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I want to put in a strong bid to replace Parfit’s On What Matters Volume One with Parfit’s On What Matters Volume Three. Between volumes Two and Three, Parfit had many fruitful discourses with leading moral antirealists (Gibbard, Railton, Blackburn, etc), which are partially reproduced in Volume Three, where they really start to converge on some claims and get beyond their previous talking-past-each-other. It’s truly amazing to read. Volume Three is self-contained and I think it should be considered as the best and final revision of Parfit’s ethics.

Some thoughts:

1. Entrepreneurship and strategy:

   1. I think lean startup seems better than everything there.

   2. If you’re looking for something in particular drop, maybe good strategy, bad strategy?

2. Change of heart: I don’t think this has survived the replication crisis well, I would drop it.

3. Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: I didn’t think this was a very epistemically rigorous book, I would drop it

I love the idea of a Library of EA! It would be helpful to eventually augment it with auxiliary and meta-information, probably through crowdsourcing among EAs. Each book could also be associated with short and medium summaries of the key arguments and takeaways, and warnings about which sections were later disproven or controversial (or a warning that the whole thing is a partial story/​misleading). There’s also a lot of overlap and superseding within the books (especially within the rationality and epistemology section), so it would be good to say “If you’ve read X, you don’t need to read Y”. It would also be great to have a “Summary of Y for people who have already read X” that just covers the key information.

I do strongly feel that a smaller library would be better. While there are advantages to being comprehensive, a smaller library is better at directing people to the most important books. It is really valuable to say that someone should start with a particular book on a subject, rather than their uninformed choice from a list. Parsimony in recommendations, at least on a personal level, is also important for conveying the importance of the recommendations you do make. It somewhat feels like you weren’t confident enough to cut a book that was recommended by some subgroup, even if there were better options available.

There’s a Pareto principle at play here, where reading 20% of the books will provide 80% of the value, and a repeated Pareto principle where 4% provide 64% of the value. I think you could genuinely recommend four or five books from this list that provide two-thirds of the EA value of the entire list between them. My picks would be The Most Good You Can Do, The Precipice, Reasons and Persons, and Scout Mindset. Curious what others would pick.

I like this project, and the book selection looks good to me! :)

I would vote against The Singularity is Near, because I don’t think Kurzweil meets the epistemic bar for EA and I don’t think he contributes any important new ideas. If you want more intro AI books, there’s always Smarter Than Us (nice for being short).

Though honestly, a smaller AI section seems fine to me too; I would rather trade away some AI space on the EA Bookshelf in exchange for extra space in a hypothetical future EA Blog Post Shelf. :P The only published AI-risk book I’m super attached to is Superintelligence (in spite of its oldness).

+1 for adding Elephant in the Brain in the next version. :)

I don’t much like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; a lot of people acquire a sort of mystical, non-gearsy model of scientific progress from Kuhn. And I’d guess a blog post or two suffices for learning the key concepts?

I love it!

Two suggestions:

1. Some books are more important than others. E.g., Thinking Fast and Slow is much more foundational to the EA mindset than the Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn (IMHO but hopefully that’s not very controversial). I think the visualization would benefit from showing some of the books as larger and others as smaller.

2. It would be cool if you could mouseover/​click on books to get more info about them. Some of the titles are too small to read, even when zoomed in.

Thanks for doing this!

This is an excellent project and an excellent post. Big kudos for making it happen. Also, thanks for introducing me to the term visual knowledge projects. I’d never heard of the specific term before and have always thought these sorts of visual maps are fantastic.

I’ve been trying to think of any important topic areas which have been missed and the first one that springs to mind is one on rational and compassionate/​altruistic interpersonal communication. I really enjoyed Nonviolent Communication but I’m not sure it’s our best bet due to a lack of randomised studies and some of the vibe. Maybe something on CBT like Feeling Good? Although this may now be drifting out of EA scope.

Secondly, for anyone who has enjoyed Factfulness by Hans Rosling or anything by Steven Pinker, I’d recommend this video essay for some strong counterpoints. I learned a lot and it’s made me more cautious regarding the global application of ‘new optimism’.

Finally, here’s another of my favourite visual knowledge projects: The Map of Philosophy by Carneades.org

Good list! I might also recommend Radical Markets, Progress and Poverty, and On Liberty for politics. I might also represent the somewhat more deontological perspective on animal rights with Fellow Creatures and Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism. For ethics, the Methods of Ethics comes to mind as a possibility, if you are open to older books, as it is one of both Singer’s and Parfit’s biggest influences. In a similar historical vein I’m fond of the Happiness Philosophers, but I’m not sure where that would fit. Possibly also in ethics.

Books that have significantly reshaped my thinking in a useful way since I got into EA that are EA or adjacent both in authorship and in content, and that I therefore find myself recommending to EAs all the time:

• Moral Tribes (delighted to see it on here)

• Hidden Games by Yoeli and Hoffman

• Elephant in the Brain by Simler and Hanson (and relatedly I’m somewhat surprised to not see Age of Em in the AI section; I haven’t read it yet but it’s one of the books that EA Books Direct gives out, if I’m not mistaken)

I would lean away from encouraging people to all read the same books, for intellectual diversity reasons. I think there’s great value in having different people read many different books, and then bringing a fresh perspective. Things like the scratch-off poster idea go too far in the direction of creating a canon, where each book is not particularly thoroughly vetted in any case, and leans towards promoting existing bestsellers rather than hidden gems.

How do ‘book recommendations’ fit into this ‘diversity’ stance? My feeling is that book recommendations should arise organically, rather than be centrally organised, since the former is firstly more adaptable (evolvable), and secondly allows for much more thorough vetting (people generally have to read the book before recommending it to a friend).

I love this!

How to Measure Anything is in the Global Poverty section, so don’t forget to fix that!

Governance could probably handle The Myth of the Rational Voter.

I wonder if The Model Thinker should be included as a high-value easy to read mathematical modelling book.

Great initiative!! I hope it gains traction. As for the selection of books, I miss and would like to see more books on evolutionary thought, which can e.g. teach us about human nature, the nature of the natural world as well as teach us something on the design of systems. For example, this can yield evolutionary economics, wherein our actual human nature reveals a deep rationality distinct from traditional notions of rationality, and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can be replaced and updated. I just finished Douglas T. Kenrick’s book Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life (subtitle: a psychologist investigates how evolution, cognition and complexity are revolutionizing our view of human nature) in which these two points are raised. Furthermore, epistemic rationality requires worldview consistency and thus scientific consilience, also necessitating evolutionary thinking, among the integration of other sciences. In general I would like to see more books on integrating perspectives, as for example illustrated in David Deutsch’ books.

Thank you to the many of you who have filled out the Google form as an alternative to writing a comment!

Here are some great points made:

• the current average is at EA as a knowledge space being 75% principles/​values and only 25% concrete knowledge

Introduction:

• What We Owe The Future is heavily upvoted by those who already read it

• Removing Factfulness from top line of books as there have been substantial critiques of New Optimism “people on both sides of the ‘is the world getting better’ debate can try to make the world better.”

• HPMOR should not be included in the introductory section “it teaches a certain mindset that fits inside Effective Altruism, but fails to introduce many important parts of the community”, the style does not fit the values of a serious movement (person likes it a lot, though)

Ethics:

• maybe replace ‘The Moral Landscape’ by Sam Harris with ‘Think’ by Simon Blackburn

• Moral Tribes is extremely digestible for a philosophy book, much more so than Practical Ethics

• Current ethics list is unfocused: “Parfit is an important ethicist and reasons and persons is important. But he isn’t really more EA than many other ethicists. On Liberty is not really that EA-relevant. Utilitarianism is good. I like Hedonic Imperative but Pearce’s writing style is a turn-off for many, I think. I’d strongly prefer collections of papers/​articles than a list of full books. Reading full books is just a terrible strategy for getting a handle on important issues in ethics. If it has to be books, than I would use books that are collections of papers. Particularly: (1) The Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics. And (2) Greaves & Pummer’s Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues. (But I think you could do even better than these collections if you handpicked papers.) To these I would add (3) Mill’s Utilitarianism (4) Singer’s Expanding Circle. Strongly prefer a small list. Apologies that these thoughts are dashed off and unorganized.”

Rationality:

• redundant information, strongly prefer culling all but maybe one or two.

• The Scout Mindset was fantastic, and of all the EA books I’ve read, it’s probably the one I’m most inclined to recommend to pretty much everyone I know.

• Once again, I just think it’s a bad idea to include all these books that are only tangentially related to EA, but are part of niche subcultures with their own worldviews. We’re not going to get a diverse community with fresh ideas if we filter for people who have a similar culture to current EAs.

• https://​​mitpress.mit.edu/​​books/​​handbook-rationality this collection (The Handbook of Rationality) is a more information-dense path to learning this stuff I think. There are likely equally good subs

Economics:

• Add Nudge and Make It Stick

• Freakonomics is not important to read. It’s just some fun cases of applied economics. It’s not an efficient learning tool and it isn’t focused on important issues. It is entertaining. I don’t think microeconomics is important because it helps with entrepreneurial decisions; these should maybe be considered separately. Quantitative economics is at least as important as micro. Prefer a culled list. Possibly culled to zero.

• Black Swan contains some helpful stuff, but it is off-puttingly polemical and not focused on extinction risks. Would make sense in a very large library maybe.

• Can’t really see a justification for including Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I think this list is too long. I don’t think EA has a unified or consistent political ideology for short-term nation-states; I think this is a good thing and don’t want a list that implies that EA does have one.

• Add Radical Markets by Posner and Weyl and Nudge

AI:

• The Alignment Problem, while I would say is overall good, does jump around quite a bit narratively. I would want to read other books in this category before recommending it too strongly.

• “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” is the only book I’m familiar with on the list that I dislike. The vast majority of people need something more accessible.

• Animal Liberation was a great “why” book, The End of Animal Farming was a great “how” book. They serve different purposes. Overall, I found Animal Liberation more compelling than The End of Animal Farming, though it is quite a bit denser.

Community and Soft Skill:

• How to Make Friends and Influence People

Happiness:

• Daniel Haybron’s work on happiness is the best I’ve come across by far: Happiness and Well-Being: Integrating Research Across the Disciplines; The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008); Happiness: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Transhumanism:

• Haven’t read ending aging but this seems like a preoccupation of the rationalist community that makes little sense by EA-lights? I’d prefer to get rid of this category.

Other

• Would be surprised if anything beyond what’s included in the main EA recommendations is helpful here. Cull!

• Biographies of changemakers seem like not particularly important reads?

Are there categories missing?

• BioSecurity/​Global Catastrophic Biological risks

• I think you did an extremely thorough job. Well done!

• Connections to other philosophies that value EA principles; ask e.g. Buddhist, Christian, and Jewish EA groups for recommendations

Should a category be removed?

• I think people will assume the importance of an issue is proportional to the number of books included in it on the diagram. As a result, I would remove all object-level categories save the most important, and I would cull within them dramatically. I also think presenting object-level books seems like an endorsement, when mostly they are probably intended as jumping-off points for future thinking.

• In general, I view MBA-style business strategy books as a negative signal. Of the philosophy books, Parfit is the only positive signal for me. The others mostly scan as popular philosophy.

• I get a negative impression of people who are really into rationalist books and not much else—convinced of their own superiority, narrow-minded unless the idea is from a trusted rationalist guy, etc.

anything important missing?

• Strangers Drowning, by Larissa MacFarquhar

Which books if understood by others would make you more confident in collaborating with them?

• The Scout Mindset, Human Compatible, The Scout Mindset, anything introductory, Waking Up
  

Great article! Here another list from the study-buddy channel in the Virtual Programs Slack workspace. The channel is made to promote self-study of this kind of EA material. https://​​bit.ly/​​3rblLj1

I don’t understand why “Surely, You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” is on the list. I haven’t learned anything from this book aside from some trivia about Feynman’s life and, honestly, I disliked it.

I would much recommend Thomas Schelling’s book: The Strategy of Conflict. This nobel-prize winning economist describes game theory around nuclear deterrence. “Original, and providing a way forward, but unfortunately not yet developed further,” says Daniel Ellsberg, in e.g. 80.000 interview, author of the here-included Doomsday Machine. Next to this topic, this book makes an excellent introduction into relevant and cutting edge game theory, with relevance in (the improvement of) all of our interactions.