Scott examines the Metaculus Threat To Democracy Index, which uses crowdsourced forecasting to measure democratic health, discussing its advantages over traditional expert-based indices and its vulnerabilities to manipulation and selection bias.

Scott Alexander attempts to replicate a poll claiming high rates of COVID vaccine deaths, finds much lower rates, and concludes such polls are unreliable due to bias.

Scott Alexander evaluates predictions about the Russia-Ukraine war, analyzing the performance of prediction markets and individual pundits.

Scott Alexander explores the concept of 'trapped priors' as a fundamental problem in rationality, explaining how it leads to persistent biases and suggesting potential solutions.

Scott Alexander analyzes a survey on readers' estimated probabilities of Kavanaugh's guilt, finding significant partisan differences and no clear consensus even with probabilistic thinking.

A collection of interesting links spanning topics from CRISPR technology to economic studies, with Scott's commentary on each item.

The author analyzes results of a prediction contest about American political opinions, revealing participants' inaccuracies and biases in estimating current views and changes over time.

Scott defends a 'soft positivism' in which meaningful statements can be reduced to testable claims, and argues that statements that resist such reduction, like 'Islam is a religion of peace', often smuggle in emotion and prejudice.