An instrumental question: how would you exploit this to your advantage, were you dark-arts inclined? For example, if you are a US presidential candidate, what tactics would you use to invisibly switch voters' choice to you? Given that you are probably not better at it than the professionals in each candidate's team, can you find examples of such tactics?

One of the most audacious and famous experiments is known informally as "the door study": an experimenter asks a passerby for directions, but is interrupted by a pair of construction workers carrying an unhinged door, concealing another person whom replaces the experimenter as the door passes. Incredibly, the person giving directions rarely notices they are now talking to a completely different person. This effect was reproduced by Derren Brown on British TV (here's an amateur re-enactment).

I think the response of the passerby is quite reasonable, actually. Confronted with a choice between (a) "the person asking me directions was just spontaneously replaced by somebody different, also asking me directions," and (b) "I just had a brain fart," I'll consciously go for (b) every time, especially considering that I make similar mistakes all the time (confusing people with each other immediately after having encountered them). I know that this is probably not a phenomenon that occurs at the conscious level, but we should expect the unconscious level to be even more automatic.

There has been an interest check in a rationality course Course on logic and critical thinking which garnered significant interest: 261 upvotes at the time of this post. A course in rationality certainly seems to hold the interest of redditors, especially since 200+ upvotes are quite rare outside of the big 30 subreddits.

The original poster of the interest check is websnarf. If anyone is interested in helping him out, PM him, as he stated that he didn't create the syllabus yet

Of course, running a concurrent course is also an option since he seems to be focusing on logic and logical fallacies.

I was making a joke (hence the smiley).

There are legitimate reasons for the feminist movement to continue. This is not one of them.

I thoroughly agree and consider myself a feminist.

wants to correct that word to "patriarchal"

This is why we still need feminism!

:-)

Hi, LessWrong,

I used to entertain myself by reading psychology, and philosophy articles on Wikipedia and following the subsequent links. When I was really interested in a topic though, I used google to further find websites would provide me more information on said topics. Around late 2010, I found that some of my search results led to this very website. Less Wrong proved to be a little too dense for me to enjoy; I needed to fully utilize my cognitive capabilities to even begin to comprehend some of the articles posted here.

Since I was looking for entertainment, I decided to ignore all links to LW for quite a while, but the frequency of LW result coming up in my queries became more and more frequent with time. I finally decided to read some of the posts, and some of the articles (determinism, cryonics, and death related ones) described conclusions I've derived independently. It was quite shocking as I thought of myself as a rather unique thinker. Thinking more about this, I came to a conclusion. Instead of having a "eureka" moment every couple of months to come at the same conclusion people arrived at centuries ago, I decided to optimize my time - compressing the learning/awakening period by reading the sequences instead of attempting to figure out everything myself.

Funnily enough, I detest reading the same articles that I enjoyed reading before now that I've given myself the goal of reading them. I'm sure that the explanation and the solution to this conundrum can be found on this website as well.

Lastly, a note to ciphergoth - I do not identify myself as a rationalist, as the second sentence of this post implies. I found out that labeling myself limits my words, my actions, and more importantly, my thoughts, so I refuse to label myself by my political ideologies, gender, nationality, etc. I even go by a few different names so I can become more detached to my name itself as I found people to be irrationally attached to names as it is nothing but an identifying label. I will use rationalist techniques and tools, and I may even grow to adopt your ideologies, but I will not identify myself as a rationalist. At least until the benefits of applying labels to myself becomes more concrete.

Nice to meet all of you.

If I want to become a system administrator instead of a programmer, which of these advises would still apply? Also, is it feasible to become a system administrator if I don't have a bachelor's in a related area of study?