Hume's problem of induction is pretty awesome, if you're looking for specific arguments. Nietzsche is often misinterpreted, if you want to understand his ideas you should read any summaries which were written by Giles Deleuze who is another smart person.
Hume was one of the first and best naturalists and his stuff is very easy to read (unlike Kant's stuff which is all either entirely wrong or a more confusing way of phrasing the arguments that Hume had already made). Wikipedia's list of entries is fairly informative, many philosophers who are awesome think that Hume was really smart.
Attention to Hume's philosophical works grew after the German philosopher Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumbers" (circa 1770).[98]
According to Schopenhauer, "there is more to be learned from each page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher taken together".[99]
A. J. Ayer (1936), introducing his classic exposition of logical positivism, claimed: "The views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume."[100]
Albert Einstein (1915) wrote that he was inspired by Hume's positivism when formulating his Special Theory of Relativity.[101]
Hume was called "the prophet of the Wittgensteinian revolution" by N. Phillipson, referring to his view that mathematics and logic are closed systems, disguised tautologies, and have no relation to the world of experience.[102]
Hume's Problem of Induction was also of fundamental importance to the philosophy of Karl Popper.
I strongly recommend Hume. Nietzsche is pretty tough to understand and he goes off into poetics too often to be easily understood, it's a lot of work without a proportional amount of gain. But Hume was a genius and was very good at communicating. His writings are very concise and informative and will almost certainly benefit you. Treatise on Human Nature is pretty good for a starter, as is Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding. They are very short books and should only take about an hour or so to read.
Enquiry is a very short book, but the Treatise is not. I certainly couldn't read it in an hour. The edition I have is about 300 pages long. Anyway, I agree that Hume is awesome. I think, though, that most what is of greatest value in his work (empiricism, the problem of induction, instrumental rationality, ethical anti-rationalism) is probably already part of the collective memeset at LW, in more sophisticated guise. So I'm not sure it would be worth it for the average LWer without a genuine interest in the history of philosophy to work their way through Hume.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, I think a lot of people here could learn a lot from.
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This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 85. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments. Comment in the 15th thread until you read chapter 85.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
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