Slate Star Codex

Slate Star Codex (SSC) is a blog focused on science, medicine (especially within psychiatry), philosophy, politics, and futurism. The blog was written by Scott Alexander Siskind, a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist, under the pen name Scott Alexander. Slate Star Codex was launched in 2013, and was discontinued on June 23, 2020, as Alexander feared doxing (publication of his full name) in a New York Times article. , the blog is partially back online, with the content restored but commenting disabled. A successor blog, Astral Codex Ten (ACX), was launched on Substack on January 21, 2021. Alexander also blogged at the rationalist community blog LessWrong, and wrote a fiction book in blog format named Unsong. The New Yorker states that the volume of content Alexander has written on Slate Star Codex makes the blog difficult to summarize, with . Many posts are book reviews (typically of books in the fields of social sciences or medicine) or reviews of a topic in the scientific literature. For example, the March 2020 blog post "Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know" analyzes available medical literature and comes to the conclusion that, contrary to early guidance by the CDC, masks are likely an effective protection measure against COVID-19 for the general public under certain conditions. Some posts are prefaced with a note on their "epistemic status," an assessment of Alexander's confidence in the material to follow. Slate Star Codex ranks fourth on a survey conducted by Rethink Charity of how effective altruists first heard about effective altruism, after "personal contact", "LessWrong", and "other books, articles and blog posts", and just above "80,000 Hours." The blog discusses moral questions and dilemmas relevant to effective altruism, such as moral offsets, ethical treatment of animals, and trade-offs of pursuing systemic change for charities. Alexander regularly wrote about advances in artificial intelligence and emphasized the importance of AI safety research.