Book Launch: The Engines of Cognition

The covers are beautiful!

Glad you think so :)

I don't have a copy yet, so this could be written somewhere in them, but is there any way we could learn what the prompt for all the art/covers are? I found it pretty fun to learn what one of them was.

[-]Ben Pace4y50

I agree, sharing all the prompts is fun. I'd like to share them at some point.

[-]Pattern4y230

Only physical books, no ebooks?

[-]holomanga4y70

Would me compiling the Lesswrong posts as they are on the website into an .epub and uploading it provide a significant amount of the value of an ebook, or does enough of it come from other sources that one can't do at home like the pretty new diagrams and being on the Kindle store?

[-]Ben Pace4y80

25% of the value I reckon? You wouldn’t recreate the art or layout or additions content. Would be nice if you did it, I’d certainly learn a new fact based on number of downloads if that was measurable.

[-]Vanessa Kosoy4y70

+1, also I wish there was an ebook version of "A Map that Reflects the Territory"

[-]Ben Pace4y50

Yep, at this point. May change later.

[-]yagudin4y160

I would appreciate it if the ToC linked to the web versions of the essay.

[-]yagudin4y250

`Trust`
`Rule Thinkers In, Not Out`	`Scott Alexander`
`Gears vs Behavior`	`John S. Wentworth`
`Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success`	`Scott Alexander`
`Reason isn't magic`	`Ben Hoffman`
`"Other people are wrong" vs "I am right"`	`Buck Shlegeris`
`In My Culture`	`Duncan Sabien`
`Chris Olah's views on AGI safety`	`Evan Hubinger`
`Understanding "Deep Double Descent"`	`Evan Hubinger`
`How to Ignore Your Emotions (while also thinking you're awesome at emotions)`	`Hazard`
`Paper-Reading for Gears`	`John S. Wentworth`
`Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain`	`Kaj Sotala`
`Noticing Frame Differences`	`Raymond Arnold`
`Propagating Facts into Aesthetics`	`Raymond Arnold`
`Do you fear the rock or the hard place?`	`Ruben Bloom`
`Mental Mountains`	`Scott Alexander`
`Steelmanning Divination`	`Vaniver`
`Modularity`
`Book Review: Design Principles of Biological Circuits`	`John S. Wentworth`
`Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services as General Intelligence`	`Rohin M. Shah`
`Building up to an Internal Family Systems model`	`Kaj Sotala`
`Being the (Pareto) Best in the World`	`John S. Wentworth`
`The Schelling Choice is "Rabbit", not "Stag"`	`Raymond Arnold`
`Literature Review: Distributed Teams`	`Elizabeth Van Nostrand`
`Gears-Level Models are Capital Investments`	`John S. Wentworth`
`Evolution of Modularity`	`John S. Wentworth`
`You Have About Five Words`	`Raymond Arnold`
`Coherent decisions imply consistent utilities`	`Eliezer Yudkowsky`
`Alignment Research Field Guide`	`Abram Demski`
`Forum participation as a research strategy`	`Wei Dai`
`The Credit Assignment Problem`	`Abram Demski`
`Selection vs Control`	`Abram Demski`
`Incentives`
`Asymmetric Justice`	`Zvi Mowshowitz`
`The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics`	`Jai Dhyani`
`Unconscious Economics`	`Jacob Lagerros`
`Power Buys You Distance From The Crime`	`Elizabeth Van Nostrand`
`Seeking Power is Often Convergently Instrumental in MDPs`	`Alexander Turner & Logan Smith`
`Yes Requires the Possibility of No`	`Scott Garrabrant`
`Mistakes with Conservation of Expected Evidence`	`Abram Demski`
`Heads I Win,Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists`	`Zack M. Davis`
`Excerpts from a larger discussion about simulacra`	`Ben Hoffman`
`Moloch Hasn’t Won`	`Zvi Mowshowitz`
`Integrity and accountability are core parts of rationality`	`Oliver Habryka`
`The Real Rules Have No Exceptions`	`Said Achmiz`
`Simple Rules of Law`	`Zvi Mowshowitz`
`The Amish, and Strategic Norms around Technology`	`Raymond Arnold`
`Risks from Learned Optimization: Introduction`	`Evan Hubinger, Chris van Merwijk, Vladimir Mikulik, Joar Skalse, & Scott Garrabrant`
`Gradient hacking`	`Evan Hubinger`
`Failure`
`The Parable of Predict-O-Matic`	`Abram Demski`
`Blackmail`	`Zvi Mowshowitz`
`Bioinfohazards`	`Megan Crawford, Finan Adamson, & Jeffrey Ladish`
`What failure looks like`	`Paul Christiano`
`Seeking Power is Often Convergently Instrumental in MDPs`	`Alexander Turner & Logan Smith`
`AI Safety “Success Stories”`	`Wei Dai`
`Reframing Impact`	`Alexander Turner`
`The strategy-stealing assumption`	`Paul Christiano`
`Is Rationalist Self-Improvement Real?`	`Jacob Falkovich`
`The Curse Of The Counterfactual`	`P.J. Eby`
`human psycholinguists: a critical appraisal`	`Nostalgebraist`
`Why wasn't science invented in China?`	`Ruben Bloom`
`Make more land`	`Jeff Kaufman`
`Rest Days vs Zombie Days`	`Lauren Lee`

Here is a google sheet.

[-]Pattern4y*40

As would I.

Perhaps that can be fixed with a spreadsheet:

Title Author Formula Base Link

[etc.] [etc.] =concat(A4, A2, A3) https://www.lesswrong.com/search?terms=

Then it's just a matter of copying columns 3 and 4 down, (after pasting in the TOCs), opening a bunch of tabs, then copying the results over to column 5. Then a formula for column 6 could spit out the markdown formatting, which can be copied and pasted* into a comment with the appropriate formatting selected.

*Copied as a column for speed.

Any ideas for ways to point to, or retrieve*, the first search result by default?

*Might already have the formatting (title and link).

[-][anonymous]4y120

5 x 7.75 inches

fwiw that's 12.7 x 19.7 cm

[-]holomanga4y100

There is a listing already on Amazon UK, automatically generated by Amazon reselling from Amazon US, which as of the time of writing claims to deliver by January 5th. For me it was slightly cheaper to order it there than from the US site with international delivery directly :).

[-]Ben Pace4y60

Wow, great to hear!

[-]Alex_Altair4y90

Whooo mine just arrived! First thoughts;

I mean, they're amazing, that's the first 15 things I have to say
Sad that they're much larger, but I can't blame you, and they're still on the small side, and you warned me
The covers are more matte, whereas the previous ones are more glossy. This is fine by me aesthetically, though it does make me feel like maybe they'd be more damaged by water.
Amazon delivered it in one of those plastic bubble wrap bags rather than in a box. It seems like this caused the edges to get a bit dinged up, which is unfortunate. Not sure if there's anything you can do about that.

[-]Ben Pace4y50

It's very cool that people get the books so quickly this time! Thanks for the comments :)

[-]Tomas Piala4y10

Its a shame Amazon is sending them this way, mine came with corners completely bruised off, so I will be probably returning them :(

[-]lumenwrites4y80

Looks amazing!

I'd love to buy an ebook version though. Or even better - an audiobook.

[-]Christopher Galias4y70

Will the previous LW books be made available again?

[-]Ben Pace4y60

I'd be surprised if we don't get around to it sometime, but no concrete plans right now.

[-]m0sys4y70

Just the fact that they're AI generated images based on the content of each essay makes the books beautifully sweet. Can't wait till they arrive!

[-]Alex_Altair4y60

Me: Hm, I notice that all the swirly images have the same basic structure. I wonder what base image they used for it...
Me: *scrolls* oh my goood it's the Mississippi river map

[-]Ben Pace4y60

Yeah, last year’s books evolved into this year’s books :)

One idea we’ve been playing with it to have a tradition every year of using the last year’s covers as the base for the new covers.

[-]JanGoergens4y50

I would like to have these books in audio form. Are there any plans to record an audiobook on audible (or other platforms)?

[-]MikkW4y50

Is there anywhere the art for all the essays can be viewed online?

[-]Ben Pace4y50

No, it's just in the books.

[-]niplav4y50

Power Buys You Distance From The Crime was by Elizabeth, not Ben Hoffman.

[-]Ben Pace4y40

Fixed.

[-]__nobody4y50

It says the UK Amazon doesn't ship to Germany [at least for the auto-generated listing], and from the US it'd be ~$45 incl. shipping + taxes... =/

And since it's above the magic number of 1kg (around 1.2kg), even a bulk order with local distribution would have to add about €5 for the last leg of shipping, which (adding packaging etc.) makes that just not worth it.

Since Amazon UK is happy to ship other books, I subscribed to the UK availability notification -- maybe it'll work once it's "really" there. I'll update this once the notification comes and I have time to check.

(If that doesn't fix it: If it were available at some endpoint within the EU, Amazon's shipping would probably be around €6 (based on looking at comparable book boxes from ES or FR.) So if UK refuses to ship and it's not too terrible (or would add extra costs that make it useless), then I'd appreciate having some EU endpoint next year again... but first let's see what'll happen.)

[-]__nobody4y130

Update: Amazon Germany now also has the books listed, for €36 (which is fine.) Since I haven't received the "Notify me when the UK books are available" mail yet, I assume this is further downstream propagation from the Amazon US listing.

If that is accurate, then there should be no need at all to manually ship books to other regions?! I guess that's very good news for future books!

[-]Ben Pace4y40

Indeed the books are not yet in-stock in Amazon UK.

[-]MondSemmel4y30

Thanks for writing this; I didn't even think to check Amazon Germany since it wasn't listed here.

That said, a quick search for Engines of Cognition on some websites that purportedly compare product prices on all Amazon EU stores did only list prices for UK and DE. Since the product is imported from the US in either case, and the non-US store pages were not created manually, I don't really understand why it wouldn't be offered on all Amazon storefronts.

EDIT: Apparently the product is available on Amazon DE (though probably only within Germany) for "free worldwide shipping" from the US: the checkout page lists a shipping fee of 11.14€, which it then discounts to zero. This is the same procedure they use for nationwide free shipping, which is nominally priced at 3~4€ IIRC.

[-]Steven Byrnes4y50

"Seeking Power is Often Convergently Instrumental in MDPs" is listed as being present in two books…

[-]Ben Pace4y80

I guess I'll go open the books to double check it's just a typo...

[-]🟠UnlimitedOranges🟠4y40

Are there any plans to print more copies of last year's set?

[-]Ben Pace4y70

Not right now, but that was probably a mistake. I had some edits I wanted to do for last year’s books that I didn’t get around to yet for a second print run.

[-]__nobody3y30

Design feedback: Alignment is hard, even when it's just printing. Consider bumping up the running footer by 1-2mm next time, it ended up uncomfortably close to the bottom edge at times. (Also the chapter end note / references pages were a mess.) More details:

variance: For reference, in the books that I have, the width of the colored bars along the page edge at each chapter (they're easy to measure) varies between ~4.25mm and ~0.75mm, and sometimes there's a ~2mm width difference between top and bottom. (No complaints here. The thin / rotated ones look a bit awkward if you really look at them, but you'll likely be distracted by the nice art on the facing page anyway. So who cares, and they do their job.)

footers: Technically, the footer was always at least 2mm away from the edge (so it didn't really run the risk of getting cut off), but occasionally it felt so close that it was hard not to notice. That distracted from reading, and made those pages feel uncomfortable… giving it just 1 or 2mm more should take out the tension. (While I didn't experiment with it, my gut feeling says the text block probably won't have to move to make more space.)

end notes/references: These just looked weird to me. Rambling train of thought style notes:

Choice of a different font that looked thin and spindly compared to the main text, worsened by the all-italic choice. (That also made it look fidgety/restless, thanks to constant kerning weirdness – the font is clearly not meant to be used this way, worst in URLs like Incentives p. 77 item 8.)
Usual citation formats are something like 'Author (Year). "Title." More stuff.' or 'Author (Year). Title. More stuff.', so there's either sufficient punctuation to create noticeable points, or the emphasis creates a texture difference. The chosen 'Author. Title. Year' just runs together with no strongly noticeable points, making it hard to pick out the individual fields. It seems to be close to the Bluebook style, but that really relies on the texture contrast in the "Author, Title. Year" to function.
The parenthesized item numbering (23) also looked weird in that font, maybe dotted 23. or 23: would have looked better; combined with the numbers being the only thing not italicized, it looked more like a mistake than intention to me.
Also lots of typos / inconsistencies, e.g. occasional missing years/dates, sometimes it's just "Wikipedia. Article name." (good IMHO) then sometimes it's "Article. Wikipedia" (why is the "author" not first here?) and sometimes it's a badly-formatted link (whyyy), occasionally it looks like there's two spaces instead of one (or just more kerning weirdness?), and e.g. Incentives p. 206 has items 4 + 5 running into each other.
Some indication for where the text can be found would be helpful. (Also whether it's a text or something else.) Most seem to be on LW, some can be guessed, but for others you have to search. Shorthands like e.g. a ° after the title to mark "this is on LW" or maybe a small ˣ for "can be found in arXiv" would be enough for the usual sources. But try finding Incentives p 133 item (10) by searching! The only way to find it is to look up the original article, locate the link, and then facepalm hard at the incomplete information.
It all seemed more like an afterthought than a planned part of the book, and the look of the whole really encouraged me to quickly turn to the next page, instead of looking for more things to read.
(Also: Consider reducing the line height and item spacing? It's not text that you read continuously, so less leading both reduces the required space and makes it stand apart from the main text without using questionable fonts.)

Apart from that, I loved the design! Thanks to everyone involved for making the books, they're lovely! <3

[-]Ben Pace3y50

Thanks for the feedback! Agree with your overall paragraph. Main constraint you're not modeling is how increasing margin size increases total pages and thus cost. Seems plausible I should cut one or two essays to accommodate, but I do love all the essays, and actually the real answer is just that the paragraph spacing is way too big.

I didn't notice that about the footers, I will go back and take a look.

The end notes were time-crunched for a lot of reasons, I wish they had been better.

[-]__nobody3y10

Main constraint you're not modeling is how increasing margin size increases total pages and thus cost.

That's why I'm saying it probably won't need that for the footers. There's ~10mm between running footer and text block, if that's reduced to ~8 or 9mm and those 1-2mm go below the footer instead, that's still plenty of space to clearly separate the two, while greatly reducing the "falling off the page" feeling. (And the colored bars that mark chapters are fine, no need to touch those.)

[-]Ben Pace3y30

I see, I misread, yup that makes sense.

[-]PointlessOne4y20

The books are unavailable anywhere. Can we expect more anytime soon?

[-]Georgios Kaklamanos4y20

Are there any updates about when the books would be available on Amazon UK or even better Amazon DE / FR to make it easier for people based in EU countries to get them?

Thanks for making the books, I'm really looking forward to get them! :-D

[-]MarcelloV4y20

Was "Rest Days vs Zombie Days" removed from LessWrong, or at the very least available online anywhere else? I can't find it either via Google search or LessWrong's site search. All I see is "Rest Days vs. Recovery Days" by Unreal from 2019.

[-]Ben Pace4y70

Same post! Author changed the name for the book. I'll probs check in with author and then change it on LW too.

[-]Yoav Ravid4y20

Shouldn't the order of Asymmetric Justice and The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics be flipped? (the former references the latter)

[-]Ben Pace4y30

The former essay makes sense without it, and then reading it as a follow-up gives more depth. Mostly I didn't want to open with an essay that wasn't in the 2019 Review.

[-]Yoav Ravid4y20

Fair enough.

[-]Samuel Clamons1y10

Late to the party, I know, but I just got my copies and really looking forward to reading them! I really miss the tiny form factor of "Maps that Reflect the Territory" though, they really felt elegant in a way the more recent ones don't.

[-]Orome3y10

I missed these somehow, and they're no longer available on Amazon. Any chance of a reprint?

[-]Dan Meltz3y*10

I missed the print run. any chance of a new printing?

[-]Kenny4y10

The layouts look impressively well done!

[-]Alex Vermillion4y10

For what it's worth, https://www.lesswrong.com/books/ still points to https://www.lesswrong.com/books/2018, not https://www.lesswrong.com/books/2019, which is where the new books are. I noticed only because I checked both /books and /books/2019 in order since I didn't know which link would update, but luckily found these are out!

[-]Ben Pace4y30

Lol, I didn't finish the 2019 page and intentionally didn't change the link to point to it.

[+]lc4y*-60

Trust
Rule Thinkers In, Not Out	Scott Alexander
Gears vs Behavior	John S. Wentworth
Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success	Scott Alexander
Reason isn't magic	Ben Hoffman
"Other people are wrong" vs "I am right"	Buck Shlegeris
In My Culture	Duncan Sabien
Chris Olah's views on AGI safety	Evan Hubinger
Understanding "Deep Double Descent"	Evan Hubinger
How to Ignore Your Emotions (while also thinking you're awesome at emotions)	Hazard
Paper-Reading for Gears	John S. Wentworth
Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain	Kaj Sotala
Noticing Frame Differences	Raymond Arnold
Propagating Facts into Aesthetics	Raymond Arnold
Do you fear the rock or the hard place?	Ruben Bloom
Mental Mountains	Scott Alexander
Steelmanning Divination	Vaniver
Modularity
Book Review: Design Principles of Biological Circuits	John S. Wentworth
Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services as General Intelligence	Rohin M. Shah
Building up to an Internal Family Systems model	Kaj Sotala
Being the (Pareto) Best in the World	John S. Wentworth
The Schelling Choice is "Rabbit", not "Stag"	Raymond Arnold
Literature Review: Distributed Teams	Elizabeth Van Nostrand
Gears-Level Models are Capital Investments	John S. Wentworth
Evolution of Modularity	John S. Wentworth
You Have About Five Words	Raymond Arnold
Coherent decisions imply consistent utilities	Eliezer Yudkowsky
Alignment Research Field Guide	Abram Demski
Forum participation as a research strategy	Wei Dai
The Credit Assignment Problem	Abram Demski
Selection vs Control	Abram Demski
Incentives
Asymmetric Justice	Zvi Mowshowitz
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics	Jai Dhyani
Unconscious Economics	Jacob Lagerros
Power Buys You Distance From The Crime	Elizabeth Van Nostrand
Seeking Power is Often Convergently Instrumental in MDPs	Alexander Turner & Logan Smith
Yes Requires the Possibility of No	Scott Garrabrant
Mistakes with Conservation of Expected Evidence	Abram Demski
Heads I Win,Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists	Zack M. Davis
Excerpts from a larger discussion about simulacra	Ben Hoffman
Moloch Hasn’t Won	Zvi Mowshowitz
Integrity and accountability are core parts of rationality	Oliver Habryka
The Real Rules Have No Exceptions	Said Achmiz
Simple Rules of Law	Zvi Mowshowitz
The Amish, and Strategic Norms around Technology	Raymond Arnold
Risks from Learned Optimization: Introduction	Evan Hubinger, Chris van Merwijk, Vladimir Mikulik, Joar Skalse, & Scott Garrabrant
Gradient hacking	Evan Hubinger
Failure
The Parable of Predict-O-Matic	Abram Demski
Blackmail	Zvi Mowshowitz
Bioinfohazards	Megan Crawford, Finan Adamson, & Jeffrey Ladish
What failure looks like	Paul Christiano
Seeking Power is Often Convergently Instrumental in MDPs	Alexander Turner & Logan Smith
AI Safety “Success Stories”	Wei Dai
Reframing Impact	Alexander Turner
The strategy-stealing assumption	Paul Christiano
Is Rationalist Self-Improvement Real?	Jacob Falkovich
The Curse Of The Counterfactual	P.J. Eby
human psycholinguists: a critical appraisal	Nostalgebraist
Why wasn't science invented in China?	Ruben Bloom
Make more land	Jeff Kaufman
Rest Days vs Zombie Days	Lauren Lee

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

174

Book Launch: The Engines of Cognition

174

174

About

Book Spreads

Table of Contents

Trust

Modularity

Incentives

Failure

FAQ

How were the essays in the books selected?

How are the books made?

What size are the books?

How was the art generated?

Does this book assume I have read other LessWrong content, like The Sequences?

How can I get the books?

When will the books be on Amazon UK?

I have a question not answered here?

Remind me again, how can I order it in the US?