My motley collection of thoughts upon reading this (please note that, wherever I say “you” or “your” in this post, I’m referring to the whole committee that is working on this ebook, not to you, lukeprog, in particular):
It’s a difficult book to name, chiefly because the sequences themselves don’t really have a narrow common thread; eliminating bias and making use of scientific advances don’t qualify as narrow enough, many others are trying to do that these days. (But then again, I didn’t read them in an orderly fashion, or enough times, to be able to identify the common thread if there is one more specific than that. If there is one, by all means, play on that.)
Absolutely no mention of anything such as The Less Wrong Sequences, 2006-2009. This belongs in a blurb or in an introduction to the book. You probably think that, by using that in a title, you’re telling readers the following: the contents of this book were originally published as sequences of blog posts on the website lesswrong.com, from 2006 to 2009. But you’re not. This information can be conveyed in a sentence such as that one, but it cannot be conveyed in a short title, given that readers are unfamiliar with the terms. There isn’t really a way for them to guess from a quick glance at the title that “Less Wrong” means “the website ”LessWrong.com″ or that “the Sequences” mean “several series of blog posts around which the LessWrong community was formed”, or what all of that has to do with them.
And even so—is that the first thing you wish to tell your readers? What happened to the contents of the book before they were made into a book...? And in a form which is basically incomprehensible to them? While giving little insight into the content itself? And do you really, honestly think that you’re not doing the material a disservice by telling the readers that it was first published on some guy’s blog, before they know anything else about the book (i.e. how it distinguishes itself from ordinary blog posts)? If the first association is with something as low-status as a blog, then that’s gonna be the lowest common denominator—you’re gonna have to work up from that, which is harder than working up from the expectation of an average pop-sci book. (Thankfully for you, though, the readers won’t be able to draw those inferences; see the paragraph above.)
The rest of the suggestions—The Craft of Rationality, The Art of Rationality, Becoming Less Wrong—they’re not technically bad, but… they’re—they’re weak. They’re not distinguishable. The authors out there that are trying to establish themselves as the masters of the “art/craft” of something are a dime a dozen. Sure, probably LWers are probably the most eager bunch to claim “the art of rationality” for themselves, or at least this is what a quick internet search told me, but the connection isn’t immediately established in the minds of the readers.
Careful about any unflattering allusions to the reader’s intelligence. They can be taken well if presented in a humorous/witty form, but you have to make believable promises that the book will help readers overcome them. Also (and this is directed mainly towards the rest of the commenters), everything that suggests that the book is meant to drill the “correct” ideas into your head, rather than teach you how to develop good thinking practices on your own, is a no-no.
How come Eliezer hasn’t come up with a good, catchy title yet? I’ve just gone over the titles of the blog posts included in the sequences, and those ones are very good, very appropriate as chapter/subchapter titles. He’s good at this titling business. Surely he could think up something witty for the one title to rule them all?
No suggestions from me just yet. I need to think this through better.
Absolutely no mention of anything such as The Less Wrong Sequences, 2006-2009. This belongs in a blurb or in an introduction to the book.
Agree. Would like to emphasize even more. Taking in that title with fresh eyes, it sounds perhaps like part N of a multi-volume autobiographical series written by a musician trying to make less shitty music.
I’m not kidding.
If I imagine that I haven’t spent almost a year on this website, and maybe I’ve even been told about it or saw the front page but didn’t really dive into the community, and saw that book on a library shelf somewhere. What would happen? Or if someone told me it was a great book that I should read, but only told me the title?
Obviously, I’d think it’s about something obscure, a book only for “insiders” who already know what the book is talking about. Would I want to pick it up? Not really.
Please, focus on the contents and the message, rather than the history behind the book. No one cares about the history behind a book before they’ve at least read it, unless it’s Gandhi’s secret unrevealed memoirs or something.
My long overdue title suggestion: Rationality 2.0: A Less Wrong Guide to Beliefs, Biases and Bayesianism
Overall: I followed the title-subtitle format which seems very popular these days for pop-sci books. I tried to go for something broad enough to hint at the diversity of the material contained within the Sequences without giving the impression that the book is about anything and everything. 2.0 is nice and trendy and appeals to techies (who tend to gravitate towards such content). The general tone of the title is hopefully catchy and playful enough to appeal to a wide audience that would otherwise get intimidated by very formal, technical vocabulary.
Why “Rationality”? Because the most common word we use to refer to ourselves is “rationalist” and we refer to the totality of LW-specific memes as “rationality”. However, including the word “rationalist” rather than “rationality” in the title might make people mentally associate the book with the sort of rationalism that opposes empiricism.
Why “Rationality 2.0”? Because many posts in the Sequences distinguish between Traditional Rationality and Bayesianism, and because we generally think of LW philosophy as improving on the traditional concept of rationality. It’s bold enough to assert meaningful innovation, but not arrogant enough to not even allow the possibility of a 3.0.
Why “A Less Wrong Guide”? This one’s probably the weakest part of the title. I chose it because it explicitly named the community in which the contents of the book originated, in a context that more or less rendered the meaning of “less wrong” relevant. The problematic aspect of it is that it carries the hidden implication that there have been several other, more wrong guides to “Beliefs, Biases, and Bayesianism”. The word “guide” is there because the Sequences serve as didactic material to many.
Why “Beliefs, Biases and Bayesianism”? Because it has a nice alliterative ring to it, and because I think it captures the thematic core of Less Wrong. Besides, ennumerations are what you use to convey thematical breadth when you have a very limited word count; 3 listed items generally do the job. (You don’t need 10 listed items.) It’s ordered from the most common word to the least common. I had this in mind for the primary title, but I thought it might be better to relocate the phrase to the subtitle because “Bayesianism” doesn’t immediately tell the average reader what the book might be about, which is the main function of a primary title.
Anyway, while I’m not completely assured that this is the best possible title for the Sequences out of all imaginable ones (although I think it is out of all the titles I’ve thought up so far), I can confidently say that this is how much you need to think about any given title for a work so important. Maybe even more. Every single word needs to be pondered carefully.
everything that suggests that the book is meant to drill the “correct” ideas into your head, rather than teach you how to develop good thinking practices on your own, is a no-no.
So how about:
Mysterious Answers To Mysterious Questions: Everything You Never Knew You Wanted To Know, About Things Most People Never Even Question
500 Mindbending Daily Essays on Truth, Beauty, Science, Reasoning, Intelligence, Bias, Optimization, Wisdom, and Ethics, And How You, Yes YOU, Can Become Smarter, Stronger-willed, And Maybe, Just Maybe Save The World
(Replacing the “500” with an appropriate number, of course.)
My motley collection of thoughts upon reading this (please note that, wherever I say “you” or “your” in this post, I’m referring to the whole committee that is working on this ebook, not to you, lukeprog, in particular):
It’s a difficult book to name, chiefly because the sequences themselves don’t really have a narrow common thread; eliminating bias and making use of scientific advances don’t qualify as narrow enough, many others are trying to do that these days. (But then again, I didn’t read them in an orderly fashion, or enough times, to be able to identify the common thread if there is one more specific than that. If there is one, by all means, play on that.)
Absolutely no mention of anything such as The Less Wrong Sequences, 2006-2009. This belongs in a blurb or in an introduction to the book. You probably think that, by using that in a title, you’re telling readers the following: the contents of this book were originally published as sequences of blog posts on the website lesswrong.com, from 2006 to 2009. But you’re not. This information can be conveyed in a sentence such as that one, but it cannot be conveyed in a short title, given that readers are unfamiliar with the terms. There isn’t really a way for them to guess from a quick glance at the title that “Less Wrong” means “the website ”LessWrong.com″ or that “the Sequences” mean “several series of blog posts around which the LessWrong community was formed”, or what all of that has to do with them.
And even so—is that the first thing you wish to tell your readers? What happened to the contents of the book before they were made into a book...? And in a form which is basically incomprehensible to them? While giving little insight into the content itself? And do you really, honestly think that you’re not doing the material a disservice by telling the readers that it was first published on some guy’s blog, before they know anything else about the book (i.e. how it distinguishes itself from ordinary blog posts)? If the first association is with something as low-status as a blog, then that’s gonna be the lowest common denominator—you’re gonna have to work up from that, which is harder than working up from the expectation of an average pop-sci book. (Thankfully for you, though, the readers won’t be able to draw those inferences; see the paragraph above.)
The rest of the suggestions—The Craft of Rationality, The Art of Rationality, Becoming Less Wrong—they’re not technically bad, but… they’re—they’re weak. They’re not distinguishable. The authors out there that are trying to establish themselves as the masters of the “art/craft” of something are a dime a dozen. Sure, probably LWers are probably the most eager bunch to claim “the art of rationality” for themselves, or at least this is what a quick internet search told me, but the connection isn’t immediately established in the minds of the readers.
Careful about any unflattering allusions to the reader’s intelligence. They can be taken well if presented in a humorous/witty form, but you have to make believable promises that the book will help readers overcome them. Also (and this is directed mainly towards the rest of the commenters), everything that suggests that the book is meant to drill the “correct” ideas into your head, rather than teach you how to develop good thinking practices on your own, is a no-no.
How come Eliezer hasn’t come up with a good, catchy title yet? I’ve just gone over the titles of the blog posts included in the sequences, and those ones are very good, very appropriate as chapter/subchapter titles. He’s good at this titling business. Surely he could think up something witty for the one title to rule them all?
No suggestions from me just yet. I need to think this through better.
Agree. Would like to emphasize even more. Taking in that title with fresh eyes, it sounds perhaps like part N of a multi-volume autobiographical series written by a musician trying to make less shitty music.
I’m not kidding.
If I imagine that I haven’t spent almost a year on this website, and maybe I’ve even been told about it or saw the front page but didn’t really dive into the community, and saw that book on a library shelf somewhere. What would happen? Or if someone told me it was a great book that I should read, but only told me the title?
Obviously, I’d think it’s about something obscure, a book only for “insiders” who already know what the book is talking about. Would I want to pick it up? Not really.
Please, focus on the contents and the message, rather than the history behind the book. No one cares about the history behind a book before they’ve at least read it, unless it’s Gandhi’s secret unrevealed memoirs or something.
My long overdue title suggestion: Rationality 2.0: A Less Wrong Guide to Beliefs, Biases and Bayesianism
Overall: I followed the title-subtitle format which seems very popular these days for pop-sci books. I tried to go for something broad enough to hint at the diversity of the material contained within the Sequences without giving the impression that the book is about anything and everything. 2.0 is nice and trendy and appeals to techies (who tend to gravitate towards such content). The general tone of the title is hopefully catchy and playful enough to appeal to a wide audience that would otherwise get intimidated by very formal, technical vocabulary.
Why “Rationality”? Because the most common word we use to refer to ourselves is “rationalist” and we refer to the totality of LW-specific memes as “rationality”. However, including the word “rationalist” rather than “rationality” in the title might make people mentally associate the book with the sort of rationalism that opposes empiricism.
Why “Rationality 2.0”? Because many posts in the Sequences distinguish between Traditional Rationality and Bayesianism, and because we generally think of LW philosophy as improving on the traditional concept of rationality. It’s bold enough to assert meaningful innovation, but not arrogant enough to not even allow the possibility of a 3.0.
Why “A Less Wrong Guide”? This one’s probably the weakest part of the title. I chose it because it explicitly named the community in which the contents of the book originated, in a context that more or less rendered the meaning of “less wrong” relevant. The problematic aspect of it is that it carries the hidden implication that there have been several other, more wrong guides to “Beliefs, Biases, and Bayesianism”. The word “guide” is there because the Sequences serve as didactic material to many.
Why “Beliefs, Biases and Bayesianism”? Because it has a nice alliterative ring to it, and because I think it captures the thematic core of Less Wrong. Besides, ennumerations are what you use to convey thematical breadth when you have a very limited word count; 3 listed items generally do the job. (You don’t need 10 listed items.) It’s ordered from the most common word to the least common. I had this in mind for the primary title, but I thought it might be better to relocate the phrase to the subtitle because “Bayesianism” doesn’t immediately tell the average reader what the book might be about, which is the main function of a primary title.
Anyway, while I’m not completely assured that this is the best possible title for the Sequences out of all imaginable ones (although I think it is out of all the titles I’ve thought up so far), I can confidently say that this is how much you need to think about any given title for a work so important. Maybe even more. Every single word needs to be pondered carefully.
So how about:
(Replacing the “500” with an appropriate number, of course.)