SSC

Article

SSC is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 15 times across 15 issues between January 21, 2021 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “An SSC reader admitted to telling a New York Times reporter that SSC was interesting”; “SSC posts like If Only Turing Was Alive To See This or Bulls**t Jobs (Part 1 of ∞)”; “In SSC Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein I wrote about my reasons for opposing Trump”. It most often appears alongside New York Times, Scott, Substack.

Metadata

  • Category: Publications
  • Mention count: 15
  • Issue count: 15
  • First seen: January 21, 2021
  • Last seen: July 26, 2025

Appears In

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.

January 21, 2021 · Original source
No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn't be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees. I accidentally sent about three hundred emails to each of five thousand people in the process of trying to put my blog back up.
And also - I am maybe the worst person possible to argue that this doesn't matter. Almost everything good in my life I've gotten because of you. I met most of my friends through blogging. I met my housemates, who are basically my family right now, through blogging. I got introduced to my girlfriend by someone I know through blogging. My patients are doing better than they could be - some of them vastly better - because of things I learned from all of you in the process of blogging. Most of the intellectual progress I've made over the past ten years has been following up on leads people sent me because of my blogging. To the degree that the world makes sense to me, to the degree that I've been able to untie some of the thornier knots and be rewarded with the relief of mental clarity, a lot of it has been because of things I learned while blogging. However many over-the-top dubious claims you want to make about how much I have improved your life, I will one-up you with how much you have improved mine. And after reading a few hundred of your emails, I've realized, crystal-clear, that I am going to be spending the rest of my life trying to deserve even one percent of the love you've shown and the gifts you've given me.
As I was trying to figure out how this was going to work financially, Substack convinced me that I could make decent money here. With that in place, I felt like I could also take a chance on starting my dream business. You guys have had to listen to me write ad nauseum about cost disease - why does health care cost 4x times more per capita than it did just a generation ago? I have a lot of theories about why that happened and how to fix it. But as Feynman put it, "what I cannot create I cannot understand". So I'm going to try to start a medical practice that provides great health care to uninsured people for 4x less than what anyone else charges. If it works, I plan to be insufferable about it. If it doesn't, I can at least have a fun conversation with Alex Tabarrok about where our theories went wrong. Since I'm no longer protecting my anonymity, I can advertise it here - Lorien Psychiatry - though I'm not currently accepting blog readers as patients, sorry.
January 22, 2021 · Original source
All "important" content will be freely available regardless of subscription status, but subscribers will get a little extra. In particular, there will be one subscribers-only Open Thread a week (on Wednesdays), along with the normal free Open Thread on Sundays, and occasional subscriber-only AMA (ask me anything) threads. I also plan to occasionally post shorter or lighter content for subscribers only, maybe once or twice a month. This would be along the lines of SSC posts like If Only Turing Was Alive To See This or Bulls**t Jobs (Part 1 of ∞). I might also paywall a few very impulsive Culture War posts, just to prevent them from going viral. I predict this will be less than 10% of content, and less than 1% of content weighted by some measure of importance.
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.
April 19, 2021 · Original source
As far as I know, the first post I wrote about Trump was this one, where I argued against the prevailing narrative that Trump was practicing "the politics of white insecurity" or had an unusually white base of support (for a Republican). I wrote that Trump seemed to be doing pretty well (for a Republican) among blacks and Hispanics, and concluded that:
In SSC Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein I wrote about my reasons for opposing Trump. There's a lot in here and I'll try to extract relevant-prediction-shaped things - but be sure to read the post to see how honest you think I'm being in my extractions.
I think this basically happened. See eg Trump: A Setback For Trumpism. A.
June 06, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
June 23, 2021 · Original source
25: Related: when surveyed privately, most Saudi men support women working outside the home. But in public they oppose it because they think everyone else opposes it and don’t want to get in trouble! Relevant Scott Aaronson lecture and SSC story.
June 25, 2021 · Original source
If you're a researcher (professional or amateur) who wants to ask questions to the ACX readership, please send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com, by July 10, with:
August 26, 2021 · Original source
My neighbors have a four year old kid, and every day she comes up with games at least as imaginative as riding a toy horse and pretending that it’s real. The hobbyhorsing comment gets dangerously close to the idea that kids need adults to force them to play pretend, according to predetermined adult-made rules, or else they’ll never learn to have imagination. But if you just stop forcing kids to be sitting in school, or sitting in their room doing homework, during the time when they would otherwise be inventing these things, they will come up with things so much more brilliant than this. My own teenage hobbies looked to all the world like me sitting on a laptop, but I will put them up against hobbyhorsing on any axis you might care about, and I remain deeply grateful that I had enough time off from school and its stupid forced fake fun to develop them.
…sorry for getting so animated here, but this topic is my hobbyhorse. On another level, I 100% get where this stuff is coming from. I don’t have kids yet, but even now I’m scared that my future kid might be an Internet addict. Or wander into the wrong part of social media and become alt-right, or dirtbag left, or one of those people who quote-tweet Vox articles with the comment “This”. I laughed at my parents for having these kinds of fears, and my parents’ fears ended up completely wrong, and now I have those same dumb fears in turn. I don’t plan to fully unschool my children. I do plan to make them “try new things”, maybe even including Finnish hobbyhorsing. If they seem too relaxed all the time, I will have the usual parental worries that they’re getting soft and flabby and will not survive the winter. We just know so little about child-rearing that any deviation from the norm is scary, and there does seem to be a norm of “make sure your kids have some really tough experiences”. I’ve written about this before here. This kind of parent-child conflict is inevitable. Maybe the best I can do is try to avoid the very specific problems that traumatized me personally.
April 28, 2022 · Original source
— iVarun making what I interpret as a similar point:
— Jaysmt writes:
— Stitched together from Yeangster and FiveHourMarathon:
May 04, 2022 · Original source
I think that all of this together is pretty strong evidence that most people prefer the old Slate Star Codex layout to the new Substack-mandated ACX.
This is weird, because the old Slate Star Codex layout was - mostly something I threw together in a day or two. I am widely recognized as not having taste, and the only website I ever developed before this was a Geocities site that was even worse. A few of my web designer friends helpfully smoothed over some rough edges (in one case literally, Apple-style), but the basic design remained my amateurish rush job.
Slate Star Codex: Original version Slate Star Codex: After some web designer friends spruced it up Meanwhile, Substack is run by tech industry veterans who probably hired a team of really experienced designers and thought really hard about every aspect of their product. It doesn’t make any sense at all for me to do a better job than them. So what’s going on?
June 01, 2022 · Original source
In 2018, thanks to the 8,000 of you who filled out the Slate Star Codex Reader Survey, I discovered that higher birth order siblings were much more likely to read this blog than later-borns:
Source here; thanks to Emile for the graph That is, of people with exactly one sibling who read this blog, about 72% of those are the older of the two children in their family, compared to only 29% who are the younger of the two (where by chance we would expect 50-50). This was surprising, because at the time lots of studies had shown there weren’t really birth order effects (that is, firstborn siblings had no major personality differences compared to laterborns). I theorized that maybe for some reason it was easier to find by looking in a heavily-selected group of people and asking members about their birth order, compared to getting a random sample and trying to correlate birth order with things. Sure enough, later amateur research revealed strong birth order effects in physics Nobelists and great mathematicians (and potentially Harvard philosophy students). Given that readers of this blog are highly-educated (about 37% have masters or PhDs) and mostly in STEM (41% programmers of some sort), plausibly birth order affects something about intelligence, education, or STEM orientation (somebody should check literature and peace Nobelists!) Followup research by Less Wrong user “Bucky” determined that the effect fell off with age gaps; the closer in age you are to your sibling, the stronger an effect birth order has: I continue to be confused by this extremely strong effect which most of what we know about psychology says shouldn’t exist. So in 2020, I asked my readership some even more complicated questions about their family situations, in the hopes of teasing out why this is happening. I’ll be honest - I think I over-reached here. I’m not very good at statistics, and this is a weird statistical problem: the dependent variable is whether the case ended up in the sample at all! I wasn’t able to figure out a good way to use most of the data you gave me. And the stuff I did use, I mostly made work by slicing and dicing so much that the sample size got pretty low, even when I started from 8,000 survey respondents. I’m publishing this in the hopes that it will inspire someone else will more domain knowledge to do a sophisticated re-analysis. But for now, here’s what I’ve got. Confirming Old Results With The 2020 Dataset The 2020 dataset also shows a strong birth order effect in people who read this blog. In 2018, among people with exactly one sibling, respondents were 2.51x more likely to be the older sibling than the younger (72%). In 2020, the number was 2.39x (71%). Change with age gap is shown below: Note truncated y-axis This seems to be broadly similar to the 2018 results. There was an anomaly in 2018 where some categories seemed to drop off surprisingly quickly between 7 and 8 years, which I thought might be meaningful. But Bucky’s analysis showed this was probably a coincidence, and indeed it doesn’t show up in the new data. Does Sex Matter For Birth Order Effects? I wondered if there might be a smaller birth order effect for people with opposite-sex siblings. One possible explanation for the birth order effect is children trying to get out of the “shadow” of their older sibling and differentiate themselves in some way. But children are already pretty different from an opposite-sex sibling and might feel less pressure in that situation. But this doesn’t seem to be true. The percent firstborns in sibships of two on the survey was 70% among people with a same-sex sibling, and 71% among people with an opposite-sex sibling; no real difference. Do Biological Or Social Factors Produce Birth Order Effects? All previous results are for biological siblings. But it might be worth asking the question separately for biological vs. social siblings. One could imagine either biological or social causes of the birth order effect. For example, some biologists speculate that pregnancy depletes choline, that it takes a long time for choline stores to recover, and that a second child born within that window will have less choline available to build their nervous system, which could be bad. But also: maybe if you have an older sibling, your parents can’t pay as much attention to you when you’re a kid, and you learn less. This was very hard to test for. Again, I wasn’t able to use traditional statistical tests because I’m trying to determine whether someone was in the sample at all, rather than whether two variables are related. It was easy to check normal birth order because I could compare people with exactly one older sibling to people with exactly one younger. It was harder to do with things like adoption in the mix, because that could introduce a bias: are parents more likely to adopt out their first child (because that’s when they’re most unprepared for parenting)? Are adoptive parents more likely to adopt when they already have children of their own (because they’re comfortable with child-rearing) or less likely (because they really want kids and can’t have them biologically)? I had no way of getting controls for these questions and so I couldn’t do a lot of the analyses I wanted. But I did two relatively weak analyses instead: First, I took the entire set of people in weird situations - people who said their number of social siblings was not the same as their number of biological siblings. In this group of 174 people, biological firstborns made up only 61% of respondents with one sibling, notably less than the 71% in the entire sample. That suggests that the unusual social situations are having an effect. You shouldn’t update on the fact that it’s still higher than 50%, because some of the people’s weird social situations don’t affect their status as social firstborns. Second, I tried to compare people who were firstborn under a biological definition but not a social definition, to people in the opposite situation. There were 40 people in the sample who were biological but not social firstborns, and 60 people who were social but not biological firstborns. Again, this suggests that social firstborn-ness is more important as an explanation than biological firstbornness, although it doesn’t rule out the latter having some effect. I additionally tried to compare two different types of social firstbornness - one where no older siblings lived in the house when you were growing up, and one where your parents had never parented another child. There weren’t many people discordant on these two measures (29 vs. 20 respectively), but for what it’s worth, the ratio was in favor of the first type. Since I wasn’t very confident in my analytical abilities here, I asked Bucky, who knows more and who did good work analyzing the last dataset, to look into this (we worked independently and didn’t tell each other our results until we were done). He writes: It seems to me that the effect is entirely caused by social siblings. I filtered for only people with 1+ biological but 0 social siblings. There were 24 oldest biological children in this group vs 21 2nd children (or 25 youngest children with a large overlap between 2nd oldest and youngest groups). This significantly differed from the ~0.7 fraction of older children in the general surveys (p<0.05 or p<0.01 depending on whether I use the 2nd oldest or youngest as the comparison) and is close to a 1:1 ratio. I then filtered for only people with 0 biological but 1+ social siblings. There were 51 oldest social children and 23 2nd children (or 26 youngest children again with large overlap). This differs significantly from a 1:1 ratio (p<0.001 or p<0.01) and matches pretty well with the 70% of the Birth order effect. I tried doing some filtering by age gap (2-7 years) and the results were compatible with the same result, although the sample sizes got too small to really conclude anything. For dealing with answers left blank I treated them as 0 unless it looked like the whole section had been missed out. If I ignored any respondents who left something blank I got similar results (smaller sample size but ratios are even further in favour of the social hypothesis). I checked for categorisation errors by looking at respondents’ descriptions of their families and they mainly matched pretty well with the numbers given so I think the data should be considered reliable. I did chuck a couple of results out which seemed unreliable and there was one row which was a repeat so your numbers might not match up exactly (plus you have the non-public data). There are a couple of confounders in the analysis such as whether e.g. oldest children are more likely to be adopted or how much you know about your birth family depending on how old one was when the family unit changed etc. I don’t see a realistic way to account for these but I also can’t see any of them being big enough to explain the difference in the results. Hopefully this matches up with what you found! I think this suggests birth order effects are social rather than biological. So What Causes Birth Order Effects? Based on this analysis, it seems unlikely they are biological. Based on my very weak sub-analysis, and on their tendency to decay with larger age gaps, it seems they have more to do with the social presence of a sibling in the house than with any changes in parenting style (ie your parents learn to parent differently). Two explanations that satisfy both those criteria: Parents are able to devote their full attention to parenting their first child, but only half of their attention to parenting their second. Firstborns get more quality time with their parents during the first few years of childhood.
Finally, other people might be able to extract more signal out of this than I was. If you’re interested, you can find the raw data, the original question list, and a description of how to use them here. Note that a few people refused permission for me to republish their data, so you will probably get slightly different numbers than I did.
January 08, 2023 · Original source
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. Also:
6: Also, many, many of you commented that Bob and Ramchandra were just “reinventing the wheel” and antistocks were the same as some existing financial product, although none of you could agree on which existing product it was. See the cases for bucket shops, call options, equity swaps / total return swaps, dividend derivatives, and (inevitably) prediction markets. Also, several people chimed in to say they were working on something similar on the blockchain, including Tracer and Synthetix. I hope I don’t need to add the disclaimer that if you invest in a blockchain product based on a Bay Area House Party post, then you will lose all your money faster than anyone has ever lost all of their money before in all of history.
7: People often ask me for psychiatrist/therapist recommendations. I don’t have any especially good ones, although a while back I got SSC readers to create this reference. But I notice there’s nobody in Austin on there and I have gotten an Austin-based request specifically. If anyone knows good psychiatrists, therapists, or couples counselors in Austin (or licensed to work in Texas), please let me know.
April 17, 2023 · Original source
Regarding (2), see the full story of my IRB experience written up here for how the attempt to get a waiver of consent went.
NoIndustry9653 from the subreddit writes:
OwenQuillion gives a longer explanation:
August 26, 2024 · Original source
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. Also:
April 03, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
July 26, 2025 · Original source
Complexity of thought – Perhaps the most important feature distinguishing the ACX Commentariat from other, lesser, blogs is that some really smart people comment here and give novel and well-nuanced takes on a topic. If this ever disappeared it would not matter about any of the other three features, because the Commentariat would effectively be dead anyway. To me, these broad categories represent the unique and positive features of the SSC/ACX Commentariat, and the extent to which they are present is a reasonable indicator of comment section quality, especially if they are all present at the same timepoint and that timepoint happens to line up with peak engagement in 2016 (this is foreshadowing). To generate data on the ACX Commentariat, I scraped the comments section of every post Scott has made since 2013. The Old Ones whisper of a blog that existed before even Slate Star Codex, but since I’m not 100% certain we’re encouraged to talk about the older blog (and nobody dates the golden era of Scott’s writing to pre-2013 anyway) I kept my scraping to just the two websites we’re definitely allowed to talk about; Slate Star Codex (SSC) and Astral Codex Ten (ACX). The main points of failure with my scraping were Subscriber-only threads (which my algorithm virtuously refused to read as it wasn’t a subscriber) and battling with the Substack UI to get all the comments to load for me simultaneously on larger threads. Nevertheless, between my incompetent code and the jaunty Substack UI I only dropped a few comments on even very long threads, so I figured the data scrape would be adequate for the use-case I had for it. I then used a bunch more janky code (some written by me, some written by ChatGPT) to try and quantify the levels of depth, freedom, politeness and complexity of each comment. I captured 2460 individual posts, and approximately 1.8m comments. Of the 24,486 unique comment authors, around 40% have made only one comment to the blog. The most prolific poster is the irrepressible Deiseach, at 20,685 contributions. Deiseach is also the only commentor to have made a comment on both the first post in my sample and the last, so has been with the blog a very long time! Only one other commentor has made more contributions than Scott (11,249), and this is John Schilling (11,607). The quality of data on individual users is not great for the ACX era (Substack seems to record missing author data in a few different ways, and sometimes swallow data for no reason) but I’m happy to give the rank ordering of anyone else who cares to know their specific level of clout in this niche community - I myself am the 799th most prolific contributor to the comments section (225 comments). I’m also delighted to share my raw data with anyone interested – the summary statistics per post are here. The scraped comments themselves are about 2Gb so I don’t know where I can host them but if anyone has any ideas (and Scott doesn’t mind) I’ll share them too. I know that some of the post titles seem to have turned into hieroglyphics, but as far as I can tell it is cosmetic only and won’t affect any of the actual data – it is a symptom of a cool hidden feature of Microsoft Excel where it open UTF-8 encoded CSVs in a way that garbles special characters for no particular reason. Considering each of these factors in turn: Depth of engagement with a topic
The SSC-era is highlighted in blue. You can see that it shows something a bit like a classic sigmoidal adoption curve (but wearing a top hat). Post engagement starts low, before rapidly shooting up in 2014-15. It peaks in April 2016 – which is highlighted in red in this and all subsequent graphs so you can track peak engagement - before dropping back to a steady level of around 400-600 comments per post for the next three years. Notably, the run of posts that most people regard as being the ‘Golden Age’ for Scott’s writing happens much earlier than peak engagement with the comments section. People disagree about where this run of exceptionally good posts in quick succession start and ends, but I think you could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts.
This graph shows that around 9% of comments will contain at least one token indicating the comment is discussing a sensitive topic, with a range of about 6% to 14%, disregarding the very early years where small sample size made the data more variable. There wasn’t any one ‘sensitive’ token in particular which correlated exceptionally well with the rise and fall of this 6% to 14%, which implies to me that we have correctly identified a general factor of ‘willingness to discuss sensitive topics’ (or possibly that the peaks and troughs correspond to peaks and troughs in the external landscape – ie specific touchpoints and lulls in the Culture War – which would also be fine for the purpose we’re putting it to). This is an imperfect measure because it only tracks if someone is using a sensitive phrase and not whether they are using it in a heretical way (cf. ‘fifty Stalins’ here). However, I thought in the context of ACX posts the approach was probably reasonable – sensitive phrases are only likely to appear if they are being discussed a lot, and we know from the previous section that discussion depth is high both now and during the 2016 peak engagement period. It isn’t necessarily true that deep discussion implies spirited debate - some political discussions on reddit can go into the thousands of comments without anyone ever actually expressing a counter-orthodoxy view – but I think in the specific context of ACX it is reasonable, because we don’t generally have norms of expressing substanceless agreement. Hopefully, therefore, the changing ratio of socially or professionally sensitive phrases to phrases not included in my dictionary would tell us something about the willingness of the comment section to engage in potentially emotive discussions at any point in time. The relationship of occurrence of these tokens to engagement with the comment section is hard to draw clear conclusions from – although the peak does indeed look to be about 2016 or 2017 the data are noisy, and strongly affected by the choice of words to include in my dictionary. I picked the dictionary before I saw the data, but perhaps a different set of words would have given a different result, especially if I had a better way of identifying sensitive discussions around COVID (‘ivermectin’ was the only COVID-related word I could think of that became politicised in the same way ‘microaggression’ or ‘misgender’ did). Nevertheless, I would say this gives some weak support to the idea that 2016 was a turning point in SSC Commentariat free speech norms (and strong support to the idea that the start of ACX was a low point for discussion of sensitive topics) I include below a few specific sensitive phrases which I thought were interesting. Do note the different scales on each graph. Of particular interest to me is the ‘SJW’ graph, which has a really clear peak at exactly the high point of Commentariat engagement. I will return to this graph later in the review. Politeness