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mstevens comments on Intellectual insularity and productivity - Less Wrong
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Comments (169)
As per our discussion on irc, I agree!
I am a defender of "read the sequences". People should!
One step I've found often interesting that builds on EY's posts is to... read some of the stuff he mentions! For example, Influence is a great book.
In particular, we need more maths around here. I am totally displaying the problem I'm complaining about, but for example there is a great shortage of game theory. And I'd like to see people work through Khan Academy or similar.
On your math point:
Patrick offored in september last year to do tutoring
http://lesswrong.com/lw/7vd/free_tutoring_in_mathprogramming/
Maybe we should build a network of people who'd apply enough peer pressure and guidance to replicate the level of pressure present in a classroom to get stuff done and learn math. We shouldn't overload Patrick but would it be helpful to have LW affiliated University of Reddit, or Udemy or even just Skype class.
Maybe a list of all material Eliezer recommended ever would be useful. It wouldn't do much for insularity, but at least we could start asking people to read actual books and articles not included in the sequences.
And yes I do agree people should "read the sequences". I try to promote this with frequent linking to the specific articles, hopefully setting up tab explosions, but I fear I may have just contributed to overuse of titles as phrases.
I actually started on a list of all the rationality references in HPMoR as a project. I'm somewhere around Chapter 40 but haven't worked on it in a while.
That sounds great! I recall someone asking for interesting rationality related blogs. A main article that summarizes all book recommendations in the sequences (yes there are writers besides Eliezer), HPMOR as well as a short summary of all those blogs should be a good first step towards solving this.
It should also include the rational why we should read them would be a good start to solving much of this.
Perhaps we could after that is published hold 3 month challenge to find the best concept from such material that LessWrong should update on but hasn't.
Post this in discussion as a link.
If someone compressed the salient points into something that is 10% or less in size, this would even be plausible.
The sequences are already a summary. Summarizing too much more risks committing the usual sins of science journalism.
I find it difficult to believe that the average commenting LWer couldn't spare the time to read the major sequences. That may be the issue for some, sure; but is it the dominant factor?
I'm probably having typical mind fallacy here, and possibly also privilege of having spare time. When I found LW, I devoured the sequences over a few days — then re-read them slower, fascinated. But I'm a pretty avid reader both of books and blogs, so substituting sequences in place of other things I would have read was neither very much opportunity cost nor a disruption to my personal habits. If I were substituting reading the sequences for some other activity it might have been more of both.
And this was before I'd encountered the "you should read the sequences" meme, so there wasn't any interference from the "assigned reading" complex.
But still — I wonder if instead of pushing "you should read the sequences" we should push "the sequences are pretty damn awesome".
I think you mean Typical Mind Fallacy, expecting too much that people are like you. Mind Projection Fallacy is projecting features of maps, like uncertainty, onto the territory.
You're right. Fixed.
Are you serious? A summary that is as long as a multi-volume novel (apparently 4000 printed pages or so)? Feel free to look up the definition of the word summary.
The published literature on heuristics and biases alone is rather larger than that.
As a note for anyone interested: Khan academy covers everything from math to biology, chemistry, physics and a whole lot of other topics. I personally find that the methods employed there are very useful in learning those topics, but YMMV.