What Topics Does Slate Star Codex Cover?

Updated

Slate Star Codex (SSC) was a long-running blog by Scott Alexander that covered a wide range of subjects, with recurring themes in rationality, science and medicine, economics and political systems, and effective altruism and existential risk. The site's own blogroll and archives confirm this breadth: its link categories include Economics, Effective Altruism, Rationality, and Science, alongside a general "SSC Elsewhere" section. If you are looking for a single-issue blog, SSC is not that; if you want long-form essays that apply reasoning tools across many domains, it is a strong fit.

Rationality and cognitive biases

This was the blog's foundational theme. Posts in this area typically examined how people reason, where thinking goes wrong, and how to correct for it. Common subjects included:

  • Cognitive biases and heuristics, and when they help versus mislead
  • Bayesian reasoning and probabilistic thinking
  • Prediction, calibration, and forecasting
  • Meta-level discussions about how to run a rationalist community

The blog's audience and linked community reflect this focus: the blogroll lists Less Wrong and individual writers such as Katja Grace, Paul Christiano, and Zvi Mowshowitz under Rationality.

Science, medicine, and psychiatry

Scott Alexander's professional background in psychiatry shaped a large share of the content. Topics here included:

  • Psychiatry and psychiatric medication, including debates over efficacy and side effects
  • Medicine and medical research methodology, especially study design and replication
  • Genetics, epidemiology, and public health
  • Broader science policy and how research gets funded, published, and reported

The blogroll's Science category points to writers like Andrew Gelman, Razib Khan, Steve Hsu, and Stephan Guyenet, which matches this empirical, data-oriented strand.

Economics and political systems

SSC regularly analyzed economic ideas and institutional design rather than day-to-day politics. Recurring subjects included:

  • Economic growth, regulation, and market mechanisms
  • Comparative political systems and proposals for institutional reform
  • Taxation, redistribution, and welfare design
  • Historical and cross-country comparisons of governance

One archived post title, "Slightly Skew Systems Of Government," illustrates the style: taking a structural question about government and reasoning through variations. The Economics blogroll category includes Tyler Cowen, Scott Sumner, Bryan Caplan, and David Friedman.

Effective altruism and existential risk

A fourth major cluster concerned how to do the most good and how to reduce large-scale risks. Topics included:

  • Effective altruism: cause prioritization, charity evaluation, and giving decisions
  • Existential risk, including AI risk and other low-probability, high-impact scenarios
  • Long-termism and how to weigh future generations
  • Community and movement questions within effective altruism

The blogroll's Effective Altruism category lists 80,000 Hours, the Effective Altruism Forum, and the GiveWell Blog, which shows the overlap between SSC's readership and that movement.

Other recurring interests

Beyond the four main areas, SSC also carried:

  • Book reviews and fiction, including Alexander's own serialized novel Unsong
  • Open threads and community discussion posts
  • Media criticism and commentary on online discourse
  • Personal updates, including the 2020 posts about deleting the blog and the 2021 announcement of the successor site, Astral Codex Ten

How to use this if you are deciding whether to read it

  • If you want rigorous, long-form essays that cross between psychology, medicine, economics, and ethics, SSC's archive is a good match.
  • If you want a narrow beat—only AI, only medicine, only politics—expect to filter heavily, since topics are interleaved across the archive.
  • The full archives are browsable by month from 2013 through early 2021, so you can sample by date or search by topic.
  • Note that the original site stopped publishing in 2020 and the author moved to a new blog, Astral Codex Ten, announced on January 21, 2021. For current writing, follow the successor site rather than expecting new posts on slatestarcodex.com.