Book Launch: "The Carving of Reality," Best of LessWrong vol. III

post by Raemon · 2023-08-16T23:52:12.518Z · LW · GW · 22 comments

Contents

  COORDINATION & CONSTRAINT
  ALIGNMENT & AGENCY
  TIMELINES & TAKEOFF
  REALITY & REASON
  FAQ[1]
    How do I acquire the books?
    Are they available in other countries?
    How did you make the art?
    Are there any egregious printing errors you're embarrassed about?
    Are previous book sets still available?
None
22 comments

The Carving of Reality, third volume of the Best of LessWrong books is now available on Amazon (US).

The Carving of Reality includes 43 essays from 29 authors. We've collected the essays into four books, each exploring two related topics. The "two intertwining themes" concept was first inspired when as I looked over the cluster of "coordination" themed posts, and noting a recurring motif of not only "solving coordination problems" but also "dealing with the binding constraints that were causing those coordination problems."

I've included the foreword from "Coordination & Constraint", which I think conveys the overall spirit and context of the books:

Each year, the LessWrong community votes on the best posts from the previous year, to see which posts have stood the tests of time. 

In 2020, the highest ranked post was Catherine Olsson’s announcement of microCOVID.org, a calculator for evaluating COVID risk. MicroCOVID is one of the clearest success stories of the ‘rationalist mindset’ that I know of. Creating it involved research during the early pandemic, when information was scarce, and time was of the essence – a classic situation where the traditional scientific process is inadequate and LessWrong-style rationality tools are valuable. It also required a quantitative mindset, and willingness to assign numbers to risks and make tradeoffs.

But microCOVID.org is most interesting to me as a tool for coordination. It doesn’t just let individuals make better life choices. Microcovid changed the entire covid coordination landscape by relaxing a constraint.  Previously, if you lived with people with varying covid-caution preferences, and you wanted to hang out with someone from another house of people with varying covid-caution preferences… your only option was to have fairly involved negotiations on a case-by-case basis. Many people I know grew exhausted from negotiating, and gave up on trying to visit their friends. The microCOVID tool gave people a simplified “risk budget”, letting them do whatever activities made sense to them as long as they didn’t overspend. 

“Negotiation energy” was a limiting resource, and microcovid.org made negotiation radically cheaper. It also opened up entirely new options, like “create a household microCOVID tax” (some houses decided that you could do whatever activities you wanted, you just had to pay other housemates $1 per microcovid).

The proximate inspiration for the theme of this book (and included herein) are John Wentworth’s posts “Coordination as Scarce Resource”, “Transportation as Constraint”, and “Interfaces as Scarce Resource.” Other posts explore the nature of particular constraints that society faces – Zvi’s posts on “Simulacra Levels and their Interactions,” “The Road to Mazedom,” and “Motive Ambiguity” each spell out how and why some communication is systematically distorted. And while they don’t give us a solution, they help ask a question – what would need to change, in order for society to coordinate at scale, without incentivizing distorted communication? 

COORDINATION & CONSTRAINT

John Wentworth	Coordination as a Scarce Resource [LW · GW]
John Wentworth	Transportation as a Constraint [LW · GW]
John Wentworth	Interfaces as a Scarce Resource [LW · GW]
Catherine Olsson	MicroCOVID.org [LW · GW]
Jacob Falcovich	Seeing the Smoke [LW · GW]
Alkjash	Pain is not the unit of Effort [LW · GW]
Alkjash	Is Success the Enemy of Freedom? [LW · GW]
Zvi Mowshowitz	Simulacra Levels and their Interactions [LW · GW]
Zvi Mowshowitz	The Road to Mazedom [LW · GW]
Zvi Mowshowitz	Motive Ambiguity [LW · GW]
Scott Alexander	Studies On Slack [LW · GW]
Jim Babcock,  Elizabeth Van Nostrand	Credibility of the CDC on SARS-CoV-2 [LW · GW]
Raymond Arnold	"Can you keep this confidential?  [LW · GW]  How do you know?" [LW · GW]
Abram Demski	Most Prisoner's Dilemmas are Stag Hunts;  [LW · GW] Most Stag Hunts are Schelling Problems [LW · GW]
Martin Sustrik	Swiss Political System:  [LW · GW] More than You ever Wanted to Know (I.) [LW · GW]
Jason Crawford	Why haven't we celebrated any major achievements lately? [LW · GW]

ALIGNMENT & AGENCY

Essays about how agency works, and how we might successfully build an AI agent more powerful than us that does what we actually want.

John Wentworth	Alignment By Default [LW · GW]
Abram Demski	An Orthodox Case Against Utility Functions [LW · GW]
Orthonormal	Choosing the Zero Point [LW · GW]
John Wentworth	The Pointers Problem: Human Values  [LW · GW] Are A Function Of Humans' Latent Variables [LW · GW]
Evan Hubinger	An overview of 11 proposals for building safe advanced AI [LW · GW]
Paul Christiano	Inaccessible information [LW · GW]
Scott Garrabrant	Introduction to Cartesian Frames [LW · GW]
Andrew Critch	Some AI research areas and their relevance to existential safety [LW · GW]
Richard Ngo	AGI safety from first principles: Introduction [LW · GW]

TIMELINES & TAKEOFF

Essays about when (and how) powerful technology might permanently alter our world.

Daniel Kokotaljo	The date of AI Takeover is not the day the AI takaes over [LW · GW]
Daniel Kokotaljo	Cortés, Pizarro, and Afonso as Precedents for Takeover [LW · GW]
Daniel Kokotaljo	Against GDP as a metric for timelines and takeoff speeds [LW · GW]
Scott Alexander	Biological Anchors:  [LW · GW] The Trick that Might or Might Not Work [LW · GW]
Katja Grace	Discontinuous progress in history: an update [LW · GW]
Jeffrey Laddish	Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction [LW · GW]
Alex Zhu	How uniform is the neocortex? [LW · GW]

REALITY & REASON

Essays about how to build an accurate map that reflects the underlying territory.

Mark Xu	The First Sample Gives the Most Information [LW · GW]
John Wentworth	What Money Cannot Buy [LW · GW]
Anna Salamon	Reality-Revealing and Reality-Masking Puzzles [LW · GW]
Ben Kuhn	To listen well, get curious [LW · GW]
Kaj Sotala	The Felt Sense: What, Why and How [LW · GW]
Mark Xu	The Solomonoff Prior is Malign [LW · GW]
Jacob Falcovich	The Treacherous Path to Rationality [LW · GW]
Jack H	Anti-Aging: State of the Art  [LW · GW]
Alex Flint	Search versus design [LW · GW]
Abram Demski	Radical Probabilism [LW · GW]
Vanessa Kosoy, Diffractor	Introduction To The Infra-Bayesianism Sequence [LW · GW]

FAQ^[1]

How do I acquire the books?

The Carving of Reality is available on Amazon (US) for $30. 

Are they available in other countries?

Alas, we don't have the bandwidth to do the logistics necessary to get it formally set up a listing for other countries. (Sorry about this! We did this the first year and it unfortunately turned out to be extremely effort-prohibitive)

How did you make the art?

The art was AI generated, using Midjourney version 4. 

Are there any egregious printing errors you're embarrassed about?

Sigh, yeah. Most notably, we ended up with a misaligned "LessWrong" logo on the spine of the Coordination book. However, some say this simply reality demonstrating that coordination is hard, with one book deciding to do its own thing and ruin the aesthetic for everyone.

Are previous book sets still available?

Yes! You can also buy copies of A Map That Reflects The Territory and The Engines of Cognition.

1. ^{^}

   By which I mean "questions that nobody has actually asked yet but I vaguely anticipate people asking."

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