You list a number of great posts but the trouble with the sequences and most of LW is Death By Dependency. Nothing makes sense until everything else makes sense after which everything makes sense.
For that reason alone I think every post that links to related material every second sentence should be disqualified from the suggested reading list. People who tend to read in a depth-first manner (I think most people do?) will open the #1 post “What do we mean with Rationality” only to immediately start reading about “Your map and the territory” and will keep circling until they’ve read over 2 million words.
The core of the problem is that every post is entangled with every other post and this cannot be solved by creating a new post that itself refers to a 100 other posts. You cannot first explain that Curiosity is a virtue to people who are already curious by nature and then casually link to Newcombike problems (as is the case in reading list post #1) and not expect them to get stuck on Newcomb’s problem and TDT for the next week of their life.
Wikipedia has pages in English and pages in Simple English. Example: average and average simple. I think this is the approach we need to take. A separate Introduction to LessWrong sequence that can be read linearly and covers the subjects in a direct and accessible manner.
Feedback on the reading list itself:
“Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence” is probably one of the strongest posts in the MATMQ sequence and I think it should replace or at least precede Conservation of Expected Evidence (that post simply doesn’t make sense even to people who are familiar with basic statistics).
A link to Luke’s Reading Yudkowsky series would probably also be a good addition.
Edit: I do think the list as it is now is tremendously valuable because it’s very easy to miss a few of the great posts even if you think you’ve read about everything.
That has to be the biggest problem: The lack of teaching stuff on a concept by concept basis, and lack of building a pyramid of concepts from the ground up.
khanacademy is on the right track in this regards, they try to teach everything in the smallest concepts possible.
Khanacademy is excellent since it has a tree diagramm of subjects on which you can see how far you have come and what material you need to learn in order to understand the topics. The big problem with LessWrong’s sequences is that they are highly entangled in contrast to the highly hierarchic way people usually learn. The other problem is that the useful or better articles came later in the sequences so that one has to read older, less interesting ones in order to understand the vocabulary of the newer articles. Maybe the sequences should be rewritten with this in mind?
You list a number of great posts but the trouble with the sequences and most of LW is Death By Dependency. Nothing makes sense until everything else makes sense after which everything makes sense.
For that reason alone I think every post that links to related material every second sentence should be disqualified from the suggested reading list. People who tend to read in a depth-first manner (I think most people do?) will open the #1 post “What do we mean with Rationality” only to immediately start reading about “Your map and the territory” and will keep circling until they’ve read over 2 million words.
The core of the problem is that every post is entangled with every other post and this cannot be solved by creating a new post that itself refers to a 100 other posts. You cannot first explain that Curiosity is a virtue to people who are already curious by nature and then casually link to Newcombike problems (as is the case in reading list post #1) and not expect them to get stuck on Newcomb’s problem and TDT for the next week of their life.
Wikipedia has pages in English and pages in Simple English. Example: average and average simple. I think this is the approach we need to take. A separate Introduction to LessWrong sequence that can be read linearly and covers the subjects in a direct and accessible manner.
Feedback on the reading list itself:
“Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence” is probably one of the strongest posts in the MATMQ sequence and I think it should replace or at least precede Conservation of Expected Evidence (that post simply doesn’t make sense even to people who are familiar with basic statistics).
A link to Luke’s Reading Yudkowsky series would probably also be a good addition.
Edit: I do think the list as it is now is tremendously valuable because it’s very easy to miss a few of the great posts even if you think you’ve read about everything.
I could not agree more.
That has to be the biggest problem: The lack of teaching stuff on a concept by concept basis, and lack of building a pyramid of concepts from the ground up.
khanacademy is on the right track in this regards, they try to teach everything in the smallest concepts possible.
Khanacademy is excellent since it has a tree diagramm of subjects on which you can see how far you have come and what material you need to learn in order to understand the topics. The big problem with LessWrong’s sequences is that they are highly entangled in contrast to the highly hierarchic way people usually learn. The other problem is that the useful or better articles came later in the sequences so that one has to read older, less interesting ones in order to understand the vocabulary of the newer articles. Maybe the sequences should be rewritten with this in mind?