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.
My picks for a Core Longtermist EA Bookshelf (I don’t see myself as having any expertise on what belongs in a Core Neartermist EA Bookshelf) would be:
HPMoR ↔ Scout Mindset
Rationailty: A-Z ↔ Good and Real
SSC (Abridged)
Superintelligence
Inadequate Equilibria ↔ Modern Principles of Economics (Cowen and Tabarrok)
Getting Things Done (Allen)
Some people hate Eliezer’s style, so I tried to think of books that might serve as replacements for at least some of the core content in RAZ etc.
If I got a slightly longer list, I might add: How to Measure Anything, MPE, The Blank Slate (Pinker), Zero to One (Thiel), Focusing (Gendlin).
Note that I tried to pick books based on what I’d expect to have a maximally positive impact if lots of people-who-might-help-save-the-future read them, not based on whether the books ‘feel EA’ or cover EA topics.
Including R:AZ is sort of cheating, though, since it’s more like six books in a trenchcoat and therefore uses up my Recommended EA Reading Slots all on its own. :p
I haven’t read the vast majority of books on the longer list, and if I did read them, I’d probably change my recommendations a bunch.
I’ve read only part of The Blank Slate and Good and Real, and none of MPE, How to Measure Anything, or Focusing, so I’m including those partly on how strongly others have recommended them, and my abstract sense of the skills and knowledge the books impart.
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.
My picks for a Core Longtermist EA Bookshelf (I don’t see myself as having any expertise on what belongs in a Core Neartermist EA Bookshelf) would be:
HPMoR ↔ Scout Mindset
Rationailty: A-Z ↔ Good and Real
SSC (Abridged)
Superintelligence
Inadequate Equilibria ↔ Modern Principles of Economics (Cowen and Tabarrok)
Getting Things Done (Allen)
Some people hate Eliezer’s style, so I tried to think of books that might serve as replacements for at least some of the core content in RAZ etc.
If I got a slightly longer list, I might add: How to Measure Anything, MPE, The Blank Slate (Pinker), Zero to One (Thiel), Focusing (Gendlin).
Note that I tried to pick books based on what I’d expect to have a maximally positive impact if lots of people-who-might-help-save-the-future read them, not based on whether the books ‘feel EA’ or cover EA topics.
Including R:AZ is sort of cheating, though, since it’s more like six books in a trenchcoat and therefore uses up my Recommended EA Reading Slots all on its own. :p
I haven’t read the vast majority of books on the longer list, and if I did read them, I’d probably change my recommendations a bunch.
I’ve read only part of The Blank Slate and Good and Real, and none of MPE, How to Measure Anything, or Focusing, so I’m including those partly on how strongly others have recommended them, and my abstract sense of the skills and knowledge the books impart.