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, while italicized and/or small essays are relatively unimportant. Some essays are also indented to indicate that they are tangents or self-contained elaborations upon a previous essay.
Contents
Map and Territory
- The Simple Truth @yudkowsky.net
- What Do We Mean By "Rationality"?
- An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes's Theorem @yudkowsky.net
- Why truth? And...
- What is Evidence?
- How Much Evidence Does It Take?
- How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3
- Occam's Razor
- The Lens That Sees Its Flaws
Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
- Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)
- Belief in Belief
- Bayesian Judo
- Professing and Cheering
- Belief as Attire
- Focus Your Uncertainty
- The Virtue of Narrowness
- Your Strength As A Rationalist
- Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence
- Conservation of Expected Evidence
- Hindsight Bias
- Hindsight Devalues Science
- Fake Explanations
- Guessing the Teacher's Password
- Science as Attire
- Fake Causality
- Semantic Stopsigns
- Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
- The Futility of Emergence
- Say Not "Complexity"
- Positive Bias: Look Into the Dark
- My Wild and Reckless Youth
- Failing to Learn from History
- Making History Available
- Explain/Worship/Ignore?
- "Science" as Curiosity-Stopper
- Applause Lights
- Truly Part of You
- Chaotic Inversion
How to Actually Change Your Mind
See also: Locating the hypothesis, Privileging the hypothesis, Litany of Gendlin, Litany of Tarski
- A Fable of Science and Politics
- Politics is the Mind-Killer
- Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
- The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality
- Correspondence Bias
- Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
- The Robbers Cave Experiment
- Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence
- Argument Screens Off Authority
- Hug the Query
- Rationality and the English Language
- The Litany Against Gurus
- Politics and Awful Art
- False Laughter
- Human Evil and Muddled Thinking
- The Affect Heuristic
- Evaluability and Cheap Holiday Shopping
- Unbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, & Futurism
- The Halo Effect
- Superhero Bias
- Mere Messiahs
- Affective Death Spirals
- Resist the Happy Death Spiral
- Uncritical Supercriticality
- Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs
- When None Dare Urge Restraint
- The Robbers Cave Experiment
- Every Cause Wants to be a Cult
- Guardians of the Truth
- Guardians of the Gene Pool
- Guardians of Ayn Rand
- The Litany Against Gurus
- Two Cult Koans
- Asch's Conformity Experiment
- Lonely Dissent
- Cultish Countercultishness
- Seeing with Fresh Eyes
- Anchoring and Adjustment
- Priming and Contamination
- Do We Believe Everything We're Told?
- Cached Thoughts
- The 'Outside the Box' Box
- Original Seeing
- The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence
- How to Seem (and Be) Deep
- We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
- Hold Off On Proposing Solutions
- Asch's Conformity Experiment
- On Expressing Your Concerns
- Lonely Dissent
- The Genetic Fallacy
- Noticing Confusion
- Your Strength as a Rationalist
- Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
- Hindsight Bias
- Hindsight Devalues Science
- Positive Bias: Look Into the Dark
- Against Rationalization
- Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People
- Update Yourself Incrementally
- One Argument Against An Army
- The Bottom Line
- What Evidence Filtered Evidence?
- Rationalization
- A Rational Argument
- Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points
- Motivated Stopping and Motivated Continuation
- A Case Study of Motivated Continuation
- Fake Justification
- Fake Optimization Criteria
- Is That Your True Rejection?
- Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies
- Of Lies and Black Swan Blowups
- Anti-Epistemology
- The Sacred Mundane
- Against Doublethink
- Singlethink
- Doublethink: Choosing to be Biased
- No, Really, I've Deceived Myself
- Belief in Self-Deception
- Moore's Paradox
- Don't Believe You'll Self-Deceive
- Overly Convenient Excuses
- The Proper Use of Humility
- The Third Alternative
- Privileging the Hypothesis (and its requisites, like Locating the hypothesis)
- 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
- Feeling Rational
- The Importance of Saying "Oops"
- The Crackpot Offer
- Just Lose Hope Already
- The Proper Use of Doubt
- You Can Face Reality
- The Meditation on Curiosity
- Something to Protect
- No One Can Exempt You From Rationality's Laws
- Leave a Line of Retreat
- Crisis of Faith
- The Ritual