LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Blog post request: a summary of all the UFO stuff and what odds I should put on alien visitations of earth.

Sounds quite cool!

There are quite a lot of interesting things, but it's hard to read less wrong as there are just so many links, and finding what to read next is computationally very costly. A book solve the problem! I may imagine buying the ebook version just for having this order simplifying the reading decision.

One question: do you have any plan to make an audiobook of it? I listen more than I read, and would really love to listen to it, assuming that some texts can be understood without the drawings. I assume that some textes from Scott Alexander may already exists in audio thanks to SSC podcast. A LW Best-Of podcast, similar to SSC podcast and to the RAIFTZ audiobook would be extremly wonderful.

I would be quite surprised if we ran out before the book is up on Amazon. The primary reason to preorder is either if you want to support us by helping us plan and adjust various plans based on demand, or if you want to make sure you get the books before Christmas. 

We have been selling faster than I expected though (we made a print run of 1000 books and have sold 270 today), so there is some chance my estimate here is wrong, but overall I still only assign around 10% to us running out at all.

These look amazing! I'm really blown away by the designs. I know it's early days, but do you think there will likely be stock left after preorders are filled? I generally don't like preordering things, but I will likely buy a copy once it's on sale unless there's an unforeseen quality issue, so if there won't be stock left then I'd like to just preorder.

Also, I took a look at the sample chapter and noticed a possible typographical error: on the 8th line of text on the back cover, it looks like there's two spaces between "blog" and "devoted". Same on line 12 between "essays" and "of". I might just be seeing things though.

The support provided in the book is purely anecdotal (along the lines of what I discussed above) and doesn't really discuss any other models. The alternative explantions I discuss such as re-religiofication due to material conditions are not mentioned in the book, which is wrote in a somewhat impressionistic manner.

Hmm, I would have assumed that gentile Christians just never followed the practice (just like they didn't keep kosher or follow other Old Testament laws), and (fairly naturally) saw it as conflicting with monogamy.

Am I mistaken -- was levirate marriage actually ever widely practiced in the Western Christian church?

I think a "Nth annual" is a good thing. It will be on the Amazon page (still not fully sure what the series title will be, by default something like "Best of LessWrong"), and of course we will have a section on the site that will organize the books in order, after we released more than one. But having each individual book be prominently stand-alone seems pretty important to me, and also having a prominent series title for the first book, or book set, in a series seems also kind of unnecessary to me. If we've done three of those, then maybe there is a benefit that people get from knowing what series it is part of, but for the first one, the info seems really unnecessary for the vast majority of readers. 

I also don't want to commit us too hard to doing a book every year. Like, I know we want to do a book for this year's (2019) review, but I really don't know yet whether we will do one for next year, and also the book for this year's review might look so totally different that putting them in a series doesn't really make sense. Starting a whole series title and then abandoning it seems pretty bad to me, if you don't even know whether it will have more than two entries.

Other timeless but year-of-publication restricted anthologies like "Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror" and  "Year's Best Science Writing"  have either "Nth annual" or [year the entries were published] prominently on the title.  This is an established convention. The problems of "what the hell book did I read that in?", "Finding the books on Amazon" and "Have I read this already? Who's to say." seem much bigger to me than a fraction of the audience that hasn't picked up that convention AND will be blocked from reading by it.

Yeah, I expect Chromium-based browsers will have a good chance of just working, but we will have no resource margin for properly testing anything but Chrome. (I also sort of expect that the kind of person who uses an uncommon browser will be the kind of person to try it anyway.)

It seems like there should be a significant reputation cost to the reversal, since it needed to be widely understood.

I'd expect arbitary exploration to be averse to conspicuous costs. Whereas planned strategies can be plausibly motivated by a vision of inheriting valuable land from widows who have less pressure to leave the land to kin in their wills.