I feel like I “got it” on a lot more than half of the essays. I’m a native speaker though. And both an American and enough of a nerd to get most of EY’s cultural references. Maybe slogging through is not the best approach for you. If a cursory search of LessWrong’s wiki, Wikipedia, and Google aren’t enough to understand an unfamiliar reference, you can try one of LessWrong’s chatrooms. I think the Freenode one is probably still active, but I haven’t been following it lately. And you can ask more questions in the open threads or with new question posts here on LessWrong proper.
I feel like I “got it” on a lot more than half of the essays. I’m a native speaker though. And both an American and enough of a nerd to get most of EY’s cultural references. Maybe slogging through is not the best approach for you. If a cursory search of LessWrong’s wiki, Wikipedia, and Google aren’t enough to understand an unfamiliar reference, you can try one of LessWrong’s chatrooms. I think the Freenode one is probably still active, but I haven’t been following it lately. And you can ask more questions in the open threads or with new question posts here on LessWrong proper.