Vaniver comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013) - Less Wrong

21 Post author: KnaveOfAllTrades 26 July 2013 02:35AM

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Comment author: iarwain1 29 October 2013 04:09:06PM *  6 points [-]

Hi, I've been lurking for a while. I haven't yet read most of the sequences, since I find the style not so much to my liking. I prefer textbooks, so I'll probably go out and get the textbooks on this list or this one instead. I read somewhere on this site that Thinking and Deciding is pretty much the sequences in book form. I did read HP:MOR though - brilliant!

In the meantime, I've read a decent amount on LW-related subjects, including the following books on rationality:

  • Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
  • Everything Is Obvious Once You Know the Answer by Duncan Watts
  • The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
  • The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
  • How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff
  • Thinking Statistically by Uri Bram

Another interest is futurism, on which I've read the following:

  • The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil
  • Abundance by Peter Diamandis
  • The Future by Al Gore
  • The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
  • Big Data by Victor Mayer-Schonberger
  • Approaching the Future by Ben Hammersley
  • Radical Abundance by Eric Drexler

I'm also very interested in positive psychology and behavioral change. Good books I've read on this include:

  • Flourish by Martin Seligman
  • Happiness by Ed Diener
  • The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky
  • The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt
  • Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
  • Pretty much everything by Gallup, especially the books by Tom Rath
  • The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
  • Self-Directed Behavior by David Watson and Roland Tharp

Finally, I've read quite a bit about business, including about half of the excellent Personal MBA reading list.

Comment author: Vaniver 29 October 2013 10:15:15PM *  2 points [-]

I read somewhere on this site that Thinking and Deciding is pretty much the sequences in book form.

So, my review of Thinking and Deciding claims that T&D is a good introduction to rationality. One of the comments there is a link to Eliezer's comment that Good and Real is basically the Sequences in book form.

The two are about different topics- T&D is about the meat of rationality (what is thinking, biases, hypothesis generation and testing, values, decisionmaking under certainty and uncertainty), whereas G&R is about the philosophy of reductionism, focusing on various paradoxes, like Newcomb's Problem. For reasons that I have difficulty articulating, I found G&R painful to read, but I appear to be atypical in that reaction. (I liked the Sequences, and so if you disliked the Sequences my pain might be a recommendation for G&R!)

A primary value of the Sequences, in my opinion, is the resulting philosophical foundation- many people come away from the Sequences with the feeling that their views haven't changed significantly, but that they have been clarified significantly- which I don't think one gets from T&D (whereas I do think that T&D is much more effective at training executive-nature / facility with decision-making than the Sequences).

Comment author: iarwain1 30 October 2013 11:07:08PM 1 point [-]

Thanks. I already had Good & Real on my reading list, but based on this I think I'll bump it up to higher priority.

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