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djcb comments on Recommended reading for new rationalists - Less Wrong
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I voted this up because it's a very good book, but I want to add a little disclaimer:
SICP is a book on how to write programs. It is not, as one might think from the title, a theoretical book. It is accessible to people who have never programmed, but it will not be liked by people who dislike the actual activity of programming.
I have found that many people hate to program, and most who try it discover they hate it.
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.
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.
"and is as irrelevant for rationalists as astrology."
Do you mean quick-and-dirty programming or this book?