I don’t think the idea Anna suggests is to pick books you think young people should read, but to actually ask the best people what books they read that influenced them a lot.
Things that come to my mind include GEB, HPMOR, The Phantom Tolbooth, Feynman. Also, which surprises me but is empirically true for many people, Sam Harris’s “The Moral Landscape” seems to have been the first book a number of top people I know read on their journey to doing useful things.
What do you mean by Feynman? I endorse his Lectures in Physics as something that had a big effect on my own intellectual development, but I worry many people won’t be able to get that much out of it. While his more accessible works are good, I don’t rate them as highly.
“Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman” still shows genuine curiosity, which is rare and valuable. But as I say, it’s less about whether I can argue for it, and more about whether the top intellectual contributors in our community found it transformative in their youth. I think many may have read Feynman when young (e.g. it had a big impact on Eliezer).
While I couldn’t quickly find the source for this, I’m pretty sure Eliezer read the Lectures on Physics as well. Again, I think Surely You’re Joking is good, I just think the Lectures on Physics is better. Both are reasonable candidates for the list.
Totally agree about data collection. Seems like a good candidate for an approval vote. After a five-minute search, I couldn’t find a good approval-voting platform, when I realized that basically all polls on DEAM work this way (i.e. Facebook supports this). Maybe this is something we could post in the EA Facebook group? @Peter_Hurford?
I don’t think the idea Anna suggests is to pick books you think young people should read, but to actually ask the best people what books they read that influenced them a lot.
Things that come to my mind include GEB, HPMOR, The Phantom Tolbooth, Feynman. Also, which surprises me but is empirically true for many people, Sam Harris’s “The Moral Landscape” seems to have been the first book a number of top people I know read on their journey to doing useful things.
But either way I’d want more empirical data.
What do you mean by Feynman? I endorse his Lectures in Physics as something that had a big effect on my own intellectual development, but I worry many people won’t be able to get that much out of it. While his more accessible works are good, I don’t rate them as highly.
“Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman” still shows genuine curiosity, which is rare and valuable. But as I say, it’s less about whether I can argue for it, and more about whether the top intellectual contributors in our community found it transformative in their youth. I think many may have read Feynman when young (e.g. it had a big impact on Eliezer).
While I couldn’t quickly find the source for this, I’m pretty sure Eliezer read the Lectures on Physics as well. Again, I think Surely You’re Joking is good, I just think the Lectures on Physics is better. Both are reasonable candidates for the list.
Totally agree about data collection. Seems like a good candidate for an approval vote. After a five-minute search, I couldn’t find a good approval-voting platform, when I realized that basically all polls on DEAM work this way (i.e. Facebook supports this). Maybe this is something we could post in the EA Facebook group? @Peter_Hurford?