The very best of Scott Alexander and Slate Star Codex

Scott Alexander is one of my favorite writers and Slate Star Codex is (by far) my favorite blog. It’s pretty difficult for me to communicate with people who haven’t read most of Slate Star Codex. It’s like trying to have a conversation with a frequentist Hegelian who doesn’t believe in evolution. The inferential distances are so huge, you don’t even know where to start.

At some point, I realized that not everyone wants to read absolutely everything by Scott Alexander. At first, I wanted to give up on humanity. But now I think that there could be a tiny chance that humanity is not completely doomed even if everyone reads only Scott’s top 50 posts or so. That’s why I created this list of my favorite posts of his.

The posts are sorted into somewhat arbitrary categories and the really good ones are marked in bold. The most super duper uber amazing crucial ones are marked in bold and italic.

My favorite posts by Scott Alexander

Coordination, game theory, decision theory or other profound things that vaguely relate to that sort of stuff

• • Meditations on Moloch
  • You Kant Dismiss Universalizability

In favor of kindness, reason, truth, non-tribalism, and not demonizing the outgroup

• In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization
• I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup
• Five Case Studies on Politicization
• Guided By the Beauty of Our Weapons
• The Spirit of the First Amendment
• We Are All MsScribe
• Against Bravery Debates
• All Debates Are Bravery Debates

The system is not your friend

• SlateStarCodex Gives a Graduation Speech
• Against Tulip Subsidies
• Considerations On Cost Disease

Bayesianism, reductionism, rationality, diseased thinking, etc.

• Generalizing From One Example
• Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism
• If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing with Made-Up Statistics
• Diseased Thinking: Dissolving Questions about Disease
• Proving Too Much
• The Noncentral Fallacy — The Worst Argument in the World?
• Weak Men are Superweapons
• All in All, Another Brick in the Motte

Scientific studies: Not as great as you might think…

• Beware the Man of One Study
• Two Dark Side Statistics Papers
• The Control Group Is Out Of Control
• Noisy Poll Results and the Reptilian Muslim Climatologists from Mars

… and (social) psychology is the worst

• Social Psychology is a Flamethrower
• Trouble Walking Down the Hallway

Is reality biologistic?

• Book Review: The Nurture Assumption
• Society is Fixed, Biology is Mutable
• Proposed Biological Explanations for Historical Trends in Crime

Politics – or why prediction markets should rule the world

• A Something Sort of Like Left-Libertarian-ist Manifesto
• The Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka Why I Hate Your Freedom)
• Democracy is the Worst Form of Government Except for All the Others Except Possibly Futarchy
• A Thrive/Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum
• Right is the New Left
• Basic Income Guarantees
• Vote on Values, Outsource Beliefs

Not everyone in the medical system is as brilliant as Scott…

• Statistical Literacy Among Doctors Now Lower Than Chance

…especially not when it comes to antidepressants

• Prescriptions, Paradoxes, and Perversities
• Nefarious Nefazodone and Flashy Rare Side-Effects

Doing good…

• The Consequentialism FAQ
• Doing Your Good Deed for the Day

…in a world full of misery

• Who By Very Slow Decay
• How Bad Are Things?

Human psychology: a mixed bag

• Beware Trivial Inconveniences
• Trivers on Self-Deception

The ultimate mind-kill section

Lies, damned lies, and social media

• Drug Testing Welfare Users is a Sham, But Not for the Reasons You Think
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Facebook (Part 1 of ∞)
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Social Media: False Rape Accusations

Social justice

• Fearful Symmetry
• A Response to Apophemi on Triggers
• Black People Less Likely
• Framing for Light Instead of Heat

Feminism, race, sex, PUA, loaded terms, people yelling at each other, losing your faith in humanity, etc.

• The First Meditation on Privilege
• The Second Meditation on Privilege
• The Third Meditation on Privilege
• The Fifth Meditation on Creepiness
• The Sixth Meditation on Superweapons
• The Seventh Meditation on the War on Applause Lights
• The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo
• The Ninth Meta-tation on Meta

The library of Scott Alexandria

I also highly recommend Rob Bensinger’s “Library of Scott Alexandria” which is more extensive.