Maybe you disagree with something that I've said here? In that case, what data do you think generated this advice? What conclusions would you derive instead?

I disagree with your claim that obviously wrong information is still worth reading because it gives you clues into the author's thoughts and the evidence behind them.

This is kinda obvious, but I think that prior experience with successful from following this principle generated the advice. That, and possibly an overestimation of its useful due to the fact that it's counterintuitive- evidence for it could cause you either to overcorrect, or you may be more likely to remember the times when its correct, since those would probably be more memorable. (Alternately, you may be implicitly referring only to reasonably OK writing, or to descriptions of physical events, in which I'd be more equivocal.)

I'd say that bad interpretations are, in general, not worth reading.

• Most incorrect interpretations tend to be very similar; once you've, e.g. read one explanation as to why Obama is a Muslim, there's probably very little more to be gained from reading more. This applies to less wrong, or even correct reasoning, as well- if you understood the first, there's probably relatively little to be gained from reading two textbooks covering the same material.

• There's no reason to assume that the argument will, in fact, be an interpretation of an event, or, even if it is, that the description will be accurate. Even ignoring, e.g. post-modernist tracts, many accounts involve just making things up. e.g. I ignore anything from the Discovery Institute. (Which would tell me what? Something about what they think they want their readers to know? That's not useful to me, and I could probably make equally good predictions just by introspection.)

• Any time you spend reading one thing is time not spent reading something else; just because the account provides a little useful information isn't a good reason to read it.

This is an awesome idea! I've been reading LessWrong for years, but I still fairly frequently click on links within articles that look interesting, read the first few paragraphs of the article linked to, only to realize that I've read it before (sometimes a few times before!)

This might be too hard to implement, but here is the system I would like: a way to mark articles as 'unread', 'in progress', or 'read'. This information would be saved and links to articles that you marked 'read' would change colour. (Of course, maybe I'm the only one absentminded enough to need this!)

As a new reader, I would very much like to have a method for marking how far through the sequences I am. A dot next to read articles, or possibly a timestamp of last access could work, as could a button at the bottom of the article labeled "Mark as read" that would display the article title differently in the main sequence page. I feel lost when I hop around on different computers as to what articles I've read and where I have seen them before, and simply saving read articles every time is unsuitable for this.

EDIT TO ADD: Based off of what other commenters have said, I feel like a clarification is in order. What I'm looking for is a way to mark the sequence pages I've read, so that when they're linked to in the newer articles I can tell right away if I've read that particular post. Hopefully, this would work for both backward-linking sequences AND new posts that also link to sequence pages. Perhaps a way to store the URL of a read page, link it to my account, and when that URL is displayed again within LW a new graphic could show up to the side of the link to show that it has already been read.

As someone from the southern US, I was asked (jokingly) about whether or not I was a racist when I went north for college. At first I was repulsed by the question, until I noticed that I automatically got more nervous when passing a black person on the street at night. I am going to college in Cleveland, and so I have some actual reason for this since every mugger I've seen for five years in incident reports has been black. My problem (though I only started defining it this way within the past few months of reading LW) is that I was weighting race far too strongly in my everyday interactions.

After I realized I was doing this, I decided to switch my threat assessment style to a more clothing-based approach, with some success. Everyday interactions with other races than my native white within the university also felt easier and less forced. Taking an implicit association test helped me to realize that I was racist to some degree despite my intense repulsion to the idea. I now encourage everyone to examine their thought process for racism, especially if they would feel dismay if someone accused them of racism.