Sunday, September 12, 2021

Review of A Blog Book based on the Less Wrong Blog

There is a blog called lesswrong. Many people contribute to it (how many people must contribute to a website before it stops being called a blog and starts being called... Not sure what?). The theme is rationality. They (not sure who they are) have made a best-of collection from lesswrong which is named

A Map that Reflects the Territory (available here)

Actually, its not one book, but five mini-books. I quote the titles and paraphrase the first sentence of each:

Epistemology:  How we come to know the world.

Agency: The ability to take action in the world and control the future.

Coordination:  The ability of multiple agents to work together.

Curiosity: The desire to understand how the world works.

Alignment: The problem of aligning the thoughts and goals.

I have written a review of the the book. The book was my first exposure to the blog, except sometimes reading about the blog, probably on Scott's blog.

I am posting this to both complexity blog and to lesswrong, though with lesswrong I will have a different intro since they know lesswrong but might not know complextyblog. 

My review is here.

I would appreciate intelligent comments and suggestions, which I will use to improve the review.

2 comments:

  1. I would update "The most common word in this book might be Bayes" to "The most common non-trivial word..." for the pedantic.

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    Replies
    1. Indeed! It is likely that `the' is the most common word.
      Thanks- I have fixed it.

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