I would add that most of those things can also be found in other sources; sometimes they have different names.
But the practical question is: have you read those “other sources”? If not, then the Sequences are a compressed form of a lot of useful stuff. They may be long, but reading all the original sources would be much longer. (This is not to discourage people from reading the other sources, just saying that if “that’s too much text” is your real objection, then you probably haven’t read them.)
Unfortunately, I think many of the people who come to LessWrong are in the position of having read about 50-75% of the content of the sequences through other sources, and may become frustrated by the lack of clear indication within the sequences as to what the next post actually includes.… it is very annoying to read through a couple of pages only to find that this section has just been a wordy setup to reviewing basic physics.
What % do you define as “many”? Those percentages of content already known sound very high to me in regards to the first 1/3rd of the Sequences. (I’m still working on the rest so can’t comment there.) Also, they can use the Article Summaries to test out whether they’ve seen the concept before and then read the full article or not. I don’t recommend just reading the summaries though. I think a person doing that would be doing a disservice to themselves because of the reasons supplied by Vaniver above.
I would add that most of those things can also be found in other sources; sometimes they have different names.
But the practical question is: have you read those “other sources”? If not, then the Sequences are a compressed form of a lot of useful stuff. They may be long, but reading all the original sources would be much longer. (This is not to discourage people from reading the other sources, just saying that if “that’s too much text” is your real objection, then you probably haven’t read them.)
Unfortunately, I think many of the people who come to LessWrong are in the position of having read about 50-75% of the content of the sequences through other sources, and may become frustrated by the lack of clear indication within the sequences as to what the next post actually includes.… it is very annoying to read through a couple of pages only to find that this section has just been a wordy setup to reviewing basic physics.
What % do you define as “many”? Those percentages of content already known sound very high to me in regards to the first 1/3rd of the Sequences. (I’m still working on the rest so can’t comment there.) Also, they can use the Article Summaries to test out whether they’ve seen the concept before and then read the full article or not. I don’t recommend just reading the summaries though. I think a person doing that would be doing a disservice to themselves because of the reasons supplied by Vaniver above.