27 ms·

Still alive

898 points by Lewton 6y ago

lordnacho 6y ago
Why isn't it just called slatestarcodex?
- ShannonAlther 6y ago
  On his original blog the author once said that he was considering making the title of his new blog an anagram, and that the closest options were Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten. We should be grateful he didn't go with Trans Latex Coeds
  - deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- fossuser 6y ago
  I think he was looking for something new (that was actually a perfect anagram of Scott Alexander).
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  Someone on twitter observed it would have been called "extranslocated"
legerdemain 6y ago
> Therapists are supposed to be blank slates, available > for patients to project their conflicts and fantasies > upon. Their distant father, their abusive boyfriend, > their whatever. They must not know you as a person. I don't read Slate Star Codex, nor do I visit a therapist. I don't know if this is something that's peculiar to the author, or genuinely universal among therapists. But it sounds nuts and... kind of creepy? I'm happy to believe in a culture of professional detachment among therapists and doctors, but to believe that you are a blank slate seems kind of delusional. The therapist has some perceived race, gender, and age. They dress a certain way. They have a certain accent when speaking. Patients may prefer a male or female therapist, or a therapist who shares some other background with them. Patients probably want the confidence that their therapist will not dismiss their concerns and will actually help them make progress. At this point calling the relationship a "blank slate" seems delusional. Sure, maybe the therapist is such a perfect mimic that they're not actually female, middle-aged, Black, or have experience working with trans patients. Maybe this is all just a mirage projected by their professionalism. Maybe there is no therapist, and I'm just sitting on a couch alone, in an empty room.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  He does say "is supposed to be". He's describing some kind of ideal to live up to, not the way anything can actually be once you get down to messy reality.
  - legerdemain 6y ago
    Yes, I'm questioning it as a goal. I don't know what fraction of patients project their abusive boyfriend onto their therapist. That honestly sounds like an account of Freudian psychotherapy from 100 years ago. If I was to seek therapy for myself, I would actively seek a therapist who looked and sounded likely to help me. I would hope to have a conversation with them about their background, their experiences, and their familiarity with my culture. If I come from, say, India, I would want the therapist to understand my relationship with my parents, instead of medicalizing it. And if I did walk into a therapist's office and find it barren and grey, and the therapist completely and utterly avoidant of any personal topics... Well, that would remind me of getting polygraphed at the NSA Friendship Annex just outside the BWI airport, by a cold and hostile interviewer. That's not a fun experience.
    - ska 6y ago
      > I would actively seek a therapist who looked and sounded likely to help me. And a therapists goal is to feel like that person for all of their prospective clients, ideally. The less you can pigeonhole them into social/religious/political/etc boxes the better, from this point of view.
      - legerdemain 6y ago
        Yes, and I object to that goal being either achievable or reasonable. I'm sure some therapists believe it is both, and that they are some kind of universal therapists. I assume these are the therapists I hear about from friends and online acquaintances when they describe a therapist as friendly, approachable, but ultimately both clueless and hopeless. I have mostly heard this kind of feedback from non-white and LGBT friends, for what it's worth.
Metacelsus 6y ago
I'm glad to see that Scott's back. His previous blog was quite impressive.
Smaug123 6y ago
This link is the new home of Scott Alexander, of Slate Star Codex fame; he stopped blogging for much of last year, but has returned. Here's to many more years of intensely interesting in-depth inquiries packed with perfect puns.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gringoDan 6y ago
I'm glad that Scott is back (and that Substack will make it easy for him to get paid for his work). That said, some of the best things about Slate Star Codex were stumbling on the archives, going down a rabbit hole of old LessWrong posts, the links in the blogroll. Substack is much worse than a standard WordPress blog when it comes to that sort of casual reading and creating a permanent home for posts that are timeless. [1] I'm all for creators being paid for their work, I just hope that SSC doesn't lose anything that made it special with the new platform. [1] Applied Divinity Studies / Nintil on Substack: https://nintil.com/substack-milquetoast https://nintil.com/substack-milquetoast
war1025 6y ago
For the uninitiated, what sort of content is Slate Star Codex known for? I see he kind of addresses it in his initial post. That description seemed pretty broad and open ended though.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > For the uninitiated, what sort of content is Slate Star Codex known for? IIRC, it's a blog that's very influential in the "rationalist" community, which I think spun out of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong. So very long-winded posts on miscellaneous topics.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    Why put the word rationalist in quotes?
    - tptacek 6y ago
      Because the word has multiple meanings, some of them subtextual. The quotes don't need to be derisive.
    - zepto 6y ago
      Because it’s a label rather than a descriptor.
    - mkr-hn 6y ago
      I don't know about them, but I've found the community around it both intelligent and accepting. That's not what I've come to expect from the word rationalist.
      - mrec 6y ago
        Agreed. Much less of a Mensa syndrome going on. I remember at the peak of the 2016 post-election meltdown the SSC subreddit hosted a sort of "ask Trump supporters anything" thread. Despite the absolute insanity of the time and only a minuscule fraction of the sub's readership supporting Trump, the conversation was interesting, calm and uniformly civil. There were a few Social Justice types that used to comment there too; again, all very civil, although there was sometimes the sense that they were regarded as an interesting zoo exhibit.
gisely 6y ago
Nice to know Balaji Srinivasan encouraged him to commit war crimes against nytimes journalists and he appreciated the advice.
- deleted 6y ago
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- dang 6y ago
  Please don't do this here. We're trying for something other than flamewar hell, regardless of the topic. Thoughtful critique is welcome of course. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - gisely 6y ago
    Here's the quote from the article: "He had some very creative suggestions for how to deal with journalists. I'm not sure any of them were especially actionable, at least not while the Geneva Convention remains in effect. But it was still a good learning experience." If pointing out something very dark was stated in the article that was shared is considered flamebait here, I think maybe that reflects a desire on the part of this community to look the other way when the people they respect do ugly things.
    - Lazare 6y ago
      Writing is a way we communicate ideas. You did not successfully pick up on the idea Scott was communicating here. Maybe that means the writing was bad; maybe it means your ability to comprehend vernacular English failed you in this instance. Either way, neither Scott nor anyone commenting here thinks "war crimes are good", so your increasingly heated arguments that they are actually quite bad is just a waste of time and energy.
      - gisely 6y ago
        No he just thinks joking about his friends encouraging him to commit them is funny. I just don't find joking about that to be funny. Maybe I'm just a sour pickle, but the last four years in the states have made me wary of people who find a suggestion of war crimes humorous.
fouc 6y ago
https://www.paranormalmind.com/chess-piece-illusion https://www.paranormalmind.com/chess-piece-illusion
walrus01 6y ago
> I think the New York Times wanted to write a fairly boring article about me, but some guideline said they had to reveal subjects' real identities, if they knew them, unless the subject was in one of a few predefined sympathetic categories (eg sex workers). I have a theory that whatever policies exist within the NYTimes now, are quite possibly a consequence of this guy's actions as a "reporter": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair on another topic: > Sure, I might get SWATted, but realistically that's a really scary fifteen seconds before the cops apologize and go away. Sure, that sounds great, unless you a person of color, or you happen to own a small collection of one hundred percent legal firearms, or god forbid you're simultaneously a person of color AND you own firearms. That whole sentence reeks of such class privilege I can't even begin to convey the depth of my disgust. You would think that a professional psychiatrist, of all people, would be slightly familiar with the statistics for the number of people mistakenly shot dead by police in the USA every year.
- vgel 6y ago
  re: SWAT: His point was a) that he is privileged and b) that was what the NYT was thinking about why it's ok for them to dox him, not what he thinks...
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > b) that was what the NYT was thinking about why it's ok for them to dox him It's not really doxing if you posted your own personal info publicly. At least once, in 2017 when he was less careful, Alexander publicly outed himself under his real name as the author of his blog. IIRC, it's a pretty core journalistic principle that subjects don't get to make decisions about how their story is presented.
    - vgel 6y ago
      Maybe journalists think that, but lots of people (including Scott and me) don't. I believe people have a right to privacy. > when he was less careful... publicly outed himself Is the NYT journalists, or hostiles? Usually needing opsec is reserved for activists and criminals hiding from oppressive governments, not bloggers who reasonably want a private life.
snoshy 6y ago
This whole episode serves as an interesting datapoint in how long a public person needs to stay out of the spotlight in order to return to their pseudoanonymity after being threatened to be outed by the media. It's not common to face such a threat, and it's not common for those threatened this way to even try to return to their former online identity and life. Somewhat reassuring to me that it's this short.
- bialpio 6y ago
  I'd not treat it as a data point for that - he's no longer anonymous at all, since he signed his name at the end of the post, and links to his psychiatry practice. It looks like it took him that much time to decide that he can make posting under his full name work for him.
  - snoshy 6y ago
    You're quite right, and I stand corrected. Although it's not the datapoint I suggested previously, I suppose there is another datapoint to be gathered: for someone in his position, perhaps nuking the world (physical and virtual) is the only way forward when dealing with such a threat. He basically had to quit his job and career as a psychiatrist as well as delete SSC in a way, in order to continue with his online no-longer-pseudo-identity.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      He didn't quit his career, but he had to quit his job. Fortunately, he's at the stage where he can start his own practice (a somewhat experimental, no less). But if this situation happened just a few years earlier, it would most likely have destroyed his career prospects completely.
  - solveit 6y ago
    He actually decided to drop his pseudonymity a few months back, but it took time to get himself in a position where he could do that responsibly.
snakeboy 6y ago
I do hope Scott will some day restore the old website to its original layout rather than the default WordPress template it's had since he pulled it. At least for archival and nostalgic value. Does anyone know why SubStack doesn't allow more customization of the blogs? I feel like every one is nearly identical in font/layout/"feel".
- freddie_mercury 6y ago
  SubStack is for e-mail not blogging. All email has nearly identical font/layout/feel. Substack is not a blogging platform.
  - i_am_proteus 6y ago
    As long as Substack hosts a blog-like format for its newsletters, it's also a blogging platform.
  - input_sh 6y ago
    I wish at the very least they'd make the font customizable by the readers. I can't stand looking at that font they chose for a prolonged period of time. The only way I read stuff published on Substack is by proxying the content (reader mode, RSS feeds, Pocket).
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Does anyone know why SubStack doesn't allow more customization of the blogs? I feel like every one is nearly identical in font/layout/"feel". Because it's about the content -- it's literally an emailing list subscription service.
- applieddivinity 6y ago
  You inspired me to customize it myself: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/slatestarsubstack/ https://applieddivinitystudies.com/slatestarsubstack/ If you download a chrome extension and paste in the provided styles, you can get a pretty good approximation of the original page!
floren 6y ago
> So I'm going to try to start a medical practice that provides great health care to uninsured people for 4x less than what anyone else charges. Interesting note buried way down in the article. I'm looking forward to hearing more about this in future.
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  Let's be honest. It's still going to be unaffordable for those without insurance.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Nope - he's charging $35/month.
    - ketamine__ 6y ago
      For how many hours?
      - gbear605 6y ago
        20 minutes / month + unlimited emergency phone calls and emails. It’s mainly intended either as a way for people with long term psychiatric needs to be able to get medications and be monitored without having to also have an expensive health insurance plan, or in conjunction with a separate therapist.
        ketamine__ 6y ago
        Is the first appointment an hour?
        gbear605 6y ago
        Yes
      - PoignardAzur 6y ago
ArtDev 6y ago
Here are a number of his articles. They are quite good: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/ https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/
nineplay 6y ago
For anyone who hasn't yet had the pleasure, Scott's (fiction) book Unsong is magnificent. It's one of the best books I read last year, and I read constantly. http://unsongbook.com/ http://unsongbook.com/ Ebook https://github.com/JasonGross/unsong_scraper https://github.com/JasonGross/unsong_scraper Sample: “I AM BUSY. I AM TRYING TO FIX CONTINENTAL DRIFT.” “I…didn’t know it was broken.” Uriel’s face became more animated, his speech faster. “IT HAS BEEN BROKEN FOR FIVE WEEKS AND FIVE DAYS. I THINK IT BROKE WHEN I RELOADED NEW ZEALAND FROM A BACKUP COPY, BUT I DO NOT KNOW WHY. MY SYNCHRONIZATION WAS IMPECCABLE AND THE CHANGE PROPAGATED SIMULTANEOUSLY ACROSS ALL SEPHIROT. I THINK SOMEBODY BOILED A GOAT IN ITS MOTHER’S MILK. IT IS ALWAYS THAT. I KEEP TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO DO IT, BUT NOBODY LISTENS.”
- jarbus 6y ago
  I didn’t know he wrote a book, thanks!
- rognjen 6y ago
  When it comes to humor like that only HHGTTG -- that I (un)fortunately read first -- has been entertaining. Everything after that seemed as if it was trying to emulate it.
  - samatman 6y ago
    My father, sadly for him, read Vonnegut before Douglas Adams, and felt that Hitchhiker's was just trying to emulate him. I didn't inherit this gene, happily for me, and enjoy all three authors a great deal. If anyone wants to recommend something else in this vein, please do; I'll probably like it.
    - Nition 6y ago
      HHGTTG was absolutely trying to emulate The Sirens Of Titan. They're both great though.
      - loriverkutya 6y ago
reducesuffering 6y ago
Scott is a "national treasure." His intelligence, wit, and creative thinking oozes from his writing. Whatever he proceeds to do with substack and the new medical practice, I only wish that he would make the most impact he can on people. Because it's clear to me his heart is in the best place and he has the wit to elevate and inform many many more people.
ve55 6y ago
I particularly liked the emotional end to this post, and I'm very glad he ended it with such a strong and positive tone. Online communities are able to connect people that, before the Internet, would have had a very difficult time finding the right peers for them. Some communities adjacent to SSC (and some near HN) have helped me find some amazingly smart and cool people, and I'm very thankful that they exist (and that Scott can continue blogging as well), and if anything I hope we can encourage significantly more niche community building on the Internet, and with many more modalities than blogs, forums, and comments (which SSC indeed has). His notes about people being afraid to express themselves, have open discussions, be honest, and share with one another are pretty saddening however, and I hope that we can progress towards a better area here, even if progress sometimes seems slow or impossible.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  Absolutely. Time and money are important resources. But for myself, and I imagine many other people, the single richest form of currency in life is the trade in ideas. It is how my relationships intertwine with experience and the trading of ideas that matters most. This is part of what makes SCC so good, it is packed with amazing and rich ideas. The internet facilitates the trade in ideas (and relationships!) and I hope we do not lose it.
enw 6y ago
What's the TL;DR? Who is this? Why are they important? Why would NYT write about them? And threaten them? Sorry there's just so much text I don't have time to read through it all, but I'm curious!
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Scott Alexander, a very, very popular blogger deleted his blog because the NYT was going to dox him. After uprooting his life to deal with that he has returned to blogging. Many people expressed their support, for which he is very grateful. The NYT is still committed to doxxing people if they feel like it, which Scott abhors. As part of radically changing his life he quit his previous psychiatrist job and is going to see if it’s possible to make a living treating the uninsured for a lot cheaper than most psychiatrists. He signs off with his real name.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    Alexander's name was public (in fact: it was, before the drama occurred, exposed by one of the most naive possible Google queries for it --- as well, some of his better-known writing was originally published under his real name) prior to his encounter with the NYT; Alexander's demand was that the NYT pretend the fact of his name was a secret. The principled arguments about how the NYT was in the wrong revolve around an NYT story simply being more visible than the other public places you could read his name; of course, that's true for practically anybody and any source, the NYT being one of the most visible sources in the world. He gives good reasons for not wanting his name more public than it already is; they're hard to argue with. But some genies are hard to put back in the bottle, and reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which the NYT is obligated to help with the attempt.
    - mcphage 6y ago
      > reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which the NYT is obligated to help with the attempt. How far was he asking them to go?
    - yellowstuff 6y ago
morpheuskafka 6y ago
> I got emails that were like that, only it was grad students. Apparently if you have a blog about your field, that can make it harder to get or keep a job in academia. I'm not sure what we think we're gaining by ensuring the smartest and best educated people around aren't able to talk openly about the fields they're experts in, but I hope it's worth it. This is very concerning, because it lends credence to the general public's idea of an "ivory tower," as well as academia's own idea that it can somehow achieve perfect neutrality through apersonality.
- caterama 6y ago
  This is also concerning because it contradicts the general sentiment here on HN that You Should Be Blogging. Maybe you shouldn't... or at very least, there's more to consider than first appears.
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    A lot of things that may be sound career advice in SF tech scene would make terrible advice for other fields and other places. One example is frequent job hops. SF software companies may not judge you negatively because of it, but Zurich architecture firms (as a random example) might.
    - YuriNiyazov 6y ago
      Depends on what you mean by frequent. At a SF software company, and I look at multiple 6-9 month stints as very big red flags that must have overwhelming evidence in the other direction to be considered. OTOH 2 - 3 years is perfectly fine; I can maybe imagine “Zurich architecture firms” viewing 2-3 years as flighty, if they are used to employees that used to be there decades.
  - lmg643 6y ago
    You should be blogging...and you can, as long as you avoid saying any of the Things You Can't Say, which seems to mean following a template, which means the content gets bland and repetitive - unless it is technical, in which case it's special interest and the censors lose interest. (That's actually my best guess as to why HN has stayed high quality all these years - minimal politics.) Bloging, or writing, is just thinking out loud. Thinking about the real world outside of technology can easily yield heterodox conclusions that are better off not published these days.
DelightOne 6y ago
> Some of the steps they take seem extreme - the Internet is a scarier place than I thought - but I've taken some of what they said to heart, rejected the rest in a calculated way, and realized realistically I was never that protected anyhow. So here we are. What steps?
- bhelkey 6y ago
  I would be interested in this as well but I believe that the omission was intentional. In cases like this, enumerating the precautions one is taking (and by extension the precautions one has rejected) would be unwise.
  - DelightOne 6y ago
    Agreed. Though it would be good to know what to do then if its unavoidable.
sombremesa 6y ago
I don't know how exactly I found Slate Star Codex, but it has (had) been one of the scant handful of RSS feeds I've been subscribed to and enjoyed for quite a while. I have a blog that I'd like to delete as well, but it was on Blogspot, and circumstances are such that I have no access to it whatsoever (thanks to the Google acquisition and the eminently unhelpful Google support), while it remains fully open to the public. My only hope now is to try and distance myself from it on the strength of how common my real name is.
- hntrader 6y ago
  What are the other feeds/blogs that you can recommend with similarly good content?
  - sombremesa 6y ago
    Here are two other blogs I found through the same (now unknown) source: - https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ - https://jasoncollins.blog/ https://jasoncollins.blog/ Though they've gotten a bit more topical and/or political in recent times.
Bayart 6y ago
I've never heard of that man, but his post was a pleasant bit of my day and his writing is excellent. It's the first time in a long time I've properly went through a text linked on HN, front to back. My habit is to parse at break-neck pace, squeeze the meaningful marrow out of it and then go to the comment page to exercise my God-given right of inventing an opinion I didn't know I had a minute prior. Good luck to him.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ralfd 6y ago
  You are in for a treat: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/ https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/ https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/ https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/ https://danwahl.net/blog/slate-star-codex https://danwahl.net/blog/slate-star-codex
llacb47 6y ago
He's a talented writer.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bedobi 6y ago
Downvote away, but I really don't understand why psuedo-intellectuals who write pretentious posts full of meaningless nonsense are so popular on HackerNews. This guy runs a psychiatry called "Lorien", lives in a group-housing-community called "Valinor", and spams "rationalist" neckbeard blog posts on the internet. Does that seem like a well-adjusted individual you would entrust your treatment resistant depression, let alone mental health in general to? I don't know about you, but to me it seems like a comical case of the psychiatrist being the one who's in need of help. + psychiatry and mental health aside, are his opinions on all the countless fields and topics he writes about (in implied expert capacity) worth listening to? Keep in mind, each of those fields and topics have plenty of actual experts to go around. (eg in Economics, take a pick from the dozens of top economists in the IGM Expert panel https://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel https://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel)
- DaniloDias 6y ago
  It’s clear you don’t like it. It’s weird that you are mad others do. In what way does it traumatize you that other people like and shared a thing?
  - bedobi 6y ago
    I really don't like it. I'm not mad others like things I don't. I guess what does bug me is, the type of people who generate and like this kind of drivel have a strong tendency to walk around thinking they know better than Literally Everyone(tm), while not realizing they themselves in fact know next to nothing about all these fields and topics, and are themselves really no better than anti-vaxxers or chrystal healers - they'll literally just make up and believe anything as long as it comes with the right labels and has a certain air of what they perceive as rationality to it. For some reason, the HackerNews and Tech scene in general are very susceptible to this. (techies share the bizarre hubris of thinking they know better than everyone at everything, and can improve and "disrupt" any field) Economics and health care especially are apparently "solved" fields where literally every one of these people are actually hidden gem PhD level experts. If you think I'm exaggerating, ask them a question about economics or health care, and listen as they "expertly" explain Everything(tm) to you. Ffs, even the label "rationalist" itself is pathetic, and very revealing. It's basically a way to signal "I am right, take my word for it".
cwkoss 6y ago
"I've read lots of interesting discussion on how much power tech oligarchs should or shouldn't be allowed to have. But this is the first time I've seen someone suggest their powers should include a magic privacy-destroying gaze, where just by looking at someone they can transform them into a different kind of citizen with fewer rights. Is Paul Graham some weird kind of basilisk, such that anyone he stares at too long turns into fair game?" This is an interesting concept that I haven't heard discussed by society much, but seems like its true. The powerful have the ability to make someone go viral without their consent.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  And it's not even an ability they wield themselves - it happens by association. So you can't just go and ask 'pg, would you please not look directly at Scott - it's the journalists noticing, "hey, he has celebrities in his fanbase", and using this as an argument why he himself is of public interest. Essentially second-order paparazzism.
htshnr 6y ago
"I got an email from Balaji Srinivasan, a man whose anti-corporate-media crusade straddles a previously unrecognized border between endearing and terrifying. He had some very creative suggestions for how to deal with journalists. I'm not sure any of them were especially actionable, at least not while the Geneva Convention remains in effect. But it was still a good learning experience. In particular, I learned never to make an enemy of Balaji Srinivasan. I am humbled by his support." Top notch.
- morsch 6y ago
  In another context I'd find such oblique references to violence crass and offensive. I don't particularly enjoy them here, either.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - morsch 6y ago
    Okay, I changed my mind, on second read I can tell that he's being ironic. Wow. That is pretty top notch.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  You think threatening violence against journalists is "top notch"? Is that what Hacker News is now? Has it really descended that far into actual fascism?
  - arc-in-space 6y ago
    This is an overly hostile reading of the above comment, Scott certainly didn't, and wouldn't, threaten violence against anyone.
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      He will not threaten it. But he sure isn't doing a damn thing to condemn it, and seems positively giddy about having the support of those who apparently do want to threaten journalists.
modulusshift 6y ago
Huh. I'm pretty sure I remember blog posts by Scott Siskind back in the early 2010's. And I've never heard of Scott Alexander. So that was a weird perspective to come at this post from. I wish him the best of luck.
claw_howitzer 6y ago
eagerly awaiting his followup to "You Are Still Crying Wolf"
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  The original article still seems appropriate tbh.
vincentmarle 6y ago
I am confused as to why someone who apparently has a large following decides to host their content on a Substack subdomain...
- strstr 6y ago
  He is getting paid to.
andredz 6y ago
I discovered SSC through this blog: http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog which I discovered thanks to this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18176929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18176929 and I can heartily recommend it. That comment, and more specifically, Aron's blog have made a huge impact in my life. I've spent hundreds of hours reading it and losing myself in intellectual rabbit holes, I've been introduced to many interesting topics, books and authors (such as Scott Alexander, G.K Chesterton and Gödel, Escher, Bach (which I have on my nightstand)), and I've come to truly believe in God. The comments section is usually very interesting as well.
- mssundaram 6y ago
  Someone else in another comment mentioned his work might appeal to atheists, so it's interesting you mention now believing in God. I grew up as an atheist but later in life returned to the eternal Dharma (Hinduism) and thoroughly have experienced God
  - sundarurfriend 6y ago
    > Someone else in another comment mentioned his work might appeal to atheists, so it's interesting you mention now believing in God. It's probably the G.K.Chesterton influence that led to that. Scott definitley writes from an atheist viewpoint, although like a lot of the rationalist community he has a soft spot for Buddhism - see for eg. his short story Samsara (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/).
    - andredz 6y ago
      Chesterton certainly played a role, but it was mostly the posts on Aron's blog themselves. The story is like this: I was born into a christian family, but like many young people, and helped by some written works, some healthy amount skepticism, other not-so-healthy things, and what I saw inside and outside my social circles, I came to doubt my previous beliefs. Anyway, then I discovered Aron's blog, and it was like a new world open to me. Something that I've experienced very few times in my life; maybe when I found SICP/Lisp… And it could even ve said that I discovered that blog thanks to SICP since it went something like this: OCW > SICP > Paul Graham > Hacker News > (eventually) The Blog. ^^ Scott does write from an atheist viewpoint, since he is atheist, but even though I am not, I still enjoy his writing very much, just as I've liked many of PG's essays or LessWrong articles. It is not necessary to hold the same beliefs to enjoy intellectual fellowship/communion as it is (usually) exemplified by Hacker News itself. Also, if you want to, I can share with you some of my favorite articles there. I have a huge list though.
speleding 6y ago
For those who did not get the "Portal" references interspersed in the article, you can listen to it here: https://open.spotify.com/track/3za3bQrlpdEwcT2C4t5Cag?si=U97iNsBzRSym0bktIoP-YA https://open.spotify.com/track/3za3bQrlpdEwcT2C4t5Cag?si=U97...
vanderZwan 6y ago
> Also, my patients couldn't Google my name and find me immediately, which I was increasingly realizing the psychiatric community considered important. Could somebody tell the Swedes? When I looked up the name of a local therapist here, expecting to get a website of their practice, I found their Swedish personal number, private phone number and address as the first search result. Out of curiosity, I then tried looking up the names of the other therapists in her practice. Same issue. Apparently the government freely shares this kind of personal information unless you explicitly opt out! I emailed the them (through the practice website) that this surprised me and would never fly in my home country. Obviously, those therapists did not want me after that.
- mongol 6y ago
  I am surprised you found their personal number. This used to be commonplace but less and less so over the past decades.
- tephra 6y ago
  It's not that the government freely shares that information (they do some) but that they actually sell information to companies that then create searchable products on that data. And of course you can't generally opt out of the government selling you data (a friend litigated this and lost).
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Hm. GDPR disagrees.
- skrebbel 6y ago
  > Obviously, those therapists did not want me after that. Not obvious to me. Why didn't they?
  - vanderZwan 6y ago
    Because they were apparently incapable of distinguishing the messenger who reminded them that there are potentially scary patients out there from said actual potentially scary patients.
skinkestek 6y ago
Having most of my friends beaten up as a group on prime time TV by the national broadcaster quite recently this resonates deeply with me. The complete lack of care for the consequences it has for normal law abiding citizens and their children. And at the same time a good number of them are paranoid themselves: one particular friend of mine got in hot water because he included pictures of guns in a description of how he had been threatened by criminals, journalists made a story of how he was somehow threatening violence to journalists..!)
- prionassembly 6y ago
  I struggle to see how journalism has any positive value at all. Edit: Downvotes to this controversial statement are legitimate, but please be mindful of the nuance: "I struggle to see" is an expression of doubt, not certainty. I struggle to see because I'm believably told there's something there; if I was convinced there's no value, I'd phrased this completely differently.
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    It has enourmous positive value and I actively support it by subscribing to newspapers that I don't strictly need (or even have time to properly read). Other journalists around here have uncovered big problems in how we care for elderly, corruption etc etc etc. Journalists makes us aware of what is happening in Syria, US, UK etc so we can better compare different approaches. Journalists sometimes prevents war or at least sometimes puts an end to war crimes. The problem is we the quality varies extremely even for the same news outlet and even the same reporters - and we all suffer somewhat from Gell-Mann Amnesia.
    - prionassembly 6y ago
      Yes, information has positive value. Maybe what I said about journalism is best applied to “news media”. Journalists also do in-depth book-length work that’s less time-indexed and more atemporal. Have you seen the news segment in Wikipedia’s homepage? It directly leads you to a rabbit hole of information rather than build a narrative of any kind. Right now everybody knows not to speak to journalists — it’s a vampiric activity that will prey on your real life in ways you have no control over. I see all the upsides you see (I did say “struggle to find positive value”, not “know definitively there’s none) but the net result of journalists at work is dubious at best. Even a daily news cycle is more about maintaining narrative threads than exploring issues in depth, let alone the 24 x 7 x {style and audience} x {degrees of meta} x {filter bubbles} news space that floods current discourse.
Siira 6y ago
See https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/ https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/ for an anthology of Scott's works.
LockAndLol 6y ago
Uh...who is this guy and why were people trying to dox him?
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  known for his blog that is described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex
screye 6y ago
What's up with these substacks being so expensive. I have about 5-6 blogs that I really like, and 60$ a month is simply quite a lot. Now Scott is probably my favorite, so I'll subscribe.. but I would have liked to distribute my payments across all the ones I like more evenly.
miki123211 6y ago
Is the inability to subscribe a screen reader problem, or do other people face this too? I can't find a subscribe button anywhere, and I suspect that might be the reason, but I'm not sure how right I am.
- nchelluri 6y ago
  I see it in Chrome. Here's a link https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=menu&simple=true&next=https%3A%2F%2Fastralcodexten.substack.com%2Fp%2Fstill-alive https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=men...
fuzxi 6y ago
Isn't one of the golden rules of journalism "Don't give up your sources"? It's pretty disgusting that you can dox a source who specifically asked to remain anonymous and face no repercussions at all, professional or otherwise.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  He wasn't a source, he was the subject of the story. Journalists have done similar before with no professional repercussions. Naomi Wu is another example of similar.
wolverine876 6y ago
It seems intellectually dishonest to me: The job of every news organization is to obtain and publicize otherwise unavailable information, often information that some people want to keep hidden. Someone desiring to withhold the information is the norm, not a reason to make an exception. A journalist's obligation is to their readers. Withholding the identity of a public figure - especially someone who actively attempts to be an influential public figure - is not in their readers' interests. Their job is to inform readers. There is nothing unusual about identifying public figures; it's valuable to the public to know who is behind public actions. If the author is as intelligent and informed as he presents himself to be, he knows that. It's nothing like doxxing, the author knows it, and so do HN readers. The NYT wasn't going to provide his home address and social security number. It's dishonest of the author to say otherwise. To make a massive public stink about the article would of course just inflate his own public profile and spread his name further. Again, if he is the smart person he claims to be, he knows it and did it intentionally. Everyone on HN would know it. It's dishonest to act surprised, but fits the pattern of this sort of manipulative rhetoric - both play the victim and increase your public profile. It's also well-known that powerful people in Silicon Valley are actively engaged in a power play against the news media, also attempting to discredit it. I'm confident that the author knows that very well and knows that his actions will play a part in it. To ignore that is not honest; to claim it is coincidence seems hard to believe. (Also, the news media is a critical part of democracy and an open society; it's not clear the good of society, rather than the narrow interests of powerful people in SV, is on his mind.) Most of this claims are unverified and he offers no evidence. There's no reason I should trust him, especially given the dishonesty I already see. Finally, playing the victim card is a strong signal, IMHO, of an attempt to manipulate.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > Withholding the identity of a public figure - especially someone who actively attempts to be an influential public figure - is not in their readers' interests. What is the public interest justification for making his legal name a part of his identity in this case? Its not as though his legal name is relevant to the subject of the article. > There is nothing unusual about identifying public figures; it's valuable to the public to know who is behind public actions. This is a very interesting way to frame “having a blog”. Calling some blogger a public figure makes it seem like he’s a senator or something. Even moreso when you call a blog post a “public action” like its an act of congress or executive order. > It's nothing like doxxing, the author knows it, and so do HN readers. This is false. No one is confused or misled by the quite conventional use of “dox” to refer to a nonconsensual public revelation of the legal name of someone who was formerly known by a pseudonym to the majority of the public. > The NYT wasn't going to provide his home address and social security number. No, no one is that stupid. Rather we all understand that the NYT was going to put his legal name in their article, which was going to lead to marginally more opportunities for crazy people to mess with him. Since he’s already got crazy people messing with him, any marginal increase in opportunity is likely to lead to an increase in incidents. > It's dishonest of the author to say otherwise. Yeah I’m not seeing where he claimed that. Clearly the NYT isn’t going to expose themselves to any kind of lawsuit by publishing his address, and the threat vector comes from some malevolent actor using the name on a search engine to find the address themselves. I’m not sure how this inference escapes anyone literate enough to wade through one of scott’s articles. > Again, if he is the smart person he claims to be, he knows it and did it intentionally. Everyone on HN would know it. It's dishonest to act surprised Dude clearly does not think he is smart, his entire existence is an attempt to magnify his intellect with recursive use of instrumental reason. Besides its naive in 2020 to think that anyone, least of all “smart” people, do not have the same impulse control issues that normal people have. And there have been so many incidents of people causing actual harm to themselves and others through impulsive online behavior that there are books about it now, theres no real reason to consider siskind to be some evil mastermind thinking to himself “what’s bigger than having my real name and my blog in the NYT? Forcing the NYT to not write about me by summoning the entire internet <evil laugh>“ > It's also well-known that powerful people in Silicon Valley are actively engaged in a power play against the news media, also attempting to discredit it. I'm confident that the author knows that very well and knows that his actions will play a part in it. To ignore that is not honest; to claim it is coincidence seems hard to believe. (Also, the news media is a critical part of democracy and an open society; it's not clear the good of society, rather than the narrow interests of powerful people in SV, is on his mind.) Its well known that powerful people in the media are actively engaged in a power play against businesses (particularly sv) and attempting to discredit them. I’m confident you’re well aware of this and know that your reply has its own small role in the discussion. Also the technology to be heard, and strong norms towards privacy are key parts of democracy and an open society rather than the narrow interests of legacy media platforms that you seem to regard as representative of us all. > Most of this claims are unverified and he offers no evidence. There's no reason I should trust him, especially given the dishonesty I already see. Its a personal account, you haven’t identified anything that would even conceivably have a reference elsewhere. Is he supposed to record his phone call and put it online for you? Your earlier examples of dishonesty are not really worthy of the term. > Finally, playing the victim card is a strong signal, IMHO, of an attempt to manipulate. IMHO playing the persecutor card is a poorly thought response to an individual “playing the victim card” as you say. Perhaps next time don’t bother?

Still alive

898 points by Lewton 6y ago

lordnacho 6y ago

Why isn't it just called slatestarcodex?

ShannonAlther 6y ago
On his original blog the author once said that he was considering making the title of his new blog an anagram, and that the closest options were Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten. We should be grateful he didn't go with Trans Latex Coeds
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fossuser 6y ago
I think he was looking for something new (that was actually a perfect anagram of Scott Alexander).
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
Someone on twitter observed it would have been called "extranslocated"

legerdemain 6y ago

> Therapists are supposed to be blank slates, available > for patients to project their conflicts and fantasies > upon. Their distant father, their abusive boyfriend, > their whatever. They must not know you as a person. I don't read Slate Star Codex, nor do I visit a therapist. I don't know if this is something that's peculiar to the author, or genuinely universal among therapists. But it sounds nuts and... kind of creepy? I'm happy to believe in a culture of professional detachment among therapists and doctors, but to believe that you are a blank slate seems kind of delusional. The therapist has some perceived race, gender, and age. They dress a certain way. They have a certain accent when speaking. Patients may prefer a male or female therapist, or a therapist who shares some other background with them. Patients probably want the confidence that their therapist will not dismiss their concerns and will actually help them make progress. At this point calling the relationship a "blank slate" seems delusional. Sure, maybe the therapist is such a perfect mimic that they're not actually female, middle-aged, Black, or have experience working with trans patients. Maybe this is all just a mirage projected by their professionalism. Maybe there is no therapist, and I'm just sitting on a couch alone, in an empty room.

Smaug123 6y ago
He does say "is supposed to be". He's describing some kind of ideal to live up to, not the way anything can actually be once you get down to messy reality.
- legerdemain 6y ago
  Yes, I'm questioning it as a goal. I don't know what fraction of patients project their abusive boyfriend onto their therapist. That honestly sounds like an account of Freudian psychotherapy from 100 years ago. If I was to seek therapy for myself, I would actively seek a therapist who looked and sounded likely to help me. I would hope to have a conversation with them about their background, their experiences, and their familiarity with my culture. If I come from, say, India, I would want the therapist to understand my relationship with my parents, instead of medicalizing it. And if I did walk into a therapist's office and find it barren and grey, and the therapist completely and utterly avoidant of any personal topics... Well, that would remind me of getting polygraphed at the NSA Friendship Annex just outside the BWI airport, by a cold and hostile interviewer. That's not a fun experience.
  - ska 6y ago
    > I would actively seek a therapist who looked and sounded likely to help me. And a therapists goal is to feel like that person for all of their prospective clients, ideally. The less you can pigeonhole them into social/religious/political/etc boxes the better, from this point of view.
    - legerdemain 6y ago
      Yes, and I object to that goal being either achievable or reasonable. I'm sure some therapists believe it is both, and that they are some kind of universal therapists. I assume these are the therapists I hear about from friends and online acquaintances when they describe a therapist as friendly, approachable, but ultimately both clueless and hopeless. I have mostly heard this kind of feedback from non-white and LGBT friends, for what it's worth.

Metacelsus 6y ago

I'm glad to see that Scott's back. His previous blog was quite impressive.

Smaug123 6y ago

This link is the new home of Scott Alexander, of Slate Star Codex fame; he stopped blogging for much of last year, but has returned. Here's to many more years of intensely interesting in-depth inquiries packed with perfect puns.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gringoDan 6y ago

I'm glad that Scott is back (and that Substack will make it easy for him to get paid for his work). That said, some of the best things about Slate Star Codex were stumbling on the archives, going down a rabbit hole of old LessWrong posts, the links in the blogroll. Substack is much worse than a standard WordPress blog when it comes to that sort of casual reading and creating a permanent home for posts that are timeless. [1] I'm all for creators being paid for their work, I just hope that SSC doesn't lose anything that made it special with the new platform. [1] Applied Divinity Studies / Nintil on Substack: https://nintil.com/substack-milquetoast https://nintil.com/substack-milquetoast

war1025 6y ago

For the uninitiated, what sort of content is Slate Star Codex known for? I see he kind of addresses it in his initial post. That description seemed pretty broad and open ended though.

ardy42 6y ago
> For the uninitiated, what sort of content is Slate Star Codex known for? IIRC, it's a blog that's very influential in the "rationalist" community, which I think spun out of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong. So very long-winded posts on miscellaneous topics.
- malandrew 6y ago
  Why put the word rationalist in quotes?
  - tptacek 6y ago
    Because the word has multiple meanings, some of them subtextual. The quotes don't need to be derisive.
  - zepto 6y ago
    Because it’s a label rather than a descriptor.
  - mkr-hn 6y ago
    I don't know about them, but I've found the community around it both intelligent and accepting. That's not what I've come to expect from the word rationalist.
    - mrec 6y ago
      Agreed. Much less of a Mensa syndrome going on. I remember at the peak of the 2016 post-election meltdown the SSC subreddit hosted a sort of "ask Trump supporters anything" thread. Despite the absolute insanity of the time and only a minuscule fraction of the sub's readership supporting Trump, the conversation was interesting, calm and uniformly civil. There were a few Social Justice types that used to comment there too; again, all very civil, although there was sometimes the sense that they were regarded as an interesting zoo exhibit.

gisely 6y ago

Nice to know Balaji Srinivasan encouraged him to commit war crimes against nytimes journalists and he appreciated the advice.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dang 6y ago
Please don't do this here. We're trying for something other than flamewar hell, regardless of the topic. Thoughtful critique is welcome of course. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- gisely 6y ago
  Here's the quote from the article: "He had some very creative suggestions for how to deal with journalists. I'm not sure any of them were especially actionable, at least not while the Geneva Convention remains in effect. But it was still a good learning experience." If pointing out something very dark was stated in the article that was shared is considered flamebait here, I think maybe that reflects a desire on the part of this community to look the other way when the people they respect do ugly things.
  - Lazare 6y ago
    Writing is a way we communicate ideas. You did not successfully pick up on the idea Scott was communicating here. Maybe that means the writing was bad; maybe it means your ability to comprehend vernacular English failed you in this instance. Either way, neither Scott nor anyone commenting here thinks "war crimes are good", so your increasingly heated arguments that they are actually quite bad is just a waste of time and energy.
    - gisely 6y ago
      No he just thinks joking about his friends encouraging him to commit them is funny. I just don't find joking about that to be funny. Maybe I'm just a sour pickle, but the last four years in the states have made me wary of people who find a suggestion of war crimes humorous.

fouc 6y ago

https://www.paranormalmind.com/chess-piece-illusion https://www.paranormalmind.com/chess-piece-illusion

walrus01 6y ago

> I think the New York Times wanted to write a fairly boring article about me, but some guideline said they had to reveal subjects' real identities, if they knew them, unless the subject was in one of a few predefined sympathetic categories (eg sex workers). I have a theory that whatever policies exist within the NYTimes now, are quite possibly a consequence of this guy's actions as a "reporter": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair on another topic: > Sure, I might get SWATted, but realistically that's a really scary fifteen seconds before the cops apologize and go away. Sure, that sounds great, unless you a person of color, or you happen to own a small collection of one hundred percent legal firearms, or god forbid you're simultaneously a person of color AND you own firearms. That whole sentence reeks of such class privilege I can't even begin to convey the depth of my disgust. You would think that a professional psychiatrist, of all people, would be slightly familiar with the statistics for the number of people mistakenly shot dead by police in the USA every year.

vgel 6y ago
re: SWAT: His point was a) that he is privileged and b) that was what the NYT was thinking about why it's ok for them to dox him, not what he thinks...
- ardy42 6y ago
  > b) that was what the NYT was thinking about why it's ok for them to dox him It's not really doxing if you posted your own personal info publicly. At least once, in 2017 when he was less careful, Alexander publicly outed himself under his real name as the author of his blog. IIRC, it's a pretty core journalistic principle that subjects don't get to make decisions about how their story is presented.
  - vgel 6y ago
    Maybe journalists think that, but lots of people (including Scott and me) don't. I believe people have a right to privacy. > when he was less careful... publicly outed himself Is the NYT journalists, or hostiles? Usually needing opsec is reserved for activists and criminals hiding from oppressive governments, not bloggers who reasonably want a private life.

snoshy 6y ago

This whole episode serves as an interesting datapoint in how long a public person needs to stay out of the spotlight in order to return to their pseudoanonymity after being threatened to be outed by the media. It's not common to face such a threat, and it's not common for those threatened this way to even try to return to their former online identity and life. Somewhat reassuring to me that it's this short.

bialpio 6y ago
I'd not treat it as a data point for that - he's no longer anonymous at all, since he signed his name at the end of the post, and links to his psychiatry practice. It looks like it took him that much time to decide that he can make posting under his full name work for him.
- snoshy 6y ago
  You're quite right, and I stand corrected. Although it's not the datapoint I suggested previously, I suppose there is another datapoint to be gathered: for someone in his position, perhaps nuking the world (physical and virtual) is the only way forward when dealing with such a threat. He basically had to quit his job and career as a psychiatrist as well as delete SSC in a way, in order to continue with his online no-longer-pseudo-identity.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    He didn't quit his career, but he had to quit his job. Fortunately, he's at the stage where he can start his own practice (a somewhat experimental, no less). But if this situation happened just a few years earlier, it would most likely have destroyed his career prospects completely.
- solveit 6y ago
  He actually decided to drop his pseudonymity a few months back, but it took time to get himself in a position where he could do that responsibly.

snakeboy 6y ago

I do hope Scott will some day restore the old website to its original layout rather than the default WordPress template it's had since he pulled it. At least for archival and nostalgic value. Does anyone know why SubStack doesn't allow more customization of the blogs? I feel like every one is nearly identical in font/layout/"feel".

freddie_mercury 6y ago
SubStack is for e-mail not blogging. All email has nearly identical font/layout/feel. Substack is not a blogging platform.
- i_am_proteus 6y ago
  As long as Substack hosts a blog-like format for its newsletters, it's also a blogging platform.
- input_sh 6y ago
  I wish at the very least they'd make the font customizable by the readers. I can't stand looking at that font they chose for a prolonged period of time. The only way I read stuff published on Substack is by proxying the content (reader mode, RSS feeds, Pocket).
coldtea 6y ago
>Does anyone know why SubStack doesn't allow more customization of the blogs? I feel like every one is nearly identical in font/layout/"feel". Because it's about the content -- it's literally an emailing list subscription service.
applieddivinity 6y ago
You inspired me to customize it myself: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/slatestarsubstack/ https://applieddivinitystudies.com/slatestarsubstack/ If you download a chrome extension and paste in the provided styles, you can get a pretty good approximation of the original page!

floren 6y ago

> So I'm going to try to start a medical practice that provides great health care to uninsured people for 4x less than what anyone else charges. Interesting note buried way down in the article. I'm looking forward to hearing more about this in future.

ketamine__ 6y ago
Let's be honest. It's still going to be unaffordable for those without insurance.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Nope - he's charging $35/month.
  - ketamine__ 6y ago
    For how many hours?
    - gbear605 6y ago
      20 minutes / month + unlimited emergency phone calls and emails. It’s mainly intended either as a way for people with long term psychiatric needs to be able to get medications and be monitored without having to also have an expensive health insurance plan, or in conjunction with a separate therapist.
      - ketamine__ 6y ago
        Is the first appointment an hour?
        gbear605 6y ago
        Yes
    - PoignardAzur 6y ago

ArtDev 6y ago

Here are a number of his articles. They are quite good: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/ https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/

nineplay 6y ago

For anyone who hasn't yet had the pleasure, Scott's (fiction) book Unsong is magnificent. It's one of the best books I read last year, and I read constantly. http://unsongbook.com/ http://unsongbook.com/ Ebook https://github.com/JasonGross/unsong_scraper https://github.com/JasonGross/unsong_scraper Sample: “I AM BUSY. I AM TRYING TO FIX CONTINENTAL DRIFT.” “I…didn’t know it was broken.” Uriel’s face became more animated, his speech faster. “IT HAS BEEN BROKEN FOR FIVE WEEKS AND FIVE DAYS. I THINK IT BROKE WHEN I RELOADED NEW ZEALAND FROM A BACKUP COPY, BUT I DO NOT KNOW WHY. MY SYNCHRONIZATION WAS IMPECCABLE AND THE CHANGE PROPAGATED SIMULTANEOUSLY ACROSS ALL SEPHIROT. I THINK SOMEBODY BOILED A GOAT IN ITS MOTHER’S MILK. IT IS ALWAYS THAT. I KEEP TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO DO IT, BUT NOBODY LISTENS.”

jarbus 6y ago
I didn’t know he wrote a book, thanks!
rognjen 6y ago
When it comes to humor like that only HHGTTG -- that I (un)fortunately read first -- has been entertaining. Everything after that seemed as if it was trying to emulate it.
- samatman 6y ago
  My father, sadly for him, read Vonnegut before Douglas Adams, and felt that Hitchhiker's was just trying to emulate him. I didn't inherit this gene, happily for me, and enjoy all three authors a great deal. If anyone wants to recommend something else in this vein, please do; I'll probably like it.
  - Nition 6y ago
    HHGTTG was absolutely trying to emulate The Sirens Of Titan. They're both great though.
    - loriverkutya 6y ago

reducesuffering 6y ago

Scott is a "national treasure." His intelligence, wit, and creative thinking oozes from his writing. Whatever he proceeds to do with substack and the new medical practice, I only wish that he would make the most impact he can on people. Because it's clear to me his heart is in the best place and he has the wit to elevate and inform many many more people.

ve55 6y ago

I particularly liked the emotional end to this post, and I'm very glad he ended it with such a strong and positive tone. Online communities are able to connect people that, before the Internet, would have had a very difficult time finding the right peers for them. Some communities adjacent to SSC (and some near HN) have helped me find some amazingly smart and cool people, and I'm very thankful that they exist (and that Scott can continue blogging as well), and if anything I hope we can encourage significantly more niche community building on the Internet, and with many more modalities than blogs, forums, and comments (which SSC indeed has). His notes about people being afraid to express themselves, have open discussions, be honest, and share with one another are pretty saddening however, and I hope that we can progress towards a better area here, even if progress sometimes seems slow or impossible.

ImaCake 6y ago
Absolutely. Time and money are important resources. But for myself, and I imagine many other people, the single richest form of currency in life is the trade in ideas. It is how my relationships intertwine with experience and the trading of ideas that matters most. This is part of what makes SCC so good, it is packed with amazing and rich ideas. The internet facilitates the trade in ideas (and relationships!) and I hope we do not lose it.

enw 6y ago

What's the TL;DR? Who is this? Why are they important? Why would NYT write about them? And threaten them? Sorry there's just so much text I don't have time to read through it all, but I'm curious!

barry-cotter 6y ago
Scott Alexander, a very, very popular blogger deleted his blog because the NYT was going to dox him. After uprooting his life to deal with that he has returned to blogging. Many people expressed their support, for which he is very grateful. The NYT is still committed to doxxing people if they feel like it, which Scott abhors. As part of radically changing his life he quit his previous psychiatrist job and is going to see if it’s possible to make a living treating the uninsured for a lot cheaper than most psychiatrists. He signs off with his real name.
- tptacek 6y ago
  Alexander's name was public (in fact: it was, before the drama occurred, exposed by one of the most naive possible Google queries for it --- as well, some of his better-known writing was originally published under his real name) prior to his encounter with the NYT; Alexander's demand was that the NYT pretend the fact of his name was a secret. The principled arguments about how the NYT was in the wrong revolve around an NYT story simply being more visible than the other public places you could read his name; of course, that's true for practically anybody and any source, the NYT being one of the most visible sources in the world. He gives good reasons for not wanting his name more public than it already is; they're hard to argue with. But some genies are hard to put back in the bottle, and reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which the NYT is obligated to help with the attempt.
  - mcphage 6y ago
    > reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which the NYT is obligated to help with the attempt. How far was he asking them to go?
  - yellowstuff 6y ago

morpheuskafka 6y ago

> I got emails that were like that, only it was grad students. Apparently if you have a blog about your field, that can make it harder to get or keep a job in academia. I'm not sure what we think we're gaining by ensuring the smartest and best educated people around aren't able to talk openly about the fields they're experts in, but I hope it's worth it. This is very concerning, because it lends credence to the general public's idea of an "ivory tower," as well as academia's own idea that it can somehow achieve perfect neutrality through apersonality.

caterama 6y ago
This is also concerning because it contradicts the general sentiment here on HN that You Should Be Blogging. Maybe you shouldn't... or at very least, there's more to consider than first appears.
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  A lot of things that may be sound career advice in SF tech scene would make terrible advice for other fields and other places. One example is frequent job hops. SF software companies may not judge you negatively because of it, but Zurich architecture firms (as a random example) might.
  - YuriNiyazov 6y ago
    Depends on what you mean by frequent. At a SF software company, and I look at multiple 6-9 month stints as very big red flags that must have overwhelming evidence in the other direction to be considered. OTOH 2 - 3 years is perfectly fine; I can maybe imagine “Zurich architecture firms” viewing 2-3 years as flighty, if they are used to employees that used to be there decades.
- lmg643 6y ago
  You should be blogging...and you can, as long as you avoid saying any of the Things You Can't Say, which seems to mean following a template, which means the content gets bland and repetitive - unless it is technical, in which case it's special interest and the censors lose interest. (That's actually my best guess as to why HN has stayed high quality all these years - minimal politics.) Bloging, or writing, is just thinking out loud. Thinking about the real world outside of technology can easily yield heterodox conclusions that are better off not published these days.

DelightOne 6y ago

> Some of the steps they take seem extreme - the Internet is a scarier place than I thought - but I've taken some of what they said to heart, rejected the rest in a calculated way, and realized realistically I was never that protected anyhow. So here we are. What steps?

bhelkey 6y ago
I would be interested in this as well but I believe that the omission was intentional. In cases like this, enumerating the precautions one is taking (and by extension the precautions one has rejected) would be unwise.
- DelightOne 6y ago
  Agreed. Though it would be good to know what to do then if its unavoidable.

sombremesa 6y ago

I don't know how exactly I found Slate Star Codex, but it has (had) been one of the scant handful of RSS feeds I've been subscribed to and enjoyed for quite a while. I have a blog that I'd like to delete as well, but it was on Blogspot, and circumstances are such that I have no access to it whatsoever (thanks to the Google acquisition and the eminently unhelpful Google support), while it remains fully open to the public. My only hope now is to try and distance myself from it on the strength of how common my real name is.

hntrader 6y ago
What are the other feeds/blogs that you can recommend with similarly good content?
- sombremesa 6y ago
  Here are two other blogs I found through the same (now unknown) source: - https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ - https://jasoncollins.blog/ https://jasoncollins.blog/ Though they've gotten a bit more topical and/or political in recent times.

Bayart 6y ago

I've never heard of that man, but his post was a pleasant bit of my day and his writing is excellent. It's the first time in a long time I've properly went through a text linked on HN, front to back. My habit is to parse at break-neck pace, squeeze the meaningful marrow out of it and then go to the comment page to exercise my God-given right of inventing an opinion I didn't know I had a minute prior. Good luck to him.

deleted 6y ago
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ralfd 6y ago
You are in for a treat: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/ https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/ https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/ https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/ https://danwahl.net/blog/slate-star-codex https://danwahl.net/blog/slate-star-codex

llacb47 6y ago

He's a talented writer.

deleted 6y ago

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bedobi 6y ago

Downvote away, but I really don't understand why psuedo-intellectuals who write pretentious posts full of meaningless nonsense are so popular on HackerNews. This guy runs a psychiatry called "Lorien", lives in a group-housing-community called "Valinor", and spams "rationalist" neckbeard blog posts on the internet. Does that seem like a well-adjusted individual you would entrust your treatment resistant depression, let alone mental health in general to? I don't know about you, but to me it seems like a comical case of the psychiatrist being the one who's in need of help. + psychiatry and mental health aside, are his opinions on all the countless fields and topics he writes about (in implied expert capacity) worth listening to? Keep in mind, each of those fields and topics have plenty of actual experts to go around. (eg in Economics, take a pick from the dozens of top economists in the IGM Expert panel https://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel https://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel)

DaniloDias 6y ago
It’s clear you don’t like it. It’s weird that you are mad others do. In what way does it traumatize you that other people like and shared a thing?
- bedobi 6y ago
  I really don't like it. I'm not mad others like things I don't. I guess what does bug me is, the type of people who generate and like this kind of drivel have a strong tendency to walk around thinking they know better than Literally Everyone(tm), while not realizing they themselves in fact know next to nothing about all these fields and topics, and are themselves really no better than anti-vaxxers or chrystal healers - they'll literally just make up and believe anything as long as it comes with the right labels and has a certain air of what they perceive as rationality to it. For some reason, the HackerNews and Tech scene in general are very susceptible to this. (techies share the bizarre hubris of thinking they know better than everyone at everything, and can improve and "disrupt" any field) Economics and health care especially are apparently "solved" fields where literally every one of these people are actually hidden gem PhD level experts. If you think I'm exaggerating, ask them a question about economics or health care, and listen as they "expertly" explain Everything(tm) to you. Ffs, even the label "rationalist" itself is pathetic, and very revealing. It's basically a way to signal "I am right, take my word for it".

cwkoss 6y ago

"I've read lots of interesting discussion on how much power tech oligarchs should or shouldn't be allowed to have. But this is the first time I've seen someone suggest their powers should include a magic privacy-destroying gaze, where just by looking at someone they can transform them into a different kind of citizen with fewer rights. Is Paul Graham some weird kind of basilisk, such that anyone he stares at too long turns into fair game?" This is an interesting concept that I haven't heard discussed by society much, but seems like its true. The powerful have the ability to make someone go viral without their consent.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
And it's not even an ability they wield themselves - it happens by association. So you can't just go and ask 'pg, would you please not look directly at Scott - it's the journalists noticing, "hey, he has celebrities in his fanbase", and using this as an argument why he himself is of public interest. Essentially second-order paparazzism.

htshnr 6y ago

"I got an email from Balaji Srinivasan, a man whose anti-corporate-media crusade straddles a previously unrecognized border between endearing and terrifying. He had some very creative suggestions for how to deal with journalists. I'm not sure any of them were especially actionable, at least not while the Geneva Convention remains in effect. But it was still a good learning experience. In particular, I learned never to make an enemy of Balaji Srinivasan. I am humbled by his support." Top notch.

morsch 6y ago
In another context I'd find such oblique references to violence crass and offensive. I don't particularly enjoy them here, either.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- morsch 6y ago
  Okay, I changed my mind, on second read I can tell that he's being ironic. Wow. That is pretty top notch.
user-the-name 6y ago
You think threatening violence against journalists is "top notch"? Is that what Hacker News is now? Has it really descended that far into actual fascism?
- arc-in-space 6y ago
  This is an overly hostile reading of the above comment, Scott certainly didn't, and wouldn't, threaten violence against anyone.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    He will not threaten it. But he sure isn't doing a damn thing to condemn it, and seems positively giddy about having the support of those who apparently do want to threaten journalists.

modulusshift 6y ago

Huh. I'm pretty sure I remember blog posts by Scott Siskind back in the early 2010's. And I've never heard of Scott Alexander. So that was a weird perspective to come at this post from. I wish him the best of luck.

claw_howitzer 6y ago

eagerly awaiting his followup to "You Are Still Crying Wolf"

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
The original article still seems appropriate tbh.

vincentmarle 6y ago

I am confused as to why someone who apparently has a large following decides to host their content on a Substack subdomain...

strstr 6y ago
He is getting paid to.

andredz 6y ago

I discovered SSC through this blog: http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog which I discovered thanks to this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18176929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18176929 and I can heartily recommend it. That comment, and more specifically, Aron's blog have made a huge impact in my life. I've spent hundreds of hours reading it and losing myself in intellectual rabbit holes, I've been introduced to many interesting topics, books and authors (such as Scott Alexander, G.K Chesterton and Gödel, Escher, Bach (which I have on my nightstand)), and I've come to truly believe in God. The comments section is usually very interesting as well.

mssundaram 6y ago
Someone else in another comment mentioned his work might appeal to atheists, so it's interesting you mention now believing in God. I grew up as an atheist but later in life returned to the eternal Dharma (Hinduism) and thoroughly have experienced God
- sundarurfriend 6y ago
  > Someone else in another comment mentioned his work might appeal to atheists, so it's interesting you mention now believing in God. It's probably the G.K.Chesterton influence that led to that. Scott definitley writes from an atheist viewpoint, although like a lot of the rationalist community he has a soft spot for Buddhism - see for eg. his short story Samsara (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/).
  - andredz 6y ago
    Chesterton certainly played a role, but it was mostly the posts on Aron's blog themselves. The story is like this: I was born into a christian family, but like many young people, and helped by some written works, some healthy amount skepticism, other not-so-healthy things, and what I saw inside and outside my social circles, I came to doubt my previous beliefs. Anyway, then I discovered Aron's blog, and it was like a new world open to me. Something that I've experienced very few times in my life; maybe when I found SICP/Lisp… And it could even ve said that I discovered that blog thanks to SICP since it went something like this: OCW > SICP > Paul Graham > Hacker News > (eventually) The Blog. ^^ Scott does write from an atheist viewpoint, since he is atheist, but even though I am not, I still enjoy his writing very much, just as I've liked many of PG's essays or LessWrong articles. It is not necessary to hold the same beliefs to enjoy intellectual fellowship/communion as it is (usually) exemplified by Hacker News itself. Also, if you want to, I can share with you some of my favorite articles there. I have a huge list though.

speleding 6y ago

For those who did not get the "Portal" references interspersed in the article, you can listen to it here: https://open.spotify.com/track/3za3bQrlpdEwcT2C4t5Cag?si=U97iNsBzRSym0bktIoP-YA https://open.spotify.com/track/3za3bQrlpdEwcT2C4t5Cag?si=U97...

vanderZwan 6y ago

> Also, my patients couldn't Google my name and find me immediately, which I was increasingly realizing the psychiatric community considered important. Could somebody tell the Swedes? When I looked up the name of a local therapist here, expecting to get a website of their practice, I found their Swedish personal number, private phone number and address as the first search result. Out of curiosity, I then tried looking up the names of the other therapists in her practice. Same issue. Apparently the government freely shares this kind of personal information unless you explicitly opt out! I emailed the them (through the practice website) that this surprised me and would never fly in my home country. Obviously, those therapists did not want me after that.

mongol 6y ago
I am surprised you found their personal number. This used to be commonplace but less and less so over the past decades.
tephra 6y ago
It's not that the government freely shares that information (they do some) but that they actually sell information to companies that then create searchable products on that data. And of course you can't generally opt out of the government selling you data (a friend litigated this and lost).
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  Hm. GDPR disagrees.
skrebbel 6y ago
> Obviously, those therapists did not want me after that. Not obvious to me. Why didn't they?
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  Because they were apparently incapable of distinguishing the messenger who reminded them that there are potentially scary patients out there from said actual potentially scary patients.

skinkestek 6y ago

Having most of my friends beaten up as a group on prime time TV by the national broadcaster quite recently this resonates deeply with me. The complete lack of care for the consequences it has for normal law abiding citizens and their children. And at the same time a good number of them are paranoid themselves: one particular friend of mine got in hot water because he included pictures of guns in a description of how he had been threatened by criminals, journalists made a story of how he was somehow threatening violence to journalists..!)

prionassembly 6y ago
I struggle to see how journalism has any positive value at all. Edit: Downvotes to this controversial statement are legitimate, but please be mindful of the nuance: "I struggle to see" is an expression of doubt, not certainty. I struggle to see because I'm believably told there's something there; if I was convinced there's no value, I'd phrased this completely differently.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  It has enourmous positive value and I actively support it by subscribing to newspapers that I don't strictly need (or even have time to properly read). Other journalists around here have uncovered big problems in how we care for elderly, corruption etc etc etc. Journalists makes us aware of what is happening in Syria, US, UK etc so we can better compare different approaches. Journalists sometimes prevents war or at least sometimes puts an end to war crimes. The problem is we the quality varies extremely even for the same news outlet and even the same reporters - and we all suffer somewhat from Gell-Mann Amnesia.
  - prionassembly 6y ago
    Yes, information has positive value. Maybe what I said about journalism is best applied to “news media”. Journalists also do in-depth book-length work that’s less time-indexed and more atemporal. Have you seen the news segment in Wikipedia’s homepage? It directly leads you to a rabbit hole of information rather than build a narrative of any kind. Right now everybody knows not to speak to journalists — it’s a vampiric activity that will prey on your real life in ways you have no control over. I see all the upsides you see (I did say “struggle to find positive value”, not “know definitively there’s none) but the net result of journalists at work is dubious at best. Even a daily news cycle is more about maintaining narrative threads than exploring issues in depth, let alone the 24 x 7 x {style and audience} x {degrees of meta} x {filter bubbles} news space that floods current discourse.

Siira 6y ago

See https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/ https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/ for an anthology of Scott's works.

LockAndLol 6y ago

Uh...who is this guy and why were people trying to dox him?

matkoniecz 6y ago
known for his blog that is described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex

screye 6y ago

What's up with these substacks being so expensive. I have about 5-6 blogs that I really like, and 60$ a month is simply quite a lot. Now Scott is probably my favorite, so I'll subscribe.. but I would have liked to distribute my payments across all the ones I like more evenly.

miki123211 6y ago

Is the inability to subscribe a screen reader problem, or do other people face this too? I can't find a subscribe button anywhere, and I suspect that might be the reason, but I'm not sure how right I am.

nchelluri 6y ago
I see it in Chrome. Here's a link https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=menu&simple=true&next=https%3A%2F%2Fastralcodexten.substack.com%2Fp%2Fstill-alive https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=men...

fuzxi 6y ago

Isn't one of the golden rules of journalism "Don't give up your sources"? It's pretty disgusting that you can dox a source who specifically asked to remain anonymous and face no repercussions at all, professional or otherwise.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
He wasn't a source, he was the subject of the story. Journalists have done similar before with no professional repercussions. Naomi Wu is another example of similar.

wolverine876 6y ago

It seems intellectually dishonest to me: The job of every news organization is to obtain and publicize otherwise unavailable information, often information that some people want to keep hidden. Someone desiring to withhold the information is the norm, not a reason to make an exception. A journalist's obligation is to their readers. Withholding the identity of a public figure - especially someone who actively attempts to be an influential public figure - is not in their readers' interests. Their job is to inform readers. There is nothing unusual about identifying public figures; it's valuable to the public to know who is behind public actions. If the author is as intelligent and informed as he presents himself to be, he knows that. It's nothing like doxxing, the author knows it, and so do HN readers. The NYT wasn't going to provide his home address and social security number. It's dishonest of the author to say otherwise. To make a massive public stink about the article would of course just inflate his own public profile and spread his name further. Again, if he is the smart person he claims to be, he knows it and did it intentionally. Everyone on HN would know it. It's dishonest to act surprised, but fits the pattern of this sort of manipulative rhetoric - both play the victim and increase your public profile. It's also well-known that powerful people in Silicon Valley are actively engaged in a power play against the news media, also attempting to discredit it. I'm confident that the author knows that very well and knows that his actions will play a part in it. To ignore that is not honest; to claim it is coincidence seems hard to believe. (Also, the news media is a critical part of democracy and an open society; it's not clear the good of society, rather than the narrow interests of powerful people in SV, is on his mind.) Most of this claims are unverified and he offers no evidence. There's no reason I should trust him, especially given the dishonesty I already see. Finally, playing the victim card is a strong signal, IMHO, of an attempt to manipulate.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> Withholding the identity of a public figure - especially someone who actively attempts to be an influential public figure - is not in their readers' interests. What is the public interest justification for making his legal name a part of his identity in this case? Its not as though his legal name is relevant to the subject of the article. > There is nothing unusual about identifying public figures; it's valuable to the public to know who is behind public actions. This is a very interesting way to frame “having a blog”. Calling some blogger a public figure makes it seem like he’s a senator or something. Even moreso when you call a blog post a “public action” like its an act of congress or executive order. > It's nothing like doxxing, the author knows it, and so do HN readers. This is false. No one is confused or misled by the quite conventional use of “dox” to refer to a nonconsensual public revelation of the legal name of someone who was formerly known by a pseudonym to the majority of the public. > The NYT wasn't going to provide his home address and social security number. No, no one is that stupid. Rather we all understand that the NYT was going to put his legal name in their article, which was going to lead to marginally more opportunities for crazy people to mess with him. Since he’s already got crazy people messing with him, any marginal increase in opportunity is likely to lead to an increase in incidents. > It's dishonest of the author to say otherwise. Yeah I’m not seeing where he claimed that. Clearly the NYT isn’t going to expose themselves to any kind of lawsuit by publishing his address, and the threat vector comes from some malevolent actor using the name on a search engine to find the address themselves. I’m not sure how this inference escapes anyone literate enough to wade through one of scott’s articles. > Again, if he is the smart person he claims to be, he knows it and did it intentionally. Everyone on HN would know it. It's dishonest to act surprised Dude clearly does not think he is smart, his entire existence is an attempt to magnify his intellect with recursive use of instrumental reason. Besides its naive in 2020 to think that anyone, least of all “smart” people, do not have the same impulse control issues that normal people have. And there have been so many incidents of people causing actual harm to themselves and others through impulsive online behavior that there are books about it now, theres no real reason to consider siskind to be some evil mastermind thinking to himself “what’s bigger than having my real name and my blog in the NYT? Forcing the NYT to not write about me by summoning the entire internet <evil laugh>“ > It's also well-known that powerful people in Silicon Valley are actively engaged in a power play against the news media, also attempting to discredit it. I'm confident that the author knows that very well and knows that his actions will play a part in it. To ignore that is not honest; to claim it is coincidence seems hard to believe. (Also, the news media is a critical part of democracy and an open society; it's not clear the good of society, rather than the narrow interests of powerful people in SV, is on his mind.) Its well known that powerful people in the media are actively engaged in a power play against businesses (particularly sv) and attempting to discredit them. I’m confident you’re well aware of this and know that your reply has its own small role in the discussion. Also the technology to be heard, and strong norms towards privacy are key parts of democracy and an open society rather than the narrow interests of legacy media platforms that you seem to regard as representative of us all. > Most of this claims are unverified and he offers no evidence. There's no reason I should trust him, especially given the dishonesty I already see. Its a personal account, you haven’t identified anything that would even conceivably have a reference elsewhere. Is he supposed to record his phone call and put it online for you? Your earlier examples of dishonesty are not really worthy of the term. > Finally, playing the victim card is a strong signal, IMHO, of an attempt to manipulate. IMHO playing the persecutor card is a poorly thought response to an individual “playing the victim card” as you say. Perhaps next time don’t bother?