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Comment by jdpigeon | Hacker News Reader

This is Scott Alexander, previously from Slate Star Codex. He's highly respected as a blogger about psychiatry

To be clear- he isn't just a "blogger about psychiatry", he is a licensed, practicing psychiatrist with an MD.

and also an influential figure in the Effective Altruism/ LessWrong communities. Interestingly enough, he also wrote a really enjoyable and clever fiction novel.

https://unsongbook.com/

im not going to tell you you're wrong for respecting him, but i feel this comment is only telling half the story. He's very well respected in the "rationalist" community, but he and that community are pretty controversial and definitely not universally respected

If anyone is curious about the controversy, here's the NYTimes piece on Scott Alexander: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod... It's a decent article, and the few attempts at pearl-clutching fall pretty flat.

My only gripe with rationalists is that they suck at running their own conference, CFAR. (:

If somebody's interested, I would strongly suggest checking out both sides of the dispute and not only that, as the NYT story caused quite some ruckus at the time.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...

The operating point is that Scott Alexander isn't looking for a few extra dollars selling potentially fake health products.

He makes a *lot* of money on Substack, enough that this concertn isn't valid.

Also, "So and so isn't respected in the whole world, only in the people that know about them" isn't a super helpful argument anyways.

Well, the point was that he (or at least the community he is in) is actively disrespected by some people as well, so it's a bit more pointed than just "not known about".

Mentioning this only for completeness' sake. I think he's good, on net. But somewhat adjacent to some more dubious and distasteful stuff.

Well, he is trustworthy on psychiatry even if he’s a member of a religion that worships nonexistent AIs and Bayes’ theorem.

But his main posting hobby is that he wants to be friends with weird internet right-wing intellectuals and that you should too. So every time I glance at the comments there someone wants to give their opinions on exactly who is genetically less intelligent than the commenter.

I heard he's been known to wear white after labor day.

Yeah, that's not it.

Would you write the same comment about a Catholic psychiatrist who wrote a blog about both Catholicism and psychiatry?

Catholicism is definitely pretty controversial and definitely not universally respected, but I think most people would have pretty strong pushback against a commenter who felt the need to bring up an author's Catholicism regarding a blog post that had little to do with catholicism.

I would not trust Scott Alexander on real science. He's a pseudo scientific hack with an agenda

Must really be a pretty bad right winger given that he talks so much about being liberal and donates to Democrats[0].

0. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-217?s=r

Okay maybe hes not a right winger , just pseudo scientific

Or more likely given that your first claim was clearly incorrect you are just trying to paint him in a bad light and your specific accusations have little real basis.

That article says he donated to what he considered an “Effective Altruist”, so the party affiliation was probably secondary.

Politically, he’s a centrist with some libertarian/communitarian mix-ins. More conservative now than he was in the Archipelago days. [0]

Dude used to love Musk and the other technocrats before that became cringe in actual leftist circles.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...

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