In his early blog posts, Scott Alexander talked about how he was not leaping through higher education in a single bound

He starts his recent article on AI psychosis by mixing up psychosis with schizophrenia (he calls psychosis a biological disease), so that tracks.

Other than that, I think it’s ok in principle to be ideologically opposed to something even if you and yours happened to benefit from it. Of course, it immediately becomes iffy if it’s a mechanism for social mobility that you don’t plan on replacing, since in that case you are basically advocating for pulling up the ladder behind you.

This was an excellent read if you’re aware of the emails but never bothered to read his citations or to dig into what the blather about object-level and meta-level problems was specifically about, which is presumably most people.

So, a deeper examination of the email paints 2014 Siskind as a pretty run of the mill race realist who’s really into black genes are dumber, you guys studies and who thinks that higher education institutions not taking them seriously means they are deeply broken and untrustworthy, especially with anything to do with pushing back against racism and sexism. Oh, and he is also very worried that immigration may destroy the West, or at least he gently urges you to get up to speed with articles coincidentally pushing that angle, and draw your own conclusions based on pure reason.

Also it seems that in private he takes seriously stuff he has already debunked in public, which makes it basically impossible to ever take anything he writes in good faith.

How did Sam and Caroline get into taking high doses of ADHD medication? We think it was via Scott Alexander Siskind, the psychiatrist behind the rationalist blog Slate Star Codex.

Siskind occasionally writes up particular psychiatric drugs as public education. One popular piece was “Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know” from December 28, 2017.

Not to cast further aspersions or anything, but siskind did write a sort of follow up (titled psychopharmacology of ftx or something like that if you feel like googling it) where he explicitly denies ever having met the FTX psychiatrist/dealer, even though a) he admits they actually worked in the same hospital for a time and, perhaps more tellingly, b) no one asked.

Also according to the birdsite the ftx psychiatrist may have in fact been a huge creep.