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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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In his early blog posts, Scott Alexander talked about how he was not leaping through higher education in a single bound (he went overseas for medical school, and failed to get medical residency on his first try, ending up in a small Midwestern city). So I wonder why he is sure that in a world with fewer university degrees, he would have gotten as far as he did (medical schools in the USA used to limit admissions from people of his ethnicity).
Likewise with immigration restrictions: he knows that they often blocked Jews, many Europeans. and East Asians not just brown people right?
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.
wait, this man is a psychiatrist? or is that another scott
Yes, Scott Alexander is an unusual rationalist blogger who had a credentialed professional career as a psychiatrist. After Substack became his patron, he opened his own medical practice, but the website has said "not accepting new patients at this time" since 2022. So he seems to live off gifts from fellow travelers with a side hustle in psychiatry.
i'll risk a guess that running ritalin-dispenser-as-a-service type business catering to overly confident rationalists might get him a pretty penny
That is very possible although I would guess that was earlier in his career given that he does not advertise as treating ADHD or similar. He has two small children, a writing job, and side projects like writing end-of-the-world stories for AI 2027. His practice has a name drawn from Lord of the Rings like other things in the Thielsphere.
fuckin lol, I had not spotted this, what a tell
Fatty Lumpkin's Headshrinking and Sundry?
he had a blogpost about how amphetamines risks are overstated and it's fine actually for more people than usually prescribed https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
this post was the starting pistol for rationalists taking as much adderall as they could get down their necks. Scott is not telling you that adderall will make you a financial genius and super effective, you understand. Except Kelsey Piper, who he literally says this about by name.
This is the post that made it a rationalist commonplace that adderall makes anyone a super effective financial genius.
it's what got TPOT losers "microdosing" street meth. Of course the same TPOT confused meth and MDMA.
Somehow, Scott still has a license.
ye, who are we to doubt superpredictors like them
Making general statements about the risks and benefits of medication is different from proscribing them. The George K. Lerner, MD who was FTX's resident pill-pusher seems to be based in San Francisco and wants potential patients to know that inter alia "Dr. Lerner specializes in the treatment of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD) in adults. He has extensive experience in treating adults who have been successful in their professional endeavors but have found attention deficit symptoms to be an impediment to achieving their full potential." (nudge nudge)
His website does not mention a connection with the hospital in Michigan which is the only one where I know Alexander worked. I would like to know more about possible connections other than their mutual connections to the FTX gang. I have not done shoe-leather reporting in SoCal and almost all of the things we know about Alexander are things he posted voluntarily under his main handle.
Lerner's site shows what Alexander's site might look like if he were focused on psychiatry rather than writing and peddling racist lies.
scott also has an explainer article for stimulants for ADHD where he tells that:
so maybe he doesn't have to advertise lot, or at all https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/adderall/
some relevant discussion from a couple of years ago
Reading his adderall article I couldn't help but think that this guy is handing scripts to everyone in the Bay Area