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.

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.

1. It seems like very few people voted overall if the average is "10-20" voters per post. I hope they are buying 50+ books each otherwise I don't see how the book part is remotely worth it.
2. The voting was broken in multiple ways - you could spend as many points as possible, but instead of a cut-off, your vote was just cast out due to the organizers' mistake to allow it.
3. The voting was broken in the way described in the post, too.
4. People didn't understand how the voting worked (Look at the few comments here) so they didn't really even manage to vote in the way that satisfies their preferences best. The system and the explanation seem at fault.
5. I note that a lot of promotion went into this - including emails to non-active users, a lot of posts about it, long extended reviews.

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:

1. I really liked the bit. Possibly because I've been lowkey following his efforts.
2. He looks quite good, and I like the beard on him.
3. ..

4. Eliezer clearly gets too much flack in general, and especially in this case. It's not like I haven't criticised him but come on.

5. 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.

6. I'm not against the concept of triggering - some stuff can be, including eating disorders, but like this? Can a person not talk at all about weight gain/loss? Is the solstice at all LW-related if things can't be discussed even at their fairly basic (and socially accepted) level? Please, if you hated it give a detailed response as to why. I'm genuinely curious.

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.

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.