I understand the sequences are important to you folks, and I don’t want to seem disrespectful. I have browsed them, and think they contain some good information.
However, I’d recommend going back to books published at least 30 years ago for reads about:
critical thinking
scientific explanation
informal logic
formal logic
decision theory
cybernetics (Ashby, for the AI folks)
statistics and probability
knowledge representation
artificial intelligence
negotiation
linguistic pragmatics
psychology
journalism and research skills
rhetoric
economics
causal analysis
Visit a good used book store, or browse older books and print-only editions descriptions on the web, or get recommendations that you trust on older references in those areas. You’ll have to browse and do some comparing. Also get 1st editions wherever feasible.
The heuristics that this serves include:
good older books are shorter and smarter in the earlier editions, usually the 1st.
older books offer complete theoretical models and conceptual tools that newer books gloss over.
references from the 20th Century tend to contain information still tested and trusted now.
if you are familiar with newer content, you can notice how content progressed (or didn’t).
old abandoned theories can get new life decades later, it’s fun to find the prototypical forms.
most of the topics I listed have core information or skills developed in the 20th century.
it’s a nice reminder that earlier generations of researchers were very smart as well.
some types of knowledge are disappearing in the age of the internet and cellphone. Pre-internet sources still contain write-ups of that knowledge.
it’s reassuring that you’re learning something whose validity and relevance isn’t versioned out.
NOTE: Old books aren’t breathless about how much we’ve learned in the last 20 years, or how the internet has revolutionized something. I’d reserve belief in that for some hard sciences, and even there, if you want a theory introduction, an older source might serve you better.
If you don’t like print books, you can use article sources online and look at older research material. There are some books from the 90′s available on Kindle, hopefully, but I recommend looking back to the 70′s or even earlier. I prefer an academic writing style mostly available after the 70′s, I find older academic texts a bit hard to understand sometimes, but your experience could be different.
Visiting an old book store and reading random old books on topis is a horrible idea and I disrecommend it whole-heartedly. The vast majority of random books are crap, and old books are on average maybe even more crap (caveat that the good ones are the ones we still hear about more) since even more from them has been disproven/has been added to by now.
I doubt that most people would know who to look for that authored books written in the late 20th Century in those fields that I listed, particularly when the theory remains unchanged now, or as in the case of Ashby’s book, is not available in any modern textbook.
I believe that:
good material from decades ago doesn’t appear in new texts, necessarily.
new material isn’t always an improvement, particularly if it reflects “the internet era”.
what is offered as “new material” isn’t always so new.
One concern with modern textbooks is pedagogical fads (for example, teaching formal logic with a software program or math with a TI calculator). I support pen and paper approaches for basic learning over TI calculators and software packages. Older textbooks offer more theory than current ones. Older textbooks are usually harder. Dover math books are one example where unchanged theory written up in older texts is still appreciated now.
It doesn’t take a lot of learning to find useful 20th Century books about linguistics, scientific reasoning, rhetoric, informal logic, formal logic, and even artificial intelligence. Yes, there was AI material before neural networks and machine learning, and it still has utility.
For most people, a random search at a decent used bookstore can turn up popular titles with good information. A random search by topic in an academic library or in a used bookstore that accepts used academic titles, (which used to be common, but is becoming more rare), can turn up some amazing finds. I do recommend all those approaches, if you like books and are patient enough to to try it. Otherwise, I suggest you look into older journal articles available in PDF format online.
It’s just one approach, and takes some trial and error. You need to examine the books, read the recommendations, figure out who published it and why and get to know the author, read the preface and forward, so it takes some patience. It can help to start with an older book and then visit the new material. When I started doing that is when I noticed that the new material was sometimes lesser quality, derivative, or the same content as older material.
The most precious finds are the ones that are nowhere to be found now. Yes, sometimes that’s because they’re crap, but sometimes that’s because they’re really good and people ignored them in spite or, or because of, that.
EDIT: I also find that reading from a book offers a visceral experience and steadier pace that digital reading can lack.
I understand the sequences are important to you folks, and I don’t want to seem disrespectful. I have browsed them, and think they contain some good information.
However, I’d recommend going back to books published at least 30 years ago for reads about:
critical thinking
scientific explanation
informal logic
formal logic
decision theory
cybernetics (Ashby, for the AI folks)
statistics and probability
knowledge representation
artificial intelligence
negotiation
linguistic pragmatics
psychology
journalism and research skills
rhetoric
economics
causal analysis
Visit a good used book store, or browse older books and print-only editions descriptions on the web, or get recommendations that you trust on older references in those areas. You’ll have to browse and do some comparing. Also get 1st editions wherever feasible.
The heuristics that this serves include:
good older books are shorter and smarter in the earlier editions, usually the 1st.
older books offer complete theoretical models and conceptual tools that newer books gloss over.
references from the 20th Century tend to contain information still tested and trusted now.
if you are familiar with newer content, you can notice how content progressed (or didn’t).
old abandoned theories can get new life decades later, it’s fun to find the prototypical forms.
most of the topics I listed have core information or skills developed in the 20th century.
it’s a nice reminder that earlier generations of researchers were very smart as well.
some types of knowledge are disappearing in the age of the internet and cellphone. Pre-internet sources still contain write-ups of that knowledge.
it’s reassuring that you’re learning something whose validity and relevance isn’t versioned out.
NOTE: Old books aren’t breathless about how much we’ve learned in the last 20 years, or how the internet has revolutionized something. I’d reserve belief in that for some hard sciences, and even there, if you want a theory introduction, an older source might serve you better.
If you don’t like print books, you can use article sources online and look at older research material. There are some books from the 90′s available on Kindle, hopefully, but I recommend looking back to the 70′s or even earlier. I prefer an academic writing style mostly available after the 70′s, I find older academic texts a bit hard to understand sometimes, but your experience could be different.
Visiting an old book store and reading random old books on topis is a horrible idea and I disrecommend it whole-heartedly. The vast majority of random books are crap, and old books are on average maybe even more crap (caveat that the good ones are the ones we still hear about more) since even more from them has been disproven/has been added to by now.
I doubt that most people would know who to look for that authored books written in the late 20th Century in those fields that I listed, particularly when the theory remains unchanged now, or as in the case of Ashby’s book, is not available in any modern textbook.
I believe that:
good material from decades ago doesn’t appear in new texts, necessarily.
new material isn’t always an improvement, particularly if it reflects “the internet era”.
what is offered as “new material” isn’t always so new.
One concern with modern textbooks is pedagogical fads (for example, teaching formal logic with a software program or math with a TI calculator). I support pen and paper approaches for basic learning over TI calculators and software packages. Older textbooks offer more theory than current ones. Older textbooks are usually harder. Dover math books are one example where unchanged theory written up in older texts is still appreciated now.
It doesn’t take a lot of learning to find useful 20th Century books about linguistics, scientific reasoning, rhetoric, informal logic, formal logic, and even artificial intelligence. Yes, there was AI material before neural networks and machine learning, and it still has utility.
For most people, a random search at a decent used bookstore can turn up popular titles with good information. A random search by topic in an academic library or in a used bookstore that accepts used academic titles, (which used to be common, but is becoming more rare), can turn up some amazing finds. I do recommend all those approaches, if you like books and are patient enough to to try it. Otherwise, I suggest you look into older journal articles available in PDF format online.
It’s just one approach, and takes some trial and error. You need to examine the books, read the recommendations, figure out who published it and why and get to know the author, read the preface and forward, so it takes some patience. It can help to start with an older book and then visit the new material. When I started doing that is when I noticed that the new material was sometimes lesser quality, derivative, or the same content as older material.
The most precious finds are the ones that are nowhere to be found now. Yes, sometimes that’s because they’re crap, but sometimes that’s because they’re really good and people ignored them in spite or, or because of, that.
EDIT: I also find that reading from a book offers a visceral experience and steadier pace that digital reading can lack.