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

X. Progress

XI. Social Justice

XII. Politicization

XIII. Competition and Cooperation

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

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.

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

X. Progress

XI. Social Justice

XII. Politicization

XIII. Competition and Cooperation

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

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 :)

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

5Rob Bensinger11y

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.

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