The "Rationality Book Club" series will meet once a month to discuss readings about improving human reasoning and decision-making. This month, we're discussing the first three sections of Rob Bensinger's introduction to Rationality: from AI to Zombies.
Effective Altruists seek to do the most good we can. To do this, we take actions based on our beliefs about what constitutes a positive impact, how best to achieve it, and how to assess what we've accomplished. This works best when these beliefs are accurate.
But how do we know if our beliefs are accurate? In fact, it's surprisingly hard to form accurate beliefs about the world! We don't often have access to complete information, and cognitive biases lead us to incorrectly interpret the information we do have. The practice of Rationality is about helping us avoid cognitive biases; we learn what they are so that we can recognize them more easily in our own thinking and try to avoid them, hopefully seeing the world more clearly.
The Rationalist community historically has some overlap with the Effective Altruist community, but Rationality is not a set of beliefs -- it's just a tool for reasoning, which can be applied to any goal. This includes EA, but Rationality can also help with other learning or decision making you want to do in your life.
In this book club, we'll be discussing "Rationality: from AI to Zombies," by Eliezer Yudkowsky (known as "The Sequences"), which was originally a series of blog posts written from 2006-2009 and is now generally, though not universally, thought of as a core text about Rationality. At this introductory session, we will discuss The Sequences at a high level, and also discuss Rob Bensinger's Biases: an Introduction, which is the official introduction to The Sequences (only the first three sections of Bensinger's essay, up to "A Word About This Text," are needed, though the rest may provide useful context).
The Rationality Book Club is anticipated to be an ongoing series; we may focus exclusively on The Sequences themselves, or we may divert to other Rationality readings from other sources. In all cases, a spirit of honest investigation is encouraged, including (especially!) thoughtful disagreement. No prior familiarity with Rationality is required -- just an interest in learning more about the world and how we come to form beliefs about it.
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Bonus resources on The Sequences/Rationality:
"Read the Sequences" on the EA Forum
All of the Sequences in an easily viewable format
Hardcopy / Audiobook versions of The Sequences on Amazon
LessWrong (a Rationality forum)
Rationality reading list from CFAR
Scott Alexander's blog, Astral Codex Ten
Resources about EA:
Podcast series introducing Effective Altruism
"Reasons for EA Meetups to Exist" on the EA Forum
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