You could just trying to read the posts even if you don't explain all the jargon: over time, as you get more exposed to the terms that people use, I'd expect it to get easier to understand what the examples mean. And you might get a rough idea of the main point of a post even if you don't get all the details. Eric Drexler actually argues that if you want to learn a bit of everything, this is the way to do it.

If you don't understand some post at all, you could always ask for a summary in plain English. Many of the posts in the Sequences are old and don't get much traffic, so they might not be the best places to ask, but you could do it an Open Thread... and now that I think of it, I suspect that a lot of others are in the same position as you. So I created a new thread for asking for such explanations, to encourage people to ask! Here it is.

Hello, I'm Erin. I am currently in high school, so perhaps a little younger than the typical reader.

I'm fascinated by the thoughts here. This is the first community I've found that makes an effort to think about their own opinions, then is self aware enough to look at their own thought processes.

But, this might not be the place for this, I'm am struggling to understand anything technical on this website. I've enjoyed reading the sequences, and they have given me a lot to thing about. Still, I've read the introduction to Bayes theorem multiple times, and I simply can't grasp it. Even starting at the very beginning of the sequences I quickly get lost because there are references to programming and cognitive science which I simply do not understand.

I recently returned to this site after taking a statistics course, which has helped slightly. But I still feel rather lost.

Do you have any tips for how you utilized rationality when you were starting? How did you first incorporate it into your thought processes? Can you recommend any background material which might help me to understand the sequences better?

This seems to be a direct reply to the common thought/command/belief "Just stop" As in "why don't you just stop biting your fingernails/smoking/overeating/procrastinating?" or "Why can't I just stop (hated activity here)?" I don't know if this is a common experience, but everyone I have met and discussed the issue with personally (a very small minority) believes that humans have the ability to stop an action by "deciding to stop". Then, when that fails anger and self-loathing is immediate result. I understand that these thoughts are in no way original, but this is the first time I have seen anything even remotely explaining or offering a solution to the "just stop" in normal areas of life. I had heard of CBT before, but only in regards to extreme depression or self-harm. So, my question. Do you commonly use this process for motivation? Has it proven to be effective in smaller, immediate areas of life?