So8res

Sequences

Replacing Guilt

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So8res130

We have an advertising campaign planned, and we'll be working with professional publicists. We have a healthy budget for it already :-)

So8res60

I'm told that Australians will be able to purchase the UK e-book, and that it'll be ready to go in a week or so.

So8res210

There's not a short answer; subtitles and cover art are over-constrained and the choices have many stakeholders (and authors rarely have final say over artwork). The differences reflect different input from different publishing-houses in different territories, who hopefully have decent intuitions about their markets.

So8res40

The US and UK versions will have different covers and subtitles. I'm not sure why the US version shows up on the .co.uk website. We've asked the publishers to take a look.

So8res333

We're still in the final proofreading stages for the English version, so the translators haven't started translating yet. But they're queued up.

So8res5813

We're targeting a broad audience, and so our focus groups have been more like completely uninformed folks than like informed skeptics. (We've spent plenty of time honing arguments with informed skeptics, but that sort of content will appear in the accompanying online resources, rather than in the book itself.) I think that the quotes the post leads with speak to our ability to engage with our intended audience.

I put in the quote from Rob solely for the purpose of answering the question of whether regular LW readers would have anything to gain personally from the book -- and I think that they probably would, given that even MIRI employees expressed surprise at how much they got out of it :-)

(I have now edited the post to make my intent more clear.)

So8res*3316

My guess is that "I'm excited and want a few for my friends and family!" is fine if it's happening naturally, and that "I'll buy a large number to pump up the sales" just gets filtered out. But it's hard to say; the people who compile best-seller lists are presumably intentionally opaque about this. I wouldn't sweat it too much as long as you're not trying to game it.

So8res20

I agree that in real life the entropy argument is an argument in favor of it being actually pretty hard to fool a superintelligence into thinking it might be early in Tegmark III when it's not (even if you yourself are a superintelligence, unless you're doing a huge amount of intercepting its internal sanity checks (which puts significant strain on the trade possibilities and which flirts with being a technical-threat)). And I agree that if you can't fool a superintelligence into thinking it might be early in Tegmark III when it's not, then the purchasing power of simulators drops dramatically, except in cases where they're trolling local aliens. (But the point seems basically moot, as 'troll local aliens' is still an option, and so afaict this does all essentially iron out to "maybe we'll get sold to aliens".)

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