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Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
Scott Alexander evaluates his predictions about the Trump presidency, finding he performed about average overall with some notable successes and failures.
63 min read 9,658 words
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2,008 essaysACX
Nootropics Survey 2020 Results
Scott Alexander presents results from his 2020 nootropics survey, covering effectiveness ratings, tolerance, and user experiences with various substances.
13 min read 1,949 words
LW
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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Ezra Klein On Vetocracy
Scott Alexander examines Ezra Klein's concept of 'vetocracy' and its implications for American governance and progress.
11 min read 1,563 words
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Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
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.
18 min read 2,728 words
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Pause For Thought: The AI Pause Debate
Scott Alexander reviews a debate on AI development pauses, discussing various strategies and their potential impacts on AI safety and progress.
38 min read 5,768 words
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Ro-mantic Monday 2/13/23
Scott explores various technological and market-based approaches to dating and relationships, including prediction markets, matching sites, and cryptocurrency concepts.
19 min read 2,824 words
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Contra Dynomight On Sexy In-Laws
Scott critiques evolutionary explanations for suitor-parent disagreements in mate choice, proposing that suitors use innate instincts while parents rely on reasoning, leading to different preferences.
17 min read 2,513 words
LW
2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Scott announces the 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey and encourages all readers to take it, emphasizing that the optional extra credit questions shouldn't prevent anyone from completing the main survey.
3 min read 430 words
LW
A signaling theory of class x politics interaction
Scott proposes that class-based attitudes toward wealth redistribution are driven by status signaling rather than "last place aversion," where lower middle class people oppose redistribution to differentiate themselves from the poor, while upper middle class people support it to differentiate themselves from the lower middle class.
7 min read 987 words
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Highlights From The Comments On Jhanas
Scott Alexander summarizes comments debating the reality and implications of jhanas, a meditative state of extreme bliss.
47 min read 7,250 words
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Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change
Scott responds to various reader comments on his article about having children despite climate change, addressing critiques and expanding on several points.
35 min read 5,387 words
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Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability
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.
66 min read 10,199 words
ACX
What Is Going On In IFS?
Scott Alexander explores conflicting descriptions of Internal Family Systems therapy, questioning whether it involves trance-like states and real internal entities or more mundane visualization techniques.
11 min read 1,688 words
LW
Interlude for Behavioral Economics
Scott examines experimental data on how people actually behave in Prisoner's Dilemma and Ultimatum Game situations, finding that people use various heuristics like tit-for-tat and fairness considerations rather than purely rational strategies.
12 min read 1,742 words
LW
Physical and Mental Behavior
Scott explains how thoughts and intentions are reinforced separately from actions, using B.F. Skinner's concept of "mental behavior" to show why people often intend to do things but never actually do them.
7 min read 936 words
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Links For July
Scott Alexander presents a diverse collection of interesting links and news items from July, covering topics from linguistics and AI to politics and economics.
20 min read 3,007 words
LW
Ego syntonic thoughts and values
Scott explains how the brain presents socially acceptable desires as genuine values (ego syntonic) and unacceptable ones as external compulsions (ego dystonic) to improve social signaling, with willpower representing the balance between these forces.
8 min read 1,121 words
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"Deros And The Ur-Abduction" In Asterisk
Scott explores the recurring myth of evil underground humanoids across different cultures and time periods in an article written for Asterisk magazine's 'Weird' themed issue.
2 min read 265 words
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Links For October
Scott Alexander presents a curated list of 41 diverse links and news items, covering topics from linguistics and technology to politics and popular culture, with brief commentary on each.
21 min read 3,111 words
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Mantic Monday 7/31/23: Room Temperature Superforecaster
Scott Alexander discusses recent developments in prediction markets, including regulatory issues, new platforms, and current market probabilities on various topics.
22 min read 3,353 words
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Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds
Scott Alexander summarizes a debate between Yudkowsky and Christiano on whether AI progress will be gradual or sudden, exploring their key arguments and implications.
55 min read 8,479 words
LW
Behaviorism: Beware Anthropomorphizing Humans
Scott defends behaviorism as a sophisticated methodological approach that avoided using mental phenomena as fundamental explanations, connecting it to reinforcement learning and the idea that minds are behavior-executors rather than utility-maximizers.
8 min read 1,118 words
LW
Offense versus harm minimization
Scott uses a thought experiment about aliens making British people sensitive to salmon photos to argue that causing offense should be viewed through a consequentialist harm-minimization framework rather than a deontological blame-assignment framework.
17 min read 2,604 words
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Know Your GABA-A Receptor Subunits
Scott explores GABA-A receptor subunits, their effects, and how various drugs interact with them, discussing potential for more selective drug development.
8 min read 1,173 words