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 (perma) and The Parable Of The Talents (perma) 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? (perma); Gwern’s review of McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War (perma); ‘How Schools Work’ Review: The Worm in the Apple (perma)
    

• Genetic Russian Roulette (perma)

As an aside, why do I use 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 (perma) (This is now one of my favorite books)

• Zero To One (perma)

• Red Plenty (perma)

• The Black Swan (perma)

• Chronicles Of Wasted Time (perma)

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 (perma)

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

• What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing? (perma)

• Different Worlds (perma)

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

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

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 (perma)

• Two Dark Side Statistics Papers (perma)

• The Control Group Is Out Of Control (perma)

• Beware Mass-Produced Medical Recommendations (perma)

• Beware Summary Statistics (perma)

• Beware The Man Of One Study (perma)

• Beware Regional Scatterplots (perma)

  • Also see this comment (perma)

…but after you listen a post, make sure to add it to OneNote (my video that introduces OneNote and explains why it’s so good), highlighting most important parts, and Tab Snooze it

Philosophy / Economics / Anthropology

• Meditations On Moloch (perma)

• Bottomless Pits Of Suffering (perma)

• The Phatic And The Anti-Inductive (perma)

• The Price Of Glee In China (perma)

• Who By Very Slow Decay (perma)

• Black People Less Likely (perma)

• Proving Too Much (perma)

Bonus: SSC comments

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

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

Bonus: Squid314 - Scott Alexander’s old blog

• The Fifth Meditation on Creepiness (perma)

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

• On the realism of WW2 (perma)

• Epistemic learned helplessness (perma)

  • Also read celandine13’s comment on that post

Bonus: Scott Alexander on LessWrong

• Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism (perma)

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