A while back, I set myself the project of figuring out how much of the MIT undergrad physics curriculum could be taught from free online books. The answer, so far, is more than I had anticipated but much less than what we deserve. But working on that, along with a few other conversations, has got me to wondering. We’ve seen TESCREAL types be just plain wrong about science many times over the years. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality botches Punnett squares and pretty much everything more advanced than that. LessWrong demonstrably has no filter against old-school math crankery. The (ahem) leading light of “effective accelerationism” just plays Mad Libs with physics words. Yudkowsky’s declarations about organic chemistry boggle the educated mind. They even manage to be weird about theoretical computer science — what we might call the “lambda calculus is super-Turing!” school of TESCREAL.
Sometimes, the difference between a TESCREAL understanding of science and a legitimate one comes from having studied the subject in a formal way. But not every aspiring autodidact with an interest in molecular biology or the theoretical limits of computation is a lost cause!
So, then: What books come down upon the superficial TESCREAL version of cool things like a ton of scientific bricks? What are the texts that one withdraws from an inside coat pocket and slides across the table, saying “This here is the good shit”?
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I thought about assembling a kind of anti-Sequence reading list about quantum mechanics, a view from outside the cult shit that the Sequences try to drown you in, with their bad history, caricatured philosophy and mathematics that ranges from turgid to incorrect. The trouble is that a better understanding is not written all in one place, and even the good papers don’t necessarily convey the everything Yud taught you is wrong emotional hook. The literature does not lead to cracking many smiles, though I did appreciate Adrian Kent’s eel remark in this book review.
Some papers that have a bit more zing than average:
- L. Catani et al., “Why interference phenomena do not capture the essence of quantum theory,” Quantum 7 (2023), 1119.
- K. Camilleri and M. Schlosshauer, “Niels Bohr as philosopher of experiment: Does decoherence theory challenge Bohr’s doctrine of classical concepts?,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 49 (2015), 73–83.
- D. Howard, “Who invented the “Copenhagen Interpretation”? A study in mythology.” Philosophy of Science 71 (2004), 669–682.
- C. Chevalley, “Why do We Find Bohr Obscure?.” In Epistemological and Experimental Perspectives on Quantum Physics (Springer, 1999), 59–73.
And, if you really want to dive into the waters and open your eyes below the surface:
- N. Bohr, “The Causality Problem in Atomic Physics.” In New Theories in Physics (International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1939), 11–30.
I wrote a thing about Bohr and the “interpretation” of quantum mechanics here: https://www.sunclipse.org/2026/01/a-more-mature-bohr-ism/.
The Mismeasure Of Man is the obvious threat, given Yudkowsky felt it necessary to post why good rationalists should not read Gould.
So what other books has the subculture declared unsuitable?
I want to add William H. Tucker’s posthumous “The Bell Curve in Perspective”, which came out I think right at the end of last year. It’s a short, thorough, assessment both of the history of The Bell Curve book itself and what has happened since.
Even the first chapter is just mindblowingly terse in brutally unpacking how (a) it was written by racists, (b) for racist ends, © Murray lied and lied afterwards in pretending that ‘only a tiny part of the book was about race’ or whatever
The Bell Curve in Perspective is free online.
Jesus, that math crankery post is mind-boggling.
SCSPL, which stands for Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language, is just a totally intrinsic, i.e. completely self-contained, language that is comprehensively and coherently (self-distributively) self-descriptive
Okay but is it also self-fuckable in the sense of being able to go fuck itself?
