User:Benito
LessWrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. The many thousands of posts however, are difficult to get into, and can feel quite overwhelming. This is my first attempt at an ordered list, with the aim of getting across the core ideas as concisely as possible. This guide is hopefully useful to someone who has a goal of getting into LessWrong - perhaps, someone who has read HpMoR and decided they need to be a bit more like Harry - or at least start thinking like him.
Before reading the posts though, I've added a list of talks. These are light and interesting talks about the sorts of content below, and these are probably the best place to start learning about rationality and LessWrong, even if you're not currently planning on working through the lists. If you'd like a few posts that don't require lots of reading, I'd recommend picking some of these posts, and this is a great example of LessWrong-style Rationality in action.
One of the main problems that I had, when I started reading the core archives of LessWrong, was that I didn't see how a lot of the ideas fit together, or where they were heading, which is one of the main reasons that I've written this intro. Once you've read all of this, if you're were to continue, you'd start reading through the sequences, and you'd instantly be able to see how it all fits together.
Suggestions for reading rate: For the Primers and the Front Kick sections, perhaps read one or two per day to let them sink in. For the Central Philosophy section, read at whatever rate you find comfortable. Forcing yourself to read isn't going to make the information seem interesting to you, and some of those articles are hard (and long). That's just one person's advice, do it differently as it suits, make sure to process them fully and enjoy :-)
Rationalist Talks
Luke Muehlhauser - Rationality
Julia Galef: The Straw Vulcan
Julia Galef: Rationality and the Future
Kenzi Amodei - Interview about CFAR
Anna Salamon - CFAR
Rationality Short Videos - Rationality
The Front Kick of Rationality
1) A Fable of Science and Politics
4) Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want to Become Stronger)
5) Tsuyoku vs. the Egalitarian Instinct
7) The Meditation on Curiosity
11) Guessing the Teacher's Password
12) Science as Curiosity-Stopper
14) Cached Thoughts
15) Original Seeing
17) Feeling Rational
20) Knowing about Biases Can Hurt People
21) Hug the Query
22) Use Curiosity
23) Get Curious
Extra - The Principle of Charity and Inferential Gaps
5) Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You
7) Expecting Short Inferential Distances
8) Double Illusion of Transparency
9) Wiki Entry: Inferential Distance
The Central Philosophy of LessWrong
3) What do we mean by rationality?
5) Skill: The Map is Not the Territory
6) How You Make Judgements: The Elephant and its Rider
8) Intuition and Unconscious Learning
9) Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms
10) Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational
11) When Intuitions are Useful
12) Philosophy by Humans 1: Concepts Don't Work That Way
13) Philosophy by Humans 2: Living Metaphorically
14) Philosophy by Humans 3: Intuitions Aren't Shared That Way
16) The Lens that Sees its Flaws
17) How Much Evidence Does it Take?
19) The Martial Art of Rationality
20) What Cost for Irrationality?
21) Your Rationality is My Business
24) No One Can Exempt You From Rationality's Laws
25) Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgement of Global Risk
26) Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though it Shouldn't
Epistemic Rationality Primer
3) Your Strength as a Rationalist
6) Guessing the Teacher's Password
10) Taboo Your Words
11) Replace the Symbol with the Substance
14) How Much Evidence Does It Take?
15) Hindsight Devalues Science
16) Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence
18) Wiki Entry: Locate the Hypothesis
19) Wiki Entry: Privileging the Hypothesis
21) But There's Still a Chance, Right?
25) The Proper Use of Humility
Instrumental Rationality Primer
Part 1
5) Generalising from One Example
6) Adaptation-Executors, no Fitness-Maximisers
8) What is Signalling, Really?
9) The Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary
11) Guilt (Another Gift Nobody Wants)
15) Procrastination
17) How to Beat Procrastination
18) My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination
19) Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others
21) Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic
22) Levels of Action
23) Approving Reinforces Low-Effort Behaviours
25) Urges vs. Goals: The analogy to anticipation and belief
Part 2
3) Positive Bias: Look Into the Dark
5) Availability
11) Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
12) Keep Your Identity Small (Paul Graham)
13) Fake Causality
14) Belief in Belief
15) Rationalization
16) Your Intuitions Aren't Magic
18) Zut Allais!
21) The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism"
22) Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People
24) Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality
25) Rationality is Systematized Winning
26) We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
29) No One Can Exempt You From Rationality's Laws
30 A Sense That More Is Possible
Welcome to Bayesianism
1) Bayes' Theorem Illustrated (My Way)
4) You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not That (Particular) Proof
5) An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction
7) A Priori
8) Being Wrong About Your Own Subjective Experience
10) The Power of Positivist Thinking
12) The Good News of Situationist Psychology
14) Can the Chain Still Hold You?
15) Action and Habit
16) Break Your Habits: Be More Empirical
21) Confidence Levels Inside and Outside an Argument
24) Compartmentalization in Epistemic and Instrumental Rationality
25) Understanding Your Understanding
26) Hold Off On Proposing Solutions
27) Lost Purposes
28) How Not To Lose An Argument
29) How An Algorithm Feels From The Inside
31) Eight Short Studies on Excuses
33) Diseased Thinking: Dissolving Questions About Disease
35) Useful Questions Repository
36) Self-Fulfilling Correlations
37) The Bias You Didn't Expect
38) Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction
39) Explicit and Tacit Rationality
40) Three Ways CFAR has changed my view of rationality
Post-LessWrong: What Rationalists Get Up To
Effective Altruism
The Why and How of Effective Altruism
Intelligence Explosion
Facing the Intelligence Explosion
AI and the Intelligence Explosion
A Non-Technical Introduction to AI Risk
General
Best of Rationality Quotes 2012