video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl_ZQlYKdz4
crucial note: a majority of the sequences are not about rationality. They are instead about pet topics that the thought-leaders of LW care about. (The Metaethics sequence was both irrelevant to rationality and painful. If you are interested in metaethics I recommend the recommendations at https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2019/12/best-introductory-texts-in-moral-philosophy.html which are by professional philosophers; Daniel Weltman’s suggestions particularly stand out.)
I tried to make the reading list focused on rationality specifically. I know the politics of these authors aren’t appreciated here; that is what philosophy and political science are for. This list was specifically oriented around reducing bias, i.e. literally being less wrong.
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Here’s my rationality reading list, for those who are interested in getting a better foundation than what is provided by the Sequences/HPMOR:
- while unorthodox, I usually suggest this above everything else: the PowerScore Logical Reasoning Bible, while meant as LSAT prep, is the best test of plain-language reasoning that I am aware of. the kinds of questions you are meant to do will humble many of you. https://www.amazon.com/PowerScore-LSAT-Logical-Reasoning-Bible/dp/0991299221 and you can take a 10-question section of practice questions at https://www.lsac.org/lsat/taking-lsat/test-format/logical-reasoning/logical-reasoning-sample-questions — many of you will not get every question right, in which case there is room to sharpen your ability and powerscore’s book helps do that. (edit/note: there are three subsections of the LSAT, and one is titled “logic games”; the ‘games’ section is not this, and also IMO not useful. I specifically think the reasoning section excels in evaluating plain-language reasoning, in the sense that it is widely available and normed to about 100,000 people annually and requires no former training in logic. it can be considered a test of informal logic, but it is not a test of formal logic by any means.)
- https://www.amazon.com/Cengage-Advantage-Books-Understanding-Introduction/dp/1285197364 in my view, the best book on argumentation that exists; worth reading either alongside PowerScore’s book, or directly after it.
- https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-What-Seems-Scarce-Matters/dp/B08X4X4SQ4 pinker’s “rationality” is an excellent next step after learning how to reason through the previous two texts, since you will establish what rationality actually is.
- https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Handbook-Reasoning-Handbooks-Psychology/dp/0521531012 this is a reference text, meaning it’s not meant to be read front-to-back. it’s one of the most comprehensive of its kind.
- https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-History-Logic-Valued-Nonmonotonic/dp/044460359X — this is both prohibitively and ludicrously expensive, so you will probably need to pirate it. however, this history of logic covers many useful concepts.
- https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555 this is a standard text that established “irrationality” as a mainstream academic concept. despite being a psychologist, some of kahneman’s work won him the nobel prize in economics in 2002, shared with vernon smith.
- https://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-audiobook/dp/B0014EAHNQ this is another widely-read text that expands on the mainstream concept of irrationality.
- https://www.amazon.com/BIASES-HEURISTICS-Collection-Heuristics-Everything/dp/1078432317 it is exactly what it says: a list of about 100 cognitive biases. many of these biases are worth rereading and/or flashcarding. there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
- https://www.amazon.com/Informal-Logical-Fallacies-Brief-Guide/dp/0761854339 also exactly what it says, but with logical fallacies rather than biases. (a bias is an error in weight or proportion or emphasis; a fallacy is a mistake in reasoning itself.) there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
- here is another fantastic handbook of rationality, which is a wonderfully integrated work spanning psychology, philosophy, law, and other fields with 806 pages of content. https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Rationality-Markus-Knauff/dp/0262045079 (it is quite expensive – no one will blame you if you pirate it from libgen.)
You will learn more through these texts than through the LessWrong Sequences. as mentioned, many of these are expensive, and no one will blame you if you need to pirate/libgen them. many or maybe even most of these you will need to reread some of these texts, perhaps multiple times.
This will also not make you a god of rationality. This is the foundation, which is why some of these (to those who are familiar with them) seem basic: they are. That’s the point. And the Sequences are much worse.
Lesswrong is primarily made up of nerds who want a hangout group/subculture, rather than a means of learning rationality, and this disparity between claimed purpose and actual purpose produces most of the objections people have and many of my objections in my video, and why I have created this alternate reading list in the first place. A subculture or ingroup should not dictate what you are able to learn. For as much as people regard feminist philosophy as an echo chamber, nothing is stopping me from reading Judith Butler. Meanwhile, LessWrong expects a person interested in rationality to actively participate in their subculture to become more rational. This is, to say, the least, backward.
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Grain of salt on ariely - there’s an ongoing investigation of some fabricated data in one of his studies, and his work in predictably irrational predates the psychology replication crisis
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Have you heard about our Lord and Savior, Ludwig Wittgenstein?
It’s probably worth abandoning the “rationality” terminology, which is marketing used to confuse the audience into thinking this stuff is some kind of secret material for the elect rather than just what every first year philosophy student has learnt since the invention of the university, and just calling it “logic and critical thinking.”
So I mentioned the virtues of reading history (and one could also say literature) in another comment, but when it comes to thinking about reason and logic I think it is important to read critiques of them and not just more instructive works. So like, Wittgenstein’a Philosophical Investigations. Might not actually be the last word on Philosophy but a lot of his concepts are a really useful reminder that a lot of ways people talk and think aren’t ‘rational’ and that is fine, actually. Rorty apparently takes this ball and runs with it but I haven’t read him.
On your point on vitamin A supplementation, I was very quickly able to find that Give Well’s justification for VAS is based on studies looking at the effect of VAS on all-cause mortality. I don’t know how sound their conclusions are as I haven’t looked deeply at them at all, but I don’t think you gave a fair characterisation of the evidence supporting the pro-VAS position.
Also, I think you dismissal of veganism is pretty spurious tbh. I find it weird that you appeal to number of neurons as a sort of proxy for ability to suffer (or awareness of suffering?) like there’s a linear relationship between the two.
I feel like it’s strange to assume that people in this particular subreddit can’t answer 10 basic LSAT reasoning questions but i digress
There is no trick to being less wrong about the world, and the only method to being less wrong about a particular subject is to study it seriously, or, short of that, study it less seriously through those who have studied it seriously. For example, if you’re interested in the psychology of making decisions, reading Kahneman may teach you a number of things about the subject (although it won’t make you really know the subject), while reading Steven Pinker, who was a scholar in psycholinguistics (although he is mostly famous as a pop-sci writer with strong opinions) on anything other than psycholinguistics is likely to make you know less about that subject (as would reading any work on subjects the author hasn’t actually studied, especially of the kind that’s gaining popularity in circles that favour opinion over scholarship).
No algorithm can replace education, and no amount of thinking can make you know more. Movements for knowing more by learning less are the intellectual equivalents of get-rich-quick schemes. Those schemes won’t make you rich, and “rationality” won’t educate you.
Man, I’ve never seen a community of haters this smart and dedicated. Not disagreeing with y’all. I’ve no experience with EA or dog in this fight, just found all this through recent drama. Am amazed at the level and volume of discourse. If all this attention and brainpower were somehow directed at legitimately recognized accountability, EA accountability could be insanely good?