This week, I hung out with the LessWrong team while they talked to relatively new users. New users often had a vague intention to read Eliezer’s original Sequences, but were blocked on the size of the project. They thought the Sequences would only work in, well, sequence.
I just polled eight people (including me) who have read the Sequences whether they only work in sequence.
7 people said they work out of sequence (though 2 noted that it might be better to read a given sequence in order)
A typical sequence post has many links to other sequence posts. But these are mostly context and elaboration. The posts tend to work well standalone.
Here are three posts you might get started with:
Fake Explanations. The first post in the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence, described by Eliezer as “probably the most important core sequence in Less Wrong”.
Leave a Line of Retreat. Letting go of a belief that’s important to you is hard. Particularly if you think stuff you care about depends on it (e.g. if you think being good depends on moral realism, it could be hard to reexamine your belief in moral realism). This post describes the phenomenon, and gives advice for dealing with it.
The Hidden Complexity of Wishes. Imagine you had a device that could cause any concrete statement to become true. This post explores the difficulties you would have getting what you want with the device.
(Thanks to various people at the Lightcone offices for beta reading this post, particularly Ben Pace).
PSA: The Sequences don’t need to be read in sequence
This week, I hung out with the LessWrong team while they talked to relatively new users. New users often had a vague intention to read Eliezer’s original Sequences, but were blocked on the size of the project. They thought the Sequences would only work in, well, sequence.
I just polled eight people (including me) who have read the Sequences whether they only work in sequence.
7 people said they work out of sequence (though 2 noted that it might be better to read a given sequence in order)
1 person said they thought it was necessary to read any given sequence in order, but it didn’t matter if you read one sequence (e.g. A Human’s Guide to Words) before or after another (e.g. Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions)
A typical sequence post has many links to other sequence posts. But these are mostly context and elaboration. The posts tend to work well standalone.
Here are three posts you might get started with:
Fake Explanations. The first post in the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence, described by Eliezer as “probably the most important core sequence in Less Wrong”.
Leave a Line of Retreat. Letting go of a belief that’s important to you is hard. Particularly if you think stuff you care about depends on it (e.g. if you think being good depends on moral realism, it could be hard to reexamine your belief in moral realism). This post describes the phenomenon, and gives advice for dealing with it.
The Hidden Complexity of Wishes. Imagine you had a device that could cause any concrete statement to become true. This post explores the difficulties you would have getting what you want with the device.
(Thanks to various people at the Lightcone offices for beta reading this post, particularly Ben Pace).