What are some of the most deep, profound, meaningful, impactful; ideas, notions, concepts, viewpoints, and considerations, relative to the amount of time an average layman would need to wrap ’eir head around them? Chain of thoughts so far:
not all ideas are created equal
some ideas are clearly better than others
among the ideas, that are clearly better than others, there is a (+/-) clear order
the order of ideas, ordered by their respective impact, can further be enhanced, EA-wise, by considering the amount of time it would take to get acquainted with:
the idea itself
its own foundation
its practical implications
To anyone, who has been here long enough to tell, is there:
a set of all the candidates, pre-vetted or otherwise, for the (3), around here?
an order in which, at least some of, the elements within this set, are ranked by (2), or impact, or their overall contribution as per standards of rationalism and/or EA?
an order in which the list above would be refined, if time-to-learn was considered?
The sequences, essays, codex seem to be the prime candidates.
Are they, though?
Do they distill each individual idea down to its most fruitful essence, taking into consideration an average attention span of a new-blood, embarking upon LW/EA?
Or are they more of general thoughts and opinion pieces? Not to discard their overall importance, either. Just brainstorming the addition of the time variable into the equation. To reduce it to the barest possible terms, we could say:
I = W / T
Where ‘I’ is the (potential) impact of the idea itself, the ‘W’ is the wisdom, knowledge, understanding imparted by it, and ‘T’ is the amount of time required to ‘grok’ it.
Which ideas would rank the highest/lowest?
Realized after posting that T is not unary. A better equation would be:
Where is the time-to-understand and is the time-to-implement.
E = MC^2 + AI