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Welcome to SSC Abridged
This is a collection of some of the best essays written by psychiatrist and author Scott Alexander on his long-running blog, Slate Star Codex. They’re divided into several categories, such as “Science and Pseudoscience”, “Liberalism and Its Enemies”, “Medicine”, etc.
Slate Star Codex is currently inactive (visit the blog to read about the reasons for this). As a result, finding Alexander’s best writing is difficult, and reading his essays on SSC in its current form is inconvenient. Fortunately, all the content of Slate Star Codex is licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows us to re-host Scott’s work here.
(The “abridged” in this site’s title doesn’t, by the way, mean that any of the posts have been shortened—only that the collection as a whole is a selected subset of Scott Alexander’s writing. Each individual post comes to you in its full and glorious length; not a word has been omitted from any of these essays.)
Slate Star Codex Abridged is licensed under the same license (CC BY) as Slate Star Codex. (Our contribution to the content herein may be attributed to “Slate Star Codex Abridged”.)
Using this site
Click on the SSC icon (
) at the bottom of each post to read the comments for that post on Slate Star Codex.
Click on the links at the top left of each page (
) to view that post in an alternative format:
- Click the MD link to view the post in Markdown format
- Click the PDF link to view the post in PDF format
- Click the DOC link to view the post in Microsoft Word format
- Click the EPUB link (on each chapter page) to download that chapter in EPUB format
Use the light/dark mode selector at the top right of the page (
) to select your dark mode setting (light mode always on, dark mode always on, or [the default] automatically conform to system setting).
Downloads
You can download this anthology in any of the following formats:
- Download Slate Star Codex Abridged in EPUB format (single
.epubfile) - Download all chapters in EPUB format (zipped archive, one
.epubfile per chapter) - Download a zipped archive of the site (includes all images, PDFs, etc.)
Note on dead links
In the years since these essays have been written, many of the links in the Slate Star Codex posts hosted here have, unfortunately, succumbed to link rot. These are gradually being fixed—replaced with archived versions where possible, etc.—but the process is slow. We apologize for the inconvenience in the meantime.
Liberalism And its Enemies
- Liberalism And its Enemies
- In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization
- Promising The Moon
- Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous Planet Sized Nutshell
- Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism
- Book Review: On The Road
- The Anti-Reactionary FAQ
Moloch
- Moloch
- [REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ
- Growing Children For Bostrom’s Disneyland
- Book Review: Age of Em
- Meditations On Moloch
- Book Review: Red Plenty
- The Goddess of Everything Else
Culture War
- Culture War
- The Toxoplasma Of Rage
- Beware The Man Of One Study
- Infinite Debt
- Bottomless Pits Of Suffering
- Nydwracu’s Fnords
- The Virtue of Silence
- Fundamental Value Differences Are Not That Fundamental
- Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor
- Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable
- The Parable Of The Talents
- I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup
- Can Things Be Both Popular And Silenced?
- Social Censorship: The First Offender Model
- Vote On Values, Outsource Beliefs
- Weak Men Are Superweapons
- How Did New Atheism Fail So Miserably?
- The Influenza Of Evil
- Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons
- Ethics Offsets
- Sort By Controversial
Science and Pseudoscience
- Science and Pseudoscience
- [REPOST] Epistemic Learned Helplessness
- If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics
- Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%
- The Control Group Is Out Of Control
- Meat Your Doom
- SSC Journal Club: Expert Prediction Of Experiments
- My IRB Nightmare
- Book Review: The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions
Psychiatry, Psychology, & Neurology
- Psychiatry, Psychology, & Neurology
- The Phatic And The Anti-Inductive
- CBT In The Water Supply
- What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?
- What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?
- An Iron Curtain Has Descended Upon Psychopharmacology
- Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?
- Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person
- Did A Melatonin Patent Inspire Current Dose Confusion?
- It’s Bayes All The Way Up
- Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty
- Book Review: Behavior – The Control Of Perception
- Predictive Processing And Perceptual Control
Medicine
- Medicine
- Who By Very Slow Decay
- Book Review: House of God
- Side Effects May Include Anything
- Cost Disease In Medicine: The Practical Perspective
- The Amish Health Care System
Sociology and Economics
- Sociology and Economics
- The Ideology Is Not The Movement
- Against Tulip Subsidies
- Book Review: Hive Mind
- SSC Gives A Graduation Speech
- Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia
- Bulls**t Jobs (Part 1 of ∞)
- Considerations On Cost Disease
- What Happened To ’90s Environmentalism?
- The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project
- Hungarian Education II: Four Nobel Truths
- Hungarian Education III: Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Budapestians
- Book Review: Seeing Like A State
- Book Review: Legal Systems Very Different From Ours
- Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success
- Book Review: Secular Cycles
- Book Review: Ages Of Discord
- 1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled
- Ars Longa, Vita Brevis
“Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity…”
- “Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity…”
- Book Review and Highlights: Quantum Computing Since Democritus
- Answer to Job
- Wirehead Gods On Lotus Thrones
- …And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes
- SSC Journal Club: AI Timelines
- Asches to Asches
- SSC Journal Club: Dissolving The Fermi Paradox
- Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence
- It Was You Who Made My Blue Eyes Blue