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 between LW thought and HNP thought, and expect to do so from sections in which HNP has content LW other does not, or where LW would insert content. This is also a test of both thought systems.
So this would be for someone committed to reading more than one blog post, as the first will not be designed to stir curiosity for the second.
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?