I don't understand the not-so-subtle anti-zoomer sentiment in this post.
If I (a 19 year old male) texted “www.readthesequences.com” to my roommate, the probable outcome is that he would skim the site for under a minute, text back something like “seems interesting, I’ll def check it out sometime”, and then proceed to never read another word.
That's a normal response. Your roommate is being polite. The Sequences are obviously very important to you, and you're clearly very enthusiastic about them, but they neither understand nor do they really care. To them, a recommendation to read the Sequences would seem about as relevant as someone recommending to me a book length treatment detailing the specifics of the 1972 Chicago Bears. For what it's worth, I would expect exactly the same response from my dad, if I sent him a link to The Sequences.
The same dude did not read a single book during the entirety of his high school career. No, not even the books assigned in English class. He used SparkNotes.
I fail to see how this is an indictment of your friend's character, or an indication that he is incapable of reading. More likely, he rationally viewed school as a day job, and optimized towards getting the grade that he wanted with a minimum of effort, in order to build slack for other activities, such as performing well on the math team. It's a commendable attitude. I did much the same thing in high school, only I spent the additional time learning Perl.
I think what you're missing is that The Sequences are niche. It's not sufficient to be a smart person. You have to be a smart person, interested in meta-cognition, and interested in AI. That's not a very large intersection. Your experience is exactly what I'd expect if I mass-recommended The Sequences across my social circle, even though I'm a Millenial, and know many Boomers. It's not that Zoomers can't read (an accusation that older generations have been leveling against younger ones since time immemorial), it's that most people aren't really interested in The Sequences.
If I (a 19 year old male) texted "www.readthesequences.com" to my roommate, the probable outcome is that he would skim the site for under a minute, text back something like "seems interesting, I'll def check it out sometime", and then proceed to never read another word. I have another friend, one that I would consider a smart guy. He would consistently rank above me in our high school's math team, and he scored in the 1500's (≥3SD) on his SATs. The same dude did not read a single book during the entirety of his high school career.[1]
Attention is one's scarcest resource, and actually reading something longer than a paragraph is a trivial inconvenience, especially for my generation.
What, then, does manage to hold the fickle eyeballs of zoomers like me? Well, TikTok, mostly. However, there is one (very popular) genre of TikTok video worth investigating. In this genre of video, a Reddit post is broken into sub-paragraph chunks of text, and these chunks are sequentially rendered onscreen while a text-to-speech program reads them to the user. The text is overlaid upon a background video, which is either gameplay from the mobile game Subway Surfers, or parkour footage from Minecraft. The background gameplay provides engaging novelty to the user's visual cortex, while the synthetic voice ensures that the user doesn't have to go through the hard work of translating symbols into sounds. Really, it's all quite hypnotizing.
The fact that these videos are often recommended by TikTok's algorithm implies that they are among the most-engaging videos that our civilization produces. Therefore, to reduce the effort-cost of reading the sequences, I gave the TikTok treatment to Book I ("Map and Territory") of Rationality: From AI to Zombies.
(Update: Circa 2023-02-09, all these links are dead. This was in response to an AWS alert notifying me that 85 gigabytes (or more) of data had been transferred out. I really shouldn't have used a public S3 bucket to serve video in the first place, as it exposed me to an unacceptable amount of risk in the form of a denial of wallet attack. I've got a second batch of videos in the works, which I intend to distribute via a more secure mechanism.)
(Update 2: THE VIDEOS ARE HERE, CLICK HERE)
Predictably Wrong
Fake Beliefs
Noticing Confusion
Mysterious Answers
Interlude: The Simple Truth
Do whatever you want with these videos. I may or may not convert the other 5 books of R:AZ, and I may or may not upload them to TikTok. If you want another work of text converted to video, please pitch it to me in the comments, or DM me.
No, not even the books assigned in English class. He used SparkNotes. ↩︎