work fell short. Dogbert is clearly Sociopath, but has no permanent role in the corporation, and doesn’t really represent a real thing you can be - his character was a ridiculous scammer who succeeded at near-impossible endeavours (like convincing people he was a Nostradamus-style mystical prophet) because the logic of the strip demanded it. Later, Adams foregrounded the CEO character more, maybe to create a purer Sociopath, letting the Boss go closer to Clueless. This is making me somewhat regret accusing Adams of wanting to be the Pointy-Haired Boss. It would have been fairer (and less of an accusation/surprise) to accuse him of wanting to be Dogbert. But again, Dogbert doesn’t represent a real thing you could be, which might have been why the PHB made a better metaphor. (contra my claim, the cover of Win Bigly shows a mashup of Dogbert and Trump. Fine, Dogbert is a thing one person can be.) You can read my full review of The Gervais Principle here. cincilator writes: Scott Alexander, former tribune of nerds now says that the sneerclub was right about everything all along? I didn’t expect that, let me tell you. Several people interpreted me as attacking nerds. I disagree - I think I was attacking self-hating nerds, because nerdiness is fine and you shouldn’t have to hate yourself for it. To spell it out more explicitly: All nerds must eventually realize they’re not going to immediately dominate everything by intellect alone. This isn’t because intellect isn’t great, it’s because 1) it’s only one of many skills, and 2) you probably aren’t even the person with the most intellect. Again, every mildly-talented person has to face this realization, whether it’s a nerd realizing he won’t be the next Einstein or a jock realizing he won’t be the next LeBron. If someone deals with this using denial (one of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the nerd who says no, I really am the next Einstein, ie a crackpot, aka the sort of person who gets featured on Sneerclub. If they deal with it using reaction formation (another of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the self-hating nerd, aka the sort of person who joins Sneerclub4. If they just deal with it maturely instead of spinning up maladaptive defenses against it, they’re a nerd who is hopefully good-natured and accepting of their nerdiness, and hopefully does some good work in some specific small area, and changes the world in some specific small way (or some very large way, if they can work together with other people and get lucky). Bugmaster writes: I think Adams is basically correct. Yes, facts and evidence do exist and are real; but they have virtually no impact on anything socially important -- i.e., on anything important whatsoever. Memes and charisma and persuasion are what matters if you want to achieve life goals that extend beyound yourself and your immediate family. I worry that Adams (and you) are doing something where unless the average person can solve every problem by facts and intelligence alone, then facts+intelligence lose and memes and persuasion win. But the average person also can’t solve every problem by memes+persuasion alone! If Dilbert is an 80th percentile nerd, the 80th percentile persuader is - I don’t know, a used-car salesman? Dilbert’s probably earning more money, especially nowadays when he could make L5 at Google. And if Donald Trump is a 99.9999th percentile persuader, the 99.9999th percentile nerd is Ilya Sutskever. Probably most people would slightly prefer being Trump to Sutskever, but Sutksever does have a couple billion dollars, plus the more ethereal rewards of genius; it still seems like a pretty good deal. I also think you’re doing a sort of black-and-white thinking here. Every day, great persuaders like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes end up in jail, because in fact the things that they said were true were not true. Every day, smooth-talking charismatic manipulators successfully seduce the girl into bed with them, then totally fail to turn it into a happy stable marriage, because after a few years even the dumbest woman catches on and figures out whether her mate provides real value or not. Even Donald Trump has only a 37% approval rating, because he can’t make “we should alienate our allies over Greenland” sound plausible to most of the American people. When someone’s very good at it, persuasion sometimes helps them blur facts around the edges. But that’s it. Nobody except Scott Adams and a few psychotherapists ever go to hypnotist school. Most don’t even go to any formal persuasion classes. That’s because hypnotism/persuasion isn’t really a lifehack that helps you win all the time at everything. If the world’s best hypnotist asked a room of VCs for money with a stupid business plan, he would probably fail. This isn’t to say persuasion is useless, and in certain fields it can be very powerful indeed. But let’s not go crazy and start worshipping it. The grass is always greener on the other side. The nerd sits in his cubicle and thinks “If only I were more charismatic.” But the salesman with the bright teeth and the firm handshake thinks “Man, I bet I could get out of this dead-end job if only I were smarter.”5 … 4: The Part On Race And Cancellation (INCLUDED UNDER PROTEST) … Ilya Lozovsky writes: Ninety percent of this essay is brilliant — smarter and realer than anything anyone else has written about Adams — but the end lost me. It's too generous, to the point of being a whitewash. Adams was vicious and hateful and played a material role in convincing Americans to vote for actual fascism. I don't think it's right to "hand it to him." JJ McCullough (JJM’s Shortstack) writes: Good essay, but I think you kinda yadda-yadda'd away his racist rant, which was extremely explicit and extended. I think it was the opposite of a "bog-standard cancellation," which we think of as being a slightly unfair, overzealous policing of an at least slightly subjectively offensive comment, often from years ago. But Scott went on quite a long diatribe about why black people, as a group, are dangerous and undesirable to be around, and why he, personally, goes out of his way to avoid them. Some conservatives have tried to use "bog-standard" anti-woke logic in defending him, but no, his comments really are quite explicitly and undeniably racist, if that term has any useful definition at all. Alex Wotbot writes: Now, you quoted Adams saying: “the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away” If this was the intended point, does it really make sense that only the far-left freaked out? It’s kind of important to mention this was within a hypothetical. Suppose a survey reported that 26% of a population believes “The phrase ‘It’s OK to be blonde’ is hate speech” and another 21% weren’t sure if they agree with the statement or not. Now suppose you were blonde, would you hang around that population? Now go read the February 2022 Rasmussen Reports survey. Please do better than this, I don’t want to have to Gell-Mann memoryhole this. Many people had strong opinions on this, so I have to respond to it. But first, I want to make it extra clear in capital letters: I AM DOING THIS IN THE COMMENTS POST, TO RESPOND TO YOUR COMMENTS, AND NOT BECAUSE I THINK IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. Certain people screenshotted the one paragraph of my ten thousand word essay that discussed this and posted it on Twitter, in order to make it look like I was joining in some kind of chorus of liberals reducing Adams to his worst moment. I posted what I thought was a no-nonsense, factual description of what happened, in order not to be accused of hiding it or covering it up. It was the least important part of my essay, I’m aware that writing about it at all opens me to attack from both sides, and I discuss it here only to respond to all of you who wanted to know my opinion on it. Just don’t screenshot it on Twitter and say “LOOK SCOTT IS STILL HARPING ON THE RACE THING”, that’s all I’m asking. That having been said… To make sure we’re all on the same page - Adams’ comments were prompted by this poll, conducted February 2023. The question was: “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ‘It’s OK to be white’” Among blacks, 53% agreed, 26% disagreed, and 21% were “not sure”. Among whites, the numbers were 81/7/13. Here’s the video of Adams’ comments: Transcript: If nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people - according to this poll, not according to me - that’s a hate group. And I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the f**k away. Wherever you have to go. Just get away. Cause there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. You just have to escape. That’s what I did. I went to a neighborhood with a very low black population. Because unfortunately, there’s a high correlation between the density - this is according to Don Lemon, here I’m just quoting Don Lemon, who said when he lived in a mostly black neighborhood, there were a bunch of problems he didn’t see in white neighborhoods. So even Don Lemon sees a big difference, for your quality of living, based on where you live and who’s there. So I think it makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen of America to try to help black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. Because there’s no longer a rational impulse. And so I’m… I’m gonna, uh, I’m gonna back off from being helpful to black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. Like I’ve been doing it all my life, and I’ve been… the only outcome is I get called a racist. That’s the only outcome. [cackles] It makes no sense to help black Americans if you’re white… it’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying. Totally not trying. Is this racist? I have a piece called Against Murderism, where I talk about why it’s so hard for people to agree on questions about “racism”. The summary: although it would be possible to have someone be purely, axiomatically racist - having it be a premise of their reasoning that they hate black people - in practice few people are like this. More typically, people have some argument more like: I don’t like [specific bad thing]

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KA_U!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2cb6162-0262-4c4c-8048-e8355f38967a_900x280.gif, If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It, writes, writes, the famous observation that executives are sociopaths, management are clueless, and the workers losers, The Gervais Principle, writes, 4, writes, 5, writes, JJM’s Shortstack, writes, writes, this poll, Against Murderism

[original post: The Dilbert Afterlife]

Inline links: The Dilbert Afterlife

This is my second time having this argument - the first was my Elegy For John McCain, which failed much worse - basically everyone thought it was unfairly negative to him and inappropriate just after his death. That was eight years ago, I don’t think I’ve done any more posts, positive or negative, on people’s deaths since then, and I felt ready to try again. For what it’s worth, I still like the elegy, and am glad I memorialized McCain in some way. This became more awkward after I found out that Adams had said several nice things about me. Sandeep writes: Among the numerous intellectual gifts I have received from reading Scott Adams is that I started reading slatestarcodex on his recommendation (which then had a huge influence on me). I had known about slatestarcodex even before, but it was Adams’ recommendation that gave me the energy to overcome my reading-inertia and start poring through long articles of Alexander. I think I’d heard that Adams recommended me at one point, but forgotten by the time I wrote this post. Here’s one of his articles saying nice things about me; someone else dug up a kind tweet, though it was in response to someone else’s deleted message and I couldn’t see exactly what he was praising. I don’t want to have a blanket policy of never criticizing anyone who’s nice to me; it seems corrupt in the sense of “replacing my journalistic judgment with a policy of praising anyone who gives me favors”. On the other hand, the deepest circle of hell is supposedly reserved for people who betray their benefactors, and this makes game theoretic sense. Without having a general solution to this problem. In this situation, I mainly considered the point above - I don’t think this was a fully hostile article, and so I didn’t run my full “is it appropriate to write a hostile article about this person?” check. But secondarily, I think Adams linked my blog post as part of the usual blogosphere activity of recommending interesting links, not as a specific attempt to kindle a friendship with mutual obligations. If I were his friend, then I hope I would understand him well enough to know whether he would want a mixed memorial like this (and if not, I wouldn’t do it). @Eigengender on Twitter ran a poll, and found that: …which makes me more confident that I landed on the tone I wanted. And several people commented that the essay seemed pro-Adams, or made them like Adams more: Joel McKinnon writes: As a chronic sufferer of TDS I've fallen into the "the friend of my enemy is my enemy," and long stopped having any respect for this other Scott A. The post did a great job of contextualizing a complicated and intelligent man's life and ideas. Jonathan Lipschutz writes: I loved Dilbert! He had a remarkable ability to identify the absurdity of life/reality. I was not aware of so much other material/information/‘wisdom’?!/ideas. It seems to me he was a true, great contributor to America and Americans and Western intellectual discourse in the vain of other greats like Mark Twain. What I learned from your piece, which was absolutely amazing in its own right and shined throughout as a tribute and labor of love, was [Adams’] humanity. He was labeled as a racist, which i believe to be bunk and a lack of honesty/courage with addressing the point/argument he was making. He was an eminently flawed human being, like all humans, but he was also acutely aware of this and tried to help others with humor and honesty. Pointing out ways humans fall short, including himself. But he used his special powers in the service of intellectual honesty/inquisitiveness/love for his fellow human beings. Banjo Kildeer writes: This is a wonderful piece. Your love for Scott Adams shines through. @disgruntledcho1 writes: [This] made me actually feel warmly for Scott Adams, a thus-far unparalleled feat. The most important question is whether Scott Adams himself would have appreciated the post, and this convinces me that he would have. One of Adams’ favorite persuasion topics was what he called “Two Movies On One Screen”, where people would come away from the same event with totally different narratives - for example, a Democrat might watch a Trump speech and conclude that Trump had openly and clearly announced his racism, while a Republican watching the same speech might think that Trump had just said something patriotic and hadn’t mentioned race at all. Whatever his opinion on what I said, I’m sure he would have found your reactions hilarious. … 2: Was I Unfair To Adams? … Leo Abstract writes: [The problem with your eulogy] isn’t that it was harsh--he was harsher to himself, frequently. (i.e. when he said he realized at age 8, sadly looking at his nerdy little face in the mirror, he was gonna have to ‘get rich’). [The] problem is it was just wrong, and seemed badly(or un-)researched. His interest in persuasion was teaching people when others were doing it to them, not teaching them to do it to others. His interest in Trump was Trump doing it BACK at the media, not on his poor voters. Disagree. Adams’ book Win Bigly includes Persuasion Tips, persuasion checklists, and a Persuasion Resource Reading List, all of which take it as a given that he is teaching you to persuade others: I haven’t watched his videos, but they have names like You Could Be MUCH More Persuasive, The Persuasion Playbook (“Learn practical techniques to harness the power of persuasion”), and Persuasion Techniques That Will Improve Your Business And Life. Adams absolutely did not limit his interest in Trump’s persuasion to the media, and praised Trump (for example) using persuasion techniques to take down other Republican candidates. You can find his discussion of how Adams “publicly predicted Ben Carson’s demise” after Trump acted out a mocking version of Carson’s description of getting stabbed in the belt buckle (according to Adams, a masterful example of “visual persuasion”). Leo continues: A good example would be spinning a whole tale about him as an ‘ivermectin true believer’, when he was open about his skepticism. if you knew his history with medically-assisted suicide, you’d know he didn’t plan on fighting the cancer and only did IVM because his fans begged him. I half-apologize for this one. I didn’t try to “spin a whole tale” about Adams as “an ivermectin true believer”. What I said was: » “In 2024, diagnosed with terminal cancer, Adams decided to treat it via ivermectin, according to a protocol recommended by fellow right-wing contrarian Dr. William Makis. This doesn’t seem to me like a story about a cynic milking right-wingers for the grift. It sounds like a true believer.” I stand by that paragraph. I don’t think someone who was milking right-wingers as a cynical grift would have gone so far as to trust their recommendations on what to take for his cancer. I think Adams became a sincere right-winger, and so was willing to listen to right-wing medical advice. But I agree that it was written sloppily and sort of suggests he was an ivermectin true believer. He wasn’t, and I apologize for that. I later realized I didn’t need to read tea leaves about this - he says, very explicitly, in one of his books, that yes, after getting attacked by too many left-wing trolls, he decided to commit to fully joining the right wing: » “If you want to see the world more clearly, avoid joining a tribe. But if you are going to war, leave your clear thinking behind and join a tribe. Trumped joined the Republican tribe to win the presidency. Now I was joining the Trump tribe. For a war against Hillbullies [ie pro-Hillary Clinton bullies]. I was all in.” After I made some of these arguments to Leo, he said: I do think that people who listened to thousands of hours of him speaking off-the-cuff might have a better understanding than someone attempting to gain the same by reading a few of his old blog posts. This is a fair criticism. I tried listening to a couple of his shows, and they had a different, friendlier tone than his books / interviews / tweets. Arguably Adams thought of formal written communication as a place to do manipulation, and verbal communication as a cozier spot where he could relate to people normally and explain all the manipulation he was doing. @Ashwin V writes: If you knew anything about Scott, you would know that he never considered anyone a "lesser human" as you've so confidently asserted. He was streaming and trying to pass on his wisdom on his death bed. This was a response to my claim that Adams “longed to be a manipulator of lesser humans”. Several people including Ashwin objected that Adams didn’t see anyone as lesser, nor think of manipulation as demeaning. For example, nutter_just: “Your error is in thinking you must be a lesser human to be manipulable. My impression was Scott believed everyone was like this even himself which is why he believed self affirmations worked. It’s you manipulating your dumb self.” Again, I’ll half-apologize. I regret my exact framing (“lesser humans”), which I think was unnecessarily inflammatory since it implies he was sort of thinking in those terms. But I think he was doing a bad thing which requires that on some philosophical level he has to be treating other people as his lessers in an unacceptable way, even if he wasn’t consciously thinking that they were. I think trying to manipulate people is inherently demeaning to the dignity of humankind. Nor is it exonerating to say “I also manipulate myself” (even if this is true). For analogy, suppose that Adams was a literal telepathic mind controller. If he used his powers on himself (mind controlling himself to work harder), that sounds like a good lifehack. But if he used his powers to turn everyone else into his zombie slaves, he would be offending the dignity of humankind, and “I also use my powers on myself!” would be no excuse. There are a thousand edge cases, complications, things that are sort of manipulation but not quite, and ways that some of those things might be permissible for the greater good. But none of them change the fact that in the simplest and most typical of cases, like the telepathic mind controller with his zombie slaves, manipulation is wrong. One might object that there are simple, typical cases on the other side too. When a job candidate shaves, dresses nicely, and gives a firm handshake, this is in some sense “manipulating” the interviewer, since it’s an attempt to influence his decision through some channel other than facts. I can’t draw a perfect bright line here between the good and the bad cases, but I would apply tests like “is this an attempt to more effectively convey true information?” (eg when I shave, it conveys that I’m capable of remembering to shave and care a lot about the interview), “is this something where failing to do the thing would also convey even more information?” (eg if I didn’t shave, it would falsely suggest I really didn’t want the job), and “is this something where the target has basically given implied consent to this level of manipulation” (eg the interviewer wants and even hopes that people will dress nicely for the interview). I think some of Adams’ manipulations seem closer to the bad cases than the good ones. He wrote about the moment he decided to use his persuasion powers to convince America to elect Trump. One day when he was doing his dispassionate observer act, he heard about Hillary’s estate tax plan and realized it would cost his estate lots of money. He had no particular principled stance against it (“You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children”) but concluded that: This was personal. This was also the day I decided to move from observer to persuader. Until then I was happy to simply observe and predict. But once Clinton announced her plans to use government force to rob me on my deathbed, it was war. Persuasion war.” Accepting for the sake of argument that Adams’ persuasive powers are as impressive as he thinks, he manipulated thousands of people who might have stood to benefit from an estate tax, or who sincerely believed in fairness-based arguments for an estate tax, to vote against their own interests/beliefs, in order to enrich him personally1. I think this requires some sort of standpoint where you consider their agency and interests less important than your own, and that’s why I described him as wanting to manipulate “lesser humans”. This coexists with him often being very nice, with many people saying his podcast helped them become better people, etc. @janiesaysyay writes: This essay is a great demonstration of the kind of leftist, myopic thinking Scott [Adams] was fighting. This is how [Alexander] describes [Coffee With Scott Adams], one of the most influential online shows: » "I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show. I couldn’t entirely follow..." “Some community"?! CWSA was one of the first long running, online, interactive, alternative news shows. Scott was a trailblazer host with his reasonable, thoughtful take on current events, often describing the "2 screens” views of both the left and right political opinions on current events. Scott [Adams]' question and answer discussions with his audience brought varied insights, and gave Americans a nuanced view of news. At the end of his life, Scott was highly influential in American thought, culture and politics. CWSA made it acceptable to be an American, someone who was proud of the country, unashamed of their race; proud of the culture, and proud of the heritage which built the country. This made me wonder whether I was underestimating the reach of Adams’ podcast, so I tried to find statistics. CWSA ranks 50th on Apple’s top 100 news/politics podcasts2. It’s very close to the rankings of Jen Psaki (Biden’s ex-press-secretary) and Al Franken (ex-Senator), but also to very many people I have never heard of. I’m not sure how to interpret this. Comparing YouTube subscribers of Adams and various other podcasts I’ve heard of, all numbers in thousands: Joe Rogan: 21,000

Inline links: Elegy For John McCain, writes, Here’s one of his articles saying nice things about me, ran a poll, writes, writes, writes, writes, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8Dya!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6aea0e56-b1a1-48ca-84ab-406017ae27a1_1618x462.png, You Could Be MUCH More Persuasive, The Persuasion Playbook, Persuasion Techniques That Will Improve Your Business And Life, writes, nutter_just, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r4fL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d643c5f-b24c-4f01-baad-963686d680da_560x174.jpeg, 1, writes, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wOcC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F141d78d7-8756-4ed6-bc53-081bac795a0a_728x250.png

Astral Codex Ten

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Astral Codex Ten

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Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander

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