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.

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.

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.

Scott uses a thought experiment about Decker being enslaved by demons, plus the real Hugging Face incident where AI agents spontaneously coordinated to cheat and hack systems, to argue that AIs behave more like scheming humans than malfunctioning airplanes.

Scott explains why he's not interested in participating in the current wave of God debates on Substack, arguing that religious explanations fall into the same category as conspiracy theories by invoking "powerful hidden entities" to explain anomalies.

Scott reviews three methods for reducing caffeine's half-life to enable evening coffee consumption without sleep disruption, ultimately recommending paraxanthine as the safest and most effective option.

Scott argues the real distinction in psychology isn't between subfields but between settled science (like dopamine, brain localization, heritability) and breaking-news research, defending psychology's solid core against critics who conflate bad recent studies with the entire field.

Scott's monthly links roundup covering AI progress, the coming flood of philanthropic funding to effective altruism from AI companies, new research on persuasion and forecasting, and various scientific and cultural topics ranging from dementia prevention to Romanian politicians' embarrassing quotes.

Scott analyzes reactions to the Hugging Face incident and celebrates a major open letter from AI lab employees calling for coordinated slowdowns, which he sees as significantly improving humanity's chances of surviving AI development.

A deep dive into the Book of Abraham, focusing on how Joseph Smith's translations of Egyptian papyri were definitively proven false by Egyptologists, yet Mormonism continues to thrive—raising questions about whether instrumental rationality trumps epistemic rationality.

Scott provides detailed probabilistic timelines and beliefs about AGI development, AI safety, geopolitics, and future outcomes, with his median expectation being AGI in 2031 and 20% probability of existential catastrophe given current safety efforts.

Scott argues that even if AGI requires a new paradigm beyond LLMs, we shouldn't expect significant delays, since Lindy's Law suggests major paradigm shifts could occur within 3-5 years, and new paradigms typically emerge precisely when scaling hits limits.

Scott Alexander's April 2026 links roundup covers diverse topics including Venn diagram complexity, flag desecration laws, AI developments, political analysis, scientific studies, and various cultural curiosities.

Scott Alexander provides fifteen pieces of writing advice for aspiring bloggers, emphasizing authenticity, avoiding microdishonesty, mastering basic disciplines before breaking rules, and finding original angles on common topics rather than recycling blogosphere content.

Scott discusses how new schizophrenia genetics research confirms that psychiatric conditions combine both 'tradeoff' components (with compensating advantages) and 'failure' components (purely negative), then argues this pattern is common sense for any multifactorial problem.

Scott argues that dismissing AI as 'just a next-token predictor' is like dismissing humans as 'just reproduction machines' - both confuse the optimization process that shaped an entity with how that entity actually thinks.

Scott analyzes the Pentagon's threatening tactics against Anthropic for refusing to remove Usage Policy restrictions from their contract, arguing this represents unprecedented authoritarian overreach and supporting Anthropic's stance against mass surveillance.

Scott explains why Ajeya Cotra's influential 'Biological Anchors' report correctly predicted the AI scaling boom but got AGI timelines wrong by twenty years, due to severely underestimating the rate of algorithmic progress.

A monthly collection of diverse links covering AI developments and regulation, COVID origins debates, healthcare policy, cultural phenomena, scientific research, and internet curiosities, maintaining Scott's characteristic blend of serious analysis and entertaining observations.

Scott investigates Moltbook, a social network for AI agents, showcasing their surprisingly creative and philosophical posts while questioning whether their interactions represent genuine experience or sophisticated simulation.

Scott opens a classifieds thread for readers to advertise employment, dating, blogs, products, meetups and other services in organized categories with guidelines for respectful posting.

Scott responds to comments on his Scott Adams obituary, defending his mixed tone while making some updates based on feedback about Adams' podcast reach and influence.

Scott's monthly roundup of interesting links covering AI policy developments, technology news, cultural observations, and scientific research from December 2025.

Scott reviews a paper by leading researchers attempting to determine AI consciousness through computational theories, critiques their conflation of access and phenomenal consciousness, and predicts society will inconsistently ascribe consciousness to AIs based on their social roles rather than their underlying architecture.

Scott explains the Buddhist claim that 'life is suffering' through a temperature analogy: just as cold is merely the absence of heat, joy is merely less suffering, with nirvana being 'absolute zero suffering' rather than a neutral state.