I suspect that the Sequences don’t seem so useful to you for the reason that Scott Alexander pointed out in his recent five-year Less Wrong retrospective. Having read the Sequences, people find upon reading them that the concepts seem obvious, though they recall thinking they were revelatory at the time. There’s something about learning an epistemological framework that makes it difficult to remember what it could have been like to think in any other terms. And yet, I did once argue about ways in which words were wrong, or fail to take into account the outside view, or waver between utilitarianism and deontology without even knowing those words. And I still suffer from scope insensitivity and the typical mind fallacy and a host of other issues.
The Sequences are for smart people. Rationality for not-as-smart people is: use contraception; quit smoking; astrology doesn’t work; Cosmo’s not a reliable source; don’t get into credit card debt for trivial things; try to be more mindful about your hedonic or status treadmill.
Scope insensitivity, utilitarianism vs. deontology, ect. are all good things to know, but they wouldn’t place in a list of the biggest mistakes smart people make
I suspect that the Sequences don’t seem so useful to you for the reason that Scott Alexander pointed out in his recent five-year Less Wrong retrospective. Having read the Sequences, people find upon reading them that the concepts seem obvious, though they recall thinking they were revelatory at the time. There’s something about learning an epistemological framework that makes it difficult to remember what it could have been like to think in any other terms. And yet, I did once argue about ways in which words were wrong, or fail to take into account the outside view, or waver between utilitarianism and deontology without even knowing those words. And I still suffer from scope insensitivity and the typical mind fallacy and a host of other issues.
The Sequences are for smart people. Rationality for not-as-smart people is: use contraception; quit smoking; astrology doesn’t work; Cosmo’s not a reliable source; don’t get into credit card debt for trivial things; try to be more mindful about your hedonic or status treadmill.
Scope insensitivity, utilitarianism vs. deontology, ect. are all good things to know, but they wouldn’t place in a list of the biggest mistakes smart people make