A Suggested Reading Order for Less Wrong [2011]

Less Wrong contains over four thousand posts. This is awesome. For newcomers, however, it’s quite intimidating. Rather than leave newcomers to figure out which posts are worth reading themselves, we provide some guidance, in the form of suggested reading orders. Previously, this has mainly meant the sequences, which are a list of posts that fit neatly into topics, sorted by topic. Unfortunately, reading in topic-sorted order is less than ideal, and many of Less Wrong’s best posts weren’t part of any sequence. Therefore, I have put together a suggested reading order: the hundred best posts on Less Wrong, in my purely subjective and unofficial judgment, arranged in a sensible order. Thanks to Student_UK for pointing out the need to reconsider how Less Wrong’s archived content is presented, to XiXiDu for creating a reading list and to Academian for another reading list; my reading list draws on (but is not a strict superset of) both these lists.

This is only a draft. Since the set of posts newcomers read has a significant impact on the community, I am soliciting feedback. After feedback has been collected, I will move (or clone) this list into the wiki, with feedback incorporated. Note that after my first pass, I had more than four hundred candidates for the top hundred; there were many excellent posts that I had to cut, and doubtless many more that I simply overlooked. I used karma as one consideration when deciding what to include, but this list is not karma based. Additional notes about what I did and didn’t include at the bottom.

And with all that out of the way, the top five Less Wrong posts that everyone should read:

Top 5
What Do We Mean By “Rationality” by Eliezer_Yudkowsky
Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge by lukeprog
Cached Selves by AnnaSalamon and Steve_Rayhawk
Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others… by Yvain
Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) by Eliezer_Yudkowsky

A good pace is one or two posts per day, so that you have time to digest and internalize them. If you enjoyed the top five, take a moment to bookmark this page before continuing to the rest of the top 25. If you have questions or thoughts on a post, leave a comment; readers who follow the recent comments page will see it and may reply.

And that’s it for the top 100! If you’ve read up to this point, now is a good time to pause, reflect, and start incorporating the better parts into your life and your thinking.

And now, some notes about this list. I’ve tried to include a balanced mix of epistemic rationality, instrumental rationality, and motivations to learn about rationality, spread out through the list, except that the motivations are front-loaded. I have omitted some topics entirely; now that I’m done with the top 100, I will be starting on an “overflow list”, containing all the posts that deserved to be here but which didn’t fit in the top 100. This will include the Quantum Physics, Luminosity, Zombies, and Metaethics sequences, plus skipped portions of the main sequences and probably at least a hundred other miscellaneous posts.

I am looking for three types of feedback. First: point out if any posts are using concepts without sufficient introduction, so I can change the order to put the introduction in the right place. Second: if there are any posts in this list aren’t pulling their weight, that might be profitably replaced with the best of the overflow list, point them out. (Note that a post can meet this criterion and still be excellent.) And third: point out any posts that should be here but aren’t, especially posts that introduce concepts or jargon that occur frequently in comments.