I like this one. Also Your Guide to Becoming Less Wrong feels nice and friendly and accessible.
If anything, I think “How to Be Less Wrong” is too good of a title for this. “The Methods of Rationality” isn’t an inherently very good title, its only real advantage being that it draws a lot more HPMoR people into the fold. Those people will be relatively nerdy and Internet-friendly and are familiar with (and fond of) a lot of Eliezer’s idiosyncrasies and jargon, so it makes sense to have the extant Sequences (qua ‘The Methods of Rationality’) be the version of the book we want them to get.
But, really, a giant pack of EY posts isn’t a very good introduction for the general public, or even for the more intelligent and capable portion of the general public, to rationality. There’s enough content within LessWrong to make a truly superb book along those lines, with a bit of minor supplementation and a lot of editing and reorganizing. And if we published such a book (both as a book book and as an e-book), the more simple and accessible title ‘How to Be Less Wrong’ (or something along those lines) would sell better, while leading a lot of people toward the lesswrong.com domain. (And since these people would be less Internet-happy and Yudkowsky-happy than the HPMoR crowd, this brand name continuity would be a lot more integral to getting them to visit the site and join the LW community and keep progressing in their personal cultivation.)
So I think those two titles are both good, and should be attached to independent projects:
The Methods of Rationality is a more exhaustive (but much less polished and lay-accessible) dump of existing writings, targeted in large part at Internety people just outside our horizon (most obviously, HPMoR folks).
How to Be Less Wrong is a much shorter, jargon-freer, more polished book, this time for general consumption. The kind of thing I’d mass-purchase to give to every non-rationalist I know and recruit them in one fell swoop to the Bayesian Conspiracy.
A third project might be a sequel to HLW that goes into the more advanced and challenging topics that are good for high-level rationality, but not really needed for greatly improving the average smart person’s effectiveness. (Most of the quantum stuff is probably too high-level even for the latter project.)
The problem with the current Sequences as an enchiridion or bible for aspiring rationalists is that it’s too uneven; it freely appeals to very advanced jargon and prerequisites in the course of explaining incredibly simple concepts that, if it weren’t for the unnecessary reliance on quantumy and philosophytastic examples, could be absorbed and put to good use by a random person on the street. Since this is a very large project that would take a lot of work and time, and the end product would probably differ a lot from the current Sequences, it makes sense to just publish what we have now with a mediocre but effective title (MoR), then start thinking about cannibalizing and enhancing the best content for much more targeted rationality initiatives.
How to Be Less Wrong
I like this one. Also Your Guide to Becoming Less Wrong feels nice and friendly and accessible.
If anything, I think “How to Be Less Wrong” is too good of a title for this. “The Methods of Rationality” isn’t an inherently very good title, its only real advantage being that it draws a lot more HPMoR people into the fold. Those people will be relatively nerdy and Internet-friendly and are familiar with (and fond of) a lot of Eliezer’s idiosyncrasies and jargon, so it makes sense to have the extant Sequences (qua ‘The Methods of Rationality’) be the version of the book we want them to get.
But, really, a giant pack of EY posts isn’t a very good introduction for the general public, or even for the more intelligent and capable portion of the general public, to rationality. There’s enough content within LessWrong to make a truly superb book along those lines, with a bit of minor supplementation and a lot of editing and reorganizing. And if we published such a book (both as a book book and as an e-book), the more simple and accessible title ‘How to Be Less Wrong’ (or something along those lines) would sell better, while leading a lot of people toward the lesswrong.com domain. (And since these people would be less Internet-happy and Yudkowsky-happy than the HPMoR crowd, this brand name continuity would be a lot more integral to getting them to visit the site and join the LW community and keep progressing in their personal cultivation.)
So I think those two titles are both good, and should be attached to independent projects:
The Methods of Rationality is a more exhaustive (but much less polished and lay-accessible) dump of existing writings, targeted in large part at Internety people just outside our horizon (most obviously, HPMoR folks).
How to Be Less Wrong is a much shorter, jargon-freer, more polished book, this time for general consumption. The kind of thing I’d mass-purchase to give to every non-rationalist I know and recruit them in one fell swoop to the Bayesian Conspiracy.
A third project might be a sequel to HLW that goes into the more advanced and challenging topics that are good for high-level rationality, but not really needed for greatly improving the average smart person’s effectiveness. (Most of the quantum stuff is probably too high-level even for the latter project.)
The problem with the current Sequences as an enchiridion or bible for aspiring rationalists is that it’s too uneven; it freely appeals to very advanced jargon and prerequisites in the course of explaining incredibly simple concepts that, if it weren’t for the unnecessary reliance on quantumy and philosophytastic examples, could be absorbed and put to good use by a random person on the street. Since this is a very large project that would take a lot of work and time, and the end product would probably differ a lot from the current Sequences, it makes sense to just publish what we have now with a mediocre but effective title (MoR), then start thinking about cannibalizing and enhancing the best content for much more targeted rationality initiatives.