The Engines of Cognition: Essays by the LessWrong Community

“Essays from LessWrong have been one of my favorite sources of wisdom.” —Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum

Featuring essays by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Zvi Mowshowitz, and over 30 more LessWrong writers.

Starting with the simple epistemic question of when and how to trust different sources of information, the essays go on to explore how our world is shaped by incentives, when and why complex systems become modular, and concludes with a discussion of failure, both personal and civilizational.

The essays take a variety of forms, from thought experiments to literature reviews, as well as personal stories, microeconomic arguments, mathematical explanations, book reviews, interviews, research advice, philosophical musings, published papers, forecasts of the future, survey data, disagreements-with-Robin-Hanson, cartoons and more.

Each essay is accompanied with unique piece of artwork, designed using machine learning software that created each image using the corresponding essay title and a diagram of the Mississippi River.

The essays were originally published on LessWrong in 2019, and for the first time are available in print form.

“Whenever there’s a cutting-edge new idea making the rounds, Eliezer was writing about it 5-10 years ago. A deep dive into LessWrong will make you smarter.” — Tim Urban, Author of "Wait But Why"

“The rationality community is one of the brightest lights in the modern intellectual firmament.” —Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics, George Mason University