djcb comments on Recommended reading for new rationalists - Less Wrong

27 Post author: XFrequentist 09 July 2009 07:47PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 11 July 2009 07:21:23PM 1 point [-]

Could you elaborate?

I expect that it has a very different success rate than other books; that a binary variable of "likes programming" is not the best model. That more analytical people are more like to learn programming from it than from other sources, and less analytical people the opposite. But I suppose "learn programming from it" and "like it" may be independent.

Comment author: djcb 11 July 2009 10:06:58PM 3 points [-]

Excellent point.

SCIP is as far as you can get from 'Learn X in 24 hours'. It's about real thinking about a problem, and then coming up with some elegant solution.

A lot of 'real-world' programming is about programming in an as quick-and-dirty fashion as you can get away with. This book is most definitely not for that -- and is as irrelevant for rationalists as astrology.

This book, however, is about thinking, in terms of computation. And the reason for mentioning it here for 'rationalist purposes' is that I think that viewing the world in computational terms bring valuable insight, just like e.g. an evolutionary viewpoint does, or a bayesian.

Comment author: Curiouskid 15 May 2011 01:03:38PM 3 points [-]

"and is as irrelevant for rationalists as astrology."

Do you mean quick-and-dirty programming or this book?