Today we're announcing a partnership with Castify to bring you Less Wrong content in audio form. Castify gets blog content read by professional readers and delivers it to their subscribers as a podcast so that you can listen to Less Wrong on the go. The founders of Castify are big fans of Less Wrong so they're rolling out their beta with some of our content.
To see how many people will use this, we're having the entire Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions core sequence read and recorded. We thought listening to it would be a great way for new readers to get caught up and for others to check out the quality of Castify's work. We will be adding more Less Wrong content based on community feedback, so let us know which content you'd like to see more of in the comments.
The free sample is pretty good. The reader is awesome. You've probably got my (monetary) support in the long run, though I'd like to see how it'd work with Kaj's suggestion about the business model. Getting new people to listen to the sequences would be easier if it doesn't look like there's any commitment, and/or if a sequence can be 'gifted' to someone.
The one nitpick or suggestion I might have, however, would be to have slightly longer pauses between main points / topics, to let everything sink in. The pacing of the reader is excellent, but Eliezer's writing can require some heavy mental juggling between concepts, so I would have put a bit more time spacing e.g. before and after the "It's tempting to try to eliminate (...) short and direct step, but it is still a step." paragraph to let the jump from the argument to the belief steps and from the steps to the tall building example sink in and run more smoothly.
I doubt this alone is worth re-editing all the audio, and it might just be specific to the sample article. Might be worth keeping in mind once you're doing the meat of things like Reductionism or Human's Guide to Words, though.
We definitely hear you. We'll pass that suggestion and positive feedback onto George, he's the reader. The subject material can certainly be dense, you definitely do not want to hit the 2X speed button on your iPhone!