EA - Read The Sequences by Quadratic Reciprocity

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Read The Sequences, published by Quadratic Reciprocity on December 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.There is heavy overlap among the effective altruism and rationality communities but they are not the same thing. Within the effective altruism community, especially among those who are newer to the movement and were introduced to it through a university group, I've noticed some tension between the two. I often sense the vibe that sometimes people into effective altruism who haven’t read much of the canonical LessWrong content write off the rationalist stuff as weird or unimportant.I think this is a pretty big mistake.Lots of people doing very valuable work within effective altruism got interested in it via first interacting with rationalist content, in particular The Sequences and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I think that is for good reason. If you haven’t come across those writings before, here’s a nudge to give The Sequences a read. The Sequences are a (really long) collection of blog posts written by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the science and philosophy of human rationality. They are divided into sequences - a list of posts on a similar topic. Most of the posts would have been pretty useful to me on their own but I also got more value from reading posts in a particular sequence to better internalise the concepts. There are slightly fewer posts in The Sequences than there are days in the year so reading the whole thing is a very doable thing to do in the coming year! You can also read Highlights from the Sequences which cover 50 of the best essays.Below, I’ll list some of the parts that I have found especially helpful and that I often try to point to when talking to people into effective altruism (things I wish they had read too).Fake Beliefs is an excellent sequence if you already know a bit about biases in human thinking. The key insight there is about making beliefs pay rent (“don’t ask what to believe—ask what to anticipate”) and that sometimes your expectations can come apart from your professed beliefs (fake beliefs). The ideas were helpful for me noticing when that happens, for example when I believe I believe something but actually do not. It happens a bunch when I start talking about abstract, wordy things but forget to ask myself what I would actually expect to see in the world if the things I am saying were true.Noticing Confusion is a cool sequence that talks about things like:What is evidence? (“For an event to be evidence about a target of inquiry, it has to happen differently in a way that’s entangled with the different possible states of the target”)Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality - noticing confusion when something doesn’t check out and going EITHER MY MODEL IS FALSE OR THIS STORY IS WRONGAbsence of evidence is evidence of absence, and conservation of expected evidence (“If you expect a strong probability of seeing weak evidence in one direction, it must be balanced by a weak expectation of seeing strong evidence in the other direction”)I am often surrounded by people who are very smart and say convincing-sounding things all the time. The ideas mentioned above have helped me better recognise when I'm confused and when a smooth-sounding argument doesn't match up with how I think the world actually works.Against rationalisation has things that are useful to remember:Knowing about biases can hurt people. Exposing subjects to an apparently balanced set of pro and con arguments will exaggerate their initial polarisation. Politically knowledgeable subjects, because they possess greater ammunition with which to counter-argue incongruent facts and arguments, will be more prone to some biases.Not to avoid your belief's real weak points. “Ask yourself what smart people...