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?
I agree that "The Simple Truth" is long and meandering. It would definitely benefit from being supplemented with a summary containing just the core claims and arguments, with all of the characters and satire stripped away.
But that article is not part of the sequences. It was written before Eliezer started blogging at Overcoming Bias (the blog from which LW branched off)*. It certainly isn't typical of the sequence posts. Almost none of them (if any) are anywhere close to that long.
*At least, I believe that this is so. Eliezer already mentions it in his third OB post.