badger comments on Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don’t Implement Themselves - Less Wrong

32 Post author: calcsam 10 May 2011 07:15AM

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Comment author: badger 10 May 2011 12:34:41PM *  17 points [-]

This sequence still feels like it is privileging the hypothesis of the desirability of LDS organizational practices, but you make a good point. We lack condensed introductions. Eliezer handed out copies of the Twelve Virtues of Rationality in the past, but I don't remember any other attempts at pamphlets or booklets. How much can the material be compressed with reasonable fidelity?

Some possible booklet ideas:

  • You Are A Brain: map/territory distinction, mind projection fallacy, reductionism, mysterious answers
  • Short guide to cognitive biases: examples of biases that can be directly illustrated and are less likely to be turned against others, like hindsight bias or the Wason selection task.
  • Checklists: e.g. Polya and Adam Savage on problem solving, Personal MBA questions to improve results
  • Sequence overviews: Scientific Self-help, 37 ways words can be wrong
  • Techniques/Heuristics: noticing confusion, holding off solutions, consider-the-opposite, tracking/data collection, being specific, and perhaps touching on deliberative vs automatic cognition or Haidt's elephant and rider metaphor
  • You are already living with the truth: Litany of Gendlin (plausibly the most important thing beginning rationalists can hear), On being ok with the truth
  • Identity and rationality: Keeping your identity small, cached selves, entropic nature of organizations, social vs individual rationality
Comment author: David_Gerard 11 May 2011 08:10:11AM *  1 point [-]

This sequence still feels like it is privileging the hypothesis of the desirability of LDS organizational practices

Only insofar as it describes them at all. (Which, given what human brains are like, does automatically privilege the hypothesis inside them, annoyingly.). Remind yourself that there will be a space of other approaches to apply?