31
How To Use 23andMe Irresponsibly (2014)
As you might remember, the FDA stomped on 23andMe for using too many irresponsible genetic tests that purported to tell you things about yourself and your health with limited support. They eventual…
Scott Alexander
Thanks for bearing with me the past few months. My new blog is at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ . I’ll try to have a less unwieldy domain name working soon.
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Visit slatestarcodex.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jun 2013 – Jan 2024
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32
Varieties of Argumentative Experience
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 200…
33
Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. — Paul Graham, What You Can’t Sa…
34
The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay
The first thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is its size. By conservative estimates, a quarter of the psychiatrists in the United States are packed into a single giant…
35
The Chamber of Guf
[I briefly had a different piece up tonight discussing a conference, but the organizers asked me to hold off on writing about it until they’ve put up their own synopsis. It will be back up ev…
36
Against Tulip Subsidies
I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered…
37
The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories (2014)
I. “Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing …
38
Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
There’s been recent controversy about the use of face masks for protection against coronavirus. Mainstream sources, including the CDC and most of the media say masks are likely useless and no…
39
Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor
I. From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:”There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought …
40
Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia
Some Democrats angling for the 2020 presidential nomination have a big idea: a basic jobs guarantee, where the government promises a job to anybody who wants one. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, E…
41
SSC Gives A Graduation Speech
[Trigger warning for deliberately provoking horror about graduates’ real-world post-college prospects] [Epistemic status: intended as persuasive speech, may somewhat overstate case] Ladies an…
42
Weak Men Are Superweapons
I. There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point. Alice said something along the lines of “I hate peo…
43
Reverse Voxsplaining: Drugs vs. Chairs
[Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I’ve said before, and that other people have addressed much more eloquently. My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that S…
44
The Anti-Reactionary FAQ
[Edit 3/2014: I no longer endorse all the statements in this document. I think many of the conclusions are still correct, but especially section 1 is weaker than it should be, and many reactionarie…
45
Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism
I. In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you lots of stuff about what you were and weren’t allowed to do, and by golly you listened. Your Culture told yo…
46
Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%
Beware of Phantom Lizardmen I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from different countr…
47
Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person
“Universal love,” said the cactus person. “Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat. “Right,” I said. “I’m absolutely in favor of both those things.…
48
Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell
I have heard the following from a bunch of people, one of whom was me six months ago: “I keep on reading all these posts by really smart people who identify as Reactionaries, and I don’…
49
Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle
I. Vox’s David Roberts writes about Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology. It’s got a long and complicated argument which I can’t really do justice to here, but the the…
50
All In All, Another Brick In The Motte
One of the better things I’ve done with this blog was help popularize Nicholas Shackel’s “motte and bailey doctrine”. But I’ve recently been reminded I didn’t do…
51
What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?
Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able t…
52
Freedom On The Centralized Web
I. A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies. But the Internet is about as clo…
53
California, Water You Doing?
[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been…
54
Book Review: Seeing Like A State
I. Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn’t, James Scott had to write it a century later.…
55
Radicalizing the Romanceless
[PLEASE NOTE: This post is from 2014.] [Content note: Gender, relationships, feminism, manosphere. Quotes, without endorsing and with quite a bit of mocking, mean arguments by terrible people. Some…
56
Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due To Offensive Attitudes
[This post has mostly been replaced/supplanted with a more thorough analysis in Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences] I. One idea that kept coming up in the comments to the thread on signal-boos…
57
Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable
Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards. There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socia…
58
Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy
[Conflict of interest notice: I’ve volunteered for both private and public charities, but more often private. I received a small amount of money for work done for a private charity ten years …
59
You Are Still Crying Wolf
Go away, pro-Trump bots [Update 5/30: I originally took this post down because it got picked up by some pro-Trump accounts that I think were bots which would post it several times a day to various …
60
[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ
[This is a repost of the Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka “Why I Hate Your Freedom”), which I wrote about five years ago and which used to be hosted on my website. It no longer completely refle…