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Due to an oversight by the ancient Greeks, there is no Muse of blogging. Denied the ability to begin with a proper Invocation To The Muse, I will compensate with some relatively boring introductions.

The name of this blog is Slate Star Codex. It is almost an anagram of my own name, Scott S Alexander. It is unfortunately missing an \u201cn\u201d, because anagramming is hard. I have placed an extra \u201cn\u201d in the header image, to restore cosmic balance.

This blog does not have a subject, but it has an ethos. That ethos might be summed up as: charity over absurdity.

Absurdity is the natural human tendency to dismiss anything you disagree with as so stupid it doesn\u2019t even deserve consideration. In fact, you are virtuous for not considering it, maybe even heroic! You\u2019re refusing to dignify the evil peddlers of bunkum by acknowledging them as legitimate debate partners.

Charity is the ability to override that response. To assume that if you don\u2019t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, that this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs.

There are many things charity is not. Charity is not a fuzzy-headed caricature-pomo attempt to say no one can ever be sure they\u2019re right or wrong about anything. Once you understand the reasons a belief is attractive to someone, you can go ahead and reject it as soundly as you want. Nor is it an obligation to spend time researching every crazy belief that might come your way. Time is valuable, and the less of it you waste on intellectual wild goose chases, the better.

It\u2019s more like Chesterton\u2019s Fence. G.K. Chesterton gave the example of a fence in the middle of nowhere. A traveller comes across it, thinks \u201cI can\u2019t think of any reason to have a fence out here, it sure was dumb to build one\u201d and so takes it down. She is then gored by an angry bull who was being kept on the other side of the fence.

Chesterton\u2019s point is that \u201cI can\u2019t think of any reason to have a fence out here\u201d is the worst reason to remove a fence. Someone had a reason to put a fence up here, and if you can\u2019t even imagine what it was, it probably means there\u2019s something you\u2019re missing about the situation and that you\u2019re meddling in things you don\u2019t understand. None of this precludes the traveller who knows that this was historically a cattle farming area but is now abandoned \u2013 ie the traveller who understands what\u2019s going on \u2013 from taking down the fence.

As with fences, so with arguments. If you have no clue how someone could believe something, and so you decide it\u2019s stupid, you are much like Chesterton\u2019s traveler dismissing the fence (and philosophers, like travelers, are at high risk of stumbling across bull.)

I would go further and say that even when charity is uncalled-for, it is advantageous. The most effective way to learn any subject is to try to figure out exactly why a wrong position is wrong. And sometimes even a complete disaster of a theory will have a few salvageable pearls of wisdom that can\u2019t be found anywhere else. The rationalist forum Less Wrong teaches the idea of steelmanning, rebuilding a stupid position into the nearest intelligent position and then seeing what you can learn from it.

So this is the ethos of this blog, and we proceed, as Abraham Lincoln put it, \u201cwith malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.\u201d