Totally agree -- helps if you can convince them to read Fire Upon the Deep, too. I'm not being facetious; the explicit and implicit background vocabulary (seems to) make it easier to understand the essays.
(EDIT: to clarify, it is not that I think Fire in particular must be elevated as a classic of rationality, but that it's part of a smart sci/fi tradition that helps lay the ground for learning important things. There's an Eliezer webpage about this somewhere.)
Followup to: The Most Frequently Useful Thing
What's the number one thing that goes into a book on rationality, which would make you buy a copy of that book for a friend? We can, of course, talk about all the ways that the rationality of the Distant World At Large needs to be improved. But in this case - I think the more useful data might be the Near question, "With respect to the people I actually know, what do I want to see in that book, so that I can give the book to them to explain it?"
(And again, please think of your own answer-component before reading others' comments.)