The Engines of Cognition is a newly published collection of essays by the LessWrong Community. They're currently available with Prime at Amazon US, where they'll arrive in time for Christmas, and you can read on to learn more about them.

About

In The Engines of Cognition, the writers set out to understand key elements of the art of rationality. Starting with the simple epistemic question of when and how to trust different sources of information, the essays in this collection move through understanding the lens of incentives, an exploration of when and why complex systems become modular, and finally into a discussions of failure, both personal and civilizational.

This book set is for people who want to read the most interesting ideas LessWrong has recently explored. It's for the people who read best away from screens, away from distractions. It's for people who do not check the site regularly, but would still like to get the ideas within. For such people, this is intended to be the ideal way to read LessWrong.

Essays in this book set take a variety of forms, from thought experiments to literature reviews, as well as book reviews, interviews, personal stories, microeconomic arguments, mathematical explanations, research advice, philosophical musings, published papers, disagreements-with-Robin-Hanson, forecasts for the future, survey data, cartoons, and more.

Authors featured include Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Zvi Mowshowitz, and over 30 more LessWrong writers. The essays were originally published to LessWrong in 2019, and for the first time are available with editing and illustration in print form. In addition, given recent advances in machine learning art, each essay has a unique piece of ML-generated art based on the essay title, some of which are shown below.

Order now on Amazon Prime US ($30) and it will arrive in time for Christmas.

Book Spreads

Table of Contents

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.

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