36 claims
“I wrote a 30,000 word condemnation of one of them on my blog a few years ago”
Scott Alexander, blog author 14 February 2021 Statement on New York Times Article (Astral Codex Ten)
Scott Alexander wrote a 30,000-word condemnation of one of the right-wing figures named in the article on his blog a few years ago.
Mixed Partly true and partly false in roughly equal measure.
The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.
What would count as true or false
True if, before February 2021 ("a few years ago", roughly 2–9 years earlier), Scott Alexander published on his own blog (Slate Star Codex or his earlier blog) a critique or condemnation, of about 30,000 words, of a right-wing figure, or of that figure's ideas, named in the February 2021 article he was replying to. Treat a length of about 24,000–36,000 words as consistent with "30,000". Mostly true if such a piece exists but its length is somewhat outside that band (e.g. 20,000–45,000 words), or it was published a bit longer ago than "a few years" would usually mean. Mixed if the piece mainly criticises a movement or ideology linked to the figure rather than the figure, so that whether it is a "condemnation of one of them" is genuinely unclear. Mostly false if the piece exists but is much shorter (under about 15,000 words), or targets someone not named in the article. False if no such critique by him exists on his blog.
Evidence
- Silicon Valley's Safe Space The New York Times (Cade Metz), mirrored at pdf.stafforini.com · 13 February 2021
“He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform.”
- What Ever Happened To Neoreaction? Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander) · 7 December 2023 Own record
“Ten years ago, I saw some people blogging about an exciting new political philosophy called neoreaction. I looked into it, decided it was bad, and wrote a 30,000 word rebuttal.”
- What Ever Happened To Neoreaction? Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander) · 7 December 2023 Own record
“Luckily for everyone, Curtis Yarvin was in tech and seemed to be inventing a new way of being far-right”
Reasoning
The New York Times article the claim responds to [E1] independently confirms that Scott Alexander "denounced the neoreactionaries," which it calls a movement popularised by Curtis Yarvin, the figure named in the article. Alexander's own later post [E2] says that about ten years before 2023 (so around 2013, inside the 2–9 year window) he wrote "a 30,000 word rebuttal" of neoreaction as a political philosophy. [E3] links Yarvin to that movement. The 30,000-word length rests only on his own statement, and the evidence describes the piece as a rebuttal of the movement and ideology, not of Yarvin himself, so whether it counts as a "condemnation of one of them" is genuinely unclear, which the criteria define as mixed.
Cite this claim
Scott Alexander, “Scott Alexander wrote a 30,000-word condemnation of one of the right-wing figures named in the article on his blog a few years ago.” (said 14 February 2021). Verdict: mixed. Reliability API, claim c_7d9566c133b2, method 0.1.0+8bea457b. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_7d9566c133b2
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts and scores are made. The same data is on Hugging Face under CC BY 4.0.