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This is a collection of Yudkowsky's blog posts on LessWrong, and it's making the rounds now because it forms the basis for most of Harry's rationalist insights
by xianshou 12y ago
This is a collection of Yudkowsky's blog posts on LessWrong, and it's making the rounds now because it forms the basis for most of Harry's rationalist insights in the extremely entertaining and recently finished Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. (The last chapter of HPMoR went up on Ultimate Pi Day - 3/14/15 - last week.) I picked it up on the advice of some friends, and while the editing is less than perfect, it is overall an impressively well-organized and cross-linked treatise on how to reason.
At the heart of the book is the assertion that rationality is not about justifying why we are right, but thinking how we might be wrong, and paying careful attention to any evidence that puzzles us or could convince us to change our minds. The resulting philosophy is a combination of the falsification principle and the scientific method, applied to your own character. Highly recommended.
- Strilanc 12y agoGiven that this compilation was published on March 11th, and hpmor finished on March 14th, I don't think it's making the rounds now because of the timing of hpmor. Their finish/release dates are simply close together.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoI think it still may be - people are posting this around as an additional reading for those who liked HPMOR; number of people who read that fanfic is most likely much greater than the number of people that read the Sequences.
- maaku 12y agoThe release dates were purposefully close together.
- jtheory 12y agoI don't have inside knowledge, but yeah, it seems extremely likely -- the sequences have been available for years, after all.
- ciphergoth 12y agoThey didn't wait for the end of HPMoR to publish this book - they made an extra effort to have it ready in time!