Meta-Proposal of which this entry is a subset:

The Shortcut Reading Series is a series of less wrong posts that should say what are the minimal readings, as opposed to the normal curriculum, that one ought to read to grasp most of the state of the art conceptions of humans about a particular topic. Time is finite, there is only so much one person can read and thus we need to find the geodesic path to epistemic enlightenment and show it to Less Wrong readers.

Exemplar:

“How not to be a Naïve Computationalist”, the Shortcut Reading Series post in philosophy of mind and language:

This post’s raison d’etre is to be a guide for the minimal amount of philosophy of language and mind necessary for someone who ends up thinking the world and the mind are computable (such as Tegmark, Yudkowsky, Hofstadter, Dennett and many of yourselves) The desired feature which they have achieved, and you soon will, is to be able to state reasons, debugg opponents and understand different paradigms, as opposed to just thinking that it’s 0 and 1’s all the way down and not being able to say why.

This post is not about Continental/Historical Philosophy, about that there have been recommendations in http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subject/

The order is designed.

What is sine qua non, absolutely necessary, is in bold and OR means you only have to read one, the second one being more awesome and complex.

Language and Mind:

• 37 Ways words can be Wrong - Yudkowsky
• Darwin Dangerous Idea Chapters 3,5, 11, 12 and 14 - Daniel Dennett
• On Denoting - Bertrand Russell
• On What There Is - Quine
• Two Dogmas of Empiricism - Quine
• Namind and Necessity - Kripke OR Two Dimensional Semantics - David Chalmers
• “Is Personal Identity What Matters?” - Derek Parfit
• Breakdown of Will - Part Two (don’t read part 3) George Ainslie
• Concepts of Consciousness 2003 - Ned Block
• Attitudes de dicto and de se - David Lewis- Phil Papers 1
• General Semantics - David Lewis - Phil Papers 1
• The Stuff of Thought, Chapter 3 “Fifty Thousand Innate Concepts” - Steve Pinker
• Beyond Belief - Daniel Dennett in Intentional Stance
• The Content and Epistemology of Phenomenal Belief - David Chalmers
• Quining Qualia OR I Am a Strange Loop OR Consciousness Explained - Dan & Doug
• Intentionality - Pierre Jacob - Stanford Encyclopedia Phil
• Philosophy in the Flesh - Lakoff  & Johnson - Chap 3,4, 12, 21,24 and 25. 

What you cannot find here you probably will on Google or Library.nu (if anyone has a link to Beyond Belief (EDIT: Found it!), post it, it is the only hard to find one)

Congratulations, you are now officially free from the Naïve philosophical computationalism that underlies part of the Less Wrong Community. Your computationalism is now wise and well informed.

Feel free now to delve into some interesting computational proposals such as

• Consciousness as Integrated Information - Giulio Tononi
• What is Thought - Eric Baum
• Good and Real - Gary Drescher
• The Mathematical Universe Hipothesis - Max Tegmark

Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple. - Edward de Bono

There are many realms and domains in which the quote above should not be praised. But I think I have all philosophy majors with me when I say that there must be a simpler way to get to the knowledge level we reach upon graduation.

Finally, having wasted substantial amounts of time reading those parts that should not be read of philosophy, and not intending to do the same mistake in other areas, I ask you to publish a selection of readings in your area of expertise, The Sequences are a major rationality shortcut, and we need more of that kind.

Follow-up to There just has to be something more, you know? and The two insights of materialism.

I have alluded that one cause for the common reluctance to consider physicalism — in particular, that our minds can in principle be characterized entirely by physical states — is an asymmetry in how people perceive characterization.  This can be alleviated by analogy to how our external senses can supervene on each other, and how abstract manipulations of those senses using recording, playback, and editing technologies have made such characterizations useful and intuitive.

We have numerous external senses, and at least one internal sense that people call "thinking" or "consciousness".  In part because you and I can point our external senses at the same objects, collaborative science has done a great job characterizing them in terms of each other.  The first thing is to realize the symmetry and non-triviality of this situation.

First, at a personal level:  say you've never sensed a musical instrument in any way, and for the first time, in the dark, you hear a cello playing.  Then later, you see the actual cello.  You probably wouldn't immediately recognize these perceptions as being of the same physical object.  But watching and listening to the cello playing at the same time would certainly help, and physically intervening yourself to see that you can change the pitch of the note by placing your fingers on the strings would be a deal breaker:  you'd start thinking of that sound, that sight, and that tactile sense as all coming from one object "cello". 

Before moving on, note how in these circumstances we don't conclude that "only sight is real" and that sound is merely a derivate of it, but simply that the two senses are related and can characterize each other, at least roughly speaking:  when you see a cello, you know what sort of sounds to expect, and conversely.

Next, consider the more precise correspondence that collaborative science has provided, which follows a similar trend:  in the theory of characterizing sound as logitudinal compression waves, first came recording, then playback, and finally editing.  In fact, the first intelligible recording of a human voice, in 1860, was played back for the first time in 2008, using computers.  So, suppose it's 1810, well before the invention of the phonoautograph, and you've just heard the first movement of Beethowen's 5th.  Then later, I unsuggestively show you a high-res version of this picture, with zooming capabilities:

If we had topic-headings here, I'd be suggesting a new one: I changed my mind today.

Being rational is all about chainging your mind, right? It's about re-assessing in the face of some new evidence. About examining the difference between your assumptions and the world itself. Narrowing down the difference between the model and the reality, the map and the territory.

Maybe your 'karma' should reflect how much you've told us when you changed your mind? Certainly I'd like to know when people change their minds about things more than when they just agree with me.

In fact, I think that is probably the thing I most want to know about from any of the people whom I know primarily because of their professed rationality.

Especially if they explain why they changed their minds, and do it well.

With that in mind, and introducing the new acronym: ICMMT

I Changed My Mind Today!

Or at least I revised my opinion.