Expecting Short Inferential Distances (I think maybe this one and Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People should maybe be the first parts of the Sequences everybody reads.)
What are the ones you would include if you were including repeats? (Viliam_Bur is asking for an absolute top 20, not several independent lists of good posts.)
Who exactly is “Simple Truth” aimed at? As far as I can tell, the message is that worrying about the cashing out the meaning of truth is not worth the effort in ordinary circumstances. That’s true, but it is a fully generalizable counter-argument to studying anything—worrying about the meaning of “quantum configuration” has no practical payoff, even though building things like computers relies on studying those sorts of things. Likewise, the meaning of truth is really hard if you actually examine it.
Put differently, religious people don’t disagree with us about truth means, they disagree about what is actually true. And they are wrong, for the reasons detailed in “Making Beliefs Pay Rent.” In short, no real person is analogous to Mark, so no real person’s philosophical positions are contradicted by the story.
To repeat, the story doesn’t solve any real questions about truth, it simply says they are practically [Edit] unimportant (which is true, but makes the story itself pretty unhelpful),
For me the message of “Simple Truth” was that the intelligence should not be used to defeat itself. To be right, even if you can’t define it to philosopher’s satisfaction, is better than to be wrong, even if you can find some smart words to support that. The truth business is not about words (that’s signalling business), but when you are right, nature rewards you, and when you are wrong, nature punishes you. (Although among humans, speaking truth can cause you a lot of trouble.) At the same time it explains the origins of our ability to understand truth—we have this ability because having it was an evolutionary advantage.
Or maybe I just like that the annoying wise-ass guy dies in the end.
This is not about religious people, who disagree about what is actually true, as you said. This is about people who try to do “philosophy” by inventing more complex ways to sound stupid… errr… profound, and perhaps they even sometimes succeed to convince themselves. People who say things like “there is no truth”, because for anything you say they can generate a long sequence of words that you just don’t have time to analyze and debunk (and even if you did, they would just use a fraction of that time to generate a new sequence of words). If you didn’t meet such people, consider yourself lucky, but I know people who can role-play Mark and thus ruin any chance of a rational discussion, and for a non-x-rational listener it often seems like their arguments are rather important and deep, and should be addressed seriously.
Anyway, the “Simple Truth” is kinda long, which I enjoyed, but other people may hate; so it is probably no harm in removing it, as long as “Making Beliefs Pay Rent” and “Something to Protect” stays in the list.
the intelligence should not be used to defeat itself
I agree with this feeling, but “Do the impossible” or one of the nearby posts raises this point more explicitly and more effectively.
The problem with “Simple Truth” is that—beyond the message I highlighted - the text is too open ended. Mirror-like, the story contains whatever philosophical positions the reader wishes to see in it.
I know people who can role-play Mark
There are two possible kinds of people who can do this. (1) People with useful but complicated theories that you happen not to understand, and (2) stupid people—who might be poorly parroting a useful theory. Please don’t let the (negative) halo effect of the second type infect your view of the first type of people.
Generally, your objection pattern matches with the argument that law is too complicated. Respectfully, I disagree.
I think you mean “practically unimportant” in your last sentence.
I’ve always understood the purpose of that article to be to pre-emptively foreclose objections of the form “but being rational is irrelevant, because you can’t really know what’s true” by declaring them rhetorically out-of-bounds.
I’ve always taken the objection you mentioned as invoking the problem of reliability of the sense (i.e. Cartesian skepticism), not the meaningfulness of truth. In the story, Mark is no Cartesian skeptic (of course, it’s hard to tell, because Mark is a terribly confused person)
I think skeptical objections to Bayesian reasoning are like questions about the origin of life directed at evolutionary theory. The criticisms aren’t exactly wrong—it’s just that the theory targeted by the criticism is not trying to provide an answer on that issue.
OK, my first shot, probably just to encourage people to do better than this:
The Simple Truth (humans love storytelling)
Why truth? And… (the motivation for what we do)
What Do We Mean By “Rationality”?
An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem (medical examples = serious business)
Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) (important point)
The Virtue of Narrowness (important point)
Guessing the Teacher’s Password (people will agree with this)
Universal Fire
Universal Law
Mind Projection Fallacy
Politics is the Mind-Killer
Applause Lights (an example of mindkilling)
Affective Death Spirals
Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence (important point)
Uncritical Supercriticality (mindkilling in extreme)
Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People (important point)
Something to Protect (our connection to reality)
Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate (community building)
Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism (community protecting)
3 Levels of Rationality Verification
Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories (instrumental value of LW)
How to Be Happy (something you can try at home)
EDIT: Oops, it was more than 20, I was in a hurry. The more important (IMHO) articles are now marked by a bold font, with explanation added.
Seems to me like you need Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions in there. That’s far and beyond one of my favorites.
(You can single-space your posts by putting two spaces at the end of each line. Do this, for it will save scrolltime.)
I’m going to avoid repeating ones on your list, entirely because I think repetition is bad. Here I go:
Twelve Virtues of Rationality (my favorite thing Eliezer has ever written bar none)
A Fable of Science and Politics
Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism
Absense of Evidence Is Evidence of Absense
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant
The Proper Use of Humility
Expecting Short Inferential Distances (I think maybe this one and Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People should maybe be the first parts of the Sequences everybody reads.)
Truly Part of You
Newcomb’s Problem and Regret of Rationality
Three Dialogues on Identity (another favorite of mine)
The 5-second Level
Cached Selves
Learned Blankness
Why You’re Stuck in a Narrative
Your Inner Google
Errors vs. Bugs and the End of Stupidity
Yes, a Blog (more of an appetizer, I guess)
A Parable on Obsolete Ideologies
The trouble with picking stand-alone posts is that Eliezer’s sequences of posts are so much better.
What are the ones you would include if you were including repeats? (Viliam_Bur is asking for an absolute top 20, not several independent lists of good posts.)
Who exactly is “Simple Truth” aimed at? As far as I can tell, the message is that worrying about the cashing out the meaning of truth is not worth the effort in ordinary circumstances. That’s true, but it is a fully generalizable counter-argument to studying anything—worrying about the meaning of “quantum configuration” has no practical payoff, even though building things like computers relies on studying those sorts of things. Likewise, the meaning of truth is really hard if you actually examine it.
Put differently, religious people don’t disagree with us about truth means, they disagree about what is actually true. And they are wrong, for the reasons detailed in “Making Beliefs Pay Rent.” In short, no real person is analogous to Mark, so no real person’s philosophical positions are contradicted by the story.
To repeat, the story doesn’t solve any real questions about truth, it simply says they are practically [Edit] unimportant (which is true, but makes the story itself pretty unhelpful),
For me the message of “Simple Truth” was that the intelligence should not be used to defeat itself. To be right, even if you can’t define it to philosopher’s satisfaction, is better than to be wrong, even if you can find some smart words to support that. The truth business is not about words (that’s signalling business), but when you are right, nature rewards you, and when you are wrong, nature punishes you. (Although among humans, speaking truth can cause you a lot of trouble.) At the same time it explains the origins of our ability to understand truth—we have this ability because having it was an evolutionary advantage.
Or maybe I just like that the annoying wise-ass guy dies in the end.
This is not about religious people, who disagree about what is actually true, as you said. This is about people who try to do “philosophy” by inventing more complex ways to sound stupid… errr… profound, and perhaps they even sometimes succeed to convince themselves. People who say things like “there is no truth”, because for anything you say they can generate a long sequence of words that you just don’t have time to analyze and debunk (and even if you did, they would just use a fraction of that time to generate a new sequence of words). If you didn’t meet such people, consider yourself lucky, but I know people who can role-play Mark and thus ruin any chance of a rational discussion, and for a non-x-rational listener it often seems like their arguments are rather important and deep, and should be addressed seriously.
Anyway, the “Simple Truth” is kinda long, which I enjoyed, but other people may hate; so it is probably no harm in removing it, as long as “Making Beliefs Pay Rent” and “Something to Protect” stays in the list.
I agree with this feeling, but “Do the impossible” or one of the nearby posts raises this point more explicitly and more effectively.
The problem with “Simple Truth” is that—beyond the message I highlighted - the text is too open ended. Mirror-like, the story contains whatever philosophical positions the reader wishes to see in it.
There are two possible kinds of people who can do this. (1) People with useful but complicated theories that you happen not to understand, and (2) stupid people—who might be poorly parroting a useful theory. Please don’t let the (negative) halo effect of the second type infect your view of the first type of people.
Generally, your objection pattern matches with the argument that law is too complicated. Respectfully, I disagree.
I think you mean “practically unimportant” in your last sentence.
I’ve always understood the purpose of that article to be to pre-emptively foreclose objections of the form “but being rational is irrelevant, because you can’t really know what’s true” by declaring them rhetorically out-of-bounds.
Indeed a typo, thanks.
I’ve always taken the objection you mentioned as invoking the problem of reliability of the sense (i.e. Cartesian skepticism), not the meaningfulness of truth. In the story, Mark is no Cartesian skeptic (of course, it’s hard to tell, because Mark is a terribly confused person)
I think skeptical objections to Bayesian reasoning are like questions about the origin of life directed at evolutionary theory. The criticisms aren’t exactly wrong—it’s just that the theory targeted by the criticism is not trying to provide an answer on that issue.
I’d add something like Keep your identity small, Beware Identity.