# Scott Alexander ## Overview Scott Alexander — real name **Scott Alexander Siskind**, formerly writing online under the handle **"Yvain"** — is the most influential cultural producer of the [[Rationalism]] community and the person most responsible for its expansion beyond the original LessWrong audience into a broad Silicon Valley intellectual scene. A San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist who writes at length on psychiatry, philosophy, politics, economics, epistemology, and AI, Alexander operated **Slate Star Codex (SSC)** from 2013 to 2020 and, since January 2021, has run **Astral Codex Ten (ACX)** on Substack. Alexander's importance to the [[TESCREAL]] bundle is less about his individual ideological commitments (which are, by his own description, idiosyncratic and not easily categorizable) than about his *function*: his blog was the single most effective translation layer between the insular LessWrong community and a much wider readership of tech founders, VCs, journalists, economists, and policymakers. [[Tyler Cowen]] has described Alexander as "a thinker who is influential among other writers." The *New Yorker* has described his output as so voluminous that a compiled PDF of his posts runs over nine thousand pages. For the Right-Wing KB's purposes, Alexander matters for two further reasons: (1) his willingness to engage with and partially air [[Dark Enlightenment]] ideas during the mid-2010s created one of the principal on-ramps between rationalism and the far right, and (2) his 2020 dispute with *The New York Times* became a cultural event that substantially shaped Silicon Valley's adversarial relationship with mainstream media. ## Background Alexander was educated in the United States and completed psychiatric residency in the mid-2010s. He practices psychiatry in the San Francisco Bay Area, operating **Lorien Psychiatry** — a low-overhead telehealth practice whose fee structure and operational philosophy he has written about extensively. His writing and his clinical work are deliberately not separated: many of his most-read posts treat psychiatric topics (antidepressant trial design, the ADHD diagnosis, the Rosenhan experiment) with the same methodological seriousness he applies to economics or AI risk. He was a regular participant on [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]'s **LessWrong** from the late 2000s under the handle "Yvain." When he launched **Slate Star Codex** on WordPress in 2013, he carried over the LessWrong epistemic toolkit (Bayesian reasoning, steelmanning, scout mindset) but applied it to a much broader set of topics and with a substantially lighter touch than the original LessWrong "Sequences." ## Slate Star Codex (2013–2020) SSC developed a distinctive voice — long-form, heavily footnoted, digressive, generous to opposing views, willing to take a long view on charged topics (psychiatry's replication problems, IQ and genetics, the predictive-policing debate, the gender wage gap). A few representative posts became widely cited across the tech/intellectual web: - **"I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup"** (2014) — on political tribalism, arguably the most-shared essay of Alexander's career - **"Meditations on Moloch"** (2014) — a rationalist reframing of coordination failure as the mechanism behind most social ills; became one of the defining essays of the rationalist subculture - **"The Anti-Reactionary FAQ"** (2013) — a long critique of neoreactionary thought that also served, controversially, to summarize and disseminate it - **"Scott Alexander's Annual Predictions"** — a calibration ritual that modeled the rationalist project of tracking one's predictions against reality SSC's comment section was influential in its own right — at its peak, one of the highest-signal online discussion communities in the English-speaking internet — and its spin-off forum *r/slatestarcodex* continues to operate. ## The New York Times Incident (2020–2021) In June 2020, Alexander abruptly deleted Slate Star Codex after learning that **The New York Times** was planning to publish an article about him that would include his real name. Alexander considered his legal name critical to protect because (a) he believed psychiatric patients should not have easy access to his personal political and cultural writing, (b) he had received death threats from across the political spectrum, and (c) he objected to what he viewed as an unwritten journalistic norm against doxxing pseudonymous writers who had specific reasons for pseudonymity. The incident mobilized a significant fraction of Silicon Valley — Paul Graham, [[Balaji Srinivasan]], [[Marc Andreessen]], and many VCs publicly sided with Alexander — and became a foundational grievance in the emerging Silicon Valley / mainstream media feud. When the *Times* article eventually ran in February 2021 (Cade Metz's "Silicon Valley's Safe Space"), it disclosed Alexander's full name and characterized SSC as a bridge between rationalism and the alt-right. Alexander responded with an ~11,000-word rebuttal, **"Statement on New York Times Article"** (February 2021), which remains one of the most-read posts in the genre of "public intellectual responds to legacy-media profile." The net effect of the episode was to substantially increase Alexander's readership and to catalyze a broader Silicon Valley posture of skepticism toward legacy journalism — a posture that has since metastasized into, among other things, the [[Substack]]-based alternative media ecosystem and the "legacy media is incentive-captured" frame that now dominates much of tech discourse. ## Astral Codex Ten (2021–present) Alexander relaunched in January 2021 on Substack as **Astral Codex Ten** (ACX). The substantive editorial voice is continuous with SSC, but with two changes: (1) the Substack platform brought a large new audience and substantial subscription revenue, and (2) Alexander has been somewhat more guarded on the most politically charged topics in the ACX era. ACX has become one of the largest-readership "serious" Substacks, with a mix of free and paid content. Alexander's book reviews, his annual prediction posts, his long-form engagements with contemporary intellectual figures, and his psychiatric essays collectively define the contemporary rationalist "house style." ## Dark Enlightenment / Neoreaction Engagement Alexander's 2013–2015 engagement with the **[[Dark Enlightenment]]** (NRx) — the monarchist/reactionary movement associated with [[Curtis Yarvin]] (then writing as [[Mencius Moldbug]]) — is the most contested aspect of his intellectual history and the reason he appears in the Right-Wing KB. His "Anti-Reactionary FAQ" (2013) was explicitly presented as a critique of NRx, and Alexander has consistently distanced himself from the movement's conclusions. However: - The FAQ format required him to summarize NRx arguments in their strongest form, which served, intentionally or not, as a significant dissemination vector - Alexander maintained cordial relations with a number of NRx-adjacent figures - A 2017 leaked email (later authenticated) showed Alexander discussing his willingness to entertain some NRx premises in private - The SSC comment section was persistently hospitable to NRx-adjacent discussion, which drew both NRx figures and their critics The upshot is that Alexander sits in an unusual intellectual position: he is himself not a neoreactionary, but his community was one of the principal sites where rationalist epistemic norms and NRx political content met. This matters for understanding the [[TESCREAL]] / [[Dark Enlightenment]] overlap documented elsewhere in the KB — the same social graph produced both. ## TESCREAL Alignment Alexander's position in the [[TESCREAL]] matrix is primarily as a **cultural producer** rather than as a theorist or operator: - **Rationalism (R)**: Central — Alexander is arguably the most-read writer in the rationalist tradition and the person most responsible for its mainstream visibility - **Effective Altruism (EA)**: Adjacent — EA-sympathetic, publicly participates in EA discourse, has raised significant funds for [[GiveWell]]-style charities, but has maintained a critical distance from EA institutional politics He is less directly aligned with the other TESCREAL components (transhumanism, extropianism, cosmism, singularitarianism, longtermism), though his writing routinely engages all of them. ## Critical Reception - **Supporters** (Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan, many tech writers) argue Alexander is the most consistently reasonable long-form commentator on the contemporary intellectual scene - **Critics** (writers at *The New Statesman*, *The Baffler*, and in the TESCREAL-critical tradition of [[Timnit Gebru]] and [[Émile Torres]]) argue that Alexander's surface reasonableness functions as a laundering mechanism — introducing contested or extreme ideas into mainstream tech culture in a tone that makes them feel safe to consider - **RationalWiki** and a number of left-leaning writers have documented what they see as persistent right-wing ideological drift across his body of work ## Key Relationships - **[[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]** — Intellectual forerunner; LessWrong was Alexander's original platform - **[[Curtis Yarvin]]** — NRx interlocutor; Alexander's 2013 FAQ is the most-cited engagement with Yarvin's work from within the rationalist community - **Robin Hanson** — Fellow blogger and frequent interlocutor - **Tyler Cowen** — Cross-promoter and intellectual ally - **Scott Aaronson**, **Bryan Caplan** — Overlapping blogosphere - **Paul Graham**, **Balaji Srinivasan**, **Marc Andreessen** — High-profile Silicon Valley defenders during the NYT incident - **[[Peter Thiel]]** — Not a direct interlocutor but a reader; the SSC/ACX readership is a significant node in Thiel's broader intellectual network ## See Also - [[TESCREAL]] - [[Rationalism]] - [[Dark Enlightenment]] — The NRx overlap - [[Effective Altruism]] - [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] - [[Curtis Yarvin]]