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Essays tagged “Steven Pinker”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott Alexander methodically rebuts Steven Pinker's arguments against AI risk concerns and documents fifteen years of what he considers misrepresentations and bad-faith arguments from Pinker about the AI safety community.
Scott Alexander examines how public predictions are judged over time, using examples like Nostradamus and Fukuyama to illustrate common pitfalls and offer advice on making predictions.
Scott Alexander examines various interpretations of rationality, concluding it might be best understood as 'the study of study' - a meta-level examination of truth-seeking methods.
Scott Alexander uses historical data to refute the Reactionary claim that modern society increases war, showing instead that violence has decreased significantly in progressive eras.
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.'