This is a very large question; a significant fraction of all the posts on LessWrong are relevant. In particular, the World Modelling tag seems like a good starting point to look for relevant ideas.
I would specifically advise against looking for information which directly impacts your plans/outlook in life, and rather try yo obtain strong general-purpose understanding of aspects of the world which are relevant to you. The reason is that it often just isn’t possible for a strong understanding to be “shallow”—you need to figure out the big picture of how a system works before it’s clear which parts are critical for you specifically.
Thanks, I agree that LW is a good place to start reading. I would add that LW can also be a good source for curated material, i.e. someone might post about the best primary and secondary sources to find out more about a topic.
I also get your point about “broad” vs “shallow”. I do wonder what a good model would look like for reading since broad understanding in itself is relatively useless—it needs to be translated into shallow, technical understanding at some point.
This is a very large question; a significant fraction of all the posts on LessWrong are relevant. In particular, the World Modelling tag seems like a good starting point to look for relevant ideas.
I would specifically advise against looking for information which directly impacts your plans/outlook in life, and rather try yo obtain strong general-purpose understanding of aspects of the world which are relevant to you. The reason is that it often just isn’t possible for a strong understanding to be “shallow”—you need to figure out the big picture of how a system works before it’s clear which parts are critical for you specifically.
Thanks, I agree that LW is a good place to start reading. I would add that LW can also be a good source for curated material, i.e. someone might post about the best primary and secondary sources to find out more about a topic.
I also get your point about “broad” vs “shallow”. I do wonder what a good model would look like for reading since broad understanding in itself is relatively useless—it needs to be translated into shallow, technical understanding at some point.