Original Sequences

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.

Bolded essays are more important than other posts in the sequence -- and big bolded essays even more so -- while shrunk essays are relatively unimportant. Some essays are also indented to indicate that they are tangents or self-contained elaborations upon a previous essay.

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

:#'''Argument Screens Off Authority

:#'''Hug the Query

1. Rationality and the English Language
2. The Litany Against Gurus

:#Politics and Awful Art

1. False Laughter
2. Human Evil and Muddled Thinking

 
Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor

Most important posts:

1. '''The Affect Heuristic
2. '''The Halo Effect
3. '''Affective Death Spirals
4. '''Resist the Happy Death Spiral
5. '''Uncritical Supercriticality

 
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. On Expressing Your Concerns
12. 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

:#A Case Study of Motivated Continuation

1. Fake Justification
2. Fake Optimization Criteria
3. Is That Your True Rejection?
4. Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies

:#Of Lies and Black Swan Blowups

1. Anti-Epistemology

:#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. Privileging the Hypothesis (and its requisites, like Locating the hypothesis)
4. But There's Still A Chance, Right?

:#The Fallacy of Gray

:#Absolute Authority

:#How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3

:#Infinite Certainty

:#0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities

 
Letting Go

1. Feeling Rational
2. The Importance of Saying "Oops"

   The Crackpot Offer

   Just Lose Hope Already

3. The Proper Use of Doubt
4. You Can Face Reality
5. The Meditation on Curiosity
6. Something to Protect
7. No One Can Exempt You From Rationality's Laws
8. Leave a Line of Retreat
9. Crisis of Faith

:#The Ritual