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If you’re just starting off, I would recommend as my favorite post Who By Very Slow Decay. It’s about my experiences as a very new doctor just starting off in a big hospital. It’s a post about death and some of the lies we tell ourselves about it. It’s one of the most popular things I’ve ever written, I’ve gotten requests from medical schools who want to use it in their curriculum, it’s not too long or confusing, and it’s one of the few posts here I can stand behind a year later without reservation.

In Favor Of Niceness, Community, And Civilization is my SUPER LONG response to a Facebook comment I got telling me I should argue dirty. My defense of pure truth-seeking turned into a meandering tour of game theory, psychology, and politics which invokes Thomas Hobbes, transgender rights, elder gods, Aung San Suu Kyi, and demonic ants. It might be the closest thing I have to a general philosophy. You may want to read it second. Meditations On Moloch is sort of a sequel which attempts to give a very abstract meta-level answer to the question “what is wrong with the world and what do we do about it?”

I am a doctor and try (usually unsuccessfully) to focus this blog on medicine. The Life Cycle Of Medical Ideas, Sleep – Now By Prescription, Fish – Now By Prescription, and An Iron Curtain Has Descended Upon Psychopharmacology form a kind of tetralogy about the drug discovery and licensing process. Evening Doc, Medicine As Not Seen On TV, and Burdens are more about my personal experiences as a medic in training.

My interest in drug discovery naturally segues into scientific and statistical methods in general. My longest piece on this – as well as the most popular thing this blog has ever produced – is The Control Group Is Out Of Control, which notices that parapsychologists are consistently able to prove telepathy exists using the research methods standard across most biological and social sciences, and suggests that maybe that means most biological and social sciences need to up their game. I also point out that Statistical Literacy Among Doctors Is Lower Than Chance, explore the Dark Side Statistics Papers that explain how to fudge research results, and criticize sketchy research on euthanasia, Victorian IQ, and bullying.

I write a lot about politics from a vaguely centrist point of view with occasional forays to the right or left. Some especially interesting political threads here include A Thrive-Survive Theory Of The Political Spectrum, A Something Sort-Of-Like-Left-Libertarian Manifesto, The Spirit Of The First Amendment, Right Is The New Left, and the Slate Star Codex Political Spectrum Quiz. If you’re willing to have several metric tons of highly concentrated conservative political philosophy blasted into your brain, you can also try Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous Planet-Sized Nutshell.

Although I acknowledge the importance and danger of racism and sexism, I also think a lot of the social justice movement as it currently exists is an attempt to sanctify ad hominem arguments and poor epistemology that can be used by a would-be cognitive elite to abuse and humiliate anyone who disagrees with them. I start explaining why I’m not on board with the social justice program in A Response To Apophemi, talk about the toxicity in the social justice community in Living By The Sword (better remembered more for its whale cancer metaphor than its main thesis) and talk about the way language becomes weaponized in Social Justice and Words, Words, Words. And speaking of weapons, I discuss the very poor condition of the social justice evidence base in Social Psychology Is A Flamethrower. Despite all of this, I do come out strongly in favor of trigger warnings in The Wonderful Thing About Triggers

Sometimes I get bored and just research the hell out of something to try to resolve a difficult question to my own satisfaction. Thus far this has resulted in cost-benefit analyses of legalizing marijuana, eating wheat, and using SSRI antidepressants.

I’m also very interested in rationality – questions like how debates work in general and how we can conduct them better. I find the current set of logical fallacies mostly orthogonal to the way debates between smart people fail – though I do have a list of some of my own favorite fallacy-style bad arguments in Arguments From My Opponent Believes Something. But in All Debates Are Bravery Debates, I claim that a lot of hard problems are trade-offs between two goods and debates are difficult because we can’t tell which side people are erring towards. And in Weak Men Are Superweapons I note that straw men are less dangerous than real-but-irrelevant “weak men” as a way of biasing this calculation. I suggest some ways of arguing better, including doing things with made-up statistics and bewaring isolated demands for rigor.

Somehow I manage to have a personal life. I write about my polyamorous relationships in Polyamory Is Boring, about my much more dysfunctional relationship with mathematics in The Lottery Of Fascinations and about my thoughts on having children in Genetic Russian Roulette.

Finally, What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Knowing It? starts off with the story of someone who lacked a sense of smell but didn’t realize it for a long time because they’d always figured other people’s references to smell were metaphorical or something, then goes through a couple similar examples. But the real gold here is the comments section, where seven hundred and something people chime in to talk about how really really different their internal experiences are from the commonly accepted “universal” norm in ways that no one would ever have been able to guess. This was definitely the post I learned the most from.

You can find a full archive of all SSC posts here.