I was pretty pleased with it, and recommended it to my parents. (Like Ajeya, I’ve had some difficulty giving them the full picture since I stopped working in industry.) There’s a sentence on rationalists and small talk that I read out loud to several people in the office, all of whom thought it fit pretty well.
One correction: he refers several times to UCLA Berkeley, when it should just be UC Berkeley. (UCLA refers to the University of California at Los Angeles, a different university in the same UC system as Berkeley.)
One of the things that I’m sad about is that the book makes no mention of LW 2.0 / the revival. (The last reference I could find was to something in early 2018, but much of the book relates to stuff happening in 2017.) We announced the transition in June 2017, but how much it had succeeded might not have been obvious then (or it may have been the sort of thing that didn’t get advertised to Chivers by his in-person contacts), and so there’s a chapter on the diaspora which says there’s no central hub. Which is still somewhat true—I don’t think LW is as much of a central hub as I want it to be—but is not true to the same extent that it was in 2016, say.
I was pretty pleased with it, and recommended it to my parents. (Like Ajeya, I’ve had some difficulty giving them the full picture since I stopped working in industry.) There’s a sentence on rationalists and small talk that I read out loud to several people in the office, all of whom thought it fit pretty well.
One correction: he refers several times to UCLA Berkeley, when it should just be UC Berkeley. (UCLA refers to the University of California at Los Angeles, a different university in the same UC system as Berkeley.)
One of the things that I’m sad about is that the book makes no mention of LW 2.0 / the revival. (The last reference I could find was to something in early 2018, but much of the book relates to stuff happening in 2017.) We announced the transition in June 2017, but how much it had succeeded might not have been obvious then (or it may have been the sort of thing that didn’t get advertised to Chivers by his in-person contacts), and so there’s a chapter on the diaspora which says there’s no central hub. Which is still somewhat true—I don’t think LW is as much of a central hub as I want it to be—but is not true to the same extent that it was in 2016, say.