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In response to Advices needed for a presentation on rationality

Comment author: Cyan 13 June 2012 11:20:31AM 3 points [-]

There's good material here and here.

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In response to comment by Cyan on Advices needed for a presentation on rationality

Comment author: Worthstream 14 June 2012 10:21:33AM 2 points [-]

Great, thank you! The first post is what convinced me to have this presentation, but i did lose the link.

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In response to Advices needed for a presentation on rationality

Comment author: stcredzero 13 June 2012 06:54:04PM * 3 points [-]

The idiomatic wording would be, "Advice needed for a presentation on rationality." Advice is a type of information, so making it plural is redundant. This is also why you never hear people saying, "I need your advices." (Or, for that matter, "I need your helps.")

EDIT: However, it's idiomatic to say, "I need your services," as well as, "I need your service." It could be that people who provide service generally provide possibly multiple types of service. The tenor of "I need your service" is more imperative, however. There's more of a presumption of the asker knowing what they want ahead of time, versus "I need your services." The above doesn't apply to advice/advices, however. It may be arbitrary.

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In response to comment by stcredzero on Advices needed for a presentation on rationality

Comment author: Worthstream 14 June 2012 10:18:09AM * 0 points [-]

Thank you! As you may have guessed, english is not my first language. While it is easy to find grammar rules, it is actually difficult to find informations on the correct wording to choose.

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Advices needed for a presentation on rationality

2 Worthstream 13 June 2012 10:41AM

Hi, next month I'm going to be doing an hour long presentation on rationality to Mensa members. It needs to be rather introductory, since High QI != Rationality and most of them are not familiar with the concepts discussed here.

I'm planning to talk about what rationality is (any good quotes?), what is the difference between the brain and the conscience, why being rational does not mean having a perfect willpower, some common and easily avoided fallacies (sunk cost, scope insensitivity).

I did a search on the site for this kind of introductory posts and have quite a large pool of interesting arguments to touch. Does anyone have any suggestion on which topics should be included, any pointers to interesting posts that should be summarized or used as source material, etc.?

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In response to Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Comment author: Worthstream 30 May 2012 03:24:21PM * 2 points [-]

Hi, Worthstream here. I'm from Italy, as you will no doubt notice from my unusual choice of words. (Europeans then to overuse latin derived words in my experience)

I'm graduated in computer science, currently working as a web programmer, the kind of technical background i think is quite common here, judging by the number of useful applets and websites built by community members (Beeminder, just to name the first that comes to mind).

I'm a regional coordinator of the italian Mensa, a society i joined thinking that i would have found a lot of rational people. That assumption has been proved false, mensa members are not appreciably more rational than the rest of the population.

While i usually do not like fanfiction neither Harry Potter, HP:MoR is one of the best book i've read. I'm actively trying to get my friends to read it.

If i remember correctly i've found LW by looking for akrasia and time management advices, since i'm really interested in self improvement. I remember reading some articles i found interesting, started following the link to other posts, and the link in those posts too... and suddenly i did have an enormous backlog of articles to read!