I predict that when your wife read "The Simple Truth" she was not acquainted with (or was not thinking about) the various theories of truth that philosophers have come up with. I like it a lot, but when I first read it I was able to see it as a defense of a particular theory of truth and a critique of some other ones.

(In particular, it's a defense of the correspondence theory, though see this thread.)

Edit: In other words, I think "The Simple Truth" appeals mainly to people who have read descriptions of the other theories of truth and said to themselves, "People actually believe that?!"

They are all regularities, but laws of physics are regularities that people notice (or try to notice), while legal laws and chess rules are regularities that people impose. (Grammar rules as linguists study them are more like physics; grammar rules as language teachers teach them are more like chess rules.)

I'm not sure what Lewis is trying to say here, but the physical science meaning and the legal meaning of "law" are different enough that I think it's better to consider them different words that are spelled the same (and etymologically related of course). Which means he's making a pun.

Yeah, posts use HTML but comments use Markdown.

Less Wrong's Markdown implementation doesn't allow HTML, and there's no way to do tables in the non-HTML part of Markdown, except for using spaces to separate the columns so that they line up in a fixed-width font, then indenting each line by four spaces.

       |                 | Projected Monetary | Projected Opportunity     |
       | Available Funds |  Cost of Attending | Cost of Not Attending     | End Result
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Friend |            $600 |               $600 | Unknown (Possibly Nought) | Known loss of monetary funds
       |                 |                    |                           | - unknown opportunity cost
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------
Other  |          $3,000 |             $1,200 | Lifelong Saudade          | Worthwhile expenditure of
       |                 |                    |                           | time & funds
-------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------

(Today I learned a new word.)

Here's the comment where Eliezer calls Good and Real "practically Less Wrong in book form".

Eliezer describes the Born probabilities as a "serious mystery" and an "open problem".

Motl's record of being wrong??? Who the hell are you to say?

Scott Aaronson (who is presumably qualified) doesn't seem to have a very high opinion of Motl either.

most notably the quantum mechanics sequence. Which I am afraid fails terribly as an attempted first course on QM, is blatantly wrong in some parts and reflects that indeed Yudkowsky never had any proper physics education because he fails to understand even basic notions properly.

I think he would like to have any mistakes pointed out. (Preferably math mistakes rather than philosophical stuff that scientists don't all agree on.) LWer ciphergoth recently posted a Physics StackExchange question (and a corresponding LW post) about errors in the quantum physics sequence.

Let the down-voting commence!

It's better to omit passive-aggressive stuff like this.

The following all happen to be about hypercompetent thinkers. How inspirational they are varies.

• Limitless. If you like the Bourne movies you'll like this. My favorite scene is when Eddie, the main character, is on the phone with his girlfriend while she is being pursued by a bad guy. It is a fun little dramatization of brains being mightier than brawn. (For me the main defect of the movie was that despite his chemically enhanced hyperintelligence Eddie does some stupid things in order to keep the plot wheels turning.)
• Understand by Ted Chiang -- available in its entirety online! This novelette is kind of a takeoff on Flowers for Algernon. Unlike in Limitless, the protagonist doesn't do anything stupid, yet the story manages to be interesting.
• R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing trilogy. I started this on Yvain's recommendation but somewhere in the second book my interest flagged or I got distracted by other books or whatever. I'd still like to finish it sometime. From what I've read of it, Kellhus (a super-smart rationalist who is also basically a ninja) is kind of an antihero, or at least morally ambiguous. He's very good at achieving his goals, but I don't know whether his goals are worth achieving.

Edit -- here a couple other things:

• The main character in Frank Conroy's Body and Soul is a musician with a lot of native talent (who also puts in the hours). I recently typed out a favorite passage.
• A bit different from the above stuff, but Wodehouse's Jeeves stories are laugh-out-loud funny and feature a hypercompetent valet. (I know these from the stories rather than the TV adaptations, but the latter feature Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry.)

Aaron Swartz (this guy) gave a short but glowing review to HP:MoR in April.