Support for book on finding terminal goals and higher purpose
As part of my project of spreading rationality to a broad audience and thus raising the sanity waterline, I’m writing a book on using rationality-informed strategies to help people find terminal values, with an orientation toward encouraging a positive and externally-oriented higher purpose carried out in an effective way. To be appealing a wide audience, the book is couched in the language of self-improvement, while also being based on and studying much recent research in the sphere of meaning and purpose, from psychology, cognitive neuroscience, medicine, etc. The goal of the book is to get readers to use rationality-informed, science-based methods to find their long-term goals, and also to get them interested in rational, science-based thinking more broadly, the whole point of my project.
To fund the costs of publishing the book, I’m running a crowdfunding campaign, and the campaign page describes the book in full. I would appreciate any support for the campaign, as well as feedback on optimizing the story and rewards in the campaign in such a way as to make it more appealing to a broad audience. Thank you!
EDIT: Several people messaged to ask how much is appropriate to contribute. My answer in these cases is always based on how many utilons and hedons you think this book has the potential to bring to the world. That’s how I measure my own giving, and my own approach to rationality as a whole, as I describe in this LW Main Post.
The idea to combine happiness guide with rationality techniques and popularizing science seems appealing to me. Unfortunately video is not available for watching in my region. The book content I suppose have to be very introductory and written in friendly language opposing to “from ai to zombies” for example. Where I can see some of your previous publications? And why you want to crowdfund an actual hardcover book and not distribute it through Amazon e-books?
Here’s an earlier post with a link to a draft copy of the workbook, which includes a number of citations of my earlier work on this topic. As you’ll see, it’s couched in friendly language. The crowdfunding campaign page, linked above, explains in more depth the reasoning for the crowdfunding campaign.
How many papers do you expect to cite in the final book?
There are over 70 currently, and I still expect to add a few more based on a final round of feedback. And thanks for your own feedback earlier about citing some CBT studies in the exercises!