It sounds like what you’re looking for is a (large) corpus of material containing the majority of the community’s foundational insights and a ground-level-up course of rationality instruction. Fortunately, we have just such a thing! It’s called the Sequences. It’s a series of posts, mostly by Eliezer Yudkowsy, from 2007 or so onward, and is divided into several sections by topic. You can find it by clicking the “sequences” link on the upper right hand corner of this page, or just click here. A warning: the Sequences are a lot of material—more than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s probably best to start with the “core sequences”, the ones titled “map and territory”, “mysterious answers to mysterious questions”, and “how to change your mind”. There’s a more detailed explanation of reading order and summaries of what topics various sequences cover on the above page, and you can read whichever ones seem most likely to be useful to you.
Dear Normal_Anomaly, I thank you for the kindness and tone of your answer. Could I upvote it I would.
I’m aware of the existence of the sequences but it’s still not quite what I mean.
The sheer size of them detracts a lot from their usefulness and there seems to be no organization.
What I mean was some kind of page where one could self or externally assess and then based on his shortcomings be directed to adequate pages.
Then adequate assessment of the state of these elements and links based on this organization (so, adding mindware would link to probability theory, logic, the virtue of scholarship; fixing corrupted mindware would link to debiasing, dissolving the question; and so forth) [based on lukeprog’s “A cognitive Science of Rationality”].
This is just a model of how it could be, just a way of organizing it. Which is what appears to be missing, organization.
It’s true that LessWrong could have more focus on catering to newcomers as opposed to catering to people who’ve been here for months; which is to be expected when most content (posts and wiki) are made by long-timers.
I guess the best approach for newcomers for now is just to show up and talk to people (like what you’re doing now!) - not as smoothly organized as having a formal system, but at least it’s a self-correcting process that adapts to the quirks and interests of people better than a pre-programmed self-assessment system could!
It sounds like what you’re looking for is a (large) corpus of material containing the majority of the community’s foundational insights and a ground-level-up course of rationality instruction. Fortunately, we have just such a thing! It’s called the Sequences. It’s a series of posts, mostly by Eliezer Yudkowsy, from 2007 or so onward, and is divided into several sections by topic. You can find it by clicking the “sequences” link on the upper right hand corner of this page, or just click here. A warning: the Sequences are a lot of material—more than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s probably best to start with the “core sequences”, the ones titled “map and territory”, “mysterious answers to mysterious questions”, and “how to change your mind”. There’s a more detailed explanation of reading order and summaries of what topics various sequences cover on the above page, and you can read whichever ones seem most likely to be useful to you.
Dear Normal_Anomaly, I thank you for the kindness and tone of your answer. Could I upvote it I would. I’m aware of the existence of the sequences but it’s still not quite what I mean. The sheer size of them detracts a lot from their usefulness and there seems to be no organization.
What I mean was some kind of page where one could self or externally assess and then based on his shortcomings be directed to adequate pages.
So something like: To Win you must:
-Add mindware -Fix corrupted mindware -Fix cognitive miserliness
Then adequate assessment of the state of these elements and links based on this organization (so, adding mindware would link to probability theory, logic, the virtue of scholarship; fixing corrupted mindware would link to debiasing, dissolving the question; and so forth) [based on lukeprog’s “A cognitive Science of Rationality”].
This is just a model of how it could be, just a way of organizing it. Which is what appears to be missing, organization.
Cheers
It’s true that LessWrong could have more focus on catering to newcomers as opposed to catering to people who’ve been here for months; which is to be expected when most content (posts and wiki) are made by long-timers.
I guess the best approach for newcomers for now is just to show up and talk to people (like what you’re doing now!) - not as smoothly organized as having a formal system, but at least it’s a self-correcting process that adapts to the quirks and interests of people better than a pre-programmed self-assessment system could!