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. Some essays are indented to indicate that they are tangents or self-contained elaborations upon a previous essay.

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!