I agree that some combination of rewriting and rearranging is called for. I think that most people here haven't thought of editing the sequences as allowed, because they're Eliezer's articles, promoted to high status. In actual fact, that page started as just a categorized list; using it as a suggested reading order came later, and it was never optimized for that purpose. The very notion of reading articles in category-sorted order is pretty stupid; it would be better to give new readers a taste of each of the topics Less Wrong has to offer, to maximize the chance that one of them will pull them in, and then go in depth about particular topics.
There should be particular emphasis on the first posts in a depth-first traversal, since those are what people will start with when told to read the sequences. The first article people will read, following this pattern, is The Simple Truth. And as a newcomer's introduction to Less Wrong, The Simple Truth is terrible. I mean, it's a good article, but it's much too long, indirect and sparse, and it's aimed at dispelling specific confused notions which most readers won't even have.
So let's fix it. Our goal is to choose the first few articles people read, in order to maximize the chance that they get hooked and keep reading. We can either pick high-quality historical posts, by any author, or write new articles specifically for this purpose. The very first article should get special attention, and be chosen carefully. After that, there should be one article about each major topic, before circling around to go into depth about any one topic. Many of the best articles for this purpose will come from the sequence, but there are also a lot of high-quality posts that aren't part of any sequence that should be considered. It's also probably a good idea to include a variety of authors, to make it clear that this is a community blog and not just Eliezer.
So please post (1) the one article that you think newcomers should read, to maximize the chance that they read more; and (2) articles you think should be in the first ten articles that a newcomer reads.
Our goal is to choose the first few articles people read, in order to maximize the chance that they get hooked and keep reading.
I am doing a reordering of posts in the sequences with a different goal and according to a different method. I started yesterday.
I undertook to rewrite a book from the Harvard Negotiation Project as hyperlinks to LW articles with a few words in between, sort of in this style. It is not optimized to be an organized introduction to the material, but it does trace a book that was so designed. I hope to learn about the relationship...
If this has been discussed before, then I ask for patience, and a point in the right direction.
I have been a lurker on Lesswrong for a while, and have mostly just been reading things, and only commenting occasionally. It wasn't long before I realised that the sequences played a very important role for understanding lots of what goes on here.
I have been trying to read them, but I've been getting very frustrated. Apart from being insanely long, they are not very easy to understand.
Take the first one I came to "The Simple Truth".
It is a very long story, and it is never really explained what the point is. Is it that truth is whatever helps you to survive? If it is, that seems obviously false.
It also took me quite a while to realise that all these posts are written by one person, that struck me as a bit odd for a "community" blog. So couldn't there be some work to improve the sequences, while also making it more of a community effort?
Maybe:
* Some people could rewrite the key ones, and others could vote on them, or suggest changes
* There could be summary posts alongside the sequences listing the key claims
Any other suggestions?