Whenever someone in your life asks you half-jokingly asks “how can I become smart like you?”, you no longer need to answer “Have you ever read Harry Potter?” because Projectlawful.com does not have Harry Potter in it.
On the contrary, this is a work I strongly wouldn’t recommend, and especially not to newcomers. It’s highly sexualized, contains descriptions of awful torture and various other forms of extreme misconduct, has a bunch of weird fetish material that more or less immediately disqualifies it as an intro rec in my opinion (far more so than Harry Potter stuff), is very difficult to get into thanks to the formatting, and also just… generally isn’t all that good? I like some of Eliezer’s writing, but I think this is very much not him at his finest.
Further, I very seriously doubt the idea that reading about a fictional government ruled by hell is meaningfully providing any real policy experience at all.
You say :
On the contrary, this is a work I strongly wouldn’t recommend, and especially not to newcomers. It’s highly sexualized, contains descriptions of awful torture and various other forms of extreme misconduct, has a bunch of weird fetish material that more or less immediately disqualifies it as an intro rec in my opinion (far more so than Harry Potter stuff), is very difficult to get into thanks to the formatting, and also just… generally isn’t all that good? I like some of Eliezer’s writing, but I think this is very much not him at his finest.
Further, I very seriously doubt the idea that reading about a fictional government ruled by hell is meaningfully providing any real policy experience at all.
I like most of Eliezer’s writing, and I agree with this sentiment.