This sounds like good advice for people with very high g-factor (i.e. IQ), but I feel like it probably doesn't generalize as g-factor decreases.

I enjoyed this, thank you for sharing it.

(I'm not the best arbiter of what belongs on LW, but this does feel, to me, at home on LW. There are many works of fiction I have enjoyed reading on LW that share some similar qualities with this story, and the themes that it explores / the concepts the story is built on, are the sort of thing that a typical reader of LW finds intellectually captivating, but a less cerebral audience would struggle to relate to.)

To be clear, Russia was part of the Council of Europe from 1996 until its expulsion in 2022. (Your comment can be interpretted as meaning that Russia was never part of the CoE)

Nitpick: The human birth canal does not limit the size of adult human brains. The human skull and brain both increase drastically in size from infancy to adulthood, and there is no upper limit to how big the ratio of adult-brain-size : baby-brain-size can get (and based on how quickly other large mammals grow in general compared to humans, I assume that the growth size of the brain could, in principle, be much faster than it is).

Other biological factors, including energy usage, and the mechanics of having such a large mass included at that position in the human, and others, do constrain adult human brain size.

I see that the numbers indicate people disagree with this post. Since there are several clauses, it's hard to know which specifically (or all of them) are being disagreed with.

The second paragraph (beginning "Contrary to what you wrote...") is a list of factual statements, which as far as I can tell are all correct.

The third paragraph ("Most importantly, the title is plenty big...") is more subjective, but I'm currently not imagining that anyone is disagreeing with that paragraph (that is, that anyone thinks "actually, the title is too small").

The fourth paragraph ("In this case, part of the point...") is more speculative, and I could easily imagine someone reading it and thinking "that's not the point of publishing / writing a book". There's certainly a reason I put a "presumably" in there. I do still feel that there's something to what I'm saying in that paragraph. My surprise would be of a limited extent if Soares and Yudkowsky said "that was not a consideration in our decision to do this" - but I would be somewhat surprised.

I can see someone disagreeing with the first paragraph ("Given that the book..."), but my current state of mind is that such people would be simply wrong. The book is not being self-published, but is being published by Little, Brown and Company. Some excerpts from Wikipedia's article on Little, Brown and Company:

"The company was the most extensive law publisher in the United States, and also the largest importer of standard English law and miscellaneous works, introducing American buyers to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the dictionaries of William Smith, and many other standard works. In the early years [starting in 1837] Little and Brown published the Works of Daniel Webster, [...], [and] Letters of John Adams. [...] Little, Brown and Company was the American publisher for Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

The firm was the original publisher of United States Statutes at Large beginning in 1845, under authority granted by a joint resolution of Congress.

and

During this time [about 1908 to 1985] the joint Atlantic Monthly Press/Little Brown imprint published All Quiet on the Western Front, Herge's The Adventures of Tintin, James Truslow Adams's The Adams Family, [...] [and] J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.

The point being, the company that is publishing Soares and Yudkowsky's book, is an established company that has sold important and/or bestselling works for two centuries. The people there know what they are doing, and that includes the people who design covers, as well as the bosses of the people who design the covers.

Given that the book is being published by a major publisher, it can safely be assumed that the cover design was made by a professional cover designer, who knew what they were doing.

Contrary to what you wrote, the title has a bigger font size than both the subtitle and the authors' names (this is true of both the American and UK covers; I am primarily talking about the American cover, which I presume is the one you are referencing). Even if the author names were the same size as the title, it is immediately obvious which one is the title, and which one isn't. Putting the subtitle in a dark grey, which is much closer to the background color (black) than the color of the title (white) is, also does a lot to move emphasis towards the title of the book (away from the subtitle)

Most importantly, the title is plenty big. If it was small, then I would feel there is something to what you are saying; but the title is quite large and readable from a distance, and clearly delineated from the rest of the text on the cover.

In this case, part of the point of publishing a book (including writing it in the first place), is presumably to promote the identity of the authors, to make them a known name / schelling point for discussion about AI safety. That would indicate making the names quite prominent on the cover.

I would assume e-book orders will also play a role in encouraging the publisher to print more physical copies, because it indicates that more people are interested in reading the book.

Tim Urban has written about AI X-risk before, in a way that indicates that he's spent a good bit of time thinking about the problem. But, the point of the book seems to be to speak to people who don't have a deep knowledge of AI risk.

I agree that this description fits the paper.

If you read this and, like I did, felt unfulfilled after reading it, it's worth noting that this paper (which was linked in the OP, but which I [and perhaps the unfulfilled reader] overlooked) goes into more detail:

https://projects.panickssery.com/docs/allen-2009-a_theory_of_the_pre-modern_british_aristocracy.pdf