
A Human's Guide to Words (2010) - Symmetry
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human%27s_Guide_to_Words
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knzhou
While there's a lot of value in the rationalist literature, there's also a lot
of, well, _words_. The standard "sequences" take up nearly a million words,
and the introductory fanfic ("prereq material") spans 2/3 of a million. The
combined literature is longer than War and Peace plus the entire Bible plus my
bloated summary of most of physics, combined.

People with technical backgrounds (scientists, engineers, etc.) have already
internalized many of the key ideas as part of their education. It should be
possible to convey 99% of the remaining value to us with only 1% of the
wordcount. Has anybody worked on making such a resource?

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pjscott
This particular collection of blog posts is IMO the most valuable part of that
canon. It _does_ have some redundancy, since some points are worth belaboring
-- but if you'd like to skip that and just read the parts that interest you,
there's an introductory post with one-paragraph summaries of each one:

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-
th...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-
can-be-wrong)

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chalst
I agree that this is the high point of the Sequences.

In my view, the two most important ideas are EY's idea about what the two
alternate neural architectures "look like from the inside" for concepts, and
the combinatorio-spatial metaphor for alternative regimes of concepts.

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Joker_vD
Ah, the Parable of the Dagger. Most people wouldn't be surprised if, when
looking into a shed with word "S * * T" written on it in large letters, they'd
see a shovel, a garden rake, a couple of empty buckets, and a broken
wheelbarrow but no feces. Yet, write "This shed is full of manure. The
previous sentence and this sentence either are both true, or both false" on
the shed, and they apparently _will_ be surprised to find garden tools inside.

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a-nikolaev
Isn't LessWrong a pseudo-intellectual personality cult with lots of big words
but little substance? I wonder how one can produce this much output tho.

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Isamu
Just a bit long-winded, I think. It probably boils down into some useful
stuff, but I'm not entirely sure because the here-we-go-again prose pushes me
away. It's not crankery, certainly.

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a-nikolaev
Yeah I agree. I think I feel the same about their work actually.. Calling it
"pseudo-intellectual" is too provocative on my part.

