Meaning and Magic

Tag: rationality

  • Identifying With

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    divia
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    Recently I’ve been using the phrase “identify with” a bunch. As in, “I’m learning not to identify with my past self”, or “I try not to identify with my beliefs”, or “the ego is what, when accurately perceived, we stop identifying with”. When a friend of mine asked me what I meant by “identifying with”,…

  • Rationalist Conversation Patterns

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    divia
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    A few months ago a conversation I had with someone at one of the NYC Rationality meetups prompted me to write an email on the subject of rationalist conversational norms. I kept telling myself I’d distill my points from the email into a more coherent summary, and I’ve haven’t, so instead I’m posting it pretty…

  • Brain burning

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    divia
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    Here’s a thought experiment: If you could burn ten claims about the nature of the world into everyone’s brain, so that they truly grokked them, which ones would you choose?   My answers, stolen from all over the place, in rough order of perceived importance: Reality is not vague. The past is sunk. There is no failure,…

  • Sticky claims and surprise meters

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    divia
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    I’ve been rereading the early posts of Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions, and will now, as an exercise for myself, try summarize my best understanding of the relevant concepts and how I relate to them using my own jargon: I will describe two natural clusters of mental representations “sticky claims” and “surprise meters” and their respective…

  • Less Wrong Sequences decks

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    divia
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    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…