Help us Optimize the Contents of the Sequences eBook

I tend to think of "Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease " as belonging into the "A Human's Guide to Words" sequence. As I remember, the example of "what is a desease" is much more relevant, motivating and enlightening than any example in Yudkowsky's sequence.

Will the QM sequence be checked over for mathematical errors? These have been used in practice to quickly dismiss the sequence.

I agree with moridinamael...nix "The Simple Truth". I know it's not really from the original sequences, but I think "The Useful Idea of Truth" should be used instead.

I can think of two possible primary goals for this project:

1. A prettier format for LWers to review the Sequences in, allowing easy full-text-search. A refresher and trophy.

2. A tidier, better-organized, more approachable update of the Sequences to introduce entirely new people to the ideas therein.

If the latter, brevity is a virtue. Every 50 pages longer the eBook gets probably takes a significant chunk out of how many people read any of it at all. So there's a lot of reason to excise everything unnecessary to an Appendix. And to shunt the Appendix off into a separate eBook of its own. ("The Out-Of-Sequences.")

An alternative (or complementary) solution is to divide the Sequences into several separate volumes, each no more than 250 pages long. Then you can be given the option either of downloading a single eBook that collects these volumes, or of downloading the separate eBooks and choosing a favorite one to send to a friend. Makes for a drastically less intimidating Christmas present.

fake fake utility functions is an important subsequence, IMO, as is the one around thermodynamics and engines of cognition.

In fact I'd feel a bit uneasy cutting out any well referenced post. IMO the whole thing should be in chronological order, or an order strongly influenced by chronology, with just the worst stuff cut out.

Expecting Short Inferential Distances may be a good idea, since it encapsulates the reason there are so many words/posts in the sequences.

I thought Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable is an amazing post, one of the most memorable, and it'd be a shame not to include it.

Likewise, The Hidden Complexity of Wishes was an incredibly intuitive way to explain that an AI doesn't have to hate you for it to destroy the world, it simply has to not have your values.

No Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners?

Do you have a list of blog posts that won't be in the book as a result?

On the one hand, I want to say "it's an ebook, stick them all in an appendix". On the other hand, the more slowly the progress bar at the bottom of the page moves the more readers are likely to give up. What can be left out should be.

Here are the most-frequently-referenced links within the sequences to posts outside of the sequences (with a count of three or more). This may help you notice posts that you think should be included in the sequences eBook.

This seems to imply that the listed posts aren't part of the sequences, but several of the linked posts say they are part of a sequence, for example Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable says it it part of the QM sequence.

Luke, Alex: After reading through most of Eliezer's 2006-2009 posts over the last 3 days, I suggest including in the eBook all the out-of-sequence articles you listed, except:

• The Cartoon Guide to Löb's Theorem
• Conjunction Fallacy (summarized adequately in lots of other articles, especially Burdensome details)
• Cynical About Cynicism
• Fake Fake Utility Functions
• For The People Who Are Still Alive
• Locate the hypothesis
• The Martial Art of Rationality
• The Modesty Argument
• No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know
• Optimization
• Passing the Recursive Buck
• Possibility and Could-ness
• Priors as Mathematical Objects
• Rational evidence
• Rationality is Systematized Winning (don't need a whole article for this; to the extent it isn't just a recap of the Newcomb's Problem article, the point can be made in one sentence in the Introduction, or in a slightly edited What do I mean by rationality? and/or Incremental progress and the valley)
• Surface Analogies and Deep Causes
• The Two-Party Swindle (interesting but not essential, and copy-pastes content from other pages)
• The Ultimate Source
• The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet (this and Akrasia and Shangri-La are both too specific to be good core sequence candidates; their message is better covered in Beware of other-optimizing)
• We Don't Really Want Your Participation
• Why is the Future So Absurd? (use Stranger than history instead; showing is more powerful than telling)
• You Only Live Twice (already in the FOOM eBook)
• Zen and the Art of Rationality

From what I can tell, all the links to those pages within the Sequences are minor passing mentions, and their contents aren't particularly valuable for understanding the core content of the Sequences. Understanding Free Will, for instance, isn't needed for the rest of the Sequences, and EY actively discourages just copy-pasting his answer here.

I note that about 25 of the posts from the Quantum Mechanics / Timeless Physics sequence also aren't necessary for understanding the rest of the Sequences, differ in tone in interesting ways (they remind me of 2010-2013 Eliezer), and make the QM section look a heck of a lot more intimidating than it needs to. They also need new images to replace the quick pencil drawings, so I suggest leaving out the more technical stuff and then consolidating all the QM posts in a future eBook, once the images are polished up.

I can also suggest places to integrate the new additions that will make it possible to read the entire Sequences eBook from front to back without doing any hopping around. It doesn't take very much reshuffling to make the dependencies work sequentially in the Sequences.

I would rather the QM sequence was shortened to the low-controversy subset Eliezer described in An Intuitive Explanation of Quantum Mechanics and checked for technical accuracy. The pure MWI advocacy part belongs in some appendix, and the outright nonsense like "a Bayesian can become as smart as Einstein" should be chucked and never mentioned again.

Are there any updates on when this will be released?

Has anyone considered A/B testing different versions of proposed changes or orderings?

One metric that could be calculated automatically: how many articles in the book contain hyperlinks to the articles that appear later in the book, or don't appear in the book?

I guess we should try to make that number as small as possible, for convenient linear reading, but of course it has to be balanced against other concerns (such as keeping articles with similar topics together, so we can make chapters with a unified topic).

Another idea: identify the main topics of the book (they roughly correspond to the chapters you have now: "map and territory", "words", "politics", "reductionism", "quantum physics", "metaethics", "community", etc.), and mark each article with the corresponding tags.

The goal of this is to reduce the cognitive load while sorting the chapters. Instead of thinking "what was the Fake Morality article about, again?" (and trying to keep all those articles in your head), reduce all chapters to a short information: article name (or identifiers), article tags, names of referenced articles. And then only use this information to sort the articles. -- Perhaps by describing every articles in one line of a text file, easily moving them around in the text editor, and calculating the "non-backwards hyperlinks" metric automatically.

Should it open with "The Simple Truth", since it's a precursor to Map and Territory?

The closing parenthesis is missing on the link to "Map and Territory (sequence)". If you compose in Markdown, you have to escape this with a backslash.

I have a comment that takes no issue with the central argument of the 'Mind Projection Fallacy' sequence post, it's just about an embellishment that is, I think, false and a little cringe-inducing:

From "Mind Projection Fallacy":

But the Mind Projection Fallacy generalizes as an error...to Kant's declaration that space by its very nature is flat, and Hume's definition of a priori ideas as those "discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe"...

This should be removed or altered. Kant's declaration that space is by its very nature flat is a declaration about the conditions of experience, not the world as such. He's explicit that space and its flatness are not features of the territory (so to speak), but necessary features of the map. He may be wrong about this, but it's not a case of the mind projection fallacy.

As to the Hume comment, this is a bit of a non-sequitor as phrased: a definition of a philosophical term can't be a case of the mind projection fallacy.

I've been working on an introductory set of posts for a (religious) friend and Hpmor fan. I've been trying to find the posts that explain the various parts of the LW philosophy best, and I've come up with this.

I'd just like to comment a little on which posts I selected, and then recommend for the ebook.

I think zen-like little pieces are nice to start with, like the Twelve Virtues and The Simple Truth, but I think that the Simple Truth requires as either a pre-req or an immediate following by 'The Useful Idea of Truth', to make people see the meaning of the former, otherwise it can be lost entirely. I think f Useful was edited slightly it could fit into the ebook well enough on its own. Also the Map and Territory and Appreciating Cognitive Agorothms from HAE101FB I think are great to introduce core ideas.

I think the inferential distances should be in, so the reader realises things can take time to explain. Also, posts on Curiosity are very useful near the beginning, to give the reader a care for the truth after they later perhaps read something they disagree with.

I'd like to see all the ones that have been referenced over six times added, and also Conjunction Fallacy, Lawful Creativity and Illusion of Transparency.

Cheers. Hope there's an opportunity to get it as two or three physical volumes.

I'd drop A Case Study of Motivated Continuation from Politics rather than trying to add two such unrelated prereqs.

Like other commenters here, I'd like to see the Twelve Virtues make the cut.

I'm really excited about this book!