Even though R:AZ isn’t very hands on, it’s still pretty core and definitely worth your time. I think all three all roughly equally newbie friendly (Much of the Codex was written with the sequences as background assumptions, but still probably accessible without it)
HPMOR is probably the most “fun”, if you happen to like the genre.
I agree, the “big, vague things” are the bedrock of epistemology, the lens which helps you be more discerning and critical when you read anything else (e.g. those more “hands on” materials) and get more value out of it.
I think that the sequences could be rewritten to half the length and still retain the vast majority of the value, but oh well, this is where we are at the moment with core rationality literature.
HPMOR is especially fun if you’ve read the original HP.
This seems to be the eternal conflict between epistemology and practicality.
Epistemology lets you find out which things are true, construct correct models of the world, and build awesome stuff. The problem is that it can take enormous amounts of time, and the resulting stuff is often easy to use even for people who have no idea why it works. (Not only the obvious cases like using a microwave without having an idea of how it works, but also the invisible stuff like living all your life without a plague while perhaps being a successful anti-vaxer blogger.) Then the people who use stuff invented by others will laugh: “if you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?”
The problem is, if you go the opposite way, and just use the stuff without understanding how it works, sometimes you copy something useful, but sometimes you copy something harmful—you have no idea how to distinguish between them. You lead a successful life, then you drink some bleach and die. It’s like walking though a minefield, hoping that it works on average.
So, you probably want some combination of both. To have a knowledge of what works, and to actually exploit that knowledge.
In a parallel universe where Eliezer followed his own advice (to the extreme) and published a book full of hands-on lessons without the epistemology… some people probably read that book and wondered how exactly it differs from any other advice-providing website. So they took some inspiration from that, some other inspiration from somewhere else, and probably got a little bit better on average, but without any deeper change. Instead of rationality meetups, people go to productivity meetups, where they get some good advice, some bad advice, and some irrelevant advice. There is already a lot of this out there; no need to pour more water into the ocean. Also, there would be no effective altruism, and people wouldn’t care about AI, because, well, you can solve all these things by the power of positive thinking and visualizing success, can’t you?
That said, a CFAR-blessed textbook of practical advice would be nice to have, of course.
Even though R:AZ isn’t very hands on, it’s still pretty core and definitely worth your time. I think all three all roughly equally newbie friendly (Much of the Codex was written with the sequences as background assumptions, but still probably accessible without it)
HPMOR is probably the most “fun”, if you happen to like the genre.
I agree, the “big, vague things” are the bedrock of epistemology, the lens which helps you be more discerning and critical when you read anything else (e.g. those more “hands on” materials) and get more value out of it.
I think that the sequences could be rewritten to half the length and still retain the vast majority of the value, but oh well, this is where we are at the moment with core rationality literature.
HPMOR is especially fun if you’ve read the original HP.
This seems to be the eternal conflict between epistemology and practicality.
Epistemology lets you find out which things are true, construct correct models of the world, and build awesome stuff. The problem is that it can take enormous amounts of time, and the resulting stuff is often easy to use even for people who have no idea why it works. (Not only the obvious cases like using a microwave without having an idea of how it works, but also the invisible stuff like living all your life without a plague while perhaps being a successful anti-vaxer blogger.) Then the people who use stuff invented by others will laugh: “if you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?”
The problem is, if you go the opposite way, and just use the stuff without understanding how it works, sometimes you copy something useful, but sometimes you copy something harmful—you have no idea how to distinguish between them. You lead a successful life, then you drink some bleach and die. It’s like walking though a minefield, hoping that it works on average.
So, you probably want some combination of both. To have a knowledge of what works, and to actually exploit that knowledge.
In a parallel universe where Eliezer followed his own advice (to the extreme) and published a book full of hands-on lessons without the epistemology… some people probably read that book and wondered how exactly it differs from any other advice-providing website. So they took some inspiration from that, some other inspiration from somewhere else, and probably got a little bit better on average, but without any deeper change. Instead of rationality meetups, people go to productivity meetups, where they get some good advice, some bad advice, and some irrelevant advice. There is already a lot of this out there; no need to pour more water into the ocean. Also, there would be no effective altruism, and people wouldn’t care about AI, because, well, you can solve all these things by the power of positive thinking and visualizing success, can’t you?
That said, a CFAR-blessed textbook of practical advice would be nice to have, of course.
There’s room for epistemology practice to be hands-on, relevant and exercise-based without being about “productivity.”