I’ve said before that my favorite blog — and the one that’s shifted my views in the most varied and consequential ways — is Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex. Scott has written a lot of good stuff, and it can be hard to know where to begin; so I’ve listed below what I think are the best pieces for new readers to start with. This includes older writing, e.g., from Less Wrong.

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 — many of the posts are self-contained. The list isn’t chronological. Instead, I’ve tried to order things by a mix of “where do I think most people should start reading?” plus “sorting related posts together.” If stuff doesn’t make sense, you may want to Google terms or read background material in Rationality: From AI to Zombies.

This is a work in progress; you’re invited to suggest things you’d add, remove, or shuffle around.

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I. Rationality and Rationalization

○ Blue- and Yellow-Tinted Choices

○ The Apologist and the Revolutionary

○ Historical Realism

○ Simultaneously Right and Wrong

○ You May Already Be A Sinner

○ Beware the Man of One Study

○ Debunked and Well-Refuted

○ How to Not Lose an Argument

○ The Least Convenient Possible World

○ Bayes for Schizophrenics: Reasoning in Delusional Disorders

○ Generalizing from One Example

○ Typical Mind and Politics

II. Probabilism

○ Confidence Levels Inside and Outside an Argument

○ Schizophrenia and Geomagnetic Storms

○ Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale

○ Arguments from My Opponent Believes Something

○ Statistical Literacy Among Doctors Now Lower Than Chance

○ Techniques for Probability Estimates

○ On First Looking into Chapman’s “Pop Bayesianism”

○ Utilitarianism for Engineers

○ If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing with Made-Up Statistics

○ Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

○ Are You a Solar Deity?

○ The “Spot the Fakes” Test

○ Epistemic Learned Helplessness

III. Science and Doubt

○ Google Correlate Does Not Imply Google Causation

○ Stop Confounding Yourself! Stop Confounding Yourself!

○ Effects of Vertical Acceleration on Wrongness

○ 90% Of All Claims About The Problems With Medical Studies Are Wrong

○ Prisons are Built with Bricks of Law and Brothels with Bricks of Religion, But That Doesn’t Prove a Causal Relationship

○ Noisy Poll Results and the Reptilian Muslim Climatologists from Mars

○ Two Dark Side Statistics Papers

○ Alcoholics Anonymous: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

○ The Control Group Is Out Of Control

○ The Cowpox of Doubt

○ The Skeptic’s Trilemma

○ If You Can’t Make Predictions, You’re Still in a Crisis

IV. Medicine, Therapy, and Human Enhancement

○ Scientific Freud

○ Sleep – Now by Prescription

○ In Defense of Psych Treatment for Attempted Suicide

○ Who By Very Slow Decay

○ Medicine, As Not Seen on TV

○ Searching for One-Sided Tradeoffs

○ Do Life Hacks Ever Reach Fixation?

○ Polyamory is Boring

○ Can You Condition Yourself?

○ Wirehead Gods on Lotus Thrones

○ Don’t Fear the Filter

○ Transhumanist Fables

V. Introduction to Game Theory

○ Backward Reasoning Over Decision Trees

○ Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points

○ Introduction to Prisoners’ Dilemma

○ Real-World Solutions to Prisoners’ Dilemmas

○ Interlude for Behavioral Economics

○ What is Signaling, Really?

○ Bargaining and Auctions

○ Imperfect Voting Systems

○ Game Theory as a Dark Art

VI. Promises and Principles

○ Beware Trivial Inconveniences

○ Time and Effort Discounting

○ Applied Picoeconomics

○ Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes

○ Democracy is the Worst Form of Government Except for All the Others Except Possibly Futarchy

○ Eight Short Studies on Excuses

○ Revenge as Charitable Act

○ Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up?

○ Are Wireheads Happy?

○ Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants

VII. Cognition and Association

○ Diseased Thinking: Dissolving Questions about Disease

○ The Noncentral Fallacy — The Worst Argument in the World?

○ The Power of Positivist Thinking

○ When Truth Isn’t Enough

○ Ambijectivity

○ The Blue-Minimizing Robot

○ Basics of Animal Reinforcement

○ Wanting vs. Liking Revisited

○ Physical and Mental Behavior

○ Trivers on Self-Deception

○ Ego-Syntonic Thoughts and Values

○ Approving Reinforces Low-Effort Behaviors

○ To What Degree Do We Have Goals?

○ The Limits of Introspection

○ Secrets of the Eliminati

○ Tendencies in Reflective Equilibrium

○ Hansonian Optimism

VIII. Doing Good

○ Newtonian Ethics

○ Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others…

○ The Economics of Art and the Art of Economics

○ A Modest Proposal

○ The Life Issue

○ What if Drone Warfare Had Come First?

○ Nefarious Nefazodone and Flashy Rare Side-Effects

○ The Consequentialism FAQ

○ Doing Your Good Deed for the Day

○ I Myself Am A Scientismist

○ Whose Utilitarianism?

○ Book Review: After Virtue

○ Read History of Philosophy Backwards

○ Virtue Ethics: Not Practically Useful Either

○ Last Thoughts on Virtue Ethics

○ Proving Too Much

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

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

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If you liked these posts and want more, I suggest browsing the Slate Star Codex archives.