Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
All you've done is dump a load of links on me. I could just as well list a bunch of books and say 'come back to me'.
For what it's worth, I skimmed Yudkowsky; not much there to get excited about, frankly -- in terms of 'rationalism', that is. Better you - having internalised Yudkowsky and the rest - provide a succinct, compelling statement of what you're on about. (You know, like you encourage GB to do).
I'll come back to this when I am not so tired...
But what I asked GB to do was post something actually comprehensible.
I hope you will agree that my posts (whether you agree with them or not) make
their meaning clear.
And are (I hope) formatted in such a way as to make reading them easy.
My problem with GB is that he posts gibberish or fortune cookie 'wisdom'.
As for just dumping links on you...
Well first off....
I am rather tired and long detailed well thought out posts take effort and
time I frankly either don't have or feel like right now, Especially when someone else has
created A whole string of well thought out easy bite size blog posts that explain the
ideas I want to explain to you.
And secondly, not all ideas are simple enough that you can effectively boil them down
to a simple bumper-sticker.
The most succinct definition of rationality is probably this...
1. Epistemic rationality: believing, and updating on evidence, so as to systematically improve the
correspondence between your map and the territory. The art of obtaining beliefs that correspond
to reality as closely as possible. This correspondence is commonly termed "truth" or "accuracy",
and we're happy to call it that.
2. Instrumental rationality: achieving your values. Not necessarily "your values" in the sense of being
selfish values or unshared values: "your values" means anything you care about. The art of choosing
actions that steer the future toward outcomes ranked higher in your preferences.
On LW we sometimes refer to this as "winning".
However that does absolutely nothing to explain HOW you go about doing that.
And the whole point of the Less Wrong site is that it's not simple.
There is no quick one size fits all rationality algorithm that you can just learn by rote and then apply.
The problem being that our brains are not wired to do rationality, we jump to conclusions and take short-cuts
often completely unconsciously that give us wrong or misleading answers and just listing all the different biases
let alone how to combat them would take the entire post.
Combating them takes an entire ever expanding website.
And secondly...
Giving you a few links is entirely not the same as dumping books on you for several reasons.
1, books tend to cost money, and the contents of the links are free.
2, books take time to acquire, the links are instant.
3, books tend to be quite long, the links are to bite-sized blogs.
4, books tend to be broader and less narrowly focused, the links are to blogs that are right on point.
The major issues with 'dumping links' is usually people responding with posts that are just links to some
youtube video or website with no reference as to whether the person agrees with any or all the content
or what it is, or why it's relevant.
I hope I haven't done that.
Those were links to specific articles detailing succinctly what I wanted to say.
How is it any harder to read those blogs I linked than to read posts written by me saying the same thing?
And knowing me probably they would be less succinctly and in more words.