Looking for alteration suggestions for the official Sequences ebook

If it were me, I'd split your list after reductionism into a separate ebook. Everything that's controversial or hackles-raising is in the later sequences. A (shorter) book consisting solely of the sequences on cognitive biases, rationalism, and reductionism could be much more a piece of content somebody without previous rationalist intentions can pick up and take something valuable away from. The later sequences have their merits, but they are absolutely counterproductive to raising the sanity waterline in this case. They'll label your book as kooky and weird, and they don't, in themselves, improve their readers enough to justify the expense. People interested in the other stuff can get the companion volume.

You could label the pared down volume something self helpey like 'Thinking Better: The Righter, Smarter You." For goodness sake, don't have the word 'sequences' in the title. That doesn't mean anything to anyone not already from LW, and it won't help people figure out what it's about.

EDIT: Other title suggestions - really just throwing stuff at the wall here

• Rationality: Art and Practice

• The Rational You

• The Art of Human Rationality

• Black Belt Bayesian: Building a Better Brain

• The Science of Winning: Human Rationality and You

• Science of Winning: The Art and Practice of Human Rationality (I quite like this one)

Pay lots of attention to the first articles. Definitely don't lead with The Simple Truth; it's not a good hook and it's much too long. I made a suggested reading order awhile back, which you might find useful; I also have the spreadsheet which generated it (though the sheet really just records the subjective judgments I made). That reading order includes other authors in addition to Eliezer, and it doesn't have anything after July 2011 when it was made.

Removal Suggestion: Bayesian Judo. I'm an atheist, too, but this post has a pile of issues:

1. His reasoning is "If this one thing is false, the entire religion is wrong" - but that's a hasty generalization. I briefly explained in the comments why this cannot prove religion wrong.

2. Since the reasoning is poor, and he opens with "You can have some fun with people..." this really looks like he's just putting in a "good, solid dig" like in the political mindkill piece.

3. Also, this is likely to scare off religious people by causing them mindkill right as they begin to read the sequences. It seems to me that a better objective would be to encourage them to read more.

4. Also, to avoid encouraging problems like undiscriminating skepticism and people confusing optimal things for rational ones and going the way of Ayn Rand's objectivists, it is probably better not to put the following line in the first few sequences:

"There's a theorem of rationality called Aumann's Agreement Theorem which shows that no two rationalists can agree to disagree. If two people disagree with each other, at least one of them must be doing something wrong."

Regardless of whether this is true, if new people aren't inoculated against the conformity in thinking that this kind of statement encourages, it could make them more likely to behave like phyg members.

I'm somewhat interested in doing editing work for these. I'm not sure if you guys are looking for a volunteer editor, and we'd have to negotiate before I would want to commit to such a huge project, but I'm inquiring about this.

I have three years of experience as a writer's group organizer, have been paid to edit two books in the past, and I write practically constantly (though I have not attempted to get published).

P.S. I have an editing suggestion, myself: there are places that use odd wording that is reminiscent of ancient holy books. This might contribute to The Singularity Institute's Arrogance Problem as well as making lesswrong.com look like a phyg.

Update: I have SEO training. I forgot to mention that. This isn't as useful for an e-book as for web pages but I don't see why you'd have someone edit only the e-book and not the web pages only to end up with two different versions.

Would there be any issues with titling the actual book "How to actually change your mind"?

It's catchy, it covers a lot of why someone might find the book interesting, and it's not that unusual for a book to have a chapter name identical to the title (or just rename that chapter, or break it down by sub-sequence instead)

Add references and footnotes for alluded or summarised studies, papers, findings, etc. Use footnotes when original points have diverging academic parallels.

In general, make it easier to find out whence the Sequences' information derives, or what, if anything, inspired the original insights; if original insights were no inspired by anything, but have historical precedent in the same philosophical vein, please include a footnote providing that context.

I have suggestions other than posts to add or remove, for instance like how the crux of My Wild and Reckless Youth seems to be that you need to use "retrospective predictions" but this term is not defined and it's not searchable because the common term for this is "retrodiction". Gwern explained in the comments, but that sequence could really use a definition and example. Or how "Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence" has a terrible title because it sounds too much like he's saying "make appeals to ignorance". I already know what an appeal to ignorance is but if one has never heard of it before, one may be encouraged to make appeals to ignorance because of this article. I think it would be beneficial if he put more emphasis on differentiating between his point and appeals to ignorance - the distinction he makes is brief and not emphasized.

I suspect that edit suggestions won't be as well-received since it would require that Eliezer spends time editing the sequences, as opposed to simply approving addition and removal requests. You might have a volunteer editor though, if you want one.

Anyway, what should I do with edit suggestions like these? Comment in the sequences, comment here, comment to /dev/null?

universal fire and universal law. Your selection of "reductionism" seems to imply they won't be in there.

very good posts.

I have an idea/question:

Would it be helpful if I (or anyone, or maybe as a collaborative effort of volunteers) put articles from the sequences in private collaborative formats (like, say, Google Drive documents) and pinned comments to specific sections of text within those articles?

I'd love to go over some of the explanations, particularly some IT/CS jargon I've noticed that would probably be utterly lost on non-IT people (or even just confuse them), and suggest improvements/replacements or at least point that there's something there that might need rewording. However, I don't want to do this if it's only going to cause trouble or be completely useless in the end.

Add logical rudeness to the sequences. Why:

• Getting everyone to be consciously aware of this may help them improve their thinking quality.

• Being able to link to this and say "this argument is wrong" can be extremely helpful. I am noticing a pattern - when I simply describe bad reasoning, I am ignored or stupid arguments are thrown at me. When I link to a sequence describing bad reasoning, I am not ignored. It's like it's causing them to behave. I think everyone should be aware of this in order to be able to link to it and get people to realize they're doing this. That would help maintain quality in the discussions.

• It's really useful for me to have words for these irksome behaviors. I keep referring back to it over and over again. It's clarifying and validating. I'd have missed something important if I had not encountered it. I think you should make sure everyone encounters this.

Depending on your deadline for the e-book... I'm in the process of reading the sequences right now (just finished mysterious answers to mysterious questions). If you want, I could agree to provide feedback as I go and also to finish them ASAP. I've already done work on improving my rationality like setting out to raze my cached thoughts (almost half my life ago, not triggered by the sequences), detecting biased reasoning in myself and learning about logical fallacies and I ran a writer's group for several years, so I'd probably give good feedback.

What is the deadline for the feedback / would you be interested in somebody reading it over with these and/or other concerns in mind?

If you could specially mark interbook links and internet links so that they're visually different, that'd be nice. I'm working my way through an unofficial epub of the sequences, and I'm never sure if the blue link will take me to another chapter, or open the browser and ruin my reading experience.

In the spirit of being more specific, could you please list all the chapters in the order they will have in the book?

I am not sure if some chapters don't appear in more than one sequence. The linear ordering could be used to check whether a sooner chapter does not hyperlink to a later chapter; which should be avoided, if possible. Also on wiki some chapters are written in bold font, and some in plain font; does it mean the first ones will be somehow emphasised in the book?

To avoid unbalanced hierarchy, perhaps the sequence "How To Actually Change Your Mind" (the one that contains many subsequences) should not be mentioned in the table of contents; use just the subsequences. Alternatively, divide the book into three parts -- the second part is "How to Actually Change Your Mind" and we need some names for the first and the third parts. Also if the specific chapters are listed, we will see how balanced are the parts of the book.

In wiki we have these pages with short descriptions of the posts in the sequences. There should be something similar in the book. Especially... I am already imagining a paper version... on paper there are no hyperlinks and search, so it would be good to have a tool to help you find the chapter you want to see. Also, to be reminded quickly about the ideas in the book.

Fix this

Also, that whole article needs to make it clear that this structure is entirely a function of how humans categorize things, rather than of reality itself, and that comparisons between dimensions are impossible without reference to human values (there is no absolute way to compare one cm of height to three jnds of redness). The sequence does more-or-less get to that later, but the argument is not presented cleanly and clearly.

Because writing out summaries of what I just read along with the terms used to describe things (like titles) assists me in remembering things, I am essentially creating a Cliff's notes version of the sequences as I read them. Is there any interest in posting either a Cliff's notes version of the sequences or using summaries in the table of contents or marketing materials?

"Clearer Thinking, More Effective Action" would be a very accurate title, but it may not be exciting enough.

wait, so is this the actual, has-been-in-the-works-for-years, legendary final Rationality Book, or something more temporary to get existing stuff out there because the former is taking to long?