Back to the Basics of Rationality

I like how pragmatic you're being. I am new here, but one of the things that attracted me to this site was the fact that much of the material is simply above my head. That's hard to find in informal public online communities outside of academia, and I feel that the very challenge of trying to wrap my head difficult material is an absolute necessity for keeping my math and statistics skills sharp. However, different people have different bars that they want to reach, and I do agree that more accessible material is a great idea. As for me, I have a voice for radio and a knack for stating difficult theories in an accessible way, so I think a good microphone will be my next purchase for my computer. Making a Youtube video or two on rationality would be a great way for me to contribute to this goal.

But videos in the familiar PowerPoint style or the Khan Academy style are easier to do well. All it requires is some free presentation software, free screen capture software and a $70 high-quality USB mic like the Blue Snowball.

Here we see the author breaking a goal into small pieces, which tends to be an excellent move in many kinds of conversations. Nice post.

(For example, I no longer condemn gays or waste time and money on a relationship with an imaginary friend.)

Thank you. I truly appreciate this.

I think that it would be far better if you combined the tutorials with spaced repetition decks.

I will be summarizing some of my favorite university textbooks into 50-page blog posts.

I'm not sure this is in general a very good approach. Many people won't want to read something that is 50 pages long. But if one splits the same content up into 4 or 5 posts it will appear to be much more readable.

This is the post that finally prompted me to make an account on the site; I've been lurking and reading for quite some time, but while I haven't felt (most of) the topics to be over my head, I also did not think my (sometimes sparse) background in the subjects gave me much to add.

In the past I've been struck by how useful some of the articles here tend to be, and the simultaneous regret that they would not be likely to reach the people they would assist the most. I think that this post provides an excellent breakdown of ways to reach more people more effectively, and I hope that in the near future I'll be able to contribute to that goal. (And in the spirit of naming specifics, I can hopefully provide some biology- and evolution-centered tutorials, and assuming I can keep my other creative writing projects moving as well, I might very well try my hand at the story approach. I do ADORE HPatMoR.)

This is a great post, thanks! I want to vote it up 2^8 times.

Another good route for rationalist education is podcasts. To share some anecdata, I personally got into basic rationalism, and gave up my fairly vague and non-commital beliefs in ESP and various other forms of woo, after getting into The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

I think it would be amazing if there were a Less Wrong-ish parallel to such a podcast, that focuses less on traditional skeptical topics like anti-woo and atheism (since there are already plenty of podcasts about those), and more on formal rationalism and abstract topics like fun theory and Bayesian reasoning.

Also, seconded on the notion of Khan Academy style videos. Those are just amazing; the fact that they're drawn on the fly actually makes them easier to understand for me than pre-done PowerPoint-style slides. I think this is because I get a glimpse into the creator's thought processes as they explain, and also it normalizes the amount of information delivered per unit of time down to a nice even stream, instead of sudden jumps at slide transitions. It also has the advantage of also reducing viewer expectations for shiny graphics.

This might be on-topic. In a recent discussion Emile asked what topics people would like to see more of on LessWrong. Comments with suggestions were voted up accordingly and the winner so far is statistics.

This post is focused on a reasonable and discussion-worthy question: the question of whether to devote more time and energy to spreading the basics of rationality.

Still, I wish it were in the Discussion section rather than the main area, because it would be nice if the main area could contain a high ratio of direct discussion of how to be rational to meta discussion about the community.

I'm attempting to work on a few short youtube videos based on Lesswrong posts, but it's my first time making such videos and I admit I'm a little intimidated by people who are plainly better. Not sure if I'm right for the job.

I wonder--what is it exactly you mean by "the basics"? I don't find Kolmogorov complexity more difficult than Bayes' theorem, but I found it absolutely essential to understanding the technical approach to Occam's Razor, which I found essential to understanding the advantages of Bayesian reasoning over traditional rationality.

If "the basics" means breaking down some of the technical points of Lesswrong posts, I agree wholeheartedly. I tried to take a friend through A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation, my personal favorite, and found it was pretty difficult to explain to someone who didn't already know about some probability theory, expected value, and so on. Many potential Lesswrong contributors are intimidated by the background work they have to do to get into the site. You can see this in the RationalWiki discussion of this site; people find it absurd that you should have to read the entire sequences before questions can be answered. I'm not sure if writing even more will make it less intimidating, but I imagine that finding shorter (and still accurate) ways to say the same things will.

If "the basics" means ignoring some of the important technical contributions (ie Occam's Razor's technical formulation, the probabilistic structure of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, etc.), then I'm not sure I agree, partially because my deconversion story was a bit different from yours. Personally, I needed to see that many standard arguments for belief had precise refutations, almost completely ignored by any religious apologist working the scene. In my experience, people are more likely to change their beliefs when confronted with surprising arguments. Strong formalisms of arguments that people think apologists have already "defeated" are often the key.

I am in the same boat as VirtualAdept. I've been following luke's blog forever which naturally lead me to LW, and whilst I'm still very in my Rational Infancy, I am hugely grateful for the gradual steps toward maturity that this site affords me, so I think I was due to register. Problem is it also makes me more and more frustrated at the lack of rationality surrounding me, especially as an exchristian with a very devout evangelical family and friend network. I mean I'm no Eliezer, but some of these people....

to have content that is accesible, interesting and easily sharable would be fantastic, because the type of people who need these lessons the most are the type of people who will give up at the slightest difficulty.

So my first step is attempting to be more active in this site, then start 'evangelizing' the more accesible parts on mediums like twitter and facebook. after that....the world!

but we'll see....

Mega kudos to Lukeprog and www.lesswrong.com!!

Off-topic but maybe of interest to some readers. While following the link to Luke's post on cognitive science I looked for more books by the author of the discussed book and saw that Jose Luis Bermudez wrote another one called Decision Theory and Rationality. It sounds very LWish:

This fine book conducts a deep analysis and subtle evaluation of decision theory... Many valuable points about decision theory and rationality arise during this book's meticulous, probing examination of various accounts of utility, outcomes, and consistency among choices over time...

That might be outdated given that Yudkowsky et al. are developing a new decision theory. But it might be a good introductory work? If someone could point me to other basic works on decision theory I'd be grateful.

To make this work well requires lots of resources: (1) a good camera, (2) a shotgun or lavavlier microphone, (3) a teleprompter, and (4) an experienced and enthusiastic presenter. That's hard to do!

Also, it helps to have someone with a good voice.

I think it may be useful to look at infrastructure changes that could promote these ends. Would it be worth having a video section (not sure if the karma value per upvote should be less or more than 10)? A basic and advanced section? It would be nice to have the site be useful for both beginning rationalists and people who are interested in Solomonoff induction without having them trip over each other.

The other benefit of having an explicit 'basic' section might be that restatements of other posts (ideally linked in the new post) could be encouraged- one basic educational fact is different people approach similar concepts in different ways, and so two posts with nearly identical content but different presentations can be rather valuable, and help things click for a larger group of people. It would be cool (but I don't know how easy it would be to make) to have a concept index, where I could type in "belief in belief" and get a list of all the basic posts explaining belief in belief, sorted by upvotes. (A less explicit method of doing this is the tag system we have already, but I doubt it should be used for this / would do this as well as it could. Actually, if the tags were specific to the basic section, that might work out well.)

The linked post looks well-written, but it is long for a top-level post. On the other hand, if many of these are being done, then it might be better to reduce the number of appearances in the feed rather than the length of individual posts.

For popularizing rationality (and hence raising the high water mark), online video is a solid choice of medium. In addition to the beat-it-into-the-ground simplicity of the Khan Academy lectures, there are some subjects where a less intensive, more conversational approach may help. People have been made to learn certain principles by rote (e.g. Bayes) but may have never grokked the full implications; I would love to see an animated visual in the style used by The RSA in Britain, fitted to a lecture on Bayes.

As creator of the power-point style video, I'd appreciate some help making future videos. Email me at patrick.robotham2@gmail.com if interested.

5. Keep developing the wiki, obviously.

Maybe not so obvious. The wiki is stagnating. Looking at the recent changes page, very few edits are being made and most the ones that are made seem to be on a small number of popular pages.

I will be summarizing some of my favorite university textbooks into 50-page blog posts.

I'm not sure, but isn't taking the ideas of an author and giving it away for free in this way illegal?