Less Wrong

Hi, I'm James, and I'm also a contributor to this blog.  I don't know how often I'll post anything, though - and no one has posted anything in a while.

Today I'd like to mention my favorite website - another blog - Less Wrong.  On its About Page, Less Wrong describes itself as a "large, active website for people who try to think rationally".  In my opinion, they've discussed almost every interesting thing you can think of there.

My favorite reading on Less Wrong was a "sequence" of posts called "How to Actually Change Your Mind".  This series of blog posts discusses ways that people (including you (and me)) can be biased when evaluating different truth claims, and ways that we can avoid such bias and be in the best possible psychological state to change our minds about something, if that is what the evidence truly dictates we should do.

A quote I recently read there that I found insightful was taken from the post "My Childhood Death Spiral" (discussing the author's reaction to his parents' reaction when he questioned the religion he was brought up in, Judaism):

For a long time, I thought that the moral of this story was that experience was no match for sheer raw native intelligence.  It wasn't until a lot later, in my twenties, that I looked back and realized that I couldn't possibly have been more intelligent than my parents before puberty, with my brain not even fully developed.  At age eleven, when I was already nearly a full-blown atheist, I could not have defeated my parents in any fair contest of mind.  My SAT scores were high for an 11-year-old, but they wouldn't have beaten my parents' SAT scores in full adulthood.  In a fair fight, my parents' intelligence and experience could have stomped any prepubescent child flat.  It was dysrationalia that did them in; they used their intelligence only to defeat itself.

Another one of my favorite Less Wrong posts is "Truly Part of You".

I'm sorry that this blog post wasn't well-written.  I preferred to write a somewhat disjointed blog post over nothing at all.  Less Wrong is such a large site that I didn't really know how to compress it into a single blog post.  If you want to learn more about it, Less Wrong also has a FAQ.

And one more addendum: The primary author of Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, wrote a Harry Potter fanfiction (which actually gets good reviews) called "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality".  You might want to take a look at that here, if you are both a fan of Harry Potter and rational thought.