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Adele_L comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013) - Less Wrong
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Hello, I'm Erin. I am currently in high school, so perhaps a little younger than the typical reader.
I'm fascinated by the thoughts here. This is the first community I've found that makes an effort to think about their own opinions, then is self aware enough to look at their own thought processes.
But, this might not be the place for this, I'm am struggling to understand anything technical on this website. I've enjoyed reading the sequences, and they have given me a lot to thing about. Still, I've read the introduction to Bayes theorem multiple times, and I simply can't grasp it. Even starting at the very beginning of the sequences I quickly get lost because there are references to programming and cognitive science which I simply do not understand.
I recently returned to this site after taking a statistics course, which has helped slightly. But I still feel rather lost.
Do you have any tips for how you utilized rationality when you were starting? How did you first incorporate it into your thought processes? Can you recommend any background material which might help me to understand the sequences better?
Hi Erin, I'm Adele! It's good to see young rationalists here. I think you might really like Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Daniel Kahneman is a well-known psychologist, and winner of the 2002 Nobel prize in Economics. In this book, he goes through different thinking processes that humans often use, and how they are often wrong. It is not very technical, and is a pretty easy read IMO. It might also help with some of the cognitive science stuff in the sequences.
It's okay to not understand Bayes' theorem for now, knowing the math doesn't really make you that much better at being rational - there are easier things to do with larger gains. If you want to get the programming references, it might be worth learning to program. There are some online courses which make it relatively easy to get started. It's also a good skill to have for when you are looking for employment.
One thing that has helped me a lot in being more rational is having friends who can point out when I am being irrational. Another good place to look at (and go if you can) is CFAR, whose point is basically to help you get better at being rational.
Thank you for the resources! Kahneman's book looks very interesting, and luckily my library has it. I'll check it out as soon as possible. I am planning on taking a Java Programming class next year. Does Java have the same set up/structure/foundation as the languages that are referenced on here? What would you say is the programming language that is most relevant to rationality (even if it isn't a good beginning language)?
I definitely recommend learning to program in a different language before you take your Java class. Java makes things more complicated than they need to be for a beginner, so it's good to have a conceptual foundation in a simpler language. If all you care about is being able to reason abstractly about recursion and that sort of thing, Scheme is a language that's good for beginners and will teach you to do that. (You could download this and read this free book or this free book.) If you want to focus more on kicking butt in your Java class and building games/web applications/scripts for automating your computer, I recommend learning Python (I like this guide; here's another free book). These are both great choices compared to the languages people typically start learning to program with. I would lean towards Python because the resources for teaching it to yourself are better (there's a Udacity class, the community online is bigger, etc.) and it will still give you most or all of the rationality-related benefits of learning to program. Search on Google or talk to me if you run in to problems (teaching yourself is tough).
Awesome! Pretty much any language will give you enough background to understand the programming references here. I agree with John that Scheme and Python are good languages to start with. The most rational language to use depends a lot on what exactly you are trying to do, what you already know, and your personal style, so don't worry about that too much.