= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Black Belt Bayesian: Building a Better Brain
That one is taken.
My mistake.
I'm not sure whether what looks like rambling is actually an effective method of easing people into the ideas so that the ideas are easier to accept, rather than just being inefficient.
Is there any way to find out?
In general, when something can be either tremendously clever, or a bit foolish, the prior tends to the latter. Even with someone who's generally a pretty smart cookie. You could run the experiment, but I'm willing to bet on the outcome now.
It's important to remember that it isn't particularly useful for this book to be The Sequences. The Sequences are The Sequences, and the book can direct people to them. What would be more useful would be a condensed, rapid introduction to the field that tries to maximize insight-per-byte. Not something that's a definitive work on rationality, but something that people can crank through in a day or two, rave about to their friends, and come away with a better idea of what rational thinking looks like. It'd also serve as a less formidable introduction for those who are very interested, to the broader pool of work on the subject, including the Sequences. Dollar for sanity-waterline dollar, that's a very heavily leveraged position.
Actually, if CFAR isn't going to write that book, I will.
In response to
The Fabric of Real Things
You could plug a baby's nervous system into the output of a radium decay random number generator. It'd probably disagree (disregarding how crazy it would be) that its observations were best described by causal graphs.
In response to
The Fabric of Real Things
"Does your rule there forbid epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness - that consciousness is caused by neurons, but doesn't affect those neurons in turn? The classic argument for epiphenomenal consciousness has always been that we can imagine a universe in which all the atoms are in the same place and people behave exactly the same way, but there's nobody home - no awareness, no consciousness, inside the brain. The usual effect of the brain generating consciousness is missing, but consciousness doesn't cause anything else in turn - it's just a passive awareness - and so from the outside the universe looks the same. Now, I'm not so much interested in whether you think epiphenomenal theories of consciousness are true or false - rather, I want to know if you think they're impossible or meaningless a priori based on your rules."
How would you reply?
It does not. Epiphenomenal consciousness could be real for the same reason that the spaceship vanishing over the event horizon. It's Occam's Razor that knocks down that one.
In response to
The Fabric of Real Things
"You say that a universe is a connected fabric of causes and effects. Well, that's a very Western viewpoint - that it's all about mechanistic, deterministic stuff. I agree that anything else is outside the realm of science, but it can still be real, you know. My cousin is psychic - if you draw a card from his deck of cards, he can tell you the name of your card before he looks at it. There's no mechanism for it - it's not a causal thing that scientists could study - he just does it. Same thing when I commune on a deep level with the entire universe in order to realize that my partner truly loves me. I agree that purely spiritual phenomena are outside the realm of causal processes, which can be scientifically understood, but I don't agree that they can't be real."
How would you reply?
1: If your cousin can demonstrate that ability using somebody else's deck, under experimental conditions that I specify and he is not aware of ahead of time, I will give him a thousand dollars.
2: In the counter-factual case where he accomplishes this, that does not mean that his ability is outside the realm of science (well, probably it means the experiment was flawed, but we'll assume otherwise). There have been a wide range of inexplicable phenomena which are now understood by science. If your cousin's psychic powers are real, then science can study them, and break down the black box to find out what's inside. There are certainly causal arrows there, in any case. If there weren't, we wouldn't know about it.
3: If your strongest evidence that your partner loves you is psychic intuition, you should definitely get a prenup.
If it were me, I'd split your list after reductionism into a separate ebook. Everything that's controversial or hackles-raising is in the later sequences. A (shorter) book consisting solely of the sequences on cognitive biases, rationalism, and reductionism could be much more a piece of content somebody without previous rationalist intentions can pick up and take something valuable away from. The later sequences have their merits, but they are absolutely counterproductive to raising the sanity waterline in this case. They'll label your book as kooky and weird, and they don't, in themselves, improve their readers enough to justify the expense. People interested in the other stuff can get the companion volume.
You could label the pared down volume something self helpey like 'Thinking Better: The Righter, Smarter You." For goodness sake, don't have the word 'sequences' in the title. That doesn't mean anything to anyone not already from LW, and it won't help people figure out what it's about.
EDIT: Other title suggestions - really just throwing stuff at the wall here
Rationality: Art and Practice
The Rational You
The Art of Human Rationality
~~Black Belt Bayesian: Building a Better Brain~~
The Science of Winning: Human Rationality and You
Science of Winning: The Art and Practice of Human Rationality (I quite like this one)
Oh, and somebody get Yudkowsky an editor. I love the sequences, but they aren't exactly short and to the point. Frankly, they ramble. Which is fine if you're just trying to get your thoughts out there, but people don't finish the majority of the books they pick up. You need something that's going to be snappy, interesting, and cater to a more typical attention span. Something maybe half the length we're looking at now. The more of it they get through, the more good you're doing.
EDIT: Oh! And the whole thing needs a full jargon palette-swap. There's a lot of LW-specific jargon that isn't helpful. In many cases, there's existing academic jargon that can take the place of the phrases Yudkowky uses. Aside from lending the whole thing a superficial-but-useful veneer of credibility, it'll make the academics happy, and make them less likely to make snide comments about your book in public fora. If you guys aren't already planning on a POD demand run, you really should. Ebooks are wonderful, but the bulk of the population is still humping dead trees around. An audiobook or podcast might be useful as well.
If it were me, I'd split your list after reductionism into a separate ebook. Everything that's controversial or hackles-raising is in the later sequences. A (shorter) book consisting solely of the sequences on cognitive biases, rationalism, and reductionism could be much more a piece of content somebody without previous rationalist intentions can pick up and take something valuable away from. The later sequences have their merits, but they are absolutely counterproductive to raising the sanity waterline in this case. They'll label your book as kooky and weird, and they don't, in themselves, improve their readers enough to justify the expense. People interested in the other stuff can get the companion volume.
You could label the pared down volume something self helpey like 'Thinking Better: The Righter, Smarter You." For goodness sake, don't have the word 'sequences' in the title. That doesn't mean anything to anyone not already from LW, and it won't help people figure out what it's about.
EDIT: Other title suggestions - really just throwing stuff at the wall here
Rationality: Art and Practice
The Rational You
The Art of Human Rationality
~~Black Belt Bayesian: Building a Better Brain~~
The Science of Winning: Human Rationality and You
Science of Winning: The Art and Practice of Human Rationality (I quite like this one)
There will always be multiple centers of power What's at stake is, at most, the future centuries of a solar-system civilization No assumption that individual humans can survive even for hundreds of years, or that they would want to
You give no reason why we should consider these as more likely than the original assumptions.
This conversation sounds a little bit to me like the conversation in disputing definitions.
Taboo transhumanism or something, perhaps? I think that these superheroes count as significant positive change at least, one of the things NancyLebovitz described in the title post.
Sure. I think we just have different definitions of the term. Not much to be gained here.
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The difference is necessary vs. sufficient. Money and most purchasable goods aren't a significant source of happiness as best I can tell, and neither is freedom as such. Lower incomes constrain your happiness by increasing your sensitivity to negative externalities and probably also by way of status effects, but removing those constraints doesn't lead reliably to a happy life; granted, I'd expect the miserable millionaire trope to be at least partly sour grapes, but I'm sure there are plenty of independently wealthy people out there that never developed the skills to be happy. Particularly if we're talking old money, since I'd expect people who grew up with that level of privilege to respond poorly to any minor disruption. A billion dollars would give you all the freedom you need to be happy -- but going from that to "a billionaire must be unusually happy", or even "most billionaires are unusually happy", seems to depend on a lot more self-awareness and agency than I think most people of any income actually have.
I also doubt there's much of a discontinuity in the income-to-happiness curve when income reaches what Neal Stephenson called "fuck-you money"; if there was, we'd expect the lottery winner results to look different.
Lottery winners have different problems. Mostly that sharp changes in money are socially disruptive, and that lottery players are not the most fiscally responsible people on Earth. It's a recipe for failure.