Rationality Quotes November 2009

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Rationality Quotes November 2009 — LessWrong

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And, it cannot be repeated often enough, Good and Real is a must-read for LW-minded folks

By the way, what's so special about it? I got it off Amazon a while ago and read it up to around page 100, but none of the content up to that seemed too special. This might be because I'd already internalized many of those points off OB/LW, of course, but still.

Large chunks of the remaining book seem to mostly be about physics and ethics. I'm hesitant to spend time reading any popular physics, as I don't know the actual math behind it and am likely to just get a distorted image. Formal ethical systems are mainly just rationalizations for existing intuitions, so that doesn't seem too interesting, either. Where are the good bits?

gwern17y30

I read it twice, and I'd summarize it as: for a longtime OB/LW reader, the only interesting parts are the treatment of Quantum Mechanics and the Newcomb's Dilemma chapters*. Those, incidentally, are past page 100.

* I assume that the person taking the advice is like me and has not understood very much of the 'timeless decision theory' stuff that's been flying around for months, which Drescher takes seriously (he's a user here after all), and which seem to be similar to or better to what he advocates.

8AngryParsley17y

The book is similar to Eliezer's posts in content, but with different examples and a focus more towards refuting non-materialism. If there's something you don't understand from reading LW, it's probably explained differently in Good and Real. The different arguments and examples may or may not be more enlightening. You should probably buy Good and Real if any of the following are true: * You dislike Eliezer's attitude or writing style. * You are often distracted by other things while reading on your computer. * You prefer the structured organization of a book to the Wiki-link effect of blog posts. * You like to show how smart you are by having shelves of books with important-sounding titles. OK, that last one might have been a joke.

0djcb17y

Fair comment. The books is not perfect - I think it gets a bit tedious in the examples. Maybe my recommendation was a bit too strong. Nevertheless, I do think it's special in the way it promotes the naturalistic worldview, and how it applies this all across the board - from consciousness to the sense of time to quantum physics to ethics. There's indeed quite some overlap with topics discussed here, but it's nice to read it in a book with all the themes connected. Those are the 'good bits' for me. Talking about books, it'd be great if there were some LW Books Top-10 for 2009.

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