Eliezer and others on LessWrong have authored a treasure trove of articles on using your brain more effectively. For a high level map of some "tracks" of articles elaborating common themes, check out http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences
It's just about impossible to start if you're intent on reading the articles in order, however. Every article seems to link to some collection of other unread articles. I manually scraped them all a while back and came up with a rough graph order, although there are some circular loops (cycles).
It's a useful metaphor when talking to people too. I find I'm a lot calmer once I've considered how something must look from behind their eyes - it's not enough to just "put yourself in their shoes", you have to remember that things that seem true to them may not to you (and vice versa).
I never interpreted the question the way presented in the article. I always interpreted it as "Does something exist if it is unobserved?" and therefore never cared if the sound of a falling tree is heard by a human, recorded by a cassette recorder or recognized due to seeing a tiny movement of a light object caused by the pressure wave. This problem seems - at least to me - to be much more interesting than arguing about the (correct) definition of sound (to use in this context).
Wonderful example of arguing with strawmen and assigning mental deficiencies to those who disagree with you. The whole idea about the tree falling in the forest is not the definition of the word "sound", but rather that we have no evidence it made a sound. It's a comment on how we assume the world works in a certain way even where we can't really observe it doing so.
Wikipedia lists "is sound only sound if a person hears it?" as "The most immediate philosophical topic that the riddle introduces."
This is the question that Eliezer addresses. You may have been introduced to the tree falling riddle in a different context, but he's dealing with the most common interpretation of the question.
You can't accuse him of straw manning simply because he didn't deal with some other possible philosophical question regarding trees and sounds (the wikipedia article lists a few others, including something like yours). He clearly states up front the exact argument that he's dealing with.
That's just one step away from reasoning form a paradox and patting yourself on the back, how you have proved something (would the same argumentation be as enticing if it were based on misappropriation or misunderstanding like that of using "physics" for arguing for perpetuum mobile?).
My bigger gripe with your reasoning is that using topology 1 and stopping at that (i.e. there are no questions left) precludes (or makes intractable because of combinatorial explosion) reasoning by analogy (symmetry).
It's quite correct that people's misconceptions about physics aren't a good guide to reasoning about physics. But they can be useful evidence for reasoning about how people form conceptions.
Did you read everything on the site and determine this to be true based on exhaustive "rational" analysis, or did you simply assume it to be true based on a few hunches without doing any sort of deep inquiry and "rational" investigation?
It's quite easy to believe others are "rational" (and right) when you assume them to be "rational" (and right) from the very beginning.
I think most people would parse "rational thinking community" as a community interested in rational thinking, similarly to how you'd parse Python community as a community interested in Python rather than one that was implemented in Python. English is generally very prone to ambiguity, and if there's a valid interpretation of what someone said that makes sense it's usually best to assume that's what they meant unless further evidence indicates otherwise.
I think most people would parse "rational thinking community" as a community interested in rational thinking
You are right, it would have been wiser to apply grace and ask to clarify why he was in such wonderment at the existence of a "rational thinking community".
However, my concern was merely that the phrase "rational thinking" carries with it all sorts of implicit assumptions about the "rightness" or "wrongness" of what is being discussed, and it's important that when joining in a presupposed community of "rational thinkers" that this does not carry the assumption of "well, these people claim to be rational thinkers, therefore they are holders of the truth"
The context of his surprise at the existence of a "rational thinking community" gives us a hunch at this potentially incorrect presupposition, but we can't know.
