I’ve noticed that people seem to have their minds blown by the sequences, not really learn all that much more by spending a few years in the rationality scene, and then go back to read the sequences and wonder how they could have ever found them anything but obvious.
I saw Yvain describe this experience. My experience was actually kind of the opposite. When I read the sequences, they seemed extremely well written, but obvious. I thought that my enjoyment of them was the enjoyment of reading what I already knew, but expressed better than I could express it, plus the cool results from the heuristics-and-biases research program. It was only in retrospect that I noticed how much they had clarified my thinking about basic epistemology.
That’s very interesting that your experience was the opposite.
And yeah, I saw where Yvain wrote that he and a friend shared that experience, and I noticed that I shared it exactly as well. It also seems to match with attitudes I had seen around, so I feel like it could be fairly general.
I saw Yvain describe this experience. My experience was actually kind of the opposite. When I read the sequences, they seemed extremely well written, but obvious. I thought that my enjoyment of them was the enjoyment of reading what I already knew, but expressed better than I could express it, plus the cool results from the heuristics-and-biases research program. It was only in retrospect that I noticed how much they had clarified my thinking about basic epistemology.
That’s very interesting that your experience was the opposite.
And yeah, I saw where Yvain wrote that he and a friend shared that experience, and I noticed that I shared it exactly as well. It also seems to match with attitudes I had seen around, so I feel like it could be fairly general.