I'm glad to hear that you've been enjoying your studies and am happy that you're here.
You might find the References & Resources For Less Wrong posting useful.
Aside from the ones mentioned there, one book that I had a favorable impression of upon browsing through it and that looked pretty accessible to me is Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
I concur with the points made by SarahC and Unnamed. My experience has been that with very few exceptions, learning substantive subject for the first time is a struggle. I've often felt bewildered and disoriented for a significant period of time before things started to gel and coalesce.
Quoting from Sections 7 and 8 of William Thurston's Mathematical Education essay :
Mathematics is amazingly compressible: you may struggle a long time, step by step, to work through some process or idea from several approaches. But once you really understand it and have the mental perspective to see it as a whole, there is often a tremendous mental compression. You can file it away, recall it quickly and completely when you need it, and use it as just one step in some other mental process. The insight that goes with this compression is one of the real joys of mathematics.
After mastering mathematical concepts, even after great effort, it becomes very hard to put oneself back in the frame of mind of someone to whom they are mysterious.
I remember as a child, in fifth grade, coming to the amazing (to me) realization that the answer to 134 divided by 29 is 134/29 (and so forth). What a tremendous labor-saving device! To me, ‘134 divided by 29’ meant a certain tedious chore, while 134/29 was an object with no implicit work. I went excitedly to my father to explain my major discovery. He told me that of course this is so, a/b and a divided by b are just synonyms. To him it was just a small variation in notation.
One of my students wrote about visiting an elementary school and being asked to tutor a child in subtracting fractions. He was startled and sobered to see how much is involved in learning this skill for the first time, a skill which had condensed to a triviality in his mind.
Mathematics is full of this kind of thing, on all levels. It never stops.
[...]
Similarly, students at more advanced levels know many things which less advanced students don’t yet know. It is very intimidating to hear others casually toss around words and phrases as if any educated person should know them, when you haven’t the foggiest idea what they’re talking about. Less advanced students have trouble realizing that they will (or would) also learn these theories and their associated vocabulary readily when the time comes and afterwards use them casually and naturally. I remember many occasions when I felt intimidated by mathematical words and concepts before I understood them: negative, decimal, long division, infinity, algebra, variable, equation, calculus, integration, differentiation, manifold, vector, tensor, sheaf, spectrum, etc. It took me a long time before I caught on to the pattern and developed some immunity.
My experience has been that with very few exceptions, learning substantive subject for the first time is a struggle. I've often felt bewildered and disoriented for a significant period of time before things started to gel and coalesce.
One of my professors once told me that you only really understand the content of one math course when you're taking the next one that builds upon it...
If this post is inappropriate, I apologize.
I stumbled upon this site after reading "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". The story so far has really moved me on multiple levels and sent me here in a quest to learn more about rationality as a philosophy/way of thinking about the world. I have read Ayn Rands published works and loved the stories and most of the message. The characters always seemed like titans that were far and above me, but now, I've seen a character that is a bit more approachable.
I've started to go through the "Map and Territory" section of the "Core Sequences" and this whole project and community makes me ecstatic. I'm currently working my way through the Bayes's Theorem article with some success. The more I read, the more I realize I may have a problem.
I'm pretty dumb.
Is higher level reasoning "use it or lose it" ? I like learning new things and love reading but any new ideas require a ton of thought and re-reading. I think I have enough interest to keep plugging away at it, but I'm not sure I'm going at things the right way. Is there a "Kid's Table" for lesswrong.com?
For "Priors": I'm 28 years old, white male, married, no children, poor economic upbringing, solid emotional upbringing, currently lower to middle class, high school diploma, US Navy, currently a civilian electronics technician, raised Baptist currently Agnostic/Atheist (recently).
I guess that's it. Thanks!
--John