This isn’t directly relevant to the topic of the group, but since I was asked last week to post it, here’s the majority of the works of Eliezer Yudkowsky that I’ve been reading lately.
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences
It’s been taking me a good while to completely wrap my head around most of what’s here, but the sequences on that page address some of the mechanisms of cognition and reasoning from a somewhat removed viewpoint – and introduce methods of to overcome some of the common biases of thought. I find each of the topics here are presented in a easy, digestable form – so it’s easy to read a couple of them in a break and have it stew for hours/days/weeks in the back of your head.
There’s a lot in there about updating beliefs and how to interpret evidence, which I’d argue is quite useful for developing research skills – but aside from that it’s mostly just good for fine-tuning reasoning skills. As I said, it’s not really related to this page, but it’s a very interesting take on the application and ideal functioning of a lot of cognitive psychology concepts.
