Scott Alexander is Smarter Than Me. Should I Steal His Beliefs?

It’s no secret I’m a Scott Alexander glazer. Scott once said that he was an embarrassing fanboy of Eliezer Yudkowsky, and that it may be his fate to have embarrassing fanboys of his own one day. Well, the bell tolls. I find Scott to be consistently interesting and intelligent, and he has a way of connecting topics to one another in an interesting way that I’ve never seen from anyone else. He’s seemingly dedicated to truth more than anyone else I know.

So, he’s smarter than me, and a better thinker than me, and spent a lot of time on many different topics trying to find the truth. As the smartest guy I’ve found, should I steal all of his beliefs indiscriminately? Legitimately. If a person only care about having the most correct beliefs, which I feel like is a reasonable goal, is finding the smartest person you know and stealing his beliefs a good idea?

Epistemology and epistemic practices are the study and methods of finding true things 1 . For the vast majority of issues, in politics, religion, psychology, and philosophy, where Scott’s gotten his beliefs through fantastic epistemic practices and I’ve gotten my beliefs from random sources and friends and biases that I can’t remember, does it make sense to copy everything?

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