PSA: The Sequences don’t need to be read in sequence

[kave]

This week, I hung out with the LessWrong team while they talked to relatively new users. New users often had a vague intention to read Eliezer’s original Sequences, but were blocked on the size of the project. They thought the Sequences would only work in, well, sequence.

I just polled eight people (including me) who have read the Sequences whether they only work in sequence.

• 7 people said they work out of sequence (though 2 noted that it might be better to read a given sequence in order)

• 1 person said they thought it was necessary to read any given sequence in order, but it didn’t matter if you read one sequence (e.g. A Human’s Guide to Words) before or after another (e.g. Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions)

A typical sequence post has many links to other sequence posts. But these are mostly context and elaboration. The posts tend to work well standalone.

Here are three posts you might get started with:

• Fake Explanations. The first post in the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence, described by Eliezer as “probably the most important core sequence in Less Wrong”.

• Leave a Line of Retreat. Letting go of a belief that’s important to you is hard. Particularly if you think stuff you care about depends on it (e.g. if you think being good depends on moral realism, it could be hard to reexamine your belief in moral realism). This post describes the phenomenon, and gives advice for dealing with it.

• The Hidden Complexity of Wishes. Imagine you had a device that could cause any concrete statement to become true. This post explores the difficulties you would have getting what you want with the device.

(Thanks to various people at the Lightcone offices for beta reading this post, particularly Ben Pace).

[trevor]

W H A T

I C A N H A V E A M O R N I N G S E Q U E N C E I N S T E A D O F M O R N I N G N E W S

[Ben Pace]

Idea: forward emails to yourself every day for a month with a sequence post each day.

[Kaj_Sotala]

Some other posts that I think are good and work well stand-alone:

• Cached Thoughts

• Expecting Short Inferential Distances

• What Is Evidence?

• The Lens That Sees Its Flaws

• Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You

  • Double Illusion of Transparency

[nim]

I found that some parts of sequences felt like cliff-hangers and demanded that the next post follow, but for the most part, they could be jumped around in to wherever piqued my interest at the time.

Logistically, tracking what I had left to read of them was fiddly: I ended up putting the titles of and links to all the sequences posts (scraped from some overview page) into a checklist in my notes app, then trying to remember to tick them off as I read them. If a feature for this was built into lesswrong itself, I was unaware of it at the time.

[Ulisse Mini]

Personally my process goes something like:

1. Click a citation/​link on LW that sends me to a sequence post

2. Read the post, opening any interesting citations in new tabs

3. Repeat until I run out of time or run out of interesting citations (the latter never happens)

[Kenny]

{ TV Tropes /​ Wikipedia } style!

[Pattern]

https://​​www.readthesequences.com

https://​​www.readthesequences.com/​​#preface

I recommend the preface because it tells you [some] issues [that the author noticed] with the work. (It doesn’t mention ‘this research is no longer up to date/​etc.’, but it does mention some other things:)

It was a mistake that I didn’t write my two years of blog posts with the intention of helping people do better in their everyday lives. I wrote it with the intention of helping people solve big, difficult, important problems, and I chose impressive-sounding, abstract problems as my examples.

In retrospect, this was the second-largest mistake in my approach. It ties in to the first-largest mistake in my writing, which was that I didn’t realize that the big problem in learning this valuable way of thinking was figuring out how to practice it, not knowing the theory. I didn’t realize that part was the priority; and regarding this I can only say “Oops” and “Duh.”

...

A third huge mistake I made was to focus too much on rational belief, too little on rational action.

The fourth-largest mistake I made was that I should have better organized the content I was presenting in the sequences. In particular, I should have created a wiki much earlier, and made it easier to read the posts in sequence.

That mistake at least is correctable. In the present work Rob Bensinger has reordered the posts and reorganized them as much as he can without trying to rewrite all the actual material (though he’s rewritten a bit of it).

...

My fifth huge mistake was that I—as I saw it—tried to speak plainly about the stupidity of what appeared to me to be stupid ideas.

...

To be able to look backwards and say that you’ve “failed” implies that you had goals. So what was it that I was trying to do?

...

In spite of how large my mistakes were, those two years of blog posting appeared to help a surprising number of people a surprising amount. It didn’t work reliably, but it worked sometimes. In modern society so little is taught of the skills of rational belief and decision-making, so little of the mathematics and sciences underlying them… that it turns out that just reading through a massive brain-dump full of problems in philosophy and science can, yes, be surprisingly good for you. Walking through all of that, from a dozen different angles, can sometimes convey a glimpse of the central rhythm.

Because it is all, in the end, one thing. I talked about big important distant problems and neglected immediate life, but the laws governing them aren’t actually different. There are huge gaps in which parts I focused on, and I picked all the wrong examples; but it is all in the end one thing. I am proud to look back and say that, even after all the mistakes I made, and all the other times I said “Oops”…

Even five years later, it still appears to me that this is better than nothing.

...-2015

There’s been some comments (or at least a post I think) on what that ‘book’/​he had to say about Neural Networks. Understandability has been mentioned as an issue today, and I think that’s more of a problem where it’s less clear how to evaluate ‘ability’ or ‘performance’.

ETA:

1)

Added the [bracketed text] on the line duplicated below:

‘I recommend the preface because it tells you [some] issues [that the author noticed] with the work. ’