Finally finished it, took about a month-and-a-half at around 3 hours a day. It kind of ate my life. I enjoyed it immensely.
I think the last thing that I liked as much as this was 'Game of Thrones'. I think it's probably a Great Work of Literature. Shame the future isn't going to be long enough for it to get recognised as such...
I wouldn't have wished it shorter. There were a couple of 'Sandbox' chapters that I'd probably cut, in the same way that Lord of the Rings could do without Tom Bombadil, but the main thing is well-paced and consistently both fun and thought-provoking.
It turned out that my preferred way to read it was to unzip project-lawful-avatars-moreinfo.epub. In the unzipped structure all the chapters become plain html files with avatars included, which can be easily read in firefox.
Have ended up reading project-lawful-avatars-moreinfo.epub as the best of the options. 70 pages into a total of 183 (very long) pages. It is still great. Enjoying it immensely.
Thank you so much for this! I tried to read this thing once before, and didn't get into it at all, despite pretty much loving everything Eliezer has ever written, which experience I now put down to something about the original presentation.
I'm now about 10% of the way through, and loving it. Two days well spent, see y'all in a fortnight or so.....
For anyone in a similar position, I found (and am currently reading):
https://akrolsmir-glowflow-streamlit-app-79n743.streamlit.app
which is much more to my taste.
And I also found https://www.mikescher.com/blog/29/Project_Lawful_ebook, of which the project-lawful-avatars-moreinfo.epub version looks like the one I would prefer to read (but haven't actually tried reading more than a couple of pages of yet).
I actually think that the avatars are really important to the feel of the story, and have been carefully chosen, and I wouldn't want to be without them.
I knew that those wise and good benefactors of humanity would turn out to have been warning us of the dangers of polyunsaturated fats all along.
They might want to mention it to people like my father, who, on the advice of his doctor, has been pretty much only eating polyunsaturated fats these last twenty years, for the good of his heart.
Or perhaps to McDonalds, who on the basis of a consumer-led campaign changed their famously good beef-dripping fried chips to vegetable-oil fried chips, coincidentally at about the time obesity and various other nasty diseases with no known cause really became fashionable in America.
Another thing linoleic acid does when there's oxygen around is polymerize into a varnish, which is why linseed oil (lin-oleic) is traditionally used to waterproof cricket bats.
It used to say 'do not eat' in quite large letters on the cricket-bat-varnish bottles. Presumably now it says 'heart-healthy!'.
I wouldn't just write off the naive anti-seed oil position either from a chemical point of view. Metabolism is absurdly complicated and finely tuned. Substituting a slightly different substrate into a poorly understood set of reactions and feedback loops is unlikely to go well.
There was very little linoleic acid in the diet we evolved to eat. Sure, it's essential in small quantities, but using it as a major energy source is likely a very bad idea a priori.
I don't buy this, the curvedness of the sea is obvious to sailors, e.g. you see the tops of islands long before you see the beach, and indeed to anyone who has ever swum across a bay! Inland peoples might be able to believe the world is flat, but not anyone with boats.
A Great Man and an inspiration to me and to this community and to all thinking men.
God rest his soul in peace in Paradise.
1alt-text is supposed to be: "I'm not even sure they've read Superintelligence"
Hi, I've pre-ordered it on the UK Amazon, I hope that works for you. Let me know if I should do something different.
I have a number of reasonably well-respected friends in the University of Cambridge and its associated tech-sphere, I can try to get some of them to give endorsements if you think that will help and can send me a pdf.