Sequences Highlights — LessWrong

Epistemic rationality: systematically improving the accuracy of your beliefs.

Instrumental rationality: systematically achieving your values.

Epistemic rationality: systematically improving the accuracy of your beliefs.

Somehow, someone is going to horribly misuse all the advice that is contained within this book. Nothing I know how to say will prevent this, and all I can do is advise you not to shoot your own foot off; have some common sense; pay more attention to observation than to theory in cases where you’re lucky enough to have both and they happen to confli

So rationality is about forming true beliefs and making winning decisions.

Good protocols, in short, manage to catalyze good enough outcomes with respect to a variety of contending criteria, via surprisingly limited and compact interventions.

But a human brain is a flawed lens that can understand its own flaws—its systematic errors, its biases—and apply second-order corrections to them.

To solve problems, our brains have evolved to employ cognitive heuristics—rough shortcuts that get the right answer often, but not all the time.