Scott Alexander

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Articles

Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats

Jan 9, 2025 | open.substack.com | Scott Alexander

An old tweet from Vivek Ramaswamy, now co-head of the Department of Government Efficacy:I was surprised to see someone with such experience in the pharmaceutical industry say this, because it goes against how I understood the FDA to work. My model goes:FDA procedures require certain bureaucratic tasks to be completed before approving drugs. Let’s abstract this into “processing 1,000 forms”. Suppose they have 100 bureaucrats, and each bureaucrat can process 10 forms per year.
Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats

Jan 9, 2025 | astralcodexten.com | Scott Alexander

An old tweet from Vivek Ramaswamy, now co-head of the Department of Government Efficacy:I was surprised to see someone with such experience in the pharmaceutical industry say this, because it goes against how I understood the FDA to work. My model goes:FDA procedures require certain bureaucratic tasks to be completed before approving drugs. Let’s abstract this into “processing 1,000 forms”. Suppose they have 100 bureaucrats, and each bureaucrat can process 10 forms per year.
Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe

Aug 30, 2024 | open.substack.com | Scott Alexander

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]April, 1861 was a cruel month.
Your Book Review: How the War Was Won

Aug 9, 2024 | open.substack.com | Scott Alexander

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien?
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke

May 1, 2024 | open.substack.com | Scott Alexander

The Origins Of Woke, by Richard Hanania, has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn’t the one it argues for. The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”.
The Psychopolitics Of Trauma

Jan 24, 2024 | open.substack.com | Scott Alexander

I. Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on? I’m only half joking. Psychiatrists have spent decades developing a whole catalog of ways brains can go wrong. Politics makes people’s brains go wrong. Shouldn’t it be in the catalog? Wouldn’t it be weird if 21st century political extremists had discovered a totally new form of mental dysfunction, unrelated even by analogy to all the forms that had come before?
Some Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders

Jan 24, 2024 | open.substack.com | Scott Alexander

E. Fuller Torrey recently published a journal article trying to cast doubt on the commonly-accepted claim that schizophrenia is mostly genetic. Most of his points were the usual “if we can’t name all of the exact genes, it must not be genetic at all” - but two arguments stood out:Even though twin studies say schizophrenia is about 80% genetic, surveys of twin pairs show that if one identical twin has schizophrenia, the other one only has a 15% to 50% chance of having it.
Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible — LessWrong

Dec 12, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Seth Herd |Adele Lopez |Scott Alexander |William C Stanford

TL;DR versionIn the course of my life, there have been a handful of times I discovered an idea that changed the way I thought about where our species is headed. The first occurred when I picked up Nick Bostrom’s book “superintelligence” and realized that AI would utterly transform the world. The second was when I learned about embryo selection and how it could change future generations.
Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games

Nov 30, 2023 | astralcodexten.com | Scott Alexander

Followup to: In Continued Defense Of Effective AltruismFreddie deBoer says effective altruism is “a shell game”:Who could argue with that! But this summary also invites perhaps the most powerful critique: who could argue with that? That is to say, this sounds like so obvious and general a project that it can hardly denote a specific philosophy or project at all.
God Help Us, Let's Try To Understand The Paper On AI Monosemanticity

Nov 27, 2023 | astralcodexten.com | Scott Alexander

You’ve probably heard AI is a “black box”. No one knows how it works. Researchers simulate a weird type of pseudo-neural-tissue, “reward” it a little every time it becomes a little more like the AI they want, and eventually it becomes the AI they want. But God only knows what goes on inside of it. This is bad for safety. For safety, it would be nice to look inside the AI and see whether it’s executing an algorithm like “do the thing” or more like “trick the humans into thinking I’m doing the thing”.