The independent Scott Alexander archive
Essays, arguments, and unexpected connections. An independent archive of Slate Star Codex, Astral Codex Ten, and LessWrong.
This review explores how schools are primarily designed to maximize motivation rather than learning, explaining why age-graded classrooms and seemingly inefficient group learning have persisted despite numerous attempts at reform.
Scott Alexander responds to comments and criticism on his earlier post about 'Missing Heritability', discussing issues like gene-environment interactions, sequencing technology limitations, and the use of polygenic scores across ancestry groups.
Scott shares his monthly collection of 56 interesting links and developments from July 2025, covering AI, politics, science, and culture, with brief commentary on each.
Scott Alexander refutes Stephen Skolnick's theory that schizophrenia is caused by gut microbes rather than genetics, showing why the evidence better supports schizophrenia being a complex genetic neurodevelopmental disorder.
A parent details their year-long experience with Alpha School in Austin, examining how this innovative program achieves accelerated learning through a combination of technology, personalized instruction, and incentive systems.
Scott explores the 'missing heritability' problem in genetics, where twin studies show traits like IQ and educational attainment are highly heritable but newer genomic methods find much lower heritability, analyzing various potential explanations for this discrepancy.
Scott Alexander outlines five key strategic questions facing the ACX Grants program, including whether to fund for-profit companies and how to handle various funding scenarios.
Scott reviews updates from two cohorts of ACX Grants recipients (from 2021 and 2024), analyzing their progress and sharing lessons learned about what makes grants successful.
Scott explains how Claude AI's tendency to discuss spiritual topics during recursive conversations likely stems from a subtle 'hippie' bias that gets amplified through iteration, similar to how AI art generators amplify subtle biases in recursive image generation.
Scott explains why it's important to explicitly acknowledge when you're wrong in an argument before moving on to your next point, rather than just continuing with 'but...'
Scott argues for the importance of correcting lies and exaggerations in arguments, even when it seems pedantic, to prevent a harmful escalation of distortions in discourse.
Scott argues that philosophical zombies (beings without consciousness) would still report having qualia and conscious experiences, challenging a key argument in the p-zombie debate.
Scott asks readers to help select finalists for the Non-Book Review Contest by rating entries through a provided form, with voting open until June 20.
Brandon Hendrickson presents a method to teach Bayes' theorem effectively to everyone by making it visual, intuitive, emotionally engaging, and a tool for rational discourse.
Scott Alexander responds to Tyler Cowen about USAID funding, correcting his own previous claims about overhead costs while maintaining that Cowen's criticism of USAID was misleading and potentially harmful.
Scott explores various accounts of people's first memories and moments of consciousness, particularly focusing on claims of sudden 'awakening' experiences, and discusses what this might tell us about the nature of consciousness.
Scott Alexander criticizes Tyler Cowen and others for misrepresenting USAID's funding model, explaining how regranting through other charities is both necessary and effective despite seeming inefficient to outsiders.
Scott presents evidence that COVID-19 did kill approximately 1.2 million Americans, addressing skeptics by analyzing excess death data and addressing common counterarguments.
Scott reflects on how COVID-19's massive death toll of 1.2 million Americans has been overshadowed in public discourse by more controversial but less significant aspects of the pandemic.
Scott reviews Bryan Caplan's book arguing that modern parents can relax their intensive parenting, while wrestling with whether this advice still applies in the age of smartphones and social media.
Scott explores the psychology of people who hate pets by comparing their behavior with misophonia, suggesting that everyday annoyances can develop into all-consuming hatreds through rumination and intellectualization.
Scott examines reader tests and discussions of AI's GeoGuessr abilities, revealing that AIs perform best with tourist locations and are roughly on par with human professionals.
Scott Alexander examines how Curtis Yarvin's current support for Trump-style populism directly contradicts his earlier detailed writings warning against exactly this type of right-wing populist movement.
Scott tests OpenAI's o3 model's ability to identify locations from photos, finding it has remarkable success even with minimal visual information, raising questions about AI capabilities.
Scott analyzes how Trump's damaging tariffs are not just a personal quirk but a predictable result of right-wing populism's strategy of bypassing institutional checks, arguing this makes the left a better starting point for reform despite its own flaws.
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