Slate Star Codex

I. The man standing outside my front door was carrying a clipboard and wearing a golden robe. "Not interested," I said, preparing to slam the door in his face. "Please," sai…

I. Julian Jaynes' The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciou…

I. Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science. That is, in let's say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn't tell …

The saying goes: "Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance". This is the same idea as "weirdness points": you can only bother people a certain …

I. A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, a…

Suppose a lot of that stuff about bravery debates is right. That lots of the advice people give is useful for some people, but that the opposite advice is useful for other people. For example, R…

I. I was recently recommended Chronicles of Wasted Time, the autobiography of Malcolm Muggeridge. It was a good choice, and not just because its title appropriately described my expectations about …

I. Vox's David Roberts writes about Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology. It's got a long and complicated argument which I can't really do justice to here, but the the…

Some of my friends have depression and have asked me for some suggestions. These will be inferior to reading official suggestions, but you will probably not read official suggestions, and you may r…

When I was in high school, some friends and I decided it would be cool to start our own country, Bridge to Teribithia-style. As the idea gradually came into contact with reality, it degenerated int…