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iarwain1 comments on Open Thread, January 11-17, 2016 - Less Wrong
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I'm an undergrad going for a major in statistics and minors in computer science and philosophy. I also read a lot of philosophy and cognitive science on the side. I don't have the patience to read through all of the LW sequences. Which LW sequences / articles do you think are important for me to read that I won't get from school or philosophy reading?
Check out the Rationality: A to Z contents page, click on things that look interesting, it'll mostly work out.
A Human's Guide to Words is really good exposition of philosophy. The subsequence of thinking about morality that I can point at with the post fake fake utility functions is good too. Or if you just want to learn what this rationality stuff is about, read the early posts about biases and read Knowing about biases can hurt people. That one's important - the point of knowing about biases is to see them in yourself.
I just don't know what suits you, is all.
One of the chief benefits of reading through the sequences is being able to notice, label, and communicate many different things. Instead of having a vague sense that something is wrong and having to invent an explanation of why on the spot, I can say "oh, there's too much inferential distance here" or "hmm, this argument violates conservation of expected evidence" or "but that's the Fallacy of Gray." But in order to have that ability, I need to have crystallized each of those things individually, so that I can call on it when necessary.
But if you're only going to read one thing, A Human's Guide to Words (start here) is probably going to be the most useful, especially going into philosophy classes.
I would add that most of those things can also be found in other sources; sometimes they have different names.
But the practical question is: have you read those "other sources"? If not, then the Sequences are a compressed form of a lot of useful stuff. They may be long, but reading all the original sources would be much longer. (This is not to discourage people from reading the other sources, just saying that if "that's too much text" is your real objection, then you probably haven't read them.)
Unfortunately, I think many of the people who come to LessWrong are in the position of having read about 50-75% of the content of the sequences through other sources, and may become frustrated by the lack of clear indication within the sequences as to what the next post actually includes.... it is very annoying to read through a couple of pages only to find that this section has just been a wordy setup to reviewing basic physics.
What % do you define as "many"? Those percentages of content already known sound very high to me in regards to the first 1/3rd of the Sequences. (I'm still working on the rest so can't comment there.) Also, they can use the Article Summaries to test out whether they've seen the concept before and then read the full article or not. I don't recommend just reading the summaries though. I think a person doing that would be doing a disservice to themselves because of the reasons supplied by Vaniver above.
The Quantum Mechanics sequence - you won't get that in school.
How about the Grad Student Advice Repository?
I'm more interested more in epistemic rationality concepts rather than practical life advice, although good practical advice is always useful.