Thanks for the reply. That seems like a sensible position.
It sounds like maybe you were less involved in this than some of the 7(is that right?) other employees/admins so I'm very curious to hear their take, too.
Printing costs are hardly the only or even main issue, and I hadn't even mentioned them. You are right though, those costs make the insistence on publishing a book make even less sense.
I’m confused by this. Why would only voters be interested in the books?
Because I doubt there are all that much more people interested in these than the number of voters. Even at 1000 it doesn't seem like a book makes all that much sense. In fact, I still don't get why turning them into a book is even considered.
So, my question is - do the organizers think it was worth it? And if yes, do you think it is worth it enough for publishing in a book? And if yes to both - what would failure have looked like?
He has been trying to do it for years and failed. The first time I read his attempts at doing that, years ago, I also assigned a high probability of success. Then 2 years passed and he hadn't done it, then another 2 years..
You have to adjust your estimates based on your observations.
I have a bunch of comments on this:
I've always thought that his failed attempts at researching weightloss and applying what he learned were a counter example of how applicable LW/EY rationality is. Glad to see he solved it when it became more important.
several people’s reaction was, “Why is this guy talking to me like I’m his friend, I don’t even know him”
Really? Fine, you don't know him but if you don't know EY and are at a rationalist event why would you be surprised by not knowing a speaker? From the public's reaction to his openning it should've been clear most people did know him.
I think of CFAR as having "forked the LW epistemological codebase", and then going on to do a bunch of development in a private branch. I think a lot of issues from the past few years have come from disconnects between people who having been using 'the private beta branch' and people using the classic 'LessWrong 1.0 epistemological framework.'"
This rings true, and I like the metaphor. However, you seem to imply that the Open Source original branch is not as good as the private fork, pushed by a handful of people with a high turnover rate, which could be true but is harder to agree with.
not a real error, comment, post or karma.
I assume that means you print them? Because I find pdfs to be the worst medium, compared to mobi, epub or html - mainly because I usually read from my phone.
Why are so many resources being sunk into this specifically? I just don't understand how it makes sense, what the motivation is and how they arrived at the idea. Maybe there is a great explanation and thought process which I am missing.
From my point of view, there is little demand for it and the main motivation might plausibly have been "we want to say we've published a book" rather than something that people want or need.
Having said that, I'd rather get an answer to my initial comment - why it makes sense to you/them - rather than me having to give reasons why I don't see how it makes sense.