Most Important Slate Star Codex Posts

Alternatively titled: Giant Pieces of Essential Mental Machinery You Didn’t Even Know You Were Missing

Scott Alexander affected how I think more than any other person I know. This is a collection of his most important writing. His headlines are usually totally uninformative and/or misleading, so I would suggest to just try the links one by one.

Depression, how to live, and finding yourself

• Burdens (a) and The Parable Of The Talents (a) are foundational to how I think about my responsibility to the world.

  • Supplementary material: What’s the fastest way you’ve seen someone fuck up their life? (a); Gwern’s review of McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War (a); ‘How Schools Work’ Review: The Worm in the Apple (a)

• Genetic Russian Roulette (a)

As an aside, why do I prefer to use archive.today and perma.cc and not Internet Archive? Because Internet Archive is not a real archive. The webmaster can write to IA and pull out the archives of their site at any moment.

Book reviews

• Twelve Rules For Life (a) (This is now one of my favorite books)

• Zero To One (a) (this one should be re-read every 3-months indefinitely):

Thiel says the most successful visionaries of the past did the opposite of this. They knew what they wanted, planned a strategy, and achieved it. The Apollo Program wasn’t run by vague optimism and “keeping your options open”. It was run by some people who wanted to land on the moon, planned out how to make that happen, and followed the plan. Not slavishly, and certainly they were responsive to evidence that they should change tactics on specific points. But they had a firm vision of the goal in their minds, an approximate vision of what steps they would take to achieve it, and a belief that acheiving an ambitious long-term plan was the sort of thing that people could be expected to do. And great startups like SpaceX are much the same. Elon Musk started with a n-step plan to get to Mars, and he’s currently about halfway through.

• Red Plenty (a)

• The Black Swan (a)

• Chronicles Of Wasted Time (a)

• The Secret Of Our Success (a)

• Against The Grain (a):

The advent of grain farming made oppression possible, and a new class of oppression-entrepreneurs arose to turn this possibility into a reality. They incentivized farmers to intensify grain production further at the expense of other foods, and this turned into a vicious cycle of stronger states = more grain = stronger states. Within a few centuries, Uruk and a few other cities developed the full model: tax collectors, to take the grain; scribes, to measure the grain

As another aside, if you find any of these useful and want to make sure you at least sort of remember what they were about, consider using Tab Snooze and snoozing them for 1 then 3 then 12 months into the future (this is basically spaced repetition for the internet).

On the subjectiveness of subjective experience

• Generalizing From One Example (a)

• What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It? (a)

• What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing? (a)

• Different Worlds (a)

  • Also see Spencer Greenberg’s list of “psychological gulfs” (a)

• Should You Reverse Any Advice You Hear? (a)

As yet another aside, if you find that there are too many posts here and you don’t have the time to read all them, consider listening to the Slate Star Codex podcast…

Statistics

• Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers (a)

• 5-HTTLPR: A Pointed Review (a)

• Two Dark Side Statistics Papers (a)

• The Control Group Is Out Of Control (a)

• Beware Mass-Produced Medical Recommendations (a)

• Beware Summary Statistics (a)

• Beware The Man Of One Study (a)

• Beware Regional Scatterplots (a)

  • Also see this comment (a)

*…but after you listen a post, make sure to add it to Roam Research.

Philosophy / Economics / Anthropology

• Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad

What if there are some issues where rational debate inherently leads you astray?

• Proving Too Much (a)

• Meditations On Moloch (a)

• Bottomless Pits Of Suffering (a)

• The Phatic And The Anti-Inductive (a)

• The Price Of Glee In China (a)

• Who By Very Slow Decay (a)

• Black People Less Likely (a)

• Does Age Bring Wisdom? (a)

Biology

• Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Working Because A Liver Fluke Tried To Turn Your Nth-Great-Grandmother Into A Zombie (a)

• Lots Of People Going Around With Mild Hallucinations All The Time (a)

Bonus: meta

• What Intellectual Progress Did I Make In The 2010s? (a):

One of the best parts of writing a blog is being able to answer questions like this. Whenever I felt like I understood new and important, I wrote a post about it. This makes it easy to track what I learned.

Bonus: SSC comments

• On the inevitable growth of bureaucracy over time (a)

• On Gell-Mann amnesia in tax reform (a)

Bonus: Squid314 - Scott Alexander’s old blog

• The Fifth Meditation on Creepiness (a)

• Book Review: Empire of the Summer Moon (a)

• Epistemic learned helplessness (a)

  • Also read celandine13’s comment on that post

Bonus: Scott Alexander on LessWrong

• Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism (a)

My posts directly related to Slate Star Codex

• On Friendship and on Finding Your People — initially started out with two quotations from Slate Star Codex and ended up being its own post

• Contra Scott Alexander’s “The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life” — about the relationship between meaning and happiness

Bonus: pretty good SSC posts that I thought I should mention

• The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay (a)

  • the anthropology of modern psychiatry

• Is There A Case For Skepticism Of Psychedelic Therapy? (a)

  • a reminder to question the hype everyone around you believes

• Gay Rites Are Civil Rites (a)