Slate Star Codex
former long-form blog by Scott Alexander
Astral Codex Ten (ACX), formerly Slate Star Codex (SSC), is a blog focused on science, medicine (especially psychiatry), philosophy, politics, and futurism. The blog is written by Scott Alexander Siskind, a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist, under the pen name Scott Alexander.
Slate Star Codex was launched in 2013 and was temporarily discontinued on June 23, 2020. In July 2020 the blog was partially back online, with the content restored but commenting disabled. The successor Substack blog, Astral Codex Ten, was launched on January 21, 2021.
Author
The site was a primary venue of the rationalist community and also attracted wider audiences. The New Statesman characterizes it as "a nexus for the rationalist community and others who seek to apply reason to debates about situations, ideas, and moral quandaries." The New Yorker describes Alexander's fiction as "delightfully weird" and his arguments "often counterintuitive and brilliant". Economist Tyler Cowen calls Scott Alexander "a thinker who is influential among other writers".
The New Yorker states that the volume of content Alexander has written on Slate Star Codex makes the blog difficult to summarize, with an e-book of all posts running over nine thousand pages in PDF form. Many posts are book reviews (typically of books in the fields of social sciences or medicine) or reviews of a topic in the scientific literature.
“Slate Star Codex” enters the record as former long-form blog by Scott Alexander. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Slate, Star and Codex can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Slate Star Codex” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Slate, Star and Codex provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q96622866. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2013, 2020 and 2021.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Slate Star Codex”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Slate Star Codex primary sources, Slate Star Codex archive and Slate research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Slate Star Codex”?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Slate Star Codex” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.