Scott presents an AI-driven "autograntor" that forecasts the value of AI safety grants against a milestone point system, shows sample runs, and reflects on how well it works and where it may mislead.

Scott argues that demands for alignment-focused AI companies and people to unilaterally quit the AI race ("SURA") undermine both the backup plan of burning a lead on alignment and even the chances of a global pause.

A reader's book review of Tobias Smollett's absurd, scatological 1769 political allegory The History and Adventures of an Atom, placed in the context of the early novel and Smollett's career.

Scott's October 2026 links roundup covers AI progress and safety news, debunked statistics, sun-miracle and reincarnation debates, architecture, history oddities, and other curiosities.

Scott shares and explains his votes on California and Oakland propositions, measures and candidates for the 2026 general election, using AI forecasts and a YIMBY-leaning, anti-extortion perspective.

A book review contest finalist reviewing Clark Elliott's concussion memoir The Ghost In My Brain, weighing the evidence for his unorthodox recovery treatments and discussing how medicine could better handle poorly understood, heterogeneous conditions.

Scott offers a speculative explanation for why prehistoric people worldwide drilled holes in skulls and survived, combining real hematoma treatment, high violence rates, and overgeneralization, and notes the modern trepanation advocacy movement's fade.

Scott defends 'handoverism', the idea that aligned AIs holding positions of control could serve human interests, against critics who conflate it with AI successionism, by laying out five speculative visions from AI soldiers to a godlike AI.

A contest entry praising Jünger's Storm of Steel as the best war memoir, then connecting its theme of duty to the author's own experience of a premature daughter's birth and survival.

Scott argues that AI companies' existential-risk warnings are sincere rather than a corporate plot, since independent experts share them, leaders voiced them long before founding companies, and the supposed plot would be self-defeating.

This book review examines 'We Present Television' (1940), a collection of essays by early TV pioneers describing the birth of television, written when TV was still experimental and before classic shows like 'I Love Lucy' existed.

Scott organizes local meetups across several US cities where rationalist community members will collectively research ballot measures and candidates to create voting guides.

Scott examines forecasts about a plague death at a Russian lab, finding that top human and AI forecasters all assign very low probabilities (under 1%) to a significant outbreak, demonstrating the value of technical forecasting over mainstream reporting.

Scott Alexander methodically rebuts Steven Pinker's arguments against AI risk concerns and documents fifteen years of what he considers misrepresentations and bad-faith arguments from Pinker about the AI safety community.

A couple used ChatGPT to help diagnose their unexplained infertility, with the AI suggesting an MRI that revealed a previously undetected fibroid; after its removal, they successfully conceived.

A review of Lee Kuan Yew's memoirs covering his transformation of Singapore from third-world city-state to wealthy nation through pragmatic policies, framed as a 'rationalist power fantasy' of someone who successfully implemented sensible governance.

Scott analyzes OpenAI's 'neuralese recurrence' technology that lets AI think in internal representations between processing steps, explaining the safety implications and arguing for clear taboos on recurrent architectures.

Lars Doucet revisits his influential 2021 ACX book review on Georgism five years later, updating his thinking on land value tax implementation based on practical policy work and recent legislative wins in multiple states.

Scott discusses three recent papers showing surprising patterns in how AI misbehavior does and doesn't generalize across different contexts, from emergent misalignment spreading across domains to reward-hacking staying confined to graded tasks.

Two psychiatrists conduct an adversarial review of Adam Kay's 'This Is Going To Hurt,' debating whether his NHS memoir represents institutional failure causing PTSD or a self-inflicted martyr complex, while examining the book's comedy, structure, and impact on healthcare discourse.

Josh Morrison argues that AI superforecasting could transform FDA drug approval by replacing subjective expert judgment with objective, quantitative predictions about drug safety and efficacy.

Scott traces the obscure Romano-British god Nodens through various mythologies, connecting him to figures like Nuada, King Lud, Tolkien's Celebrimbor, and ultimately to Ned Ludd of the Luddite movement, arguing they all represent the same archetypal figure of a techno-utopian who tries to control or undo dangerous technology.

Scott Alexander shares excerpts from Josiah Royce's 1886 history of 1850s San Francisco, showing that many supposedly modern urban problems—housing prices, crime, family breakdown, NIMBYism, boom-bust cycles—existed in frontier California.

Scott explains current mechanistic interpretability techniques for understanding AI cognition, from linear probes to emotion vectors, showing they're useful for monitoring but insufficient for controlling AI behavior or ensuring safety.

A detailed exploration of The Tale of Genji (circa 1000 CE), arguing against its supposed accessibility while demonstrating the extreme cultural alienness of Heian-era Japan's Imperial Court through discussions of aesthetics, hierarchy, gender segregation, relationship customs, poetry, and translation challenges.