Rationalia

👋 Hello and welcome to your personal guide to LessWrong, The Effective Altruism Forum, and The AI Alignment Forum.

This repository is a starting point to take notes on the concepts, terms, jargon, and principles you'll find in the rationality/effective altruism space. It was built with Obsidian in mind (as a starter template for a new vault or a drop-in for your existing vault).

Motivation

LessWrong and its compatriots have accumulated a lot of content over the years. This is daunting for newcomers. Sure you can grind through The Sequences, but it's going to take more work to actually keep the information in long-term memory.

In particular, the aim of this repository is:

• To get you up to speed with LessWrong's "concepts", jargon, and canon, as well as with EA's "topics".¹
• To walk you through LessWrong's, AF's and EA's "standard" libraries.

Structure

This vault consists of note-taking templates that correspond to published posts. These templates are usually pretty bare (you're the one taking the notes).

What you can expect to find is:

• Metadata (tags, external links, authors, etc.). Each note also has a status set to todo by default. You can set it to in progress and done as you work through the material. (This works well with Dataview if you want to keep track of your overall progress.)
• Internal (bidirectional) links
• When applicable, definition(s) and flashcard template(s).

The file structure is as follows (this might change in the future):

── LW
   │   # Guides to the vault
   ├── Reading Orders
   │   # Content
   ├── Collections
   ├── Books
   ├── Sequences
   ├── Posts
   ├── Other Resources
   │   # Ideas / People / etc.
   ├── Concepts
   ├── Jargon
   ├── People
   └── Organizations

Flashcards

Thanks to Obsidian_to_Anki, you can automatically generate flashcards from the concepts and topics in this vault.

%%

% START
Basic (and reversed card)
What is **Absurdity Heuristic**?
Back: Our intuitive tendency to classify very unlikely scenarios as bizarre, even impossible.
Tags: LessWrong
END

%%

NOTE: In order to make a flashcard visible to Obsidian_to_Anki, replace % START with START (i.e, remove the %). This requires your manual approval because the first rule of SRS is to understand before you memorize. It's up to you to decide what you want to learn.

Tracking Progress

Each concept, post, collection, etc. has a status field in its metadata that can take one of three values todo, in progress, or done.

By default, all notes are todo. Thanks to Dataview , we can use this to keep track of progress in a reading order/sequence, so you know exactly where you are:

How to Start

• LessWrong
• The Effective Altruism Forum (in progress)
• The AI Alignment Forum (in progress)

Timeline

• Clean up the garbage code I wrote to generate/sync the content in this vault.
• Support for EA, AF, Overcoming Bias, etc.

Miscellaneous

• This vault comes along with a little plugin (tucked away into .obsidian) that synchronizes notes. To sync the current note, use the Rationalia: Sync active note with LW/EA command. To sync call notes use the Rationalia: Sync all notes with LW/EA command.
• Colons, : , aren't allowed in filenames, so when they occur in titles, they've been replaced with an en dash, —.
• To disambiguate posts/sequences/concepts that have the same names, note titles may include a (Post) or (Sequence) where necessary.
• "Concepts" have a corresponding page on the LessWrong wiki. "Jargon" items don't, but refer to a common idea or acronym used on the site.

Contributing

If you want to contribute, awesome! There's room for everything from fixing tags and links, to sharing your own notes (it may be interesting to have note-takers submit their notes on different branches, so future users have a wide range of inspiration), to radical redesigns. Feel free to message me on LessWrong.

Footnotes

1. Each concept note has one or more flashcard templates that you can use to reword the provided definition in your own words. It's a good idea to autogenerate Anki flashcards. ↩