Highly Ad­vanced Episte­mol­ogy 101 For Beginners

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s bottom-up guide to epistemology. Includes practical applications and puzzling meditations.

Intro

• The Useful Idea of Truth

• Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms

• Minor Post—Skill: The Map is Not the Territory

• Minor Post—Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational

Causality/​Physics

• The Fabric of Real Things

• Causal Diagrams and Causal Models

• Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen

• Causal Reference

• Causal Universes

Logic/​Mathematics

• Proofs, Implications, and Models

• Logical Pinpointing

• Standard and Nonstandard Numbers

• Gödel’s Completeness and Incompleteness Theorems

• Second-Order Logic: The Controversy

Mixed Reference

• Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project

• By Which It May Be Judged