Scott Alexander's blog (predecessor to Astral Codex Ten) — the defining intellectual publication of the rationalist community, known for its exhaustive steelmanning, epistemic standards, and synthetic intelligence.
Steelmanning as practice: where most intellectual writing attacks the weakest version of opposing arguments, SSC's signature move was to construct the strongest possible version. The SSC archive: thousands of essays spanning psychiatry, statistics, politics, and philosophy — the most comprehensive single-author intellectual corpus of the 2010s rationalist movement. Popularized concepts like 'galaxy-brained' (convincing yourself of absurd conclusions through valid-seeming reasoning), 'motivated reasoning,' and 'scissor statements' (claims that reliably divide people).
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