Slate Star Codex

Slate Star Codex (often abbreviated SSC) is a long-form blog written by a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist known by his partial name Scott Alexander. The blog focused on science, medicine (especially within psychiatry), philosophy, politics, and futurism.

Slate Star Codex
Screenshot of the SlateStarCodex home page prior to deletion
Type of site
Blog
Available inEnglish
Created byScott Alexander
URLwww.slatestarcodex.com
Alexa rank 50,352 (Global, July 2019)
LaunchedFebruary 12, 2013 (2013-02-12)

Slate Star Codex was launched in 2013, and was taken down by its author on June 23, 2020, due to fears of having his full name published in an upcoming piece by the New York Times.[1] As of July 22, 2020, the blog was partially back online, with the content restored but commenting disabled.

Prior to starting Slate Star Codex, Alexander blogged at the rationalist community blog LessWrong.

Content

The New Yorker notes that the sheer volume of content that Alexander has written on Slate Star Codex makes the corpus difficult to summarize, with an ebook collating his posts running to around nine thousand pages. Alexander's fiction is described as "delightfully weird" and his arguments "often counterintuitive and brilliant".[2] Conservative magazine National Review said the blog had an "emphasis on unbiased empirical analysis", and said Alexander had written about subjects which are "dangerous territory", including "the gender earnings gap" and the IQ of ethnic groups.[3][4][5]

A post from the blog, "No Time Like The Present for AI Safety Work", was reprinted as a chapter in The Technological Singularity: Managing the Journey.[6] The blog has been used as an academic source on American politics.[7] Campbell and Manning's The Rise of Victimhood Culture references an SSC post in their chapter "Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, and the Language of Victimhood".[8] Recurring features on SSC included annual predictions about the upcoming year that Alexander published every January and would rate for their accuracy a year later (e.g. predicting for 2017 with 60 percent confidence that the United States would not get involved in any major new war where more than 100 US soldiers would die).[9]

The 2013 post "The Anti-Reactionary FAQ" is considered one of Alexander's significant contributions in rationalist community discourse. The post repudiates the work and worldview of the neoreactionary movement, countering in particular the work of Curtis Yarvin. This worldview as of 2013 made claims about natural racial hierarchies and desired the restoration of feudalism. Out of a belief in the superiority of debate over outright bans, Alexander allowed neoreactionary individuals to continue commenting on posts and in "culture war" threads, as well as engaged through extended dialogues such as the thirty-thousand word FAQ.[2] Alexander's essays on neoreaction have been highlighted by Slate and Vox.[10][11]

Reception

In 2019, the site was receiving around 20,000 page views per day.[9] Alexander's departure from LessWrong has been described as one of "the main two" reasons for a decline in LessWrong's popularity between 2012 and 2016.[9]

Slate Star Codex was described by The Daily Beast as a "widely read site".[12] The New Statesman characterized it as "a nexus for the rationalist community and others who seek to apply reason to debates about situations, ideas and moral quandaries."[13] In his 2019 book The AI Does Not Hate You, author Tom Chivers called Slate Star Codex "by far the most high-profile part of the movement, and the most overtly political", although its readership "includes a large number of people I know who absolutely would not call themselves 'Rationalists'."[9] The New Yorker describes Slate Star Codex as "perhaps the premier public-facing venue of the 'rationalist' community".[2]

Economist Tyler Cowen has called Scott Alexander "a thinker who is influential among other writers".[14] Conor Friedersdorf, writing for The Atlantic, has regularly included articles from the blog in his annual top 100 list of "The Best of Journalism".[15][16][17][18]

Potential surname dissemination

"Scott Alexander" is the author's real first and middle name, and the blog's name is based on an approximate anagram of this name.[19] Alexander states that he attempts to conceal his last name for privacy reasons, citing professional and safety concerns, although he has used his last name in academic publication of Slate Star Codex content.[6] In June 2020, he deleted all entries on Slate Star Codex, stating that a New York Times technology reporter intended to publish an article about the blog using his full name. According to Alexander, the reporter told him that it was newspaper policy to use real names.[20][1] The Times responded: "We do not comment on what we may or may not publish in the future. But when we report on newsworthy or influential figures, our goal is always to give readers all the accurate and relevant information we can."[21] The Verge cited a source saying that at the time when Alexander deleted the blog, "not a word" of a story about SSC had been written.[22]

National Review criticized the Times for applying its anonymity policy inconsistently.[1] The New Statesman said that it was "difficult to see how Scott Alexander's full name is so integral to the NYT's story that it justifies the damage it might do to him", but cautioned that such criticism was based solely on Alexander's own statements as long as the Times was being "tight-lipped on the matter".[13] An article in Reason agreed with Alexander's rationale regarding the negative impact on his day job as psychiatrist, but criticized his concerns about his personal safety as overblown (arguing that online death threats such as those reported by Alexander "are almost never carried out"). It noted that while "publishing information about a person without their permission" was standard practice in journalism, "it's still hard to see what was about to happen to Alexander as anything other than doxxing", and perceived an inconsistency in the Times' willingness to accommodate requests for anonymity, contrasting the current situation with a February 2020 article in which the Times did not use the subject's real name.[23] As reported by The Daily Beast, the criticism by Alexander and his supporters caused considerable internal debate among the Times' staff.[12]

Supporters of the site organized a petition against release of the author's name. The petition collected over six thousand signatures in its first few days, including psychologist Steven Pinker, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, computer scientist and blogger Scott Aaronson, and philosopher Peter Singer.[2]

References
  1. Hoonhout, Tobias (23 June 2020). "What an NYT Reporter's Doxing Threat Says about the Paper's 'Standards'". National Review. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  2. Lewis-Kraus, Gideon (2020-07-09). "Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley's War Against the Media". The New Yorker.
  3. Tenreiro, Daniel. "When 'Boundary Policing' Becomes Intimidation: How the Media Protect Their Turf". National Review.
  4. "Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due To Offensive Attitudes". Slate Star Codex. Archived from the original on 2017-09-29.
  5. "The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project". Slate Star Codex. Archived from the original on 2018-03-26.
  6. Scott S. (May 22, 2017). "14.3 No Time Like The Present for AI Safety Work". In Callaghan, Victor; Miller, James; Yampolskiy, Roman; Armstrong, Stuart (eds.). The Technological Singularity: Managing the Journey. Springer. p. 235. ISBN 3662540339. The following is an edited version of an article that was originally posted on http://www.SlateStarCodex.com on May 29, 2015.
  7. al Gharbi, Musa (December 2018). "Race and the Race for the White House: On Social Research in the Age of Trump". The American Sociologist. 49 (4): 496–519. doi:10.1007/s12108-018-9373-5.
  8. Campbell, Bradley; Manning, Jason (2018). "Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, and the Language of Victimhood". The Rise of Victimhood Culture. pp. 71–104. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-70329-9_3. ISBN 978-3-319-70328-2.
  9. Chivers, Tom (2019). The AI does not hate you: Superintelligence, Rationality and the Race to Save the World. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-1-4746-0877-0.
  10. Auerbach, David (10 June 2015). "When All It Takes to Be Booted From a Tech Conference Is Being a "Distraction," We Have a Problem". Slate Magazine. If you’re curious, the tireless Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex has written extensive rebuttals of neoreactionary theory, which go to prove Brandolini’s Law
  11. Matthews, Dylan (18 April 2016). "The alt-right is more than warmed-over white supremacy. It's that, but way way weirder". Vox. Note that these empirical claims are, well, not true. Scott Alexander explains well here; his devil's advocate account of reactionary beliefs is also well worth your time.
  12. Tani, Maxwell (2020-06-24). "The Latest Squabble Inside The New York Times". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 2020-06-26.
  13. Jackson, Jasper (2020-06-25). "Why is the New York Times threatening to reveal blogger Scott Alexander's true identity?". www.newstatesman.com. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  14. Cowen, Tyler (May 4, 2018). "Tyler Cowen: Holding up a mirror to intellectuals of the left". Twin Cities Pioneer Press. Retrieved July 3, 2019.
  15. Friedersdorf, Conor (July 23, 2015). "Roughly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
  16. Friedersdorf, Conor (August 11, 2016). "Slightly More Than 100 Exceptional Works of Journalism". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
  17. Friedersdorf, Conor (September 4, 2017). "More Than 100 Exceptional Works of Journalism". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
  18. Friedersdorf, Conor (August 28, 2018). "Slightly More Than 100 Fantastic Articles". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 4, 2019.
  19. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/12/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive-called-you-here-today/
  20. Alexander, Scott (22 June 2020). "NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog". Slate Star Codex. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  21. Athey, Amber (23 June 2020). "The death of the private citizen". Spectator USA. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  22. Schiffer, Zoe (2020-07-16). "How Clubhouse brought the culture war to Silicon Valley's venture capital community". The Verge. Retrieved 2020-07-16.
  23. Soave, Robby (24 June 2020). "The New York Times's Inconsistent Standards Drove Slate Star Codex To Self-Cancel". Reason. Retrieved 24 June 2020.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.