Who is Scott Alexander and what is he about?

I've been absolutely bingeing on his blog since discovering the podcast[1] during the 2020 Christmas break. The measured pace seems to make it much easier for me to absorb it without cognitive overload, at least the less extremely technical pieces. The podcasters make a great job of summarizing visuals, and mentioning ahead of time if a post is particularly visual.

Scott is one of those rare bloggers who tries their damnedest to present a rational rather than emotional case, and the vast majority of the content is a breath of fresh air:

- He's willing to change his mind when presented with sufficiently powerful evidence, rather than always doubling down.

- He absolutely fries people faking scientific legitimacy, but only in particularly egregious cases.

- He uses cautious language when presenting interesting but inconclusive data, rather than trying to blow things up as much as possible.

[1] https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/

Nice summary. I've read most of those. Whether or not Alexander could use an editor would be an interesting piece unto itself. Much of his charm is in the nested parentheses and asides that would get cut, but a distilled version with higher production value could be a useful way to create examples of thoughtfulness and charitableness in public discourse. When I don't agree with him, I still like the sort of enemies he makes.

Scott is also the author of the web fiction novel Unsong which is at the same time funny and intellectually intriguing. Here's an excerpt that always makes me laugh.

'According to Wilson, ritual magic is to Reality as the placebo effect is to humans. Tell a human that a sugar pill will cure their toothache, and the pill will make the toothache disappear. Tell Reality that a ritual will make rain fall, and the ritual will cause a downpour.

In Wilson’s system, ambience wasn’t just the most important thing; it was the only thing. Doctors have long known how every aspect of the medical experience enhances placebo effect: the white coat, the stethoscope, the diplomas hung and framed on the wall – all subconscious reassurances that this is a real doctor prescribing good effective medicine. Likewise, the job of a ritual magician – or in Wilson’s terminology, placebomancer – was to perform a convincing wizard act. The grey robes, the flickering candles, incantations said on the proper day and hour, even shrines and holy places. They all added an extra element of convincingness, until finally Reality was well and truly bamboozled.

...

For to get one’s magician’s license revoked was a terrible thing. Who would trust a placebo given by a doctor stripped of his medical diploma, dressed in street clothes, working out of his garage? A magician who lost his license would lose the ability to convince Reality of anything. The American Board of Ritual Magic, originally a perfectly ordinary example of regulatory capture, had taken on ontological significance.

So nobody had been too worried when young apprentice magician Dylan Alvarez had pissed off one too many people, gotten expelled from the Board, and vowed revenge. He was just an apprentice, after all, and anyway he’d lost his license. Good luck convincing the universe of anything now.

But Alvarez had realized that there are people without medical degrees who hand out convincing placebos. They just don’t do it by pathetically begging people to believe they’re doctors. They do it by saying they’re better than doctors, that they’ve discovered hidden secrets, that the medical establishment is in cahoots against them, but they’ll show the fools, oh yes, they’ll show them all. A good naturopath armed with a couple of crystals and a bubbling blue solution can convince thousands, millions, even in the face of mountains of contradictory evidence. Ambience, they realize, is really a subset of a stronger power. The power of narrative. The literary tropes declaring that, given A, B is sure to follow.

...

Can you imagine a story where a man lies in wait to assassinate the five masters of the American Board of Ritual Magic even as they are plotting to kill him, confounds their ritual, bursts out of the trap-door to their wine cellar at the most theatrical possible moment, raises his staff made of a rare and exotic wood that grows only his far-off homeland – and then dies ignominiously, shot by a security guard before he even can even get a word in edgewise? No? You can’t imagine the story ending that way? Neither can Reality. That was Dylan Alvarez’s secret. He always tried to be the protagonist of whatever story he was in, and the protagonist never dies.'

Why is HN so obsessed with this guy?