Spock is famous for logic. Ask anyone, even people who aren t necessarily
Star Trek fans, and they ll tell you that the half-human, half-Vulcan science officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise is the guy who s always looking for the most logical, rational way to tackle any problem, whether we re talking about discovering new life and new civilizations or just trying to figure out what to have for lunch. But does that approach always serve Spock well? One expert says no, and she has the data to prove it.
In her new book
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don t, Center for Applied Rationality co-founder Julia Galef attempted to tabulate just how successful Spock s logical way of living actually is in various
In the franchise, Spock makes confident predictions based on his superior Vulcan mind. Galef was curious to see exactly how often these predictions pan out. “I went through all of the Star Trek episodes and movies all of the transcripts that I could find and searched for any instance in which Spock is using the words ‘odds,’ ‘probability,’ ‘chance,’ ‘definitely,’ ‘probably,’ etc.,” she says. “I catalogued all instances in which Spock made a prediction and that prediction either came true or didn’t.”
The results, which appear in Galef’s new book
The Scout Mindset, are devastating. Not only does Spock have a terrible track record events he describes as “impossible” happen 83 percent of the time but his confidence level is actually anti-correlated with reality. “The more confident he says he is that something will happen that the ship will crash, or that they will find survivors the less likely it is to happen, and the less confident he is in som
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Let s talk about the grand
Slate Star Codex brouhaha.
A lot of people have already written about this. Here is the original
New Yorker essay from last June is probably the best “neutral” piece that has been written yet; If you do not know anything about
Slate Star Codex or why so many people are writing about it now, start there. Sebastian Benthall s commentary is also a very good middle ground analysis.[4]
I am sure there has been a great deal of debate on twitter as well. I have not read it and thus cannot link to it: I unfollowed everyone on Twitter except a handful of newspapers and thus dwell in blissful ignorance. Indeed, from the perspective of one slowly letting go of Twitter following this debate has been great fun. Linking to all those blogs and substacks feels like reliving a memory from an older, better internet.
Slow Boring
Some thoughts on the New York Times Slate Star Codex profile
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Some time ago, Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous author of the Slate Star Codex blog, announced that he was abandoning his site. The reason was that a New York Times reporter had been in touch with him explaining that he was doing a profile of the blog, and in the course of writing it he was compelled by some NYT policy to disclose Alexander’s real name.