The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain
and simple to express:

Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.

– Piet Hein

LessWrong is an online forum and community dedicated to improving human reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. Each day, we aim to be less wrong about the world than the day before.

See also our New User's Guide.

Training Rationality

Rationality has a number of definitions^[1] on LessWrong, but perhaps the most canonical is that the more rational you are, the more likely your reasoning leads you to have accurate beliefs, and by extension, allows you to make decisions that most effectively advance your goals.

LessWrong contains a lot of content on this topic. How minds work (both human, artificial, and theoretical ideal), how to reason better, and how to have discussions that are productive. We're very big fans of Bayes Theorem and other theories of normatively correct reasoning^[2].

To get started improving your Rationality, we recommend reading the background-knowledge text of LessWrong, Rationality: A-Z (aka "The Sequences") or at least selected highlights from it. After that, looking through the Rationality section of the Concepts Portal is a good thing to do.

Applying Rationality

You might value Rationality for its own sake, however, many people want to be better reasoners so they can have more accurate beliefs about topics they care about, and make better decisions.

Using LessWrong-style reasoning, contributors to LessWrong have written essays on an immense variety of topics on LessWrong, each time approaching the topic with a desire to know what's actually true (not just what's convenient or pleasant to believe), being deliberate about processing the evidence, and avoiding common pitfalls of human reason.

Check out the Concepts Portal to find essays on topics such as artificial intelligence, history, philosophy of science, language, psychology, biology, morality, culture, self-care, economics, game theory, productivity, art, nutrition, relationships and hundreds of other topics broad and narrow.

LessWrong and Artificial Intelligence

For several reasons, LessWrong is a website and community with a strong interest in AI and specifically causing powerful AI systems to be safe and beneficial.

AI is a field concerned with how minds and intelligence works, overlapping a lot wi

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Pamela Sears

Pamela Sears