Confirmed not Scott:

He made a slight typo, it was meant to be:

Within the next few months, I'm going to be releasing an episode with by far my biggest guest, Yeti

By which he of course is referring to the Obamanable Snowman aka Barack Obama

Maybe the answer is "strategic ambiguity"

Scott Alexander went on the Dwarkesh podcast! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htOvH12T7mU

@dreev On the one hand, Dwarkesh says that Scott Alexander has been on his bucket list (for getting on podcast) and he's super excited it finally happened. On the other hand, as amazing as Scott is, and as much as a lot of Rat-adjacent types put way more weight on his writing than most other living humans, is he really a bigger guest than Zuck or Satya?

Edit: the answer is (now that I've thought a tiny bit more), I think 14% might be correctly priced so not buying. XD

Looks like in the meantime some people are almost certain it's not Scott. Note the market description that says it's not about any objective sense of who's "biggest" but rather who Dwarkesh had in mind when tweeting about the upcoming "biggest guest yet".

Dwarkesh calling it a bucket list item lends credibility to the claim that he meant Scott, I think?

@dreev

I'm not saying it isn't Scott, but I'm only confident that he's in the top-3 most famous people called Scott Alexander (vs the pitcher and the politicians) vs Zuck who you could make a case for being top 3 famous people... period...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think maybe there is the case for Scott being the biggest is that it’s his first ever podcast appearance despite being blogging for 15 years or so

@qumeric The whole point of the tweet was to sell special ad time because the guest is so famous. That clearly doesn't apply to Scott Alexander.

@dreev also, i know this market has a million comments and so it's hard to load, but we actually do already know at least a little bit about who dwarkesh intended, i.e.:

"we were scheduled to do it but it got postponed again and again" seems very unlikely to be scott, and much more likely to be someone famous/non-local/hard to schedule with. (i am sure that scott is very busy with his other obligations, but i doubt this interview about the site they are launching this week was originally scheduled for early in the fall, & then delayed repeatedly).

i am personally quite confident it was intended to be someone very famous who has a busy schedule & the scheduling fell through, as it often does. if the interview never happens, the market might well N/A (the creator said it would if dwarkesh never reveals who it is)

Where did he say it would N/A

@PoliticalEconomyPK

creator's past comments. he clarified several times that "other" does not include cases like "we never find out who it is" or etc—the market only resolves if a specific person can be identified. (to be clear, the interview does not need to occur—we just need to know who dwarkesh was referring to at the time).

it's a unfortunate that this fairly important clarification is buried so deep in the comments, & it's hard to load past comments (+ the creator isn't active atm). but the creator was quite clear on this point when asked, & i think it's important for markets to follow the rules that the creator lays out

@Ziddletwix full comment exchange, to make it more clear (creator was asked what happens if we never find out who it was referring to, he says it will N/A):

@Ziddletwix thank you for the detailed reply but seems a total waste for such a big market to get cancelled

@Ziddletwix yikes. that definitely should have been added to the description months ago (or at least pinned), or an option added to the market similar to the "no one, it was a joke" answer that resolves to not finding out or Dwarkesh saying he won't reveal it etc.

personally I think one of us Mods needs to update the description to make that clear, if Dylan is not currently active to do it personally.

@shankypanky yeah i would personally vote to add at least that screenshot to the description (which is a step short of saying "this is definitively how we guarantee it will resolve", rather just "important context that the creator has said"). but since i've been actively trading in this have not wanted to touch it myself

@squirrelfish Important consideration. Thank you! Though I know plenty of companies (like mine!) that would've been especially 😍 about being a sponsor of Scott Alexander's first podcast appearance. So I'm inclined to stay long on the Scott Alexander option here, even though I agree the tweet makes the most sense if it's referring to a household name. Just that Dwarkesh is very much part of the community where Scott Alexander is basically the biggest celebrity there is. (Recall the bit about getting Scott being a bucket list item for Dwarkesh.)

@Ziddletwix

> i doubt this interview about the site they are launching this week was originally scheduled for early in the fall

https://x.com/slatestarcodex/status/1907923686725923269

Given the tweet above, it's not implausible that the website was supposed to be launched many months ago as well

@Lorenzo that's plausible! i still think it's quite unlikely given the rest of the context (like, if scott wanted to do a podcast with dwarkesh i do not think scheduling would be a substantial constraint, to the point that dwarkesh was no longer sure it would happen, whereas if this was a potential interview with some big CEO/politician that would make complete sense), but you're right that the timing could fit, depending on what those delays on the site were

@Ziddletwix My understanding is that Dwarkesh only wrote "it got postponed a bunch", which seems 100% consistent with Scott's tweet

i would be shocked if Scott were broadly considered a bigger guest than Satya Nadella, tbh. seems implausible to me. especially when the OG tweet was looking for sponsorship and while I think Scott is great he's not a household name and is far more of a niche.

i could be wrong, but this seems like the type of bias that contributed to high Altman bets on the POTY market a couple of years ago.

@shankypanky I can totally see him saying that about Scott, slightly tongue-in-cheek. And the way Scott had vowed to never ever go on a podcast and then Dwarkesh gets him to change his mind? Feels legitimately pretty huge!

@dreev yeah I guess that's true too, fair enough

@dreev I only started talking to Dwarkesh about doing a podcast after he made that tweet, so it couldn't have been about me.

@ScottAlexander Scott are you guys really taking even odds bets on anything in the post? Up to what size?

@Joshua Not necessarily even odds if we're at an inherent disadvantage because your position is less specific than ours, but we aspire to bet fairly. What's up at https://docs.google.com/document/d/18_aQgMeDgHM_yOSQeSxKBzT__jWO3sK5KfTYDLznurY/preview?tab=t.0#heading=h.b07wxattxryp is all I know, you will have to get in touch with the rest of the team if you want more details than that.