A few of the clearest examples are listed below, though I can point to countless others
Yes, I would certainly love to read more, in a format longer than the bullet points you made here (but maybe shorter than the original Sequences?).
If you believe (it seems to me that correctly) that some lessons from the Sequences are frequently misunderstood, then it probably makes sense to make the explanations very clear, with several specific examples, a summary at the end... simply, if they were misinterpreted once, it seems like there is a specific attractor in the idea-space, and that attractor will act with the same force on your clarifications, so you need do defend hard against it. So please do err on the side of providing more specific examples and further dumbing it down for audience such as me. (Also, clearly spell out the specific misunderstanding you are trying to avoid, and highlight the difference. Maybe as a separate section at the end of the article.)
If this idea seems interesting, I'll probably be writing my own series of posts in the format of "Reading [Post from the Sequences] As If It Were Written Today."
Definitely interesting! Not sure if 1:1 correspondence is optimal (one article of yours per one article of the original Sequences). The information density varies and so does the article length; sometimes it might make more sense to read two or three articles at the same time; sometimes it might make sense to address two important points from the same article separately. Up to you; just saying that if you start with this format, don't feel like you have to stick with all the time.
Thanks for the support. I'll try and work a bit more on my first post in the coming days and I hope it will be up soon.
Some of them, sure, but for a lot I'd be like "that's completely outdated" and for others I'd be like "OK, that's obviously meant to be a jab at some specific person you don't like."
"Ethical Injunctions" is making a Kantian argument about certain patterns of behavior being inherently self-contradictory and thus impossible to consistently follow, not a rule-utilitarian argument about certain patterns of behavior causing bad outcomes if everyone were to do them.
So, basically, the argument against things like "let's kill a few thousand people so that we can make this planet a paradise for millions" is not "killing people is absolutely forbidden". Because, we are actually making similar tradeoffs, even with much smaller ratio, all the time. For example, using cars (as opposed to banning them worldwide, and e.g. only using trains) condemns thousands of people to painful death in car accidents, and it doesn't even bring a paradise to the rest, only a little more convenience. And the mainstream consensus is that this is acceptable.
The real objection instead is that plans like "let's kill a few thousand people so that we can make this planet a paradise for millions" predictably fail all the time, and if you actually thought about it a little, you could easily see it. Thousands of things would need to magically go right in order for such plan to succeed, and many of them are extremely unlikely, so the overall probability is practically zero. (For example, any plan that involves killing thousands will attract people who enjoy killing, and who enjoy organizing killing. Now after they succeed, you expect them to simply give up all the power and stop killing? As opposed to, e.g. putting a bullet through your brain, and declaring themselves the kings of the new order? Is that a likely scenario?) And the reason you don't immediately see this is that your brain has a blind spot here -- any plan that matches "I need to get more power, and then good things will happen" sounds instinctively very plausible to you, because your ancestors who believed such things and succeeded to convince others to give them the power, were usually very successful... that is, reproductively; not necessarily at making the good things actually happen.
That's sort of it, but it was specifically talking about certain types of self-deceptive behavior that appears to be instrumentally rational. The problem being is that once you've deceived yourself, you can't tell if it's a good idea or not.
If you've never read the LessWrong Sequences (which I read through the book-length compilation Rationality: From AI To Zombies), I suggest that you read the Sequences as if they were written today. Additionally, if you're thinking of rereading the Sequences, I suggest that your agenda for rereading, in addition to what it may already be, should be to read the Sequences as if they were written today.
To start, I'd like to take a moment to clarify what I mean. I don't mean "think about what you remember the Sequences talking about, and try to apply those concepts to current events." I don't even mean "read the Sequences and reflect on where the concepts are relevant to things that have happened since they were written." What I mean is that you should read the Sequences as if they were written today. You should imagine that, on January 1, 2025 (or whenever you happen to be reading this post), whatever post you're reading has just been released by some unknown 20-something-year-old alignment researcher, you saw it while scrolling down a bit on the front page of LessWrong, the title caught your eye, and you started reading it.
Many Sequences posts seem to be responding very directly to certain historical events within the rationalist community and Internet culture more broadly, at least if you approach them as a historical document. If you read them as if they were written today, however, they will seem instead to be responding very directly to certain current events within the rationalist community and Internet culture more broadly.
Strictly speaking, I don't think either one of these understandings is accurate, especially given how heavily they were based on scholarly work from decades earlier (e.g. the work of Tversky and Kahneman) that was likely in the works for a long time before it was even published. However, it's natural to try and apply them to whenever they were written, given how much Eliezer Yudkowsky is idolized (however unintentionally) as an original thinker and how comparatively uncommon it is to fully account for the giants whose shoulders he stood on.
While it may be intellectually interesting to see how Yudkowsky's work applies to the time in which it was written, there are a few key weaknesses to this approach.
In contrast, if one makes the supposition that they were written today,
To that end, setting aside the popular vision of Eliezer as a long-standing intellectual juggernaut is another purpose of reading the Sequences as if they were written today, and is one that Eliezer himself has endorsed on numerous occasions (including e.g. the "post-Sevarists" dialogue from Planecrash). This allows the ideas within them to stand on their own, apart from any positive or negative perception one may have of Eliezer, which leads into the second key advantage of reading the Sequences as if they were written today.
Many concepts from the Sequences have entered into common usage within the rationalist community, and have been used to refer to things that the Sequences was not referring to. While this is not on its own a bad thing, it does mean that it's harder to read the Sequences without unnecessarily injecting this context. A few of the clearest examples are listed below, though I can point to countless others:
When reading the Sequences as a historical document, it's hard to avoid injecting these ideas with their modern meanings and assuming that Yudkowsky defined them as they are used today. If one instead were to read the Sequences as if they were written today, one can instead simply suppose that Yudkowsky is re-defining these concepts for what he thinks are more instructive meanings, at least in the particular context in which he presents them.
I understand this is a pretty controversial assertion, but hear me out. Much of the Sequences, particularly the Sequence titled "The Craft and the Community," discuss the sort of problems that could befall a large organized rationalist community and how to prevent them. Additionally, many posts are written in a way that expects them to reach a very large number of people, far larger than the original audience. This means that when approaching the Sequences as a historical document, one is stuck between either seeing arrogance on Yudkowsky's part in assuming he'd become very popular (and by pure coincidence being right) or seeing an extreme degree of foresight instead. This further props up whatever pre-existing vision of Yudkowsky you have and prevents you, as discussed earlier, from evaluating these ideas on their own. If one were to instead read the Sequences as if they were written today, one doesn't have to think that way; in this framework, one can imagine that they were written to a large number of people because LessWrong is a large community and well-written posts, even by unknown authors, can go viral quite often.
If this idea seems interesting, I'll probably be writing my own series of posts in the format of "Reading [Post from the Sequences] As If It Were Written Today." I already have at least a dozen post ideas lined up for that, and I'm not sure how frequent they'll be, but I expect this would be interesting.
I'm planning to take a very literal "as if it were written today" framing in these posts (e.g. talking about MIRI as if I don't have the benefit of hindsight but maybe nudging and winking a bit because I do, speculating on whether the early MIRI will be able to get Open Philanthropy funding or not even though that's anachronistic to what actually happened here, acting like posts are vagueposting about things that happened over a decade later) both to better get myself into the "as if it were written today" framing and to add small amounts of humor throughout the post. However, I'm also willing to abandon that framing if it becomes too grating or cumbersome.