List of most interesting ideas I encountered in my life, ranked
Bayesian thinking
It litterally was n°1 in my list, I was really happy to find this website, will not detail.Active ignorance/avoidance and selective attention/participation
Instead of thinking, commenting, or saying something is stupid/bad, ignore/block it and just talk about the other thing that is better. Because just by thinking about/mentionning the thing, you propagate it, starting in your memory and to a greater extent in the world. This is applicable to ideas, people, activities, etc.
Participating in something is accepting that that thing is worth participating in.
Paying (money, time, attention, action) is voting/supporting.Source Criticism
When reading information, take into account who created that information and what are their environment/interests/incentives.Memetic Evolution
Natural selection and evolution applied to ideas.Subjectivity of Value
Value of a thing is subjective. Loopy example is money: everyone wants money because everyone wants money.Life as negentropy
The definition of life is to locally reduce entropy/slow entropy/maximise possibilites while minimising energy consumption/will-to-power in Nietzsche’s words. And maybe reversing entropy.Identity as Action, Not Essence
Human identity is a consequence of doing/being, not doing/being is a consequence of identity. What you do defines who you are, not who you are defines what you do.When you die, people come at your burial and the next day, they go back to work.
Emotions are a deprecated way of making decision. Not intuition.
History of the entire world, I guess
Curious about other people’s list.
In no particular order, because interestingness is multi-dimensional and they are probably all to some degree on my personal interesting Pareto frontier:
We’re not as 3-dimensional as we think
Replacing binary questions with “under which circumstances”
Almost everything is causally linked, saying “A has no effect on B” is almost always wrong (unless you very deliberately search for A and B that fundamentally cannot be causally linked). If you ran a study with a bazillion subjects for long enough, practically anything you can measure would reach statistical significance
Many disagreements are just disagreements about labels (“LLMs are not truly intelligent”, “Free will does not exist”) and can be easily resolved / worked around once you realize this (see also)
Selection biases of all kind
Intentionality bias, it’s easy to explain human behavior with supposed intentions, but there is much more randomness and ignorance everywhere than we think
Extrapolations tend to work locally, but extrapolating further into the future very often gets things wrong; kind of obvious, applies to e.g. resource shortages (“we’ll run out of X and then there won’t be any X anymore!”), but also Covid (I kind of assumed Covid cases would just exponentially climb until everything went to shit, and forgot to take into account that people would get afraid and change their behavior on a societal scale, at least somewhat, and politicians would eventually do things, even if later than I would), and somewhat AI (we likely won’t just “suddenly” end up with a flawless superintelligence)
“If only I had more time/money/whatever” style thinking is often misguided, as often when people say/think this, the sentence continues with “then I could spend that time/money/whatever in other/more ways than currently”, meaning as soon as you get more of X, you would immediately want to spend it, so you’ll never sustainably end up in a state of “more X”. So better get used to X being limited and having to make trade-offs and decisions on how to use that limited resource rather than daydreaming about a hypothetical world of “more X”. (This does not mean you shouldn’t think about ways to increase X, but you should probably distance yourself from thinking about a world in which X is not limited)
Taleb’s Extremistan vs Mediocristan model
+1 to Minimalism that lsusr already mentioned
The mindblowing weirdness of very high-dimensional spaces
Life is basically an ongoing coordination problem between your past/present/future selves
The realization that we’re not smart enough to be true consequentialists, i.e. consequentialism is somewhat self-defeating
The teleportation paradox, and thinking about a future world in which a) teleportation is just a necessity to be successful in society (and/or there is just social pressure, e.g. all your friends do it and you get excluded from doing cool things if you don’t join in) and b) anyone having teleported before having convincing memories of having gone through teleportation and coming out on the other side. In such a world, anyone with worries about teleportation would basically be screwed. Not sure if I should believe in any kind of continuity of consciousness, but that certainly feels like a thing. So I’d probably prefer not to be forced to give that up just because the societal trajectory happens to lead through ubiquitous teleportation.
+1 to Taleb’s Extremistan vs Mediocristan model
I’ll go in temporal order, though in contrast to Gordon’s comment, I believe the later ones are more interesting because I got better at asking the right questions.
1: Memetics
2: Bayesian thinking
3: Asking “what do you think you know and how do you think you know it?”
4: Algorithmic information theory—Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction, AIXI
5: The recursion, fixed-point, and parameter theorems
6: Deliberating on actions causes epistemic problems for prediction (unrealizability problems for 2,4)
Ranked in order of how interesting they were to me when I got interested in them, which means in approximately chronological order because the more ideas I knew the less surprising new ideas were (since they were in part predicted by earlier ideas that had been very interesting).
Cybernetics
Evolution
Game Theory
Developmental psychology
Dependent Origination
The Problem of the Criterion
Epistemics (Bayes, Knowing how/when to look things up)
Evolutionary Psychology of Emotion
Valuism (from Spencer Greenberg) for helping you better understand your values
SPIRE model of well-being (to have a wider understanding of how to build my well-being).
Model x Care x Understanding (to better interpret others action)
How to create good habits (Atomic Habits, Beeminder...)
Material reduction
Vipassana
Supply and Demand
Moral Hazard
Memetics
Minimalism