MIRI's ongoing effort to publish the sequences as an eBook has given us the opportunity to update their contents and organization.
We're looking for suggested posts to reorder, add, or remove.
To help with this, here is a breakdown of the current planned contents of the eBook and any currently planned modifications. Following that is a list of the most popular links within the sequences to posts that are not included therein.
Now's a good time to suggested changes or improvements!
———
Map and Territory
Added …What's a Bias Again? because it's meant to immediately follow Why Truth, And….
Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
No changes.
A Human's Guide to Words
No changes.
How to Actually Change Your Mind
Politics is the Mind-Killer
Removed The Robbers Cave Experiment because it already appears in Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor, and there in the original chronological order which flows better.
Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor
Removed The Litany Against Gurus because it already appears in Politics is the Mind-killer.
Seeing with Fresh Eyes
Removed Asch's Conformity Experiment and Lonely Dissent because they both appear at the end of Death Spirals. Removed The Genetic Fallacy because it's in the Metaethics sequence: that's where it falls chronologically and it fits better there with the surrounding posts.
Noticing Confusion
Removed this entire subsequence because it is entirely contained within Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions.
Against Rationalization
Added Pascal's Mugging (before Torture vs Dust Specks) because it explains the 3^^^3 notation. Added Torture vs Dust Specks before A Case Study of Motivated Continuation because A Case Study refers to it frequently.
Against Doublethink
No changes.
Overly Convenient Excuses
Removed How to Convince Me that 2+2=3 because it's already in Map & Territory.
Letting Go
No change.
The Simple Math of Evolution
Added Evolutionary Psychology because it fits nicely at the end and it's referred to by other posts many times.
Challenging the Difficult
No change.
Yudkowsky's Coming of Age
No change.
Reductionism
No change. (Includes the Zombies subsequence.)
Quantum Physics
No change. Doesn't include any "Preliminaries" posts, since they'd all be duplicates
Metaethics
No change.
Fun Theory
No change.
The Craft and the Community
No change.
Appendix
Includes:
- The Simple Truth
- An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem
- A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation
———
Here are the most-frequently-referenced links within the sequences to posts outside of the sequences (with a count of three or more). This may help you notice posts that you think should be included in the sequences eBook.
- Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality => 24
- The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition => 22
- Terminal Values and Instrumental Values => 16
- Burdensome Details => 16
- Expecting Short Inferential Distances => 15
- Thou Art Godshatter => 14
- Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable => 14
- Scope Insensitivity => 13
- The Ultimate Source => 13
- No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know => 12
- The Design Space of Minds-In-General => 11
- Think Like Reality => 10
- Passing the Recursive Buck => 9
- Lost Purposes => 9
- The Hidden Complexity of Wishes => 9
- Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence => 9
- A Priori => 8
- Beautiful Probability => 8
- Possibility and Could-ness => 8
- Why is the Future So Absurd? => 8
- Fake Utility Functions => 8
- Availability => 7
- Ghosts in the Machine => 7
- Nonsentient Optimizers => 7
- Fake Fake Utility Functions => 7
- Searching for Bayes-Structure => 7
- Outside the Laboratory => 7
- Dreams of AI Design => 6
- Surface Analogies and Deep Causes => 6
- Artificial Addition => 6
- Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone) => 6
- Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization => 5
- Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable => 5
- The Cartoon Guide to Löb's Theorem => 5
- Can't Unbirth a Child => 5
- The Psychological Unity of Humankind => 5
- Humans in Funny Suits => 5
- Rationality is Systematized Winning => 5
- The True Prisoner's Dilemma => 5
- Zen and the Art of Rationality => 5
- The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism" => 5
- For The People Who Are Still Alive => 4
- The Two-Party Swindle => 4
- Conjunction Fallacy => 4
- Anthropomorphic Optimism => 4
- The Modesty Argument => 4
- Rational evidence => 4
- Priors as Mathematical Objects => 4
- The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet/ => 4
- I Defy the Data! => 4
- Bystander Apathy => 3
- We Don't Really Want Your Participation => 3
- You Only Live Twice => 3
- Lawful Creativity => 3
- One Life Against the World => 3
- Locate the hypothesis => 3
- Cynical About Cynicism => 3
- Optimization => 3
- Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You => 3
- Detached Lever Fallacy => 3
- Circular Altruism => 3
- The Allais Paradox => 3
- The Martial Art of Rationality => 3
- Fake Morality => 3
Suggestions?
Luke, Alex: After reading through most of Eliezer's 2006-2009 posts over the last 3 days, I suggest including in the eBook all the out-of-sequence articles you listed, except:
From what I can tell, all the links to those pages within the Sequences are minor passing mentions, and their contents aren't particularly valuable for understanding the core content of the Sequences. Understanding Free Will, for instance, isn't needed for the rest of the Sequences, and EY actively discourages just copy-pasting his answer here.
I note that about 25 of the posts from the Quantum Mechanics / Timeless Physics sequence also aren't necessary for understanding the rest of the Sequences, differ in tone in interesting ways (they remind me of 2010-2013 Eliezer), and make the QM section look a heck of a lot more intimidating than it needs to. They also need new images to replace the quick pencil drawings, so I suggest leaving out the more technical stuff and then consolidating all the QM posts in a future eBook, once the images are polished up.
I can also suggest places to integrate the new additions that will make it possible to read the entire Sequences eBook from front to back without doing any hopping around. It doesn't take very much reshuffling to make the dependencies work sequentially in the Sequences.