A sequence is a series of multiple posts on Less Wrong on the same topic, to coherently and fully explore a particular thesis. See the Library page for a list of LessWrong sequences in their modern form.
The original sequences were written by Eliezer Yudkowsky with the goal of creating a book on rationality. MIRI has since collated and edited the sequences into Rationality: From AI to Zombies. If you are new to Less Wrong, this book is the best place to start.
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
Rationality: From AI to Zombies is an ebook collecting six books worth of essays on the science and philosophy of human rationality. It’s one of the best places to start for people who want to better understand topics that crop up on Less Wrong, such as cognitive bias, the map-territory distinction, meta-ethics, and existential risk.
The ebook can be downloaded on a “pay-what-you-want” basis from intelligence.org. Its six books in turn break down into twenty-six sections:
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Book I: Map and Territory. An introduction to the Bayesian concept of rational belief.
A. Predictably Wrong
B. Fake Beliefs
C. Noticing Confusion
D. Mysterious Answers
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Book II: How to Actually Change Your Mind. A guide to noticing motivated reasoning and overcoming confirmation bias.
E. Overly Convenient Excuses
F. Politics and Rationality
G. Against Rationalization
H. Against Doublethink
I. Seeing with Fresh Eyes
J. Death Spirals
K. Letting Go
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Book III: The Machine in the Ghost. Essays on the general topic of minds, goals, and concepts.
L. The Simple Math of Evolution
M. Fragile Purposes
N. A Human’s Guide to Words
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Book IV: Mere Reality. Essays on science and the physical world.
O. Lawful Truth
P. Reductionism 101
Q. Joy in the Merely Real
R. Physicalism 201
S. Quantum Physics and Many Worlds
T. Science and Rationality
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Book V: Mere Goodness. A discussion of ethics, and of things people value in general.
U. Fake Preferences
V. Value Theory
W. Quantified Humanism
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Book VI: Becoming Stronger. Essays on self-improvement, group rationality, and rationality groups.
X. Yudkowsky’s Coming of Age
Y. Challenging the Difficult
Z. The Craft and the Community
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Other sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky
The following collections of essays come from the original sequences, an earlier version of much of the material from Rationality: From AI to Zombies:
Ethical Injunctions: A discussion of prohibitions you may want to follow even when you’ve thought of a clever reason to think they don’t apply.
The Metaethics Sequence: A longer version of “Value Theory”, discussing the apparent “arbitrariness” of human morality.
The Fun Theory Sequence: A discussion of the complexity of human value, and what the universe might look like if everything were much, much better. Fun theory is the optimistic, far-future-oriented part of value theory, asking: How much fun is there in the universe; will we ever run out of fun; are we having fun yet; could we be having more fun?
The Quantum Physics Sequence: A much longer version of the “Quantum Physics and Many Worlds”, delving more into the implications of physics for our concepts of personal identity and time.
Other collections from the same time period (2006-2009) include:
The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate: A blog conversation between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson on the topic of intelligence explosion and how concerned we should be about superintelligent AI.
Free Will: Yudkowsky’s answer to a challenge he raises in Rationality: From AI to Zombies to come up with an explanation for the human feeling that we have free will.
Yudkowsky has also written a more recent sequence:
Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners. These essays include a discussion of truth, formal logic, causality, and metaethics, and are a good way for more ambitious readers to quickly get up to speed.
Sequences by others
Sequences of essays by Scott Alexander include:
Priming and Implicit Association. Priming may be described as the capability of any random stimulus to commandeer your thinking and judgement for the next several minutes. Scared? Don’t be. There exist ways to defend yourself against these kinds of intrusions, and there are even methods to harness them into useful testing mechanisms.
Sequences by Luke Muehlhauser:
The Science of Winning at Life. This sequence summarizes scientifically-backed advice for “winning” at everyday life: in one’s productivity, in one’s relationships, in one’s emotions, etc. Each post concludes with footnotes and a long list of references from the academic literature.
Rationality and Philosophy. This sequence explains how intuitions are used in mainstream philosophy and what the science of intuitions suggests about how intuitions should be used in philosophy.
No-Nonsense Metaethics. This sequence explains and defends a naturalistic approach to metaethics.
By Anna Salamon:
Decision Theory of Newcomblike Problems. Decisions need to be modeled with some structure in order to be scrutinized and systematically improved; simply “intuiting” the answers to decision problems by ad-hoc methods is not conducive to thorough analysis. For this, we formulate decision theories. This sequence, themed with an analysis of Newcomb’s problem, is a consolidated summary and context for the many decision theory discussions found on LessWrong at the time of writing.
By Alicorn:
Living Luminously. Luminosity, as used here, is self-awareness. A luminous mental state is one that you have and know that you have. It could be an emotion, a belief or alief, a disposition, a quale, a memory—anything that might happen or be stored in your brain. What’s going on in your head?
And by Kaj Sotala:
What Intelligence Tests Miss. A sequence summarizing the content of Keith Stanovich’s book What Intelligence Tests Miss.
Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite by Kaj_Sotala. An unfinished sequence summarizing the content of Robert Kurzban’s book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind.
Other resources
Benito’s Guide aims to systematically fill the reader in on the most important ideas discussed on LessWrong (not just in the sequences). It also begins with a series of videos, which are a friendly introduction, and useful if you enjoy talks and interviews.
Thinking and Deciding by Jonathan Baron and Good and Real by Gary Drescher have been mentioned as books that overlap significantly with the sequences. More about how the sequences fit in with work done by others.
I think this page would be more useful if it linked to the individual sequences it lists.
As far as I’ve seen, there is no page that links to all sequences in order, which would be useful for working through them systematically.
From the old discussion page:
Talk:Sequences
The Sequences page is probably the most important page on the Wiki. As such, speed of user experience is more important than a vague urge for abstract symmetry or consistency. Where the original sequence guides are blog posts, we want users—especially new users—to visit those original sequence guides immediately. We don’t want to send them to a Wiki page that forwards to the sequence guide and force them to click twice or read the same content over again. User interface studies show that requiring one more click results in a significant drop-off in participation, and this is very debilitating when it comes to the Sequences page. We want the user to click and see something interesting and attractive as fast as possible.
Hence I’m rolling back various edits that increase the number of user clicks. I designed the page the way it is for a reason. --Eliezer Yudkowsky 18:43, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
Eliezer, that’s causing problems. See the issue I’ve just moved from #215:
--Matt 04:04, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
As I’ve said on the tracker, it’s not really so:
There is a wiki page for quantum physics sequence, it’s just not linked from the main sequences page, because the post that is linked has abstracts, while the wiki page doesn’t (and probably shouldn’t, since it’ll be just a copy-paste of what’s already available). Here it is: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Quantum_Physics_Sequence
The same goes for fun theory sequence: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Fun_Theory_Sequence
--Vladimir Nesov 08:26, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
Wording
“Map and Territory contains some of the most important introductory posts and essays.
“If you don’t read the sequences on Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and Reductionism, nothing else on Less Wrong will make much sense.”
This has bugged me somewhat since I first came here. “Map and Territory is ‘introductory’, suggesting that I’m best off reading it first, but at the same time it won’t make much sense without MAMQ, but I should read it first for some reason anyway?”. --Document 04:22, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Alternative formats
It wasn’t til I’d already added links under each section heading that I noticed the “Alternative Formats” section at the bottom and discovered OneWhoFrogs’s apparently more complete collection; sorry about that. I’d try to clean things up, but I’m up late and I’m hoping it’s still closer to ideal accessibility than before than before. (Edit: another thing that should be done is making links to summary posts more prominent, and possibly linking this.) --Document 08:18, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I’m reverting all your edits, as they seem to be redundant (correct me if there’s some material not included in the last section, I haven’t actually checked; in that case, it should be added to the last section), and distort structure of the page (by interrupting the text that describes the sequences). --Vladimir Nesov 13:58, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
Chronological Format
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/overcoming-bias notes that the posts may make more sense in chronological format, and for me, it seems like http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~andwhay/postlist.html offers a better starting point than the “map and territory” sequence (ie, just a bit more exciting to start reading). So, I suggest that this be mentioned as an alternative in the wiki page, possibly in the introduction after the bit about “the most systematic way...”
Communication sequence
Work in progress: User:Chriswaterguy #A communication sequence.
I don’t know whether it should eventually be linked here, but it’s possibly of interest to people besides myself. --Chriswaterguy (talk) 11:44, 8 December 2014 (AEDT)