To be completely honest, I wasn’t going on a strict definition of the term rationalist; frankly I consider the term kind of flawed anyway. But I don’t have a better replacement in mind. For me it means being interested in being rational, being interested in how the mind works, being interested in cognitive biases, Bayes’ rule, probability, statistics, logical fallacies, and scientific self-improvement.
I selected the sources starting with lesswrong and overcoming bias, then taking suggestions from people, doing some rudimentary graph analysis, manually adding blogs of authors in related fields, watching what sources I selected linked to themselves.
I tried to include sources that were readable but not gimmicky (e.g. top 7 secret tips to supercharge your goals!!!). Sometimes sources vary outside this interval, and I don’t have any filtration sophisticated enough to handle this.
I selected against sources that posted too frequently, anything political, anything that seemed angry or upbraiding or read like a manifesto. I included some sources which include these but against which I was able to filter out the political etc. posts easily. The rudimentary methods I used to filter topics doesn’t work perfectly, though.
I tried to include a few sources from less closely related subjects that were high quality and don’t seem to post that frequently. For instance, I included only a couple skeptic blogs, but there are tons and tons of them out there and I feel that it’s a different niche that’s already addressed pretty well elsewhere. Some fields I avoided almost entirely like entrepreneurship or economics.
I tried to not let any one subject dominate the set of sources. I feel like I included too many psychology blogs, for example.
Very interesting, I suspect I will spend a lot of time reading this.
How are you defining rationalist for these purposes? How are you selecting the blogs?
To be completely honest, I wasn’t going on a strict definition of the term rationalist; frankly I consider the term kind of flawed anyway. But I don’t have a better replacement in mind. For me it means being interested in being rational, being interested in how the mind works, being interested in cognitive biases, Bayes’ rule, probability, statistics, logical fallacies, and scientific self-improvement.
I selected the sources starting with lesswrong and overcoming bias, then taking suggestions from people, doing some rudimentary graph analysis, manually adding blogs of authors in related fields, watching what sources I selected linked to themselves.
I tried to include sources that were readable but not gimmicky (e.g. top 7 secret tips to supercharge your goals!!!). Sometimes sources vary outside this interval, and I don’t have any filtration sophisticated enough to handle this.
I selected against sources that posted too frequently, anything political, anything that seemed angry or upbraiding or read like a manifesto. I included some sources which include these but against which I was able to filter out the political etc. posts easily. The rudimentary methods I used to filter topics doesn’t work perfectly, though.
I tried to include a few sources from less closely related subjects that were high quality and don’t seem to post that frequently. For instance, I included only a couple skeptic blogs, but there are tons and tons of them out there and I feel that it’s a different niche that’s already addressed pretty well elsewhere. Some fields I avoided almost entirely like entrepreneurship or economics.
I tried to not let any one subject dominate the set of sources. I feel like I included too many psychology blogs, for example.