I've been a lurker here for a long time. Why did I join?
I have a project I would like to share and discuss with the community. But first, I would like to hear from you guys. Will my project fit in here? Is there interest?
My project is: I wrote a book for my 6yo son. It is a bedtime-reading kind of book for a reasonably nerdy intelligent modern child.
Reading to young kids is known to be very beneficial to their development. There are tons of great books for any age and interests. My wife and me have read and enjoyed a lot of them with our boy.
However, I still wasn't satisfied. Most of what I could find was too stale, pedestrian, or just plain irrelevant to a child growing up in the modern world. The world is already vastly different from what the authors of these books had to experience. Right now, our world is on the verge of becoming even more unrecognizably different.
So, I wrote my own. I did read it to my boy, and he enjoyed it a lot. My wife enjoyed it too, and suggested it might be interesting to others.
Why Lesswrong? I think there are both cons and pros (in that order) to publishing it here.
Cons: This is not a book teaching young kids rational thinking as such. Its focus is more on psychological matters: overwhelm, emotions, attachments, obligations. One of the book's themes is cheating: with so much help available from the increasingly sentient technology, when using that help becomes cheating? Another core topic is happiness: what makes us happy? How to achieve and maintain that state? Can there be a cheated happiness?
Pros: It is a weird and rather complex book. Its subject matter includes virtual companions, space travel, and benevolent but still scary superintelligences. My boy is a bit of a language nerd, so there are elements of language-themed wordlbuilding as well. Overall, even though it's a book for kids, I was trying to make it interesting for adults too - at least, for adults who are somewhat similar to me. Lesswrong is one of the few places I know where such people gather.
More cons: Despite sounding vaguely sci-fi, it's not serious sci-fi. I don't pretend to describe the real, or even to any extent realistic, world. It's basically a fairy tale. At times, it chooses to be poetic at the expense of rationality. Also, at times it's quite idiosyncratic to our family so may sound confusing or even off-putting to others.
More pros: I do think it's reasonably well written and fun to read :)
Welcome to LessWrong! Your story sounds fitting to me. I'd love to read to read it :)
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