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While there's a lot of value in the rationalist literature, there's also a lot of, well, words. The standard "sequences" take up nearly a million words, and the

by knzhou 7y ago

While there's a lot of value in the rationalist literature, there's also a lot of, well, words. The standard "sequences" take up nearly a million words, and the introductory fanfic ("prereq material") spans 2/3 of a million. The combined literature is longer than War and Peace plus the entire Bible plus my bloated summary of most of physics, combined. People with technical backgrounds (scientists, engineers, etc.) have already internalized many of the key ideas as part of their education. It should be possible to convey 99% of the remaining value to us with only 1% of the wordcount. Has anybody worked on making such a resource?

smitty1e 7y ago
Looking at the first line, "37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong", one wonders to what degree these are not logical fallacies enjoying a tryst with Zen loans.
tlb 7y ago
It only takes a few pages to describe how to be rational. Cataloging the many ways people tend to be irrational, so they can detect and defeat their own biases, creates most of the word count. "Less Wrong" is apt, because it's organized around how people tend to be wrong. Once you have nearly a million words about what's wrong with people, I suppose it needs a little narrative sauce or it'd be massively discouraging.
pjscott 7y ago
This particular collection of blog posts is IMO the most valuable part of that canon. It does have some redundancy, since some points are worth belaboring -- but if you'd like to skip that and just read the parts that interest you, there's an introductory post with one-paragraph summaries of each one: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-th...
- chalst 7y ago
  I agree that this is the high point of the Sequences. In my view, the two most important ideas are EY's idea about what the two alternate neural architectures "look like from the inside" for concepts, and the combinatorio-spatial metaphor for alternative regimes of concepts.
AnthonBerg 7y ago
To me, David Chapman's writing under Meaningness is somewhere in that direction: https://meaningness.com https://meaningness.com
lidHanteyk 7y ago
All maps are wrong; the map is never the territory. All statements are hedged. All signs can do is point, never indicate. People are not special. People are humans; humans are primates; primates are animals. If genes are like blueprints for constructing life-supporting structures, then memes are like blueprints for thinking viral ideas. All computation is symbolic. ...That should be enough to let people skip all of the philosophy, at a first pass. The main problem is that folks don't actually absorb these slogans on their own; the slogans require support from a library of lore and learnings. It is obvious, once one's mind has the right scaffolding, to see that everything and everybody is wrong about everything, but actually setting up that scaffolding is unique to every different reader. I've found that I, too, need to write a fictional story set inside a fictional universe akin to ours, if I want to communicate certain non-fictional abstract mathematical ideas. People cannot grasp some concepts without some sort of path which leads to the concept, and humanity paves those paths with words.
- kian 7y ago
  People cannot grasp some concepts without some sort of path which leads to the concept, and humanity paves those paths with words. -- beautifully spoken.

by knzhou 7y ago

smitty1e 7y ago

Looking at the first line, "37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong", one wonders to what degree these are not logical fallacies enjoying a tryst with Zen loans.

tlb 7y ago

It only takes a few pages to describe how to be rational. Cataloging the many ways people tend to be irrational, so they can detect and defeat their own biases, creates most of the word count. "Less Wrong" is apt, because it's organized around how people tend to be wrong. Once you have nearly a million words about what's wrong with people, I suppose it needs a little narrative sauce or it'd be massively discouraging.

pjscott 7y ago

This particular collection of blog posts is IMO the most valuable part of that canon. It does have some redundancy, since some points are worth belaboring -- but if you'd like to skip that and just read the parts that interest you, there's an introductory post with one-paragraph summaries of each one: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-th...

chalst 7y ago
I agree that this is the high point of the Sequences. In my view, the two most important ideas are EY's idea about what the two alternate neural architectures "look like from the inside" for concepts, and the combinatorio-spatial metaphor for alternative regimes of concepts.

AnthonBerg 7y ago

To me, David Chapman's writing under Meaningness is somewhere in that direction: https://meaningness.com https://meaningness.com

lidHanteyk 7y ago

All maps are wrong; the map is never the territory. All statements are hedged. All signs can do is point, never indicate. People are not special. People are humans; humans are primates; primates are animals. If genes are like blueprints for constructing life-supporting structures, then memes are like blueprints for thinking viral ideas. All computation is symbolic. ...That should be enough to let people skip all of the philosophy, at a first pass. The main problem is that folks don't actually absorb these slogans on their own; the slogans require support from a library of lore and learnings. It is obvious, once one's mind has the right scaffolding, to see that everything and everybody is wrong about everything, but actually setting up that scaffolding is unique to every different reader. I've found that I, too, need to write a fictional story set inside a fictional universe akin to ours, if I want to communicate certain non-fictional abstract mathematical ideas. People cannot grasp some concepts without some sort of path which leads to the concept, and humanity paves those paths with words.

kian 7y ago
People cannot grasp some concepts without some sort of path which leads to the concept, and humanity paves those paths with words. -- beautifully spoken.