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ciphergoth comments on Simplified Humanism, Positive Futurism & How to Prevent the Universe From Being Turned Into Paper Clips - Less Wrong
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Comments (43)
I'm pleased to see that the rationality book is going to be long, at around 300,000 words twice the length of your average fantasy blockbuster. It should be one of these voluminous and somewhat self-indulgent pop-science books in the mould of Godel, Escher, Bach or The Emperor's New Mind for a shot at the NYT bestseller list.
Heresy alert: Eliezer seems to be better at writing than he is at AI theory. Maybe he should write a big piece of SF about unfriendly and friendly AI to make these concepts as popular as Skynet or the Matrix. A textbook on rationality won't have as much impact.
Or the Da Vinci Code. EMP attacks, rogue AI researchers, counterfactual terrorists, conflicts between FAI coders, sudden breakthroughs in molecular nanotechnology, SL5 decision theory insights, the Bayesian Conspiracy, the Cooperative Conspiracy, bioweapons, mad scientists trying to make utility monsters to hack CEV, governmental restrictions on AI research, quantum immortality (to be used as a plot device), and maybe even a glimpse of fun theory. Add in a gratuitous romantic interest to teach the readers about the importance of humanity and the thousand shards of desire.
Oh, and the main character is Juergen Schmidhuber. YES.
By the way, writing such a book would probably lead to the destruction of the world, which is probably a major reason why Eliezer hasn't done it.
Marcus Hutter and the Prophets of Singularity. Works fine as a band name, too.
I don't know that Eliezer Yudkowsky has spent much time talking about AI theory in this forum such that his competence would be obvious - but either way, the math of the decision theory is not as simple as "do what you are best at".
It might not even be as simple as comparitive advantage, but there are certainly more good writers in the world than good AI theorists.
cousin_it:
I don't think this would be a good strategy. In the general public, including the overwhelming part of the intelligentsia, SF associations are not exactly apt to induce intellectual respect and serious attention.
I have to dissent here: I actually stopped reading the sequences with several more to go because many of them have a very high words-to-content ratio (especially because they were written as separate blog posts over multiple days, and often take the time to summarize points from previous posts). I was really hoping that Eliezer's book would be a concise summary of the rationality content here, not only for my own benefit, but because let's face it: telling LW newcomers that they should probably get started reading the several hundred posts that make up the sequences is a pretty large barrier to entry.
Although, now that I think about it, I'm likely atypical. Even though I very much enjoyed (parts of) GEB, I thought it was very wordy and actually never finished it (quit around page 400).
That's the length of the first draft-- the finished version might be a good bit longer or shorter.
I can't believe you just put those two books in the same sentence.
I agree that TENM is no GEB (though it has its strengths) but they are both voluminous and somewhat self-indulgent pop-science books that got on the NYT bestseller list..
A bit of calculating: It's typical to have about 250 words per page in a published book (unless it's really wide, or has fine print, or something), so that would come out to about 1200 pages. Of course, if it's printed with larger pages, it'll be around the same weight as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which had almost that many words.