Top all-time · #4
Slate Star Codex
Personal blog · slatestarcodex.comphilosophyscience
Slate Star Codex is a personal blog at slatestarcodex.com about philosophy and science. Since 2013, 1,861 different Hacker News readers have linked it 4,446 times, most often “Meditations on Moloch (2014)”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Slate Star Codex for ideas like Moloch, 'I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup' and the Contra Grant reply. Posts are called nuanced, fully-sourced and useful.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Called a good distillation, nuanced, excellent, thoughtful, a good argument, fully-sourced and a useful exercise.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Meditations on Moloch (2014)152 people · 222 mentions · first linked 2017-02-23
- I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014)66 people · 77 mentions · first linked 2017-03-26
- Scissor Statements: Sort by Controversial65 people · 78 mentions · first linked 2018-10-31
- Lizardman's Constant Is 4%64 people · 78 mentions · first linked 2019-03-05
- Meditations on Moloch63 people · 138 mentions · first linked 2014-07-30
- I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014)54 people · 61 mentions · first linked 2014-10-01
- Considerations on Cost Disease46 people · 54 mentions · first linked 2017-02-22
- Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences42 people · 58 mentions · first linked 2017-08-08
- Melatonin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know (2018)38 people · 42 mentions · first linked 2018-08-07
- The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014)37 people · 41 mentions · first linked 2017-03-06
What Hacker News says?
A good distillation of what you're saying is here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
Comment linking /2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
on “GitHub, fuck your name change”Submitted I Am Deleting the Blog as a story · 2450 points
HN discussionThis reminds me of a few passages in the SSC post on IRBs[0]. Main point is that IRBs were created in response to some highly unethical and harmful "studies" being carried out by institutions thought of as top-tier. Now they are considered to be a mandatory part of carrying out ethical research. But if you think about it, isn't outsourcing all sense of ethics to an organization external to the actual researchers kin…
Comment linking /2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
on ““They introduce kernel bugs on purpose””Submitted Bullshit Jobs as a story · 964 points
HN discussionYes, and people generally don't seem upset by viral Youtube social experiments. The Nuremberg code may be the status quo and nothing more. No one here is trying to justify the code on its merits, just blindly quoting it as an authority. Here's another idea: If it's ethical to do it in a non-experimental context, it's also ethical to do it in an experimental context. So if it's OK to walk up to a stranger and ask the…
Comment linking /2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
on ““They introduce kernel bugs on purpose””Submitted Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know as a story · 370 points
HN discussionReminds me of “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
Comment linking /2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
on “Social Cooling (2017)”Submitted Considerations on Cost Disease as a story · 369 points
HN discussionThis uncaring attitude is directly a result of lack of competition. Amazon won. (Sure, there are some other big names in the game, but the online retail market is in a pathological state. As in case of other "natural monopolies" the network effect is very large, thus barriers to entry is absurdly high, hence no real competition. The incumbents are optimizing and diversifying, participating in meta-games - eg. lobbyi…
Comment linking /2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
on “A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing”Submitted My Institutional Review Board Nightmare as a story · 304 points
HN discussionI think a more nuanced essay on this subject is: I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup[1]. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
Comment linking /2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
on “Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments”Submitted RIP Culture War Thread as a story · 301 points
HN discussionI like this article on the trouble with not censoring: But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all. Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppr…
Comment linking /2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
on “Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources”Submitted I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014) as a story · 282 points
HN discussionSome highlights of Slate Star Codex over the years (I'm missing archives for two of these, and I'd appreciate anyone linking to archives if you have them): Mediations on Moloch: https://web.archive.org/web/20200516181754/https://slatestar... I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup: https://web.archive.org/web/20200516181754/https://slatestar... Proving too Much: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-…
Comment linking /2013/04/13/proving-too-much/
on “I Am Deleting the Blog”Submitted Melatonin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know (2018) as a story · 274 points
HN discussionI would expect that to require an extremely huge amount of money and be impractical. Candidates + parties + PACs + lobbying + think tanks + advocacy organizations spent $10B in 2018 in the US, whereas the US almond industry made $12B in 2018. So I expect political spending to not be able to change ad prices very much compared to commercial ad spending. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
Comment linking /2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
on “Twitter to ban political advertising”Submitted Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted to Know as a story · 270 points
HN discussion> What do people mean by this exactly? Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
Comment linking /2017/06/21/against-murderism/
on “Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product”Submitted The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014) as a story · 267 points
HN discussionIf you won't throw your ethics into the pit for power, someone else will. And them everybody will be forced to throw the shared ethics or be outcompeted. And collectively, everyone will be poorer as a result. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Comment linking /2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
on “Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product”Submitted How bad are things? as a story · 264 points
HN discussionYou might enjoy https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/03/the-witching-hour/
Comment linking /2013/11/03/the-witching-hour/
on “US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent”Submitted SlateStarCodex Is Back Up as a story · 260 points
HN discussion> what they're doing is _at best_ tangentially related to improving UX . . . You can spin that as the company just improving the experience so that people want to keep using it, but fundamentally it is intentional psychological manipulation. So we agree that ab testing is good for optimizing toward a numerical objective. You then seem to think that either: A) There are simply no numerical objectives that correlate w…
Comment linking /2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
on “Meta lays off 11,000 people”Submitted Wage Stagnation as a story · 259 points
HN discussionSnow Crash, by Neal Stephenson "Wait a minute--this Snow Crash thing, is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" "What's the difference?" This was the original definition of a "meme" as coined by Richard Dawkins: instead of humans choosing what to think, what if ideas self-replicate using human minds as hosts? Religions, languages, agriculture, chemistry, the word "like", uptalk, literally any thought or behavior patter…
Comment linking /2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
on “Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?”Submitted Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong as a story · 259 points
HN discussion> Study after study has shown that income and wealth inequality stifles innovation (again among some other pretty bad things). You mean studies like this one? https://academic.oup.com/restud/article/86/1/1/5026613 > This makes sense if you think about it: the next Archimedes can't innovate because she's preoccupied with how to pay for her sister's insulin. Your example is poverty, not inequality. This is a trick peo…
Comment linking /2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
on “It’s Time to Build”Submitted Against Against Pseudoaddiction as a story · 258 points
HN discussion
