An EPub of Eliezer’s blog posts
Update 2015-03-21: I would now strongly recommend reading Rationality: From AI to Zombies over this. Though the blog posts I collected here are the starting point for that book, considerable work has gone into selecting and arranging the essays as well as adding thoughtful new material and useful material not in this collection. Only if you’ve already read that should you consider starting on this; you can always skip the essays you’ve already read.
This is all Eliezer’s posts to Less Wrong up to the end of 2010 as an EPub. Can be read with Aldiko and other eBook readers, though you might have to jump through some hoops on the Kindle (haven’t tried it). I shared it privately with a few friends in the past, but I thought it might be more generally useful. Highlights include that all the screwed-up Unicode is fixed AFAIK.
Update: have now made a MOBI for the Kindle too.
Updated 2011-08-13 17:20 BST: Now with images!
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Caveat Lector: This ebook is very long.
Kindles are weird. I just thought “Huh, I’ve been reading this for a long time now, and I’m only 70% through. I wonder how long it is...” So I ran a word count; One Million words. I did some calculations. At the font size I read at, I get about 115 words per page. So 1,040,000 words covers 9043 pages. A paperback I picked off my shelf fits 386 pages in 2.6cm thickness, making a page 0.00674cm thick. So if this were a physical book it would be 9cm wide, 12cm tall, and 62cm thick.
If you put it down it would stand 2 feet tall. With my 70% bookmark six inches off the ground.
Don’t be put off though, this book has easily held my interest so far. It is definitely worth the time to read. But don’t expect to knock it out over a weekend.
One million! That is alot of words.
The following link has the word counts for a bunch of well known Novels and Series. No single book mentioned in the article is even close to a million words. http://electricliterature.com/infographic-word-counts-of-famous-books/
Notably “Les Miserable” and “War and Peace” are at approx 531,000 and 563,000 (the lengths of these works vary significantly by translation. W&P can be up to around 590K).
Update: have now made a MOBI for the Kindle too.
EDIT: fixed—thanks!
Hey, I think this link’s dead. Converting from ePub to Mobi isn’t difficult but if someone’s already taken the time to get the formatting right, add chapters, ToC etc....
Fixed—sorry!
Ciphergoth—just coming back to this post to say a repeated, enormous, heartfelt thank you for taking what must have been a lot of time on this. Well laid out, wouldn’t have done anything differently, and as good a read as when I was swept up in it on OB back in the day.
Cheers
Aww, thank you very much—very glad it’s proven so useful!
For anyone interested, I have used a machine learning algorithm to generate short summaries of all but six of the Yudkowsky posts collected in this ePub. You can find them at the following link:
https://github.com/umm-maybe/MostlyWrong/blob/main/lesswrong_summaries.md
Pull requests for corrections where the algorithm wasn’t accurate are welcome.
This may be useful for people like me who feel the need to get caught up on LessWrong background, but are short on time. Others may like to skim the summaries as a way to identify posts on topics that interest them enough to go find the original and read it in full. I do hope it lowers barriers to participation in the discussion.
I haven’t had a chance to test the output much yet, but following the instructions at http://techsupport.foreverwarm.com/how-to-read-epub-books-on-your-kindle and using Calibre seems to have relatively easily produced a Kindle version.
Excellent, thank you!
The cover makes me less likely to send the link to a friend not familiar with the content.
I also don’t want to have to explain the first thing my students will see if/when I offer the link to my critical thinking class.
I’ve replaced the image in both the MOBI and EPub editions with something more sober.
I agree. Please supply alternate cover and I’ll produce a new edition. Thanks!
Note that there are previous projects for presenting Sequences in self-contained files, including EPub and MOBI versions. See “Alternative Formats” section of Sequences wiki page. (Added this project to the list.)
Publishing this as a Kindle Single would be huge for spreading the movement. I am new to the movement and trying to get caught up. I’ve been reading the 2006-2010 collected posts in mobi format on my Kindle Touch.
I would be more than happy to buy it as a Kindle Single if available so that it will sync across all my devices.
My guess is that it would just need to be cleaned up a little (ToC moved to front, etc.) and can then be published through:
https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A3R2IZDC42DJW6
.
.
I made a PDF version in Calibre.
If I can work around this bug I can create a PDF version directly. Or download the sources above and try it yourself!
When I last converted epub to PDF I used this.
I too would love to have this in PDF form.
Thank you so much. Very useful.
Have edited to add a link to source code for the scraper.
This is great. Thanks a lot!
Thanks ciphergoth. That would have saved me an hour or so when I was collecting all of Eliezer’s stuff for bulk conversion to audio!
Reading now, can confirm a) the Calibre conversation is pretty good b) massive gratitude to ciphergoth.
No such luck for me. Midway through the quantum physics sequence the font gets really tiny.
Haven’t got that far yet. What’re you using to read it?
The reader that is built into Calibre.
So far it looks fine on an actual Kindle, although I haven’t read the full document yet. A few random points in the file had acceptable fonts.
I haven’t tested the Calibre builtin reader.
Bizarre; this doesn’t happen on my phone. No idea what might cause it—sorry!
The epub is fine (no, great!). My problem is with the conversion to MOBI.
Exactly which page has gone wrong for you? I’ve now done a direct conversion to MOBI (ie not via EPUB) so that mightbe worth trying.
Thanks, I’ll check it out. May I ask, what tools are you using?
I’m using Calibre. The scripts to generate the EPUB and MOBI files are in the sources.
These already exist (I have them on my phone). What’s new about your epubs?
Thank you. I find this valuable.
However, I personally find the cover distasteful, even though it is obviously meant to be in jest.
I think it is better to avoid any hint of the trappings of religion or Eliezer as the great prophet.
I have personally encountered people who are sympathetic to Eliezer’s ideas but are wary because of the pattern-matching going on that makes them think “potentially dangerous cult leader”. The cover doesn’t help that problem; in fact, it perpetuates it—whatever the content of the document.
As we know from presidential politics, impressions matter, even or maybe especially when they are superficial.
I am new and on the dumb side of the chart/if not all charts save cooking. Can people pass on to me easy ways to few discussions on Dialectical or concomitants? kennycan22@aol.com
see I told you I was on the dumb charts. Most people tell me that AOL. addresses prove it.
Ken Cantu Bloomington In