Slate Star Codex is a long-form blog written by a San Francisco Bay Areapsychiatrist known by his partial name Scott Alexander. The blog focused on science, medicine, philosophy, politics, and futurism. The blog's name was based on an approximate anagram of "Scott Alexander". Slate Star Codex was launched in 2013, and was briefly 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. As of July 22, 2020, the blog was back online. 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". 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. 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. The blog has been used as an academic source on American politics. 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". 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.
Reception
In 2019, the site was receiving around 20,000 page views per day. 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. Slate Star Codex was described by The Daily Beast as a "widely read site". 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." 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'." The New Yorker describes Slate Star Codex as "perhaps the premier public-facing venue of the 'rationalist' community". Economist Tyler Cowen has called Scott Alexander "a thinker who is influential among other writers". Conor Friedersdorf, writing for The Atlantic, has regularly included articles from the blog in his annual top 100list of "The Best of Journalism".
Potential surname dissemination
"Scott Alexander" is the author's real first and middle name. 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. 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. 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." 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. National Review criticized the Times for applying its anonymity policy inconsistently. The New Statesman said that it was "difficult to see how Scott Alexander's full name is so integral to the NYT 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". 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. 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. As reported by The Daily Beast, the criticism by Alexander and his supporters caused considerable internal debate among the Times staff. 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 psychologistJonathan Haidt, computer scientist and blogger Scott Aaronson, and philosopher Peter Singer.
