I bashed out a bunch of summaries, by the way. The first one not done is now Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities.
This is one of my favorite LessWrong posts. When I first found LW back in 2010, I thought it was interesting but no more important than the other stuff I read online in my free time. Even after finishing the How To Actually Change Your Mind sequence, I didn't really recognize that rationality was not just another amusing subject to be tinkered with. For whatever reason, this post made it click: rationality is essential, and when wielded properly it really can make you more accurate and make your life more enjoyable.
So thank you, Eliezer, for helping me snap this crucial insight into place.
Today's post, The Lens That Sees Its Flaws was originally published on 23 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Part of what makes humans different from other animals is our own ability to reason about our reasoning. Mice do not think about the cognitive algorithms that generate their belief that the cat is hunting them. Our ability to think about what sort of thought processes would lead to correct beliefs is what gave rise to Science. This ability makes our admittedly flawed minds much more powerful.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was What is Evidence?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.