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Epsilon725 comments on Open thread, May 17-31 2013 - Less Wrong
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Comments (311)
I am new here, and I am not sure what to do.
Not sure what to do here, or not sure what to do more generally?
Welcome! I hope you find this community as useful as I have.
—As others have suggested, reading the sequences is extremely useful and I wholeheartedly recommend it. However, it's also really long. If you want to start with something less huge, there's some good stuff here.
—Consider saying more about yourself here or in this thread.
—Where do you live? There might be an in-person meetup nearby.
Read the Sequences.
How did you find the site?
I think most LWers would advise you to read the Sequences, but I reckon you could get 80% of the value from doing so by reading two of the following four books (which would be much less time consuming):
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics by Gary Drescher
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
HPMOR is like the sequneces but with way less explanations and way more narrative. If you want to save time then reading HPMOR instead of the sequences is the opposite of what you should do.
The books are good but there are multiple sequences which have maybe 5% overlap tops with any of those books. Not saying that they aren't good recommendations - I am saying that your claim is invalid.
So yeah, read the sequences. If you need motivation to read the sequences read HPMOR.
I'm definitely not claiming that two of these books will cover 80% of the subject matter of the Sequences. My claim was about the value. Of course, value is subjective, so my recommendation relies on analogical reasoning (which is quite weak, even for induction), specifically that Epsilon725 is like me in relevant respects at the time I first encountered OB/LW.
Disagree. I read the first two before I read the sequences and I definitely learned an immense amount from reading the sequences that I did not already know.
Yes, but how valuable were those additional things you learned? What percentage would you estimate, if not 80%?
Easily the most valuable thing I've read in my life, I would say. (I am also eighteen and don't read a lot.)
Why are you here? Describe in the Welcome thread to get feedback.
Note: "Why are you here, on LessWrong?" was not a rhetorical question :D
New stuff is less helpful than you'd think it is. Start with the lesswrong Sequences (just google it, too lazy to make a hyperlink).