Some of the best rationality essays

[Jack R]

Meta: Send this to anyone who is interested in learning more about “rationality”

A refresher: what is “rationality?” [1]

Rationality is the art of thinking in ways that result in accurate beliefs and good decisions [as understood by the LessWrong community; this understanding of rationality differs from others, some of which are more common in colloquial usage than “LessWrong rationality”]. It is the primary topic of LessWrong.

Rationality is not only about avoiding the vices of self-deception and obfuscation (the failure to communicate clearly), but also about the virtue of curiosity, seeing the world more clearly than before, and achieving things previously unreachable to you. The study of rationality on LessWrong includes a theoretical understanding of ideal cognitive algorithms, as well as building a practice that uses these idealized algorithms to inform heuristics, habits, and techniques, to successfully reason and make decisions in the real world.

Resources and materials

To learn more about rationality, I recommend (in order of usefulness per unit of effort):

• Subscribing to the LessWrong digest (subscribe at the sidebar),

• Reading the essays from the list below,

• Reading Rationality A to Z (podcast form here),

• Reading some of the best works from Scott Alexander.

To learn more about systematically doing good (i.e. effective altruism) I recommend:

• Subscribing to the 80,000 Hours mailing list,

• Reading this 80,000 Hours post about the importance of career choice,

• Participating in an EA Virtual Program,

• Reading/​skimming this comprehensive set of readings on effective altruism.

Some of the best rationality essays [2]

Below you can find some of the best writings on rationality, in no particular order:

1. Affective Death Spirals

2. Uncritical Supercriticality

3. Cached Thoughts

4. We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think

5. Hold Off On Proposing Solutions

6. Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People

7. Update Yourself Incrementally

8. The Bottom Line

9. Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points

10. Motivated Stopping and Motivated Continuation

11. Anti-Epistemology

12. The Proper Use of Humility

13. You Can Face Reality

14. The Meditation on Curiosity

15. Something to Protect

16. Crisis of Faith

17. Mind Projection Fallacy

18. Reductionism

19. Explaining vs. Explaining Away

20. Angry Atoms

21. Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)

22. Humans are not automatically strategic

23. Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization

24. Twelve Virtues of Rationality

25. The noncentral fallacy—the worst argument in the world?

26. Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided

27. “Other people are wrong” vs “I am right”

28. On Caring

29. Outline of Galef’s “Scout Mindset”

30. Generalizing From One Example

31. Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease

32. How An Algorithm Feels From Inside

33. Scope Insensitivity

34. Conservation of Expected Evidence

35. Your Strength as a Rationalist

36. Your intuitions are not magic

37. How To Convince Me that 2 + 2 = 3

38. The simple truth

39. Circular altruism

[1] Taken from the Rationality Tag, though the bracketed words are mine.

[2] Half of these are the bolded essays from here, the other half were recommended by a well-read LessWronger. By “some of the best” I really mean “some of the most useful to read, probably.” This is not authoritative at all; please comment if you think we missed any important essays.