If I (a 19 year old male) texted "www.readthesequences.com" to my roommate, the probable outcome is that he would skim the site for under a minute, text back something like "seems interesting, I'll def check it out sometime", and then proceed to never read another word. I have another friend, one that I would consider a smart guy. He would consistently rank above me in our high school's math team, and he scored in the 1500's (≥3SD) on his SATs. The same dude did not read a single book during the entirety of his high school career.^[1]

Attention is one's scarcest resource, and actually reading something longer than a paragraph is a trivial inconvenience, especially for my generation.

What, then, does manage to hold the fickle eyeballs of zoomers like me? Well, TikTok, mostly. However, there is one (very popular) genre of TikTok video worth investigating. In this genre of video, a Reddit post is broken into sub-paragraph chunks of text, and these chunks are sequentially rendered onscreen while a text-to-speech program reads them to the user. The text is overlaid upon a background video, which is either gameplay from the mobile game Subway Surfers, or parkour footage from Minecraft. The background gameplay provides engaging novelty to the user's visual cortex, while the synthetic voice ensures that the user doesn't have to go through the hard work of translating symbols into sounds. Really, it's all quite hypnotizing.

The fact that these videos are often recommended by TikTok's algorithm implies that they are among the most-engaging videos that our civilization produces. Therefore, to reduce the effort-cost of reading the sequences, I gave the TikTok treatment to Book I ("Map and Territory") of Rationality: From AI to Zombies.

(Update: Circa 2023-02-09, all these links are dead. This was in response to an AWS alert notifying me that 85 gigabytes (or more) of data had been transferred out. I really shouldn't have used a public S3 bucket to serve video in the first place, as it exposed me to an unacceptable amount of risk in the form of a denial of wallet attack. I've got a second batch of videos in the works, which I intend to distribute via a more secure mechanism.)

(Update 2: THE VIDEOS ARE HERE, CLICK HERE)

Predictably Wrong

• What Do I Mean By “Rationality”?
• Feeling Rational
• Why Truth? And…
• … What’s a Bias, Again?
• Availability
• Burdensome Details
• Planning Fallacy
• Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You
• Expecting Short Inferential Distances
• The Lens That Sees Its Own Flaws

Fake Beliefs

• Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)
• A Fable of Science and Politics
• Belief in Belief
• Bayesian Judo
• Pretending to be Wise
• Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable
• Professing and Cheering
• Belief as Attire
• Applause Lights

Noticing Confusion

• Focus Your Uncertainty
• What Is Evidence?
• Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence
• How Much Evidence Does It Take?
• Einstein’s Arrogance
• Occam’s Razor
• Your Strength as a Rationalist
• Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
• Conservation of Expected Evidence
• Hindsight Devalues Science

Mysterious Answers

• Fake Explanations
• Guessing the Teacher’s Password
• Science as Attire
• Fake Causality
• Semantic Stopsigns
• Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
• The Futility of Emergence
• Say Not “Complexity”
• Positive Bias: Look into the Dark
• Lawful Uncertainty
• My Wild and Reckless Youth
• Failing to Learn from History
• Making History Available
• Explain/Worship/Ignore?
• “Science” as Curiosity-Stopper
• Truly Part of You

Interlude: The Simple Truth

Do whatever you want with these videos. I may or may not convert the other 5 books of R:AZ, and I may or may not upload them to TikTok. If you want another work of text converted to video, please pitch it to me in the comments, or DM me.