I think it would also be valuable to have someone translate "in the other direction" and take (for example) Paul Christiano's writings and produce vivid, concrete parable-like stories based on them. I think such stories can be useful not just as persuasive tools but also epistemically, as a way of grounding the meaning [LW(p) · GW(p)] of abstract definitions of the sort Paul likes to argue in terms of.

I still haven’t read most of the sequences and don’t intend to read HPMOR

That's fine, that's what projectlawful is for. It's meant to be the fun thing that you can do instead of looking at TV shows and social media. I like reading it after waking up and before going to bed. 

It's ideal in a lot of ways, because it's explicitly designed to have you learn rationality by habit/repetition without any deliberate repetitive effort e.g. taking notes, which is necessary in order to actually get good at turning rationality into extreme competence at life.

The EY self-insert character, Keltham, is much more humble and is genuinely interested in the world and people around him (many of whom are "smarter" than him or vigorously intend to surpass him). He's not preachy, he's an economist; and most of the rationality lessons are just him saying how things are in an alternate timeline (dath ilan), not insisting that they ought to be his way.

I definitely agree that it's a good idea to find ways to use EY's writings to get ahead of the curve and find new opportunities; it would save everyone a lot of time and labor to just implement the original works themselves instead of usual rewriting them in your own words and taking credit for it to advance your status. What you've said about summarization makes sense, but I've tried that [LW(p) · GW(p)] and it's a lot harder than it looks; getting rid of the lists of examples and parables makes it harder to digest the content properly. This [LW · GW] is an extreme case, it turned the best 25 sequences into notes basically (a great alternative to rereading all 25 since you can do it every morning, but not ideal for the first read).

Maybe such a contest could also require the entrants to describe generally-valuable effective strategies to condense EY's writings? 

Aren’t turned off by perceived arrogance

One hypothesis I've had is that people with more MIRI-like views tend to be more arrogant themselves. A possible mechanism is that the idea that the world is going to end and that they are the only ones who can save is appealing in a way that shifts their views on certain questions and changes the way they think about AI (e.g. they need less explanation that they are some of the most important people ever, so they spend less time considering why AI might go well by default).

[ETA: In case it wasn't clear, I am positing subconscious patterns correlated with arrogance that lead to MIRI-like views]

Interesting idea. I think it’s possible that a prize is the wrong thing for getting the best final result (but also possible that getting a half decent result is more important than a high variance attempt at optimising for the best result). My thinking is: To do what you’re suggesting to a high standard could take months of serious effort. The idea of someone really competent doing so just for the chance at some prize money doesn’t quite seem right to me… I think there could be people out there who in principle could do it excellently but who would want to know that they’d ‘got the job’ as it were before spending serious effort on it.

At least 50% of the disagreement between people who align more with MIRI/Eliezer and those who align more with opposing clusters of views (Christiano, Garfinkel, etc.) is caused not by rational disagreement, but by more subconscious emotional stuff like tastes, vibes, culture, politics, etc.

Can you say more about what defines the clusters? I disagree with this if you take the top 10 people in each cluster (maybe according to the metric of "general competence * amount of time investigating these views"), and I agree if you're instead thinking of clusters of thousands of people.

The Sequences is outdated because it introduces the reader to a naturalist worldview as opposed to embedded agency which would make moving to AI alignment easier for new readers. While the core ideas are not about naturalism as much as "the art of rationality", the fabric is too tight-knitted. IE the invididuals that the series of essays is particularly recommended for are overly unlikely to see that the series is knitted from two differents yarns.

Maybe this was just me, but I skipped most of the parabels in AI to Zombies, because I did not enjoy his fantasy writing. Has someone considered publishing a no-fiction AI to Zombies volume to appeal to this audience? The highlights from the sequences are a good example of what I am thinking about, but my guess (based on our local rationality group) would be that a nonnegligable portion of people who actually read most of his nonfiction, read the ebook.