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.

Of these, "Map and Territory," "Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions," "How to Actually Change Your Mind," and "Reductionism" were classified as "core sequences." There was also a distinction between "major" and "minor" sequences, though this was based on the size of the sequence rather than its importance.

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.

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Other formats

The Sequences have been converted to eReader-compatible formats by several projects.

• Print ready versions by jb55 (GitHub). Has versions in Markdown, PDF, and ePub. ePubs can be converted to nearly any other format with calibre.
• lw2ebook by OneWhoFrogs (GitHub). Includes all sequences in ePub and mobi formats.
• Sequences in EPub and MOBI formats by ciphergoth
• PDF version of most sequences in a single file. Has cross-reference support for internal links (PDF links or footnotes), and page size is appropriate for tablets.
• Print ready versions by Jordan. Contains all posts of each sequence in one HTML file. [Dead link.]
• Github ePub, mobi, rst, and html formats available here.
• Living Luminously in ePub, mobi and html.

Two abridged indexes of Yudkowsky's sequences are XiXiDu's guide, or Academian's guide targeted at people who already have a science background.

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

Ethical Injunctions

1. Why Does Power Corrupt?
2. Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans)
3. Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies
4. Protected From Myself
5. Ethical Inhibitions
6. Ethical Injunctions
7. Prices or Bindings?
8. Ethics Notes

Yudkowsky's Coming of Age

1. My Childhood Death Spiral
2. My Best and Worst Mistake
3. Raised in Technophilia
4. A Prodigy of Refutation
5. The Sheer Folly of Callow Youth
6. That Tiny Note of Discord
7. Fighting a Rearguard Action Against the Truth
8. My Naturalistic Awakening
9. The Level Above Mine
10.       Competent Elites
11.       Above-Average AI Scientists
12. The Magnitude of His Own Folly
13.       Beyond the Reach of God
14. My Bayesian Enlightenment

Challenging the Difficult

1. The Proper Use of Humility
2. Tsuyoku Naritai (I Want To Become Stronger)
3. Tsuyoku vs. the Egalitarian Instinct
4. Guardians of the Truth
5.       Guardians of Ayn Rand
6. Lotteries: A Waste of Hope
7.       New Improved Lottery
8. The Failures of Eld Science
9. Something to Protect
10. Einstein's Superpowers
11. Trying to Try
12. Use the Try Harder, Luke
13. On Doing the Impossible
14. Make an Extraordinary Effort
15. Shut Up and Do the Impossible

The Craft and the Community

1. Raising the Sanity Waterline
2. A Sense That More Is Possible
3. Epistemic Viciousness
4. Schools Proliferating Without Evidence
5. 3 Levels of Rationality Verification
6. Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate
7. Tolerate Tolerance
8. You're Calling Who A Cult Leader?
9. On Things That Are Awesome
10. Your Price For Joining
11. Can Humanism Match Religion's Output?
12. Church vs. Taskforce
13. Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes
14. Helpless Individuals
15. Money: The Unit of Caring
16. Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately
17. Selecting Rationalist Groups
18. Incremental Progress and the Valley
19. Whining-Based Communities
20. Mandatory Secret Identities
21. Beware of Other-Optimizing
22. Akrasia and Shangri-La
23. Collective Apathy and the Internet
24. Bayesians vs. Barbarians
25. Of Gender and Rationality
26. My Way
27. The Sin of Underconfidence
28. Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
29. Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories
30. Less Meta
31. Go Forth and Create the Art!