(I want to share, but this doesn’t seem relevant enough to EA to justify making a standard forum post. So I’ll do it as a quick take instead.)
People who know me know that I read a lot.[1] Although I don’t tend to have a huge range, I do think there is a decent variety in the interests I pursue: business/productivity, global development, pop science, sociology/culture, history. Of all the books I read in 2023, here is my best guess as to the ones that would be of most interest to an effective altruist.
For people who haven’t explored much yet
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. If you haven’t worked in ‘startupy’ or lean organizations, this books may introduce you to some new ideas. I first worked for a startup in my late 20s, and I wish that I had read this book at that point.
Developing Cultural Adaptability: How to Work Across Differences. This 32 page PDF is a good introduction to ideas of working with people from other cultures. This will be particularly useful if you are going to work in a different country (although there are cultural variations within a single country). This is fairly light introduction, so don’t stop here if you want to learn more about cross-cultural communication and cross-cultural psychology.
How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. Less focused on productivity /professional skills, this is a fun and lighthearted exploration of different ethical theories. This book made me smile more than any other I read this year, and also introduced me to some new moral philosophers. This is probably the most easily ‘digestible’ book ever written on moral philosophy. If you enjoyed the TV Show The Good Place, you should listen to the audiobook version of this book, as it features the cast from The Good Place.
Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. If you aren’t familiar with the problems of the scientific process as it actually exists, or with the ‘industry’ of science, then this book will probably introduce you to some of these ideas, as well as make you a bit more skeptical of scientific publication in general. I think it would be great if we all slightly increased our incredulousness toward any any all new publications. It strikes me as a bit of a kindred spirit to the essay Beware the Man of One Study.
Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind and Free Will. I started to think more about consciousness in animals this year, and these two short books were the start of my exploration. You probably won’t learn anything new if you have already done some thinking or reading about this topic, but I’m guessing that the average twenty-something interested in EA would gain a bit from reading these.
For people who have already explored a lot and know the basics
The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. A nicely written portrait that doesn’t pull any punches, highlighting both the good and the bad. I loved how neutral the author’s tone felt; there wasn’t idolizing or vilifying. I view reading this as a good way to a) inoculate oneself a bit against hero worship, and b) understand some of the complications that come with global development work, even when you are relatively well-resourced.
Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. It is rare for me to re-read books, but I think I will revisit this one in a few years. This are useful skills that should be practiced, both in a professional environment and in personal relationships.
How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. If you are already familiar with the basics of expected value and trying to quantity things via fermi estimates, then this book will help take you to the next level. I enjoyed the balance between examples and explanation, and I could see myself taking this book out and referring to it in the future to figure out the value of an estimate.
What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins. I don’t think that I gained anything specific and concrete from this book, but in a broad sense I got a much greater appreciation for non-human life, and a strong reminder of how little I know of the world. I’m trying to read more about animals as a way of building greater understanding, and there were dozens of fascinating tidbits in this book that I view as pixels in a picture or pieces in a jigsaw puzzle (in the sense that after I gather enough of them I will start to be able to understand something larger).
Maybe not so closely related to effective altruist ideas, but still worth reading for (some people)
Simply Managing: What Managers Do–and Can Do Better, and Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. If you are interested in being a manager in the future (or if you already are a manager of people) then you should learn how to manage. While there are a lot of aspects to it, this is a good start. Henry Mintzberg is very famous and well respected when it comes to management education, and Edgar H. Schein is one of the foremost experts on organizational culture. These two books are short, simple samplings of their ideas. If you are already a skilled and experienced people manager, reading these might be a bit of a refresher, but you likely won’t encounter new concepts.
I Hate the Ivy League: Riffs and Rants on Elite Education[2]and Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. If you aren’t interested in how higher education functions in American society, then skip these books. I’m interested in how higher education functions in American society, and these two books were enjoyable and educational explorations. But if you are interested in ideas of justice, gatekeeping, access, inclusion, equality, etc., then you might enjoy these two. These really got me thinking about what admissions criteria ought to be for a university education. Simplistic answers (admit everyone and have resources stretched so thin that quality is bad, or admit only those that are already very well-resourced and then give them lots more resources) don’t seem great paths to building a better society. This is an area that I want to learn more about, and I intend to read more books about this. But there is one quote that has stuck with me: “The prestige associated with going to, say, Yale, was a function of at least in part how many people wanted to get in and couldn’t. It was the logic of the nightclub, it had never occurred to me that a university was a nightclub. I thought it was more like a hospital, an institution judged by how many patients it took in and how many of those later emerged fully healed.”
Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. If you have never been poor, read this to try and get a bit of an understanding of what it is like to live in a first world country without having much money or career stability. It isn’t brilliant literature, but it is a decently good whirlwind tour of poverty. I grew up… kind of poor, I guess? For most of my childhood my parents both had jobs, and I think that we were consistently beneath the US median household income. I never noticed it much as a kid, but looking back I can see various indications that my family didn’t have much money. If you know what it is like to be poor in America, then you probably won’t learn anything from this (although you may feel emotionally “seen” and validated).[3] A quote from a different book that seems relevant here: “That’s the difference between being privileged and being poor in America. It’s how many chances you get. If you’re wealthy, all kinds of things can happen and you’ll be okay. You can drop out of school for a year, you can get addicted to pain killers, you can have a bad car accident. No one ever says, of the upper-middle class high school kid whose parents get a terrible divorce, “I wonder if she’ll ever go to college.” She’s going to college; disruption is not fatal to life chances.”
Mixed feelings
Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed. Yes, I know that it is an influential classic. But I didn’t really gain anything from it (other than the credibility to be able to say “yes, I’ve read it.”) I think that from a few conversations, a few documentaries, and a few online articles over the years I had already picked up the core messages that this book attempted to portray. I already knew that [insert animal here] are treated horribly. It is kind of like watching Dominion after you already have watched three or four other documentaries about farm animal welfare: it is just telling you what you already know.
Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World. It was… fine. I wanted to like it, and I like the idea of it. I’m not sure why this book didn’t resonate more with me; it really should have. I could go through it with a fine-toothed comb and justify, caveat, and explain all my reactions. But it doesn’t seem worth it, so I’ll just be satisfied with a vague shrug and move on to reading other books.
Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. I thought that I would gain something from this, but it was all kind of… straightforward. Of course people are going to act on incentives, and when those incentives incentivize behavior that is damaging, I am not surprised that damage results. This all struck me as kind of blandly obvious. Maybe if I hadn’t previously read a bunch about behavioral economics and social psychology then maybe I would have learned new things and found this book worthwhile, but I’ve read almost all of the books on these subjects already at this point.[4]
A few books on diversity
DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right. If you are interested in the DEI industry, what is wrong with it, and how it can be better, read this. It focuses a lot on the DEI industry, but it has a really good chapter on practical applications and on what an organization can do.
Read This to Get Smarter: About Race, Class, Gender, Disability, and More. If you are brand new to ideas about diversity and inclusion, or if you are intimidated by the terminology, or if you just want a light introduction, then read this book. It you already are familiar with the terminology and the basic ideas, then you won’t learn anything.
A majority via audiobook, so we could quibble on whether or not it really counts as reading, but it is accurate to say that I have ‘consumed’ a lot of books.
One thing that I feel odd about the EA community is the easy confidence I observe. It is very different from the feeling of financial precariousness (I guess the term would be precariat?). Not knowing if your job will be terminated, if you will be able to afford rent, if you will be okay skipping the doctor’s appointment, etc. Existing without stability or predictability or security causes a lot of stress. I’m stunned to meet people who are in the top decile of American income earners (somebody talked about earning nearly a million dollars in a year so casually, as if it was a normal thing), or who have donated more money in the past five years than I have earned in the past ten, or who owned a house in a high cost of living city in their mid-20s. I’m amazed at people who graduate from school and earn more than the average American income by the age of 24, and who then create/found their own organization so that they can pursue their interests and get paid for it. But there is a lot of selection bias at play here: maybe people simply don’t talk about their upbringing and I make shallow and incorrect assumptions. This should be interpreted as musings that are very low-confidence.
No, not literally all of them. I mean that if you compile a list of the most recommended or most read books in behavioral economics and social psychology, I think that I have already read between 40% and 80% of them. Just popular press books, not academic books. So I’d consider myself a fairly well-read layperson.
Best books I’ve read in 2023
(I want to share, but this doesn’t seem relevant enough to EA to justify making a standard forum post. So I’ll do it as a quick take instead.)
People who know me know that I read a lot.[1] Although I don’t tend to have a huge range, I do think there is a decent variety in the interests I pursue: business/productivity, global development, pop science, sociology/culture, history. Of all the books I read in 2023, here is my best guess as to the ones that would be of most interest to an effective altruist.
For people who haven’t explored much yet
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. If you haven’t worked in ‘startupy’ or lean organizations, this books may introduce you to some new ideas. I first worked for a startup in my late 20s, and I wish that I had read this book at that point.
Developing Cultural Adaptability: How to Work Across Differences. This 32 page PDF is a good introduction to ideas of working with people from other cultures. This will be particularly useful if you are going to work in a different country (although there are cultural variations within a single country). This is fairly light introduction, so don’t stop here if you want to learn more about cross-cultural communication and cross-cultural psychology.
How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. Less focused on productivity /professional skills, this is a fun and lighthearted exploration of different ethical theories. This book made me smile more than any other I read this year, and also introduced me to some new moral philosophers. This is probably the most easily ‘digestible’ book ever written on moral philosophy. If you enjoyed the TV Show The Good Place, you should listen to the audiobook version of this book, as it features the cast from The Good Place.
Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. If you aren’t familiar with the problems of the scientific process as it actually exists, or with the ‘industry’ of science, then this book will probably introduce you to some of these ideas, as well as make you a bit more skeptical of scientific publication in general. I think it would be great if we all slightly increased our incredulousness toward any any all new publications. It strikes me as a bit of a kindred spirit to the essay Beware the Man of One Study.
Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind and Free Will. I started to think more about consciousness in animals this year, and these two short books were the start of my exploration. You probably won’t learn anything new if you have already done some thinking or reading about this topic, but I’m guessing that the average twenty-something interested in EA would gain a bit from reading these.
For people who have already explored a lot and know the basics
The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. A nicely written portrait that doesn’t pull any punches, highlighting both the good and the bad. I loved how neutral the author’s tone felt; there wasn’t idolizing or vilifying. I view reading this as a good way to a) inoculate oneself a bit against hero worship, and b) understand some of the complications that come with global development work, even when you are relatively well-resourced.
Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. It is rare for me to re-read books, but I think I will revisit this one in a few years. This are useful skills that should be practiced, both in a professional environment and in personal relationships.
How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. If you are already familiar with the basics of expected value and trying to quantity things via fermi estimates, then this book will help take you to the next level. I enjoyed the balance between examples and explanation, and I could see myself taking this book out and referring to it in the future to figure out the value of an estimate.
What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins. I don’t think that I gained anything specific and concrete from this book, but in a broad sense I got a much greater appreciation for non-human life, and a strong reminder of how little I know of the world. I’m trying to read more about animals as a way of building greater understanding, and there were dozens of fascinating tidbits in this book that I view as pixels in a picture or pieces in a jigsaw puzzle (in the sense that after I gather enough of them I will start to be able to understand something larger).
Maybe not so closely related to effective altruist ideas, but still worth reading for (some people)
Simply Managing: What Managers Do–and Can Do Better, and Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. If you are interested in being a manager in the future (or if you already are a manager of people) then you should learn how to manage. While there are a lot of aspects to it, this is a good start. Henry Mintzberg is very famous and well respected when it comes to management education, and Edgar H. Schein is one of the foremost experts on organizational culture. These two books are short, simple samplings of their ideas. If you are already a skilled and experienced people manager, reading these might be a bit of a refresher, but you likely won’t encounter new concepts.
I Hate the Ivy League: Riffs and Rants on Elite Education[2]and Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. If you aren’t interested in how higher education functions in American society, then skip these books. I’m interested in how higher education functions in American society, and these two books were enjoyable and educational explorations. But if you are interested in ideas of justice, gatekeeping, access, inclusion, equality, etc., then you might enjoy these two. These really got me thinking about what admissions criteria ought to be for a university education. Simplistic answers (admit everyone and have resources stretched so thin that quality is bad, or admit only those that are already very well-resourced and then give them lots more resources) don’t seem great paths to building a better society. This is an area that I want to learn more about, and I intend to read more books about this. But there is one quote that has stuck with me: “The prestige associated with going to, say, Yale, was a function of at least in part how many people wanted to get in and couldn’t. It was the logic of the nightclub, it had never occurred to me that a university was a nightclub. I thought it was more like a hospital, an institution judged by how many patients it took in and how many of those later emerged fully healed.”
Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. If you have never been poor, read this to try and get a bit of an understanding of what it is like to live in a first world country without having much money or career stability. It isn’t brilliant literature, but it is a decently good whirlwind tour of poverty. I grew up… kind of poor, I guess? For most of my childhood my parents both had jobs, and I think that we were consistently beneath the US median household income. I never noticed it much as a kid, but looking back I can see various indications that my family didn’t have much money. If you know what it is like to be poor in America, then you probably won’t learn anything from this (although you may feel emotionally “seen” and validated).[3] A quote from a different book that seems relevant here: “That’s the difference between being privileged and being poor in America. It’s how many chances you get. If you’re wealthy, all kinds of things can happen and you’ll be okay. You can drop out of school for a year, you can get addicted to pain killers, you can have a bad car accident. No one ever says, of the upper-middle class high school kid whose parents get a terrible divorce, “I wonder if she’ll ever go to college.” She’s going to college; disruption is not fatal to life chances.”
Mixed feelings
Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed. Yes, I know that it is an influential classic. But I didn’t really gain anything from it (other than the credibility to be able to say “yes, I’ve read it.”) I think that from a few conversations, a few documentaries, and a few online articles over the years I had already picked up the core messages that this book attempted to portray. I already knew that [insert animal here] are treated horribly. It is kind of like watching Dominion after you already have watched three or four other documentaries about farm animal welfare: it is just telling you what you already know.
Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World. It was… fine. I wanted to like it, and I like the idea of it. I’m not sure why this book didn’t resonate more with me; it really should have. I could go through it with a fine-toothed comb and justify, caveat, and explain all my reactions. But it doesn’t seem worth it, so I’ll just be satisfied with a vague shrug and move on to reading other books.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. This seemed so incredibly simple that I am amazed people rave about it. But maybe this is just a matter of perspective and age. If I had read this book prior to age ≈24 I likely would have learned a lot from it.
Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. I thought that I would gain something from this, but it was all kind of… straightforward. Of course people are going to act on incentives, and when those incentives incentivize behavior that is damaging, I am not surprised that damage results. This all struck me as kind of blandly obvious. Maybe if I hadn’t previously read a bunch about behavioral economics and social psychology then maybe I would have learned new things and found this book worthwhile, but I’ve read almost all of the books on these subjects already at this point.[4]
A few books on diversity
DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right. If you are interested in the DEI industry, what is wrong with it, and how it can be better, read this. It focuses a lot on the DEI industry, but it has a really good chapter on practical applications and on what an organization can do.
Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t. If you just want to know what does and doesn’t work in a business/organizational environment to improve diversity, read this.
Read This to Get Smarter: About Race, Class, Gender, Disability, and More. If you are brand new to ideas about diversity and inclusion, or if you are intimidated by the terminology, or if you just want a light introduction, then read this book. It you already are familiar with the terminology and the basic ideas, then you won’t learn anything.
A majority via audiobook, so we could quibble on whether or not it really counts as reading, but it is accurate to say that I have ‘consumed’ a lot of books.
I Hate the Ivy League was basically just an audiobook of thematically related podcasts, so not a book in the traditional sense.
One thing that I feel odd about the EA community is the easy confidence I observe. It is very different from the feeling of financial precariousness (I guess the term would be precariat?). Not knowing if your job will be terminated, if you will be able to afford rent, if you will be okay skipping the doctor’s appointment, etc. Existing without stability or predictability or security causes a lot of stress. I’m stunned to meet people who are in the top decile of American income earners (somebody talked about earning nearly a million dollars in a year so casually, as if it was a normal thing), or who have donated more money in the past five years than I have earned in the past ten, or who owned a house in a high cost of living city in their mid-20s. I’m amazed at people who graduate from school and earn more than the average American income by the age of 24, and who then create/found their own organization so that they can pursue their interests and get paid for it. But there is a lot of selection bias at play here: maybe people simply don’t talk about their upbringing and I make shallow and incorrect assumptions. This should be interpreted as musings that are very low-confidence.
No, not literally all of them. I mean that if you compile a list of the most recommended or most read books in behavioral economics and social psychology, I think that I have already read between 40% and 80% of them. Just popular press books, not academic books. So I’d consider myself a fairly well-read layperson.
Super interesting list! I hadn’t heard of most of these and have ordered a few of them to read. Thank you!