What Are the Most Popular Posts on Slate Star Codex?

Updated

Slate Star Codex (SSC) was a long-running blog by Scott Alexander, and its most-read posts are collected in the site's own Top Posts section, linked from the homepage navigation. That page is the most reliable starting point, because it reflects the author's own selection rather than an external ranking. The blog itself is no longer updated at slatestarcodex.com: Alexander announced in January 2021 that his new blog is at astralcodexten.substack.com, and the archived SSC content remains available through the site's archives and Top Posts page.

Where to find the popular posts

  • Top Posts — the primary curated list, accessible from the top navigation on the homepage.
  • Archives — a full month-by-month index running from February 2013 through January 2021, useful if you want to browse by date rather than by popularity.
  • Comments Feed / RSS Feed — for following discussion, though the blog is no longer actively posting.

Topics that dominate the popular posts

SSC's most-cited writing clusters around a few recurring subjects:

  • Rationality — how to reason under uncertainty, avoid bias, and evaluate evidence.
  • AI risk — long-form arguments about machine intelligence and its implications.
  • Psychiatry and medicine — Alexander's professional background informed many widely shared essays.
  • Politics and governance — including thought experiments about alternative systems, such as the post "Slightly Skew Systems Of Government."
  • Book reviews and culture — extended reviews and essays that circulated well beyond the blog's regular readership.

Commonly cited examples

Two posts are frequently referenced in online discussions and are good entry points:

  • "Meditations on Moloch" — an essay on coordination problems and why harmful equilibria persist.
  • "The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories" — a piece on how classification systems serve human purposes rather than reflecting fixed natural divisions.

These appear repeatedly in citations across forums, subreddits, and later blogs, which is a practical signal of their popularity even without a numeric ranking.

How to decide what to read first

If you want… Start with
A single famous essay "Meditations on Moloch"
Conceptual/philosophical writing "The Categories Were Made for Man…"
A sense of the blog's range The Top Posts page
Chronological browsing The full Archives (2013–2021)
Newer writing by the same author astralcodexten.substack.com

A note on the site's status

The homepage currently leads with "Introducing Astral Codex Ten" (January 21, 2021), which points readers to the Substack, and with "Update On My Situation" (September 11, 2020), where Alexander explains he deleted the blog after the New York Times threatened to reveal his real name. Because of this, treat slatestarcodex.com as an archive: the Top Posts and Archives pages still work for reading, but new material appears on the Substack instead.