Origi­nal Sequences

WikiLast edit: 17 Jun 2015 4:41 UTC by Rob Bensinger

The original sequences were a series of essays written by Eliezer Yudkowsky between 2006 and 2009 on the blogs Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong. About half of these essays were organized into a number of thematically linked “sequences” of blog posts—hence the name.

In 2015, these sequences were edited into an ebook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. The ebook leaves out some of the original posts, as well as adding some essays that were written by Yudkowsky during the same time but never previously collected into a named sequence. This page will serve to collect the older, deprecated sequences.

Of these, “Map and Territory,” “Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions,” “How to Actually Change Your Mind,” and “Reductionism” were classified as “core sequences.” There was also a distinction between “major” and “minor” sequences, though this was based on the size of the sequence rather than its importance.

Bolded essays are more important than other posts in the sequence, while italicized essays are relatively unimportant. Small essays are also less important, and are sometimes left out of the post listing altogether. Some essays are indented to indicate that they are tangents or self-contained elaborations upon a previous essay.

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Other formats

The Sequences have been converted to eReader-compatible formats by several projects.

Two abridged indexes of Yudkowsky’s sequences are XiXiDu’s guide, or Academian’s guide targeted at people who already have a science background.

Map and Territory

  1. The Simple Truth @yudkowsky.net

  2. What Do We Mean By “Rationality”?

  3. An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’s Theorem @yudkowsky.net

  4. Why truth? And...

  5. What is Evidence?

  6. How Much Evidence Does It Take?

  7. How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3

  8. Occam’s Razor

  9. The Lens That Sees Its Flaws

Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

  1. Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)

  2. Belief in Belief

  3. Bayesian Judo

  4. Professing and Cheering

  5. Belief as Attire

  6. Focus Your Uncertainty

  7. The Virtue of Narrowness

  8. Your Strength As A Rationalist

  9. Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence

  10. Conservation of Expected Evidence

  11. Hindsight Bias

  12. Hindsight Devalues Science

  13. Fake Explanations

  14. Guessing the Teacher’s Password

  15. Science as Attire

  16. Fake Causality

  17. Semantic Stopsigns

  18. Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

  19. The Futility of Emergence

  20. Say Not “Complexity”

  21. Positive Bias: Look Into the Dark

  22. My Wild and Reckless Youth

  23. Failing to Learn from History

  24. Making History Available

  25. Explain/​Worship/​Ignore?

  26. “Science” as Curiosity-Stopper

  27. Applause Lights

  28. Truly Part of You

  29. Chaotic Inversion

How to Actually Change Your Mind

See also: Locating the hypothesis, Privileging the hypothesis, Litany of Gendlin, Litany of Tarski

Politics is the Mind-Killer
  1. A Fable of Science and Politics

  2. Politics is the Mind-Killer

  3. Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided

  4. The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality

  5. Correspondence Bias

  6. Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?

  7. The Robbers Cave Experiment

  8. Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence

  9. Argument Screens Off Authority
  10. Hug the Query
  11. Rationality and the English Language

  12. The Litany Against Gurus

  13. Politics and Awful Art
  14. False Laughter

  15. Human Evil and Muddled Thinking

Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor
  1. The Affect Heuristic

  2. Evaluability and Cheap Holiday Shopping
  3. Unbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, & Futurism
  4. The Halo Effect

  5. Superhero Bias
  6. Mere Messiahs
  7. Affective Death Spirals

  8. Resist the Happy Death Spiral

  9. Uncritical Supercriticality

  10. Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs

  11. When None Dare Urge Restraint

  12. The Robbers Cave Experiment

  13. Every Cause Wants to be a Cult

  14. Guardians of the Truth

  15. Guardians of the Gene Pool
  16. Guardians of Ayn Rand
  17. The Litany Against Gurus

  18. Two Cult Koans

  19. Asch’s Conformity Experiment

  20. Lonely Dissent

  21. Cultish Countercultishness

Seeing with Fresh Eyes
  1. Anchoring and Adjustment

  2. Priming and Contamination

  3. Do We Believe Everything We’re Told?

  4. Cached Thoughts

  5. The ‘Outside the Box’ Box

  6. Original Seeing

  7. The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence

  8. How to Seem (and Be) Deep

  9. We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think

  10. Hold Off On Proposing Solutions

  11. Asch’s Conformity Experiment

  12. On Expressing Your Concerns

  13. Lonely Dissent

  14. The Genetic Fallacy


Noticing Confusion

  1. Your Strength as a Rationalist

  2. Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence

  3. Hindsight Bias

  4. Hindsight Devalues Science

  5. Positive Bias: Look Into the Dark


Against Rationalization

  1. Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People

  2. Update Yourself Incrementally

  3. One Argument Against An Army

  4. The Bottom Line

  5. What Evidence Filtered Evidence?

  6. Rationalization

  7. A Rational Argument

  8. Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points

  9. Motivated Stopping and Motivated Continuation

  10. A Case Study of Motivated Continuation
  11. Fake Justification

  12. Fake Optimization Criteria

  13. Is That Your True Rejection?

  14. Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies

  15. Of Lies and Black Swan Blowups
  16. Anti-Epistemology

  17. The Sacred Mundane


Against Doublethink

  1. Singlethink

  2. Doublethink: Choosing to be Biased

  3. No, Really, I’ve Deceived Myself

  4. Belief in Self-Deception

  5. Moore’s Paradox

  6. Don’t Believe You’ll Self-Deceive


Overly Convenient Excuses

  1. The Proper Use of Humility

  2. The Third Alternative

  3. Locating the hypothesis

  4. Privileging the Hypothesis
  5. But There’s Still A Chance, Right?

  6. The Fallacy of Gray
  7. Absolute Authority
  8. How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3
  9. Infinite Certainty
  10. 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities


Letting Go

  1. Feeling Rational

  2. The Importance of Saying “Oops”

  3. The Crackpot Offer
  4. Just Lose Hope Already
  5. The Proper Use of Doubt

  6. You Can Face Reality

  7. The Meditation on Curiosity

  8. Something to Protect

  9. No One Can Exempt You From Rationality’s Laws

  10. Leave a Line of Retreat

  11. Crisis of Faith

  12. The Ritual

The Simple Math of Evolution

  1. An Alien God

  2. The Wonder of Evolution

  3. Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyway)

  4. Speed limit and complexity bound for evolution

  5. Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers

  6. No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices

  7. Evolving to Extinction

  8. The Tragedy of Group Selectionism

  9. Fake Optimization Criteria

A Human’s Guide to Words

  1. The Parable of the Dagger

  2. The Parable of Hemlock

  3. Words as Hidden Inferences

  4. Extensions and Intensions

  5. Similarity Clusters

  6. Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity

  7. The Cluster Structure of Thingspace

  8. Disguised Queries

  9. Neural Categories

  10. How An Algorithm Feels From Inside

  11. Disputing Definitions

  12. Feel the Meaning

  13. The Argument From Common Usage

  14. Empty Labels

  15. Taboo Your Words

  16. Replace the Symbol with the Substance

  17. Fallacies of Compression

  18. Categorizing Has Consequences

  19. Sneaking in Connotations

  20. Arguing “By Definition”

  21. Where to Draw the Boundary?

  22. Entropy, and Short Codes

  23. Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace

  24. Superexponential Conceptspace, and Simple Words

  25. Conditional Independence, and Naive Bayes

  26. Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles

  27. Variable Question Fallacies

  28. 37 Ways That Suboptimal Use Of Categories Can Have Negative Side Effects On our Cognition

Reductionism

Reductionism (i)

  1. Universal Fire

  2. Universal Law

  3. Dissolving the Question

  4. Wrong Questions

  5. Righting a Wrong Question

  6. Mind Projection Fallacy

  7. Probability is in the Mind

  8. The Quotation is not the Referent

  9. Qualitatively Confused

  10. Reductionism

  11. Explaining vs. Explaining Away

  12. Fake Reductionism

  13. Savanna Poets

Joy in the Merely Real
  1. Joy in the Merely Real

  2. Joy in Discovery

  3. Bind Yourself to Reality

  4. If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help

  5. Mundane Magic
  6. The Beauty of Settled Science

  7. Amazing Breakthrough Day: April 1st

  8. Is Humanism a Religion-Substitute?

  9. Scarcity

  10. To Spread Science, Keep It Secret

  11. Initiation Ceremony

  12. Awww, a Zebra

Reductionism (ii)

  1. Hand vs. Fingers

  2. Angry Atoms

  3. Heat vs. Motion

  4. Brain Breakthrough! It’s Made of Neurons!

  5. Reductive Reference

Zombies
  1. Zombies! Zombies?

  2. Zombie Responses

  3. The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle

  4. GAZP vs. GLUT

  5. Belief in the Implied Invisible

  6. Zombies: The Movie

  7. Causal reference

Reductionism (iii)

  1. Excluding the Supernatural

  2. Psychic Powers

Quantum Physics

Basic Quantum Mechanics

  1. Quantum Explanations

  2. Configurations and Amplitude

  3. Joint Configurations

  4. Distinct Configurations

  5. Where Philosophy Meets Science

  6. Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical?

  7. Classical Configuration Spaces

  8. The Quantum Arena

  9. Feynman Paths

  10. No Individual Particles

  11. Identity Isn’t In Specific Atoms

  12. Decoherence

  13. The So-Called Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

  14. Which Basis Is More Fundamental?

  15. Where Physics Meets Experience

  16. Where Experience Confuses Physicists

  17. On Being Decoherent

  18. The Conscious Sorites Paradox

  19. Decoherece is Pointless

  20. Decoherent Essences

  21. The Born Probabilities

  22. Decoherence as Projection

  23. Entangled Photons

Many Worlds

  1. Bell’s Theorem: No EPR “Reality”

  2. Spooky Action at a Distance: The No-Communication Theorem

  3. Decoherence is Simple

  4. Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable

  5. Quantum Non-Realism

  6. Collapse Postulates

  7. If Many-Worlds Had Come First

  8. Many Worlds, One Best Guess

  9. Living in Many Worlds

Timeless Physics

  1. Mach’s Principle: Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics

  2. Relative Configuration Space

  3. Timeless Physics

  4. Timeless Beauty

  5. Timeless Causality

  6. Timeless Identity

  7. Thou Art Physics

  8. Timeless Control

Rationality and Science

  1. The Failures of Eld Science

  2. The Dilemma: Science or Bayes?

  3. Science Doesn’t Trust Your Rationality

  4. When Science Can’t Help

  5. Science Isn’t Strict Enough

  6. Do Scientists Already Know This Stuff?

  7. No Safe Defense, Not Even Science

  8. Changing the Definition of Science

  9. Faster Than Science

  10. Einstein’s Speed

  11. That Alien Message

  12. My Childhood Role Model

  13. Einstein’s Superpowers

  14. Class Project

  15. Why Quantum?

Metaethics

  1. Heading Toward Morality

  2. No Universally Compelling Arguments

  3. 2-Place and 1-Place Words

  4. What Would You Do Without Morality?

  5. The Moral Void

  6. Created Already In Motion

  7. The Bedrock of Fairness

  8. Moral Complexities

  9. Is Morality Preference?

  10. Is Morality Given?

  11. Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom

  12. My Kind of Reflection

  13. The Genetic Fallacy

  14. Fundamental Doubts

  15. Rebelling Within Nature

  16. Probability is Subjectively Objective

  17. Whither Moral Progress?

  18. The Gift We Give To Tomorrow

  19. Could Anything Be Right?

  20. Existential Angst Factory

  21. Can Counterfactuals Be True?

  22. Math is Subjunctively Objective

  23. Does Your Morality Care What You Think?

  24. Changing Your Metaethics

  25. Setting Up Metaethics

  26. The Meaning of Right

  27. Interpersonal Morality

  28. Morality as Fixed Computation

  29. Inseparably Right; or, Joy in the Merely Good

  30. Sorting Pebbles Into Correct Heaps

  31. Moral Error and Moral Disagreement

  32. Abstracted Idealized Dynamics

  33. “Arbitrary”

  34. Is Fairness Arbitrary?

  35. The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary?

  36. You Provably Can’t Trust Yourself

  37. No License To Be Human

  38. Invisible Frameworks

Fun Theory

  1. Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun

  2. High Challenge

  3. Complex Novelty

  4. Continuous Improvement

  5. Sensual Experience

  6. Living By Your Own Strength

  7. Free to Optimize

  8. Harmful Options

  9. Devil’s Offers

  10. Nonperson Predicates

  11. Amputation of Destiny

  12. Dunbar’s Function

  13. In Praise of Boredom

  14. Sympathetic Minds

  15. Interpersonal Entanglement

  16. Failed Utopia #4-2

  17. Growing Up is Hard

  18. Changing Emotions

  19. Emotional Involvement

  20. Serious Stories

  21. Eutopia is Scary

  22. Building Weirdtopia

  23. Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises

  24. Seduced by Imagination

  25. The Uses of Fun (Theory)

  26. Higher Purpose

Ethical Injunctions

  1. Why Does Power Corrupt?

  2. Ends Don’t Justify Means (Among Humans)

  3. Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies

  4. Protected From Myself

  5. Ethical Inhibitions

  6. Ethical Injunctions

  7. Prices or Bindings?

  8. Ethics Notes

Yudkowsky’s Coming of Age

  1. My Childhood Death Spiral

  2. My Best and Worst Mistake

  3. Raised in Technophilia

  4. A Prodigy of Refutation

  5. The Sheer Folly of Callow Youth

  6. That Tiny Note of Discord

  7. Fighting a Rearguard Action Against the Truth

  8. My Naturalistic Awakening

  9. The Level Above Mine

  10. Competent Elites
  11. Above-Average AI Scientists
  12. The Magnitude of His Own Folly

  13. Beyond the Reach of God
  14. My Bayesian Enlightenment

Challenging the Difficult

  1. The Proper Use of Humility

  2. Tsuyoku Naritai (I Want To Become Stronger)

  3. Tsuyoku vs. the Egalitarian Instinct

  4. Guardians of the Truth

  5. Guardians of Ayn Rand
  6. Lotteries: A Waste of Hope

  7. New Improved Lottery
  8. The Failures of Eld Science

  9. Something to Protect

  10. Einstein’s Superpowers

  11. Trying to Try

  12. Use the Try Harder, Luke

  13. On Doing the Impossible

  14. Make an Extraordinary Effort

  15. Shut Up and Do the Impossible

The Craft and the Community

  1. Raising the Sanity Waterline

  2. A Sense That More Is Possible

  3. Epistemic Viciousness

  4. Schools Proliferating Without Evidence

  5. 3 Levels of Rationality Verification

  6. Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate

  7. Tolerate Tolerance

  8. You’re Calling Who A Cult Leader?

  9. On Things That Are Awesome

  10. Your Price For Joining

  11. Can Humanism Match Religion’s Output?

  12. Church vs. Taskforce

  13. Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes

  14. Helpless Individuals

  15. Money: The Unit of Caring

  16. Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately

  17. Selecting Rationalist Groups

  18. Incremental Progress and the Valley

  19. Whining-Based Communities

  20. Mandatory Secret Identities

  21. Beware of Other-Optimizing

  22. Akrasia and Shangri-La

  23. Collective Apathy and the Internet

  24. Bayesians vs. Barbarians

  25. Of Gender and Rationality

  26. My Way

  27. The Sin of Underconfidence

  28. Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism

  29. Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories

  30. Less Meta

  31. Go Forth and Create the Art!

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