I enjoy them and recognize the brilliance in the writing abilities, but I find myself doing things like reading lists of biases over and over in order to improve my familiarity and eventually memorize them. I still want to finish the sequences because they’re so important to this culture, but what I have prioritized appears to be getting the most important information in as quickly as possible.
I wonder if the author would agree that that is the most important information. I suspect he would not. (So naturally if you learning goals are different to the teaching goals of the author then their material will not be optimized for your intentions.)
It seems to me that the problem is what intention one has when one begins learning and whether one can deal with accepting the fact that they’re biased, not how they go about learning them. Though, maybe Eliezer has put various protections in that get people questioning their intention and sells them on learning with the right intention. I would agree that if it did not occur to a person to use their knowledge of biases to look for their own mistakes, learning them could be really bad, but I do not think that learning a list of biases will all by itself turn me into an argument-wielding brain-dead zombie.
If it makes you feel any better to know this, I’ve been seeking a checklist of errors against which I can test my ideas.
I wonder if the author would agree that that is the most important information. I suspect he would not. (So naturally if you learning goals are different to the teaching goals of the author then their material will not be optimized for your intentions.)
It seems to me that the problem is what intention one has when one begins learning and whether one can deal with accepting the fact that they’re biased, not how they go about learning them. Though, maybe Eliezer has put various protections in that get people questioning their intention and sells them on learning with the right intention. I would agree that if it did not occur to a person to use their knowledge of biases to look for their own mistakes, learning them could be really bad, but I do not think that learning a list of biases will all by itself turn me into an argument-wielding brain-dead zombie.
If it makes you feel any better to know this, I’ve been seeking a checklist of errors against which I can test my ideas.