Tag: A Human’s Guide to Words

I read Eliezer’s Sequences back when he was posting them to Overcoming Bias, and both enjoyed them and thought they were full of lots of good rules about how to think. Just as with communication advice, the hardest time for me to remember rationality advice has been when I most needed it. So far I’ve made Anki decks of the first two of Eliezer’s core Sequences, and that does seem to have helped the material sink in.

Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

One piece of wisdom I’ve gotten from the self-help literature is that by default, the function of a belief in the human mind is to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. We tend to look for confirming evidence, reject (or fail to notice) counter-evidence, and take actions which confirm our world view. There are also truth-tracking beliefs. These are beliefs that we’d bet on, and that we update as new information comes in. The posts in Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions helped classify and categorize a bunch of important rules for filling my mind with the latter types of belief, not the former. My best one-sentence summary of the sequence is: “Don’t ask what to believe, ask what to anticipate.”

Here’s the deck:

A Human’s Guide to Words

I used to spend a lot of time nitpicking and arguing about words. I didn’t realize that I was doing so at the time–I would have said I was arguing about ideas–and that’s why I kept doing it. Having learned tons of Anki cards about the ways humans slip into doing this without noticing, I’m aware of at least many of the failure modes. I often find myself saying, “wait–it seems like we’re arguing about words” and changing course, which I take to be a good sign.

The deck I made for myself probably goes into more detail than most people would want, so I recommend suspending any cards that don’t seem interesting or relevant.

The deck: