> He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
Take a look at Slate Star Codex (SSC) in The Wayback Machine on January 1, 2020 - https://web.archive.org/web/20200101140213/https://slatestar...
The Blog Roll is on the left side. It's a long list of weirdly categorized links without any additional annotation. Nick Land's is "Xenosystems" (which now appears to be defunct). I think calling this an "endorsement" is really stretching things here.
Scott wrote about the neoreactionary movement on SSC more than once, and it's quite clear he _does not_ endorse those viewpoints (which to be fair, the article does say). But given that he wrote about the topic repeatedly, it's no surprise he linked to a prominent neoreactionary blog. Presumably, he trusted his readers to come to their own conclusions about the content on the linked blogs. And he also probably assumed that readers would realize this _wasn't_ an endorsement, given his own writing on the neoreactionary movement.
If I told you that you should read Marx's Communist Manifesto after telling you at length that I think Communism is terrible, am I endorsing Communism? Or am I telling you to read this because I think you should learn more about Communism, and not just from me?
> I did a Google search for Scott Alexander and one of the first results I saw in the auto-complete list was Scott Alexander Siskind.
This is one of the sketchiest things in the article. Scott made it clear that his primary concern was that his patients and potential employers might associate him with his blog. So if you're a patient googling your new psychiatrist, would you google their first and middle name (a middle name you might not even know)? Or would you google "Scott Siskind"? Of course you'd do the latter! So the question is whether googling "Scott Siskind" would get you to SSC. I'd love to go back in time and check this. I'd also love to know if Cade Metz tried this and what result he got.
I would note that if I google "Scott Siskind" right now, I do get results related to SSC, but that's because Scott after Scott gave up his pseudonymity on Astral Codex Ten, the Wikipedia page for SSC was updated to include Scott's full name.
I'm sure there are more similarly sketchy parts of the article that others will note.