Things To Take Away From The Essay

First and foremost: Yudkowsky makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of the VNM utility theorem. This is neither an oversight nor a simplification. The VNM utility theorem is not the primary coherence theorem. It's debatable whether it should be considered a coherence theorem at all.

Far and away the most common mistake when arguing about coherence (at least among a technically-educated audience) is for people who've only heard of VNM to think they know what the debate is about. Looking at the top-voted comments on this ess... (read more)

The people around me reason this way a lot, and I think it's for some reason really unintuitive for most people to start doing. This post is clearly written and I like it as an artifact I can point people to, rather than explaining the thing from scratch myself every time.

I don't particularly like dragging out the old coherence discussions, but the annual review is partly about building common knowledge, so it's the right time to bring it up.

This currently seems to be the canonical reference post on the subject. On the one hand, I think there are major problems/missing pieces with it. On the other hand, looking at the top "objection"-style comment (i.e. Said's), it's clear that the commenter didn't even finish reading the post and doesn't understand the pieces involved. I think this is pretty typical among people who object... (read more)

Vaniver has said most of the things I want to say here, but there are some additional things I want to say: 

I think building models of the mind is really hard. I also notice that in myself, building models of the mind feels scary in a way that I often prevents me from thinking sanely in many important situations. 

I think the causes of why it feels scary are varied and complicated, but a lot of it boils down to the fact that in order to model minds, a purely physically reductionistic approach is often difficult, and my standards for evidence often... (read more)

Everybody knows this post belongs in the 2019 Review.

While this sequence ended up spanning more than 2019, I think this represents some of the best 'psychology' on LW in 2019, and have some hope (like Hazard) that all of it will get represented or collected in some way.

Writing a pitch for the sequence feels like writing a pitch for writing about psychology on LW in general, as the sequence itself has it all: book reviews, highly upvoted posts, clear explanations of detailed models, commentary from other experts in the field. So why care about psychology on LW? Both because 1) it's often a source of rapid adv... (read more)

Really what I want is for Kaj's entire sequence to be made into a book. Barring that, I'll settle for nominating this post. 

Nominating this post because it asks a very important question - it seems worth considering that rationalists should get out of self-improvement altogether and only focus on epistemics - and gives a balanced picture of the discourse. The section on akrasia seems particularly enlightening and possibly the crux on whether or not techniques work, though I still don't have too much clarity on this. This post also gives me the push necessary to write a long overdue retrospective on my CFAR and Hammertime experience.

This post steps into a larger picture than what I see as normal rationality style optimization of life. I think on the margin people do far too little of this sort of dive into their motivations.

I use this concept often, including explicitly thinking about what (about) five words I want to be the takeaway or that would deliver the payload, or that I expect to be the takeaway from something. I also think I've linked to it quite a few times.

I've also used it to remind people that what they are doing won't work because they're trying to communicate too much content through a medium that does not allow it. 

A central problem is how to create building blocks that have a lot more than five words, but where the five words in each block can do a reasonable substitute job when needed.