Perhaps this is already discussed elsewhere and I’m failing at search. I’d be amazed if the below wasn’t already pointed out.
On rereading this material it strikes me that this text is effectively inaccessible to large portions of the population. When I binged on these posts several years ago, I was just focused on the content for myself. This time, I had the thought to purchase for some others who would benefit from this material. I realized relatively quickly that the purchase of this book would likely fail to accomplish anything for these people, and may make a future attempt more difficult.
I think many of my specific concerns apply to a large percentage of the population.
The preface and introductions appear aimed at return readers. The preface is largely a description of ‘oops’, which means little to a new reader and is likely to trigger a negative halo effect in people who don’t yet know what that means. - “I don’t know what he’s talking about, and he seems to make lots of writing mistakes.”
There isn’t a ‘hook’. Talking about balls in urns in the intro seems too abstract for people. The rest of the sequences have more accessible examples, which most people would never reach.
Much of the original rhetoric is still in place. Admittedly that’s part of what I liked about the original posts, but I think it limits the audience. As a specific example, a family member is starting high school, likes science, and I think would benefit from this material. However her immediate family is very religious, to the point of ‘disowning’ a sister when they found out about an abortion ~25 years ago. The existing material uses religion as an example of ‘this is bad’ frequently enough that my family member would likely be physically isolated from the material and socially isolated from myself. 87% of America (86% global) have some level of belief in religion. The current examples are likely to trigger defensive mechanisms, before they’re education about them. (Side-note: ‘Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion – by Sam Harris’ is a good book, but has this same exact issue.)
Terminology is not sufficiently explained for people seeing this material with fresh eyes. As an example, ~15% of the way through ‘New Improved Lottery’ talks about probability distributions. There was no previous mention of this. Words with specific meanings, that are now often used, are unexplained. ‘Quantitative’ is used and means something to us, but not to most people. The Kindle provided dictionary and Wikipedia definitions are not very useful. This applies to the chapter titles as well, such as ‘Bayesian Judo’.
The level of hyperlinks, while useful for us, is not optimal for someone reading a subject for the first time. A new reader would have to switch topics in many cases to understand the reference.
References to LessWrong and Overcoming Bias and only make sense to us.
Eliezer and Robb have done a lot to get the material into book state… but it’s preaching to the choir.
Specifically what I think would make this more accessible:
A more immediate hook along the lines of ‘Practicing rationality will help you make more winning decisions and be less wrong.’ (IE: keep reading because this=good and doable) Eliezer was prolific enough that I think good paragraphs likely already exist; but need connectors.
Where negative examples are likely to dissuade large numbers of people, find better examples. In general avoid mentions of specific politics or religion in general. It’s better to boil the frog.
Move or remove all early references to Bayes. ‘Beliefs that are rational are call Bayesian’ means nothing to most people. Later references might as well be technobabble.
Make sure other terminology is actually explained/understandable before it’s used in the middle of an otherwise straightforward chapter. I’d try 1n & 2n-gramming the contents against Google Ngrams to identify terminology we need to make sure is actually explained/understood before casual use.
Get this closer to a 7th grade reading level. This sets a low bar at potential readers who can understand ‘blockbuster’ books in English. (This might be accomplished purely with the terminology concern/change above)
Change all hyperlinks to footnotes.
Discuss LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, Eliezer, Hanson in the preface as ‘these cool places/people where much of this comes from’ but limit the references within the content.
Is there any ongoing attempt or desire to do a group edit of this into an ‘Accessible Rationality’?
Thanks for all the comments! This is helpful. I agree ‘Biases: An Introduction’ needs to function better as a hook. The balls-in-an-urn example was chosen because it’s an example Eliezer re-uses a few times later in the Sequences, but I’d love to hear ideas for better examples, or in general a more interesting way to start the book.
‘Religion is an obvious example of a false set of doctrines’ is so thoroughly baked into the Sequences that I think getting rid of it would require creating an entirely new book. R:AZ won’t be as effective for theists, just as it won’t be as effective for people who find math, philosophy, or science aversive.
I agree with you about ‘boiling the frog’, though: it would be nice if the book eased its way into anti-religious examples. I ended up deciding it was more important to quickly reach accessible interesting examples (like the ones in ‘Fake Beliefs’) than to optimize for broad appeal to theists and agnostics. One idea I’ve been tossing around, though, is to edit Book I (‘Map and Territory’) and Book II (‘How to Actually Change Your Mind’) for future release in such a way that it’s possible to read II before I. It will still probably be better for most people to start with I, but if this works perhaps some agnostic or culturally religious readers will be able to start with II and get through more content before running into a huge number of anti-religious sentiments.
I agree about doing more to address the technobabble. In addition to including a Glossary in future editions of the book, I’ll look into turning some unnecessarily technical asides into footnotes. The hyperlinks, of course, will need to be removed regardless when the print book comes out.
I’ve had similar concerns and I agree with a lot of this.
Get this closer to a 7th grade reading level. This sets a low bar at potential readers who can understand ‘blockbuster’ books in English. (This might be accomplished purely with the terminology concern/change above)
If we really want to approach a 7th grade reading level, then we had better aim for kindergartners. I remember reading through the book trying to imagine how to bring it down several levels and thinking about just how many words I was taking for granted as a high-IQ adult who has had plenty of time to just passively soak up vocabulary and overviews of highly complex fields. I just don’t think we’re there yet; I think that’s why there are things like SPARC where we’re trying it out on highly intelligent high school students who are unusually well-educated for their age.
Change all hyperlinks to footnotes.
To my knowledge this is already a priority.
Is there any ongoing attempt or desire to do a group edit of this into an ‘Accessible Rationality’?
I find that there’s a wide disparity between LW users in intelligence and education, and I don’t know if I see a wiki-like approach converging on anything particularly useful. I would imagine arguments about what’s not simple enough and what’s not complex enough, and about people using examples from their pet fields that others don’t understand. It might work if you threw enough bodies at it, like Wikipedia, but we don’t have that many bodies. I don’t know how others feel.
See Mark’s post regarding 7th grade; my intention was aimed at adults, who (for whatever reason) seem to like the 7th grade reading level.
I’m not sure how to effectively crowd source this without getting volunteers for specific (non-overlapping) tasks and sections. I share your concern with the wiki-method, unless each section has a lead. At work we regularly get 20 people to collaborate on ~100 page proposals, but the same incentives aren’t available in this case. Copyediting is time consuming and unexciting; does anyone know of similar crowd sourced efforts? I found a few but most still had paid writers.
What’s the payoff of changing hyperlinks to footnotes? Given all of the other, substantive, issues you raised, that seems unlikely to make any significant difference.
Frequently having multiple words as hyperlinks in ebooks mean that ‘turning the page’ may instead change chapters. Maybe it is just a problem with iPhone kindle.
For links that reference forward chapters, what is a new reader to do? They can ignore it and not understand the reference, or they can click, read, and then try to go back… but it’s not a very smooth reading experience.
Granted, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the second issue, if not for the first issue.
I don’t think the point of the sequences or the book is to be accessible to everyone. If you want to write ‘Accessible Rationality’ it likely makes more sense to start from stretch.
Agreed that it may not be the point, but other than what I think are fixable issues, the book contents work well. I don’t think starting from scratch would be a large enough improvement to justify the extra time and increased chance of failure.
I think the big work is in making the examples accessible, and Eliezer already did this for the -other- negative trigger.
“If you want to make a point about science, or rationality, then my advice is to not choose a domain from contemporary politics if you can possibly avoid it. If your point is inherently about politics, then talk about Louis XVI during the French Revolution. Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality— but it’s a terrible domain in which to learn. Why would anyone pick such a distracting example to illustrate nonmonotonic reasoning?”
Perhaps this is already discussed elsewhere and I’m failing at search. I’d be amazed if the below wasn’t already pointed out.
On rereading this material it strikes me that this text is effectively inaccessible to large portions of the population. When I binged on these posts several years ago, I was just focused on the content for myself. This time, I had the thought to purchase for some others who would benefit from this material. I realized relatively quickly that the purchase of this book would likely fail to accomplish anything for these people, and may make a future attempt more difficult.
I think many of my specific concerns apply to a large percentage of the population.
The preface and introductions appear aimed at return readers. The preface is largely a description of ‘oops’, which means little to a new reader and is likely to trigger a negative halo effect in people who don’t yet know what that means. - “I don’t know what he’s talking about, and he seems to make lots of writing mistakes.”
There isn’t a ‘hook’. Talking about balls in urns in the intro seems too abstract for people. The rest of the sequences have more accessible examples, which most people would never reach.
Much of the original rhetoric is still in place. Admittedly that’s part of what I liked about the original posts, but I think it limits the audience. As a specific example, a family member is starting high school, likes science, and I think would benefit from this material. However her immediate family is very religious, to the point of ‘disowning’ a sister when they found out about an abortion ~25 years ago. The existing material uses religion as an example of ‘this is bad’ frequently enough that my family member would likely be physically isolated from the material and socially isolated from myself. 87% of America (86% global) have some level of belief in religion. The current examples are likely to trigger defensive mechanisms, before they’re education about them. (Side-note: ‘Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion – by Sam Harris’ is a good book, but has this same exact issue.)
Terminology is not sufficiently explained for people seeing this material with fresh eyes. As an example, ~15% of the way through ‘New Improved Lottery’ talks about probability distributions. There was no previous mention of this. Words with specific meanings, that are now often used, are unexplained. ‘Quantitative’ is used and means something to us, but not to most people. The Kindle provided dictionary and Wikipedia definitions are not very useful. This applies to the chapter titles as well, such as ‘Bayesian Judo’.
The level of hyperlinks, while useful for us, is not optimal for someone reading a subject for the first time. A new reader would have to switch topics in many cases to understand the reference.
References to LessWrong and Overcoming Bias and only make sense to us.
Eliezer and Robb have done a lot to get the material into book state… but it’s preaching to the choir.
Specifically what I think would make this more accessible:
A more immediate hook along the lines of ‘Practicing rationality will help you make more winning decisions and be less wrong.’ (IE: keep reading because this=good and doable) Eliezer was prolific enough that I think good paragraphs likely already exist; but need connectors.
Where negative examples are likely to dissuade large numbers of people, find better examples. In general avoid mentions of specific politics or religion in general. It’s better to boil the frog.
Move or remove all early references to Bayes. ‘Beliefs that are rational are call Bayesian’ means nothing to most people. Later references might as well be technobabble.
Make sure other terminology is actually explained/understandable before it’s used in the middle of an otherwise straightforward chapter. I’d try 1n & 2n-gramming the contents against Google Ngrams to identify terminology we need to make sure is actually explained/understood before casual use.
Get this closer to a 7th grade reading level. This sets a low bar at potential readers who can understand ‘blockbuster’ books in English. (This might be accomplished purely with the terminology concern/change above)
Change all hyperlinks to footnotes.
Discuss LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, Eliezer, Hanson in the preface as ‘these cool places/people where much of this comes from’ but limit the references within the content.
Is there any ongoing attempt or desire to do a group edit of this into an ‘Accessible Rationality’?
Thanks for all the comments! This is helpful. I agree ‘Biases: An Introduction’ needs to function better as a hook. The balls-in-an-urn example was chosen because it’s an example Eliezer re-uses a few times later in the Sequences, but I’d love to hear ideas for better examples, or in general a more interesting way to start the book.
‘Religion is an obvious example of a false set of doctrines’ is so thoroughly baked into the Sequences that I think getting rid of it would require creating an entirely new book. R:AZ won’t be as effective for theists, just as it won’t be as effective for people who find math, philosophy, or science aversive.
I agree with you about ‘boiling the frog’, though: it would be nice if the book eased its way into anti-religious examples. I ended up deciding it was more important to quickly reach accessible interesting examples (like the ones in ‘Fake Beliefs’) than to optimize for broad appeal to theists and agnostics. One idea I’ve been tossing around, though, is to edit Book I (‘Map and Territory’) and Book II (‘How to Actually Change Your Mind’) for future release in such a way that it’s possible to read II before I. It will still probably be better for most people to start with I, but if this works perhaps some agnostic or culturally religious readers will be able to start with II and get through more content before running into a huge number of anti-religious sentiments.
I agree about doing more to address the technobabble. In addition to including a Glossary in future editions of the book, I’ll look into turning some unnecessarily technical asides into footnotes. The hyperlinks, of course, will need to be removed regardless when the print book comes out.
I’ve had similar concerns and I agree with a lot of this.
If we really want to approach a 7th grade reading level, then we had better aim for kindergartners. I remember reading through the book trying to imagine how to bring it down several levels and thinking about just how many words I was taking for granted as a high-IQ adult who has had plenty of time to just passively soak up vocabulary and overviews of highly complex fields. I just don’t think we’re there yet; I think that’s why there are things like SPARC where we’re trying it out on highly intelligent high school students who are unusually well-educated for their age.
To my knowledge this is already a priority.
I find that there’s a wide disparity between LW users in intelligence and education, and I don’t know if I see a wiki-like approach converging on anything particularly useful. I would imagine arguments about what’s not simple enough and what’s not complex enough, and about people using examples from their pet fields that others don’t understand. It might work if you threw enough bodies at it, like Wikipedia, but we don’t have that many bodies. I don’t know how others feel.
The point wasn’t to aim for 7th graders, but a 7th grade level which would make it generally accessible to busy adults.
See Mark’s post regarding 7th grade; my intention was aimed at adults, who (for whatever reason) seem to like the 7th grade reading level.
I’m not sure how to effectively crowd source this without getting volunteers for specific (non-overlapping) tasks and sections. I share your concern with the wiki-method, unless each section has a lead. At work we regularly get 20 people to collaborate on ~100 page proposals, but the same incentives aren’t available in this case. Copyediting is time consuming and unexciting; does anyone know of similar crowd sourced efforts? I found a few but most still had paid writers.
‘Accessible Rationality’ already exists… in the form of a wildly popular Harry Potter fanfiction.
What does 1n or 2n-gramming mean? I’m looking at Google Ngrams, and it’s not obvious to me.
1 gramming is checking single words; should identify unfamiliar vocabulary. (Ex: quantifiable)
2 gramming would check pairs of words; should identify uncommon phrases made of common words (ex: probability mass—better examples probably exist)
The 1⁄2 gram terminology may be made up, but I think I’ve heard it used before.
Thanks!
What’s the payoff of changing hyperlinks to footnotes? Given all of the other, substantive, issues you raised, that seems unlikely to make any significant difference.
Two reason:
Frequently having multiple words as hyperlinks in ebooks mean that ‘turning the page’ may instead change chapters. Maybe it is just a problem with iPhone kindle.
For links that reference forward chapters, what is a new reader to do? They can ignore it and not understand the reference, or they can click, read, and then try to go back… but it’s not a very smooth reading experience.
Granted, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the second issue, if not for the first issue.
I don’t think the point of the sequences or the book is to be accessible to everyone. If you want to write ‘Accessible Rationality’ it likely makes more sense to start from stretch.
Agreed that it may not be the point, but other than what I think are fixable issues, the book contents work well. I don’t think starting from scratch would be a large enough improvement to justify the extra time and increased chance of failure.
I think the big work is in making the examples accessible, and Eliezer already did this for the -other- negative trigger.