Cool project. I went to maybe-similar type of school and I think if I had encountered certain books earlier, it would have had a really good effect on me. The book categories I think I would most have benefitted from when I was that age:
Books about how the world very broadly works. A lot of history felt very detail-oriented and archival, but did less to give me a broad sense of how things had changed over time, what kinds of changes are possible, and what drives them. Top rec in that category: Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction. Other recs: The Better Angels of Our Nature, Sapiens, Moral Mazes (I’ve never actually read the whole thing, just quotes),
Books about rationality, especially how it can cause important things to go awry, how that has happened historically and might be happening now. Reading these was especially relief-inducing because I already had concerns along those lines that I didn’t see people articulate, and finally reading them was a hugely comforting experience. Top recs: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Rationality: From AI to Zombies (probably these were the most positively transformative books I’ve read, but Eliezer books are polarizing and some might have parts that people think are inappropriate for minors, and I can’t remember which), Thinking Fast and Slow. Other recs: Inadequate Equilibria,
Some other misc recs I’m not going to explain: Permutation City, Animal Liberation, Command and Control, Seeing like a State, Deep Work, Nonviolent Communication
I took a general primer on human biases (“Psychology of Critical Thinking”) at a local university in high school, which overall had an enormously beneficial effect on my thinking.
Thinking, Fast and Slow is the most comprehensive popular book I’ve read which covers that territory, and wins points for describing in detail the experiments that Kahneman and Tversky used to reach their various conclusions. My understanding is that most of Kahneman and Tversky’s results have held up, but not everything the book discusses has replicated well- many of the results it describes on priming are questionable.
Might be worth complementing with some of Ben Goldacre’s books (e.g. Bad Science or I Think You’ll Find It’s A Bit More Complicated Than That) for very object-level critiques of research (and especially research reporting in the press and the UK government) or Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto for descriptions of how to systematically avoid human errors when doing complicated tasks.
I just want to flag up that The Better Angels of Our Nature, whilst a great book, contains quite a few graphic descriptions of torture, which even as an adult I found somewhat disturbing. I don’t necessarily think teenage-me would have been affected any worse, but you might still not want to put it in a school library.
Cool project. I went to maybe-similar type of school and I think if I had encountered certain books earlier, it would have had a really good effect on me. The book categories I think I would most have benefitted from when I was that age:
Books about how the world very broadly works. A lot of history felt very detail-oriented and archival, but did less to give me a broad sense of how things had changed over time, what kinds of changes are possible, and what drives them. Top rec in that category: Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction. Other recs: The Better Angels of Our Nature, Sapiens, Moral Mazes (I’ve never actually read the whole thing, just quotes),
Books about rationality, especially how it can cause important things to go awry, how that has happened historically and might be happening now. Reading these was especially relief-inducing because I already had concerns along those lines that I didn’t see people articulate, and finally reading them was a hugely comforting experience. Top recs: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Rationality: From AI to Zombies (probably these were the most positively transformative books I’ve read, but Eliezer books are polarizing and some might have parts that people think are inappropriate for minors, and I can’t remember which), Thinking Fast and Slow. Other recs: Inadequate Equilibria,
Some other misc recs I’m not going to explain: Permutation City, Animal Liberation, Command and Control, Seeing like a State, Deep Work, Nonviolent Communication
I’d second Thinking, Fast and Slow.
I took a general primer on human biases (“Psychology of Critical Thinking”) at a local university in high school, which overall had an enormously beneficial effect on my thinking.
Thinking, Fast and Slow is the most comprehensive popular book I’ve read which covers that territory, and wins points for describing in detail the experiments that Kahneman and Tversky used to reach their various conclusions. My understanding is that most of Kahneman and Tversky’s results have held up, but not everything the book discusses has replicated well- many of the results it describes on priming are questionable.
Might be worth complementing with some of Ben Goldacre’s books (e.g. Bad Science or I Think You’ll Find It’s A Bit More Complicated Than That) for very object-level critiques of research (and especially research reporting in the press and the UK government) or Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto for descriptions of how to systematically avoid human errors when doing complicated tasks.
Worth noting that Thinking Fast and Slows has some issues in the replication crisis (mainly around priming). Eg. this article here. https://jasoncollins.blog/2016/06/29/re-reading-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow/
I just want to flag up that The Better Angels of Our Nature, whilst a great book, contains quite a few graphic descriptions of torture, which even as an adult I found somewhat disturbing. I don’t necessarily think teenage-me would have been affected any worse, but you might still not want to put it in a school library.
+1 to Sapiens, parts of Moral Mazes, Deep Work, and Seeing like a State.