Alexander 2021 Still Alive

21/01/2021 Still Alive - Astral Codex Ten
[email protected]
Astral Codex
Not subscribed Sign out Ten My Account
Subscribe
Still Alive
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake
5 hr ago 263 136
I.
This was a triumph

I'm making a note here, huge success
No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy,
but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to
protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-E ected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around
posting my real name everywhere they could nd. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but
ended up quitting so they wouldn't be a ected by the fallout. I lost a ve-digit sum in
advertising and Patreon fees. I accidentally sent about three hundred emails to each of ve
thousand people in the process of trying to put my blog back up.
I had, not to mince words about it, a really weird year.
513,000 people read my blog post complaining about the New York Times' attempt to dox me
(for comparison, there are 366,000 people in Iceland). So many people cancelled their
subscription that the Times' exasperated customer service agents started pre-empting
callers with "Is this about that blog thing?" A friend of a friend reports her grandmother in
Slovakia heard a story about me on Slovak-language radio.
I got emails from no fewer than four New York Times journalists expressing sympathy and
o ering to explain their paper's standards in case that helped my cause. All four of them
gave totally di erent explanations, disagreeing about whether the reporter I dealt with was
just following the rules, was agrantly violating the rules, was una ected by any rules, or
what. Seems like a fun place to work. I was nevertheless humbled by their support.
I got an email from Balaji Srinivasan, a man whose anti-corporate-media crusade straddles
a previously unrecognized border between endearing and terrifying. He had some very
creative suggestions for how to deal with journalists. I'm not sure any of them were
especially actionable, at least not while the Geneva Convention remains in e ect. But it was
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive 1/14
still a good learning experience. In particular, I learned never to make an enemy of Balaji
Srinivasan. I am humbled by his support.
I got emails from two di erent prediction aggregators saying they would show they cared
by opening markets into whether the Times would end up doxxing me or not. One of them
ended up with a total trade volume in the four digits. For a brief moment, I probably had
more advanced decision-making technology advising me in my stupid con ict with a
newspaper than the CIA uses for some wars. I am humbled by their support.
I got an email from a very angry man who believed I personally wrote the entirety of
Slate.com. He told me I was a hypocrite for wanting privacy even though Slate.com had
apparently published some privacy-violating stories. I tried to correct him, but it seemed
like his email client only accepted replies from people on his contact list. I think this might
be what the Catholics call "invincible ignorance". But, uh, I'm sure if we got a chance to
sort it out I would have been humbled by his support.
I got an email from a former member of the GamerGate movement, o ering advice on
managing PR. It was very thorough and they had obviously put a lot of e ort into it, but it
was all premised on this idea that GamerGate was some kind of shining PR success, even
though as I remember it they managed to take a complaint about a video game review and
mishandle it so badly that they literally got condemned by the UN General Assembly. But
it's the thought that counts, and I am humbled by their support.
I got an email from a Russian reader, which I will quote in full: "In Russia we witnessed similar
things back in 1917. 100 years later the same situation is in your country :)". I am not sure it really
makes sense to compare my attempted doxxing to the Bolshevik Revolution, and that smiley
face will haunt my dreams, but I am humbled by his support.
Eventually it became kind of overwhelming. 7500 people signed a petition in my favor.

Russia Today wrote an article about my situation as part of their propaganda campaign
against the United States. Various tech gures started a campaign to stop granting
interviews to NYT in protest. All of the humbling support kind of blended together. At my
character level, I can only cast the spell Summon Entire Internet once per decade or so. So as I
clicked through email a er email, I asked myself: did I do the right thing?
II.
I'm not even angry

I'm being so sincere right now
Before we go any further: your conspiracy theories are false. An SSC reader admitted to
telling a New York Times reporter that SSC was interesting and he should write a story about
it. The reporter pursued the story on his recommendation. It wasn't an attempt by the Times
to crush a competitor, it wasn't retaliation for my having written some critical things about
the news business, it wasn't even a political attempt to cancel me. Someone just told a
reporter I would make a cool story, and the reporter went along with it.
Nor do I think it was going to be a hit piece, at least not at rst. I heard from most of the
people who the Times interviewed. They were mostly sympathetic sources, the interviewer
asked mostly sympathetic questions, and someone who knows New York Times reporters
says the guy on my case was their non-hit-piece guy; they have a di erent reporter for
hatchet jobs. A er I torched the blog in protest, they seem to have brie y irted with
turning it into a hit piece, and the following week they switched to interviewing everyone
who hated me and asking a lot of leading questions about potentially bad things I did. My
contacts in the news industry said even this wasn't necessarily sinister. They might have
assumed I had something to hide, and wanted to gure out what it was just in case it was a
better story than the original. Or they might have been deliberately interviewing friendly
sources rst, in order to make me feel safe so I would grant them an interview, and then
moved on to the unfriendly ones a er they knew that wouldn't happen. I'm not sure. But the
pattern doesn't match "hit piece from the beginning".
As much crappy political stu as there is in both the news industry and the blogsphere
these days, I don't think this was a le -right political issue. I think the New York Times
wanted to write a fairly boring article about me, but some guideline said they had to reveal
subjects' real identities, if they knew them, unless the subject was in one of a few
prede ned sympathetic categories (eg sex workers). I did get to talk to a few sympathetic
people from the Times, who were pretty confused about whether such a guideline existed,
and certainly it's honored more in the breach than in the observance (eg Virgil Texas). But I
still think the most likely explanation for what happened was that there was a rule sort of
like that on the books, some departments and editors followed it more slavishly than others,
and I had the bad luck to be assigned to a department and editor that followed it a lot.
That's all. Anyway, they did the right thing and decided not to publish the article, so I have
no remaining beef with them.
(aside from the sorts of minor complaints that Rob Rhinehart expresses so eloquently here)
I also owe the Times apologies for a few things I did while ghting them. In particular,
when I told them I was going to delete the blog if they didn't promise not to dox me, I gave
them so little warning that it probably felt like a bizarre ultimatum. At the time I was
worried if I gave them more than a day's warning, they could just publish the story while I
waited; later, people convinced me the Times is incapable of acting quickly and I could have
let them think about it for longer.
Also, I asked you all to email an NYT tech editor with your complaints. I assumed NYT
editors, like Presidents and Senators, had unlimited unkies sorting through their
mailbags, and would not be personally a ected by any email deluge. I was wrong and I
actually directed a three to four digit number of emails to the personal work inbox of some
normal person with a nite number of unkies. That was probably pretty harrowing and
I'm sorry.
As for the Times' mistakes: I think they just didn't expect me to care about anonymity as
much as I did. In fact, most of my supporters, and most of the savvy people giving me
advice, didn't expect me to care as much as I did. Maybe I should explain more of my
history here: back in the early 2010s I blogged under my real name. When I interviewed for
my dream job in psychiatry, the interviewer had Googled my name, found my blog, and
asked me some really pointed questions about whether having a blog meant I was
irresponsible and unprofessional. There wasn't even anything controversial on the blog -
this was back in the early 2010s, before they invented controversy. They were just old-
school pre-social-media-era people who thought having a blog was fundamentally
incompatible with the dignity of being a psychiatrist. I didn't get that job, nor several
others I thought I was a shoo-in for. I actually failed my entire rst year of ACGME match
and was pretty close to having to give up on a medical career. At the time I felt like that
would mean my life was over.
So I took a bunch of steps to be in a better position for the next year's round of interviews,
and one of the most important was deleting that blog, scrubbing it o the Web as best I
could, and restarting my whole online presence under a pseudonym. I was never able to
completely erase myself from the Internet, but I made some strategic decisions - like
leaving up a bunch of older stu that mentioned my real name so that casual searchers
would nd that instead of my real blog. The next year, I tried the job interview circuit again
and got hired.
But I still had this really strong sense that my career hung on this thread of staying
anonymous. Sure, my security was terrible, and a few trolls and malefactors found my real
name online and used it to taunt me. But my attendings and my future employers couldn't
just Google my name and nd it immediately. Also, my patients couldn't Google my name
and nd me immediately, which I was increasingly realizing the psychiatric community
considered important. Therapists are supposed to be blank slates, available for patients to
project their con icts and fantasies upon. Their distant father, their abusive boyfriend, their
whatever. They must not know you as a person. One of my more dedicated professors told me
about how he used to have a picture of his children on a shelf in his o ce. One of his
patients asked him whether those were his children. He described suddenly realizing that
he had let his desire to show o overcome his duty as a psychiatrist, mumbling a
noncommital response lest his patient learn whether he had children or not, taking the
picture home with him that night, and never displaying any personal items in his o ce ever
again. That guy was kind of an extreme case, but this is something all psychiatrists think
about, and better pychiatrist-bloggers than I have quit once their side gig reached a point
where their patients might hear about it. There was even a very nice and nuanced article
about the phenomenon in - of all places - The New York Times.
A er all that, yeah, I had a phobia of being doxxed. But psychotherapy classes also teach
you to not to let past traumas control your life even a er they've stopped being relevant.
Was I getting too worked up over an issue that no longer mattered?
The New York Times thought so. Some people kept me abreast of their private discussions (in
Soviet America, newspaper's discussions get leaked to you!) and their reporters had spirited
internal debates about whether I really needed anonymity. Sure, I'd gotten some death
threats, but everyone gets death threats on the Internet, and I'd provided no proof mine
were credible. Sure, I might get SWATted, but realistically that's a really scary een
seconds before the cops apologize and go away. Sure, my job was at risk, but I was a well-o
person and could probably get another. Also, hadn't I blogged under my real name before?
Hadn't I published papers under my real name in ways that a clever person could use to
unmask my identity? Hadn't I played fast and loose with every form of opsec other than
whether the average patient or employer could Google me in ve seconds?
Some of the savvy people giving me advice suggested I ght back against this. Release the
exact death threats I'd received and explain why I thought they were scary. Play up exactly
how many people lived with me and exactly why it would be traumatic for them to get
SWATted. Explain exactly how seriously it would harm my patients if I lost my job. Say why
it was necessary for my career to publish those papers under my real name.
Why didn't I do this? Partly because it wasn't true. I don't think I had particularly strong
arguments on any of these points. The amount I dislike death threats is basically the
average amount that the average person would dislike them. The amount I would dislike
losing my job...and et cetera. Realistically, my anonymity let me feel safe and comfortable.
But it probably wasn't literally necessary to keep me alive. I feel bad admitting this, like I
conscripted you all into a crusade on false pretenses. Am I an entitled jerk for causing such
a stir just so I can feel safe and comfortable? I'm sure the New York Times customer service
representatives who had to deal with all your phone calls thought so.
But the other reason I didn't do it was...well, suppose Power comes up to you and says hey,
I'm gonna kick you in the balls. And when you protest, they say they don't want to make
anyone unsafe, so as long as you can prove that kicking you in the balls will cause long-term
irrecoverable damage, they'll hold o . And you say, well, it'll hurt quite a lot. And they say
that's subjective, they'll need a doctor's note proving you have a chronic pain condition like
hyperalgesia or bromyalgia. And you say ne, I guess I don't have those, but it might be
dangerous. And they ask you if you're some sort of expert who can prove there's a high risk
of organ rupture, and you have to admit the risk of organ rupture isn't exactly high. But also,
they add, didn't you practice taekwondo in college? Isn't that the kind of sport where you
can get kicked in the balls pretty easily? Sounds like you're not really that committed to this
not-getting-kicked-in-the-balls thing.
No! There's no digni ed way to answer any of these questions except "fuck you". Just don't
kick me in the balls! It isn't rocket science! Don't kick me in the fucking balls!
In the New York Times' worldview, they start with the right to dox me, and I had to earn the
right to remain anonymous by proving I'm the perfect sympathetic victim who satis es all
their criteria of victimhood. But in my worldview, I start with the right to anonymity, and
they need to make an a rmative case for doxxing me. I admit I am not the perfect victim.
The death threats against me are all by losers who probably don't know which side of a gun
you shoot someone with. If anything happened at work, it would probably inconvenience
me and my patients, but probably wouldn't literally kill either of us. Still! Don't kick me in
the fucking balls!
I don't think anyone at the Times bore me ill will, at least not originally. But somehow that
just made it even more infuriating. In Street Fighter, the hero confronts the Big Bad about
the time he destroyed her village. The Big Bad has destroyed so much stu he doesn't even
remember: "For you, the day [I burned] your village was the most important day of your life.
For me, it was Tuesday." That was the impression I got from the Times. They weren't
hostile. I wasn't a target they were desperate to take out. The main emotion I was able to
pick up from them was annoyance that I was making their lives harder by making a big deal
out of this. For them, it was Tuesday.
It's bad enough to get kicked in the balls because Power hates you. But it's infuriating to
have it happen because Power can't bring itself to care. So sure, deleting my blog wasn't the
most, shall we say, rational response to the situation. But iterated games sometimes require
a strategy that deviates from apparent rst-level rationality, where you let yourself consider
lose-lose options in order to in uence an opponent's behavior.
Or, in layman's terms, sometimes you have to be a crazy bastard so people won't walk all
over you.
In 2010, a corrupt policewoman demanded a bribe from impoverished pushcart vendor

Mohammed Bouazizi. He couldn't a ord it. She con scated his goods, insulted him, and
(according to some sources) slapped him. He was humiliated and destitute and had no hope
of ever getting back at a police o cer. So he made the very reasonable decision to douse
himself in gasoline and set himself on re in the public square. One thing led to another,
and eventually a mostly-peaceful revolution ousted the government of Tunisia. I am very
sorry for Mr. Bouazizi and his family. But he did nd a way to make the o ending
policewoman remember the day she harassed him as something other than Tuesday. As the
saying goes, "sometimes setting yourself on re sheds light on the situation".
III.
As I burned it hurt because

I was so happy for you
But as I was thinking about all this, I got other emails. Not just the prediction aggregators
and Russians and so on; emails of a totally di erent sort.
I got emails from other people who had deleted their blogs out of fear. Sometimes it was
because of a job search. Other times it was because of *gestures expansively at everything*.
These people wanted me to know they sympathized with what I was going through.
I got emails from people who hadn't deleted their blogs, but wished they had. A lot of them
had stories like mine - failed an interview they should have aced, and the interviewer
mentioned their blog as an issue. These people sympathized too.
I got emails that were like that, only it was grad students. Apparently if you have a blog
about your eld, that can make it harder to get or keep a job in academia. I'm not sure what
we think we're gaining by ensuring the smartest and best educated people around aren't
able to talk openly about the elds they're experts in, but I hope it's worth it.
I got an email from a far-le blogger with a similar story, which got me thinking about
socialists in particular. Imagine you're writing a socialist blog - as is 100% your right in a
democratic society. Aren't employers going to freak out as soon as they Google your name,
expecting you to start a union or agitate for higher wages or seize the means of production
or something? This is a totally di erent problem from the cancel culture stories I usually
hear about, but just as serious. How are you supposed to write about communism in a world
where any newspaper can just gure out your real name, expose you, and lock you out of
most normal jobs?
I got emails from some transgender bloggers, who talked about how trans people go by
something other than their legal name and have a special interest in not getting outed in
the national news. I don't think the Times would deliberately out trans people - probably
there's some o cial policy against it. But the people emailing me understood that we're all
in this together, and that if oppressed people don't stand up for the rights of the privileged,
no one will. Or something. Man, it's been a weird year.
I got an email telling me to look into the story of Richard Horton, a police o cer in the UK.
He wrote a blog about his experience on the force which was by all accounts incredible - it
won the Orwell Prize for being the best political writing in Britain that year. The Times (a
British newspaper unrelated to NYT) hacked his email and exposed his real identity, and his
chief forced him to delete the blog in order to keep his job. I wonder whether maybe if
police o cers were allowed to write anonymously about what was going on without getting
doxxed by newspapers, people wouldn't have to be so surprised every time something
happens involving the police being bad. See for example The Impact Of The Cessation Of
Blogs Within The UK Police Blogosphere, a paper somebody apparently needed to write.
I got an email telling me to look into the story of Naomi Wu, a Chinese woman who makes
videos about engineering and DIY tech projects under the name SexyCyborg. She granted
an interview to a Vice reporter under the condition that he not reveal some sensitive details
of her personal life which could get her in trouble with the Chinese authorities. Vice
agreed, then revealed the details anyway (who could have guessed that a webzine founded
by a violent neo-fascist leader and named a er the abstract concept of evil would stoop so
low?) In a Medium post, Wu wrote that "Vice would endanger me for a few clicks because
in Brooklyn certain things are no big deal...I had no possible recourse against a billion
dollar company who thought titillating their readers with my personal details was worth
putting me in jeopardy." She then went on to dox the Vice reporter involved, Which Was
Morally Wrong And I Do Not Condone It - but also led to some interesting revelations
about how much more journalists cared when it's one of their own and not just some
vulnerable woman in a dictatorship.
Getting all these emails made me realize that, whatever the merits of my own case, maybe
by accident, I was ghting for something important here. Who am I? I'm nobody, I'm a
science blogger with some bad opinions. But these people - the trans people, the union
organizers, the police whistleblowers, the sexy cyborgs - the New York Times isn't worthy to
wipe the dirt o their feet. How dare they assert the right to ruin these people's lives for a
couple of extra bucks.
...but I was also grateful to get some emails from journalists trying to help me understand
the perspective of their eld. They point out that reporting is fundamentally about
revealing information that wasn't previously public, and hard-hitting reporting necessarily
involves disclosing things about subjects that they would rather you not know. Speculating
on the identities of people like Deep Throat, or Satoshi Nakamoto, or QAnon, or that guy
who wrote Primary Colors, is a long-standing journalistic tradition, one I had never before
thought to question. Many of my correspondents brought up that some important people
read my blog (Paul Graham was the most cited name). Isn't there a point past which you
stop being that-guy-with-a-Tumblr-account who it's wrong to dox, and you become more
like Satoshi Nakamoto where trying to dox you is a sort of national sport? Wouldn't it be
fair to say I had passed that point?
With all due respect to these reporters, and with complete admission of my own bias, I
reject this entire way of looking at things. If someone wants to report that I'm a 30-
something psychiatrist who lives in Oakland, California, that's ne, I've had it in my About
page for years. If some reporter wants to investigate and con rm, I have some suggestions
for how they could use their time better - isn't there still a war in Yemen? - but I'm not
going to complain too loudly. But I don't think whatever claim the public has on me
includes a right to know my name if I don't want them to. I don't think the public needs to
know the name of the cops who write cop blogs, or the deadnames of trans people, or the
dating lives of sexy cyborgs. I'm not even sure the public needs to know the name of Satoshi
Nakamoto. If he isn't harming anyone, let him have his anonymity! I would rather we get
whatever pathologies come from people being able to invent Bitcoin scot-free, than get
whatever pathologies come from anyone being allowed to dox anyone else if they can argue
that person is "in uential". Most people don't start out trying to be in uential. They just
have a Tumblr or a LiveJournal or something, and a few people read it, and then a few more
people read it, and bam! - they're in uential! If in uence takes away your protection, then
none of us are safe - not the random grad student with a Twitter account making fun of bad
science, not the teenager with a sex Tumblr, not the aspiring fashionista with an Instagram.
I've read lots of interesting discussion on how much power tech oligarchs should or
shouldn't be allowed to have. But this is the rst time I've seen someone suggest their
powers should include a magic privacy-destroying gaze, where just by looking at someone
they can transform them into a di erent kind of citizen with fewer rights. Is Paul Graham
some weird kind of basilisk, such that anyone he stares at too long turns into fair game?
And: a recent poll found that 62% of people feel afraid to express their political beliefs. This
isn't just conservatives - it's also moderates (64%), liberals (52%) and even many strong
liberals (42%). This is true even among minority groups, with more Latinos (65%) feeling
afraid to speak out than whites (64%), and blacks (49%) close behind. 32% of people worry
they would be red if their political views became generally known, including 28% of
Democrats and 38% of Republicans. Poor people and Hispanics were more likely to express
this concern than rich people and whites, but people with post-graduate degrees have it
worse than any other demographic group.
And the kicker is that these numbers are up almost ten percentage points from the last poll
three years ago. The biggest decline in feeling safe was among "strong liberals", who feel an
entire 12 percentage points less safe expressing their opinion now than way back in the
hoary old days of 2017. What happens in a world where this trend continues? Does everyone
eventually feel so unsafe that we completely abandon the public square to professional-
opinion-havers, talking heads allowed to ponti cate because they have the backing of giant
institutions? What biases does that introduce to the discussion? And if we want to avoid
that, is there any better way then a rm stance that people's online pseudonymity is a basic
right, not to be challenged without one hell of a compelling public interest? Not just "they
got kinda big, so now we can destroy them guilt-free", but an actual public interest?
I'm not trying to convince the New York Times - obviously it would very much t their
business plan if we came to rely on professional-opinion-havers backed by big institutions.
I'm trying to convince you, the average Internet person. For the rst ten or twenty years of
its history, the Internet had a robust norm against doxxing. You could troll people, you
could Goatse or Rickroll them, but doxxing was beyond the pale. One of the veterans of this
era is Lawrence Lessig, who I was delighted to see coming to my defense. We've lost a lot of
that old Internet, sold our birthright to social media companies and content providers for a
few spurts of dopamine, but I think this norm is still worth protecting.
If me setting myself on re got the New York Times to rethink some of its policies, and
accidentally helped some of these people win their own ghts, it was totally worth it.
IV.
Now these points of data make a beautiful line

And we're out of beta, we're releasing on time
So I'm glad I got burned
Think of all the things we learned
For the people who are still alive
There's a scene in Tom Sawyer where Tom runs away from town and is presumed dead. He
returns just as they're holding his funeral, and gets to listen to everyone praise his life and
talk about how much they loved him. Seems like a good deal. Likewise, Garrison Keillor
said that - since they say such nice things at people's funerals - it was a shame he was going
to miss his own by just a few days.
A er deleting the blog I felt like I was attending my own funeral. I asked people to send the
Times emails asking them not to publish the article. Some people ccd me on them. These
weren't just "Dear NYT, please do not dox this blogger, yours, John". Some of them were a
bit over-the-top. I believe a few of them may have used the words "national treasure". I can
only hope the people at my real funeral are as kind.
Other people just sent me the over-the-top emails directly. I got emails from people in far-
away, very poor countries, telling me that there was nothing at all like a rationalist
movement in their countries and my blog was how they kept up with the intellectual
currents of a part of the world they might never see. I am humbled to be able to help them.
I got emails from medical interns and residents, telling me they enjoyed hearing about my
experiences in medicine. You guys only have like three minutes of free time a week, and I
am humbled that you would spend some of it reading me.
I got emails from people saying I was one of their inspirations for going into science
academia. I am so, so, sorry. I am humbled by their continued support even a er I ruined
their lives.
I got emails from people in a host of weird and di cult situations, telling me about how
reading my blog was the only thing that kept them sane through di cult times. One
woman insisted that I start blogging before she got pregnant again because I was her
postpartum coping strategy. I hope I've made it in time - but in any case I am humbled by
their support.
I got emails from couples, saying that reading my blog together once a week was their
romantic bonding activity. Again, I hope I've restarted in time, before anyone's had to
divorce. They are very cute and I am humbled by their support.
And more along the same lines, and some even more humbling than these. I want to grab
some of you by the shoulders and shake you and shout "IT'S JUST A BLOG, GET A LIFE".
But of course I would be a hypocrite. I remember back to when I was a new college
graduate, desperately trying to make sense of the world. I remember the sheer relief when I
came across a few bloggers - I most clearly remember Eliezer Yudkowsky - who seemed to
be tuned exactly to my wavelength, people who were making sense when the entire rest of
the world was saying vague fuzzy things that almost but not quite connected with the
millions of questions I had about everything. These people weren't perfect, and they didn't
have all the answers, but their existence reassured me that I wasn't crazy and I wasn't alone.
I was an embarrassing fanboy of theirs for many years - I kind of still am - and if my
punishment is to have embarassing fanboys of my own then I accept it as part of the circle
of life.
And also - I am maybe the worst person possible to argue that this doesn't matter. Almost
everything good in my life I've gotten because of you. I met most of my friends through
blogging. I met my housemates, who are basically my family right now, through blogging. I
got introduced to my girlfriend by someone I know through blogging. My patients are
doing better than they could be - some of them vastly better - because of things I learned
from all of you in the process of blogging. Most of the intellectual progress I've made over
the past ten years has been following up on leads people sent me because of my blogging.
To the degree that the world makes sense to me, to the degree that I've been able to untie
some of the thornier knots and be rewarded with the relief of mental clarity, a lot of it has
been because of things I learned while blogging. However many over-the-top dubious
claims you want to make about how much I have improved your life, I will one-up you with
how much you have improved mine. And a er reading a few hundred of your emails, I've
realized, crystal-clear, that I am going to be spending the rest of my life trying to deserve
even one percent of the love you've shown and the gi s you've given me.
So I've taken the steps I need to in order to feel comfortable revealing my real name online.
I talked to an aggressively unhelpful police o cer about my personal security. I got advice
from people who are more famous than I am, who have allayed some fears and o ered some
suggestions. Some of the steps they take seem extreme - the Internet is a scarier place than
I thought - but I've taken some of what they said to heart, rejected the rest in a calculated
way, and realized realistically I was never that protected anyhow. So here we are.
And I le my job. They were very nice about it, they were tentatively willing to try to make
it work. But I just don't think I can do psychotherapy very well while I'm also a public
gure, plus people were already calling them trying to get me red and I didn't want to
make them deal with more of that.
As I was trying to gure out how this was going to work nancially, Substack convinced me
that I could make decent money here. With that in place, I felt like I could also take a
chance on starting my dream business. You guys have had to listen to me write ad nauseum
about cost disease - why does health care cost 4x times more per capita than it did just a
generation ago? I have a lot of theories about why that happened and how to x it. But as
Feynman put it, "what I cannot create I cannot understand". So I'm going to try to start a
medical practice that provides great health care to uninsured people for 4x less than what
anyone else charges. If it works, I plan to be insu erable about it. If it doesn't, I can at least
have a fun conversation with Alex Tabarrok about where our theories went wrong. Since
I'm no longer protecting my anonymity, I can advertise it here - Lorien Psychiatry - though
I'm not currently accepting blog readers as patients, sorry.
That's taken up most of my time over the past six months. Going back to blog posts like this
is a strange feeling. I wondered if I'd enjoy the break. I didn't particularly; it felt at least as
much like trying to resist an addiction as it did resting from a di cult task. There's so
much le to say! I never got the chance to tell you whether the SSC Survey found birth
order e ects to be biologically or socially mediated! And the predictive processing
community is starting to really chip away at the question of why psychotherapies work - I
need to explain this to someone else before I can be sure I understand it! I only discovered
taxometrics a few months ago and I haven't talked your ears o about it yet - that will
change! I made predictions about Trump - now that he's come and gone I need to grade
them publicly so you can raise or lower your opinion of me as appropriate! And there's the
book review contest! We are absolutely going to do the book review contest!
So here goes. With malice towards none, with charity towards all, with rmness in the ṛta
as re ective equilibrium gives us to see the ṛta, let us restart our mutual explorations, begin
anew the joyful reduction of uncertainty wherever it may lead us.
My name is Scott Siskind, and I love all of you so, so much.
But look at me, still talking when there's Science to do

When I look out there it makes me glad I've got you
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done
On the people who are still alive
And believe me I am still alive
I'm doing science and I'm still alive
I feel fantastic and I'm still alive
Still alive
263 136
Subscribe
Discussion
Write a comment…
Chronological
7 new replies
Load More
Ready for more?

[email protected] Subscribe
© 2021 Scott Alexander. See privacy, terms and information collection notice
Publish on Substack

Alexander 2021 Still Alive

Uploaded by

Document Informationclick to expand document information

Copyright:

Available Formats

Alexander 2021 Still Alive

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Alexander 2021 Still Alive

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

21/01/2021 Still Alive - Astral Codex Ten

This was a triumph

I had, not to mince words about it, a really weird year.

Eventually it became kind of overwhelming. 7500 people signed a petition in my favor.

I'm not even angry

In 2010, a corrupt policewoman demanded a bribe from impoverished pushcart vendor

As I burned it hurt because

Now these points of data make a beautiful line

My name is Scott Siskind, and I love all of you so, so much.

But look at me, still talking when there's Science to do

Ready for more?

You might also like