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 agree with your points made and I tried to explicitly address similar arguments in the original post!
The poster is meant to exactly distill the “canon” or “current orthodoxy” by aggregating what people currently and historically so far found most important to read. It is explicitly meant to distill this to quickly get a meta-knowledge of what that entails for various reasons: getting a quick introduction to precisely this meta-knowledge and the content but also to have a representation on which to build, precisely that, namely one’s criticism of what is missing e.g. how about making a “10 knowledge spheres and their books, from which EA could gain a lot from” as a co-creational poster answer. Then more people could read in those directions and the next poster in a couple of years could entail exactly more of the new books many found crucial. The post also explicitly addresses that it is not meant to encourage anyone to read all of them.
This project is not centralized at all btw. I’m one member of the community making a draft to ask other community members what they think about it. It’s an open conversation.
By having such a representation you can also more quickly understand which book is actually a “venturing out” into new territory versus just one’s lack of knowledge of how central it already is in the community. I have seen that many times that someone would read a book and feel like they found something completely new and important, while I already knew that many have read and thought through exactly the same literature already.
Think “introductory textbook” into a field as an analogy. It’s difficult to make an argument that they shouldn’t exist because they don’t already in-depth contain all the other options and criticisms of the stances. The metaphor often used for this problem is that of Wittgenstein’s ladder: “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.”
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 agree with your points made and I tried to explicitly address similar arguments in the original post!
The poster is meant to exactly distill the “canon” or “current orthodoxy” by aggregating what people currently and historically so far found most important to read. It is explicitly meant to distill this to quickly get a meta-knowledge of what that entails for various reasons: getting a quick introduction to precisely this meta-knowledge and the content but also to have a representation on which to build, precisely that, namely one’s criticism of what is missing e.g. how about making a “10 knowledge spheres and their books, from which EA could gain a lot from” as a co-creational poster answer. Then more people could read in those directions and the next poster in a couple of years could entail exactly more of the new books many found crucial. The post also explicitly addresses that it is not meant to encourage anyone to read all of them.
This project is not centralized at all btw. I’m one member of the community making a draft to ask other community members what they think about it. It’s an open conversation.
By having such a representation you can also more quickly understand which book is actually a “venturing out” into new territory versus just one’s lack of knowledge of how central it already is in the community. I have seen that many times that someone would read a book and feel like they found something completely new and important, while I already knew that many have read and thought through exactly the same literature already.
Think “introductory textbook” into a field as an analogy. It’s difficult to make an argument that they shouldn’t exist because they don’t already in-depth contain all the other options and criticisms of the stances. The metaphor often used for this problem is that of Wittgenstein’s ladder: “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.”