It's spelled "chili". I don't know whether it would be worth your while to find out what's in chili that upsets your gut-- there may be specific ingredients (beans? hot pepper?) you want to avoid in other dishes.

Congratulations for getting that much good from thinking about what you're doing.

I believe we should keep definitions for these words on the lesswrong wiki because not all dictionaries agree on what all of them mean exactly, or what we mean by them.

I agree!

And talking about the Wiki we really should find a way for contributors there to be rewarded with karma for their efforts. Also why in the world do we require separate registration for the Wiki and the main site?

Sometimes with small children, I get the impression they're asking "why?" for the social interaction rather than to actually get answers. I'm not sure I'm right about this, but it can be very tiresome to give serious answers to questions under those circumstances.

Any thoughts about how to tell whether a child wants real answers? If it is for the social interaction, what's a graceful way to handle it without squelching real curiosity?

I agree about the comfort of giving up hope , or at least that's a plausible explanation for why I'm seeing people so sure of their pessimism being correct when the future is so hard to predict.

Did i understand correctly that you want us both to review your text and add specific examples that we can think of?
I will do both.

On the text:

I liked it very much, but I don't think the text works very well for people who do not see rationality as a virtue.
Some problems i see when i try to put on the glasses of my anti-rationality friends:
* The use of many in-crowd words and assumed meanings: hypothesis, fallacy, cognitive (non-rationality fan people do not use these words in daily life); What could be done is provide links to your definition. I believe we should keep definitions for these words on the lesswrong wiki because not all dictionaries agree on what all of them mean exactly, or what we mean by them.
* I know many people who will deny any claim that they are in some way faulty or that emotions are a bad thing, unfortunately i do not know of a good way to get around this.
* I get the feeling that the whole body of text is somewhat on the negative side: "Rationality will protect you from the cold harsh world" is the feeling i get.

On personal experience with applied rationality:
Example1:
I learned on lesswrong how an hypothesis should be used and how to use experimentation to collect evidence for or against it. Using the scientific method i formed the hypothesis that something in my food was making me have to go to the bathroom all day long (for the past 15 years). So i started keeping a food diary where i noted what i ate at what time and at what time i had to visit the bathroom and if the visit was normal or not.
Eventually a pattern began to form and after about a month of taking notes it became clear that Chili pepper seemed to be the causation, but at this point it could merely be a correlation. (i had once blamed corn, the doctors did not agree but i could clearly see the causation with my irrational eyes, as it turns out i never eat corn without chili pepper, so it was only a correlation) So i formed a new hypothesis: When I eat chilly i will get into trouble and then ran tests on that. So I removed chilly from my diet completely. (and the problems all went away), then to test i ate a big bowl of hot chili pepper soup, and in no time i was running to the bathroom again.

Example2:
(This one is about school an learning, i will be talking about a level of school similar to highschool. We use a grading system of 1(worst) to 10(best). The type of class i was in is what in the states would be considered a special school/class for gifted children)
When i got to "High School" i quickly found myself being teased about my learning abilities. With the notable exceptions of Excercise/Gym and Handwriting i was a straight 10 student, always had been. (I'm that guy that corrects mistakes in the schoolbook and the teachers explanation)
Although i pretended the teasing didn't hurt me, i only recently (with the rationality lessons of lesswrong) started to realise that they did hurt.
What happened was that i started to dislike school, getting 10's made me unpopular so something inside me snapped and i started dumbing down to be more "cool"
I still had 8's for everything and the teasing stopped.
But then something worse happened. In the 3rd grade of High School they changed the teachers for Math and we got a new one. This teacher was not a teacher. Instead it was a math genius that knew how to get the results/proofs but had no idea why. I had always relied on learning a concept through the way of asking why, mapping it to my existing knowledge and then integrating it. but this teacher expected me to "guess the teachers password" and learn math like a copyprinter.
I couldn't do it, quickly i went from an 11 average (i never dumbed down on math) to 2-3 average, not long after i quit school completely and started working for minimum wage.

From that moment on i believed i was unable to learn, the experience shocked me and scared me. I have been unable to study anything since.

Through the lesswrong sequences and advice from regulars on lesswrong i have managed to pinpoint my learned helplessness cause and overcome it. I have learned more than i have in the past 10 years since coming to lesswrong.

Some smaller examples:
* I have done a google scholar, and google regular research to figure out what the best oral health strategy is according to the "better" studies (on average they all suck though)
* I have picked up my university study that i have been procrastinating on for 5 years and am seeing good progress and most importantly, retention.
* I have earned an excellent rating at work for self improvement in communication.
* I have earned an excellent rating at work for using my rationality skills to massively improve the quality of questions asked at work. Before we would accept any claim, now we only accept questions that have empirical evidence of adding value.(this went from 60% effectiveness to 94%)

Since i suck at arguing i would love to see more posts on this subject. I also agree with previous commenter's that a clear distinction needs to be made for things that are darksidey or purely meant for winning an argument no matter what.

there are times when winning the argument is better for your terminal values than always trying to convince the other party of truth.

I would also be interested and upvoted both this post and the parent for encouragement.

EDIT: I'm having a hard time explaining what i am trying to say, i will post a new comment or top level post if i manage to figure it out. Basically I'm trying to say that there already well working and documented methods for connecting and updating beliefs in the world of outlier student research.

I would find such a post very useful.

I am one such person. I finished college at the age of 16, and I knew I was merely very good at guessing the teacher's password. People's remarks about my intelligence were dismissed by me internally, because I was aware of my own ignorance.

However, what you say can be difficult to apply in practice during a semester. I see formal education as a method for gathering data, which you can use for Bayesian propagation after the fact. This is why it can feel like you learn much more thinking between semesters, rather than during.

Your notion of necessity of integration is uncorrelated to outlier students. Given an outlier student, I would be surprised if active integration of textbook data was lower than given a non-outlier student. In both cases this conditional probability is, sadly, very small.

I had this idea that these articles and sequences would help me at winning in life while simultaneously pave the way for a better world and friendly AI. Now seeing these short summaries i am no longer so sure they will help me win.

This post made me realize just how important it is to completely integrate the new things you learn.

I have been reading a lot of books and blogs on the subject of students that finish school with honors, but don't seem to work very hard while doing so. I also met one of those people in person (he finished an entire 4 year curriculum with honors in just 3 months and is now a professor of that content)

It all boils to the same thing: Whatever the textbook is trying to tell you, make sure you integrate that in your life. Only then will you see if you really understood what it was saying and if you are missing any extra information, or if the information in the book is wrong. Once integrated you do not need any extra studying to get an A/10 for the exam.(because you will have recursively updated all your beliefs to include the thing you where supposed to learn)

Some of these books and blogs go into detail on how to how to do this. One of the methods i read was making a doodle of the idea in your notebook. This doodle borrows heavily from your current state of knowledge. An example of what I did: To model the process of taking a raw resource and making it into a profitable end product i drew a mine with rocks coming out, then a table with a chisel on the rock and finally a diamond with a price-tag. I know how diamonds are made so i could use that to represent this process.

There are many more methods, another that i have not yet tried to use is basically making a flashcard.: Question/Evidence/Conclusion http://calnewport.com/blog/2009/04/06/4-weeks-to-a-40-streamline-your-notes/

EDIT: I'm having a hard time explaining what i am trying to say, i will post a new comment or top level post if i manage to figure it out. Basically I'm trying to say that there already well working and documented methods for connecting and updating beliefs in the world of outlier student research.