Spencer
Article
Spencer is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between May 18, 2021 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “they move on to Milo and his shared appearances with Spencer”; “shared appearances with Spencer”; “Contact: Spencer, speeze[dot]pearson+acx[at]gmail[dot]com”. It most often appears alongside Scott, facebook, ACX.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 10
- Issue count: 10
- First seen: May 18, 2021
- Last seen: August 29, 2025
Appears In
- Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
- Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
- ACX Grants Results
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
- The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
- Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book (1936 Edition)
- Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
- ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
- Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
Related Pages
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- Scott (8 shared issues)
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- facebook (7 shared issues)
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- ACX (6 shared issues)
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- ACX MEETUP (6 shared issues)
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- Australia (6 shared issues)
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- Discord (6 shared issues)
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- France (6 shared issues)
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- India (6 shared issues)
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- Italy (6 shared issues)
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- LessWrong (6 shared issues)
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- Michael (6 shared issues)
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- Nigeria (6 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.
While this makes a bit of sense, I’m sort of skeptical. Steve Sailer, Richard Spencer, and John Derbyshire are still on Twitter. Spencer has over 70K followers. I can’t deny that many far-right people have been banned. But it seems more like Twitter enforces the rules somewhat harder on the right than the left for PR reasons, without having a concerted campaign to ban the right in any kind of useful/consistent way.
So they join MRA/PUA groups - until 90% of them realize that the leadership of those groups just truly, deeply hates women and literally wants them to die. They don't want to be part of that so they go on to join Gamergate. When the doxxing and the threats start having significant consequences, 90% of them eff off. Then they move on to Milo and his shared appearances with Spencer. They think it's fun to get a rise out of the overly sanctimonious by appropriating nazi symbolism. Then Charlottesville happens and they suddenly realize that they've joined an actual white supremacist movement. They leave in droves.
Inline links: leave in droves
They support Trump because he angers people but then people storm the Capitol and the boys back off. But every day some of them become radicalized - by Q, or by Spencer before him, or by redpill before that.
SEATTLE, WA (RSVP) Contact: Spencer, speeze[dot]pearson+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 6:00 PM, Wednesday, September 15 Location: Volunteer Park, near the amphitheater just north of the reservoir. I'll have an "ACX MEETUP" sign. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/value.shapes.tracks
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/value.shapes.tracks
Spencer Greenberg, $40,000, as seed money for his project to produce rapid replications of high-impact social science papers. Right now, when a new social science paper comes out, we often have to wait as long as several months to discover that it was false. Spencer and his team dream of a world where we can learn that almost immediately, soon enough that it's within the same news cycle and the journals involved feel kind of bad about it. This money will sponsor a pilot, after which he’ll be seeking additional funding - if you think you can help, you can reach him here. Spencer's been involved in rationality and EA about as long as either has existed, blogs at Optimize Everything, is the founder of ClearerThinking.org (which offers free digital tools related to rationality, decision-making and happiness) and runs the Clearer Thinking podcast, with guests including Daniel Kahneman, Tyler Cowen, and Sam Bankman-Fried.
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA Contact: Spencer Contact Info: speeze[dot]pearson+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 15th, 02:00 PM Location: Volunteer Park, by the amphitheater. I'll have a folding table set up, and probably a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJMJM+56
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVJMJM+56
The average ClearerThinking user reported their IQ as 130. These are implausibly high. Only 1/200 people has an IQ of 138 or higher. 1/50 people have IQ 130, but the ClearerThinking survey used crowdworkers (eg Mechanical Turk) who should be totally average. Okay, fine, so people lie about their IQ (or foolishly trust fake Internet IQ tests). Big deal, right? But these don’t look like lies. Both surveys asked for SAT scores, which are known to correspond to IQ. The LessWrong average was 1446, corresponding to IQ 140. The ClearerThinking average was 1350, corresponding to IQ 134. People seem less likely to lie about their SATs, and least likely of all to optimize their lies for getting IQ/SAT correspondences right. And the Less Wrong survey asked people what test they based their estimates off of. Some people said fake Internet IQ tests. But other people named respected tests like the WAIS, WISC, and Stanford-Binet, or testing sessions by Mensa (yes, I know you all hate Mensa, but their IQ tests are considered pretty accurate). The subset of about 150 people who named unimpeachable tests had slightly higher IQ (average 140) than everyone else. Thanks to Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking, I think I’m finally starting to make progress in explaining what’s going on. Problem #1: The Biggest SAT → IQ Conversion Site Is Wrong Thanks to Sebastian Jensen for pointing this out! He writes: A search of ‘SAT to IQ’ on google results in being presented with the website ‘iqcomparisonsite.com’. This man has directly converted the SAT percentiles to IQ scores, which is not what should be done. Tests like the ACT and SAT correlate with IQ at about 0.8-0.85 [rca], [my analysis], [emil article], [scholarly article]. The general factor of academic achievement and IQ correlate at about 0.81-0.88 [psychometric test], [GCSE grades]. This discrepancy occurs because they measure different abilities - an IQ test will test many different abilities, while the SAT/ACT only tests verbal/mathematical ability. In addition, these percentiles are very outdated as the average SAT score has changed over time due to changes in the content of the test. Instead, the ideal way to do this is to take the percentiles from the current versions of the SAT and then convert those into z-scores and then regress those z-scores by the mean by the estimated regression coefficient. Using Sebastian’s updated tables, we find that the average Less Wrong IQ as predicted by SATs goes down from 140 → 132, and the ClearerThinking IQ goes down from 134 → 124. So people probably exaggerated their IQs somewhat, and unrelatedly we were using an SAT → IQ conversion that exaggerated IQs, and so the numbers falsely appeared to match. Okay! It’s a start! Interlude: The ClearerThinking IQ Test The ClearerThinking survey included a battery of cognitive tests of exactly the sort that could usually be used to determine IQ. Unfortunately none of them were normed, so we know how all the 3700 subjects did relative to each other, but not where the 100 point is. Spencer was able to norm them to the general population based on education level. That is, he asked his sample about their educational attainment (college degree, PhD, etc) and found they were a little more educated than the US average. Since the US average IQ is 100, his sample should have an average a little higher than this. He was able to calculate how much higher. Then he mapped a bell curve to everyone in his sample’s performance on his tests. Since he had 3700 people, he was able to do this relatively smoothly. He found an average IQ of 110, which originally surprised me, because I thought his sample was supposed to be random crowdworkers, who should be close to the US average of 100. But in fact, his survey was a combination of 1900 crowdworkers and 1800 people who saw it on social media - eg friends and friends-of-friends of Spencer. Separating this out by group, we find that the crowdworkers have an average normed-IQ of 100, and the social media referrals have an average normed-IQ of 120, making the overall average of 110. This seems pretty trustworthy, since it correctly estimates the crowdworkers (completely average) as 100. Spencer studied math at Columbia, his friends and friends-of-friends are pretty smart, and I think the 120 estimate for them is also okay. But there’s still a problem here. Using an accurate SAT score → IQ calculator, we determined that the ClearerThinking average should be 124. But using real cognitive tests, it looks like it’s 110. What went wrong? Problem #2: Only The Smartest People Report Their SATs Using Spencer’s cognitive test results, we can compare people who did vs. didn’t take the SAT. We find: People who didn’t take the SAT (remember, this includes current high schoolers) have tested-IQ 110.
Inline links: corresponding to, for pointing this out!, [rca], [my analysis], [emil article], [scholarly article], [psychometric test], [GCSE grades], changed
First, Spencer did his demographic norming properly, but I extended it to the Less Wrong survey just by eyeballing.
FORT COLLINS, COLORADO, USA Contact: Spencer Contact Info: focorats[at]posteo[dot]net Time: Saturday, April 13th, 2:00 PM Location: Wolverine farm, upstairs Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GPHWRG+7MQ Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/dks4PmoHn4dpK94MR Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so we can reserve tables
The weakness of much verse and some poetry of the past is partly traceable to unoriginal teachers of English or versification, who advised their pupils to saturate themselves in this or that poet, and then write. Keats, saturated in Spencer, took a long time to overcome this echoey quality, and emerge into the glorious highland of his Hyperion. Many lesser souls never emerge. It is valuable to know the poetry of the past, and love it. But the critical brain should carefully root out every echo, every imitation – unless some alteration in phrasing or meaning makes the altered phrase your own creation.
Contact: Spencer Contact Info: focorats[a t]posteo[period]net Time: Saturday, May 10th, 1:00 PM Location: Wolverine Farm (316 Willow St), out front or upstairs depending on weather Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GPHWRG+7M Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/dks4PmoHn4dpK94MR
Contact: Spencer Contact Info: speeze[period]pearson[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, May 07th, 06:00 PM Location: Armistice Coffee Roosevelt, in the covered outdoor back area. I'll have a sign saying "Astral Codex Ten meetup." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ Group Link: EA: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-effective-altruists Rationality: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/
I feel bad about this one - even though I funded it and try to follow Spencer, I somehow missed that they’ve been up and running for years, got a Vox article about them, and completed replication attempts on eleven important psychology papers. Nine of the eleven replicated successfully. In my defense, Spencer does way too many things and there’s no way for a normal human to keep track of all of them.
Inline links: got a Vox article about them
Contact: Spencer Contact Info: focorats[a t]posteo[period]net Time: Sunday, September 28th, 2:00 PM Location: Old Town Library - Go in through the front doors, take a left, first door on the right. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GPHWMG+XXX Group Link: https://focorats.github.io/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/85GPHWMG+XXX
Backlinks
- ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
- ACX Grants Results
- Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
- Majuscule
- Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
- Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
- Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
- People: S
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
- The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs
- Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book (1936 Edition)