Liberals see the free market as a kind of optimizer run amuck, a dangerous superintelligence with simple non-human values that must be checked and constrained by the government - the friendly SI. Conservatives just reverse the narrative roles.

I like this analogy. So basically, how do you want to balance the power between your two overlords, one much much smarter than you but with non-human values, and the other much dumber than you but with human (mostly) values.

LessWrong is getting ready to release an actual book that covers most of the material found in the Sequences.

To be more specific...

MIRI is preparing to release, in Q1 2015, an ebook version of The Sequences that has been pretty thoroughly proofread, rearranged to be a bit more concise and a lot more accessible to new readers, filled with short introductions to each newly defined 'sequence', and nicely typeset.

A hardcopy version (in multiple volumes) will follow, after readers have had some time to find the errors that we have missed. (An ebook file can easily be reissued with mistakes fixed; not so with hardcopy.)

This audiobook version produced by Castify (if the Kickstarter campaign succeeds) will be the official audiobook companion to the ebook and hardcopy versions. We've been in conversation with Rick about this for months, now.

Also, the book won't actually be titled The Sequences.

Competed the survey. Thanks for doing this, the results are always interesting.

I've proofread three of the chapters. There are 340 of them in the version of the ebook that I was sent, and the whole thing runs over 2000 pages. At roughly 250 words per page, that's 500k words.

So, basically what alexvermeer said - pretty much all of them.

Things that we know that we don't know we know? I run into these all the time... last night, for example, I realized that I knew the English word for the little plastic cylinders at the end of a shoelace. (I discovered this when someone asked me what an 'aglet' was.) I'd had no idea.

I don't like a lot of things he did, but that's the second very good advice I've heard from Rumsfeld. Maybe I need to start respecting his competence more.

I'd actually be surprised if LessWrong made many deconverts (though such people would be interesting to hear from, if they exist). The Sequences take atheism and a vague respect for rationality for granted, and focus on arguing about other topics. And the Sequences have shifted my beliefs around on some of those other topics, most notably Bayesianism.

The comparison to apologetics is more apt, I think, for sites like Rational Wiki, which Konkvistador aptly described as, "what a slightly left of centre atheist needs to win an internet debate... an ammunition depot to aid in winning debates."

My take away from this is that you need to "shut up and multiply" every single time. Looking at the math skills study, the thought was that people glance at the raw numbers (instead of looking at the ratios) and stop there if they fit their ideological beliefs. If it conflicts with your beliefs though you spend a little longer and figure out you need to look a the ratio. So if we train ourselves to always "shut up and multiply" hopefully some of this effect will go away. Maybe a follow-up study to see if people who actually do the math still get it wrong?

I'm already booked that day but if it's a weekly thing I wouldn't mind stopping by sometime.

I was about to post something similar, although I don't have kids myself.

In some sense, I'm already doing that. For the cost of raising three kids, I could have saved something like 250 statistical lives. So I don't know that our unwillingness to torture a loved one is a good argument against the math of the dust specks.

Huh. That's ... a pretty compelling argument against having kids, actually.