But on the margin, if this particular long general list became another canonical one as had been suggested...
Do you mean suggested by me? I definitely didn’t mean to suggest that. My hope is that this list will be useful for some people, and that it’ll prompt more people to publish book recommendations/anti-recommendations, not that this comes to be one of 4 lists that pretty much all EAs draw from. As I say near the start:
These rankings are of course only weak evidence of how useful you’ll find these books
[...]
I’d welcome comments which point to reviews/summaries/notes of these books, provide commenters’ own thoughts on these books, or share other book recommendations/anti-recommendations. I’d also welcome people making their own posts along the lines of this one.
And I think it should be easy to avoid this list becoming overly canonical; I think it’d be really easy for a lot of people to make lists like this. I think most people could put together something like a scaled-down version of this (perhaps as a shortform) in ~30 minutes if they wanted to, especially if they don’t try to include all relevant books but rather just the top picks, and don’t try to rank them all but rather use rougher buckets like “top” and “also good”. And people who’ve read a lot could put together something as extensive as this post is a couple hours.
Or people could even just post on the Forum links to Goodreads profiles, or things like that. (Personally, I’d be more likely to look at such profiles if they were highlighted on the Forum.)
And I think that doing the above things is also probably one of the best ways to address the fact that “The previous Wiblin, etc. lists are already pretty canonical in the community”.
(Edit: Oh, maybe you were referring to Aaron Gertler’s comment? If so, I’d point out that he’s commenting at a point when very few lists like this exist on the Forum; if more people create lists like this—which I hope happens—then that’d reduce the special prominence that this particular list gets.)
Yes, I was referring to Aaron’s comment, but not saying that anyone wanted to intentionally canonize this list, but rather take on a life of its own. I agree with much of your comment (though still think the central point of my criticism is a valid and as a community we need to be more mindful about this).
To clarify my comment to Michael: I was excited to see him share his list because I’d like lots of people to share their lists, and I think that people are more likely to share once they’ve seen someone else do it. I don’t think Michael is a particularly good judge of books or anything like that—the whole point is to get a broad set of viewpoints on a variety of books.
If someone ever compiles all the lists together and tries to establish some kind of “canon” based on that, I’d be wary, but this personal list created by a single person to describe his own reading experiences doesn’t feel at all canonical to me.
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Possible point of confusion: In my comment, I said that I hoped Michael’s list would become one of the most-upvoted in the “EA Books” tag. That’s because I expect that tag to be used by people looking for book recommendations, and I expect this post to be useful to them, because it recommends many books.
I’d hope that a more diverse or comprehensive list would get even more upvotes in the tag—I just want posts with tags to be useful to people looking at those tags.
Do you mean suggested by me? I definitely didn’t mean to suggest that. My hope is that this list will be useful for some people, and that it’ll prompt more people to publish book recommendations/anti-recommendations, not that this comes to be one of 4 lists that pretty much all EAs draw from. As I say near the start:
And I think it should be easy to avoid this list becoming overly canonical; I think it’d be really easy for a lot of people to make lists like this. I think most people could put together something like a scaled-down version of this (perhaps as a shortform) in ~30 minutes if they wanted to, especially if they don’t try to include all relevant books but rather just the top picks, and don’t try to rank them all but rather use rougher buckets like “top” and “also good”. And people who’ve read a lot could put together something as extensive as this post is a couple hours.
Or people could even just post on the Forum links to Goodreads profiles, or things like that. (Personally, I’d be more likely to look at such profiles if they were highlighted on the Forum.)
And I think that doing the above things is also probably one of the best ways to address the fact that “The previous Wiblin, etc. lists are already pretty canonical in the community”.
(Edit: Oh, maybe you were referring to Aaron Gertler’s comment? If so, I’d point out that he’s commenting at a point when very few lists like this exist on the Forum; if more people create lists like this—which I hope happens—then that’d reduce the special prominence that this particular list gets.)
Yes, I was referring to Aaron’s comment, but not saying that anyone wanted to intentionally canonize this list, but rather take on a life of its own. I agree with much of your comment (though still think the central point of my criticism is a valid and as a community we need to be more mindful about this).
To clarify my comment to Michael: I was excited to see him share his list because I’d like lots of people to share their lists, and I think that people are more likely to share once they’ve seen someone else do it. I don’t think Michael is a particularly good judge of books or anything like that—the whole point is to get a broad set of viewpoints on a variety of books.
If someone ever compiles all the lists together and tries to establish some kind of “canon” based on that, I’d be wary, but this personal list created by a single person to describe his own reading experiences doesn’t feel at all canonical to me.
*****
Possible point of confusion: In my comment, I said that I hoped Michael’s list would become one of the most-upvoted in the “EA Books” tag. That’s because I expect that tag to be used by people looking for book recommendations, and I expect this post to be useful to them, because it recommends many books.
I’d hope that a more diverse or comprehensive list would get even more upvotes in the tag—I just want posts with tags to be useful to people looking at those tags.