Sometimes I would get a flash of light through the fog, or at least a sense that there were other people on the same lonely quest. A bit of that sense sometimes drifted over USENET, an early precursor of today’s Internet fora.
It’s strange, I don’t feel the fog much in my life. I wonder if this a problem. It doesn’t seem like I should feel like “I and everyone around me basically know what’s going on”.
I can imagine certain people for whom talking to them would feel like a flash of light in the fog. I probably want to pursue talking to them.
my paternal grandfather gave me a book called “People In Quandaries”.
That’s an awesome name for a book. I want to write a book of “People In Quandaries” and how to get out of them. Just lots of short stories of people in various parts of life and civilization, and showing how better rationality can save them. I reckon that’d be really fun.
If nothing else, I hope this essay will leave you feeling grateful that you no longer have to do a decades-long bootstrapping process the way Eliezer and Nancy and I and others like us had to in the before times.
I remember being about 14, and walking home from school, with so many deep and philosophical questions about what the world was and how I related to it. That year I read The Sequences. I remember taking the same walk a year later, and realizing that I felt I had a pretty coherent worldview and had answered a lot of my fundamental questions. I had then a sense it was time to ‘get to work’.
I am deeply grateful that I got to read this then, and didn’t have to figure it out myself.
(Here are some of my thoughts, reading through.)
It’s strange, I don’t feel the fog much in my life. I wonder if this a problem. It doesn’t seem like I should feel like “I and everyone around me basically know what’s going on”.
I can imagine certain people for whom talking to them would feel like a flash of light in the fog. I probably want to pursue talking to them.
That’s an awesome name for a book. I want to write a book of “People In Quandaries” and how to get out of them. Just lots of short stories of people in various parts of life and civilization, and showing how better rationality can save them. I reckon that’d be really fun.
I remember being about 14, and walking home from school, with so many deep and philosophical questions about what the world was and how I related to it. That year I read The Sequences. I remember taking the same walk a year later, and realizing that I felt I had a pretty coherent worldview and had answered a lot of my fundamental questions. I had then a sense it was time to ‘get to work’.
I am deeply grateful that I got to read this then, and didn’t have to figure it out myself.