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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, while italicized essays are relatively unimportant. Small essays are also unimportant, and are sometimes left out of the post listing altogether. Some essays are also indented to indicate that they are tangents or self-contained elaborations upon a previous essay.

 

__TOC__

 

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
  9.       Argument Screens Off Authority
  10.       Hug the Query
  11. Rationality and the English Language
  12. The Litany Against Gurus
  13.       Politics and Awful Art
  14. False Laughter
  15. Human Evil and Muddled Thinking

 

Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor
  1. The Affect Heuristic
  2.       Evaluability and Cheap Holiday Shopping
  3.       Unbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, & Futurism
  4. The Halo Effect
  5.       Superhero Bias
  6.       Mere Messiahs
  7. '''Affective Death Spirals
  8. Resist the Happy Death Spiral
  9. '''Uncritical Supercriticality
  10. Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs
  11. When None Dare Urge Restraint
  12. The Robbers Cave Experiment
  13. Every Cause Wants to be a Cult
  14. Guardians of the Truth
  15.       Guardians of the Gene Pool
  16.       Guardians of Ayn Rand
  17. The Litany Against Gurus
  18. Two Cult Koans
  19. Asch's Conformity Experiment
  20. Lonely Dissent
  21. Cultish Countercultishness

 

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. Asch's Conformity Experiment
  12. On Expressing Your Concerns
  13. Lonely Dissent
  14. 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
  10.       A Case Study of Motivated Continuation
  11. Fake Justification
  12. Fake Optimization Criteria
  13. Is That Your True Rejection?
  14. Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies
  15.       Of Lies and Black Swan Blowups
  16. Anti-Epistemology
  17.       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. Locating the hypothesis
  4.       Privileging the Hypothesis
  5. But There's Still A Chance, Right?
  6.       The Fallacy of Gray
  7.       Absolute Authority
  8.       How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3
  9.       Infinite Certainty
  10.       0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities

 
Letting Go

  1. Feeling Rational
  2. The Importance of Saying "Oops"
  3.       The Crackpot Offer
  4.       Just Lose Hope Already
  5. The Proper Use of Doubt
  6. You Can Face Reality
  7. The Meditation on Curiosity
  8. Something to Protect
  9. No One Can Exempt You From Rationality's Laws
  10. Leave a Line of Retreat
  11. Crisis of Faith
  12.       The Ritual

 

The Simple Math of Evolution

  1. An Alien God
  2. The Wonder of Evolution
  3. Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyway)
  4. Speed limit and complexity bound for evolution
  5. Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers
  6. No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices
  7. Evolving to Extinction
  8. The Tragedy of Group Selectionism
  9. Fake Optimization Criteria

 

A Human's Guide to Words

  1. The Parable of the Dagger
  2. The Parable of Hemlock
  3. Words as Hidden Inferences
  4. Extensions and Intensions
  5. Similarity Clusters
  6. Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity
  7. The Cluster Structure of Thingspace
  8. Disguised Queries
  9. Neural Categories
  10. How An Algorithm Feels From Inside
  11. Disputing Definitions
  12. Feel the Meaning
  13. The Argument From Common Usage
  14. Empty Labels
  15. Taboo Your Words
  16. Replace the Symbol with the Substance
  17. Fallacies of Compression
  18. Categorizing Has Consequences
  19. Sneaking in Connotations
  20. Arguing "By Definition"
  21. Where to Draw the Boundary?
  22. Entropy, and Short Codes
  23. Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace
  24. Superexponential Conceptspace, and Simple Words
  25. Conditional Independence, and Naive Bayes
  26. Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles
  27. Variable Question Fallacies
  28. 37 Ways That Suboptimal Use Of Categories Can Have Negative Side Effects On our Cognition

 

Reductionism

Reductionism (i)

  1. Universal Fire
  2. Universal Law
  3. Dissolving the Question
  4. Wrong Questions
  5. Righting a Wrong Question
  6. Mind Projection Fallacy
  7. Probability is in the Mind
  8. The Quotation is not the Referent
  9. Qualitatively Confused
  10. Reductionism
  11. Explaining vs. Explaining Away
  12. Fake Reductionism
  13. Savanna Poets

 

Joy in the Merely Real
  1. Joy in the Merely Real
  2. Joy in Discovery
  3. Bind Yourself to Reality
  4. If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help
  5.       Mundane Magic
  6. The Beauty of Settled Science
  7. Amazing Breakthrough Day: April 1st
  8. Is Humanism a Religion-Substitute?
  9. Scarcity
  10. To Spread Science, Keep It Secret
  11. Initiation Ceremony
  12. Awww, a Zebra

 

Reductionism (ii)

  1. Hand vs. Fingers
  2. Angry Atoms
  3. Heat vs. Motion
  4. Brain Breakthrough! It's Made of Neurons!
  5. Reductive Reference

 

Zombies
  1. Zombies! Zombies?
  2. Zombie Responses
  3. The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle
  4. GAZP vs. GLUT
  5. Belief in the Implied Invisible
  6. Zombies: The Movie
  7. Causal reference

 

Reductionism (iii)

  1. Excluding the Supernatural
  2. Psychic Powers

 

Quantum Physics

Basic Quantum Mechanics

  1. Quantum Explanations
  2. Configurations and Amplitude
  3. Joint Configurations
  4. Distinct Configurations
  5. Where Philosophy Meets Science
  6. Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical?
  7. Classical Configuration Spaces
  8. The Quantum Arena
  9. Feynman Paths
  10. No Individual Particles
  11. Identity Isn't In Specific Atoms
  12. Decoherence
  13. The So-Called Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
  14. Which Basis Is More Fundamental?
  15. Where Physics Meets Experience
  16. Where Experience Confuses Physicists
  17. On Being Decoherent
  18. The Conscious Sorites Paradox
  19. Decoherece is Pointless
  20. Decoherent Essences
  21. The Born Probabilities
  22. Decoherence as Projection
  23. Entangled Photons

 

Many Worlds

  1. Bell's Theorem: No EPR "Reality"
  2. Spooky Action at a Distance: The No-Communication Theorem
  3. Decoherence is Simple
  4. Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable
  5. Quantum Non-Realism
  6. Collapse Postulates
  7. If Many-Worlds Had Come First
  8. Many Worlds, One Best Guess
  9. Living in Many Worlds

 

Timeless Physics

  1. Mach's Principle: Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics
  2. Relative Configuration Space
  3. Timeless Physics
  4. Timeless Beauty
  5. Timeless Causality
  6. Timeless Identity
  7. Thou Art Physics
  8. Timeless Control

 

Rationality and Science

  1. The Failures of Eld Science
  2. The Dilemma: Science or Bayes?
  3. Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality
  4. When Science Can't Help
  5. Science Isn't Strict Enough
  6. Do Scientists Already Know This Stuff?
  7. No Safe Defense, Not Even Science
  8. Changing the Definition of Science
  9. Faster Than Science
  10. Einstein's Speed
  11. That Alien Message
  12. My Childhood Role Model
  13. Einstein's Superpowers
  14. Class Project
  15. Why Quantum?

 

Metaethics

  1. Heading Toward Morality
  2. No Universally Compelling Arguments
  3. 2-Place and 1-Place Words
  4. What Would You Do Without Morality?
  5. The Moral Void
  6. Created Already In Motion
  7. The Bedrock of Fairness
  8. Moral Complexities
  9. Is Morality Preference?
  10. Is Morality Given?
  11. Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom
  12. My Kind of Reflection
  13. The Genetic Fallacy
  14. Fundamental Doubts
  15. Rebelling Within Nature
  16. Probability is Subjectively Objective
  17. Whither Moral Progress?
  18. The Gift We Give To Tomorrow
  19. Could Anything Be Right?
  20. Existential Angst Factory
  21. Can Counterfactuals Be True?
  22. Math is Subjunctively Objective
  23. Does Your Morality Care What You Think?
  24. Changing Your Metaethics
  25. Setting Up Metaethics
  26. The Meaning of Right
  27. Interpersonal Morality
  28. Morality as Fixed Computation
  29. Inseparably Right; or, Joy in the Merely Good
  30. Sorting Pebbles Into Correct Heaps
  31. Moral Error and Moral Disagreement
  32. Abstracted Idealized Dynamics
  33. "Arbitrary"
  34. Is Fairness Arbitrary?
  35. The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary?
  36. You Provably Can't Trust Yourself
  37. No License To Be Human
  38. Invisible Frameworks

 

Fun Theory

  1. Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun
  2. High Challenge
  3. Complex Novelty
  4. Continuous Improvement
  5. Sensual Experience
  6. Living By Your Own Strength
  7. Free to Optimize
  8. Harmful Options
  9. Devil's Offers
  10. Nonperson Predicates
  11. Amputation of Destiny
  12. Dunbar's Function
  13. In Praise of Boredom
  14. Sympathetic Minds
  15. Interpersonal Entanglement
  16. Failed Utopia #4-2
  17. Growing Up is Hard
  18. Changing Emotions
  19. Emotional Involvement
  20. Serious Stories
  21. Eutopia is Scary
  22. Building Weirdtopia
  23. Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises
  24. Seduced by Imagination
  25. The Uses of Fun (Theory)
  26. Higher Purpose