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Gigi comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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Hi, everyone, you can call me Gigi. I'm a Mechanical Engineering student with a variety of interests ranking among everything from physics to art (unfortunately, I know more about the latter than the former). I've been reading LW frequently and for long sessions for a couple of weeks now.
I was attracted to LW primarily because of the apparent intelligence and friendliness of the community, and the fact that many of the articles illuminated and structured my previous thoughts about the world (I will not bother to name any here, many are in the Sequences).
While the rationalist viewpoint is fairly new to me (aside from various encounters where I could not identify ideas as "rationalist"), I am looking forward to expanding my intellectual horizons by reading, and hopefully eventually contributing something meaningful back to the community.
If anyone has recommendations for reading outside LW that may be interesting or relevant to me, I welcome them. I've got an entire summer ahead of me to rearrange my thinking and improve my understanding.
Why "unfortunately"? I'd love to see more discussion about art on Less Wrong.
Hah, the relative lack of discussion on art was exactly why it seemed to me as if the physics was more useful here. But who knows, I may be able to start up some discussion once I've gotten into the swing of things.
There was Rationality and the English Language and Human Evil and Muddled Thinking a while ago that brought in a literary angle (George Orwell, to be specific) - but I think Yudkowsky talked about how people talk about wanting "an artist's perspective" disingenously before. That there is a relative lack of discussion on art is not a reflection of the particular lack of interest in art, but the fact that we do not know what to say about art that is relevant to rationality.
(Although commentary spinning off of the drawing-on-the-right-side-of-the-brain insight into failure modes of illustration could be illuminating...)
I've been thinking on that, actually. So far all I've come up with is the fact that learning to exercise your creativity and think more abstractly can help very much with finding new ways of approaching problems and looking at your universe, thereby helping to shed new light on certain subjects. The obvious flaw is, of course, that you can learn to be creative without art; there are legions of scientists who show it to be so.
If I happen to come up with something that I think is particularly relevant or interesting I will definitely show it to the community, though.
I was thinking about recommending Effortless Mastery by Kenny Werner-- it's about the hard work of eliminating effort so as to become an excellent jazz musician, but has more general application. For example, it's the only book I've seen about getting over anxiety-driven procrastination.
It seemed too far off topic, but now that you mention art....
I've been trying to use drawing as a test case in this thread:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ax/open_thread_june_2010/23am
Just Ctrl+F my name and you'll find my derails and their replies.
Many people here loved Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. It's quite a hodge-podge, but there's a theme underlying the eclectic goodness.
I have a peculiar fondness for Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, which I find to be an excellent attempt (although [edit: I suspect] obsolete and probably flawed) to provide a reductionist explanation of an apparently-featureless phenomenon - many people, including many people here, found it dissatisfying.
I cannot think of other specifically LessWrongian recommendations off the top of my head - as NancyLebovitz said, elaboration would help.
Gödel, Escher, Bach is definitely a good recommendation, at least it appears to be from my cursory research on it.
As to what sort of recommendations I am looking for, I've noticed that LW appears to have a few favorite philosophers (Dennett among them) and a few favorite topics (AI, bias, utilitarian perspective, etc.) which I might benefit from understanding better, nice as the articles are. Some recommendations of good books on some of LW's favorite topics would be a wonderful place to start.
Thanks much for your help.
I'm a fan of Consciousness Explained as well, though that may be partly nostalgia as in some ways I feel it marks the beginning of (or at least a major milestone on) my rationalist journey.
Wow, I'm surprised to hear that two people referred to Consciousness Explained as obsolete. If there's a better book on consciousness out there, I'd love to hear about it.
I didn't intend to imply I thought it was obsolete, just that I may hold it in higher regard because of when I read it than if I discovered it today.
As would I, actually. I guessed "obsolete" because the book came out in 1991 (and Dennett has written further books on the subject in the following nineteen years). I've not investigated its shortcomings.
Good point: thanks. Dennett wrote Sweet Dreams in 2005 to update Consciousness Explained, and in the preface he wrote
I highly recommend Sweet Dreams to Gigi and anyone else interested in consciousness. (It's also shorter and more accessible than Consciousness Explained.)
Thank you for the updated recommendation. I will probably look into reading Sweet Dreams. Would I benefit from reading Consciousness Explained first, or would I do well with just the one?
I'd recommend reading them both, and you'd probably benefit from reading CE first. But I'd actually start with Godel, Escher, Bach (by Hofstadter) and The Mind's I (which Dennett co-wrote with Hofstadter).
Oh, The Mind's I was excellent - it is a compilation of short works with commentary that touches on a lot of nifty themes with respect to identity and personhood.
A while back, colinmarshall posted a detailed chapter-by-chapter review of The Mind's I.
Oh, and also Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas. (Yes, that's the correct spelling.)
The title - being the title of Hofstadter's column in Scientific American (back when Scientific American was a substantive publication), of which the book is a collection - is an anagram of Mathematical Games, the name of his predecessor's (Martin Gardner's) column. That, too, is an enjoyable and eclectic read.
Welcome!
Could you expand a little more on what sort of books you're interested in?