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).
Simplified Humanism, Positive Futurism & How to Prevent the Universe From Being Turned Into Paper Clips
Michael Anissimov recently did an interview with Eliezer for h+ magazine. It covers material basic to those familiar with the Less Wrong rationality sequences but is worth reading.
The list of questions:
1. Hi Eliezer. What do you do at the Singularity Institute?
2. What are you going to talk about this time at Singularity Summit?
3. Some people consider “rationality” to be an uptight and boring intellectual quality to have, indicative of a lack of spontaneity, for instance. Does your definition of “rationality” match the common definition, or is it something else? Why should we bother to be rational?
4. In your recent work over the last few years, you’ve chosen to focus on decision theory, which seems to be a substantially different approach than much of the Artificial Intelligence mainstream, which seems to be more interested in machine learning, expert systems, neural nets, Bayes nets, and the like. Why decision theory?
5. What do you mean by Friendly AI?
6. What makes you think it would be possible to program an AI that can self-modify and would still retain its original desires? Why would we even want such an AI?
7. How does your rationality writing relate to your Artificial Intelligence work?
8. The Singularity Institute turned ten years old in June. Has the organization grown in the way you envisioned it would since its founding? Are you happy with where the Institute is today?