Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander is the pen-name of LessWrong-rationalist blogger and psychiatrist Scott Alexander Siskind. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in Philosophy, he qualified in medicine at University College Cork - National University of Ireland, Cork with the triple degree of Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery and Bachelor of Obstetric Arts, and then completed postgraduate training certified by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education in the discipline of psychiatry.

Alexander began writing on LessWrong under the name Yvain, and then branched out into his own blog, Slate Star Codex (a near-anagram of "Scott Alexander"). SSC became one of the top-tier blogs for LessWrong-style rationalists, this and his related Tumblr being linchpins of the LessWrong Diaspora. His current blog is Astral Codex Ten.

As is customary in the writing of psychiatrists and psychologists, he mashes up details of different patients when he writes about them, so as to fictionalize the accounts and avoid his patients being identified, as well as using a pseudonym himself.

He blogs on many subjects other than psychiatry. He has mentioned controversial subjects such as eugenics, censorship, and IQ.

SSC posts are often very long. Alexander uses Twitter and (formerly) Tumblr to post shorter reactions, puns, and jokes.

Notable internet publications include his giant anti-neoreactionary FAQ, his giant anti-libertarian FAQ, his map of the rationalist blogosphere, and a long collection of quotations from actual computer scientists on the subject of why we should take AI risk seriously. Additionally, he posted a lengthy and famed criticism of feminism, which had been spurred by a feminist backlash against a blog comment by MIT professor Scott Aaronson. He is also the author of Unsong, an extensive fantasy novel about kabbalistic magic.

Alexander is a frequent visitor of local LessWrong-rationalist meetups in the US, and organizes some of them himself.

The Slate Star Codex blog was taken down on 23 June 2020, on the expressed basis that a New York Times article on the Slate Star Codex subculture by Cade Metz was going to use Alexander's real name, and he feared for his safety as he had been harassed previously at work over his blogging. (This just happened to coincide with the reporter starting to get in touch with SSC critics, and not just cheerleaders. ) Alexander recommended readers move to the Reddit forums /r/slatestarcodex and /r/themotte.

Political and social views
Alexander does not consistently censor racist and sexist opinions in his comments section (except on open threads, where race and gender discussions are always banned), a decision about which some of his fellow LessWrong-style rationalists have expressed concnerns.

Iranian secularist Kaveh Mousavi, while agreeing with Alexander that the intellectually bankrupt sections of the social justice community should be heavily critiqued, has nonetheless criticized Alexander himself for having an Americentric view of social issues and of creating a false equivalence between social justice advocates and social conservatives, as well as of downplaying discrimination against women and minorities in Western countries. It is worth noting, though, that Alexander has been willing to defend aspects of social justice he views as worthwhile, such as uses for trigger warnings and acknowledging discrimination still exists and has massive economic costs.

Neoreaction and racialism
Alexander is critical of neoreactionaries, having written what is generally regarded as the definitive takedown of neoreaction, though, per the header, he later took back some of the points he made in it. His blogroll is full of neoreactionaries and his comment section contains a lot of neoreactionary discussion, because he knows a pile of them personally, and he keeps discussing their ideas in his blog and for example, he considers Mencius Moldbug's Unqualified Reservations blog an obvious go-to reference his readers will immediately understand when he's talking about gay relationship counselling.

In 2014, Siskind sent an email that described how he thought that RationalWiki was uninformative, while at the same time describing the benefits of reading neoreactionaries and racialist (HBD) proponents.

Feminism
Alexander identifies as neither a feminist or an anti-feminist, expressing that he has been unfairly associated with both groups.

He talked of "the sane 30%-or-so of feminists" and described some essays as “blurring the already thin line between feminism and literally Voldemort”. He apparently regrets the popularity of this phrase, saying "NO NEED TO TAKE THIS ONE SENTENCE OUT OF CONTEXT AND TRY TO SPREAD IT ALL OVER THE INTERNET", though it really doesn't improve at all with context.

In the post meant to clarify his position on feminism and feminist issues, he described his negative attitudes towards the movement as:

Alexander enthusiastically supported James Damore's which suggested that the gender imbalance in tech fields was at least partly due to a greater proportion of men than women having the kinds of interests, inclinations, and talents that drew them to tech jobs, and suggested that changing Google's requirements for tech jobs might be needed to attract more women. This was after Alexander's fans on Reddit /r/slatestarcodex had spotted that it was largely a restatement of Alexander's arguments in his post "Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due To Offensive Attitudes". Alexander wrote:

Libertarianism
I feel pretty okay about both being sort of a libertarian and writing an essay arguing against libertarianism, because the world generally isn't libertarian enough but the sorts of people who read long online political essays generally are way more libertarian than can possibly be healthy.

Communism
He is highly critical of communism, and has more generally been persistently critical of what he views as millenarian ideologies, i.e., a catastrophe will destroy the current system, handwave, a new Golden Age will arise from the ashes. Much as with neoreaction, this hasn't stopped him from writing long book reports and getting very interested, for example, in the details of central planning in the USSR.

Existential risks
Alexander believes that the risks of superintelligent AIs (e.g. the risk of them misconstruing our goals and turning us all into paperclips) have been repeatedly misrepresented and downplayed by the media, that while immediate disaster is unlikely, the threat is worth taking seriously, and now is a good time to research it.

However, Alexander, who echoes the views of Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom on this, is not an AI researcher, nor a computer scientist (and the same goes for most of the "researchers" at MIRI, including Eliezer Yudkowsky). An actual AI researcher, Richard Loosemore, has criticized the assumptions behind many of the MIRI-style superintelligent AI doomsday scenarios, pointing out that an AI that thought it could correctly interpret the core goals of humanity but got them so hideously wrong would not in fact be worthy of the name "intelligent" at all, and that this is not merely a naming issue but a basic design issue for AIs. Alexander has compiled a list of renowned and accomplished AI researchers expressing concerns about AI.

Effective altruism
Alexander is a big supporter of charity, or if not at least effective altruism, on similar grounds and often gives speeches on efficient charity, and has supported the Giving What We Can project which attempts to separate effective charities from inefficient ones.

Race and IQ
Alexander identifies with the 'hereditarian left', and considers The Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray to be a close ideological ally. He has also expressed support for Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's hypothesis that the frequency of congenital diseases among Ashkenazi Jews (of which Alexander is one) is caused by selection for intelligence, as opposed to the multiple bottlenecks and founder effects for which there is actual evidence. There is almost nothing he won't try to apply human biodiversity to, e.g. Harry Potter.

The Slate Star Codex comments section and the /r/slatestarcodex subreddit are even more extreme on this issue, with Cochran, Steve Sailer and Emil O. W. Kirkegaard all having taken part in the discussion.

After the NYT article on Slate Star Codex was published, Scott's fans were outraged that they could dare smear Scott by association with scientific racists. After about a week of that, Scott's ex-friend Topher Brennan (who used to blog as Christopher Hallquist, his name before marriage) posted the receipts: an email from 2014 in which Scott earnestly pleads with Topher to take up the banner of racialism, in its Human Biodiversity variant, explicitly recommending such luminaries as John G.R. Fuerst, Steve Sailer, Hbdchick, and various neoreactionaries: "I am monitoring Reactionaries to try to take advantage of their insight and learn from them."

/r/slatestarcodex
As usual, you can make anything worse by adding Reddit. /r/slatestarcodex is an unofficial fan forum for the blog. Scott comments occasionally and is a moderator. The culture wars (a regular weekly thread, until it was recently branched off to the Scott-endorsed /r/themotte) and pseudoscientific racialism of "human biodiversity" are regular and upvoted topics (literally advocating the Fourteen Words will get you 40+ upvotes and admiring replies). Of course, much more offensive than the racism is objecting to the racism, which gets you a day's ban. According to one moderator, "A belief in HBD doesn’t automatically equate to racism", somehow.

The moderators have a partial registry of bans.

After pressure from his friends, Alexander banned "culture war" discussions from /r/slatestarcodex and moved them to a new subreddit, /r/themotte — which is now a haven for race realism and for the sort of white nationalism that thinks it's erudite. Alexander simultaneously disclaimed /r/themotte and kept recommending it. /r/themotte has since been pushed off Reddit by the site moderators, and is now at themotte.org.

In popular culture
Dark Enlightenment philosopher Nick Land's 2014 psychological horror novella Phyl-Undhu includes a technological cult reminiscent of LessWrong, and a character called "Alex Scott" expressing some of Scott's ideas on the Doomsday Hypothesis, with an intelligence at the end of time you can communicate with, and a cultist pushed out of the cult who "wants to have not thought certain things."