Are you already reading the lesswrong.com rationality blog?

A couple of months ago I came across a terrific rationality blog: lesswrong.com



Its main author is Eliezer Yudkowsky , a scientist engaged in Artificial Intelligence, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute . It was he who wrote one of the most important sections of the blog, the so-called Core sequences - a series of blog entries that tells how to learn to think rationally.



The blog covers many important topics, starting with the history of science and the Bayesian inference and ending with quantum mechanics and cognitive psychology .



Some interesting facts to attract attention:

• Alchemists of the 18th century believed that fire was nothing else as a result of the existence of a certain “Phlogiston”. With it, they could explain anything. “Why does the tree turn into ashes?” “What is this orange thing that is also called fire?” “Why does the fire go out in an airtight container?” There was one answer - Phlogiston .
• In 1975, scientists conducted an experiment: They chose a certain historical event (the conflict between the British and Gorki in 1814), about which not a single person from the group of subjects was heard, and a set of possible outcomes: the British victory, the victory of the Gurk, the draw and the peace treaty, the draw and the absence of a peace treaty. The subjects were divided into five groups, four of them reported the event and one of the results (saying that he really was), and the fifth - only about the event itself, but did not say what the matter ended. Then they were asked to calculate the probability of each of the possible outcomes. It turned out that each of the groups assigned a significantly greater probability to the variant that they were called correct. This cognitive distortion is called Hindsight Bias .
• There is a theory that time is a redundant parameter in all equations. There is only cause and effect. The fundamental equations in it are described without its use. Timeless physics

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After I started reading this blog, my views on the world have changed a lot; it seems to me for the better. I recommend the same to you, in the name of science!



PS Elizer also writes fan fiction around the Harry Potter world - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality , which more easily describes the same things.



UPD: In the comments suggest that the blog and fic translate into Russian: lesswrong.ru/w/Main_Page and hpmor.ru, respectively.