A very nice project and thanks for the effort. I look forward to picking it up.
What are your opinions on a shorter, abridged version of the book (perhaps fitting into the 'standard' 300 pages or so)?
My hope is that Book I of the eBook (Map and Territory), which will be released as its own print volume, will be able to serve a purpose a bit like that. Book II (How to Actually Change Your Mind) may also be viable as a stand-alone work, though its main intended audience is people who have read Map and Territory.
Compressing the entire 1800 pages into just 300 pages is a harder task, since it would require rewriting a lot of material. At that point it might be more useful to just write an entirely new rationality handbook loosely inspired by the Sequences.
The Sequences are being released as an eBook, titled Rationality: From AI to Zombies, on March 12.
We went with the name "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" (based on shminux's suggestion) to make it clearer to people — who might otherwise be expecting a self-help book, or an academic text — that the style and contents of the Sequences are rather unusual. We want to filter for readers who have a wide-ranging interest in (/ tolerance for) weird intellectual topics. Alternative options tended to obscure what the book is about, or obscure its breadth / eclecticism.
The book's contents
Around 340 of Eliezer's essays from 2009 and earlier will be included, collected into twenty-six sections ("sequences"), compiled into six books:
The six books will be released as a single sprawling eBook, making it easy to hop back and forth between different parts of the book. The whole book will be about 1,800 pages long. However, we'll also be releasing the same content as a series of six print books (and as six audio books) at a future date.
The Sequences have been tidied up in a number of small ways, but the content is mostly unchanged. The largest change is to how the content is organized. Some important Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong posts that were never officially sorted into sequences have now been added — 58 additions in all, forming four entirely new sequences (and also supplementing some existing sequences). Other posts have been removed — 105 in total. The following old sequences will be the most heavily affected:
I'll provide more details on these changes when the eBook is out.
Unlike the print and audio-book versions, the eBook version of Rationality: From AI to Zombies will be entirely free. If you want to purchase it on Kindle Store and download it directly to your Kindle, it will also be available on Amazon for $4.99.
To make the content more accessible, the eBook will include introductions I've written up for this purpose. It will also include a LessWrongWiki link to a glossary, which I'll be recruiting LessWrongers to help populate with explanations of references and jargon from the Sequences.
I'll post an announcement to Main as soon as the eBook is available. See you then!