I’ve been interested in how to think well since early childhood. When I was about ten, I read a book about cybernetics. (This was in the Oligocene, when “cybernetics” had only recently gone extinct.) It gave simple introductions to probability theory, game theory, information theory, boolean switching logic, control theory, and neural networks. This was definitely the coolest stuff ever.
I went on to MIT, and got an undergraduate degree in math, specializing in mathematical logic and the theory of computation—fields that grew out of philosophical investigations of rationality.
Then I did a PhD at the MIT AI Lab, continuing my interest in what thinking is. My work there seems to have been turned into a surrealistic novel by Ken Wilber, a woo-ish pop philosopher. Along the way, I studied a variety of other fields that give diverse insights into thinking, ranging from developmental psychology to ethnomethodology to existential phenomenology.
I became aware of LW gradually over the past few years, mainly through mentions by people I follow on Twitter. As a lurker, there’s a lot about the LW community I’ve loved. On the other hand, I think some fundamental, generally-accepted ideas here are limited and misleading. I began considering writing about that recently, and posted some musings about whether and how it might be useful to address these misconceptions. (This was perhaps ruder than it ought to have been.) It prompted a reply post from Yvain, and much discussion on both his site and mine.
I followed that up with a more constructive post on aspects of how to think well that LW generally overlooks. In comments on that post, several frequent LW contributors encouraged me to re-post that material here. I may yet do that!
For now, though, I’ve started a sequence of LW articles on the difference between uncertainty and probability. Missing this distinction seems to underlie many of the ways I find LW thinking limited. Currently my outline for the sequence has seven articles, covering technical explanations of this difference, with various illustrations; the consequences of overlooking the distinction; and ways of dealing with uncertainty when probability theory is unhelpful.
(Kaj Sotala has suggested that I ask for upvotes on this self-introduction, so I can accumulate enough karma to move the articles from Discussion to Main. I wouldn’t have thought to ask that myself, but he seems to know what he’s doing here! :-)
Hi!
I’ve been interested in how to think well since early childhood. When I was about ten, I read a book about cybernetics. (This was in the Oligocene, when “cybernetics” had only recently gone extinct.) It gave simple introductions to probability theory, game theory, information theory, boolean switching logic, control theory, and neural networks. This was definitely the coolest stuff ever.
I went on to MIT, and got an undergraduate degree in math, specializing in mathematical logic and the theory of computation—fields that grew out of philosophical investigations of rationality.
Then I did a PhD at the MIT AI Lab, continuing my interest in what thinking is. My work there seems to have been turned into a surrealistic novel by Ken Wilber, a woo-ish pop philosopher. Along the way, I studied a variety of other fields that give diverse insights into thinking, ranging from developmental psychology to ethnomethodology to existential phenomenology.
I became aware of LW gradually over the past few years, mainly through mentions by people I follow on Twitter. As a lurker, there’s a lot about the LW community I’ve loved. On the other hand, I think some fundamental, generally-accepted ideas here are limited and misleading. I began considering writing about that recently, and posted some musings about whether and how it might be useful to address these misconceptions. (This was perhaps ruder than it ought to have been.) It prompted a reply post from Yvain, and much discussion on both his site and mine.
I followed that up with a more constructive post on aspects of how to think well that LW generally overlooks. In comments on that post, several frequent LW contributors encouraged me to re-post that material here. I may yet do that!
For now, though, I’ve started a sequence of LW articles on the difference between uncertainty and probability. Missing this distinction seems to underlie many of the ways I find LW thinking limited. Currently my outline for the sequence has seven articles, covering technical explanations of this difference, with various illustrations; the consequences of overlooking the distinction; and ways of dealing with uncertainty when probability theory is unhelpful.
(Kaj Sotala has suggested that I ask for upvotes on this self-introduction, so I can accumulate enough karma to move the articles from Discussion to Main. I wouldn’t have thought to ask that myself, but he seems to know what he’s doing here! :-)
O&BTW, I also write about contemporary trends in Buddhism, on several web sites, including a serial, philosophical, tantric Buddhist vampire romance novel.