Dear jimr..., your confusion could be cured by "reading" and "thinking". Books and other texts should be taken with respect of their content, nor their age, cover design, typeset, or other features. However, if you want a more recent one, I'd recommend this, as a kind of emergency aid in cases of acute confusion.
My recommendations are entirely caused by the quality of the texts and by their fitting to the question above. That some were written between the beginning and the middle of the 20th century is not quite an accident: That was the time of the science and university revolution in the US: The huge and sudden growth of science education then caused a strong demand on easy to read, unpretentious, well written and high quality introductory texts for the many students from rural, underdeveloped regions and equally undereducated kids from (then, when few and simple machines were in use) unskilled industrial workers.
Dear jimr..., your confusion could be cured by "reading" and "thinking".
This comes across as extremely condescending. I didn't say that I was confused, I said that old books in general tend to be confused. Particularly in philosophy, where clarity, accuracy and academic prestige don't seem to be well aligned.
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