The Engines of Cognition: Essays by the LessWrong Community

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.