On the unofficial 2022 LessWrong Census, I asked what people thought the most important lesson of rationality was. (The actual text of the question was “If you pick one lesson of rationality that everyone in the world would magically and suddenly understand, what lesson do you pick?”) The top answers were Conservation of Expected Evidence, Making Beliefs Pay Rent, and Belief In Belief. Conservation of Expected Evidence I personally recall as mindblowing when I first read it and reflected on it.
The Litany of Gendlin and the Litany of Tarski combine in my own head to be a really useful countercharm against ugh fields around finding out information about unpleasant things, though I’m not entirely sure that’s the direction The Meditation on Curiosity was supposed to take me. That plus the offhand line that if you know what you’ll think later you aught to think it now has sped up a lot of decisions that I otherwise would have agonized over in a manner that was, in hindsight, mostly wasted motion. Those aren’t really a single post though.
For a single post with obvious implications on how to act which is not sufficient on its own to start acting like that, Hero Licensing might be my favourite pick. I don’t know how to spark the skills involved in just trying things other than being a Mysterious Old Wizarding at them and hoping something catches but it seems important. The Importance of Saying Oops seems a lot more tractable as something to turn into an exercise though.
On the unofficial 2022 LessWrong Census, I asked what people thought the most important lesson of rationality was. (The actual text of the question was “If you pick one lesson of rationality that everyone in the world would magically and suddenly understand, what lesson do you pick?”) The top answers were Conservation of Expected Evidence, Making Beliefs Pay Rent, and Belief In Belief. Conservation of Expected Evidence I personally recall as mindblowing when I first read it and reflected on it.
The Litany of Gendlin and the Litany of Tarski combine in my own head to be a really useful countercharm against ugh fields around finding out information about unpleasant things, though I’m not entirely sure that’s the direction The Meditation on Curiosity was supposed to take me. That plus the offhand line that if you know what you’ll think later you aught to think it now has sped up a lot of decisions that I otherwise would have agonized over in a manner that was, in hindsight, mostly wasted motion. Those aren’t really a single post though.
For a single post with obvious implications on how to act which is not sufficient on its own to start acting like that, Hero Licensing might be my favourite pick. I don’t know how to spark the skills involved in just trying things other than being a Mysterious Old Wizarding at them and hoping something catches but it seems important. The Importance of Saying Oops seems a lot more tractable as something to turn into an exercise though.