Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

We all make mistakes – it’s whether we learn from them that makes all the difference. But how exactly does one go about doing that? What kind of mistakes do we make? And what to do when our own minds don’t work the way we think they do?

Every one of us is biased – our patterns of thought gravitate in certain directions without us ever knowing. And we can’t fix something if we don’t even suspect it exists.So how do we find these deficiencies? How do we compensate for them?

These, along with many others, are the questions Eliezer Yudkowsky has been asking and trying to answer on LessWrong or Overcoming Bias. There he published hundreds of essays on this topic, collectively named the Sequences. While entertaining and certainly educative, they’ve been a bit harder to navigate.

This problem is now solved – 333 of those essays have been collected, ordered, edited a bit, and published as Rationality: From AI to Zombies. You can buy it on Amazon or, my personal favorite, DRM-free on a pay-what-you-want basis. Besides being an interesting primer on rationality (including what exactly is meant by that word :), the book also offers many insights into how a clever person sees the world around him. And probably much, much more – I haven’t read most of it yet. :)