How to explore Scott Alexander's work and his 1500+ blog posts? This unaffiliated fan website lets you sort and search through the whole codex. Enjoy!

See also Top Posts and All Tags.

Minutes:
Blog:
Year:
Show all filters
2 posts found
Jul 31, 2019
ssc
2 min 217 words 73 comments
Scott Alexander announces that the adversarial collaboration contest will proceed, lists the registered teams, and introduces a new rule for proposing topics. Longer summary
Scott Alexander provides an update on the adversarial collaboration contest he previously announced. He lists seven teams that have registered so far, covering topics such as circumcision, incarceration, the simulation argument, abortion, critical learning periods, and eating meat. With more than five teams registered, Scott confirms that the contest will officially take place. He invites others to form teams in the comment section, with the caveat that only people with usernames A-M can propose topics, while those with names N-Z must accept existing proposals. This rule is an experiment to address the issue of participants preferring to propose their own topics rather than accepting others'. Shorter summary
Feb 14, 2015
ssc
5 min 680 words 381 comments
Scott Alexander questions the plausibility of multifactorial explanations for trends, using the US crime rate decline as an example, and seeks literature on comparing single-factor vs multi-factor explanations. Longer summary
Scott Alexander discusses the plausibility of multifactorial trends, using the decline in US crime rates as an example. He presents two perspectives: one arguing that complex phenomena like crime are likely caused by many small factors, and another suggesting that simultaneous changes in multiple factors is improbable. Scott leans towards the second perspective, questioning the likelihood of ten different factors each accounting for about 10% of the crime decline. He asks if there are ways to calculate the relative likelihood of single-factor versus multi-factor explanations, noting that he feels he's missing an existing body of literature on this topic. Shorter summary