Top all-time · #25019
Scott Alexander
Personal blog · nothingismere.comculturephilosophymath
Scott Alexander writes nothing is mere, a personal blog at nothingismere.com about culture, philosophy and math. Since 2015, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Scott Alexander's blog for long essays on ideas, psychology and social coordination problems. Commenters point to Meditations on Moloch and Epistemic Learned Helplessness as favourites and share best-of lists.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
I like the idea of union names [1]. If you're AC and your partner is BD, then on marriage you choose a new name X. You become AXC and your partner BXD. Your child is EX. Then each child has equal connection to both parents. The cost is that you lose the deep history of names, but that history only existed for a single lineage anyway, so it's not as important as it seemed. (1) https://nothingismere.com/2013/11/12/sol…
Comment linking /2013/11/12/solve-surnames-with-union-names/
on “Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more”Submitted Solve Surnames with Union Names as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's one of my favourites too. There've been a few lists of his best posts created by readers, e.g. [0] and [1]. Personally, my absolute favourite is Meditations on Moloch [2]. It's long, but has high concept density and highlights the very important causes of problems in the world that many people miss entirely when discussing important issues. [0] - http://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexand... […
Comment linking /2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/
on “Epistemic learned helplessness (2013)”Here's a "Best of" collection https://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexan...
Comment linking /2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/
on “The Ideology Is Not the Movement”A psychiatrist that goes by pen name Scott Alexander, also known as Yvain on Less Wrong. He wrote quite a lot of insightful articles over the year; here's one reference[0]. My favourite work of his is Meditations on Moloch[1] - quite long but very good post about how various coordination problems make the world look the way it was, and how it may evolve in the future. [0] - http://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/librar…
Comment linking /2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/
on “The fall of the meritocracy”