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My fictional influences

I’ve identified as a bookworm for a very long time. Throughout primary school and high school I read voraciously, primarily science fiction and fantasy. But given how much time I’ve spent reading fiction, it’s surprisingly difficult to pin down how it’s influenced me. (This was also tricky to do for nonfiction, actually - see  my attempt in this post .) Thinking back to the fiction I’ve enjoyed the most, two themes emerge: atmosphere, and cleverness. The atmosphere that really engages me in fiction is one that says: the world is huge; there’s so much to explore; and there’s a vastness of potential. But one that’s also a little melancholy - because you can’t possibly experience all of it, and time always flows onwards. I was particularly struck by the ending of The Lord of the Rings , when Frodo leaves all of Middle-Earth behind; by His Dark Materials , when Lyra gains, and loses, uncountable worlds; by the Malazan saga, occurring against a fictional backdrop of hundreds of thousands o

My intellectual influences

Prompted by a friend's question about my reading history, I've been thinking about what shaped the worldview I have today. This has been a productive exercise, which I recommend to others. Although I worry that some of what's written below is post-hoc confabulation, at the very least it's forced me to pin down what I think I learned from each of the sources listed, which I expect will help me track how my views change from here on. This blog post focuses on non-fiction books (and some other writing); I've also written a blog post on  how fiction has influenced me . My first strong intellectual influence was Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writings on Less Wrong (now collected in Rationality: from AI to Zombies ). I still agree with many of his core claims , but don’t buy into the overarching narratives as much. In particular, the idea of “rationality” doesn’t play a big role in my worldview any more. Instead I focus on specific habits and tools for thinking well (as in Sup

Why philosophy of science?

During my last few years working as an AI researcher, I increasingly came to appreciate the distinction between what makes science successful and what makes scientists successful. Science works because it has distinct standards for what types of evidence it accepts, with empirical data strongly prioritised. But scientists spend a lot of their time following hunches which they may not even be able to articulate clearly, let alone in rigorous scientific terms - and throughout the history of science, this has often paid off. In other words, the types of evidence which are most useful in choosing which hypotheses to prioritise can differ greatly from the types of evidence which are typically associated with science. In particular, I’ll highlight two ways in which this happens. First is scientists thinking in terms of concepts which fall outside the dominant paradigm of their science. That might be because those concepts are too broad, or too philosophical, or too interdisciplinary. For e