The reader’s shortlist
Essays ranked by captured source likes. Essays without a saved count are listed last.
Scott critiques the phrase 'the purpose of a system is what it does' by showing how it confuses outcomes with intentions and leads to absurd or paranoid conclusions.
Scott investigates AI psychosis through historical analogies and a reader survey, finding it affects roughly 1 in 10,000 to 100,000 people yearly, with most cases involving pre-existing risk factors.
A satirical account of a Bay Area house party featuring absurd conversations on tech, culture, and startups, ending with the protagonist's plan to profit from the information gained.
Lars Doucet revisits his influential 2021 ACX book review on Georgism five years later, updating his thinking on land value tax implementation based on practical policy work and recent legislative wins in multiple states.
Scott Alexander introduces his new blog, Astral Codex Ten, centered around the concept of ṛta and exploring topics related to rationality, science, and human cognition.
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.
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 explains why true democracy requires more than just winning elections - it needs a complex system of checks and balances to ensure future elections remain fair and free.
A guest post arguing that ratifying the Congressional Apportionment Amendment from the original Bill of Rights would expand the House to 6,641 members and fix Congress by reducing gerrymandering, diluting donor influence, and increasing constituent accountability.
Scott examines a paradox where bloomers and anti-doomers warn against apocalyptic thinking while treating doomerism itself as an unprecedented existential crisis requiring drastic action.
Scott reviews a paper by leading researchers attempting to determine AI consciousness through computational theories, critiques their conflation of access and phenomenal consciousness, and predicts society will inconsistently ascribe consciousness to AIs based on their social roles rather than their underlying architecture.
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 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 reviews a new book by Yudkowsky and Soares that makes an uncompromising case for halting AI development to prevent human extinction, analyzing both its arguments and its potential impact as a call to action.
Scott examines and rejects conflict theory (the idea that political disagreements come from material self-interest), arguing instead that political positions are primarily driven by psychological needs and identity rather than material interests.
Scott presents Plan A, a detailed roadmap by Daniel Kokotajlo's AI Futures Project proposing a US-China regulatory agreement to safely advance AI to genius-level systems in the 2030s, solve alignment during a controlled pause, then achieve aligned superintelligence by 2040.
Scott analyzes Javier Milei's presidency in Argentina, noting mixed results in economic indicators and policies, with some successes in budget cuts and inflation reduction, but increased poverty rates.
Scott explains current mechanistic interpretability techniques for understanding AI cognition, from linear probes to emotion vectors, showing they're useful for monitoring but insufficient for controlling AI behavior or ensuring safety.
Scott Alexander satirizes Silicon Valley culture through a fictional house party where everyone is obsessed with Sam Altman's firing from OpenAI.
Scott Alexander argues against judging polyamory based on memoirs or advice books, as these are often written by unrepresentative individuals.
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 argues that Trump supporters and conservative-aligned people who push back on bad administration policies should be supported rather than pressured to publicly denounce Trump, as they're often the only ones who can effectively prevent worse outcomes.
Scott argues against the concept of 'stochastic terrorism' by showing it's applied inconsistently across the political spectrum, examining and rejecting various proposed distinctions about what criticism should be allowed, and advocating instead for a liberal solution where all criticism is permitted but violence is always the perpetrator's sole responsibility.
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 reviews Rodney Stark's 'The Rise of Christianity', which examines factors contributing to Christianity's growth from a small cult to a dominant religion in the Roman Empire.