I see that the numbers indicate people disagree with this post. Since there are several clauses, it’s hard to know which specifically (or all of them) are being disagreed with.
The second paragraph (beginning “Contrary to what you wrote...”) is a list of factual statements, which as far as I can tell are all correct.
The third paragraph (“Most importantly, the title is plenty big...”) is more subjective, but I’m currently not imagining that anyone is disagreeing with that paragraph (that is, that anyone thinks “actually, the title is too small”).
The fourth paragraph (“In this case, part of the point...”) is more speculative, and I could easily imagine someone reading it and thinking “that’s not the point of publishing / writing a book”. There’s certainly a reason I put a “presumably” in there. I do still feel that there’s something to what I’m saying in that paragraph. My surprise would be of a limited extent if Soares and Yudkowsky said “that was not a consideration in our decision to do this”—but I would be somewhat surprised.
I can see someone disagreeing with the first paragraph (“Given that the book...”), but my current state of mind is that such people would be simply wrong. The book is not being self-published, but is being published by Little, Brown and Company. Some excerpts from Wikipedia’s article on Little, Brown and Company:
“The company was the most extensive law publisher in the United States, and also the largest importer of standard English law and miscellaneous works, introducing American buyers to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the dictionaries of William Smith, and many other standard works. In the early years [starting in 1837] Little and Brown published the Works of Daniel Webster, [...], [and] Letters of John Adams. [...] Little, Brown and Company was the American publisher for Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
The firm was the original publisher of United States Statutes at Large beginning in 1845, under authority granted by a joint resolution of Congress.
and
During this time [about 1908 to 1985] the joint Atlantic Monthly Press/Little Brown imprint published All Quiet on the Western Front, Herge’s The Adventures of Tintin, James Truslow Adams’s The Adams Family, [...] [and] J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
The point being, the company that is publishing Soares and Yudkowsky’s book, is an established company that has sold important and/or bestselling works for two centuries. The people there know what they are doing, and that includes the people who design covers, as well as the bosses of the people who design the covers.
I imagine most disagreement comes from the first paragraph.
The problem with assuming that since the publisher is famous their design is necessarily good is that even huge companies make much worse baffling design decisions all the time, and in this case one can directly see the design and know that it’s not great – the weak outside-view evidence that prestigious companies usually do good work doesn’t move this very much.
Yes, my disagreement was mostly with the first paragraph, which read to me like “who are you going to believe, the expert or your own lying eyes”. I’m not an expert, but I do have a sense of aesthetics, that sense of aesthetics says the cover looks bad, and many others agree. I don’t care if the cover was designed by a professional; to shift my opinion as a layperson, I would need evidence that the cover is well-received by many more people than dislike it, plus A/B tests of alternative covers that show it can’t be easily improved upon.
That said, I also disagreed somewhat with the fourth paragraph, because when it comes to AI Safety, MIRI really needs no introduction or promotion of their authors. They’re well-known, the labs just ignore their claim that “if anyone builds it, everyone dies”.
I see that the numbers indicate people disagree with this post. Since there are several clauses, it’s hard to know which specifically (or all of them) are being disagreed with.
The second paragraph (beginning “Contrary to what you wrote...”) is a list of factual statements, which as far as I can tell are all correct.
The third paragraph (“Most importantly, the title is plenty big...”) is more subjective, but I’m currently not imagining that anyone is disagreeing with that paragraph (that is, that anyone thinks “actually, the title is too small”).
The fourth paragraph (“In this case, part of the point...”) is more speculative, and I could easily imagine someone reading it and thinking “that’s not the point of publishing / writing a book”. There’s certainly a reason I put a “presumably” in there. I do still feel that there’s something to what I’m saying in that paragraph. My surprise would be of a limited extent if Soares and Yudkowsky said “that was not a consideration in our decision to do this”—but I would be somewhat surprised.
I can see someone disagreeing with the first paragraph (“Given that the book...”), but my current state of mind is that such people would be simply wrong. The book is not being self-published, but is being published by Little, Brown and Company. Some excerpts from Wikipedia’s article on Little, Brown and Company:
and
The point being, the company that is publishing Soares and Yudkowsky’s book, is an established company that has sold important and/or bestselling works for two centuries. The people there know what they are doing, and that includes the people who design covers, as well as the bosses of the people who design the covers.
I imagine most disagreement comes from the first paragraph.
The problem with assuming that since the publisher is famous their design is necessarily good is that even huge companies make much worse baffling design decisions all the time, and in this case one can directly see the design and know that it’s not great – the weak outside-view evidence that prestigious companies usually do good work doesn’t move this very much.
Yes, my disagreement was mostly with the first paragraph, which read to me like “who are you going to believe, the expert or your own lying eyes”. I’m not an expert, but I do have a sense of aesthetics, that sense of aesthetics says the cover looks bad, and many others agree. I don’t care if the cover was designed by a professional; to shift my opinion as a layperson, I would need evidence that the cover is well-received by many more people than dislike it, plus A/B tests of alternative covers that show it can’t be easily improved upon.
That said, I also disagreed somewhat with the fourth paragraph, because when it comes to AI Safety, MIRI really needs no introduction or promotion of their authors. They’re well-known, the labs just ignore their claim that “if anyone builds it, everyone dies”.