Will Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares book "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" get on the NYT bestseller list this year?
Verification will be based on the official NYT Best Seller lists. Currently I understand that to mean this resolves YES if it makes the online list (top 35), but I intend it to mean whatever best maps to "can write, New York Times Bestseller on the book".
Number sold question: https://manifold.markets/NathanpmYoung/how-many-copies-of-yudkowsky-and-so?play=true
Update 2025-05-18 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The criteria for the book appearing on the NYT Bestseller list are:
List frequency: weekly
Required placement: top 35
Eligible lists: any category
1,000Stephen Marche not a fan of the book:
Critics of A.I. doomerism maintain that the mind-set suffers from several interlocking conceptual flaws, including that it fails to define the terms of its discussion — words like “intelligence” or “superintelligence” or “will” — and that it becomes vacuous and unspecific at key moments and thus belongs more properly to the realm of science fiction than to serious debates over technology and its impacts. Unfortunately, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” contains all these flaws and more. The book reads like a Scientology manual, the text interspersed with weird, unhelpful parables and extra notes available via QR codes.
…
Following their unspooling tangents evokes the feeling of being locked in a room with the most annoying students you met in college while they try mushrooms for the first time.
@ms shouldn’t they want to be able to convince people like him rather than people already favorably disposed to their case? Seems like a better test.
I’m not quite sure how closely he’s read the book
I expect that most people’s reactions would be different from this one
Most people are not already against the idea that AI might be very dangerous
@ms that all sounds plausible to me. All I’m saying is the test that matters , if we’re really talking about doom, is convincing the people who are both most difficult to convince and have relevant leverage. Maybe convincing Marche doesn’t matter because he has no leverage. But that they failed to convince him signals something about their ability to convince other skeptics who might have more leverage.
No, AI isn’t going to kill us all, despite what this new book says
The arguments made by AI safety researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies are superficially appealing but fatally flawed, says Jacob Aron
Was googling around how the NYT list works and this seems relevant [1]:
In addition, you can't just sell 10,000 books on Amazon to people in one city, state, or region. The New York Times requires that book sales must be spread across America using multiple retailers, including Amazon, B&N bookstores, Books-a-Million, independent bookstores, etc. Sales must be dispersed, rather than concentrated at one place.
My biggest concern betting this down was that there are probably enough rationalists to buy a lot of these. But, they are probably overwhelmingly in the SF Bay Area.
@MachiNi According to that same site, you only need 10k sales on the first week to qualify, and I'm pretty sure there's at least twice as many rationalists. Maybe even 100k? I'd be surprised if there were 1M though.
I’d love to be wrong but I don’t think it’s a topic popular enough to become a bestseller.
@nikki everybody knows Barnes and Noble customers are eager to hear what the rationalists recommend!
@MachiNi Both Superintelligence and What We Owe The Future were NYT best sellers (others I'd say were in this books reference class that were not are Human Compatible and The Precipice).
Rats are cute! And smart! 🐀
@RobertCousineau I’m honestly struggling to construct a good reference class. AI risk nonfiction is too narrow to make meaningful inferences. AI broadly construed is too loose. For every Superintelligence and WWOTF there are probably at least twice as many comparable books that don’t become bestsellers.