Scott Alexander is back and it was quite a dramatic return. The NYT hit piece that caused his disappearance was finally published. I won't link it, but here is his rebuttal. I love reading Scott's essays, including the medical/psychiatric wonkery that he explains so well that even I can follow. If there was someone who was a follower of traditional media and tropes and began to search for sources of a deeper understanding of things, I would start them off by pointing them to Scott.
A couple of other interesting sources are David Perrell and Gwern Branwen. They do a great job of gathering a broad swath of interesting, if occasionally esoteric, writings from around the web, in addition to their own original content. The downside to going down this rabbit hole is that you might lose some of your ability to bond and communicate with your mainstream/clickbait reading friends.
Scott, like most thoughtful web writers, has gone to substack.com, a service designed to let the best long form writers not only write, but get paid. And do it with a certain confidence that they will not be de-platformed for their views. Most of the writers there have both free and paid options to get their content. I suspect, more and more, the free stuff will drift away, especially the key content, and we'll start having to pay for a steady stream of quality content. I also suspect that at some point substack will figure out a method for bundling content so folks aren't trying to manage dozens of subscriptions to their favorite writers.
They could call these bundles...wait for it…
Magazines.
For now there is good free content. It's interesting to note the different ways we are now trying to recreate the blog and forum experience of the turn of the century web through sites like substack or Medium or just through tweetstorms and facebook groups and subreddits. Could it be that the snapchat/tiktok generation is beginning to mature and looking for something more substantive?
But. The topic was Astral Codex Ten. It's very very much worth your time.
