Dangers of AI are real, but doomerism may be counterproductive – Steven Pinker
An Open Letter to Scott AlexanderThe dangers of AI are real, but doomerism may be counterproductive. By Steven PinkerSep 26, 2026288150ShareSamuel Colman’s The Edge of Doom (detail), 1836–38, in which classical civilisation collapses into fire while a statue of Shakespeare stands at the centre. Brooklyn Museum.Dear Scott,I may be a veteran of debates, but this is the first time I’ve been challenged to a duel!
- ▪An Open Letter to Scott AlexanderThe dangers of AI are real, but doomerism may be counterproductive.
- ▪By Steven PinkerSep 26, 2026288150ShareSamuel Colman’s The Edge of Doom (detail), 1836–38, in which classical civilisation collapses into fire while a statue of Shakespeare stands at the centre.
- ▪Brooklyn Museum.Dear Scott,I may be a veteran of debates, but this is the first time I’ve been challenged to a duel!
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| Original publisher | Substack |
| Canonical URL | https://quillette.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-scott-alexander |
| Publication time | Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:17:30 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-05T19:59:57.191Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-05T20:00:06.150Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 58fmeY4k9CbS · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
An Open Letter to Scott AlexanderThe dangers of AI are real, but doomerism may be counterproductive. By Steven PinkerSep 26, 2026288150ShareSamuel Colman’s The Edge of Doom (detail), 1836–38, in which classical civilisation collapses into fire while a statue of Shakespeare stands at the centre. Brooklyn Museum.Dear Scott,I may be a veteran of debates, but this is the first time I’ve been challenged to a duel! Many people are eager to host this spectacle, but I choose to delope: to fire my pistol into the ground to pre-empt the conflict.Obviously I believe in defending ideas in the face of criticism. But we’re both rationalists, adamant that intellectual discourse be carried out in pursuit of objective truth, uncontaminated by cognitive biases.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Substack.
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