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Re: sub-reddits
Scott updates the community on subreddit investigation, explaining that Tricycle proposes using Discussion tags instead, though he's not entirely convinced.
2 min read 163 words
The independent Scott Alexander archive
Scott Alexander, collected.
Essays, arguments, and unexpected connections. An independent archive of Slate Star Codex, Astral Codex Ten, and LessWrong.
The collection
2,008 essaysLW
Are mass hallucinations a real thing?
Scott questions whether mass hallucinations are real, distinguishing between mass hysteria (false beliefs) and actual shared vivid hallucinations, and asks for evidence of the latter.
2 min read 273 words
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Scope insensitivity in juries
Scott highlights a study showing juries give harsher penalties for crimes affecting few people versus many, demonstrating the cognitive bias of scope insensitivity.
1 min read 32 words
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Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism
Scott introduces the concept of "meta-contrarianism" - where highly intelligent people signal their status by rejecting contrarian positions and returning to simpler views, similar to how hipsters adopt uncool styles to seem cooler.
16 min read 2,358 words
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Conflicts Between Mental Subagents: Expanding Wei Dai's Master-Slave Model
Scott expands on Wei Dai's master-slave model of the mind to explain akrasia and self-deception, proposing that the unconscious (U) uses the conscious mind (C) as a PR agency to signal socially admirable values while pursuing selfish goals, requiring just enough genuine support of C's principles to maintain credibility both to others and to C itself.
21 min read 3,191 words
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Book Review: The Root of Thought
Scott reviews a book arguing that glial cells are crucial for cognition (not just neuron support), and uses this century-long scientific oversight as a cautionary tale about how entire communities can miss important phenomena.
11 min read 1,605 words
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Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease
Scott argues that debates about whether conditions like obesity are "real diseases" are ultimately questions about sympathy, blame, and treatment that should be addressed directly rather than through the misleading disease framework.
19 min read 2,929 words
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Blue- and Yellow-Tinted Choices
Scott explains how the brain judges values relatively rather than absolutely, using optical illusions as an analogy for cognitive biases in decision-making.
9 min read 1,359 words
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Antagonizing Opioid Receptors for (Prevention of) Fun and Profit
Scott explains how the Sinclair Method treats alcoholism by using naltrexone to block the brain's reward response to alcohol, breaking the learned association between drinking and pleasure through temporal difference learning.
9 min read 1,281 words
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Eight Short Studies On Excuses
Scott uses eight game theory scenarios to show that excuses are evaluated not on truth or morality, but on whether accepting them would undermine credible commitment to rules, since accepting one excuse means accepting all equally good ones.
21 min read 3,212 words
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It's not like anything to be a bat
Scott presents an anthropic argument suggesting animals might lack subjective experience, based on the observation that if animals were conscious, we would statistically be much more likely to be animals than humans.
5 min read 682 words
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More thoughts on assertions
Scott analyzes when assertions should be trusted, showing that their evidentiary value depends on whether you already know the belief's distribution, the asserter's credentials, and how you encountered them, while claims of having 'evidence' mostly serve as signals of rationality rather than factual proof.
13 min read 1,958 words
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Are wireheads happy?
Scott discusses the neuroscientific split between 'wanting' and 'liking', showing how wireheads might not actually be happy, and explores the troubling implications this has for economics, philosophy, and AI alignment.
11 min read 1,606 words
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That other kind of status
Scott proposes that people don't just seek status itself, but rather seek mental states that allow them to believe they have status, explaining why people adopt low-status beliefs like conspiracy theories.
8 min read 1,193 words
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Doing your good deed for the day
A study shows people who do one good deed are less likely to do another soon after, suggesting moral behavior operates on a limited resource that gets depleted.
7 min read 1,071 words
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Solutions to Political Problems As Counterfactuals
Scott analyzes why some proposed political solutions feel wrong or useless by examining them as counterfactuals, arguing that valid solutions must involve modifying nodes you can actually influence rather than wishfully changing things you have no power over.
12 min read 1,787 words
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Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up?
Scott argues that the 'Cynic's Theory of Akrasia' (which says people's actions reveal their true preferences, contradicting their stated preferences) is functionally equivalent to the naive theory, just valuing unconscious over conscious preferences, and defends prioritizing conscious preferences because they're rational and morally informed.
9 min read 1,246 words
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Why Real Men Wear Pink
Scott explains Bell's theory that fashion functions as status signaling, where the upper class deliberately adopts outrageous or lower-class styles that the middle class wouldn't dare wear, creating fashion cycles and explaining phenomena like men wearing pink or the 'ghetto look.'
7 min read 1,051 words
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AndrewH's observation and opportunity costs
Scott argues that opportunity costs should be calculated based on what you'll realistically do with resources, not on theoretical optimal alternatives, using examples from cryonics spending, NASA budgets, and charitable giving.
4 min read 513 words
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Missing the Trees for the Forest
Scott argues that people make better decisions when evaluating issues in isolation rather than viewing them as symbols of larger political narratives, using examples from the Duke lacrosse case, environmental regulation debates, and gender politics to illustrate how overarching narratives distort judgment of individual cases.
15 min read 2,221 words
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Shut Up And Guess
Scott calculates that on exams penalizing wrong answers at half the reward for correct ones, guessing always has positive expected value, but none of his intelligent classmates would accept this logic despite clear explanations.
11 min read 1,700 words
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What's In A Name?
Scott examines the name letter effect, where people subconsciously prefer things that sound like their names, affecting major decisions like where to live, career choices, and who to marry.
6 min read 845 words
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Applied Picoeconomics
Scott tests picoeconomics theory by creating a formal written oath to study two hours daily, which successfully works by creating the same psychological pressure as serious deadlines, and he provides practical advice for others to try this technique.
10 min read 1,416 words
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Typical Mind and Politics
Scott explores how innate neurological differences in emotional responses might drive political disagreements, suggesting that people form intuitive reactions first and rationalize them later, making political debate extremely difficult.
13 min read 1,864 words
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A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies
Scott uses a thought experiment about hypothetical "reformed" Nazis in post-war Germany to explore whether problematic ideologies can be successfully reformed or whether their symbols and texts inevitably carry harmful baggage.
14 min read 2,071 words
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