How To Think Real Good

First, it is a brain dump: too long, epsilon-baked, and unpolished. Second, it is not obviously relevant to the topic of this site. Third, parts are more technical than most readers would want. However, a quick, bad post may be better than none. This post was prompted by discussions about Bayesianism and the LessWrong rationalist community, with Scott Alexander, Catharine G. Evans, muflax, and St. Rev. (among others). They are each brilliant, quirky, articulate, and fascinating; consider following them online! They might disagree with much of this post, though, and are not implicated in its defects.] This site concerns ways of thinking about some particularly important things: purpose, self, ethics, authority, and meaning, for instance. My aim is to point out common mistakes in thinking about those things, and how to do better. I enjoy thinking about thinking. That's one reason I spent a dozen years in artificial intelligence research. To make a computer think, you'd need to understand how you think. So AI research is a way of thinking about thinking that forces you to be specific. It calls your bluff if you think you understand thinking, but don't. I thought a lot about how to do AI. 1 In 1988, I put together "How to do research at the MIT AI Lab," a guide for graduate students. Although I edited it, it was a collaboration of many people. There are now many similar guides, some of them better, but this was the first.