I’m not sure whether what looks like rambling is actually an effective method of easing people into the ideas so that the ideas are easier to accept, rather than just being inefficient.
In general, when something can be either tremendously clever, or a bit foolish, the prior tends to the latter. Even with someone who’s generally a pretty smart cookie. You could run the experiment, but I’m willing to bet on the outcome now.
It’s important to remember that it isn’t particularly useful for this book to be The Sequences. The Sequences are The Sequences, and the book can direct people to them. What would be more useful would be a condensed, rapid introduction to the field that tries to maximize insight-per-byte. Not something that’s a definitive work on rationality, but something that people can crank through in a day or two, rave about to their friends, and come away with a better idea of what rational thinking looks like. It’d also serve as a less formidable introduction for those who are very interested, to the broader pool of work on the subject, including the Sequences. Dollar for sanity-waterline dollar, that’s a very heavily leveraged position.
Actually, if CFAR isn’t going to write that book, I will.
I’m currently writing a summary of each sequence as I read them. I am doing this because it helps me to remember what I read. What is going to result from my doing this is a Cliff’s notes version of the sequences.
If you were going to do something similar anyway, I might as well just post these notes when I am done to save you the work. Would that serve the purpose you were thinking of? Or is your idea significantly different?
I’m not sure whether what looks like rambling is actually an effective method of easing people into the ideas so that the ideas are easier to accept, rather than just being inefficient.
Is there any way to find out?
In general, when something can be either tremendously clever, or a bit foolish, the prior tends to the latter. Even with someone who’s generally a pretty smart cookie. You could run the experiment, but I’m willing to bet on the outcome now.
It’s important to remember that it isn’t particularly useful for this book to be The Sequences. The Sequences are The Sequences, and the book can direct people to them. What would be more useful would be a condensed, rapid introduction to the field that tries to maximize insight-per-byte. Not something that’s a definitive work on rationality, but something that people can crank through in a day or two, rave about to their friends, and come away with a better idea of what rational thinking looks like. It’d also serve as a less formidable introduction for those who are very interested, to the broader pool of work on the subject, including the Sequences. Dollar for sanity-waterline dollar, that’s a very heavily leveraged position.
Actually, if CFAR isn’t going to write that book, I will.
I’m currently writing a summary of each sequence as I read them. I am doing this because it helps me to remember what I read. What is going to result from my doing this is a Cliff’s notes version of the sequences.
If you were going to do something similar anyway, I might as well just post these notes when I am done to save you the work. Would that serve the purpose you were thinking of? Or is your idea significantly different?
I’m not sure if we will need these, though you should definitely put your summaries in the LW wikI!
Hmm okay. Maybe I will do just that. (:
Suggested title: The Tao of Bayes
Ideally it should not be significantly longer than “The Tao of Pooh”
I’d be half-tempted to try my hand at it myself...
So far, I’m twenty pages in, and getting close to being done with the basic epistemology stuff.