I’m currently in Fake beliefs and, as you correctly said, more than half the times I don’t really get them. I think part of this is because EY wrote using such big words and complicated grammar that confuse non-native speakers.
However, I’m not a fan of jumping ships and will try to wade through R:A-Z before committing to another sequence. You convinced me! :) That said, HPMOR seems to be very appealing to beginners since it combine something new & strange (rationality) with something most of us are familiar with already (wizardry, lol).
I feel like I “got it” on a lot more than half of the essays. I’m a native speaker though. And both an American and enough of a nerd to get most of EY’s cultural references. Maybe slogging through is not the best approach for you. If a cursory search of LessWrong’s wiki, Wikipedia, and Google aren’t enough to understand an unfamiliar reference, you can try one of LessWrong’s chatrooms. I think the Freenode one is probably still active, but I haven’t been following it lately. And you can ask more questions in the open threads or with new question posts here on LessWrong proper.
HPMOR’s main purpose was to get people interested in rationality in the first place, so you maybe read the sequences and get on board with the mission. You’re already interested, so maybe HPMOR is less important. But another major benefit is that it conveys the experience of thinking like a rationalist in a way the sequences don’t. Because you put yourself in the protagonist’s shoes. And yeah, it’s both entertaining and enlightening. But again there were certain chapters I had trouble following. It also starts out kind of slow, so don’t give up before chapter 10. You say you are not a native speaker. I don’t know your preferred language, but there are a number of translations of HPMOR, a podcast/audiobook, and machinima videos.
I’m currently in Fake beliefs and, as you correctly said, more than half the times I don’t really get them. I think part of this is because EY wrote using such big words and complicated grammar that confuse non-native speakers.
However, I’m not a fan of jumping ships and will try to wade through R:A-Z before committing to another sequence. You convinced me! :) That said, HPMOR seems to be very appealing to beginners since it combine something new & strange (rationality) with something most of us are familiar with already (wizardry, lol).
I feel like I “got it” on a lot more than half of the essays. I’m a native speaker though. And both an American and enough of a nerd to get most of EY’s cultural references. Maybe slogging through is not the best approach for you. If a cursory search of LessWrong’s wiki, Wikipedia, and Google aren’t enough to understand an unfamiliar reference, you can try one of LessWrong’s chatrooms. I think the Freenode one is probably still active, but I haven’t been following it lately. And you can ask more questions in the open threads or with new question posts here on LessWrong proper.
HPMOR’s main purpose was to get people interested in rationality in the first place, so you maybe read the sequences and get on board with the mission. You’re already interested, so maybe HPMOR is less important. But another major benefit is that it conveys the experience of thinking like a rationalist in a way the sequences don’t. Because you put yourself in the protagonist’s shoes. And yeah, it’s both entertaining and enlightening. But again there were certain chapters I had trouble following. It also starts out kind of slow, so don’t give up before chapter 10. You say you are not a native speaker. I don’t know your preferred language, but there are a number of translations of HPMOR, a podcast/audiobook, and machinima videos.