Today's post, Akrasia and Shangri-La was originally published on 10 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The Shangri-La diet works amazingly well for some people, but completely fails for others, for no known reason. Since the diet has a metabolic rationale and is not supposed to require willpower, its failure in my and other cases is unambigiously mysterious. If it required a component of willpower, then I and others might be tempted to blame myself for not having willpower. The art of combating akrasia (willpower failure) has the same sort of mysteries and is in the same primitive state; we don't know the deeper rule that explains why a trick works for one person but not another.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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Today's post, The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet was originally published on 10 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

An intriguing dietary theory which appears to allow some people to lose substantial amounts of weight, but doesn't appear to work at all for others.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Beware of Other-Optimizing, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Beware of Other-Optimizing was originally published on 10 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Aspiring rationalists often vastly overestimate their own ability to optimize other people's lives. They read nineteen webpages offering productivity advice that doesn't work for them... and then encounter the twentieth page, or invent a new method themselves, and wow, it really works - they've discovered the true method. Actually, they've just discovered the one method in twenty that works for them, and their confident advice is no better than randomly selecting one of the twenty blog posts. Other-Optimizing is exceptionally dangerous when you have power over the other person - for then you'll just believe that they aren't trying hard enough.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Mandatory Secret Identities, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Mandatory Secret Identities was originally published on 08 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

This post was not well-received, but the point was to suggest that a student must at some point leave the dojo and test their skills in the real world. The aspiration of an excellent student should not consist primarily of founding their own dojo and having their own students.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Whining-Based Communities, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Whining-Based Communities was originally published on 07 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Many communities feed emotional needs by offering their members someone or something to blame for failure - say, those looters who don't approve of your excellence. You can easily imagine some group of "rationalists" congratulating themselves on how reasonable they were, while blaming the surrounding unreasonable society for keeping them down. But this is not how real rationality works - there's no assumption that other agents are rational. We all face unfair tests (and yes, they are unfair to different degrees for different people); and how well you do with your unfair tests, is the test of your existence. Rationality is there to help you win anyway, not to provide a self-handicapping excuse for losing. There are no first-person extenuating circumstances. There is absolutely no point in going down the road of mutual bitterness and consolation, about anything, ever.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Extenuating Circumstances, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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Today's post, Extenuating Circumstances was originally published on 06 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You can excuse other people's shortcomings on the basis of extenuating circumstances, but you shouldn't do that with yourself.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Real-Life Anthropic Weirdness, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Real-Life Anthropic Weirdness was originally published on 05 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Extremely rare events can create bizarre circumstances in which people may not be able to effectively communicate about improbability.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Incremental Progress and the Valley, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, was originally published on 04 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The optimality theorems for probability theory and decision theory, are for perfect probability theory and decision theory. There is no theorem that incremental changes toward the ideal, starting from a flawed initial form, must yield incremental progress at each step along the way. Since perfection is unattainable, why dare to try for improvement? But my limited experience with specialized applications suggests that given enough progress, one can achieve huge improvements over baseline - it just takes a lot of progress to get there.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Rationality is Systematized Winning, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Rationality is Systematized Winning was originally published on 03 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The idea behind the statement "Rationalists should win" is not that rationality will make you invincible. It means that if someone who isn't behaving according to your idea of rationality is outcompeting you, predictably and consistently, you should consider that you're not the one being rational.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Selecting Rationalist Groups, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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Today's post, Selecting Rationalist Groups was originally published on 02 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Trying to breed e.g. egg-laying chickens by individual selection can produce odd side effects on the farm level, since a more dominant hen can produce more egg mass at the expense of other hens. Group selection is nearly impossible in Nature, but easy to impose in the laboratory, and group-selecting hens produced substantial increases in efficiency. Though most of my essays are about individual rationality - and indeed, Traditional Rationality also praises the lone heretic more than evil Authority - the real effectiveness of "rationalists" may end up determined by their performance in groups.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.