a) The issue of learning to walk before running, though seemingly simple, is not. Reading originals, for instance is highly likely to displace the good meme grasping/producing potential you’d have if you never went through them. Recently this link about that was posted here, can’t find the post now: http://www.infiniteinjury.org/blog/2010/02/25/reading-originals/
I agree with the author, and after 4 years in a continental philosophy department, can assure you, there is no way the rational strategy for being rational is to go through the history of rationality. The added value of learning through historic order is greatly inferior to the value of time-saved, hindsight view analytical capacity towards ancient stuff that you get from reading only what is recent.
Not that I’m claiming the Sequences are moldy old stuff. Go through them, but speed up your pace whenever you can.
A final point on “a)”. Do not read what is too recent (give 4 months here, 1 year in science as a tentative suggestion), thus allowing others to filter for you. Unless the post claims that the whole Less-Wrong endeavour is anti-instrumentalist!
When dealing with catastrophic risks, even tiny probabilities (that the Sequences suck) ought to take priority.
b) There is no doubt that the first 100 posts you read here will be more important than the second.… if you are past 400 (I’m not), probably you are beyond the tipping point. Learning rationality is logarithmic. Maybe, for professional reasons, Eliezer needs 99% of the abstract rationality he can achieve (he is the coach, after all). But if you are just part of the team (as I am) I would never get to the point where you are actually regularly reading yesterday’s stuff.
This is a red signal, if you (reader of this sentence) want only to be part of the team, and you’ve been reading daily or weekly before you got a chapter, a plan, a framework, or just plain work done, then not only you are wrong because Less Wrong in general is not doing what Patrissimo wants it to do, but also because if it were, you are using it wrong...
Here comes a new challenger.....
a) The issue of learning to walk before running, though seemingly simple, is not. Reading originals, for instance is highly likely to displace the good meme grasping/producing potential you’d have if you never went through them. Recently this link about that was posted here, can’t find the post now: http://www.infiniteinjury.org/blog/2010/02/25/reading-originals/
I agree with the author, and after 4 years in a continental philosophy department, can assure you, there is no way the rational strategy for being rational is to go through the history of rationality. The added value of learning through historic order is greatly inferior to the value of time-saved, hindsight view analytical capacity towards ancient stuff that you get from reading only what is recent.
Not that I’m claiming the Sequences are moldy old stuff. Go through them, but speed up your pace whenever you can.
A final point on “a)”. Do not read what is too recent (give 4 months here, 1 year in science as a tentative suggestion), thus allowing others to filter for you. Unless the post claims that the whole Less-Wrong endeavour is anti-instrumentalist! When dealing with catastrophic risks, even tiny probabilities (that the Sequences suck) ought to take priority.
b) There is no doubt that the first 100 posts you read here will be more important than the second.… if you are past 400 (I’m not), probably you are beyond the tipping point. Learning rationality is logarithmic. Maybe, for professional reasons, Eliezer needs 99% of the abstract rationality he can achieve (he is the coach, after all). But if you are just part of the team (as I am) I would never get to the point where you are actually regularly reading yesterday’s stuff.
This is a red signal, if you (reader of this sentence) want only to be part of the team, and you’ve been reading daily or weekly before you got a chapter, a plan, a framework, or just plain work done, then not only you are wrong because Less Wrong in general is not doing what Patrissimo wants it to do, but also because if it were, you are using it wrong...
If you are a wanna be coach on the other hand…
For posterity’s sake, the original reading originals page is down, but it’s here on archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120422134314/http://www.infiniteinjury.org/blog/2010/02/25/reading-originals/