This came to mind for me as well. This, from Burdensome Details, popped out at me: "Moreover, they would need to add absurdities—where the absurdity is the log probability, so you can add it—rather than averaging them." All this does for me is pattern-match to a Wikipedia article I once read about the concept of entropy in information theory; I don't really know what it means in any precise sense or why it might be true. And the essay even seems to stand on its own without that part. I've come to ignore my fear of not understanding things unless I don't understand pretty much everything I'm reading, but I think a lot of people would get scared that they didn't know enough to read the book and just stop reading.
Come to think of it, we could collect proposed rewrites / deletions to some wiki page: this seems suitable for a communal effort. The "deletions" wouldn't actually need to be literal deletions, they could just be moved into a footnote. E.g. in the Burdensome Details article, a footnote saying something like "technically, you can measure probabilities by logarithms and..."
Eliezer Yudkowsky's original Sequences have been edited, reordered, and converted into an ebook!
Rationality: From AI to Zombies is now available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI versions on intelligence.org (link). You can choose your own price to pay for it (minimum $0.00), or buy it for $4.99 from Amazon (link). The contents are:
The ebook's release has been timed to coincide with the end of Eliezer's other well-known introduction to rationality, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The two share many similar themes, and although Rationality: From AI to Zombies is (mostly) nonfiction, it is decidedly unconventional nonfiction, freely drifting in style from cryptic allegory to personal vignette to impassioned manifesto.
The 333 posts have been reorganized into twenty-six sequences, lettered A through Z. In order, these are titled:
Several sequences and posts have been renamed, so you'll need to consult the ebook's table of contents to spot all the correspondences. Four of these sequences (marked in bold) are almost completely new. They were written at the same time as Eliezer's other Overcoming Bias posts, but were never ordered or grouped together. Some of the others (A, C, L, S, V, Y, Z) have been substantially expanded, shrunk, or rearranged, but are still based largely on old content from the Sequences.
One of the most common complaints about the old Sequences was that there was no canonical default order, especially for people who didn't want to read the entire blog archive chronologically. Despite being called "sequences," their structure looked more like a complicated, looping web than like a line. With Rationality: From AI to Zombies, it will still be possible to hop back and forth between different parts of the book, but this will no longer be required for basic comprehension. The contents have been reviewed for consistency and in-context continuity, so that they can genuinely be read in sequence. You can simply read the book as a book.
I have also created a community-edited Glossary for Rationality: From AI to Zombies. You're invited to improve on the definitions and explanations there, and add new ones if you think of any while reading. When we release print versions of the ebook (as a six-volume set), a future version of the Glossary will probably be included.