[SEQ RERUN] My Wild and Reckless Youth

Today’s post, My Wild and Reckless Youth was originally published on 30 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Traditional rationality (without Bayes’ Theorem) allows you to formulate hypotheses without a reason to prefer them to the status quo, as long as they are falsifiable. Even following all the rules of traditional rationality, you can waste a lot of time. It takes a lot of rationality to avoid making mistakes; a moderate level of rationality will just lead you to make new and different mistakes.


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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Say Not “Complexity”, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.