The sequences are pretty long, and even the Highlights of the Sequences and the CFAR Handbook are pretty long, even though they’re the next best thing. Much too long for me to recommend to the busy people in my life so they can try out rationality for the first time.
Akash made an effort to heavily trim down the Highlights of the Sequences, but too much was lost without the evocative examples.
What I’m wondering is: what is there here on Lesswrong, and elsewhere, that amps up someone’s intelligence/rationality as much as possible, but is short enough that nobody looks at it and thinks “I’m too busy/tired for this”? News articles seem optimized for this, they seem to gravitate towards <1000 and there’s some pretty strong market optimization pressures there. I’ve heard some good things about Scott Alexander’s blog.
If provably increasing intelligence/rationality is too much to ask, then what affected you the most, what resulted in enduring, net positive change, such that after reading it, you had permanently diverged from the kind of person you were before?
I don’t think there’s a shortcut for finding a particular blogpost that’s relevant to a particular person. People’s reasoning process lumpy. Different people are in need of different insights. The mechanism by which the Sequences improve reasoning is by
a) filling in a bunch of individual concepts people might be missing (but where any given person isn’t necessarily missing all of them. Of 100 concepts, maybe they’re missing maybe 35, and sort of half-understood another 50 but didn’t realize all the implications). But which 35 missing ideas varies from person to person.
b) connecting a bunch of ideas together into a worldview more useful than the sum of it’s parts.
The first one requires you to have some knowledge of what would actually be helpful to an individual friend. The second one really does just require reading a lot, and being generally interested.
So if you only have a couple blogposts to hook someone with, you should be more optimizing for peaking their interest and reading more, if they’re the sort of person who wants to read more.
I do think… provably increasing intelligence rationality is just way out of scope for what any of these blogposts can do.
(Incidentally, if you’re the guy who’s been posting the “CFAR handbook” doubles your intelligence on Dank EA Memes, um, that’s a pretty confused, harmful concept to be promoting and I do think you should, like, stop)
It’s a book but possibly Gary Drescher’s [Good and Real](https://www.amazon.com/Good-Real-Demystifying-Paradoxes-Physics-ebook/dp/B08N4M8733). It’s 364 pages or so and has been called [practically Less Wrong in book form](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wfJebLTPGYaK3Gr8W/recommended-reading-for-new-rationalists?commentId=2B5NKt6j76vcf72Rv).
If you have some of the LessWrong books, I would recommend those. They are small little books that you can easily lend out. That’s what I’ve thought of doing before.
Really, starting is the hard part. Once I saw the value I was getting out of the sequences and other essays, I wanted to read more. So share a single essay, or lend a small book. Start small, and then if you are getting value out of it, continue.
You don’t have to commit to reading the whole Sequences before you start. Just start with one essay from the highlights, when you feel like it. They’re not super long. The enduring, net positive change that you are looking for cannot be shortcut. After all, Wisdom Cannot Be Unzipped.
Think of the sequences as a full course on rationality. You don’t introduce your friend who doesn’t know calculus into math by showing them the whole textbook and telling them they should read it. You show them a little problem. And demonstrate that the tools you learned in calculus help you solve that problem. Do the same with rationality.
The art must have an end other than itself or it collapses into infinite recursion. Have a problem in mind when you read the sequences, try and see what will help you solve it. Having a problem gives you a reason to apply it, and can motivate you into learning more. Have some fun while you’re at it! This stuff is cool!
I know I set myself up for this by sounding like the classic “I’m not asking for me, I’m asking for a friend” thing, but I actually am asking for a friend. Specifically, I want to make and print my own compilation of high-impact material, which I personally curate such that it optimizes to makes people butterfly effect/diverge from their former self.
I’m asking for help because I need it to be net-positive, and because people here are more familiar with good stuff in all sorts of places.
If the Highlights are too long, then print off a single post from each section. If that’s too long, print off your top three. If that’s too long, print off one post.
Summarizing the post usually doesn’t help, as you’ve discovered. So I’m not really sure what else to tell you. You have a lot of curated options to choose from to start. The Highlights, the Best of LessWrong, the Curated Sequences, Codex. Find stuff you like, and print it off for your friend.
Or, alternatively, tell them about HPMOR. That’s how I introduced myself to the concepts in a fashion where the protagonist had need of them. So the techniques stuck with me.