Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander is the pen-name of LessWrong-rationalist blogger and psychiatrist Scott Alexander Siskind. 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.Rationalist movement LessWrong Wiki (archived from March 26, 2020). His current blog is now Astral Codex Ten.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in Philosophy,Five Years And One Week Of Less Wrong by Scott Alexander (March 13, 2014) Slate Star Codex (archived from March 4, 2020). 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 in 2012,https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/scott-alexander and then completed postgraduate training certified by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education in the discipline of psychiatry.
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 TwitterScott Alexander Twitter (archived from April 18, 2020). and (formerly) TumblrSlate Star Scratchpad Tumblr (archived from June 23, 2020). to post shorter reactions, puns, and jokes.
Notable internet publications include his giant anti-neoreactionary FAQ, his giant anti-libertarian FAQ,The Non-Libertarian FAQ by Scott Alexander (February 22, 2017) Slate Star Codex (archived from February 22, 2020). his map of the rationalist blogosphere,Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make Me a Map by Scott Alexander (September 5, 2014) Slate Star Codex (archived from March 3, 2020). 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 criticismUntitled by Scott Alexander (January 1, 2015) Slate Star Codex (archived from February 21, 2020). of feminism, which had been spurred by a feminist backlashOn Nerd Entitlement: White male nerds need to recognise that other people had traumatic upbringings, too - and that’s different from structural oppression. by Laurie Penny (29 December 2014) New Statesman. against a blog commentWalter Lewin: Comment #171 by Scott Aaronson (December 14th, 2014 at 10:21 pm) Shtetl-Optimized: The Blog of Scott Aaronson. 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 meetupsLess Wrong meetup groups LessWrong Wiki. 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.I did recommend that the reporter talk to some people with expertise in neoreactionaries like @ElSandifer or in AI bias, it is interesting he'd delete his blog just as the reporter was going to start looking at more critical sources by Melissa McEwen (11:20 AM - 23 Jun 2020) Twitter (archived from June 23, 2020).) Alexander recommended readers move to the Reddit forums /r/slatestarcodex and /r/themotte.NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog by Scott Alexander (23 June 2020) Slate Star Codex (archived from 23 Jun 2020 08:43:57 UTC).
==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 concerns.How true is the statement 'the comment threads on Slate Star Codex are a nightmare to read through'? by Caio Camargo (December 25, 2014) Reddit. 
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.The Irregular Symmetry by Kaveh Mousavi (June 16, 2015) Patheos: On the Margins of Error. However, Alexander has been willing to defend aspects of social justice he views as worthwhile, such as uses for trigger warningsThe Wonderful Thing about Triggers by Scott Alexander (May 30, 2014) Slate Star Codex (archived from February 14, 2020). and acknowledging discrimination still exists and has massive economic costs.Social Justice For The Highly-Demanding-Of-Rigor by Scott Alexander (April 20, 2013) Slate Star Codex (archived from May 2, 2020).
===Neoreaction and racialism===
Alexander is critical of neoreactionaries, having written what is generally regarded as the definitive takedown of neoreaction.The Anti-Reactionary FAQ by Scott Alexander (October 20, 2013 ) Slate Star Codex (archived from June 18, 2020). 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.Setting The Default by Scott Alexander (December 1, 2015) Slate Star Codex (archived from April 6, 2020).
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.
His justification for suddenly becoming "very very suddenly much more conservative" is a self-invented theory about class and "fashion."
===Feminism===
Alexander identifies as neither a feminist or an anti-feminist,SSC On Feminism Slate Star Codex (archived from December 30, 2015). expressing that he has been unfairly associated with both groups.
He talked of "the sane 30%-or-so of feminists"The Anti-Reactionary FAQ by Scott Alexander (October 20, 2013 ) Slate Star Codex (archived from May 20, 2020). and described some essays as “blurring the already thin line between feminism and literally Voldemort”.Scott Alexander, Radicalizing the Romanceless. Slate Star Codex, August 31, 2014 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.I dunno, you fuck one pony.
In the post meant to clarify his position on feminism and feminist issues, he described his negative attitudes towards the movement as:
As this quote suggests, Alexander mostly engages with the feminism of social media and chatty magazines, rather than books and academia and face-to-face activism. Of the 99 modern books which Alexander reviewed until September 2024, only seven were by women, and none was on feminism (he did make time to carefully analyze a book by Richard Hanania)."The Walled Marketplace of Ideas: A Statistical Critique of SSC Book Reviews" Timeline Topography Tales, 17 October 2024 https://titotal.substack.com/p/the-walled-marketplace-of-ideas-a
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 spottedDid the SSC post on Gender Imbalances and Offensive Attitudes inspire the Google SWE's Anti-Diversity manifesto? by church_on_a_hill (05 Aug 2017) Slate Star Codex (archived from August 13, 2017). that it was largely a restatement of Alexander's arguments in his post "Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due To Offensive Attitudes".Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due To Offensive Attitudes by Scott Alexander (August 1, 2017) Slate Star Codex (archived from January 8, 2020). Alexander wrote:
He invited Ozy Frantz, a feminist blogger, for a guest post titled "Anti-Heartiste FAQ", in similar vein to his famous Anti-Libertarian FAQ and Anti-Reactionary FAQ.https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/20/ozys-anti-heartiste-faq/
===Libertarianism===
Scott Alexander describes himself as a "bleeding-heart libertarian" or "left-libertarian", which supports free markets, market based solutions to socioeconomic problems and taxes to correct for externalities.https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/
===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.SSC Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein by Scott Alexander (September 28, 2016) Slate Star Codex (archived from June 4, 2020). 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.Book Review: Red Plenty by Scott Alexander (September 24, 2014) Slate Star Codex (archived from February 5, 2020).
===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.No Time Like The Present For AI Safety Work by Scott Alexander (May 29, 2015) Slate Star Codex (archived from June 11, 2020).
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.The Maverick Nanny with a Dopamine Drip: Debunking Fallacies in the Theory of AI Motivation by Richard Loosemore (Jul 24, 2014) Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Alexander has compiled a list of renowned and accomplished AI researchers expressing concerns about AI.AI Researchers On AI Risk by Scott Alexander (May 22, 2015) Slate Star Codex (archived from April 26, 2020).
===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,Investment and Inefficient Charity by Scott Alexander (April 5, 2013) Slate Star Codex (archived from April 8, 2020). and has supported the Giving What We Can project which attempts to separate effective charities from inefficient ones.Giving What We Can
===Race and IQ===
Alexander identifies with the 'hereditarian left',Links 5/17: Rip Van Linkle by Scott Alexander (May 9, 2017) Slate Star Codex (archived from April 3, 2020). and considers The Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray to be a close ideological ally.Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them by Scott Alexander (May 23, 2016) Slate Star Codex (archived from June 15, 2020).Clarification To "Sacred Principles As Exhaustible Resources" by Scott Alexander (April 12, 2017) Slate Star Codex (archived from January 11, 2020). 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,The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project by Scott Alexander (May 26, 2017) Slate Star Codex (archived from February 17, 2020). as opposed to the multiple bottlenecks and founder effects for which there is actual evidence.A Population-Genetic Test of Founder Effects and Implications for Ashkenazi Jewish Diseases Montgomery Slatkin (2004) Am. J. Hum. Genet. 75(2): 282–293. doi:10.1086/423146. There is almost nothing he won't try to apply human biodiversity to, e.g. Harry Potter.slatestarscratchpad by mugasofer (Jan 7th, 2016) Tumblr.
After the NYT article on Slate Star Codex was published,https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html 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."Twitter thread (archive) 
In January 2025 Alexander addressed the topic in public with a blog post on Richard Lynn's estimates of national IQ which admitted that "nobody does high-quality IQ tests on the entire population of Malawi; to get his numbers, Lynn would often find some IQ-ish test given to some unrepresentative sample of some group related to Malawians and try his best to extrapolate from there." then enthused:https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to
And suggested that the real reason people objected to Lynn's estimates was fear of sounding racist. He suggested that readers read Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's Aporia Magazine to learn more about race and IQ. Fellow traveler Nick Bostrom had also tried to switch the discussion from are there large racial differences in intelligence? to how much of this difference is genetic? when apologizing for a "disgusting" email on race and IQ.https://thetab.com/2023/01/12/senior-oxford-uni-academic-argues-blacks-are-more-stupid-than-whites-in-unearthed-emails
==/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+ upvotesWhat are some true beliefs deep down you knew were true but didn't believe at one time because they were too uncomfortable to accept? by u/Danplanck (Feb 26, 2014) Reddit (archived from February 23, 2019). and admiring replies). Of course, much more offensive than the racism is objecting to the racism, which gets you a day's ban.Slate Star Codex: In a Mad World, All Blogging is Psychiatry Blogging (Feb 26, 2014) Reddit (archived from September 15, 2017). According to one moderator, "A belief in HBD doesn’t automatically equate to racism", somehow.
The moderators have a partial registry of bans.Slate Star Codex: Registry of bans (Created Feb 26, 2014) Reddit.
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."
==External links==
* Astral Codex Ten
* Slate Star Codex
* Slate Star Scratchpad (his Tumblr)
* Slate Star Codex on Reddit — unofficial fan club, with occasional participation from Scott
* Scott Alexander on Twitter
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Antifeminism
Category:Blogs
Category:Eugenics supporters
Category:Internet kooks
Category:Jews
Category:LessWrong
Category:Living people
Category:Physicians
Category:Pissed at us
Category:Psychologists
Category:Racialism
Category:Rationalism