FWIW having read Goedel, Escher, Bach is the biggest common factor I’ve found among top-tier rationalists, much moreso than having read the heuristics and biases literature for example. E.g. Eliezer only read the heuristics and biases lit a long time after he’d already become Eliezer.
Adding to this, one of the things LWers are abnormally good at is going meta and switching between levels of abstraction without making type errors. Being able to distinguish levels of abstraction is clearly an important rationality skill, but we don’t talk about it much, perhaps because we are already above-average at doing it. GEB discusses this skill at length, so the book may be both a symptom and a cause of our ability to go meta.
Hofstadterian thinking also makes you a much more competent AGI programmer if you’re into that kinda thing. In fact Hofstadter’s team’s Copycat is an example. ETA: Apparently pre-optimization-enlightenment Eliezer agrees.
FWIW having read Goedel, Escher, Bach is the biggest common factor I’ve found among top-tier rationalists, much moreso than having read the heuristics and biases literature for example. E.g. Eliezer only read the heuristics and biases lit a long time after he’d already become Eliezer.
Adding to this, one of the things LWers are abnormally good at is going meta and switching between levels of abstraction without making type errors. Being able to distinguish levels of abstraction is clearly an important rationality skill, but we don’t talk about it much, perhaps because we are already above-average at doing it. GEB discusses this skill at length, so the book may be both a symptom and a cause of our ability to go meta.
Hofstadterian thinking also makes you a much more competent AGI programmer if you’re into that kinda thing. In fact Hofstadter’s team’s Copycat is an example. ETA: Apparently pre-optimization-enlightenment Eliezer agrees.
I KNEW I was cool for having read GEB.