Comment by Isamu
5 days ago
So I like Steven Pinker’s book Rationality, to me it seems quite straightforward.
But I have never been able to get into the Rationalist stuff, to me it’s all very meandering and peripheral and focused on… I don’t know what.
Is it just me?
Depends very much on what you're hoping to get out of it. There isn't really one "rationalist" thing at this point, it's now a whole bunch of adjacent social groups with overlapping-but-distinct goals and interests.
https://www.lesswrong.com/highlights this is the ostensible "Core Highlights", curated by major members of the community, and I believe Eliezer would endorse it.
If you don't get anything out of reading the list itself, then you're probably not going to get anything out of the rest of the community either.
If you poke around and find a few neat ideas there, you'll probably find a few other neat ideas.
For some people, though, this is "wait, holy shit, you can just DO that? And it WORKS?", in which case probably read all of this but then also go find a few other sources to counter-balance it.
(In particular, probably 90% of the useful insights already exist elsewhere in philosophy, and often more rigorously discussed - LessWrong will teach you the skeleton, the general sense of "what rationality can do", but you need to go elsewhere if you want to actually build up the muscles)