The Less Wrong Sequences

[Jaime_Astorga]

This is one of the most interesting websites I've ever seen in my life. Less Wrong, a blog about "human rationality - the art of thinking", covers many different topics such as science, economics, empiricism, fiction, sociology, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies. These posts have been organized into cohesive "sequences", which, when read, provide an in-depth discussion of a given subject. No matter what else, the sequences always contain interesting insights, and, if you read them, even if you don't agree with everything stated, you are sure to learn several new things and think new thoughts you wouldn't have considered otherwise. And, of course, for you guys over at MobileRead, it just wouldn't do not to mention that they are available in .epub format for ease of conversion and transfer to a reader. Seriously guys, if you have ever wanted to do some productive non-fiction reading in your off time, this is it.

In order that you may ascertain whether the subject matter and writing styles are to your liking before you commit to visiting the site, I will post some excerpts for your perusal. First, here's one from A Fable of Science and Politics, which is part of Politics is the Mind-Killer, a subsequence of the How to Actually Change Your Mind sequence.

In the time of the Roman Empire, civic life was divided between the Blue and Green factions. The Blues and the Greens murdered each other in single combats, in ambushes, in group battles, in riots. Procopius said of the warring factions: "So there grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship, and the case is the same even though those who differ with respect to these colors be brothers or any other kin." Edward Gibbon wrote: "The support of a faction became necessary to every candidate for civil or ecclesiastical honors."

Who were the Blues and the Greens? They were sports fans - the partisans of the blue and green chariot-racing teams.

Next, here's another excerpt from Mundane Magic, part of the subsequence Joy in the Merely Real, itself part of the sequence on Reductionism.

There's an old trick for combating dukkha where you make a list of things you're grateful for, like a roof over your head.

So why not make a list of abilities you have that would be amazingly cool if they were magic, or if only a few chosen individuals had them?

For example, suppose that instead of one eye, you possessed a magical second eye embedded in your forehead. And this second eye enabled you to see into the third dimension - so that you could somehow tell how far away things were - where an ordinary eye would see only a two-dimensional shadow of the true world. Only the possessors of this ability can accurately aim the legendary distance-weapons that kill at ranges far beyond a sword, or use to their fullest potential the shells of ultrafast machinery called "cars".

"Binocular vision" would be too light a term for this ability. We'll only appreciate it once it has a properly impressive name, like Mystic Eyes of Depth Perception.

And one more, this time from Belief in Belief, which is part of the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence.

Carl Sagan once told a parable of a man who comes to us and claims: "There is a dragon in my garage." Fascinating! We reply that we wish to see this dragon - let us set out at once for the garage! "But wait," the claimant says to us, "it is an invisible dragon."

Now as Sagan points out, this doesn't make the hypothesis unfalsifiable. Perhaps we go to the claimant's garage, and although we see no dragon, we hear heavy breathing from no visible source; footprints mysteriously appear on the ground; and instruments show that something in the garage is consuming oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide.

But now suppose that we say to the claimant, "Okay, we'll visit the garage and see if we can hear heavy breathing," and the claimant quickly says no, it's an inaudible dragon. We propose to measure carbon dioxide in the air, and the claimant says the dragon does not breathe. We propose to toss a bag of flour into the air to see if it outlines an invisible dragon, and the claimant immediately says, "The dragon is permeable to flour."

Carl Sagan used this parable to illustrate the classic moral that poor hypotheses need to do fast footwork to avoid falsification. But I tell this parable to make a different point: The claimant must have an accurate model of the situation somewhere in his mind, because he can anticipate, in advance, exactly which experimental results he'll need to excuse.

[Billi]

Thank you and karma for the link to this site!

[Jaime_Astorga]

Your welcome! I recommend you start with Map and Territory and then move onto Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions, since those are the two most "basic" sequences and are pre-requisites for a lot of the other stuff.