Politics as charity: that in terms of expected value, altruism is a reasonable motivator for voting (as opposed to common motivators like “wanting to be heard”).
That a significant number of people are productively working on philosophical problems relevant to our lives.
Lots of little sanity checks to keep in mind, like Conservation of Expected Evidence, i.e. that without evidence, your expectation of what your confidence will be after seeing evidence is equal to your prior confidence. (But see this comment on things you can expect from your beliefs.)
I can’t claim to be “converted to rationality” or any particular school of thought by LessWrong, because most of the ideas in the sequences were not new to me when I read them, but it was extremely impressive and relieving to see them all written down in one place, and they would have made a huge impact on me if I’d read them growing up!
Politics as charity: that in terms of expected value, altruism is a reasonable motivator for voting (as opposed to common motivators like “wanting to be heard”).
Yes, I was impressed by Carl’s posting as well—I look forward to seeing his followup postings.
I can’t claim to be “converted to rationality” or any particular school of thought by LessWrong, because most of the ideas in the sequences were not new to me when I read them, but it was extremely impressive and relieving to see them all written down in one place, and they would have made a huge impact on me if I’d read them growing up!
Very nice post! My personal favorite things I’ve learned about from reading LessWrong:
Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, a book by Judea Pearl written in 2000 which is frequently referenced by the SIAI and on LessWrong.
Spaced Repetition Software.
Politics as charity: that in terms of expected value, altruism is a reasonable motivator for voting (as opposed to common motivators like “wanting to be heard”).
That a significant number of people are productively working on philosophical problems relevant to our lives.
Lots of little sanity checks to keep in mind, like Conservation of Expected Evidence, i.e. that without evidence, your expectation of what your confidence will be after seeing evidence is equal to your prior confidence. (But see this comment on things you can expect from your beliefs.)
I can’t claim to be “converted to rationality” or any particular school of thought by LessWrong, because most of the ideas in the sequences were not new to me when I read them, but it was extremely impressive and relieving to see them all written down in one place, and they would have made a huge impact on me if I’d read them growing up!
Yes, I was impressed by Carl’s posting as well—I look forward to seeing his followup postings.
Same here :-).
Here’s the followup.