Slate Star Codex

Slate Star Codex (often abbreviated SSC) is a blog written under the pseudonym Scott Alexander by Scott Alexander Siskind, a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist.[1] The blog is focused on science, medicine (especially within psychiatry), philosophy, politics, and futurism.

Slate Star Codex
Screenshot of the SlateStarCodex home page prior to deletion
Type of site
Blog
Available inEnglish
Created byScott Alexander
URLwww.slatestarcodex.com
LaunchedFebruary 12, 2013 (2013-02-12)

Slate Star Codex was launched in 2013, and was taken down by its author on June 23, 2020, due to fears of having his full name published in an upcoming piece by the New York Times.[2] As of July 22, 2020, the blog was partially back online, with the content restored but commenting disabled. A follow-up blog, Astral Codex Ten, was launched on January 21, 2021. The first post revealed the previously pseudonymous author's name.[1]

Prior to starting Slate Star Codex, Alexander blogged at the rationalist community blog LessWrong under the name Yvain.

Content

The New Yorker states that the volume of content Alexander has written on Slate Star Codex makes the blog difficult to summarize, with an ebook of all posts running to around nine thousand pages.[3] Many posts are detailed reviews of books (typically in the social sciences or medicine) or reviews of scientific literature on a specific topic. For example, the March 2020 blog post “Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know” analyzed available medical literature and came to the conclusion that, contrary to early guidance by the CDC, masks were likely an effective protection measure against COVID-19 for the general public.[4][3] Some posts are prefaced with a note on "epistemic status", in which Alexander rates his own confidence in the opinions to follow.[3]

Effective altruism

Alexander expressed strong support for the effective altruism movement and the pledge to give 10% of one’s income to charity.[5][6][7] Slate Star Codex, along with LessWrong, played an important role in spreading information about the movement and attracting new members.[8] The blog contains discussion of moral questions and dilemmas relevant to effective altruism, such as moral offsets, ethical treatment of animals and trade offs of pursuing systemic change for charities.[9][10][11][12]

Artificial intelligence

Alexander regularly wrote about advances in artificial intelligence and emphasized the importance of AI safety research.[13][14][15]

In the long essay "Meditations On Moloch", he analyzed game-theoretic scenarios of cooperation failure like the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons that underline many of humanity's problems and argued that AI risks should be considered in this context.[16][17][18][19][20][21]

Toxoplasma of rage

In the blog post "The Toxoplasma of Rage" Alexander discussed how controversies spread in media and social networks.[22] According to Alexander, memes that generate a lot of disagreement spread further, in part because they present an opportunity to members of different groups to send a strong signal of commitment to their cause. For example, the blog post argues that PETA with its controversial campaigns is better known than other animal rights organizations like Vegan Outreach because of this dynamic.[23] Alexander suggests that activists face a dilemma: messages that will reach greater audience are also the ones that are more likely to generate backlash.[24][25]

"Shiri's scissor"

In the short story "Sort By Controversial", Alexander introduced the term "Shiri's scissor" to describe a statement that has great destructive power because it generates wildly divergent interpretations that fuel conflict and tear people apart.[26] The term has been used to describe controversial topics widely discussed in social media.[27][28]

Anti-reactionary FAQ

The 2013 post "The Anti-Reactionary FAQ" repudiates the work and worldview of the neoreactionary movement, countering in particular the work of Curtis Yarvin. This worldview as of 2013 made claims about natural racial hierarchies and desired the restoration of monarchism. Out of a belief in the superiority of debate over outright bans, Alexander allowed neoreactionary individuals to continue commenting on posts and in "culture war" threads, as well as engaged through extended dialogues such as the thirty-thousand word FAQ.[3] Alexander's essays on neoreaction have been highlighted by Slate and Vox.[29][30]

Reception

In 2019, the site was receiving around 20,000 page views per day.[14] It is read both as the largest venue for the rationalist community and among wider audiences.[31] Alexander's departure from LessWrong has been described as one of "the main two" reasons for a decline in LessWrong's popularity between 2012 and 2016.[14]

The New Statesman characterized it as "a nexus for the rationalist community and others who seek to apply reason to debates about situations, ideas and moral quandaries."[32] In his 2019 book The AI Does Not Hate You, author Tom Chivers called Slate Star Codex "by far the most high-profile part of the movement, and the most overtly political", although its readership "includes a large number of people I know who absolutely would not call themselves 'Rationalists'."[14]

The New Yorker describes Alexander's fiction as "delightfully weird" and his arguments "often counterintuitive and brilliant".[3]

Economist Tyler Cowen has called Scott Alexander "a thinker who is influential among other writers".[33] Conor Friedersdorf, writing for The Atlantic, has regularly included articles from the blog in his annual top 100 list of "The Best of Journalism".[34][35][36][37]

Controversy over potential revelation of full name

"Scott Alexander" is the author's real first and middle name, and the blog's name is based on an approximate anagram of this name (the missing "N" in the blog's name is reflected by the letter's presence in the blog's logo).[38] Alexander stated that he had attempted to conceal his last name for safety and privacy reasons. In June 2020, he deleted all entries on Slate Star Codex, stating that a New York Times technology reporter intended to publish an article about the blog using his full name. According to Alexander, the reporter told him that it was newspaper policy to use real names.[39][2] The Times responded: "We do not comment on what we may or may not publish in the future. But when we report on newsworthy or influential figures, our goal is always to give readers all the accurate and relevant information we can."[40] The Verge cited a source saying that at the time when Alexander deleted the blog, "not a word" of a story about SSC had been written.[41] The Poynter Institute's David Cohn interprets this event and the furor around it as a flare-up in an ongoing collision in values between the tech and media industries.[42]

National Review criticized the Times for applying its anonymity policy inconsistently.[2] The New Statesman said that it was "difficult to see how Scott Alexander's full name is so integral to the NYT's story that it justifies the damage it might do to him", but cautioned that such criticism was based solely on Alexander's own statements as long as the Times was being "tight-lipped on the matter".[32] An article in Reason agreed with Alexander's rationale regarding the negative impact on his day job as psychiatrist, but criticized his concerns about his personal safety as overblown (arguing that online death threats such as those reported by Alexander "are almost never carried out"). It said that while "publishing information about a person without their permission" was standard practice in journalism, "it's still hard to see what was about to happen to Alexander as anything other than doxxing", and perceived an inconsistency in the Times' willingness to accommodate requests for anonymity, contrasting with a February 2020 article in which the Times did not use the subject's real name.[43] As reported by The Daily Beast, the criticism by Alexander and his supporters caused considerable internal debate among the Times' staff.[31]

Supporters of the site organized a petition against release of the author's name. The petition collected over six thousand signatures in its first few days, including psychologist Steven Pinker, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, computer scientist and blogger Scott Aaronson, and philosopher Peter Singer.[3]

References
  1. Alexander, Scott. "Still Alive". Astral Codex Ten. Retrieved 22 January 2021.
  2. Hoonhout, Tobias (23 June 2020). "What an NYT Reporter's Doxing Threat Says about the Paper's 'Standards'". National Review. Archived from the original on 23 June 2020. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  3. Lewis-Kraus, Gideon (2020-07-09). "Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley's War Against the Media". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 2020-07-10. Retrieved 2020-07-10.
  4. Alexander, Scott (2020-03-23). "Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know". Slate Star Codex. Archived from the original on 2020-08-20.
  5. Alexander, Scott (2019-12-23). "A Maximally Lazy Guide To Giving To Charity In 2019". Slate Star Codex. Archived from the original on 2020-05-27. Retrieved 2020-09-09.
  6. Alexander, Scott (2015-09-22). "Beware Systemic Change". Slate Star Codex. Archived from the original on 2020-08-28. Retrieved 2020-09-08.
  7. Alexander, Scott (2014-12-19). "Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable". Slate Star Codex. Archived from the original on 2020-09-04. Retrieved 2020-09-08.
  8. Mulcahy, Anna; Barnett, Tee; Hurford, Peter (2017-11-17). "EA Survey 2017 Series Part 8: How do People Get Into EA?". Rethink Charity. Archived from the original on 2019-04-29. Retrieved 2020-09-09.
  9. Chan, R., & Crummett, D. (2019-08-29). Moral Indulgences: When Offsetting is Wrong. In Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion Volume 9. : Oxford University Press. Retrieved 4 Sep. 2020, from https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198845492.001.0001/oso-9780198845492-chapter-5 Archived 2020-09-09 at the Wayback Machine.
  10. Syme, T. Charity vs. Revolution: Effective Altruism and the Systemic Change Objection. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 22, 93–120 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-09979-5 Archived 2020-09-09 at the Wayback Machine
  11. Kissel, Joshua, ‘Effective Altruism and Anti-Capitalism: An Attempt at Reconciliation’, Essays in Philosophy 18 (2017), pp. 1–18 https://www.pdcnet.org/eip/content/eip_2017_0018_0001_0068_0090 Archived 2020-09-09 at the Wayback Machine
  12. Thomas Foerster, Moral Offsetting, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 69, Issue 276, July 2019, Pages 617–635, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqy068 Archived 2020-09-09 at the Wayback Machine
  13. Miller J.D. (2017) Reflections on the Singularity Journey. In: Callaghan V., Miller J., Yampolskiy R., Armstrong S. (eds) The Technological Singularity. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54033-6_13 Archived 2020-09-09 at the Wayback Machine https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-54033-6_13 Archived 2020-09-09 at the Wayback Machine
  14. Chivers, Tom (2019). The AI does not hate you: Superintelligence, Rationality and the Race to Save the World. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-1-4746-0877-0.
  15. Scott Siskind (May 22, 2017). "14.3 No Time Like The Present for AI Safety Work". In Callaghan, Victor; Miller, James; Yampolskiy, Roman; Armstrong, Stuart (eds.). The Technological Singularity: Managing the Journey. Springer. p. 235. ISBN 978-3662540336. The following is an edited version of an article that was originally posted on http://www.SlateStarCodex.com on May 29, 2015.
  16. Alexander, Scott. "Meditations on Moloch". Slate Star Codex. Archived from the original on 2020-09-02. Retrieved 2020-09-08.
  17. Sotala, Kaj & Gloor, Lukas (2017). Superintelligence as a Cause or Cure for Risks of Astronomical Suffering. Informatica: An International Journal of Computing and Informatics 41 (4):389-400. http://www.informatica.si/index.php/informatica/article/view/1877/1098 Archived 2020-02-20 at the Wayback Machine
  18. algekalipso (2016-08-20). "Wireheading Done Right: Stay Positive Without Going Insane". Qualia Computing. Archived from the original on 2020-08-17. Retrieved 2020-09-09.
  19. Fitzsimons, Aidan (2019-12-05). "Harvard as Moloch". The Harvard Independent. Archived from the original on 2020-04-06. Retrieved 2020-09-09. Slate Star Codex’s famous blog post “Meditations on Moloch” does a great job of explaining how Moloch is formed by many multipolar traps. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma with little hope for escape.
  20. Foley, Walter. "ESSAY // Killing Moloch: Early Pandemic Reflections on Sobriety and Transcendence". RQ. Archived from the original on 2020-09-09. Retrieved 2020-09-09. The rationality blog Slate Star Codex uses the brutal Canaanite god Moloch, depicted in Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl,’ as a metaphor for humanity’s repeated failure to coordinate toward a better future
  21. Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity Archived 2020-09-09 at the Wayback Machine Quote from the book: "A second kind of unrecoverable dystopia is a stable civilization that is desired by few (if any) people. It is easy to see how such an outcome could be dystopian, but not immediately obvious how we could arrive at it, or lock it in, if most (or all) people do not want it... Meditations on Moloch is a powerful exploration of such possibilities..."
  22. Alexander, Scott (2014-12-17). "The Toxoplasma Of Rage". Archived from the original on 2020-09-02. Retrieved 2020-09-08.
  23. Steve Omohundro (16 January 2018). "Costly Signaling". This idea is brilliant: lost, overlooked, and underappreciated scientific concepts everyone should know. Brockman, John, 1941- (First ed.). New York. ISBN 9780062698216. OCLC 1019711625.
  24. Lewis, Helen. "Sound and Fury: A civil correspondence about online rage". New Statesman.
  25. Lewis, Helen. "If activists want real change they must ditch the dying cat". The Guardian.
  26. Alexander, Scott (2018-10-31). "Sort By Controversial". Slate Star Codex. Archived from the original on 2020-08-20. Retrieved 2020-09-09.
  27. Lewis, Helen. "The Mythology of Karen". The Atlantic. ISSN 1072-7825. Archived from the original on 2020-08-30. Retrieved 2020-09-09.
  28. Douthat, Ross (2019-01-22). "The Covington Scissor". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2020-08-17. Retrieved 2020-09-09.
  29. Auerbach, David (10 June 2015). "When All It Takes to Be Booted From a Tech Conference Is Being a "Distraction," We Have a Problem". Slate Magazine. Archived from the original on 26 July 2020. Retrieved 4 August 2020. If you’re curious, the tireless Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex has written extensive rebuttals of neoreactionary theory, which go to prove Brandolini’s Law
  30. Matthews, Dylan (18 April 2016). "The alt-right is more than warmed-over white supremacy. It's that, but way way weirder". Vox. Archived from the original on 31 August 2017. Retrieved 4 August 2020. Note that these empirical claims are, well, not true. Scott Alexander explains well here; his devil's advocate account of reactionary beliefs is also well worth your time.
  31. Tani, Maxwell (2020-06-24). "The Latest Squabble Inside The New York Times". The Daily Beast. Archived from the original on 2020-06-26. Retrieved 2020-06-26.
  32. Jackson, Jasper (2020-06-25). "Why is the New York Times threatening to reveal blogger Scott Alexander's true identity?". www.newstatesman.com. Archived from the original on 2020-06-27. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  33. Cowen, Tyler (May 4, 2018). "Tyler Cowen: Holding up a mirror to intellectuals of the left". Twin Cities Pioneer Press. Archived from the original on June 21, 2020. Retrieved July 3, 2019.
  34. Friedersdorf, Conor (July 23, 2015). "Roughly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on August 8, 2019. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
  35. Friedersdorf, Conor (August 11, 2016). "Slightly More Than 100 Exceptional Works of Journalism". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on June 27, 2018. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
  36. Friedersdorf, Conor (September 4, 2017). "More Than 100 Exceptional Works of Journalism". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on August 22, 2019. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
  37. Friedersdorf, Conor (August 28, 2018). "Slightly More Than 100 Fantastic Articles". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on August 10, 2019. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
  38. "You're probably wondering why I've called you here today". Slate Star Codex. 12 February 2013. Archived from the original on 10 January 2020. Retrieved 11 August 2020.
  39. "NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog". Slate Star Codex. 22 June 2020. Archived from the original on 23 June 2020. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  40. Athey, Amber (23 June 2020). "The death of the private citizen". Spectator USA. Archived from the original on 23 June 2020. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  41. Schiffer, Zoe (2020-07-16). "How Clubhouse brought the culture war to Silicon Valley's venture capital community". The Verge. Archived from the original on 2020-07-16. Retrieved 2020-07-16.
  42. Kohn, David (1 September 2020). "When journalism and Silicon Valley collide". Poynter Institute. Archived from the original on 1 September 2020. Retrieved 8 September 2020.
  43. Soave, Robby (24 June 2020). "The New York Times's Inconsistent Standards Drove Slate Star Codex To Self-Cancel". Reason. Archived from the original on 24 June 2020. Retrieved 24 June 2020.
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