Scott Alexander challenges Robin Hanson's claim that medicine doesn't work by analyzing health insurance studies and presenting evidence of medicine's effectiveness.

Scott Alexander examines the underutilization of prediction aggregation platforms like Metaculus, exploring potential reasons and expressing surprise at their lack of widespread adoption.

Scott Alexander speculates on a future 'ascended economy' where AI-run corporations dominate, discussing potential implications and risks of such a system.

Scott Alexander reviews Robin Hanson's 'Age of Em', praising its creativity while critiquing its assumptions and arguing the future may be even stranger.

Scott Alexander explores how perfect predictions of war outcomes, through oracles or prediction markets, could potentially prevent wars, and extends this concept to conflicts between superintelligent AIs.

Scott explores a dystopian future scenario of hyper-optimized economic productivity, speculating on the emergence of new patterns and forms of life from this 'economic soup'.

Scott Alexander argues that rationality should be viewed as habit cultivation rather than a limited resource, drawing parallels with aikido and lucid dreaming techniques.

Scott Alexander argues against several popular Great Filter explanations, emphasizing that the true Filter must be more consistent and thorough than common x-risks or alien interventions.

Scott reflects on his hasty utopian science post, viewing it as a success for prompting Robin Hanson to expand on academic prediction markets.

Scott Alexander uses a king-and-viziers analogy to argue that people can be inherently good even when their actions seem selfish, and explores the nature of evil and human goodness.

Scott Alexander discusses Robin Hanson's vision of a future with emulated humans, debating the preservation of human values and the nature of future societal coordination.

Scott Alexander discusses Robin Hanson's idea of investing charitable donations for later use, exploring psychological resistance and attempting to debunk it with various arguments.

Scott defines signaling and explains how it works through examples ranging from college degrees to diamond necklaces, emphasizing both its necessity for conveying credible information and its potential for wasteful resource destruction.

Scott argues against negotiating with unconscious desires, distinguishing between behavior-executors (which have context-dependent urges) and utility-maximizers (which have stable preferences), and suggests we mistakenly model ourselves as the latter when we're actually the former.

Scott uses a thought experiment about a robot that shoots blue things to argue that we mistakenly interpret simple programmed behaviors as goal-directed utility maximization, when really the robot is just executing code, not minimizing blue.

Scott analyzes when assertions should be trusted, showing that their evidentiary value depends on whether you already know the belief's distribution, the asserter's credentials, and how you encountered them, while claims of having 'evidence' mostly serve as signals of rationality rather than factual proof.

Scott analyzes results from a 166-person Less Wrong survey covering demographics, probability estimates on various topics, and philosophical positions, finding a highly educated, mostly male, atheist, politically libertarian/liberal community with surprisingly accurate collective knowledge but notable gaps between stated beliefs and actions.

Scott explores how small inconveniences can powerfully shape behavior, from China's Great Firewall to rebate forms to credit card spending, and discusses policy implications including opt-out government programs.

Scott argues that "extreme rationality" (x-rationality) - the formal study of rationality beyond normal intelligent thinking - provides much less practical benefit than the rationalist community believes, estimating a correlation of only 0.1 with success.

Scott uses self-handicapping studies to argue that people can hold a biased belief on the surface and an accurate one underneath, much like belief in belief.