The epub and mobi links both lead to “page not found”.
Also having problems with the links within the PDF. They are blacked out though they still function as links. Same problem with the AI to Zombies ebook I think.
Otherwise very excited to read this!
Sumatra PDF 3.0 on Windows 8.1 x64. I believe the problem is the same one this user had with the AI to Zombies ebook.
I’ll be reading the epub personally (which works fine in Sumatra) on my Ipad so it doesn’t bother me, but I thought I would mention it as Sumatra is a relatively popular reader and if this ebook is produced by the same team as the rationality ebook then it seems to be a recurring problem.
Are they good quality for listening to?
I listen to audio books regularly and they are at the upper end in terms of quality.
Moreover, is the material they cover comprehensible?
Yes. Articles that don’t translate well into audio are not produced e.g. Intuitive Bayes Theorem is unavailable.
have you found the Less Wrong casts to be understandable sufficiently well for a first-time listener?
Yes.
I’d like to know in which order I should provide those articles that are available on Castify.
I don’t know what you mean here but you can contact Castify directly with your questions—http://castify.co/contact/new
I recently attended a 10 day intensive Vipassana meditation retreat. Would a write-up of the experience be something LWers are interested in as an article for discussion?
I had minimal to moderate experience in meditation before this but now feel much more comfortable with it. I can see potential rationality relevance through,
* Discipline
* Concentration
* Emotion and habit regulation
* Seeing reality as it is
If there is interest then I would appreciate it if someone is willing to look over a draft of the article for me as I haven’t written for LW before.
Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
So Bayes update on intellectual arguments, but not on your emotions when you consider them likely to change in the immediate future? That seems like a good virtue if one desires accurate beliefs.
I had a very similar thought to this post. So similar in fact that I went ahead and wrote a kind of user guide for each CFAR’s techniques (though it has changed a great deal even in the last 4 months since I finished writing). I also have never been to a CFAR workshop and drew on many of the same online sources that you have. It took about a month to compile of working in my spare time. My motivation for doing so was the cost of attending a workshop (financially and time costs) were simply too high for someone in my position overseas.
I’ve printed it and only use it personally. I’ve never shared it other than with one close friend. I’m concerned about you posting this now, for the same reasons that stopped me from sharing my compilation even though I could see a great deal of benefit in it.
My thoughts for not sharing it are,
CFAR has all of this material readily available likely in a much more comprehensive and accurate format. CFAR are altruists. Smart altruists. The lack of anything like this canon suggests that they don’t think having this publicly available is a good idea. Not yet anyway. Even the workbook handed out at the workshops isn’t available.
I highly value CFAR as an organisation. I want them to be highly funded and want as many people to attend their workshops as possible. It would upset me to learn that someone had read my compilation and not attended a workshop thinking they had gotten most of the value they could.
Rather than deferring to the judgment of the Smart Altruists and assuming that within their secret backroom discussions they’ve determined with logic, rigor, and a plethora of academic citations that it’s crucial to the mission of raising the sanity waterline to not release a comprehensive exposition of their body of rationality techniques, perhaps we need only consider your second point except in less reverential light.
Given the ease with which CFAR could publish all their material online it seems worth considering why they haven’t done so. If spreading rationality wide is indeed their goal, then why haven’t they picked this low hanging fruit yet? I’d rather not have to make any assumptions so if someone from CFAR is reading this perhaps they can answer that.
So much for the Internet-era model of “free information to be disseminated to all”. Without a deferential attitude toward the Great Rationalists of CFAR, Occam’s Razor suggests that perhaps they’re simply trying to keep the money flowing. Would it upset you if thousands of people without the resources or time to make it to a CFAR workshop had access to a self-study version of the CFAR curriculum?
Of course that would not upset me. If the CFAR curriculum remained forever available only to the few who attended their workshops that would be sad indeed. But CFAR Labs is currently working on new rationality sequences, and I don’t think the curriculum will be as inaccessible for much longer.
I want the world to be a more rational place. I want as many people as possible to have the opportunity to become more rational in the most effective way available. More than any other individual or group it seems to me that CFAR is best positioned to achieve that goal. Even if the reason is money—if that money goes towards increasing the speed at which effective rationality techniques are developed and spread worldwide then all the better.
Problems one and two (hard and imperfect) would suggest that people will get less value out of ScottL’s post than a workshop. OK, fine. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Scale ScottL’s post up through easy online access and the many, many people getting a smaller somewhat unreliable benefit turns into something very significant. But problem 3,
Having seen crappy, distorted versions of the CFAR curriculum (or having attempted to absorb it from text, and failed), a typical human would then be much, much less receptive to other, better explanations in the future.
We don’t want to poison the well, we don’t want to break the very thing we’re trying to protect, and as a member of a group with something that at least resembles expertise (if you don’t want to credit us as actual experts), I think that requires a lot more work on our end, first.
That’s reason enough to not release your own material. But specifically, do you think ScottL’s compilation above or sharing the guide I’ve written (if I was to post it here for anyone to use) has the same effect? Do you think our compilations will have a net negative effect on rationality?
Thus far, CFAR hasn’t had the cycles to spend time creating the (let’s say) 80-20 version of their content.
For my own part, I think this belongs in our near future.
Do you have an estimate on this? I won’t hold you to it, I’d just like to know what kind of time frame ‘near’ is.
I have large PR problems when talking about rationality with others unfamiliar with it, with the Straw Vulcan being the most common trap conversation will fall into.
Are there any guides out there in the vein of the EA Pitch Wiki that could help someone avoid these traps and portray rationality in a more positive light? If not, would it be worth creating one?
So far I’ve found, how rationality can make your life more awesome, rationality for curiosity sake, rationality as winning, PR problems and the contrary rationality isn’t all that great.
Revisiting past conversations I think this is exactly what has been happening. When I mention rationality, reason, logic it becomes a logic v. emotion discussion. I’ll taboo in future, thanks!
What exactly are you doing that you have PR problems?
Something like,
A: I’ve been reading a lot about rationality in the last year or two. It’s pretty great.
B: What’s that?
A: Explanation of instrumental + epistemic OR Biases a la Kahneman
B: Sounds dumb. I do that already.
A: I’ve found it great because X, Y, Z.
B: I think emotion is much more important than rationality. I don’t want to be a robot.
Are you simply relabeling normal conversations with friends as PR?
Yes. Sorry for the lack of clarity.
The problem isn’t simply clarity.
In this case it is. I believe I have been less than clear again.
The frame of mind of treating a conversation with your friends as PR is not useful for getting your friends to trust you and positively respond to what you are saying.
Agreed—but I’ve never done that. The conversations are ordinary in that I share rationality in the same way I would share a book or movie I’ve enjoyed. It is “I enjoy X, you should try it I bet you would enjoy it too” as opposed to, “I want to spread X and my friends are good targets for that.” I literally meant I relabeled an ordinary conversation as PR, not that I was in the spread rationality mindset. My brain did a thing where,
‘I’m having trouble sharing rationality with friends in a way that doesn’t happen with my other interests. I bet other rationalists have similar problems. I wonder if there is any PR material on LW that might help with this.’
… and boom my brain labels it as a PR problem. I’m trying to not get caught up in the words here, do you follow my meaning?
Your recommendations on talking about the value rationality brings me look good. Thank you for them.
It’s unlikely that someone is going to say something that will take away your pain. Death sucks. Losing someone you love sucks, and sadness is a normal reaction to that. There are emotionally healthy ways to deal with grief. Give yourself more self-care than you think you need throughout this process to counter the planning fallacy and better to err on the side of too much than too little.
If you do find yourself depressed, seeking professional help is not a sign of weakness and I would encourage you to seek it out. Summoning motivation can be an impossible effort when you are depressed and sometimes someone outside your un-motivated brain is the best thing to stop you from falling down an emotional spiral. If money or something else prevents you from doing that, there are other things you can try here and some more here.
I have taken the survey.
Until LessWrong 2.0 comes out, this is how I’ve been staying in touch with the Rationalist Diaspora. It took about an hour to set up and I can now see almost everything in the one place.
I’ve been using an RSS reader (I use feedly) to collate RSS feeds from these lists,
Rationist Blogs,
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/List_of_Blogs
https://www.reddit.com/r/RationalistDiaspora/
Effective Altruist Blogs,
http://www.stafforini.com/blog/effective-altruism-blogs/
Rationalist Tumblers,
http://yxoque.tumblr.com/RationalistMasterlist
And using this twitter to RSS tool for these LessWrong Twitters,
http://lesswrong.com/lw/d92/less_wrong_on_twitter/
This system is unsatisfying in a number of ways the two most obvious to me being 1) I don’t know of any way to integrate the Rationalists on Facebook into this system and 2) Upvotes from places that use them like LW or r/rational aren’t displayed. Nevertheless it is still much simpler for me to be notified of new material. If anyone has suggestions on improvements or wants to share how they follow the Diaspora that’d be most welcome.
If you just wanted blogs (i.e. no twitter+tumblr) the following are blogs I personally like that post frequently in rough order of how useful/insightful I have found them,
There are a few that are very infrequent but very good when they do post,
CGP Grey follows a cycle that repeats → (40 min work − 7 min break − 40 min work − 20 min break). I think he mentions it in here somewhere but I don’t know the exact time. It seems probable that the most appropriate length and cycle for an individual should be based on their attention span and recovery.
...it is valuable to have an example of somebody who reliably executes on his the philosophy of “Decide to do it, then do it.” If you find that you didn’t do it, then you didn’t truly decide to do it. In any case, your own choice or lack thereof is the only factor. “Discipline is freedom.” If you adopt this habit as your reality, it become true.
It’s possible I’m getting to confused with the language here but I’ve struggled to apply this advice in my own life. I’ll decide that I’m not going to snack at work anymore and then find myself snacking anyway once the time comes. It seems to reflect a naivete in regards to how willpower and habits work.
It sounds good and I’ve listened to 4 episodes now and Jocko doesn’t seem to elaborate on how exactly this process is supposed to work. What is the difference between deciding and truly deciding? What is the habit of ‘discipline is freedom’ and how does one adopt it as their reality?
I come away from the podcast inspired for a few hours but with no lasting change.
So,
Make the decision and strongly commit to being a mentally strong person
Continuously monitor your actions to ensure they are the actions of a mentally strong person
Maintain this (for weeks/months/years?) until a new self-identity is formed.
If I’ve misrepresented something point it out, but this looks to me like a recipe for failure. It’s missing fundamental parts of the human experience. People most often fail at their goals because of conflicting short and long term desires, forgetfulness and existing habits. Jocko doesn’t adequately take that into account. Making a decision is useful—you start preparing for the new challenge, (e.g. If I’m going to wake up at 5AM I better get breakfast ready the night before...) and there’ll be some self consistency effect with the newly formed intention. There’s two obvious problems,
a) It’s massively mentally energy intensive. It’s hard to choose the kale over the donut or work over reddit. Temptations don’t disappear after you’ve decided not to pursue them. You have to decide over and over again throughout the day not to chase them. Decision fatigue is a thing.
b) Humans forget. Anyone that has done any meditation will be familiar with the experience of not being able to sustain attention on an object for more than a few moments despite the most earnest effort. Even if we didn’t have all the other things we need to think about every day to occupy our minds, maintaining consistent attention is an impossible goal.
Jocko’s framing that discipline is a decision represents an incremental improvement over Nike’s ‘Just do It’.
For those of us that have already purchased some podcast sequences from Castify,
How much of this audiobook will double up (in terms of both content and new voice acting)?
Will currently unavailable individual sequences be available for purchase separately at some stage?