The LessWrong 2018 Book is Available for Pre-order

Ben Pace; Bird Concept

We've sold 1000 copies. Jeeze louise.

2BonoQuak4y

Ben, could you please deliver this to India? Couldn't see it in the list of countries available for delivery. Appreciate your assistance. Thank you. Best, BQ

[-]jp5y290

My partner asks if there's an ebook version. I'm pretty sure he's not trying to troll you.

[-]habryka5y160

Yes! An ebook version should go live on amazon at the same time as the physical book (our sense was that fewer people would be interested in preordering an ebook compared to the physical book, and also fewer care about it as a Christmas gift, hence the lower emphasis).

5[anonymous]5y

Any chance for it to be also available in ePub format?

8habryka5y

Yes, we will probably have to sell that through an independent channel, but that should be fine.

3Raj Thimmiah5y

I think gumroad allows you to offer more than 1 format for download

4habryka5y

Yeah, Gumroad seems like the obvious choice. But I haven't looked into that yet, so we might end up going with something else.

2nick lacombe5y

how can I get notified when I can buy the ebook?

4habryka5y

Hmm, sure seems like we should set up some kind of place where you can leave your email. Here is a signup form for an email list that we will only use to send updates on where you can buy this book, and future books we sell: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TTPux7QFBpKxZtMKE/the-lesswrong-2018-book-is-available-for-pre-order#I_don_t_want_to_pre_order_it__I_want_to_be_notified_when_I_can_buy_it_on_Amazon

[-]Viliam5y220

For Europeans, 4×6 inches is approximately 10×15 cm, which is approximately the A6 format.

Big thanks to everyone who participated in creation of these books, this was an awesome team effort! (And I think team results deserve extra praise, because... you know why.)

I wonder if it would make sense to also have a "before 2018 review" for things written before 2018 (and not included in the Sequences). The years before 2018 were not as productive individually, but maybe all of them taken together would be a decent amount of good content.

7habryka5y

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about doing a review of previous years. Maybe 2013-2017 sometime in the middle of next year.

[-]hazel5y210

Where does the money go? Is it being sold at cost, or is there surplus?

If money is being made, will it support: 1. The authors? 2. LW hosting costs? 3. LW-adjacent charities like MIRI? 4. The editors/compilers/LW moderators?

EDIT: Was answered over on /r/slatestarcodex. tldr: one print run has been paid for at a loss, any (unlikely) profits go to supporting the Lesswrong nonprofit organization.

3habryka5y

Yep, that’s correct.

1[comment deleted]5y

[-]DanielFilan5y170

My copy has arrived. One thing that I've noticed is that, to my surprise, I wish there were a page telling me what fonts were used. Any chance you could tell us in the comments?

[-]habryka5y100

The primary serif font we are using is ET Bembo, inspired by Edward Tufte's use of the font in his books. For sans-serif we used the same font we use for LW comments, I think, which is Gill Sans.

9Bird Concept5y

Yep, Gill Sans for sans-serif.

[-]ozziegooen5y150

The books look very pretty, nice work.

Is this content from 2018 specifically, or is it taken from all of historic LessWrong? My impression was that this was from the 2018 review, but I don't see anything about that in the description above.

If it is from the 2018 review, do you have ideas on how you will differentiate the 2019/2020/etc versions?

6habryka5y

Yep, this is from the 2018 Review. We make that more clear in a bunch of the other copy, but apparently forgot it here. Will add something to make that clearer. Differentiation wise: I expect they will probably look pretty differently, and also will have a separate title. Of course, they will also have different essays. We are also considering changing the price point quite a bit for future books. I can imagine aiming for much cheaper ($5-10 range) or really premium hard covers.

[-]ozziegooen5y230

If the main thing that separates this book from the 2019 and 2020 books is that it's the collection of posts from 2018, it's counterintutive to me that that's not the prominent feature of the title here. Other "journals of the year" often make the year really prominent.

I feel like 5 years from now I'm going to have trouble remembering that "A Map That Reflects the Territory" refers to the 2018 edition, and some other equally elegant but abstract name refers to the 2019 edition.

If you do go with really premium books especially, I'd recommend considering making the date the prominent bit. Honestly I expect to memorize the "lesswrong"ness from the branding (which is distinct), so the year seems like the most important part to me.

That said, I feel like I'm not exactly in the target audience (generally don't prefer physical books), so it would come down to the preferences of others.

I realize you've probably thought about this a lot and have reasons, just giving my 2 cents.

[-]habryka5y200

But, who cares in 5 years whether the essays came out in 2018 or in 2017? For people who want to just read the best that LessWrong has to offer, the year isn't that crucial. Indeed, if someone is considering buying one of our review books in 5 years, I really don't want them to think that they first have to buy the 2018 book before the 2019 book, or that the year is somehow super significant, or that the content was driven by some current events happening in that year. I want them to look at the title, the content, and the structure, and see which one they like best, judging the content and not the date.

Our original title was "The LessWrong Review 2018" but then everyone we ran the name by thought that the book was released in 2018, and that was really confusing (If you call it the 2019 review, everything gets even worse, so that's also not an option). They also thought that the fact that the year is so pronounced means that the content is probably very time-sensitive, and so given that it is now two years later, the content is probably out of date. They also thought that they had to understand what the "LessWrong Review" is before they feel comfortable buying the book, becau... (read more)

[-]ozziegooen5y260

Thanks for the reasoning here. I also don't want to detract people from purchasing these books, I imagine if people really wanted they could write the dates on them manually.

That said -

To better explain my intuitions here:

In 5 years from now, I care about whether the essays came out in 2018 or in 2017 if I am trying to find a particular one in a book, or recommend one to another person. Ordering is really simple to remember compared to other kinds of naming one could use. When going between different books the date is particularly relevant because names and concepts will change over time. I'd hope that 10 years from now much of the 2018 content will look antiquated and old.

If you're just aiming for "timeless and good quality posts" (this sounds like the value proposition for the readers you are referring to), then I don't understand the need to only choose ones from 2018. Many good ones came out before 2018 that I imagine would be interesting to readers. That said, if you plan on releasing them on yearly intervals later I'd imagine some restriction might be necessary. Or, it could be that whenever a few topics seem to have come full circle or be in a good place fo... (read more)

7habryka5y

Yeah, it's mostly that I don't know of a great alternative mechanism for the Review. The Schelling nature of doing a review thing at the end of the year seems pretty strong, and having a year as the natural unit of review also seems really intuitive and nice. I do think there is a good chance we are going to release some other books that are not part of the review cycle that are more centered around specific topics. But I really don't know yet how to fit them into all of this, and whether they are part of the same series, or their branding, or whether they are going to happen at all. Yeah, I actually agree with this. Amazon has a field for "Series Title" that I want to fill in, of which this would be Vol. 1. Some obvious candidates for the series title are "Best of LessWrong" and "The LessWrong Review". I don't think there is much benefit to emphasizing a series title in the first entry of a series very much, but I think it makes sense to emphasize them more in future years, where they start actually doing anything. I still wouldn't want to put the year into the title, because if we are usually going to release these 1.5-2 years afterward, people are inevitably going to get really confused about when the books were released.

[-]Howie Lempel5y180

First of all, I think the books are beautiful. This seems like a great project to me and I'm really glad you all put it together.

I didn't think of this on my own but now that Ozzie raised it, I do think it's misleading not to mention (or at least suggest) that this is selecting the best posts from a particular year in a salient way on the cover.[1] This isn't really because anybody cares whether it's from 2018 or 2019. It's because I think most reasonable readers looking at a curated collection of LessWrong posts titled "Epistemology," "Agency," or "Alignment" would assume that this was a collection of the best ever LW[2] posts on that topic as of ~date of publication. That's a higher bar than 'one of the best posts on epistemology on LW in 2018' and many (most?) readers might prefer it.

Counterargument: maybe all of your customers already know about the project and are sufficiently informed about what this is that putting it on the cover isn't necessary.

Apologies if the ship's already sailed on this and feedback is counterproductive at this point. Overall, I don't think this is a huge deal.

[1] Though not intentionally so.

[2] Maybe people think of LW 2.0 as a sufficient break that they wouldn't be surprised if it was restricted to that.

8Ben Pace5y

Consider this quote from Robin Hanson: The post was in Feb 2017, which meant he had to wait another 10 months for it to come out. Overall that means the book came out at least 2 years and 3 months after he began writing it, and 1 year and 6 months after it was finalized and finished. I don't know if Oxford University Press is always this slow. But I don't think that if someone read the book then heard about it, they'd feel especially upset to find out it didn't represent Robin's ideas on date-of-publishing but in fact was 1.5 years out-of-date. The essays in the book were the best new essays on LW at the time we decided to make it into a book, which is 2 years ago, so we're a little slower than OUP (in large part because we have a self-imposed 1-year break in the middle_), and I think next time I'll just do the whole thing quicker (now that we've learned how to use all the software, how to interface with the printers, how to interface with Amazon, how to interface with editors, etc).

[-]habryka5y100

I understand Howie to be saying that he would expect posts from e.g. 2014 to be included, I.e. the emphasis is on older essays, not newer essays. It does seem really hard to have the best essays since the date of publication included, though I agree that we will reduce the gap of publication to essay collection in the future.

7habryka5y

I tried actually pretty hard to fit it on the front cover somewhere, but it was actually quite hard design wise (the way I phrased the design challenge is that if you have 5 books, each book can only kind of be 1/5th as complex as a normal book cover). It does say it in the first sentence on the back, and I think we tried to mention 2018 almost everywhere in the first sentence we promote the book, and also “new essays from LessWrong” a lot, so that people don’t get confused about it having really old content. My current guess is that the right place to emphasize the 2018 year is in all the marketing materials and communication, as well as the book cover, and not super prominently on the front cover itself.

3habryka5y

Small correction: We didn’t mention it as prominently as I would have liked on Twitter. We mentioned it like two levels deep, which isn‘t super great. Will be more careful with that in the future. Though Twitter just links to the /books page, which mentions it as the first sentence.

2xuae4y

What about on the spine? I agree it doesn't fit the cover, but right now the spine, from top to bottom, is [art], [title], [art], "LessWrong", [logo]. I wonder if it might make sense to either add a bit of whitespace at the top for the year, or at the bottom after the publisher info, such that it would look like "LessWrong ✵ 2019". This way it's subtle/understated, you don't have to change the title, but if, in 5-10 years' time, some of us have 2018-2027 on our bookshelves, and we want to find something we remember from 2023, we don't have to pull out each one to look at the back cover (or, gasp, be organized). Also, what were the considerations regarding size? I know the size you picked was because you found it's what people are most likely to read, but I'm thinking that "book you might take to read in a coffeeshop or on a train" and "book you keep on your bookshelf at home" (which ozziegooen seemed to be making reference to above) are different aesthetics -- that is, I might assume the latter to be much heftier than the former, more like an academic journal than a pocketbook. Actually, I wonder then if it might make sense if it might make sense to abandon ship with the current book set -- to do the yearly wrap-ups as journal-style publications (that is, single-volume instead of five, larger, simpler cover -- you may not have seen it, but I'm thinking American Affairs-style), and then publish a set of best-all-time books (like Howie Lempel mentioned) in this nice size.

5habryka4y

Yeah, we did originally plan to put something like that in the spine, but the spine was actually the hardest part of the whole design to get right. We went through at least 10 iterations of it, with literally all but the latest one looking completely hideous (according to me). It's possible we could have fit an additional thing on there, but when we finally got something that looked good, I just locked it in and moved on, since we were like a week away from our final print deadline.

8Elizabeth5y

Other timeless but year-of-publication restricted anthologies like "Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror" and "Year's Best Science Writing" have either "Nth annual" or [year the entries were published] prominently on the title. This is an established convention. The problems of "what the hell book did I read that in?", "Finding the books on Amazon" and "Have I read this already? Who's to say." seem much bigger to me than a fraction of the audience that hasn't picked up that convention AND will be blocked from reading by it.

9habryka5y

I think a "Nth annual" is a good thing. It will be on the Amazon page (still not fully sure what the series title will be, by default something like "Best of LessWrong"), and of course we will have a section on the site that will organize the books in order, after we released more than one. But having each individual book be prominently stand-alone seems pretty important to me, and also having a prominent series title for the first book, or book set, in a series seems also kind of unnecessary to me. If we've done three of those, then maybe there is a benefit that people get from knowing what series it is part of, but for the first one, the info seems really unnecessary for the vast majority of readers. I also don't want to commit us too hard to doing a book every year. Like, I know we want to do a book for this year's (2019) review, but I really don't know yet whether we will do one for next year, and also the book for this year's review might look so totally different that putting them in a series doesn't really make sense. Starting a whole series title and then abandoning it seems pretty bad to me, if you don't even know whether it will have more than two entries.

[-]Raemon5y110

For the record I totally agree with you, but I lost that argument. :)

9ozziegooen5y

+1 for being able to be open about small disagreements like this online :)

[-]emanuele ascani5y140

I really really love this initiative. Reading LW in book form is just better for me. Online I get distracted and I read stuff as procrastination instead of deliberate effort. I've read the first two books of the sequences and HPMOR on Kindle and the experience is not even comparable with reading with a browser.

7Bird Concept5y

That's great to hear! I've spent many hours with beta versions of these books, and there really is a calm, presence and deliberateness that is hard to get on a laptop or phone.

[-]habryka5y120

Oops, turns out I didn't have the Stripe checkbox for "send confirmation emails for payments" activated. I activated it now and am going through and sending you all the receipts you should have received in the first place. In case any of you accidentally ordered twice because you didn't know whether your first payment went through, please ping me on Intercom and I will give you a refund immediately! :)

[-]SuperRoyalSheep5y120

Apologies if this is the wrong place to mention this. I don't know if the cover image exactly reflects the printed copy, but it seems that the cover of Epistemology has a typo: "A Map that Reflects thet Territory."

Regardless, I'm heavily considering buying these. They're beautiful -- you've done an excellent job!

[-]NunoSempere5y120

How ironic.

7habryka5y

Oops, sorry. That will definitely be fixed in the print, and I will update the cover images. Thank you very much for noticing!

[-]AlexShpilkin5y140

I was once stupefied when I saw that the (official, Microsoft Press) Russian translation of “Introducing Microsoft .NET” called itself “Itroducing [...]” in huge type literally on the page facing the title page (it’s kind of traditional for Russian translations of nonfiction books to place a copy of the original title page there). A very informal and unauthoritative discussion at the time revealed that this is not actually uncommon: as the text (not the overall design) of the cover, title page, and to a lesser extent internal sectioning demand much less effort to prepare, they tend to get proportionally less attention from everybody in the pipeline who is concerned with text, including proofreaders, whereas the embarrassment of printing these parts wrong is of course much higher than for the bulk of the book.

So it might be a good idea in general to subject these (editing-wise, almost comically simple) parts to (what feels like) more checking than the rest of the copy.

[-]Alex_Altair5y110

My copy just arrived in the mail and it's exactly as good as I expected!

5Ben Pace5y

Aw nice :) Curious if there was anything you were surprised by?

[-]habryka5y*110

If the book isn't available for pre-order in your location, or you want to be notified when the book goes live on Amazon and other marketplaces, use this form to sign up for an email list that we will only use to send you notifications about when and where this book and other books we sell will become available.

[-]Bird Concept5y100

Update: The books are now also live on ProductHunt!

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/lesswrong-books

[-]adamShimi5y100

Ordered! Reading the table of contents made me want to look at some posts now, but I'll be a good boy and wait for the physical books.

[-]jp5y90

I just want to say that this looks beautiful, and the ad you have on the homepage is fabulous. I also expect to enjoy reading it.

[-]Chris_Leong5y70

I'd recommend seeing if you can get on some podcasts in the Sensemaking space. Jim Rutt show would be worth a try, however Both/And and Emerge aren't running any more, but there's probably more I'm not aware of.

[-]Daniel Kokotajlo5y60

I think the pre-order link is broken? It takes me to a LW page saying "No comment found"

4Kaj_Sotala5y

Fixed, thanks.

3jp5y

Looks like malformed markdown. The correct link is here: https://lesswrong.com/books.

[-]Milli | Martin3y50

Here are the links to the articles from the books. Let me know if there are any mistakes.

A Sketch of Good Communication	Ben Pace
Babble	Alkjash
Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization	Eliezer Yudkowsky
The Loudest Alarm is Probably False	Patrick LaVictoire
Varieties of Argumentative Experience	Scott Alexander
More Babble	Alkjash
Naming the Nameless	Sarah Constantin
Toolbox-thinking and Law-thinking	Eliezer Yudkowsky
Prune	Alkjash
Toward a New Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation	Abram Demski
Noticing the Taste of Lotus	Michael 'Valentine' Smith
The Tails Co

... (read more)

[-]Solenoid_Entity4y50

I do the SSC Podcast; one of my patreon supporters said he'd be really keen to have this as an audiobook. I'd certainly be keen to get an idea of the demand for that and could potentially make it happen if it seemed like it would be useful. If you wanted to chat about it you can get me on slatestarpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks!

[-]jeremy5y50

These look amazing! I'm really blown away by the designs. I know it's early days, but do you think there will likely be stock left after preorders are filled? I generally don't like preordering things, but I will likely buy a copy once it's on sale unless there's an unforeseen quality issue, so if there won't be stock left then I'd like to just preorder.

Also, I took a look at the sample chapter and noticed a possible typographical error: on the 8th line of text on the back cover, it looks like there's two spaces between "blog" and "devoted". Same on line 12 between "essays" and "of". I might just be seeing things though.

3habryka5y

I would be quite surprised if we ran out before the book is up on Amazon. The primary reason to preorder is either if you want to support us by helping us plan and adjust various plans based on demand, or if you want to make sure you get the books before Christmas. We have been selling faster than I expected though (we made a print run of 1000 books and have sold 270 today), so there is some chance my estimate here is wrong, but overall I still only assign around 10% to us running out at all.

[-]habryka5y120

Given really surprising demand (more than 700 sales so far!), we have now increased our print run from 1000 books to 2000 books. I would be quite surprised if we ran out of all of those in the preorder phase.

[-]Alex_Altair5y50

This made me want to buy the hardcopy of RAZ. But I only see the first two books on amazon; is that right? Is there any status update on printing the other books of RAZ?

[-]mingyuan5y120

Hello it me. Status update is that we really had the best of intentions re: getting the last four volumes out in time for Christmas, but we hardcore failed, but progress is really happening! I swear! Christmas 2021!

3habryka5y

Alas, there is not. Though I think the third book is being released soon.

[-]gilch5y50

This FAQ says that only 41 of the top 44 essays were included, but the back cover in the sample says that:

This book set contains 44 essays

Also, what were the other three, and why were they omitted?

7Ben Pace5y

The other three were all excellent posts, each cut primarily for space. They were Larks' 2018 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison, (which was almost the length of a single additional book!) plus was fairly recency-based and not very evergreen, Katja Grace's Will AI See Sudden Progress?, which had >50% overlap in ideas with Paul Christiano's Arguments About Fast Takeoff (which itself was higher in the review so took precedence), and Scott Alexander's A LessWrong Crypto Autopsy. As I say, all excellent content, I wish we'd had more space for it.

[-]Daniel Kokotajlo5y50

This looks awesome! Can't wait to get mine.

Is there something similar for The Codex? On Amazon I see a physical collection of slatestarcodex essays, but it has poor reviews, saying it's just a scrape of the website without images. Is it even official?

5Bird Concept5y

It is not "official" and there's nothing similar for The Codex yet (though still kudos to the guy who made the ones you're referring to, they're a lot better than nothing and some people really liked them).

[-]Holzbaum4y40

Have been waiting for months, but I still can't find a copy of this anywhere!

Is there gonna be a restock at some time?

[-]Arthur Milchior5y40

Sounds quite cool!

There are quite a lot of interesting things, but it's hard to read less wrong as there are just so many links, and finding what to read next is computationally very costly. A book solve the problem! I may imagine buying the ebook version just for having this order simplifying the reading decision.

One question: do you have any plan to make an audiobook of it? I listen more than I read, and would really love to listen to it, assuming that some texts can be understood without the drawings. I assume that some textes from Scott Alexander may already exists in audio thanks to SSC podcast. A LW Best-Of podcast, similar to SSC podcast and to the RAIFTZ audiobook would be extremly wonderful.

3Bird Concept5y

No audiobook plans; but if there's a lot of demand we might reconsider!

[-]MikkW5y40

Is the price $30 per volume, or for all five volumes?

9Ben Pace5y

For all 5 volumes!

9MikkW5y

Nice. I'm surprised that it's so cheap

4Bird Concept5y

Note that they're 4"x6" (each book fits in your pocket). Price would've been higher if they were a more standard size.

[-]Vanessa Kosoy5y40

Great news! However, it seems like there is no shipping to Israel. Is that something that can be fixed?

5habryka5y

Just added Israel (should be live within the hour). We are mostly doing fulfillment via Amazon, and apparently Amazon U.S. ships to Israel? There is some chance we will run into problems and we will have to charge something extra for shipping to Israel, or it will be delayed a bit, but I am currently 80% confident that it should work out without much of a problem.

2Vanessa Kosoy5y

Great, thank you :)

[-]Rudi C5y30

Is the content any different from the essays on Lesswrong?

[-]Sai Sasank Y5y30

Will this book be available to purchase in India when it's out on Amazon? Will I be required to order on the international site? (amazon.com) Thank you :)

[-]effective-egret5y30

Was hoping to see Singapore on the list of countries. Guess I'll have to wait for it to come out on Amazon.

[-]AlanXun5y30

The design looks great. Some questions

What software did you use to make the book? (I'm guessing some variant of LaTeX.)
What inspired this project?
Are there any plans to produce further volumes like these in future? And has anything like this been published previously (apart from Yudkowsky's Rationality book)?
Do you plan to publish a "Best of the Best" collection - all-time bests, rather than best of that year? (I expect such a collection would exclude the Yudkowsky essays already published in his book.)

[-]Bird Concept5y100

Elaborating on Habryka's comment, the full tech stack is:

Photoshop for making covers and dealing with images
ObservableHQ for generating diagrams from data
Illustrator for making illustrations and retouching diagrams
InDesign for putting it all together into a book

7habryka5y

The books were all designed in InDesign. Maybe one day we will have mastered LaTeX sufficiently to typeset a whole book like this, but today is not that day. Here is a random shortform I wrote like two years ago. There I said: The goals of the book are of course also closely entangled with the goals of the review. I think having a physical book has a real finality to it that gives the annual reviews some real stake, and makes generally contributing to LessWrong feel more rewarding. We will publish another book like this for the 2019 Review. We also have some interest in curating some books more centered around specific topics on LessWrong. Ben has been playing around with the idea of a book on Slack. I am very excited about creating a really high-end version of the sequences, as well as a printed version of the Codex we have on the site, but none of these are definite. I do not know of any super comparable projects to this. Someone recently compiled a bunch of SSC essays into a book, but that was much much lower effort, and misses crucial elements of the post, like all the images. I am not sure. I have been playing with the idea of doing a "let's review the decade before 2018" review, where we activate our review infrastructure for everything written before 2018, excluding the original sequences, and maybe compile a book out of that, but that's all just in the early brainstorm stages. Maybe after we've done this for 10 years can we do a "let's review all the essays that were in the books and create a super-book".

5ozziegooen5y

Just want to flag that I like the idea of topic-specific books, perhaps with an additional author to help rewrite things and make them consistent and clean. It's especially enticing if you can find labor to do it that doesn't have a high opportunity cost for other LessWrong style things.

6Alex_Altair5y

You can also buy a physical copy of Eliezer's Inadequate Equilibria.

[-]vae5y*30

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

4habryka5y

I am pretty sure that as soon as the book is up on Amazon, we can activate international shipping, and I think that should allow you to buy it. But I don't know the exact shipping charges we are going to run into for that, so we can't really be accepting pre-orders for that.

[-]Tyrathalis5y30

Is there a way to order more than copy of the set? Seems likely some people might want one to keep and one to gift.

2Ben Pace5y

I think for now you just hit the 'buy' button again :) But will look into making it smoother.

[-]Lukas Finnveden5y30

Awesome!

The link under Can I order a copy of the book? doesn't work for me.

I assume the books will arrive sooner if pre-ordered than if later ordered via amazon?

Also – trying to figure out where I'll be when receiving them – would you guess that the books will arrive before or after 6th january to European addresses?

2habryka5y

Oops, fixed! Our current plan is to deliver the preorders via Amazon for European countries, so my guess is it won't make much of a difference. There is a chance we figure out an alternative distribution channel, but I don't have any plans for that. It is plausible that we can put these orders into the system a bit before the final product goes live, so it might make a difference of a day or so, but not a big one. There is also some chance we will run out of books (we made a print run of a thousand books, and are currently selling something like one every 2-3 minutes, but I expect sales to drop off a lot over the next few days). I think that's pretty unlikely, but I wouldn't put it at below 10%. In that case people who preordered would of course be served first. I would put that at something like 80%. Our current timeline definitely has that as a target, but international shipping is kinda hard and we've never done it before, so I want to be conservative. If you move, you can also just let us know your new address and we can just ship it there instead. I already helped a bunch of people with figuring out details like that over the Intercom chat (available in the bottom right corner).

[-]BonoQuak4y20

Hello, Ben & Jacob

Trust you're keeping well!
I'm looking to buy the book-set but I suppose you don't ship to India.
Could you please make this happen? Appreciate it ✌️

Best,
Sahil

[-]AlexShpilkin5y20

A couple of nits regarding the illustrations in the sample:

(They are very small nits that I wouldn’t normally bother people with, but you obviously put a lot of effort and taste into making this beautiful and mostly succeeded—I especially love how the line on the GDP graph goes into the space of the ordinate ticks. And while small annoyances might not be that important from an economic viewpoint—though see 2010s Apple—they just provoke an intense feeling of sadness from a craftsman’s viewpoint.)

The dismal state of plotting software (and the laziness / g

... (read more)

4Bird Concept5y

I was the lead designer on making these graphs, and I found this feedback pretty useful. Thanks! Most of my response is "I'm a beginner, I'm still learning, and trying to ship things fast means making a bunch of sacrifices. Boy could I point out even worse things that would drive you crazy not being able to unsee them!" :) One reason for these (e.g. 4) is that the graphs were first plotted using Vega-lite in ObservableHQ, and then exported and retouched in Adobe Illustrator.

[-]AlexShpilkin5y20

Both the FAQ in this post and the email you sent out recently seem inconsistent in referring to the product as “the books / book set / book collection” vs “the [singular] book”, and the result is somewhat jarring.

(Sadly, I’m rather unlikely to buy this, both because you don’t ship to Russia—and I don’t blame you, our postal service sucks—and because it costs a US equivalent of $85 for me—the factors are 3.0 from the 2020 Big Mac index and 2.9 from the 2019 OECD PPP and today’s official exchange rate. I hope this comment can still be helpful.)

[-]Marso5y20

Books are amazing! Will it be possible to ship pre-orders to Russia? It is not in the list currently

3Ben Pace5y

Thank you :) We don't currently offer orders to Russia, even though I'd like to. My current understanding (Habryka can correct me if I'm wrong) is that Stripe doesn't let us take payment from Russia. However, when the product is up on Amazon.com, I think you'll be able to purchase it there.

[-]Holzbaum4y10

Hello! Is there any alternative to ordering the book via Amazon to Europe? Thanks :)

[-]Mohanakrishnan K4y10

Hello...

I am from India..and I found that it is not being released here (the hardcopy). But I have friend in Canada who can help me get it from there...But she is there only for another month.

Could you please tell me an almost date by which I can order the book so that she can collect it from there?!

[-]Wuschel Schulz4y10

You could make it even more accessible if Credit card was not the only payment option. In some places (like here in Germany) having a credit card is somewhat less common. Adding Paypal would be nice.

[-]achlysaa4y10

if it is possible to have a copy though I am living in china?

[-]marlisinio5y10

Very much looking forward to receiving the books! I saw that the books are now available on Amazon.com (and I assume that they are shipping in the US). When will shipping in Europe start? Thanks for the great work :)

[-]Sai Abishek5y10

How do I get to order a copy to India? I don’t see an option at the moment. Thanks

[-]satya5y10

Hope I can find this in India.

[-]Vaughn Pierce5y10

My mom preordered a copy, but unfortunately it didn’t arrive before Christmas. I’m trying to help her check the status on the order but she can’t seem to find any confirmation/ payment received/ order shipped emails. How can I check the status of it? Or see when it should arrive? Thanks

2Ben Pace5y

Oh no! Let me PM you to get some details and check it out.

[-]Perhaps5y10

Is there any way to buy a select number of books from the set, or only 1?

2Ben Pace5y

No, the whole set is a single item.

[-]Vermillion5y10

You mention its being sold to Australia, but that isn’t an option in the checkout :(

3habryka5y

Oh, no! Will fix that as soon as I wake up tomorrow! Sorry about the inconvenience!

1Oskar Mathiasen5y

Denmark seems to also not be an option. (and switzerland is an option twice)

1Søren Elverlin5y

I'd also like to pre-order from Denmark

3habryka5y

Should be fixed within half an hour! Sorry about forgetting about Denmark! (not including it was just a typo)

1Søren Elverlin5y

Thank you. I've preordered now.

Noticing the Taste of Lotus	Michael 'Valentine' Smith
The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life	Scott Alexander
Meta-Honesty: Firming up Honesty Around its Edge-Cases	Eliezer Yudkowsky
Explaining Insight Meditation and Enlightenment in Non-Mysterious Terms	Kaj Sotala
Being a Robust Agent	Raymond Arnold

Anti-social Punishment	Martin Sustrik
The Costly Coordination Mechanism of Common Knowledge	Ben Pace
Unrolling Social Metacognition: Three Levels of Meta are not Enough	Andrew Critch
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Prediction Markets: When Do They Work?	Zvi Mowshowitz
Spaghetti Towers	Georgia Ray
On the Loss and Preservation of Knowledge	Samo Burja
A Voting Theory Primer	Jameson Quinn
The Pavlov Strategy	Sarah Constantin
Inadequate Equilibria vs Governance of the Commons	Martin Sustrik

Is Science Slowing Down?	Scott Alexander
What Motivated Rescuers during the Holocaust?	Martin Sustrik
Is There an Untrollable Mathematician?	Abram Demski
Why Did Everything Take So Long?	Katja Grace
Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?	Eliezer Yudkowsky
What Makes People Intellectually Active?	Abram Demski
Are Minimal Circuits Daemon-Free?	Paul Christiano
Is There Something Beyond Astronomical Waste?	Wei Dai
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FAQ about Iterated Amplification	Alex Zhu
Challenges to Christiano's Iterated Amplification Proposal	Eliezer Yudkowsky
Response to FAQ on Iterated Amplification	Eliezer Yudkowsky
Robustness to Scale	Scott Garrabrant
Coherence Arguments Do Not Imply Goal-Directed Behavior	Rohin Shah

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