Scott Alexander's Top 10 Articles from 2013

According to me

I’d already read a fair number of Scott Alexander’s pieces (sometimes without even realizing they were his) but a few months ago I decided to do a proper deep dive. I would read everything the internet’s final boss of blogging wrote, in chronological order, starting from 2013, the first year of Slate Star Codex. Just to see if he’s really as good as everyone says.

In 2013, Scott wrote a lot. Towards the end of the year, he got accepted into medical school and things cooled off a bit. His writing started off much stronger than I expected — meaning, I was bracing for a bunch of naive, half-baked ideas from his first year of blogging — but instead I found a lot of very engaging articles some of which were surprisingly relevant to our times, all of it written with a refreshing casual clarity.

His critique of neo-reaction especially caught me off guard — a part of it was basically a much better version of a brief piece I had written, to the point where I felt a little embarrassed and started worrying that people would think I’d just copied him.

But enough with my whining, here are the final rankings of the ten eleven twelve thirteen articles I liked the most:

13. Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell

I like good summaries. Top 10 lists are a sort of summary. Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous Planet-Sized Nutshell is a great summary of what neo-reaction is all about. Reading it helped me understand the reactionary perspective better, which is definitely a plus.

But it’s not only a summary it’s also a steelman, Scott was building up neo-reaction before criticizing it, hard.

12. I Myself Am a Scientismist

Scott seems to set out to defend ‘Scientism’ the “purported fallacy in which people naively believe that science can solve everything.”

Although he kind of cheats because at the end he says:

By holding scientific theories, which can be and are disproven, they trained themselves in Doubt. And that Doubt continues to serve them when they branch into other areas where theories cannot be disproven so easily. And maybe they will be less easily swayed by attractive verbal arguments.

And that is why I consider myself a scientismist. I know it is supposed to be a perjorative, but I am reclaiming it. And I know it has many definitions, but this one is mine:

A view of hypothesis-space that accounts for human fallibilities, as revealed by past experiences.

And a very, very high burden of proof before zeroing in on any one area of that space.

Which seems a little different from actual Scientism — but I agree with it, and I like it, so I’m not complaining too hard.

11. Scientific Freud

In this article, Scott points out that cognitive behavioral therapy and psychoanalysis have been found to have roughly the same level of evidentiary support across several large meta-analyses. This surprised me greatly. So Scott wonders if perhaps “psychotherapies work by having a charismatic, caring person listen to your problems and then do ritualistic psychotherapy-sounding things to you, but not by any of the exercises or theories of the specific therapy itself.”

An interesting discussion on how to evaluate different kinds of evidence follows.

10. Thank You for Doing Something Ambiguously Between Smoking and Not Smoking

In this article, Scott explores the concept of fungibility — the idea that certain things can substitute for one another. As an example, he uses e-cigarettes to illustrate how fungibility plays out in practice.

So let’s accept that using e-cigarettes will get you addicted and set you back a lot of money and otherwise be annoying but probably not deadlier than anything else you do on a daily basis. What then?

Well, in that case, it’s worse than not smoking but much much better than smoking. And whether or not their existence is a good thing depends on what they funge against. Do they funge against smoking tobacco or not smoking at all?

The main point is that people sometimes get too caught up in how bad something is (like the e-cigarettes), without realizing that it "funges" against something even worse — and that this tradeoff should be taken into account when making decisions. True.

E-cigarettes are literally the exact same thing as something that’s given out to anyone who asks in convenience stores, except without the cancer. To suddenly hold them to an extremely high standard of safety seems like a fallacy of fungibility.

Scott Alexander

9. All Debates Are Bravery Debates

This article is titled the way it is because Scott had previously criticized what he called "bravery debates" — arguments about which group is more persecuted, oppressed, or holds a minority opinion (and is therefore braver for expressing it). He found these kinds of debates toxic and unproductive.

But now he’s reconsidering, suggesting that maybe many debates have to involve this element — because it’s kind of necessary to know which group is suffering more, since it’s hard to micro-target advice or policy to the level of the individual.

It’s really hard to target advice at exactly the people who need it. You can’t go around giving everyone surveys to see how selfish they are, and give half of them Atlas Shrugged and half of them the collected works of Peter Singer. […] To a first approximation, all you can do is saturate society with pro-selfishness or anti-selfishness messages, and realize you’ll be hurting a select few people while helping the majority.

Thus, if you can only saturate society with one kind of advice, it makes sense to figure out which of two “opposing groups” is more oppressed, to target their issues.

I’m not sold on the idea that we can only broadcast one kind of advice throughout society, but the part of the article I found most interesting was the observation that different people need different advice depending on what they’ve over-indexed on growing up.

One person might grow up learning to be too selfish, another to be too self-sacrificing, and so they end up needing very different kinds of counsel. When they eventually find their favorite thinkers, they might land on opposite sides of some cultural debate — not because they disagree at a foundational level, but because they’ve gravitated toward opposite solutions to their problems, without realizing both sets of advice are valid.

It’s much easier to be charitable in political debates when you view the two participants as coming from two different cultures that err on opposite sides, each trying to propose advice that would help their own culture, each being tragically unaware that the other culture exists.

8. Valleys-Have-Two-Sides

I really appreciated this short article; first because it’s short (I like my signal-to-noise ratio high), and second because it says something I think is true.

Scott points out that political ideologies have a bad habit of comparing "our gritty reality to their beautiful thought experiment." They promise utopias without accounting for the friction of the real world.

He then tells us that neoreactionaries fall into exactly this trap: they imagine a benevolent monarch ruling wisely over society, just like the communists imagined their worker’s paradise. But instead of comparing their utopia to other utopias, they compare it directly to our messy, imperfect reality — and of course it comes out looking better than it should.

The opposite of perfect unimpeded progress up the right side of the valley is perfect unimpeded progress up the left side of the valley. The opposite of attempted progress up the left side dragged down by lingering rightists is attempted progress up the right side dragged down by lingering leftists.

7. Nature Is Not a Slate It’s a Series of Levers

In this article, Scott says, “being raised by criminals has no effect on anyone’s personality.” I was shocked.

I couldn’t imagine how growing up around criminals wouldn’t affect someone's personality. But then I realized there was a catch: I wasn’t thinking about the right definition of "personality."

Parenting can massively influence specific outcomes like academic achievement, religious beliefs, criminal behavior, and mental health. But Scott — being a psychiatrist in training — was thinking about the technically correct definition of personality, involving traits like introversion vs. extroversion, or agreeableness vs. disagreeableness.

Research suggests that when it comes to these traits, parenting matters a lot less than almost everyone thinks, if it matters at all. Which was still very surprising to me but less so.

Anyway, the main point of the article is that using our knowledge of human nature to design good policies is a smart strategy — and that people who ignore human nature usually have a much harder time making their ideas work.

But my point is that if I’m progressive – a label I am not entirely comfortable with but which people keep trying to pin on me – this is my progressivism. The idea of using knowledge of human nature to create a structure with a few clever little lever taps that encourage people to perform in effective and prosocial ways. It’s a lot less ambitious than “LET’S TOTALLY REMAKE EVERY ASPECT OF SOCIETY AS A UTOPIA”, but it’s a lot more practical.

6. We Wrestle Not with Flesh and Blood but Against Powers and Principalities

This article starts by wondering what would happen if we granted the neoreactionary premise that the past really was better, and concludes that it probably wouldn’t matter anyway, because we can’t turn back the clock.

For Scott, "the biggest changes in history have been predetermined reactions to different technological conditions", not the results of political movements. The political movements are just the puppets of technological progress, with “Vast Formless Things” like the Industrial Revolution pulling the strings behind the scenes.

But trying to reverse massive shifts like the Industrial Revolution is both basically impossible and extremely risky. If that’s what the neoreactionaries are aiming for, they’re tilting at windmills.

So this is my first beef with Reactionaries. They see someone identifying as Progressive saying something – Gloria Steinem pushing for women’s rights or something – and they say “Oh no, that awful Progressive Gloria Steinem is screwing up our traditional gender roles. If only she would be quiet, everything would go back to normal!”

Gloria Steinem is a puppet. If she’s part of some movement, even a large saecular movement calling itself Progressivism, they, too, are puppets. It is stupid to get upset at puppets. If you rip them up, the puppeteer will get new ones.

If you don’t like women’s lib, your enemy isn’t Gloria Steinem. Your enemy is the Vast Formless Thing controlling Gloria Steinem. In this case, that would be the demographic transition.

[…]

I suspect that the most valuable features of past societies – the ones that we read fantasy books to recapture, the ones that make Renaissance Faires and Medieval Times so attractive – have nothing to do with politics and cannot be restored through politics. In order to regain them, you’re going to have to roll back the Industrial Revolution. Needless to say, that makes fighting against the demographic transition look easy.

5. Who by Very Slow Decay

Scott Alexander describes the absolutely horrific state of end-of-life care — how we prolong life until it becomes a sick caricature of itself. It’s a harrowing read.

He explains that most doctors, when facing their own deaths, choose to engage as little as possible with the dystopian ‘end of life’ healthcare system they've spent their lives working within.

While reading the piece, I couldn’t stop thinking about Daniel Kahneman — one of the fathers of decision theory — who chose assisted suicide in Switzerland in 2024.

4. If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics

Scott notices that sometimes our initial intuitions about the world are very very wrong

Remember the Bayes mammogram problem? The correct answer is 7.8%; most doctors (and others) intuitively feel like the answer should be about 80%. So doctors – who are specifically trained in having good intuitive judgment about diseases – are wrong by an order of magnitude. And it “only” being one order of magnitude is not to the doctors’ credit: by changing the numbers in the problem we can make doctors’ answers as wrong as we want.

So the doctors probably would be better off explicitly doing the Bayesian calculation.

He then argues that in some cases, it's better to just make up some rough numbers and run calculations on them, rather than relying on intuition alone. Doing so often leads to more accurate answers than we might suspect.

I like this idea. Math is a tool that makes System 2 thinking easier. At the very least, it forces one to formalize a problem more clearly, and this can help in understanding it better. Good advice for getting a quick handle on things.

Some things work okay on System 1 reasoning. Other things work badly. Really really badly. Factor of a hundred badly

3. The Poor You Will Always Have With You

In this response article, Scott Alexander explains how he sees societal change happening: for him values shift in response to economic, material, and technological conditions — it's not the values themselves that drive social change.

It's Urbanization + Growth -> Social Change -> Progressive Values

not

Urbanization + Growth -> Progressive Values -> Social Change

He argues that neoreactionaries adopt the latter mistaken framework — believing that values drive societal change — and as a result, they make big errors in their lucubrations (yes, 2013 was the year of articles against neoreaction).

I think this is a really useful way of looking at social change, and it lines up with how I think about the evolution of norms under "utilitarian naturalism." So of course I’m going to like this article — it flatters my preconceptions.

2. 90% of all Claims About the Problems with Medical Studies are Wrong

Scott is rightly preoccupied with how people interpret the true fact that much research is wrong or fails replication. Some say “this proves the medical establishment is clueless and hopelessly irrational and that two smart people working in a basement for five minutes can discover a new medical science far better than what all doctors could have produced in seventy years.”

So he takes some time to explain how scientific consensus actually work in practice.

Doctors are mostly reading famous influential studies like the ones mentioned above, which are at worst 40% and at best 5% wrong.

[…]

When doctors say that, for example, iron supplements help anaemia, it’s not because they hit iron on their Big Chart O’ Human Metabolic Pathways, then ran a single study, got p = .05, and rushed off to publish a medical textbook. It’s because they knew hemoglobin had iron in it, there are at least 21 randomized controlled studies, probably some had p-values closer to .001 than to .05 even though I don’t have any of them in front of me to check, and eventually some really really smart statisticians at the Cochrane Collaboration gave it their seal of approval.

Understanding the practical epistemology surrounding scientific consensus is of great importance, not just for interpreting medical research, but for making sense of academic findings in general.

Unfortunately, this article did not exactly spark a golden age of enlightenment, since twelve years later the situation has seemingly managed to get even worse.

1. A Thrive Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum

Scott floats a hypothesis about the origins of the two souls of the political spectrum.

My hypothesis is that rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment.

I have a soft spot for hypotheses like these, the kind that offer a different perspective on things we usually take for granted.

Scott walks through a list of reasons why he thinks his theory might be true — though he also has to admit there’s some counterevidence.

I admit some confusions. For example, it seems weird that poor people, the people who are actually desperate and insecure, are often leftist, whereas rich people, the ones who are actually completely safe, are often rightist.

But twelve years later, that counterevidence has more or less crumbled. If anything, the voting trends among poorer voters are starting to look like evidence in his favor. Some might even go so far as to say that Scott’s "theory" predicted the shift before it happened.

Maybe he really is as insightful as the legends say.