On the other hand, most Less Wrongers already know the basics of logic. That’s not to say that we don’t act extremely irrational much of the time, but just that going over the basics of logic again probably provides minimal benefit.
Logic is about the categories of true and false, Bayesianism is basically about the fact that 0 (false) and 1 (true) are not probabilities. It comes out of rejecting the “basics of logic” as Aristotle formulated them.
Going over the basics of reasoning is very useful because we aren’t really clear about what they are. That’s one of the core purposes of Lesswrong. It exists to explore how rationality actually works. Yes, frequently those discussions won’t produce knowledge that’s useful for daily life but if we can get more clear about how rationality works through discussing it in detail we can advance the field.
For Salsa Congresses there’s the saying: The beginners go to the intermediate classes, the intermediates take the advanced classes and the advances folks take the beginner classes to brush up their basics.
In Zen there’s the concept of the beginners mind, to constantly stay at the level where you think about basics.
Logic is about the categories of true and false, Bayesianism is basically about the fact that 0 (false) and 1 (true) are not probabilities. It comes out of rejecting the “basics of logic” as Aristotle formulated them.
Going over the basics of reasoning is very useful because we aren’t really clear about what they are. That’s one of the core purposes of Lesswrong. It exists to explore how rationality actually works. Yes, frequently those discussions won’t produce knowledge that’s useful for daily life but if we can get more clear about how rationality works through discussing it in detail we can advance the field.
For Salsa Congresses there’s the saying: The beginners go to the intermediate classes, the intermediates take the advanced classes and the advances folks take the beginner classes to brush up their basics.
In Zen there’s the concept of the beginners mind, to constantly stay at the level where you think about basics.