It sounds like what you're looking for is a (large) corpus of material containing the majority of the community's foundational insights and a ground-level-up course of rationality instruction. Fortunately, we have just such a thing! It's called the Sequences. It's a series of posts, mostly by Eliezer Yudkowsy, from 2007 or so onward, and is divided into several sections by topic. You can find it by clicking the "sequences" link on the upper right hand corner of this page, or just click here. A warning: the Sequences are a lot of material--more than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's probably best to start with the "core sequences", the ones titled "map and territory", "mysterious answers to mysterious questions", and "how to change your mind". There's a more detailed explanation of reading order and summaries of what topics various sequences cover on the above page, and you can read whichever ones seem most likely to be useful to you.
Dear Normal_Anomaly, I thank you for the kindness and tone of your answer. Could I upvote it I would. I'm aware of the existence of the sequences but it's still not quite what I mean. The sheer size of them detracts a lot from their usefulness and there seems to be no organization.
What I mean was some kind of page where one could self or externally assess and then based on his shortcomings be directed to adequate pages.
So something like: To Win you must:
-Add mindware -Fix corrupted mindware -Fix cognitive miserliness
Then adequate assessment of the state of these elements and links based on this organization (so, adding mindware would link to probability theory, logic, the virtue of scholarship; fixing corrupted mindware would link to debiasing, dissolving the question; and so forth) [based on lukeprog's "A cognitive Science of Rationality"].
This is just a model of how it could be, just a way of organizing it. Which is what appears to be missing, organization.
Cheers
A wild theist platonist appears, to ask about the path
I recognize the title could be more informative. At the same time I believe it says what is important.
I believe in a deity, I believe in mathematical entities in the same way.
The community of LessWrong (from whenceforth: LessWrong) is deeply interesting to me, appearing as a semi-organized atheist, reductionist community.
LessWrong seems very interested in promoting rationality, which I applaud. The effort does seem scattered, though, and this is the reason I post.
One has Eliezer's website with some interesting posts. The same of this community. The community links to some posts when you are coming for the first time into it, and you also have a filter for top posts. One has the blog. And recently, the center for modern rationality (in the same page as harrypoter fanfiction about rationality).
The point being there is no defined roadmap to go from AIC (average irrational chump to make an analogy to Game - which also seems to come up around quite a bit) to RA (again, rationality artist).
I write this post as to maybe generate a discussion on how the efforts could be concentrated and a new direction taken.
Should the creation of the Center for Modern Rationality envision this same concentration, this post may and should be disregard.
If it does not, then I leave it to your consideration.
Hang.
I'm a master's candidate to Logic at UvA. Rationality is one of my interests, altough I seem to come from the opposite side of the specter of everyone at LessWrong (from metaphysics and philosophy to rationality).
I am very interested in observing the reductionist approach, even more so after learning Eliezer values GEB so highly.
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I don't understand what this means. Do you?
What does it mean to "believe in" the number 2, for example? And even among mathematical realists one does not usually find the belief that the number 2 is going to do anything; it won't reach into your life and provide you with greater two-ness, as it were. So if you believe in a god in the same way that you believe in the number 2, whatever that may be, what is the purpose of this entity? The number 2 has its uses; you can add it to itself and get 4. What similar operation can you perform on your god, such that the belief is a useful one?
Dear Mr. RolfAndreassen.
Maybe I should have said that I believe in a deity in the same way I believe in mathematical entities. Natural language is tricky.
I question the assumption that something needs to do something else in order to exist. Take, for example, mathematical facts. They just "are" if you want. Some of them (but not all) are accessible trough our formal systems of mathematics. Some are not (certainly you are familiar with Godel's proof).
You may assert that the number two has its uses and thus assert the existence of number two. But what uses can you assert for mathematical truths that are not accessible? Do they stop existing because they are not accessible, or do they "pop into" existence, if I may, once they are?
The mere fact that the mathematical truths are before they are accessible (Again, godel's incompleteness theorem) says that mathematical truths exist, and therefore so do the parts that they are comprised of.