The Library of Scott Alexandria

[Rob Bensinger]

I’ve put to­gether a list of what I think are the best Yvain (Scott Alexan­der) posts for new read­ers, draw­ing from SlateS­tarCodex, LessWrong, and Scott’s LiveJour­nal.

The list should make the most sense to peo­ple who start from the top and read through it in or­der, though skip­ping around is en­couraged too. Rather than mak­ing a chronolog­i­cal list, I’ve tried to or­der things by a mix of “where do I think most peo­ple should start read­ing?” plus “sort­ing re­lated posts to­gether.”

This is a work in progress; you’re in­vited to sug­gest things you’d add, re­move, or shuffle around. Since many of the ti­tles are a bit cryp­tic, I’m adding short de­scrip­tions. See my blog for a ver­sion with­out the de­scrip­tions.

---

I. Ra­tion­al­ity and Rationalization

• Blue- and Yel­low-Tinted Choices ····· An in­tro­duc­tion to con­text-sen­si­tive bi­ases.

• The Apol­o­gist and the Revolu­tion­ary ····· Do sep­a­rate brain pro­cesses ra­tio­nal­ize and ques­tion ideas?

• His­tor­i­cal Real­ism ····· When re­al­ity is un­re­al­is­tic.

• Si­mul­ta­neously Right and Wrong ····· On self-hand­i­cap­ping and self-de­cep­tion.

• You May Already Be A Sin­ner ····· Self-de­cep­tion in cases where your de­ci­sions make no differ­ence.

• Be­ware the Man of One Study ····· On min­i­mum wage laws and cherry-picked ev­i­dence.

• De­bunked and Well-Re­futed ····· When should we say that a study has been “de­bunked”?

• How to Not Lose an Ar­gu­ment ····· How to be more per­sua­sive in en­trenched ar­gu­ments.

• The Least Con­ve­nient Pos­si­ble World ····· Why it’s use­ful to strengthen ar­gu­ments you dis­agree with.

• Bayes for Schizophren­ics: Rea­son­ing in Delu­sional Di­sor­ders ····· Hy­pothe­ses about the role of per­cep­tion, ev­i­dence in­te­gra­tion, and pri­ors in delu­sions.

• Gen­er­al­iz­ing from One Ex­am­ple ····· On the typ­i­cal mind fal­lacy: as­sum­ing other peo­ple are like you.

• Typ­i­cal Mind and Poli­tics ····· Do poli­ti­cal dis­agree­ments stem from neu­rolog­i­cal dis­agree­ments?

---

II. Probabilism

• Con­fi­dence Levels In­side and Out­side an Ar­gu­ment ····· Should you be­lieve your own con­clu­sions, when they’re ex­treme?

• Schizophre­nia and Geo­mag­netic Storms ····· When bizarre ideas turn out to be true.

• Talk­ing Snakes: A Cau­tion­ary Tale ····· Should we dis­miss all ab­surd claims?

• Ar­gu­ments from My Op­po­nent Believes Some­thing ····· Ten fully gen­eral ar­gu­ments.

• Statis­ti­cal Liter­acy Among Doc­tors Now Lower Than Chance ····· Com­mon er­rors in prob­a­bil­is­tic rea­son­ing.

• Tech­niques for Prob­a­bil­ity Es­ti­mates ····· Six meth­ods for quan­tify­ing un­cer­tainty.

• On First Look­ing into Chap­man’s “Pop Bayesi­anism” ····· Rea­sons Bayesian episte­mol­ogy may not be triv­ial.

• Utili­tar­i­anism for Eng­ineers ····· Are there good-enough heuris­tics for com­par­ing peo­ple’s prefer­ences?

• If It’s Worth Do­ing, It’s Worth Do­ing with Made-Up Statis­tics ····· The prac­ti­cal value of prob­a­bil­ities.

• Mar­ijuana: Much More Than You Wanted to Know ····· Assess­ing mar­ijuana’s costs and benefits.

• Are You a So­lar De­ity? ····· On con­fir­ma­tion bias in the com­par­a­tive study of re­li­gions.

• The “Spot the Fakes” Test ····· An ap­proach to test­ing hu­man­i­ties hy­pothe­ses.

• Epistemic Learned Hel­pless­ness ····· What should we do when bad ar­gu­ments sound con­vinc­ing?

---

III. Science and Doubt

• Google Cor­re­late Does Not Im­ply Google Cau­sa­tion ····· Pe­cu­liar cor­re­la­tions be­tween Google search terms.

• Stop Con­found­ing Your­self! Stop Con­found­ing Your­self! ····· A cor­re­la­tional study on the effects of bul­ly­ing.

• Effects of Ver­ti­cal Ac­cel­er­a­tion on Wrong­ness ····· On ev­i­dence-based medicine.

• 90% Of All Claims About The Prob­lems With Med­i­cal Stud­ies Are Wrong ····· Is it the case that “90% of med­i­cal re­search is false”?

• Pri­sons are Built with Bricks of Law and Brothels with Bricks of Reli­gion, But That Doesn’t Prove a Causal Re­la­tion­ship ····· Do psy­chi­a­tric in­ter­ven­tions in­crease suicide risk?

• Noisy Poll Re­sults and the Rep­tilian Mus­lim Cli­ma­tol­o­gists from Mars ····· Skep­ti­cism about poll re­sults.

• Two Dark Side Statis­tics Papers ····· Statis­ti­cal tricks for cre­at­ing effects out of noth­ing.

• Al­co­holics Anony­mous: Much More Than You Wanted to Know ····· Is AA effec­tive for treat­ing al­co­hol abuse?

• The Con­trol Group Is Out Of Con­trol ····· Para­psy­chol­ogy as the “con­trol group” for all of psy­chol­ogy.

• The Cow­pox of Doubt ····· Fo­cus­ing on easy ques­tions in­oc­u­lates against un­cer­tainty.

• The Skep­tic’s Trilemma ····· Ex­plain­ing mys­ter­ies, vs. wor­shiping them, vs. dis­miss­ing them.

• If You Can’t Make Pre­dic­tions, You’re Still in a Cri­sis ····· On psy­chol­ogy stud­ies’ repli­ca­tion failures.

---

IV. Medicine, Ther­apy, and Hu­man Enhancement

• Scien­tific Freud ····· How does psy­cho­anal­y­sis com­pare to cog­ni­tive be­hav­ioral ther­apy?

• Sleep – Now by Pre­scrip­tion ····· On mela­tonin.

• In Defense of Psych Treat­ment for At­tempted Suicide ····· Suicide is usu­ally not a ra­tio­nal, in­formed de­ci­sion.

• Who By Very Slow De­cay ····· On old age and death in the med­i­cal sys­tem.

• Medicine, As Not Seen on TV ····· What is it ac­tu­ally like to be a doc­tor?

• Search­ing for One-Sided Trade­offs ····· How can we find good ideas that oth­ers haven’t found first?

• Do Life Hacks Ever Reach Fix­a­tion? ····· Why aren’t there more good ideas that ev­ery­one has adopted?

• Polyamory is Bor­ing ····· Dero­man­ti­ciz­ing multi-part­ner ro­mance.

• Can You Con­di­tion Your­self? ····· On shap­ing new habits by re­ward­ing one­self.

• Wire­head Gods on Lo­tus Thrones ····· Is the fu­ture bor­ing? Tran­scen­dently bliss­ful? Bor­ingly bliss­ful?

• Don’t Fear the Filter ····· Does the Fermi Para­dox mean that our species is doomed?

• Tran­shu­man­ist Fables ····· Six fu­tur­ist fairy tales.

---

V. In­tro­duc­tion to Game Theory

• Back­ward Rea­son­ing Over De­ci­sion Trees ····· Se­quen­tial games, and why adding op­tions can hurt you.

• Nash Equil­ibria and Schel­ling Points ····· Si­mul­ta­neous games, mixed strate­gies, and co­or­di­na­tion.

• In­tro­duc­tion to Pri­son­ers’ Dilemma ····· Why Nash equil­ibria are some­times bad for ev­ery­one.

• Real-World Solu­tions to Pri­son­ers’ Dilem­mas ····· How so­ciety and evolu­tion en­sure mu­tual co­op­er­a­tion.

• In­ter­lude for Be­hav­ioral Eco­nomics ····· Fair­ness, su­per­ra­tional­ity, and self-image in real-world games.

• What is Sig­nal­ing, Really? ····· Ac­tions that con­vey in­for­ma­tion, some­times at great cost.

• Bar­gain­ing and Auc­tions ····· Ideal­ized mod­els of cor­rect bid­ding.

• Im­perfect Vot­ing Sys­tems ····· Strengths and weak­nesses of differ­ent vot­ing sys­tems.

• Game The­ory as a Dark Art ····· Ways to ex­ploit seem­ingly “eco­nom­i­cally ra­tio­nal” be­hav­ior.

---

VI. Promises and Principles

• Be­ware Triv­ial In­con­ve­niences ····· Small ob­sta­cles can have a huge effect on be­hav­ior.

• Time and Effort Dis­count­ing ····· On in­con­sis­ten­cies in our re­vealed prefer­ences.

• Ap­plied Pi­coeco­nomics ····· Bind­ing your fu­ture self to your pre­sent goals.

• Schel­ling Fences on Slip­pery Slopes ····· Us­ing ar­bi­trary thresh­olds to im­prove co­or­di­na­tion.

• Democ­racy is the Worst Form of Govern­ment Ex­cept for All the Others Ex­cept Pos­si­bly Futarchy ····· Like democ­racy, futarchy (rule by pre­dic­tion mar­kets) has the ad­van­tage of ap­pear­ing im­par­tial.

• Eight Short Stud­ies on Ex­cuses ····· When should we al­low ex­cep­tions to our rules?

• Re­venge as Char­i­ta­ble Act ····· Re­venge can be a per­son­ally costly way to dis­in­cen­tivize mis­deeds.

• Would Your Real Prefer­ences Please Stand Up? ····· Are we hyp­ocrites, or just weak-willed?

• Are Wire­heads Happy? ····· Dist­in­guish­ing “want­ing” some­thing from “lik­ing” it.

• Guilt: Another Gift No­body Wants ····· An evolu­tion­ary, sig­nal­ing-based ex­pla­na­tion of guilt.

---

VII. Cog­ni­tion and Association

• Diseased Think­ing: Dis­solv­ing Ques­tions about Disease ····· On ver­bal dis­agree­ments.

• The Non­cen­tral Fal­lacy — The Worst Ar­gu­ment in the World? ····· Judg­ing an en­tire cat­e­gory by an emo­tional as­so­ci­a­tion that only ap­plies to typ­i­cal cat­e­gory mem­bers.

• The Power of Pos­i­tivist Think­ing ····· Fo­cus on state­ments’ em­piri­cal con­tent.

• When Truth Isn’t Enough ····· It’s pos­si­ble to agree de­no­ta­tion­ally while dis­agree­ing con­no­ta­tion­ally.

• Am­bi­jec­tivity ····· When a ques­tion is both sub­jec­tive and ob­jec­tive.

• The Blue-Min­i­miz­ing Robot ····· A parable on agency.

• Ba­sics of An­i­mal Re­in­force­ment ····· A primer on clas­si­cal and op­er­ant con­di­tion­ing.

• Want­ing vs. Lik­ing Re­vis­ited ····· Dist­in­guish­ing mo­ti­va­tion to act from re­in­force­ment.

• Phys­i­cal and Men­tal Be­hav­ior ····· Be­hav­iorism meets think­ing.

• Trivers on Self-De­cep­tion ····· The con­scious mind as a self-serv­ing so­cial nar­ra­tive.

• Ego-Syn­tonic Thoughts and Values ····· On en­dorsed vs. non-en­dorsed men­tal be­hav­ior.

• Ap­prov­ing Re­in­forces Low-Effort Be­hav­iors ····· Us­ing your self-image to black­mail your­self.

• To What De­gree Do We Have Goals? ····· Are our un­con­scious drives like an agent?

• The Limits of In­tro­spec­tion ····· Are we good at di­rectly per­ceiv­ing our cog­ni­tion?

• Se­crets of the Elimi­nati ····· Re­duc­ing phe­nom­ena to sim­pler parts, vs. elimi­nat­ing them.

• Ten­den­cies in Reflec­tive Equil­ibrium ····· Aspiring to be­come more con­sis­tent.

• Han­so­nian Op­ti­mism ····· If ego-syn­tonic goals are about sig­nal­ing, is good­ness a lie?

---

VIII. Do­ing Good

• New­to­nian Ethics ····· Satiriz­ing moral parochial­ism and sloppy sys­tem­ati­za­tions of ethics.

• Effi­cient Char­ity: Do Unto Others… ····· How should we act when our de­ci­sions mat­ter most?

• The Eco­nomics of Art and the Art of Eco­nomics ····· Should Detroit sell its pub­li­cly owned art­work?

• A Modest Pro­posal ····· Us­ing dead ba­bies as a unit of cur­rency.

• The Life Is­sue ····· What are the con­se­quences of drone war­fare?

• What if Drone War­fare Had Come First? ····· A thought ex­per­i­ment.

• Ne­far­i­ous Ne­fa­zodone and Flashy Rare Side-Effects ····· On choos­ing be­tween drug side-effects.

• The Con­se­quen­tial­ism FAQ ····· Ar­gues for as­sess­ing ac­tions based on how they help or harm peo­ple.

• Do­ing Your Good Deed for the Day ····· Do­ing some good can re­duce peo­ple’s will­ing­ness to do more good.

• I My­self Am A Scien­tismist ····· Why ap­ply sci­en­tific meth­ods to non-sci­en­tific do­mains?

• Whose Utili­tar­i­anism? ····· Ques­tion­ing the ob­jec­tivity and unique­ness of util­i­tar­i­anism.

• Book Re­view: After Virtue ····· On virtue ethics, a re­ac­tion against mod­ern moral philos­o­phy.

• Read His­tory of Philos­o­phy Back­wards ····· His­tor­i­cal texts re­veal our im­plicit as­sump­tions.

• Virtue Ethics: Not Prac­ti­cally Use­ful Either ····· Is virtue ethics use­ful pre­scrip­tively or de­scrip­tively?

• Last Thoughts on Virtue Ethics ····· What claims do virtue ethi­cists make?

• Prov­ing Too Much ····· If an ar­gu­ment some­times proves false­hoods, it can’t be valid.

---

IX. Liberty

• The Non-Liber­tar­ian FAQ (aka Why I Hate Your Free­dom)

• A Bless­ing in Dis­guise, Albeit a Very Good Disguise

• Ba­sic In­come Guarantees

• Book Re­view: The Nur­ture Assumption

• The Death of Wages is Sin

• Thank You For Do­ing Some­thing Am­bigu­ously Between Smok­ing And Not Smoking

• Lies, Damned Lies, and Face­book (Part 1 of ∞)

• The Life Cy­cle of Med­i­cal Ideas

• Vote on Values, Out­source Beliefs

• A Some­thing Sort of Like Left-Liber­tar­ian-ist Manifesto

• Plu­toc­racy Isn’t About Money

• Against Tulip Subsidies

• SlateS­tarCodex Gives a Grad­u­a­tion Speech

---

X. Progress

• In­tel­lec­tual Hip­sters and Meta-Contrarianism

• A Sig­nal­ing The­ory of Class x Poli­tics Interaction

• Re­ac­tionary Philos­o­phy in an Enor­mous, Planet-Sized Nutshell

• A Thrive/​Sur­vive The­ory of the Poli­ti­cal Spectrum

• We Wres­tle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Pow­ers And Principalities

• Poor Folks Do Smile… For Now

• Apart from Bet­ter San­i­ta­tion and Medicine and Ed­u­ca­tion and Ir­ri­ga­tion and Public Health and Roads and Public Order, What Has Moder­nity Done for Us?

• The Wis­dom of the Ancients

• Can Athe­ists Ap­pre­ci­ate Ch­ester­ton?

• Holo­caust Good for You, Re­search Finds, But Fre­quent Taunt­ing Causes Cancer in Rats

• Public Aware­ness Campaigns

• So­cial Psy­chol­ogy is a Flamethrower

• Na­ture is Not a Slate. It’s a Series of Lev­ers.

• The Anti-Re­ac­tionary FAQ

• The Poor You Will Always Have With You

• Pro­posed Biolog­i­cal Ex­pla­na­tions for His­tor­i­cal Trends in Crime

• So­ciety is Fixed, Biol­ogy is Mutable

---

XI. So­cial Justice

• Prac­ti­cally-a-Book Re­view: Dy­ing to be Free

• Drug Test­ing Welfare Users is a Sham, But Not for the Rea­sons You Think

• The Med­i­ta­tion on Creepiness

• The Med­i­ta­tion on Superweapons

• The Med­i­ta­tion on the War on Ap­plause Lights

• The Med­i­ta­tion on Su­per­weapons and Bingo

• An Anal­y­sis of the For­mal­ist Ac­count of Power Re­la­tions in Demo­cratic Societies

• Ar­gu­ments About Male Violence Prove Too Much

• So­cial Jus­tice for the Highly-De­mand­ing-of-Rigor

• Against Brav­ery Debates

• All De­bates Are Brav­ery Debates

• A Com­ment I Posted on “What Would JT Do?”

• We Are All MsScribe

• The Spirit of the First Amendment

• A Re­sponse to Apophemi on Triggers

• Lies, Damned Lies, and So­cial Me­dia: False Rape Accusations

• In Fa­vor of Nice­ness, Com­mu­nity, and Civilization

---

XII. Politicization

• Right is the New Left

• Weak Men are Superweapons

• You Kant Dis­miss Universalizability

• I Can Tol­er­ate Any­thing Ex­cept the Outgroup

• Five Case Stud­ies on Politicization

• Black Peo­ple Less Likely

• Ny­d­wracu’s Fnords

• All in All, Another Brick in the Motte

• Eth­nic Ten­sion and Mean­ingless Arguments

• Race and Jus­tice: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

• Fram­ing for Light In­stead of Heat

• The Won­der­ful Thing About Triggers

• Fear­ful Symmetry

• Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism

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XIII. Com­pe­ti­tion and Cooperation

• The Demiurge’s Older Brother

• Book Re­view: The Two-In­come Trap

• Just for Steal­ing a Mouth­ful of Bread

• Med­i­ta­tions on Moloch

• Misper­cep­tions on Moloch

• The In­visi­ble Na­tion — Rec­on­cil­ing Utili­tar­i­anism and Contractualism

• Free­dom on the Cen­tral­ized Web

• Book Re­view: Singer on Marx

• Does Class War­fare Have a Free Rider Prob­lem?

• Book Re­view: Red Plenty

---

If you liked these posts and want more, I sug­gest brows­ing the SlateS­tarCodex archives.

[Document]

Any chance of a com­bined ebook ver­sion?

[nino]

I made epub and mobi ver­sions. Down­load here. They con­tain links to all origi­nal posts, so any­one who wants to look at com­ments can click on the ti­tle of each post to do that.

Do let me know if any­thing’s mas­sively bro­ken.

[jaime2000]

Thank you! The book is fan­tas­tic. Com­bined with The Se­quences ebooks that are already float­ing around (Eliezer Yud­kowsky Blog Posts, 2006-2010: An Unoffi­cial Com­pendium, Ra­tion­al­ity: From AI to Zom­bies, and The Han­son-Yud­kowsky AI-Foom De­bate) it is now pos­si­ble for some­one to get most of the in­sights of the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity dis­til­led into ex­tremely effi­cient book for­mats.

Do let me know if any­thing’s mas­sively bro­ken.

A large num­ber of posts have ex­tra­ne­ous > char­ac­ters. The af­fected posts ap­pear to be ei­ther SSC posts in which the > char­ac­ter ap­pears at the start of a block­quote and LiveJour­nal posts in which the > char­ac­ter ap­pears af­ter and in be­tween para­graphs. Ex­am­ples of the former in­clude “Med­i­ta­tions on Moloch,” “Misper­cep­tions on Moloch,” and “Book Re­view: Red Plenty,” while ex­am­ples of the lat­ter in­clude “The Med­i­ta­tion on Creep­iness”, “The Med­i­ta­tion on Su­per­weapons,” and “The Med­i­ta­tion on the War on Ap­plause Lights.”

Also, the ti­tle of “We Wres­tle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Pow­ers And Prin­ci­pal­itiebs” should be “We Wres­tle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Pow­ers And Prin­ci­pal­ities”. I nor­mally wouldn’t re­port a typo, but this one ap­pears to have been in­tro­duced by the ebook pro­cess; the mis­take is not in the origi­nal ar­ti­cle, nor is it on the list of ti­tles Rob­bBB pro­vided.

[nino]

Well that’s em­bar­rass­ing. Thanks for the info! Should be fixed now.

[jaime2000]

Every­thing looks fine now. Thanks once again!

[jaime2000]

I have no­ticed one more is­sue. In “Effi­cient Char­ity: Do Unto Others…” the sym­bol “£” is twice cor­rupted into “ÂŁ”. This is not an ebook-wide prob­lem, since “Search­ing for One-Sided Trade­offs” and “A Modest Pro­posal” both use the cor­rect sym­bol. Ap­par­ently this is sim­ply a prob­lem with the source; the copy of the post at the Effec­tive Altru­ism Fo­rum has this er­ror, but the copy of the post at LessWrong, has the cor­rect sym­bol.

[Document]

Thanks! Down­loaded; I don’t know whether I’ll ac­tu­ally read it (it be­ing ap­par­ently over 476,000 words), but it’s great to have.

Did you use the method Ri­car­doFon­seca de­scribed?

[nino]

I ac­tu­ally went through ev­ery post and man­u­ally copied out the rele­vant part of the html code. Then I pasted ev­ery­thing into my text ed­i­tor (fun fact: vim got quite slow han­dling the >3mb html file, but emacs han­dled the task re­ally well) and cleaned it up, re­plac­ing all

’s with

and such. Then I put all the pic­tures into a folder and changed the refer­ences to point to my lo­cal files. Then I put it into cal­ibre to cre­ate the epub and mobi ver­sions.

In ret­ro­spect, I should have just writ­ten a script to do all that be­cause it took way too long. The script would have had to han­dle the differ­ent sites differ­ently (es­pe­cially the live­jour­nal stuff is pretty messy), but it would have been so much faster. Like se­ri­ously.

[RicardoFonseca]

All right. Some­one tell me if this is de­cent enough, please. I only did the first sec­tion: “Ra­tion­al­ity and Ra­tion­al­iza­tion”.

Drop­box folder

How I did it:

• Created an ac­count at In­stapa­per and used their book­marklet in­di­vi­d­u­ally on each ar­ti­cle.

• Used cal­ibre to down­load the ar­ti­cles from In­stapa­per and con­vert them to an ebook (in­struc­tions here).

• Edited the ti­tle and other meta­data in cal­ibre to make the ebook more rele­vant and pre­sentable and con­verted it to epub/​mobi for­mats.

Note that I had to use the In­stapa­per book­marklet start­ing from the last ar­ti­cle and go­ing back­wards be­cause cal­ibre down­loads the ar­ti­cles in re­verse chronolog­i­cal or­der.

I don’t think this is ideal, though, be­cause the com­ment sec­tions of some of these ar­ti­cles are good enough to be in­cluded in the read­ing but In­stapa­per only re­trieves the ar­ti­cle post, leav­ing out ev­ery­thing else. If any­one has a bet­ter sug­ges­tion, do share :)

[Rob Bensinger]

Thanks, Ri­cardo! In MIRI’s ebooks, we’ve tried link­ing to the com­ments sec­tion at the bot­tom of each ar­ti­cle. Then peo­ple can click through to a web­site fea­tur­ing the com­ments if they’re in­ter­ested; but the ebook it­self isn’t bloated by the size of the com­ments sec­tions.

[Vulture]

Woah, awe­some! I would love to see some­thing like this for the whole col­lec­tion.

[Gunnar_Zarncke]

How does this com­pare to the other re­cent com­pila­tion of Yvains ar­ti­cles?

[Rob Bensinger]

Mine is longer: 171 links vs. 111. Mine has more LW and less LJ con­tent.

The lists are mostly in­de­pen­dent: I started mine in De­cem­ber 2014. I de­cided to clean it up and post it now be­cause case­bash’s ver­sion showed there was a lot of de­mand for some­thing like this, and I wanted a ver­sion that was a bit more op­ti­mized for new read­ers to dive in and read straight through.

The two lists over­lap quite a bit be­cause so many of Scott’s posts are ob­jec­tively great. I also went through case­bash’s list and ex­panded my own list with five items that weren’t origi­nally on it: Re­venge as Char­i­ta­ble Act, What’s in a Name?, Epistemic Learned Hel­pless­ness, Ap­prov­ing Re­in­forces Low-Effort Be­hav­iors, and Schizophre­nia and Geo­mag­netic Storms.

[Ben Pace]

This one is bet­ter or­ganised and I ei­ther like the ones I see, or dis­cover gems; not true of the last one.

[John_Maxwell]

A thread of SSC post recs on Scott Aaron­son’s blog.

[John_Maxwell]

slat­estar­codex sub­red­dit posts sorted by score.

[hg00]

slat­estar­codex sub­red­dit sorted by score.

[Rob Bensinger]

I re­moved the sec­ond post (What’s in a Name?) from the list be­cause it’s been… well, de­bunked. From a re­cent SSC link post:

A long time ago I blogged about the name prefer­ence effect – ie that peo­ple are more pos­i­tively dis­posed to­wards things that sound like their name – so I might like sci­ence more be­cause Scott and sci­ence start with the same two let­ters. A bunch of very care­ful stud­ies con­firmed this effect even af­ter ap­par­ently con­trol­ling for ev­ery­thing. Now Uri Si­mon­sohn says – too bad, it’s all spu­ri­ous. This re­ally both­ers me be­cause I re­mem­ber speci­fi­cally comb­ing over these stud­ies and find­ing them be­liev­able at the time. Yet an­other re­minder that things are worse than I thought.

[gurugeorge]

Great stuff! As some­one who’s come to all this Bayes/​LessWrong stuff quite late, I was sur­prised to dis­cover that Scott Alexan­der’s blog is one of the more pop­u­lar in the blo­go­sphere, fly­ing the flag for this sort of ap­proach to ra­tio­nal­ity. I’ve no­ticed that he’s liked by peo­ple on both the Left and the Right, which is a very good thing. He’s a great mod­er­at­ing in­fluence and I think he offers a palat­able in­tro­duc­tion to a more se­ri­ous, less bi­ased way of look­ing at the world, for many peo­ple.

[[deleted]]

THANK YOU! Any chance for a brief sum­mary of what each are (kinda like the LW Wiki does)

[Rob Bensinger]

Scott does tend to make his ti­tles pretty cryp­tic. I could edit the LW ver­sion to in­clude brief de­scrip­tions, leav­ing the ver­sion on my blog de­scrip­tion-free for peo­ple who want a cleaner link list.

How much de­tail would be ideal? E.g., would 7 words per post be bet­ter than 20 words (since it’d be eas­ier to skim such a list and spot quick key­words)?

[RaelwayScot]

I would say be flex­ible as some top­ics are much more com­plex than oth­ers. I’ve found that most sum­maries on this list have a good length.

[Raziel123]

that’s amaz­ing!, Great com­pila­tion. So many posts I didn´t know even ex­isted.

[Abhay Hegde]

Now that the ac­tual sites have been re­moved, I have found sev­eral ar­ti­cles that were on the main site here as well. Thanks for this!

[Calorion]

1. The link for “Epistemic Learned Hel­pless­ness” goes to an­other ar­ti­cle en­tirely.

2. “Epistemic Learned Hel­pless­ness” (and all other en­tries) have dis­ap­peared off of Scott Alexan­der’s LiveJour­nal.

3. I found a copy on the Way­back Ma­chine.

4. This is a trav­esty. Why have all these posts dis­ap­peared? Do they ex­ist el­se­where?

5. *in­co­her­ent mum­bling about the ephemeral na­ture of the In­ter­net, and what a gi­gan­tic prob­lem this is*

[habryka]

In this case, I think delet­ing the posts from his live­jour­nal and mak­ing them only ac­cessible via archive was an in­ten­tional choice by Scott, since he doesn’t en­dorse a large num­ber of them any­more, and his old writ­ing was of­ten as­so­ci­ated with his new writ­ing in a way that caused him prob­lems. Not con­fi­dent of this though.

[Rob Bensinger]

I re­placed the bro­ken links with archive links in May 2019, so this shouldn’t be an is­sue for this list any­more.

[Calorion]

I don’t care. Lots of peo­ple have pub­lished things that they wish they hadn’t. That doesn’t give them the right to de­mand that ev­ery book or news­pa­per or mag­a­z­ine is­sue that car­ried those un­de­sir­able words be de­stroyed.

I’m not railing against Scott here; he does have the right to re­move things off of his LiveJour­nal. I’m railing against the na­ture of the In­ter­net, that makes “de-pub­lish­ing” not only pos­si­ble, but easy.

[David Althaus]

Great list!

IMO, one should add Pre­scrip­tions, Para­doxes, and Perver­si­ties to the list. Maybe to the sec­tion “Medicine, Ther­apy, and Hu­man En­hance­ment”.

[johnjohn]

Is there a list of Scott Alexan­der’s short sto­ries some­where?

[Rob Bensinger]

You can find some here: http://​​raikoth.net/​​fic­tion.html

[CAE_Jones]

Not that I’m aware, but you might check the “fic­tion” tag on Slat­estar­codex. (I re­mem­ber find­ing a similarly use­ful tag on his Live­jour­nal, but I don’t re­mem­ber what it was called OTTOMH).

[roryokane]

The LiveJour­nal tag is also named “fic­tion”. There are 10 posts un­der it.