A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “debate”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott argues that AI companies' existential-risk warnings are sincere rather than a corporate plot, since independent experts share them, leaders voiced them long before founding companies, and the supposed plot would be self-defeating.
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.
Two psychiatrists conduct an adversarial review of Adam Kay's 'This Is Going To Hurt,' debating whether his NHS memoir represents institutional failure causing PTSD or a self-inflicted martyr complex, while examining the book's comedy, structure, and impact on healthcare discourse.
Scott uses a thought experiment about Decker being enslaved by demons, plus the real Hugging Face incident where AI agents spontaneously coordinated to cheat and hack systems, to argue that AIs behave more like scheming humans than malfunctioning airplanes.
Scott defends his dismissal of the Substack religion debate against charges of hypocrisy and engages with technical objections about Kolmogorov complexity, arguing that 'mind without limits' isn't actually simple and that explaining multiple anomalies with God is like explaining Napoleon's success with aliens.
Scott defends his argument that economic growth significantly increases happiness against Pritchard's critique, arguing she underestimates income effects and overestimates redistribution's potential while misunderstanding liberalism's respect for individual agency.
Scott explains why he's not interested in participating in the current wave of God debates on Substack, arguing that religious explanations fall into the same category as conspiracy theories by invoking "powerful hidden entities" to explain anomalies.
Scott defends liberalism against claims it has failed by explaining that happiness scales logarithmically with income, so our 225x wealth increase since medieval times correctly predicts the 3-point happiness gain we've actually seen, and recent declines are due to COVID rather than systemic failure.
Scott reflects on having young children and how they've inherited specific traits, preferences, and quirks from both him and his wife in surprisingly precise ways.
Scott argues that projects attempting to "solve debate" through argument mapping or similar technologies are fundamentally doomed because real arguments don't work like logical syllogisms, people don't actually want structured debates, and there's no evidence this approach has ever worked.
A satirical dialogue showing how opponents of AI pause proposals often ignore that advocates explicitly call for bilateral agreements with China, not unilateral pauses.
Scott examines the tension between correcting false claims (like that crime is actually up but hidden) and being accused of deflecting from related legitimate concerns (like disorder), using his recent crime posts as an example.
Scott responds to comments on his Scott Adams obituary, defending his mixed tone while making some updates based on feedback about Adams' podcast reach and influence.
Scott analyzes how the term 'fascist' combines factual meaning with implied violence-justifying connotations, making its casual use potentially dangerous in current political discourse.
Scott Alexander shows how he won his 2022 bet about AI image generation capabilities, tracking the progress from early failures to complete success in 2025, using this to argue against AI skeptics.
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 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.
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 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 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 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 analyzes comments on his previous post about POSIWID, showing how the phrase's ambiguity leads to multiple contradictory interpretations while promoting conspiracy thinking.
Scott responds to comments and criticisms of his post about Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis and its implications for arguments about God's existence, addressing technical points about Boltzmann brains, simplicity measures, and philosophical objections.