Slate Star Codex

It’s well known, but https://slatestarcodex.com/ was the best I ever found for just really interesting and thought provoking essays that changed my mind.

1. Reddit /r/programming and others 2. Twitter 3. Star Slate Codex https://slatestarcodex.com/ - I've been reading through some of Scott's great writing since the whole NYTimes things brought Scott to my attention. reply

I'd also add to this list the following for some great writing and analysis now and then (not consistently, but good enough to make the list). https://www.epsilontheory.com/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/ https://slatestarcodex.com/

He writes the "Star Slate Codex": https://slatestarcodex.com/ Personally, I've never been a fan. His writings are far too verbose for my liking. He uses 6 paragraphs for what could be one sentence, and I don't think that most of the content is that insightful either. But some people really like him shrug.

I think here is the best alternative. Something that mixed topic specific subs with the moderation and user base of HN would be ideal. For now I'm redirecting to https://slatestarcodex.com/ which has a lot of content I want to get through and I always get something out of lurking around there.

Yeah, this stuck me as poorly worded. But to follow the Charitability rule, it can be better interpreted as follows: Often, when someone puts forward an argument, there are multiple ways to interpret it. Some of these versions of their argument are strong than others. Assume that they were trying to say the strongest version. See also steelmanning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning If you want to see examples of steelmanning, read http://slatestarcodex.com/

http://slatestarcodex.com/ Amazing essays on rationality, psychology, science, all sorts of stuff. https://waitbutwhy.com Simple but deep explanations of technology(his Elon Musk series is a must read)

I like http://slatestarcodex.com/ a kinda pessimistic leftist who sometimes calls himself a libertarian, but wrote the best takedown of libertarianism I've ever read: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ It's what finally pushed me out of libertarianism after it was straining under my increasingly long list of qualifiers. He has a bunch of other great articles too ranging from ADHD to bayesian analysis.

Yeah. Other LessWrong posts are usually great. I recommend almost everything at http://slatestarcodex.com, http://ribbonfarm.com, http://meaningness.com and other insight sinks.

http://slatestarcodex.com/ https://www.gwern.net/ https://metafilter.com (comments and best-of)

Slate Star Codex: http://slatestarcodex.com/, for a lot of interesting socio-philosophical discussion on a variety of topics. Meditations on Moloch is one of my favorites: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Ben Thompson of Stratechery: https://stratechery.com/ And my most recommended read of all, Slate Star Codex: http://slatestarcodex.com/ (Skip all the link posts and open threads; just read his essays. Superb.)

We may be indeed seeing different parts of the Internet. I don't disagree there are people you describe who show the characteristics I mentioned in the post. I mostly try to navigate as far as I can from those parts of the Internet. If you want examples of problems with SJW, I think it's best for me to link SSC: http://slatestarcodex.com/?s=social+justice That's about the only source I know that a) points out the problems, b) stays civil while doing that, and c) does not commit the same "crimes". Many other complaints I've seen about SJW are done by people not better than the group they're criticizing. The both sides of this war are really a symptom of a bigger issue; if there's one thing that's worth to read on SSC in this topic, it's the classic - "Toxoplasma of Rage" - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/.

> Should people be striving to remove friction in discourse in the first place? I mean, if something hurts to hear, surely that should sound the alarm that it's worth confronting, rather than running away from, right? Not necessarily. I personally prefer Scott Alexander's criteria for commentary at SlateStarCodex (http://slatestarcodex.com/). A comment should be two of: True, kind, necessary. Plenty of things cause near-visible sparks when you put them in discourse, and most of them are mean, pedantic, or just not true. You're interested in the set of comments which are true and necessary, this is a tiny subset of the comments which cause friction.

I don't have a specific post in mind, but if you're interested in this kind of thing then I highly recommend http://slatestarcodex.com

You'll probably enjoy The Biodeterminist's Guide to Parenting[1] by Scott Alexander[2]. It's a good overview of environmental effects on cognition. There's a section on birth month, and the answer is: It's a trade-off. If you're sending your child to public school, August is best. This makes them the oldest in their grade, giving them advantages that compound throughout school. For private school, February/March might be best, as winter babies have slightly higher intelligence and social skills. 1. http://squid314.livejournal.com/346391.html 2. You may have heard of him. Scott is a resident psychologist and writer of Slate Star Codex (http://slatestarcodex.com/).

> would appreciate a few recommendations I'm reluctant to give my best recommendation, because it's a fragile community, but hopefully this thread is far enough along that it doesn't have a lot of traffic at this point. Currently, the discussion at http://slatestarcodex.com is the best that I've found on the internet for hearing intelligent views from people I otherwise disagree with. The "open threads" are very long, and contain a lot (50%?) of dross, but there are also a lot of gems within them. Post-Floyd, I was surprised by how many people whose opinions I generally respect were at least conditionally supportive of burning the police precinct office in Minneapolis. If you are interested in this question, you could pose it there. It would be considered "culture war", and thus only acceptable in the "fractional" open threads. That is, the ones that end with ".25", ".5", or ".75". To reduce visibility, these aren't officially listed on the front page, but are available from the Recent Posts or from the Archives link. Create an account, post the question there in as fair and open-ended a manner as you can, and I think you'd get good responses.

The only blog I follow is https://slatestarcodex.com/

Agreed (and upvoted). I think HN has a generally high quality of discussions (except on certain political or fanboyism-related topics where only one side of the debate is tolerated). But, the best discussions on sites I frequent are on blogs that simply sort comments by time and thread, and where the host encourages open and intelligent discussion. Scott Alexander's (https://slatestarcodex.com) is a good example. The flipside is that "report" buttons can become surrogate downvote buttons, and the lopsided volume of reports leads to inconsistent enforcement of rules, so commenters unpopular with the crowd or mods are more and more likely to be banned, while discussion devolves to groupthink, cliquishness and sycophancy towards the locally-powerful. IME BBSes are the most prone to fall victim to this; the communities are small enough that you can't be "anonymous," and with threads that can continue and be bumped to the top indefinitely, there's no mechanism besides moderator intervention to stop a flame war. Blogs and HN/Reddit-style aggregators do better because old threads are quickly buried.

> It's quite possible to create a community in an IRC channel. Sure, but it didn't used to be the norm. The usage of IRC has shifted over time, from "channel-as-place" to "channel-as-community", with many of the original "channel-as-place" IRC networks now dead or virtual ghost-towns. The big reason everyone is in a love-fest for Slack but can't quite enunciate is that it's IRC but with multiple channels for each community, which encourages people to distinguish the two concepts further. > I would not call that a feature unique to the "newer" Internet. I didn't mean to imply it was, but rather that the first-wave of BBSes was a unique time because there was very little of that; everyone was their full self, in all their horrible glory. It may have helped that many Internet users up through the early 90s were nerds without enough emotional intelligence to see the point in putting up a face; and that the great number of these made it easier to drop one's own face without being judged for it. You can still see this effect on e.g. 4chan, where it's impossible to feel "excluded" in any ongoing sense, because of the lack of persistent identity. Anyone who says that "4chan's anonymity is valuable, because it generates a lot of Original Content" means specifically that people dropping face enables for some uniquely-interesting interactions. > What has been lost on this "newer" Internet is the ability to have an ideological conflict remain purely ideological. This still…

> Aside from the fact that much of the code that was “released” was sub-par, the very act of putting code out into the world implied (whether intentionally, or not) a willingness to participate in a social contract with those who chose to use it for their own purposes. Not to disparage the 100:10:1 method, but I do disapprove of this implication. I don't want people to refrain from putting things out there, just because they don't want to feel obligated to support them. I have a public blog, where I try to maintain quality, and a semi-private blog where I try to allow myself to post stuff I'm not sure about, stuff that's not interesting to anyone other than me, stuff I don't necessarily want associated with my public persona, and so on. I know others do similar things.[1] I think there's no particular mechanism to do that with open source, but it might be valuable. Perhaps I could have two github accounts, one where I'll put anything I feel like, and one where I put stuff I'm proud of and want to remain proud of. If something's on my "real" github, I'm saying that if you ask for support I'll try to help you, if you report a bug I'll try to fix it. If it's on, let's call it my shithub, there's no social contract. Take a look if you want, and feel free to report bugs, but I might just say "yeah, that's a bug". Or even just "not interested in that project any more, I'm not going to bother confirming this". Then, if you want to follow this method and also want to make most…

This sounds about as effective as medical ethics codes: > Listen up, this will be on the test. You need to help patients, not hurt them. You need to be responsible. Try to avoid being irresponsible. Try to act professionally, and to be a positive asset to society. Don't abuse nurses. If someone asks you do to something unethical, tell them you won't. Did I mention you need to help patients, and not hurt them? > If reading that paragraph seemed like a waste of your time, imagine how I feel after attending the three hour lecture version. That's from Against medical ethics[1], an early post by psychologist Scott Alexander, who has since started writing at http://slatestarcodex.com/ People writing this sort of software either don't think they're causing harm, or they rationalize it. If the writer of malicious or deceptive software doesn't realize they're doing harm, no programming ethics course will help. The same is true if they rationalize their behavior with reasoning like, "If someone is dumb enough to get this spyware, they shouldn't be online." or "If I stopped doing this job, someone else would take my place tomorrow." I'm not sure what the best solution is, but ethics codes seem like a complete waste of time. 1. http://squid314.livejournal.com/285785.html

> They failed to anticipate the competitive pressures of capitalism... No, LessWrong types have been discussing this for over a decade now. Meditations on Moloch (2014) is also an HN favorite... https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

There is a rumour that the high doses are because the correct dose was under patent. I can only find that in a comment here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wan… but I could have sworn it was in the main article when I first read it. (If so that makes it less likely, because the author revises his articles for correctness) That (albeit long) article is worth reading. For example, it explains that melatonin is a phase signal, so being saturated with too much melatonin actually makes the signal less clear (as well as potentially causing other issues).

It's a great post. Or as Scott Alexander put it at the time: > A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying: >> I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked. > I resisted the urge to answer “Yeah, well, your mom is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.” > But I think it would have been true. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-general-int…

Scott Alexander's 2014 essay, Meditations on Moloch, explains why we ended up in this rat king of human misery rather than a utopia. I recommend it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ basically, we can blame greedy corporate overlords, and that's cathartic, and somewhat correct, but we can (and have) ended up in a hell of our own making even with every individual wanting to do better. the boss that wants to let workers have the day off can't afford to, because the competition makes workers do 8x5. the competition lays off workers to pay for more tokens, because their competitors are. it's a bad game equilibrium. labor laws are the reason we have the five day work week. we needed overtime to dissuade employers from defecting from the policy. we need coordination to keep AI from turning out like children working the bobbins in old-timey textile factories.

oh, the weird stuff is amazing reminds me of the Lizardman's constant https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian…

> Members of The Church of Graphs live by one primary commandment: thou shalt not believe your lying eyes. Ah, how familiar this is from some colleagues in tech. Demands of evidence are asymmetric: make a bold claim that's aligned with the group, and it slips by; make a hint of a misaligned claim, and you get chided for not being a researcher in the field and spreading misinformation. Ironically, it is a Scott Alexander post that articulates this phenomenon best: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigo…

Laszlo Polgar would disagree [1]. He contends that raising a genius is something you can actually target intentionally (whether or not you should). His proof being 3 daughters who became GMs and one that was a generational talent. As far as audibles go, that’s quite a flex. Yes, the daughters are not all equally talented and chess isn’t quite the same as math, but we’re talking about gradiation within an achievement only reached by much less than 1% of all active players. To me that’s genius level. Also, it’s not necessarily an accident that the youngest is the one to have attained the best result. Evidence is quite clear that older siblings can help their younger ones achieve more faster because the younger ones see it as a path to follow/if they can I can. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/genius.pdf

A similar idea occurred to the Austrian-Americam cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster in a 1960 paper, titled: Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 There is an excellent blog post about it by Scott Alexander: "1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled" https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-wa…