Free holiday reading?

(I don't know who I'm stealing from by posting these online, but if you enjoy them then you could probably do worse than making a small donation to Caltech.)

EDIT: Now free and legal to read online here.

[-]Paul Crowley14y30

Downloading now - thanks, this is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for!

[-]Armok_GoB14y150

http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/2ul/free_hard_sf_novels_short_stories/

http://www.raikoth.net/Stuff/story1.html

http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-story&story=dr_yes_jolonah (Warning! Scary!)

http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3oa/i/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/y5/the_babyeating_aliens_18/

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality

[-]Nornagest14y40

Have to say I wasn't too impressed with "Yes, Jolonah". Its protagonist's predicament, while undoubtedly horrible on a conceptual level, didn't evoke much in the way of emotional horror -- the presentation was too melodramatic, the premise too fundamentally silly, and the characters too flat. The tvtropes word for this sort of thing is "narm", I believe.

On the other hand, I've always liked "Prime Intellect", despite its faults and despite the Luddism it feels compelled to devolve into.

[-]Armok_GoB14y00

While it's true that it's hardly a great piece of literature, and there are certainly more enjoyable things out there for the same time, it still IS enjoyable and I think it teaches an useful concept.

[-]Normal_Anomaly14y30

The raikoth.net story is awesome. "Yes, Jolonah" is not worth reading.

Edited ages and ages later: "Yes, Jolonah" is a frightening story that caused me distress due to empathizing with the characters. If you aren't prone to that or if you enjoy it, go ahead and read it. It is moving and well-written.

[-]PhilGoetz14y70

The cost of a book is negligible compared to the cost of the time it takes to read it, and the cost of filling part of your brain up with its contents. Choose what you want to read, and get it, whether it's free or not.

[-]atucker14y20

If you value your time at $20/hr, then unless you decide that you would read a book for the amount of time it takes -- but not an hour longer -- then most books are worth buying.

[-]Risto_Saarelma14y10

Random serious stuff possibly related to AI I've been looking at.

Judea Pearl: Causal Inference in Statistics: An Overview. Pearl's stuff seems to be pretty central to formal causality, and this is reasonably recent.

A Philosophical Treatise of Universal Induction. Solomonoff induction, related to AIXI stuff.

Shane Legg's PhD thesis Machine Super Intelligence

A New Approach to Quantum Logic, via Shane Legg, this is supposedly related to Bayesian inference and how humans do reasoning.

Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone A generally neat thing about category theory going into everything.

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