(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, and this is the time of year for retrospectives.[1] Of all the books I read in 2024, I’m sharing the ones that I think an EA-type person would be most interested in, would benefit the most from, etc.
Animal-Focused
There were several animal-focused books I read in 2024. This is the direct result of being a part of an online Animal Advocacy Book Club. I created the book club about a year ago, and it has been helpful in nudging me to read books that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have gotten around to.[2]
Reading Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare was a bit of a slog, but I loved that there were actual data and frameworks and measurements, rather than handwavy references to suffering. The authors provided formulas, the provided estimates and back-of-the-envelope calculations, and did an excellent job looking at farm animal welfare like economists and considering tradeoffs, with far less bias than anything else I’ve ever read on animals. They created and references measurements for pig welfare, cow welfare, and chicken welfare that I hadn’t encountered anywhere else. I haven’t even seen other people attempt to put together measurements to evaluate what the overall cost and benefit would be to enact a particular change in how farm animals are treated.
Every couple of pages in An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us I felt myself thinking “whoa, that is so cool.” Part of the awe and pleasure in reading this book was a bunch of factoids about how different species of animals perceive the world in incredibly different ways, ranging from the familiar (sight, hearing, touch) to the exotic (vibration detection, taste buds all over the body, electrolocation, and more). The author does a great job of weaving it all together, and it really was fun to read. Almost every day I read this book I wanted to walk up to people like an annoying kid who won’t stop feeding you facts about their favorite thing: “Did you know that [X]? Isn’t it cool that some animals can [Y]. I just learned that [Z].” I almost felt giddy reading this book. Highly recommended.
I often enjoy reading things that make me feel humble (either as an individual or as a member of a broader civilization/culture), and reading Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? did that. I’m interested in measurement and assessment broadly, and this describes a variety of ways in which our attempts to measure and assess intelligence in other species have failed. Sometimes these were very simplistic anthropocentric failures, such as testing monkeys on their ability to differentiate human faces rather than on monkey faces, or showing elephants a mirror that was too small for the elephant to see itself fully. A lot of the research into animal intelligence seems to have come from a stance in which starting assumptions are believed true, rather than a more exploratory stance.
Sociological
Many of the books I read are what I would roughly categorize as sociology focused on injustice (or inequality, or unfairness, or lack of equal opportunity, or something along those lines).
The short summary of The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now would be that tools with serious flaws are being used improperly to make decisions that affect people’s livelihoods. The author did interviews and also did test runs with a wide variety of algorithms and “AI” tools involved in the world of work, and exposed flaws that would make me embarrassed if I was on a sales team for any of these products. An algorithmically assessed video interview tool gave her a fairly good score when she spoke in a foreign language. People got fired based on technical errors in the assessment systems rather than based on any problem with their work. Tools are implemented without any oversight by under trained staff, who have been specifically instructed that this tool should inform one aspect of their broader decision, and who instead simply “outsource” their decision to the tool. People are discriminated against for a variety of unjust reasons. I’m interested in decision-making, measurement, and selection in general, as well as hiring broadly; I’m an easy sell for this book. I recommend this not just to people involved in hiring or performance management, not just to people who make career-impacting decisions about other people, but to anyone who is interested in how technology is misused/misapplied, and anyone interested broadly in how decisions are made.
If you want to read about challenges faced by poor students at fancy schools, read The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. I’ve read several books about higher education in America, but this book had the most micro perspective and the most specific details. Other books focused on broad strokes, while this book was based on a few dozen interviews the authors did with students at Harvard College.[3] Some aspects relate to institutional policies (such as closing the cafeteria for spring break, which is negligible to wealthy students but incredibly challenging for poor students), and some relate to culture more generally (many wealthy students have no idea what it is like to be poor, and demonstrate a blasé lack of empathy and awareness). I know that I was pretty blasé when I was 20 years old, but it still stings to see a wealthy heiress casually mention buying all-new designer furniture for her dorm room while the student sitting next to her doesn’t even have a warm coat for the winter.
The Stigma Trap: College-Educated, Experienced, and Long-Term Unemployed is one of the best books I’ve read about sociological unfairness stuff, and I’m surprised that it hasn’t gotten more publicity. If I had to boil it down to a few ideas it would be that people who evaluate you for employment assume that any gap is because you are a bad employee, so if you had a misfortune (illness, family issue, industry downturn/downsizing) people will stigmatize you as an individual rather than attributing the cause to a broader, non-personalized issue. This book isn’t about your cousin who never finished high school and whose main hobby is smoking weed; this book is about people who have degrees from good schools, who have had white collar and managerial job titles, and who are able and willing to work. This also isn’t a book of practical tips and tricks. Instead, it is a sociologist highlighting the biases that people have and highlighting the systematic issues preventing people from getting good work. The “myth of meritocracy” is pervasive, which leads many people to assume that if someone is facing hardship it is because they are somehow deserving of it. Even friendships and romantic relationships suffer because people make the assumption that someone who is out of work is somehow broken, flawed, or toxic. Networking is hard, too, because people ask “what do you do” and if your response is “I used to be a director of finance, but for the past eight years I’ve worked in retail at Walmart to pay bills” people will make all kinds of assumptions about what you are capable of doing. The book also highlights many of the frustrations of being the victim of (what they perceive as) a fundamentally unjust system, and how the recognition or acknowledgement of those frustrations is in itself penalized. I’ve been involved in hiring and I read a lot about personnel selection, and many aspects of this book resonated with me: people are selected or rejected on things that are often trivial, which have very little to do with how well they would perform, or things that are falsely assumed to be predictive.[4] The other point the author drives home is that this could happen to any of us (although this is somewhat limited to an American context). Much like disability advocates say that many of us are temporarily able-bodied, any of us who are working and earning an income now could be laid off or downsized at any point, and all except for the very elite could very easily struggle to find a next job.[5]
Fiction
A few works of fiction that I think EAs might appreciate, related to civilizational resilience, artificial intelligence, and immoral actions.
Service Model is about artificial intelligence (a robot) seeking meaning and purpose after the collapse of human civilization. The author pokes satirical fun at broad swaths of current society, mainly through the various robots continuing their jobs long after it makes any sense to do so (such as a robot who rings a doorbell, and then stands there for twenty years waiting for someone to open the door). It feels fairly lighthearted and silly, while still maintaining a sense of authenticity and genuineness over the whole story.
Children of Time is about civilizational resilience, about a future in which humanity is attempting to seed and terraform exoplanets. Without major spoilers, while the terraforming missions are part-way through, bad stuff goes down on earth, and suddenly the remnants of earth life need to start from scratch on a new planet, while different remnants of earth life try to find a home and salvage what they have left. Lots of new ideas, and some of the best speculative fiction I’ve read in years. It also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Yellowface is not particularly related to EA in terms of cause areas or topics, but I think that there are some themes that can serve as great fodder for thought experiments and considerations of morality. It is also really fun. It is something of a satire, something of a thriller, and also slightly autobiographical (although in a highly fictionalized sense). EAs who read it might enjoy considering the nature of truth/honesty, the idea of what harm is actually caused or who is actually hurt by our actions, what we owe each other, self-interest and justifying our actions to ourselves, and how power relations (and especially reputational power) influences behavior.
Generic
These are books that I would expect to see on a list of bestsellers, or perhaps on a list of books that got a lot of publicity/press.
Reading Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will was kind of a slog. It was interesting, but it was still hard to work through due simply to how much of it there is. If you think that you have free will, I recommend you read this book. The idea that we can make choices free from any impact of what has transpired previously is very tempting, and it simply doesn’t seem realistic on the societal level nor on the neurological level. But this has plenty of uncomfortable implications related to how we treat people, especially in regards to rewarding or punishing people’s actions if people didn’t really ‘choose’ to take those actions.[6] It is easy to look at people doing things and make some sort of moral judgement about the person, but considering the broader influences we should question to what extent that makes sense.
Conversely, reading Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention- and How to Think Deeply Again was easy. It is written by a journalist,[7] and the smoothness of the narrative is noticeable. It is very easy to digest. Nothing in the book is particularly novel if you are familiar with the broad strokes of how people get addicted to news feeds and similar tools, but since people are still getting addicted to news feeds and similar tools it feels justified to repeat. It was nice to get a bit more context and detail about some of the effort that goes into grabbing your attention. There are a few tidbits on how to focus better, but they are things that I’ve picked up from here and there over the years from blog posts, journalistic long-form pieces, LifeHacker, and whatever other miscellaneous resources. The thing is, I can’t be angry at him for sharing true, accurate, and useful information. But I’d view this book sort of as ‘beginner-level’ or as ‘introductory’ content. My impression is that my peers know that social media algorithms show us content designed to keep us engaged. People know that working while distracted is suboptimal. People know that you shouldn’t lay in bed playing with your phone for an hour before falling asleep. People know that kids who get access to social media tend to form warped views of reality. But overall, it is really smoothly written, and the information is true and useful to people who haven’t explored these kinds of topics previously. I cannot understate how much I think this author is a very good writer. He crafts the narratives so well. His authorial tone/voice is excellent. It was literally a pleasure to read this book. Even the parts where I was annoyed by the author[8], I really wanted to keep reading because reading this book was such a great experience.
If you are interested in project management, you should read How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between. Most of us will never manage the type of mega-projects this author describes, but the lessons are applicable to smaller projects as well. The usual suspects show up: planning fallacy, ego, organizational culture, sales people over promising, etc. The author researched project management practices, and has assembled a big dataset. This book is full of good recommendations, so even if your projects are simply running a performance review for an organization or updating a website’s design, you should still find useful principals in here. For most people, I think this is helpful to remind you of all the ways things could go wrong, sort of similar to doing a pre mortem, and that awareness serves as a vague kind of “tips and tricks” in itself.[9]
Miscellaneous
These books don’t quite fit into any of the above categories, nor do they have anything clearly in common that would justify a group, so I’m just clumping them together under the heading of “miscellaneous.”
Although I might be stretching the definition of “book,” reading Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher was a challenging book to read. In brief, a young man has a motorcycle accident and becomes Paraplegic, he details the many ways that his existence is now full of frustration and annoyance and pain, and he then decides to kill himself. There was a lot of frustration and suffering in this, and I couldn’t bring myself to read more than a few pages at a time. The author is understandably bitter, and it is hard to read about so much bitterness. I’m sure that I would also feel very bitter if I was in his situation. There are so many things that he can no longer do, which he so desperately desires to do. Not just climbing trees or riding bikes, but very basic things, such as eating dinner without falling over, or being able to get ready in the morning in under two hours. In a certain sense, it feels morally beneficial to see the details of an existence full of suffering, almost as if I am training my empathy muscles. It is so easy to wave a hand and refer to malaria,[10] but so few of us really delve into the details. I also found it notable that the author seemed like such an obnoxious person: while being reflective and intelligent, he was also a prototypical highly confident young American man, obsessed with performative displays of masculinity[11], writing about how he is so much more wise and intellectually developed than normal people. He was a total bro, in all the worst connotations of that term. I would probably really dislike this guy if I met him. And, at the same time, that does nothing to diminish how miserable his existence was. Indeed, it make me wonder if he would have thought about his disability differently if it had happened to him at a later stage of his life, maybe in 2025, if he were middle aged with a loving spouse and a decade of having been a well-compensated lawyer and a part-time home health aide, maybe his situation would have had less suffering and he would have viewed it as more manageable.
An EA friend recommended that I read Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, and I found it very enjoyable. It was a nice contrast from the online rationalist forum discourse that starts with the assumption that with sufficient data any problem is solvable. I enjoyed being reminded that sometimes we simply cannot know in advance, and there isn’t any roadmap or algorithm to lead to success. I’ll share an excerpt that gives the author’s definition: “Whether to have a child is what I call a wild problem—a fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn’t obvious, where the pleasure and pain from choosing one path over another are ultimately hidden from us, where the path we choose defines who we are and who we might become. Wild problems are the big decisions all of us have to deal with as we go through life… the big decisions we face in life, the wild problems—whether to marry, who to marry, whether to have children, what career path to follow, how much time to devote to friends and family, how to resolve daily ethical dilemmas—these big decisions can’t be made with data, or science, or the usual rational approaches.” This book felt very practical in the sense of how to approach life. It isn’t practical in the sense of teaching you a specific, isolated skill, but it is practical in that it helps nurture a mindset, an approach, a perspective that will ultimately lead to better choices, better relationships, and (I suspect) a better life. It is uncommon that I encounter a book that actually gives advice on a life well-lived.
I was pleasantly surprised by the essays in Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico. It felt like it was a mixture of memoir and love letter to Mexico City. Lots of tidbits were lost on me,[12] simply because I haven’t lived in Mexico City, and I don’t understand many of the allusions or references that I am sure were embedded. But it was pleasure to allow those unknown tidbits to wash over me. It doesn’t have advice for visitors, nor even advice for people who live in Mexico City. This is not a book to give you a better experience when you visit Mexico City; it is a book to give you a better sense of Mexico City. The essays were beautifully crafted and beautifully translated (I read it in English, my Spanish isn’t good enough to read a book this complex), and it gives a sense of the atmosphere of the city.
I’m sure you’ve all heard advice about doing video interviews that mentions having good lighting and having an uncluttered background; but that has nothing to do with your ability to perform on the job.
If you think to yourself that it couldn’t happen to you, imagine that you shift from whatever you are currently doing to a new job. Maybe it is in a new city, so you don’t have a network there. Then after three months something bad happens. Maybe your spouse tells you that they want a divorce, which causes your work performance to fall. Maybe you get hit by a car and are in the hospital for a few months. Maybe you get a cancer diagnosis, and treatment prevents you from doing your work. Maybe your CEO mismanaged the company and it closes down. Maybe your manager threatens or assaults you. Maybe your parent is dying and needs you nearby. Or maybe you just make a mistake in your job and your boss fires you. So you loose your new job and your good income, spend a few months dealing with whatever issue you encountered and emotionally picking yourself up. You start job hunting, but your resume now shows that you’ve been out of work for six months and that your most recent job lasted only for three months, so people who look at your resume or meet you at networking events assume that you are not a good employee.
If you borrow a shirt from me, and then you are assaulted and the shirt gets damaged, can I really blame you for damaging the shirt? What if borrow your car, and while responsibly driving it some damage occurs that I didn’t cause and am not responsible for (such as a screw that had been loose for weeks finally falls out, which causes a side mirror to fall off). Or if you want something more personalizable, what if John Doe vomits on some possession of mine? He didn’t choose to vomit, his body did it without him willing it. We certainly can’t assume that people have complete control over their bodies.
During specific anecdotes I did find the author’s tone somewhat obnoxious, as if he were trying to say “I am so much better than these peons. I appreciate gazing deeply at the Mona Lisa for hours while these buffoons simply snap a pic and move on.” Those are not his exact words, but he really does write about gazing at the Mona Lisa while other people just take a picture and move on. He tells a story about lashing out at people who are looking at an iPad rather than looking at the world around them, and that story doesn’t make the author look great. But overall he strikes a great balance between citing facts, interviews with experts, and anecdotes of his own experiences.
Along the lines of “Oh, maybe we have a planning fallacy here, so we should set aside 15% of the budget as a management reserve” or “we should be aware of cultural pressure within the organization to respond positively to requests, even if the request is unrealistic.”
He boasts more than once about how how popular he was with women, and how many fistfights he has won, how excellent his athletic prowess was, how his peers looked up to him.
I don’t remember any specific examples, which is to be expected for things that I didn’t have the contextual knowledge to understand. But they were things such as the author stating that a particular person looked a person from Neighborhood_A of Mexico city, but acted like a person from Neighborhood_B. If you are local and you know the feel and style and reputation of those neighborhoods, then you understand what the author is saying. But if you don’t have that knowledge, you know that the author is pointing to a concept but you don’t know what that concept is. I often only get that when I read things that aren’t intended for me, but intended for a different audience (an audience that all has some tacit knowledge in common). Again, it is kind of a humbling experience.
Really enjoyed reading this, thanks for sharing! Any tips for finding a good bookclub? I’ve not used that website before but I’d expect it would be a good commitment mechanism for me as well.
I try not to do too much self-promotion, but I genuinely think that the book clubs I run are good options, and I’d be happy to have you join us. Libraries sometimes have in-person book clubs, so if you want something away from the internet you could ask your local librarian about book clubs. And sometimes some simple Googling is helpful too: various cities have some variation of ‘book club in a bar,’ ‘sci-fi book club,’ ‘professional development book club,’ etc. But I think it is fairly uncommon to have a book club that is online and relatively accessible, so I think that mine are a bit special (although I am certainly not unbiased).
I’ve browsed through bookclubs.com a bit, but my memory is that the majority of the book clubs on there seem to be some combination of fiction, local to a specific place, focused on topics that aren’t interesting to me, or defunct.
Another option that I haven’t really tried: instead of having a regular club, you could just occasionally make a post “I want to read [BOOK] and talk about it with people, so I’ll make a Google Calendar event for [DATE]. If you want to read it and talk about it, please join.” At least one person is doing that in the EA Anywhere Slack workspace in the #book-club channel. The trick is to find a book that is popular enough, and then to accept the fact that 50% to 80% of the people who RSVP simply won’t show up. But it could be a more iterative/incremental approach to get started.
Best books I’ve read in 2024
(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, and this is the time of year for retrospectives.[1] Of all the books I read in 2024, I’m sharing the ones that I think an EA-type person would be most interested in, would benefit the most from, etc.
Animal-Focused
There were several animal-focused books I read in 2024. This is the direct result of being a part of an online Animal Advocacy Book Club. I created the book club about a year ago, and it has been helpful in nudging me to read books that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have gotten around to.[2]
Reading Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare was a bit of a slog, but I loved that there were actual data and frameworks and measurements, rather than handwavy references to suffering. The authors provided formulas, the provided estimates and back-of-the-envelope calculations, and did an excellent job looking at farm animal welfare like economists and considering tradeoffs, with far less bias than anything else I’ve ever read on animals. They created and references measurements for pig welfare, cow welfare, and chicken welfare that I hadn’t encountered anywhere else. I haven’t even seen other people attempt to put together measurements to evaluate what the overall cost and benefit would be to enact a particular change in how farm animals are treated.
Every couple of pages in An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us I felt myself thinking “whoa, that is so cool.” Part of the awe and pleasure in reading this book was a bunch of factoids about how different species of animals perceive the world in incredibly different ways, ranging from the familiar (sight, hearing, touch) to the exotic (vibration detection, taste buds all over the body, electrolocation, and more). The author does a great job of weaving it all together, and it really was fun to read. Almost every day I read this book I wanted to walk up to people like an annoying kid who won’t stop feeding you facts about their favorite thing: “Did you know that [X]? Isn’t it cool that some animals can [Y]. I just learned that [Z].” I almost felt giddy reading this book. Highly recommended.
I often enjoy reading things that make me feel humble (either as an individual or as a member of a broader civilization/culture), and reading Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? did that. I’m interested in measurement and assessment broadly, and this describes a variety of ways in which our attempts to measure and assess intelligence in other species have failed. Sometimes these were very simplistic anthropocentric failures, such as testing monkeys on their ability to differentiate human faces rather than on monkey faces, or showing elephants a mirror that was too small for the elephant to see itself fully. A lot of the research into animal intelligence seems to have come from a stance in which starting assumptions are believed true, rather than a more exploratory stance.
Sociological
Many of the books I read are what I would roughly categorize as sociology focused on injustice (or inequality, or unfairness, or lack of equal opportunity, or something along those lines).
The short summary of The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now would be that tools with serious flaws are being used improperly to make decisions that affect people’s livelihoods. The author did interviews and also did test runs with a wide variety of algorithms and “AI” tools involved in the world of work, and exposed flaws that would make me embarrassed if I was on a sales team for any of these products. An algorithmically assessed video interview tool gave her a fairly good score when she spoke in a foreign language. People got fired based on technical errors in the assessment systems rather than based on any problem with their work. Tools are implemented without any oversight by under trained staff, who have been specifically instructed that this tool should inform one aspect of their broader decision, and who instead simply “outsource” their decision to the tool. People are discriminated against for a variety of unjust reasons. I’m interested in decision-making, measurement, and selection in general, as well as hiring broadly; I’m an easy sell for this book. I recommend this not just to people involved in hiring or performance management, not just to people who make career-impacting decisions about other people, but to anyone who is interested in how technology is misused/misapplied, and anyone interested broadly in how decisions are made.
If you want to read about challenges faced by poor students at fancy schools, read The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. I’ve read several books about higher education in America, but this book had the most micro perspective and the most specific details. Other books focused on broad strokes, while this book was based on a few dozen interviews the authors did with students at Harvard College.[3] Some aspects relate to institutional policies (such as closing the cafeteria for spring break, which is negligible to wealthy students but incredibly challenging for poor students), and some relate to culture more generally (many wealthy students have no idea what it is like to be poor, and demonstrate a blasé lack of empathy and awareness). I know that I was pretty blasé when I was 20 years old, but it still stings to see a wealthy heiress casually mention buying all-new designer furniture for her dorm room while the student sitting next to her doesn’t even have a warm coat for the winter.
The Stigma Trap: College-Educated, Experienced, and Long-Term Unemployed is one of the best books I’ve read about sociological unfairness stuff, and I’m surprised that it hasn’t gotten more publicity. If I had to boil it down to a few ideas it would be that people who evaluate you for employment assume that any gap is because you are a bad employee, so if you had a misfortune (illness, family issue, industry downturn/downsizing) people will stigmatize you as an individual rather than attributing the cause to a broader, non-personalized issue. This book isn’t about your cousin who never finished high school and whose main hobby is smoking weed; this book is about people who have degrees from good schools, who have had white collar and managerial job titles, and who are able and willing to work. This also isn’t a book of practical tips and tricks. Instead, it is a sociologist highlighting the biases that people have and highlighting the systematic issues preventing people from getting good work. The “myth of meritocracy” is pervasive, which leads many people to assume that if someone is facing hardship it is because they are somehow deserving of it. Even friendships and romantic relationships suffer because people make the assumption that someone who is out of work is somehow broken, flawed, or toxic. Networking is hard, too, because people ask “what do you do” and if your response is “I used to be a director of finance, but for the past eight years I’ve worked in retail at Walmart to pay bills” people will make all kinds of assumptions about what you are capable of doing. The book also highlights many of the frustrations of being the victim of (what they perceive as) a fundamentally unjust system, and how the recognition or acknowledgement of those frustrations is in itself penalized. I’ve been involved in hiring and I read a lot about personnel selection, and many aspects of this book resonated with me: people are selected or rejected on things that are often trivial, which have very little to do with how well they would perform, or things that are falsely assumed to be predictive.[4] The other point the author drives home is that this could happen to any of us (although this is somewhat limited to an American context). Much like disability advocates say that many of us are temporarily able-bodied, any of us who are working and earning an income now could be laid off or downsized at any point, and all except for the very elite could very easily struggle to find a next job.[5]
Fiction
A few works of fiction that I think EAs might appreciate, related to civilizational resilience, artificial intelligence, and immoral actions.
Service Model is about artificial intelligence (a robot) seeking meaning and purpose after the collapse of human civilization. The author pokes satirical fun at broad swaths of current society, mainly through the various robots continuing their jobs long after it makes any sense to do so (such as a robot who rings a doorbell, and then stands there for twenty years waiting for someone to open the door). It feels fairly lighthearted and silly, while still maintaining a sense of authenticity and genuineness over the whole story.
Children of Time is about civilizational resilience, about a future in which humanity is attempting to seed and terraform exoplanets. Without major spoilers, while the terraforming missions are part-way through, bad stuff goes down on earth, and suddenly the remnants of earth life need to start from scratch on a new planet, while different remnants of earth life try to find a home and salvage what they have left. Lots of new ideas, and some of the best speculative fiction I’ve read in years. It also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Yellowface is not particularly related to EA in terms of cause areas or topics, but I think that there are some themes that can serve as great fodder for thought experiments and considerations of morality. It is also really fun. It is something of a satire, something of a thriller, and also slightly autobiographical (although in a highly fictionalized sense). EAs who read it might enjoy considering the nature of truth/honesty, the idea of what harm is actually caused or who is actually hurt by our actions, what we owe each other, self-interest and justifying our actions to ourselves, and how power relations (and especially reputational power) influences behavior.
Generic
These are books that I would expect to see on a list of bestsellers, or perhaps on a list of books that got a lot of publicity/press.
Reading Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will was kind of a slog. It was interesting, but it was still hard to work through due simply to how much of it there is. If you think that you have free will, I recommend you read this book. The idea that we can make choices free from any impact of what has transpired previously is very tempting, and it simply doesn’t seem realistic on the societal level nor on the neurological level. But this has plenty of uncomfortable implications related to how we treat people, especially in regards to rewarding or punishing people’s actions if people didn’t really ‘choose’ to take those actions.[6] It is easy to look at people doing things and make some sort of moral judgement about the person, but considering the broader influences we should question to what extent that makes sense.
Conversely, reading Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention- and How to Think Deeply Again was easy. It is written by a journalist,[7] and the smoothness of the narrative is noticeable. It is very easy to digest. Nothing in the book is particularly novel if you are familiar with the broad strokes of how people get addicted to news feeds and similar tools, but since people are still getting addicted to news feeds and similar tools it feels justified to repeat. It was nice to get a bit more context and detail about some of the effort that goes into grabbing your attention. There are a few tidbits on how to focus better, but they are things that I’ve picked up from here and there over the years from blog posts, journalistic long-form pieces, LifeHacker, and whatever other miscellaneous resources. The thing is, I can’t be angry at him for sharing true, accurate, and useful information. But I’d view this book sort of as ‘beginner-level’ or as ‘introductory’ content. My impression is that my peers know that social media algorithms show us content designed to keep us engaged. People know that working while distracted is suboptimal. People know that you shouldn’t lay in bed playing with your phone for an hour before falling asleep. People know that kids who get access to social media tend to form warped views of reality. But overall, it is really smoothly written, and the information is true and useful to people who haven’t explored these kinds of topics previously. I cannot understate how much I think this author is a very good writer. He crafts the narratives so well. His authorial tone/voice is excellent. It was literally a pleasure to read this book. Even the parts where I was annoyed by the author[8], I really wanted to keep reading because reading this book was such a great experience.
If you are interested in project management, you should read How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between. Most of us will never manage the type of mega-projects this author describes, but the lessons are applicable to smaller projects as well. The usual suspects show up: planning fallacy, ego, organizational culture, sales people over promising, etc. The author researched project management practices, and has assembled a big dataset. This book is full of good recommendations, so even if your projects are simply running a performance review for an organization or updating a website’s design, you should still find useful principals in here. For most people, I think this is helpful to remind you of all the ways things could go wrong, sort of similar to doing a pre mortem, and that awareness serves as a vague kind of “tips and tricks” in itself.[9]
Miscellaneous
These books don’t quite fit into any of the above categories, nor do they have anything clearly in common that would justify a group, so I’m just clumping them together under the heading of “miscellaneous.”
Although I might be stretching the definition of “book,” reading Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher was a challenging book to read. In brief, a young man has a motorcycle accident and becomes Paraplegic, he details the many ways that his existence is now full of frustration and annoyance and pain, and he then decides to kill himself. There was a lot of frustration and suffering in this, and I couldn’t bring myself to read more than a few pages at a time. The author is understandably bitter, and it is hard to read about so much bitterness. I’m sure that I would also feel very bitter if I was in his situation. There are so many things that he can no longer do, which he so desperately desires to do. Not just climbing trees or riding bikes, but very basic things, such as eating dinner without falling over, or being able to get ready in the morning in under two hours. In a certain sense, it feels morally beneficial to see the details of an existence full of suffering, almost as if I am training my empathy muscles. It is so easy to wave a hand and refer to malaria,[10] but so few of us really delve into the details. I also found it notable that the author seemed like such an obnoxious person: while being reflective and intelligent, he was also a prototypical highly confident young American man, obsessed with performative displays of masculinity[11], writing about how he is so much more wise and intellectually developed than normal people. He was a total bro, in all the worst connotations of that term. I would probably really dislike this guy if I met him. And, at the same time, that does nothing to diminish how miserable his existence was. Indeed, it make me wonder if he would have thought about his disability differently if it had happened to him at a later stage of his life, maybe in 2025, if he were middle aged with a loving spouse and a decade of having been a well-compensated lawyer and a part-time home health aide, maybe his situation would have had less suffering and he would have viewed it as more manageable.
An EA friend recommended that I read Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, and I found it very enjoyable. It was a nice contrast from the online rationalist forum discourse that starts with the assumption that with sufficient data any problem is solvable. I enjoyed being reminded that sometimes we simply cannot know in advance, and there isn’t any roadmap or algorithm to lead to success. I’ll share an excerpt that gives the author’s definition: “Whether to have a child is what I call a wild problem—a fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn’t obvious, where the pleasure and pain from choosing one path over another are ultimately hidden from us, where the path we choose defines who we are and who we might become. Wild problems are the big decisions all of us have to deal with as we go through life… the big decisions we face in life, the wild problems—whether to marry, who to marry, whether to have children, what career path to follow, how much time to devote to friends and family, how to resolve daily ethical dilemmas—these big decisions can’t be made with data, or science, or the usual rational approaches.” This book felt very practical in the sense of how to approach life. It isn’t practical in the sense of teaching you a specific, isolated skill, but it is practical in that it helps nurture a mindset, an approach, a perspective that will ultimately lead to better choices, better relationships, and (I suspect) a better life. It is uncommon that I encounter a book that actually gives advice on a life well-lived.
I was pleasantly surprised by the essays in Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico. It felt like it was a mixture of memoir and love letter to Mexico City. Lots of tidbits were lost on me,[12] simply because I haven’t lived in Mexico City, and I don’t understand many of the allusions or references that I am sure were embedded. But it was pleasure to allow those unknown tidbits to wash over me. It doesn’t have advice for visitors, nor even advice for people who live in Mexico City. This is not a book to give you a better experience when you visit Mexico City; it is a book to give you a better sense of Mexico City. The essays were beautifully crafted and beautifully translated (I read it in English, my Spanish isn’t good enough to read a book this complex), and it gives a sense of the atmosphere of the city.
Although maybe I’m a week or two late.
If you are curious of the other books we read, I put them all here.
The author doesn’t state that it is Harvard, but it is pretty easy to deduce.
I’m sure you’ve all heard advice about doing video interviews that mentions having good lighting and having an uncluttered background; but that has nothing to do with your ability to perform on the job.
If you think to yourself that it couldn’t happen to you, imagine that you shift from whatever you are currently doing to a new job. Maybe it is in a new city, so you don’t have a network there. Then after three months something bad happens. Maybe your spouse tells you that they want a divorce, which causes your work performance to fall. Maybe you get hit by a car and are in the hospital for a few months. Maybe you get a cancer diagnosis, and treatment prevents you from doing your work. Maybe your CEO mismanaged the company and it closes down. Maybe your manager threatens or assaults you. Maybe your parent is dying and needs you nearby. Or maybe you just make a mistake in your job and your boss fires you. So you loose your new job and your good income, spend a few months dealing with whatever issue you encountered and emotionally picking yourself up. You start job hunting, but your resume now shows that you’ve been out of work for six months and that your most recent job lasted only for three months, so people who look at your resume or meet you at networking events assume that you are not a good employee.
If you borrow a shirt from me, and then you are assaulted and the shirt gets damaged, can I really blame you for damaging the shirt? What if borrow your car, and while responsibly driving it some damage occurs that I didn’t cause and am not responsible for (such as a screw that had been loose for weeks finally falls out, which causes a side mirror to fall off). Or if you want something more personalizable, what if John Doe vomits on some possession of mine? He didn’t choose to vomit, his body did it without him willing it. We certainly can’t assume that people have complete control over their bodies.
A journalist who has had issues with plagiarism.
During specific anecdotes I did find the author’s tone somewhat obnoxious, as if he were trying to say “I am so much better than these peons. I appreciate gazing deeply at the Mona Lisa for hours while these buffoons simply snap a pic and move on.” Those are not his exact words, but he really does write about gazing at the Mona Lisa while other people just take a picture and move on. He tells a story about lashing out at people who are looking at an iPad rather than looking at the world around them, and that story doesn’t make the author look great. But overall he strikes a great balance between citing facts, interviews with experts, and anecdotes of his own experiences.
Along the lines of “Oh, maybe we have a planning fallacy here, so we should set aside 15% of the budget as a management reserve” or “we should be aware of cultural pressure within the organization to respond positively to requests, even if the request is unrealistic.”
Or factory farming, or severe depression, or whatever other situation that we use as a common shorthand for bad things happening in the world.
He boasts more than once about how how popular he was with women, and how many fistfights he has won, how excellent his athletic prowess was, how his peers looked up to him.
I don’t remember any specific examples, which is to be expected for things that I didn’t have the contextual knowledge to understand. But they were things such as the author stating that a particular person looked a person from Neighborhood_A of Mexico city, but acted like a person from Neighborhood_B. If you are local and you know the feel and style and reputation of those neighborhoods, then you understand what the author is saying. But if you don’t have that knowledge, you know that the author is pointing to a concept but you don’t know what that concept is. I often only get that when I read things that aren’t intended for me, but intended for a different audience (an audience that all has some tacit knowledge in common). Again, it is kind of a humbling experience.
Really enjoyed reading this, thanks for sharing! Any tips for finding a good bookclub? I’ve not used that website before but I’d expect it would be a good commitment mechanism for me as well.
I try not to do too much self-promotion, but I genuinely think that the book clubs I run are good options, and I’d be happy to have you join us. Libraries sometimes have in-person book clubs, so if you want something away from the internet you could ask your local librarian about book clubs. And sometimes some simple Googling is helpful too: various cities have some variation of ‘book club in a bar,’ ‘sci-fi book club,’ ‘professional development book club,’ etc. But I think it is fairly uncommon to have a book club that is online and relatively accessible, so I think that mine are a bit special (although I am certainly not unbiased).
I’ve browsed through bookclubs.com a bit, but my memory is that the majority of the book clubs on there seem to be some combination of fiction, local to a specific place, focused on topics that aren’t interesting to me, or defunct.
Another option that I haven’t really tried: instead of having a regular club, you could just occasionally make a post “I want to read [BOOK] and talk about it with people, so I’ll make a Google Calendar event for [DATE]. If you want to read it and talk about it, please join.” At least one person is doing that in the EA Anywhere Slack workspace in the #book-club channel. The trick is to find a book that is popular enough, and then to accept the fact that 50% to 80% of the people who RSVP simply won’t show up. But it could be a more iterative/incremental approach to get started.