We’ve Got Five Years, What A Surprise

Today is the fifth anniversary of Slate Star Codex. Overall I’m very happy with how this project is going so far, and I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s made things work behind the scenes.

Trike Apps generously volunteered to host me free of charge. I give them the highest praise it is possible to give a hosting company – namely, that I completely forgot about their existence until right now because I’ve never had to worry about anything. Special thanks to Matt Fallshaw and Cat Truscott for their kindness and patience.

Bakkot has done various things behind the scenes to make the blog more useable – fixing WordPress bugs, helping with moderation tasks, and adding cool new features like the green highlights around new comments. A big part of the success of the comments section is thanks to his innovations; the remaining horribleness is mostly my fault. Rory O and Alice M have also helped with this.

Michael K and Mason H have done other behind-the-scenes work, especially improving the design. Remember when the front page looked like this? No? Thank Michael and Mason.

The subreddit moderation team – led by Bakkot again, but also _Vulture_, coderman9, PM_ME_YOUR_OBSIDIAN, tailcalled, werttrew, utilsucks, and cjet79 – keeps the subreddit in line, and deserves special gratitude for wading through all of your horrible offensive opinions in the process of redirecting them into the Culture Wars thread.

Deluks917 started the Discord, which is thriving. Thanks to him and the rest of the Discord moderation team – Celestia, notaraptor, and vivafringe.

Jeremiah started the podcast, which continues to update very regularly.

Mingyuan runs the general repository of meetups. Thank her if you’ve been able to find an SSC meetup in your area – and if you haven’t, give her a little while, since she’s working on a better and higher-tech version. Thanks also to everyone who organizes meetups. I’m most familiar with David Friedman’s very large and regular South Bay meetups, but I understand there are decent-sized groups all around the world and I’m grateful for everyone who puts work into it.

Cody, Oliver, and other people organized the Unsong wrap celebration so efficiently that I’m still not sure exactly what happened or who did what. I just showed up and everything seems to have worked. Apologies if I am forgetting people or exactly what they did.

Katja has organized the Open Thread system so that it posts on time and with the right decimals. She also gives general moral support and puts up with me. She also arranged the Unsong wrap after-party and has given me lots of interesting things to think about.

Ozy and Elizabeth have guest-blogged here very briefly. Thanks to them – and congratulations to Ozy on the recent birth of their first child.

Roland helped transform my post on antidepressants into a scientific paper that got accepted by a pharmacology journal. Ada Palmer’s thoughts on finally publishing a novel are pretty much how I feel about finally having published a journal article. Preliminary thanks also to everyone currently working with me on similar projects for other posts.

Scott Aaronson, Leah Libresco, and other more established bloggers – plus some Real Journalists like Conor Friedersdorf, Tom Chivers and Ross Douthat – linked to me and encouraged me when I was relatively new to this, and helped convince me that this “blogging” thing might work out.

Thanks to all our advertisers, but especially to Beeminder and MealSquares, who have stuck with me since the beginning and put up with everything from me never remembering to respond to their emails to me gratutitiously and unfairly insulting their products. I actually think they’re both great companies and totally recommend that you Beemind the number of MealSquares you eat, or something.

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Patreon. Your money pays for things like the Mechanical Turk version of the SSC survey, my books and subscriptions, and me having more time to work on the blog.

Thanks to everyone I’ve engaged with. Again and again I’ve had the experience of reading something, criticizing it (sometimes savagely), and having the author be incredibly nice to me, walk me through where we disagree, and then continue being friendly and supportive afterwards. Some people in this category include Ezra Klein, Adam Grant, Nathan Robinson, Curtis Yarvin, Bryan Caplan, David Friedman (again), Dylan Matthews, Brendan Nyhan, Nick Land, Julia Rohrer, and Freddie de Boer. I continue to disagree with them strongly on a lot of things but can’t find even the tiniest bit of fault with their decency on a personal level.

Thanks to all the people who seem to genuinely dislike me and wish me ill, but who have been decent enough not to let it get to the point of doxxing me or threatening my personal safety, my career, or my relationship with my patients.

Thanks to everyone who comments and contributes to discussions. Some people who I’ve heard praised again and again – John Schilling on international affairs, David Friedman on economic issues, Deiseach on religious and cultural issues, and of course Bean on battleships. But everybody is appreciated. Godwin’s Law says that if you want a question answered online, you shouldn’t ask – you should post something wrong and let people correct you. But I have had good luck groping towards the best answer I can, then letting a bunch of experts show up and fill in the details.

Thanks to everyone who takes the (long, often poorly worded) surveys. Without you, interesting findings like this would not be possible – and trust me, there’s more where that came from once I have time to write it up. One of my goals is to find more ways to use this blog’s readership to advance psychological research, and your surprising willingness to waste time on any crazy questions I throw at you has been delightful.

Thanks to everyone who sent me emails, requests, and questions for not being a jerk when I didn’t answer for several weeks or, in many cases, ever. Without your tolerance for my rudeness, I would have much less time to write.

I am probably forgetting all sorts of people – if so, no offense meant. You are all great.