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Skatche comments on The benefits of madness: A positive account of arationality - Less Wrong
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Seconded and thirded. These books had a very deep and lasting impact on my development and worldview. Fair warning to those unfamiliar with his writings: they're chock-full of memetic hazards, but that's kind of the point. Wilson argues that we stand to benefit a great deal from being able to occupy unusual or even "false" belief systems (I use scare quotes because I think he would be reluctant to use that word), provided we can learn to consciously choose these systems and not get attached to them.
His Quantum Psychology and Illuminatus Trilogy inspired me to destroy everything I knew until only the indestructible stuff remained. Of course, being a counterculture guy, he didn't really focus on the latter part.
What makes Quantum Psychology worth reading? (I took a look and found that R.A.W. gives a misinterpretation of Claude Shannon's 1948 paper on information theory -- on the first page.)
I'm not sure it is worth reading if, for example, you're choosing between it and the Sequences. But, for me at 24 years old in '02, it was an important step in my becoming Less Wrong. I guess you could say Wilson fueled my desire to ask questions in all directions, including questions about why I ask questions. If this website had existed then, I would've been far too insecure about my intelligence to partake in it. QP was like a gentler starter kit.
I haven't read Shannon's paper, so I'll have to take your word that RAW is misinterpreting. Does that make his mention of noise in systems (casually applied though it may be) invalid?
No, RAW's further discussion of noisy communications channels is pretty good.
(Shannon's paper proves interesting and surprising things about noisy communications channels, but it takes the noisiness as given -- contra RAW, it does not prove that all communications channels are noisy.)