Hi Hauke, thanks for commenting to explain the downvote; I don’t think I would’ve guessed that as a reason, so the comment makes the feedback more useful.
And also thanks for adding your own recommendations. As I say in the post, I welcome people doing that.
Personally, I think the thing I’m most likely to read due to your recommendation is Barack Obama’s memoir—in retrospect it seems obvious that I should’ve read a biography/autobiography/memoir of a modern leader of a liberal democratic country. (Also, btw, I previously wrote a commentary on the Beyond Near- and Long-Term paper.)
Where I think I agree with you:
This book definitely does include many books from the reading lists of three prominent EAs (Wiblin, Beckstead, and Muehlhauser), and relatedly many books that are often recommended in EAs.
And this applies especially to my top 7 books
EAs do share similar information sources and worldviews to a notable extent (though still with a lot of variety), and this can be limiting, and there can be great value in seeking out a wider set of ideas and views.
The above two points make the post less useful, relative to a post that contained similarly useful-in-an-abstract-sense books that are less often read by EAs.
Though is offset to some extent by the point Max Dalton makes above common knowledge facilitating discussion and communicating. [Edit: I originally wrote “Max Daniel” as I’d misread who the commenter was—apologies if this had confused any readers!]
I say “similarly useful-in-an-abstract-sense” because the very fact that the books are less often read by EAs makes them more useful in practice, at least at a community level (or at least that’s what I’m claiming here).
It would be good for the Forum to include a wider range of book recommendations.
(I don’t mean “It’s bad for the Forum to include this post’s list of books”; I think it’s both good for it to include this list and for it to include a wider range of book recommendations.)
Long-winded thoughts on where I think I partially disagree with you (or perhaps just some points that your comment doesn’t emphasise, rather than things we actually disagree on):
This post is what it says on the tin: A list of all EA-relevant books I’ve read, ranked by how useful I remember/perceive them being to me.
E.g., I really just did find those top 7 books very useful.
And I do say “These rankings are of course only weak evidence of how useful you’ll find these books,[2] but hopefully the list still provides a useful starting point.”
(But of course, the key claims I have to defend are that these rankings do provide weak evidence—rather than no or negative evidence—of how useful others will find the books, and also that the post is net positive on a community rather than individual level. I do believe those things, and my following points will address why.)
I do think that there are many people for whom it would be net positive to be given even a list of solely the “canonical EA books”.
Unfortunately, I think this applies mostly to “EA types” who haven’t yet engaged with EA at all. But I think it will also apply to some Forum users. I do encounter EAs who haven’t heard of even some of the particularly EA-canonical books from this list, who I think would gain from these concepts, and who don’t know of other recommendation lists like this one.
To a significant extent, I think many of the canonical books are canonical for good reason.
Though it can still be partially bad for them to be so canonical, as this means the community as a whole is exposed to less variety in information sources and worldviews, as noted above.
I also think many EAs actively seek out a wide range of quite different ideas and views, such that going with common recommendations in EA reducing diversity of viewpoints less than one might at first think (though it still has that effect in some ways). I think some of these books present very different pictures of the world to others of them.
One thing that seems worth noting is that some topics I (and many EAs) care about aren’t super widely discussed outside EA. This both increases the value of getting book recommendations on those topics (since we can’t rely on people already coming into EA knowing the nuances or even basics on the topic), and decreases the number of great books available to be recommended on those topics.
For example, thinking of your book recommendations (not the 2 papers) and my top 10 books, I came into EA with much more pre-existing knowledge about the Obamas, the US government, GDP, economics, and writing than I had about existential risks, extreme AI risks, and moral uncertainty. And I’d guess that think that there are many high-quality books on the latter 3 topics that aren’t already often recommended by EAs.
(I also had very little knowledge about forecasting, but your book recommendations do include a book on that.)
This list is not just recommendations but rather a complete ranking of all EA-relevant books I’ve read. So it could also help people get a sense of which commonly-recommended-in-EA books I found less useful than the average book I’ve read.
This includes Enlightenment Now, Inadequate Equilibria, Radical Markets, Climate Matters, and the Power Broker.
This list excludes some relatively canonical EA books.
E.g., I haven’t read Doing Good Better, The Life You Can Save, or Life 3.0. And I started reading Age of Em but am finding it a hard slog so far.
This list includes some books that I expect relatively few EAs will have heard of (or maybe heard of outside of EA, but not heard recommended within EA), and some of them are ranked relatively highly.
E.g., The Strategy of Conflict, Blueprint, The Bomb, The Sense of Style, and The Dead Hand.
This is partly a result of me recently starting to actively solicit recommendations on particular topics (e.g., here), get recommendations from random people who are not established thought leaders in EA, and screen them myself by reading some reviews and maybe watching a lecture or listening to a podcast from the author.
I started this a little bit last year, and am now doing it regularly, so hopefully over time this list will come to inject more of a range of uncommon book recommendations into the EA space.
Though I acknowledge that I’m still mostly soliciting recommendations from EAs, at least to date.
This post says “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. I’d also welcome people making their own posts along the lines of this one.” I think that people doing that (as you’ve done) will help make the overall set of recommendations on the Forum more representative, so I’d encourage more of that.
I think another way to help move towards this goal is for more people to do things roughly like how I’ve recently started making posts to solicit recommendations on a particular topic (same example as above), then later making posts with my key updates, Anki cards, and overall thoughts on the books I end up reading (see the “Suggestion: Make Anki cards, share them as posts, and share key updates” section of this post).
I say “do things roughly like” that; I’m not saying that my precise formula is the best one.
Another thought that came to mind:
As the canonical echo chamber reading list of EA books currently seems to consist of maybe on the order of 50 books, I might be less worried about this because 50 popsci books are not that many books? This should especially hold for people who read a lot, and who relatively quickly will have to explore outside of the canon. E.g. this seems to be true for Michael already, and after roughly 6 years EA I also have covered a considerable fraction of the canon and read a bunch outside of it. This is also my impression from following roughly twenty EAs on Goodreads. And for people that don‘t read so much it could be fine to just read what the busy readers recommend?
I think it might often be good for new EAs to sample in some way from a set of “very EA books” (e.g. The Precipice, Doing Good Better) + books that are very widely recommended in EA, alongside reading things that are recommended somewhat less often and are more focused on particular areas of interest, and to over time shift towards doing more of the latter and less of the former.
In my own “initial sampling”, I skipped some books from that set (e.g., Doing Good Better, Life 3.0, The Elephant and the Brain). And after about 1-1.5 years of mostly sampling from that set, I shifted into ~half my reading still being sampling from that set, while the other ~half is seeking out books on particular topics of interest, informed by the recommendation of ~1 EA I know (a different one in each case) who knew about that topic.
Thanks for your reply, I really appreciate this and your other contributions!
Sorry that I’ve been unclear. There are actually two separate issues here:
You only list male authors and lists that only feature male authors: all of them are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Sometimes it’s fine for a reading list to only feature male authors. I vote on the margin: If you had gotten downvoted, I might even have upvoted. But on the margin, if this particular long general list became another canonical one as had been suggested, I think that’d be robustly bad. The previous Wiblin, etc. lists are already pretty canonical in the community.
The issue of the EA canon: This is related but ultimately separate issue to 1). I actually agree with much of what you and Max say here. Everyone should read the Precipice and perhaps a few others. But I think when prioritizing their reading lists people should add a “neglectedness in the EA community score” to avoid echo chambers. Consider how much original insight and valuable disentanglement research you can really add if you spend years reading the same 50 pop non-fiction books that everyone else has read. Generally, people should read more papers and write more literature reviews themselves than reading more popular non-fiction.
Regarding your first point, I do worry that strong community norms against having book lists include only male authors risks the perception that female authors that do get included are only there to fulfill some imaginary quota rather than on their merits. Not saying that there isn’t an important conversation to be had about fostering diversity of viewpoints and representation along gender or other demographic lines, but in my view that is at least a pretty strong downside to this approach.
Thanks -I think this is a good point and something to watch out for people not feeling tokenized. Also, again, I’m not necessarily advocacting for “strong community norms”—I was not saying we always need to have complete diversity everywhere.
In this specific case I was not very worried about this because:
There are 50+ books here including those linked to (as opposed to say 10), so there’s a bunch of reading by non-white men that clearly dominates this reading list. I’m not recommending people read the Obama’s memoirs or Thinking in Bets over David Foster Wallace, the Hungry Brain, or Moral Mazes etc. for the sake of more representation—they’re just clearly more valuable to read from a EA point of view.
Relatedly, some of the books are arbitrary because they’re personal choices by Beckstead etc. - based also lists that are old recommendations from their personal websites. For instance, I suspect ‘Consider the Lobster’ etc is only on there because Nick Beckstead recommended it years ago to read “for fun”, which Wiblin then recommended, which is now recommended here… it’s just a bit echo chamber-y.
[This comment of mine focuses just on two specific statements of yours which aren’t very related to the topic of demographic diversity; i.e., this comment is sort-of a tangent from the main point of the thread.]
I’m not recommending people read the Obama’s memoirs or Thinking in Bets over David Foster Wallace, the Hungry Brain, or Moral Mazes etc. for the sake of more representation—they’re just clearly more valuable to read from a EA point of view.
FWIW, I started listening to Barack Obama’s memoir after you mentioned it the other day and I’m now a quarter of the way through, and currently it seems likely that it won’t end up seeming as useful for me as Moral Mazes or The Hungry Brain. I’m very much enjoying it—he’s an excellent writer and narrator, and his story is very interesting, and I’m very likely to recommend it. But so far it doesn’t seem to be substantially updating my beliefs or my frameworks for viewing the world.
And in general, I think “clearly more valuable to read from an EA point of view” is a quite strong claim, given how much EAs will differ in what they already know about and what they are working on or will work on in future. I’d be comfortable saying “[book 1] would be very likely more valuable for most EAs to read than [book 2]” in some relatively extreme cases, like Superforecasting vs Consider the Lobster, but not just “clearly more valuable”, and not for more balanced cases like Moral Mazes vs B. Obama’s memoir.
I do think it’s almost certain that I’ll end up having found B. Obama’s memoir much more useful than Consider the Lobster. (Also more enjoyable and interesting.)
But note that Consider the Lobster is ranked very last out of all 48 EA-relevant books I’ve read since learning of EA. And I say “To be honest, I’m not sure why Wiblin recommended this”, and also “This is not quite a post of book recommendations, because [...] I list all EA-relevant books I’ve read, including those that I didn’t find very useful”. So it isn’t the case that Consider the Lobster “is now recommended here”; my mention of Consider the Lobster is actually an instance of my reported views differing from those in Beckstead and Wiblin’s lists.
Obama’s memoir [… ] won’t end up seeming as useful for me as [...] The Hungry Brain
I agree what’s most useful to a person is to an extent a function of their background. I agree that there are edge cases (Moral Mazes vs. Obama). But I’m standing by my strong claim that Obama’s memoir and some of my other recommendations as clearly more useful than the Hungry Brain and some others on your list. It is implied that this holds true for the average reader. One of the reasons for this is that some of these recommendations are based on arbitrary personal recommendations of audiobooks specifically (from a few years ago when there weren’t even that many good things on Audible). It would be suspicious convergence if the Jobs biography recommendation, which is likely based on an 8-year-old recommendation by Muehlhauser, should still be ranked highly for EAs to read.
it isn’t the case that Consider the Lobster “is now recommended here”
I agree that you’ve emphasized that your list should not be taken as authoritative in several places. Yet I stand by my claim that one can reasonably interpret Foster Wallace and other titles further down the list as recommended reading.
[I think the disagreements we have here don’t matter much. That said...]
I think the point about suspicious convergence is correct. I also think it’s very reasonable to claim that B. Obama’s memoir will be more useful to the average EA than many of the things on my list—especially the things which are rated as below average usefulness to me.
But I still think it’s worth saying “more valuable to the average EA” rather than “clearly more valuable from an EA perspective”. One reason is related to precisely the point about intellectual/worldview homogeneity and echo chambers which you highlighted; I think we should be careful about saying things that could easily sound to people like “all EAs should do X”.
(This is also related to issues like 80k highlighting a career pathway or problem area as particularly important on the margin on average, and there sometimes being an overreaction to this, including people switching out of other good paths towards this new path that isn’t a good fit for them. My impression is that 80k is now more careful to add caveats and stuff to reduce how much this happens.
Of course, the stakes are far lower for a Forum comment, about books rather than careers, deep into a very large thread!)
I agree that you’ve emphasized that your list should not be taken as authoritative in several places. Yet I stand by my claim that one can reasonably interpret Foster Wallace and other titles further down the list as recommended reading.
I’ve emphasised not just that it’s not authoritative but also that it’s “not quite a list of book recommendations”, and that it includes things I didn’t find useful. I think it’s plausible that someone could interpret the bottom ranked book as a recommendation, but not that that would be reasonable—they’d have to have ignored text right near the top and right below that recommendation.
I think this is true and that saying it is useful.
Though when one is saying that, it’s probably worth also noting that a majority of EAs are male (and also a majority are white and a majority are from WEIRD societies),[1] which could increase the risk of implicit or explicit biases towards male (or white or WEIRD) authors. (I think being male, white, etc. is neither necessary nor sufficient for being biased towards reading things by males, white people, etc., but it does seem likely to raise the risk somewhat.)
I don’t think that implicit or explicit bias is what caused the list of authors I’ve read EA-relevant books from to be all male and mostly or all white and WEIRD. As noted elsewhere, I think the cause is primarily just that the books that are most prominent/recommended (and not just by EAs) in the areas I’m interested in have a strong tendency to be written by people from those demographics. (I’m of course not saying that it has to be that way—that could reflect sexism, racism, etc. in various parts of the talent or recommendation “pipeline”.)
But it’s hard to rule out implicit or explicit bias on either my part or the part of the EAs who I’ve gotten recommendations from, so it seems worth noting the possibility. And that possibility means it’s at least possible that something like “making a mild effort to fulfil an imaginary quota” may push against a bias in the opposite direction and thereby land us in something that’s more like an unbiased meritocracy, all things considered.
I’m currently unsure how best to handle this. So my current plan is to make a mild effort to increase the demographic diversity of my reading list going forward, but primarily via being more conscious to seek out ideas of books to read from authors with other demographic characteristics, as well as sometimes using demographic diversity as something like a “tie-breaker” between books that seem like good reading choices anyway.
(And I hadn’t been thinking about any of this before Hauke’s comments, so I think they’ve been useful for me.)
So perhaps we indeed shouldn’t have “strong community norms against having book lists include only male authors”, but should have a norm of gently and non-judgementally pointing out to people when their book lists (or whatever) are very demographically non-diverse, in case they hadn’t even thought about that before? It does seem hard to strike the right balance/tone in an online, written medium, though!
[1] Of respondents to the 2019 EA Survey 2019, “71% reported their gender as male” and “87% reported that they identify as white” (source). Of course, “the EA community” can be defined in many ways, and not all of its members will have responded to that survey, but it gives an indication. And “74% of EAs in the survey currently live in the same set of 5 high-income English-speaking western countries as in 2018″ (source).
First I want to say that I think your original comment and this one both express reasonable views, and do so in a civil manner. (Also, just in case you or anyone else was wondering, I’ve neither upvoted nor downvoted either comment.)
Also, while I think I disagree with you to some extent on some points, I think your comments have made me think more about things worth thinking about. I think they’ve also improved this post, via prompting me to add the following to the introductory section:
(Edit: I think that recommendations that aren’t commonly mentioned in EA are particularly valuable, holding general usefulness and EA-relevance constant. Same goes for recommendations of books by non-male, non-white, and/or non-WEIRD authors. See this comment thread.)
(I added part of that after your first comment, and the second sentence after reading your second comment.)
Also, I acknowledge that there are two separate (though related) points you’re highlighting, and that my reply didn’t explicitly address the gender diversity part.
You only list male authors and lists that only feature male authors: all of them are [also] WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic).
I believe this is indeed true. (The part I’m slightly unsure of is whether all authors meet all WEIRD criteria, but in any case it definitely heavily skews WEIRD.) I also hadn’t specifically noticed that this was the case for all/almost all of these listed authors, so it does seem useful to me that you highlighted it. And I do agree that, all else equal, it’d be better to have more diversity on each of these dimensions on someone’s reading list.
One thing I’d say in response is that there’s more demographic diversity in the other forms of content I consume (in particular, papers, podcasts, and posts) than in these books. Though those other forms of content I consume do still skew somewhat towards male and WEIRD (and also white).
I think three ways to address that are for me to:
Get more recommendations for content to consume that’s by authors (or podcasters, or whatever) with other demographic characteristics
Make more effort to actively seek out ideas for content to consume that’s from authors with other demographic characteristics
Factor in the demographic characteristics of an author when deciding which of multiple specific pieces of content I should spend time consuming
I’d be very happy if (1) happened. And I think hopefully this post should contribute to it happening, especially now that I’ve added an edit prompted by your comments. I think your own first comment already helps with that, which I appreciate.
I think I should also do a bit of (2) and (3). (For a start, I’ve just now downloaded Obama’s A Promised Land, and made a note to maybe read Strangers Drowning.) But I’m unsure how much, because I’m unsure how much weight I should give to demographic diversity relative to other factors when making tradeoffs about how I spend my time. And it just does seem to be the case that, in many of the fields I want to learn about, most of the most prominent authors—meaning prominent among e.g. the relevant academics, not just EAs—are male, WEIRD, and white. And I think there’s value in reading things from the most prominent authors.
But I’m personally inclined not to debate here precisely how much of (2) and (3) people should do, and the precise extent to which the prominent authors in these fields skew male, WEIRD, and white. This is because I’m concerned that that might result in a long and tense thread, partly due to this being a written medium with an audience and a lot of people not personally knowing each other, rather than a face-to-face conversation.
(I’m not trying to silence such a debate; it can be had here; I’m just personally inclined for it to not happen here. Readers may also be interested in posts tagged diversity and inclusion.)
(I’d also like to pre-emptively ask readers to keep in mind that it’s easy to interpret things overly harshly when they’re written down on the internet by someone you don’t know personally. If you think I or Hauke are saying things that are stupid or horrible, please seriously consider the hypothesis that that’s not really what I or Hauke mean, or that we just phrased things poorly, or something like that.)
Thanks for the courteous reply. Agree with much of this!
To be clear, I didn’t mean to criticize you or anyone personally. Though judging by the downvotes I got, people might think that I’m EA’s wokest and hardest virtue-signalling SJW, but I actually only realized and was able to flag this issue because I’m guilty of recommending a very similar set of male authors too much myself. So this is something that should be improved more generally (in the community). Also, I agree that we shouldn’t spend much time on finding a precise ‘quota’ and I’m not saying that we should have 50% of women on AI safety syllabi (which would probably leave people scrambling and is more a society-wide issue) or cancel Toby Ord, but on current margin, we should probably err on the side of having a little more diversity in what we recommend. Not upvoting a list with 50 white males trending on the front page and implicitly endorse this as the EA cannon seems a really low bar. Hence the initial downvote, which I’ve now changed to an upvote, given that there’s a productive discussion in the comments, in particular thanks to Michael.
To be clear, I didn’t mean to criticize you or anyone personally. [...] Also, I agree that we shouldn’t spend much time on finding a precise ’quota
Yeah, to be clear, I didn’t get the impression of being criticised in a way that singles me out quite specifically, and my points about being inclined not to discuss the precise amount of (2) and (3) I should do was not me saying “You’ve said too much about this already!”, but rather “I’m a little concerned that this thread could become overly spicy and contentious” (and I primarily had in mind other people jumping in; I wasn’t worried about comments you’d write). I think the comments so far have been civil, as I mentioned.
on current margin, we should probably err on the side of having a little more diversity in what we recommend
Agreed.
Not upvoting a list with 50 white males trending on the front page and implicitly endorse this as the EA cannon seems a really low bar.
I’m not totally sure I agree, partly because every Forum post starts out on the front page, and I think it’d be really easy for EA to be flooded with a bunch more recommendation lists. So I think (a) I estimate a lower chance that this list ends up being extremely prominent than you do, and (b) if we’re worried about this list being too prominent, I think the best solution is just to vigorously encourage the posting of more lists (including ones with more demographically diverse authors).
As you noted, the Wiblin, Beckstead, and Muehlhauser lists are already quite prominent, and also skew towards male, white, WEIRD, etc. So I think it may be the case that “the only way out is through”—i.e., the best way to prevent there being too much focus on a small set of lists is to post more, not to avoid posting.
But, that of course wouldn’t fix the demographic diversity issue, unless those other lists either happen to include or are encouraged to include more demographic diversity. So you highlighting this with your comment seems useful.
(But I genuinely just mean “I’m not totally sure I agree”; I think your sentence is a reasonable claim.)
judging by the downvotes I got
Yeah, I don’t like that your comment is currently on net negative karma. I’m going to strong upvote it for balance’s sake, and make a separate comment about that.
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.
*****
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.
But I think when prioritizing their reading lists people should add a “neglectedness in the EA community score” to avoid echo chambers.
Yeah, I agree with this.
Consider how much original insight and valuable disentanglement research you can really add if you spend years reading the same 50 pop non-fiction books that everyone else has read.
As noted in my other comment, I really don’t think that all things on this list are widely read in EA.
And I think that reading (let’s say ) 5-30 books on lists like this one (of which there will hopefully be more in future!) can also be seen as somewhat akin to doing an undergrad unit or two to get up to speed on a new field. It seems worth noting that:
Many fields have a set of works that most people working in that field are expected to have read some fraction of
although people can each read different particular works from that set
EA contained a lot of very unfamiliar ideas to me when I first joined.
I actually did almost immediately start thinking of original research and post ideas, but it turned out that most were reinventing the wheel or missing key considerations. I think reading books from this list really did help me “get up to speed” and start contributing in better ways.
I acknowledge that it’s possible I could’ve gotten similar or better gains from reading books that are currently less often recommended. But I do think some of the often recommended books are unusually useful for the sort of work I want to do. And I think I would’ve almost certainly been worse off if I’d had no recommendations from EAs (as opposed to “the standard recommendations plus additional, carefully chosen but less common recommendations”; I’d be keen to see us move towards that state, as noted elsewhere).
It may be worth noting that I got into EA from Western Australia and without having studied much university-level econ, philosophy, math, computer science, etc. The process I went through might be less necessary for someone based in Oxford, London, or San Francisco, or someone with a more math-y background.
Generally, people should read more papers and write more literature reviews themselves than reading more popular non-fiction.
For me, there’s hardly a tradeoff between these things: I listen to audiobooks in times of my day when I can’t do much else, e.g. when doing chores or on public transport. I could consume papers during this time using text-to-voice, but obviously text-to-voice isn’t as good as an actual voice actor. (I do spend a decent chunk of the rest of my time reading papers.)
Also, that comment seems to presume that most or all readers of this list will want to be researchers? I think a lot of EAs should be doing things other than research. And for them, it may really make sense for them to:
mostly consume nicely packaged and engaging summaries of key ideas from a wide range of fields
sometimes supplement that by reading papers on particular things
rarely or never write literature reviews.
(Less importantly, although this reading list does lean heavily towards popular non-fiction, it isn’t entirely popular non-fiction. E.g., it includes MacAskill’s thesis and The Strategy of Conflict.)
Also, that comment seems to presume that most or all readers of this list will want to be researchers? I think a lot of EAs should be doing things other than research.
I see your point and agree to an extent. My point was that I recommend people to focus more on active learning is often better than passively consuming content, even if they do not want to be a researcher. Just like at university you do not merely read things but also write essays.
I think the best way to learn things is roughly:
write a review of something yourself
read papers
read (popular) non-fiction books
listen to podcasts
But I agree that podcasts and non-fiction books can be more entertaining and not as cognitively demand especially when you have some time to while doing chores etc.
The point about active rather than passive learning, even just for learning’s sake rather than producing original work, is a good one. But I think there are many more ways to do that than writing literature reviews.
One way that seems especially time efficient is making Anki cards (as I suggest in this post), since that can be done quickly in little gaps while doing chores etc.
Another is writing up “key updates” from a thing one has read—not just copying key passages, but saying how the ideas in the book have changed one’s beliefs or plans. This is something I’m now trying out, and an example can be seen here.
Another way would be writing relatively low-effort commentaries, criticism, analysis, original thoughts, etc. as EA Forum posts, without doing proper literature reviews.
So maybe we can imagine a dimension from very active to very passive learning, and another dimension for how much non-background time is required, and we’d like people to find activities that hit the best tradeoffs on those two dimensions for the various parts of their day/week.
But I agree that podcasts and non-fiction books can be more entertaining and not as cognitively demand especially when you have some time to while doing chores etc.
These are indeed the main benefits of podcasts for me, but one other benefit is that they sometimes contain ideas that haven’t yet been properly written up anywhere. (That obviously doesn’t apply to non-fiction books.)
Another way would be writing relatively low-effort commentaries, criticism, analysis, original thoughts, etc. as EA Forum posts, without doing proper literature reviews.
I agree that active learning and writing doesn’t have to be a literature review-and all these formats actually also work. Perhaps we’re coming full circle and it does actually connect to the point in the other thread: we need to encourage people to write more commentaries.
(Just wanted to quickly say that, FWIW, I think that this is true and worth noting. I’d guess you and I would disagree about preciselyhow worth noting it is, but I do think it’s worth noting.
A fuller picture of my views are contained in my replies to Hauke.)
Hi Hauke, thanks for commenting to explain the downvote; I don’t think I would’ve guessed that as a reason, so the comment makes the feedback more useful.
And also thanks for adding your own recommendations. As I say in the post, I welcome people doing that.
Personally, I think the thing I’m most likely to read due to your recommendation is Barack Obama’s memoir—in retrospect it seems obvious that I should’ve read a biography/autobiography/memoir of a modern leader of a liberal democratic country. (Also, btw, I previously wrote a commentary on the Beyond Near- and Long-Term paper.)
Where I think I agree with you:
This book definitely does include many books from the reading lists of three prominent EAs (Wiblin, Beckstead, and Muehlhauser), and relatedly many books that are often recommended in EAs.
And this applies especially to my top 7 books
EAs do share similar information sources and worldviews to a notable extent (though still with a lot of variety), and this can be limiting, and there can be great value in seeking out a wider set of ideas and views.
The above two points make the post less useful, relative to a post that contained similarly useful-in-an-abstract-sense books that are less often read by EAs.
Though is offset to some extent by the point Max Dalton makes above common knowledge facilitating discussion and communicating. [Edit: I originally wrote “Max Daniel” as I’d misread who the commenter was—apologies if this had confused any readers!]
I say “similarly useful-in-an-abstract-sense” because the very fact that the books are less often read by EAs makes them more useful in practice, at least at a community level (or at least that’s what I’m claiming here).
It would be good for the Forum to include a wider range of book recommendations.
(I don’t mean “It’s bad for the Forum to include this post’s list of books”; I think it’s both good for it to include this list and for it to include a wider range of book recommendations.)
Long-winded thoughts on where I think I partially disagree with you (or perhaps just some points that your comment doesn’t emphasise, rather than things we actually disagree on):
This post is what it says on the tin: A list of all EA-relevant books I’ve read, ranked by how useful I remember/perceive them being to me.
E.g., I really just did find those top 7 books very useful.
And I do say “These rankings are of course only weak evidence of how useful you’ll find these books,[2] but hopefully the list still provides a useful starting point.”
(But of course, the key claims I have to defend are that these rankings do provide weak evidence—rather than no or negative evidence—of how useful others will find the books, and also that the post is net positive on a community rather than individual level. I do believe those things, and my following points will address why.)
I do think that there are many people for whom it would be net positive to be given even a list of solely the “canonical EA books”.
Unfortunately, I think this applies mostly to “EA types” who haven’t yet engaged with EA at all. But I think it will also apply to some Forum users. I do encounter EAs who haven’t heard of even some of the particularly EA-canonical books from this list, who I think would gain from these concepts, and who don’t know of other recommendation lists like this one.
To a significant extent, I think many of the canonical books are canonical for good reason.
Though it can still be partially bad for them to be so canonical, as this means the community as a whole is exposed to less variety in information sources and worldviews, as noted above.
I also think many EAs actively seek out a wide range of quite different ideas and views, such that going with common recommendations in EA reducing diversity of viewpoints less than one might at first think (though it still has that effect in some ways). I think some of these books present very different pictures of the world to others of them.
One thing that seems worth noting is that some topics I (and many EAs) care about aren’t super widely discussed outside EA. This both increases the value of getting book recommendations on those topics (since we can’t rely on people already coming into EA knowing the nuances or even basics on the topic), and decreases the number of great books available to be recommended on those topics.
For example, thinking of your book recommendations (not the 2 papers) and my top 10 books, I came into EA with much more pre-existing knowledge about the Obamas, the US government, GDP, economics, and writing than I had about existential risks, extreme AI risks, and moral uncertainty. And I’d guess that think that there are many high-quality books on the latter 3 topics that aren’t already often recommended by EAs.
(I also had very little knowledge about forecasting, but your book recommendations do include a book on that.)
This list is not just recommendations but rather a complete ranking of all EA-relevant books I’ve read. So it could also help people get a sense of which commonly-recommended-in-EA books I found less useful than the average book I’ve read.
This includes Enlightenment Now, Inadequate Equilibria, Radical Markets, Climate Matters, and the Power Broker.
This list excludes some relatively canonical EA books.
E.g., I haven’t read Doing Good Better, The Life You Can Save, or Life 3.0. And I started reading Age of Em but am finding it a hard slog so far.
This list includes some books that I expect relatively few EAs will have heard of (or maybe heard of outside of EA, but not heard recommended within EA), and some of them are ranked relatively highly.
E.g., The Strategy of Conflict, Blueprint, The Bomb, The Sense of Style, and The Dead Hand.
This is partly a result of me recently starting to actively solicit recommendations on particular topics (e.g., here), get recommendations from random people who are not established thought leaders in EA, and screen them myself by reading some reviews and maybe watching a lecture or listening to a podcast from the author.
I started this a little bit last year, and am now doing it regularly, so hopefully over time this list will come to inject more of a range of uncommon book recommendations into the EA space.
Though I acknowledge that I’m still mostly soliciting recommendations from EAs, at least to date.
This post says “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. I’d also welcome people making their own posts along the lines of this one.” I think that people doing that (as you’ve done) will help make the overall set of recommendations on the Forum more representative, so I’d encourage more of that.
I think another way to help move towards this goal is for more people to do things roughly like how I’ve recently started making posts to solicit recommendations on a particular topic (same example as above), then later making posts with my key updates, Anki cards, and overall thoughts on the books I end up reading (see the “Suggestion: Make Anki cards, share them as posts, and share key updates” section of this post).
I say “do things roughly like” that; I’m not saying that my precise formula is the best one.
I also like meerpirat’s suggestions.
Another thought that came to mind: As the canonical echo chamber reading list of EA books currently seems to consist of maybe on the order of 50 books, I might be less worried about this because 50 popsci books are not that many books? This should especially hold for people who read a lot, and who relatively quickly will have to explore outside of the canon. E.g. this seems to be true for Michael already, and after roughly 6 years EA I also have covered a considerable fraction of the canon and read a bunch outside of it. This is also my impression from following roughly twenty EAs on Goodreads. And for people that don‘t read so much it could be fine to just read what the busy readers recommend?
This roughly seems right to me.
I think it might often be good for new EAs to sample in some way from a set of “very EA books” (e.g. The Precipice, Doing Good Better) + books that are very widely recommended in EA, alongside reading things that are recommended somewhat less often and are more focused on particular areas of interest, and to over time shift towards doing more of the latter and less of the former.
In my own “initial sampling”, I skipped some books from that set (e.g., Doing Good Better, Life 3.0, The Elephant and the Brain). And after about 1-1.5 years of mostly sampling from that set, I shifted into ~half my reading still being sampling from that set, while the other ~half is seeking out books on particular topics of interest, informed by the recommendation of ~1 EA I know (a different one in each case) who knew about that topic.
Thanks for your reply, I really appreciate this and your other contributions!
Sorry that I’ve been unclear. There are actually two separate issues here:
You only list male authors and lists that only feature male authors: all of them are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Sometimes it’s fine for a reading list to only feature male authors. I vote on the margin: If you had gotten downvoted, I might even have upvoted. But on the margin, if this particular long general list became another canonical one as had been suggested, I think that’d be robustly bad. The previous Wiblin, etc. lists are already pretty canonical in the community.
The issue of the EA canon: This is related but ultimately separate issue to 1). I actually agree with much of what you and Max say here. Everyone should read the Precipice and perhaps a few others. But I think when prioritizing their reading lists people should add a “neglectedness in the EA community score” to avoid echo chambers. Consider how much original insight and valuable disentanglement research you can really add if you spend years reading the same 50 pop non-fiction books that everyone else has read. Generally, people should read more papers and write more literature reviews themselves than reading more popular non-fiction.
Regarding your first point, I do worry that strong community norms against having book lists include only male authors risks the perception that female authors that do get included are only there to fulfill some imaginary quota rather than on their merits. Not saying that there isn’t an important conversation to be had about fostering diversity of viewpoints and representation along gender or other demographic lines, but in my view that is at least a pretty strong downside to this approach.
Thanks -I think this is a good point and something to watch out for people not feeling tokenized. Also, again, I’m not necessarily advocacting for “strong community norms”—I was not saying we always need to have complete diversity everywhere.
In this specific case I was not very worried about this because:
There are 50+ books here including those linked to (as opposed to say 10), so there’s a bunch of reading by non-white men that clearly dominates this reading list. I’m not recommending people read the Obama’s memoirs or Thinking in Bets over David Foster Wallace, the Hungry Brain, or Moral Mazes etc. for the sake of more representation—they’re just clearly more valuable to read from a EA point of view.
Relatedly, some of the books are arbitrary because they’re personal choices by Beckstead etc. - based also lists that are old recommendations from their personal websites. For instance, I suspect ‘Consider the Lobster’ etc is only on there because Nick Beckstead recommended it years ago to read “for fun”, which Wiblin then recommended, which is now recommended here… it’s just a bit echo chamber-y.
[This comment of mine focuses just on two specific statements of yours which aren’t very related to the topic of demographic diversity; i.e., this comment is sort-of a tangent from the main point of the thread.]
FWIW, I started listening to Barack Obama’s memoir after you mentioned it the other day and I’m now a quarter of the way through, and currently it seems likely that it won’t end up seeming as useful for me as Moral Mazes or The Hungry Brain. I’m very much enjoying it—he’s an excellent writer and narrator, and his story is very interesting, and I’m very likely to recommend it. But so far it doesn’t seem to be substantially updating my beliefs or my frameworks for viewing the world.
And in general, I think “clearly more valuable to read from an EA point of view” is a quite strong claim, given how much EAs will differ in what they already know about and what they are working on or will work on in future. I’d be comfortable saying “[book 1] would be very likely more valuable for most EAs to read than [book 2]” in some relatively extreme cases, like Superforecasting vs Consider the Lobster, but not just “clearly more valuable”, and not for more balanced cases like Moral Mazes vs B. Obama’s memoir.
I do think it’s almost certain that I’ll end up having found B. Obama’s memoir much more useful than Consider the Lobster. (Also more enjoyable and interesting.)
But note that Consider the Lobster is ranked very last out of all 48 EA-relevant books I’ve read since learning of EA. And I say “To be honest, I’m not sure why Wiblin recommended this”, and also “This is not quite a post of book recommendations, because [...] I list all EA-relevant books I’ve read, including those that I didn’t find very useful”. So it isn’t the case that Consider the Lobster “is now recommended here”; my mention of Consider the Lobster is actually an instance of my reported views differing from those in Beckstead and Wiblin’s lists.
I agree what’s most useful to a person is to an extent a function of their background. I agree that there are edge cases (Moral Mazes vs. Obama). But I’m standing by my strong claim that Obama’s memoir and some of my other recommendations as clearly more useful than the Hungry Brain and some others on your list. It is implied that this holds true for the average reader. One of the reasons for this is that some of these recommendations are based on arbitrary personal recommendations of audiobooks specifically (from a few years ago when there weren’t even that many good things on Audible). It would be suspicious convergence if the Jobs biography recommendation, which is likely based on an 8-year-old recommendation by Muehlhauser, should still be ranked highly for EAs to read.
I agree that you’ve emphasized that your list should not be taken as authoritative in several places. Yet I stand by my claim that one can reasonably interpret Foster Wallace and other titles further down the list as recommended reading.
[I think the disagreements we have here don’t matter much. That said...]
I think the point about suspicious convergence is correct. I also think it’s very reasonable to claim that B. Obama’s memoir will be more useful to the average EA than many of the things on my list—especially the things which are rated as below average usefulness to me.
But I still think it’s worth saying “more valuable to the average EA” rather than “clearly more valuable from an EA perspective”. One reason is related to precisely the point about intellectual/worldview homogeneity and echo chambers which you highlighted; I think we should be careful about saying things that could easily sound to people like “all EAs should do X”.
(This is also related to issues like 80k highlighting a career pathway or problem area as particularly important on the margin on average, and there sometimes being an overreaction to this, including people switching out of other good paths towards this new path that isn’t a good fit for them. My impression is that 80k is now more careful to add caveats and stuff to reduce how much this happens.
Of course, the stakes are far lower for a Forum comment, about books rather than careers, deep into a very large thread!)
I’ve emphasised not just that it’s not authoritative but also that it’s “not quite a list of book recommendations”, and that it includes things I didn’t find useful. I think it’s plausible that someone could interpret the bottom ranked book as a recommendation, but not that that would be reasonable—they’d have to have ignored text right near the top and right below that recommendation.
I think this is true and that saying it is useful.
Though when one is saying that, it’s probably worth also noting that a majority of EAs are male (and also a majority are white and a majority are from WEIRD societies),[1] which could increase the risk of implicit or explicit biases towards male (or white or WEIRD) authors. (I think being male, white, etc. is neither necessary nor sufficient for being biased towards reading things by males, white people, etc., but it does seem likely to raise the risk somewhat.)
I don’t think that implicit or explicit bias is what caused the list of authors I’ve read EA-relevant books from to be all male and mostly or all white and WEIRD. As noted elsewhere, I think the cause is primarily just that the books that are most prominent/recommended (and not just by EAs) in the areas I’m interested in have a strong tendency to be written by people from those demographics. (I’m of course not saying that it has to be that way—that could reflect sexism, racism, etc. in various parts of the talent or recommendation “pipeline”.)
But it’s hard to rule out implicit or explicit bias on either my part or the part of the EAs who I’ve gotten recommendations from, so it seems worth noting the possibility. And that possibility means it’s at least possible that something like “making a mild effort to fulfil an imaginary quota” may push against a bias in the opposite direction and thereby land us in something that’s more like an unbiased meritocracy, all things considered.
I’m currently unsure how best to handle this. So my current plan is to make a mild effort to increase the demographic diversity of my reading list going forward, but primarily via being more conscious to seek out ideas of books to read from authors with other demographic characteristics, as well as sometimes using demographic diversity as something like a “tie-breaker” between books that seem like good reading choices anyway.
(And I hadn’t been thinking about any of this before Hauke’s comments, so I think they’ve been useful for me.)
So perhaps we indeed shouldn’t have “strong community norms against having book lists include only male authors”, but should have a norm of gently and non-judgementally pointing out to people when their book lists (or whatever) are very demographically non-diverse, in case they hadn’t even thought about that before? It does seem hard to strike the right balance/tone in an online, written medium, though!
[1] Of respondents to the 2019 EA Survey 2019, “71% reported their gender as male” and “87% reported that they identify as white” (source). Of course, “the EA community” can be defined in many ways, and not all of its members will have responded to that survey, but it gives an indication. And “74% of EAs in the survey currently live in the same set of 5 high-income English-speaking western countries as in 2018″ (source).
First I want to say that I think your original comment and this one both express reasonable views, and do so in a civil manner. (Also, just in case you or anyone else was wondering, I’ve neither upvoted nor downvoted either comment.)
Also, while I think I disagree with you to some extent on some points, I think your comments have made me think more about things worth thinking about. I think they’ve also improved this post, via prompting me to add the following to the introductory section:
(I added part of that after your first comment, and the second sentence after reading your second comment.)
Also, I acknowledge that there are two separate (though related) points you’re highlighting, and that my reply didn’t explicitly address the gender diversity part.
I believe this is indeed true. (The part I’m slightly unsure of is whether all authors meet all WEIRD criteria, but in any case it definitely heavily skews WEIRD.) I also hadn’t specifically noticed that this was the case for all/almost all of these listed authors, so it does seem useful to me that you highlighted it. And I do agree that, all else equal, it’d be better to have more diversity on each of these dimensions on someone’s reading list.
One thing I’d say in response is that there’s more demographic diversity in the other forms of content I consume (in particular, papers, podcasts, and posts) than in these books. Though those other forms of content I consume do still skew somewhat towards male and WEIRD (and also white).
I think three ways to address that are for me to:
Get more recommendations for content to consume that’s by authors (or podcasters, or whatever) with other demographic characteristics
Make more effort to actively seek out ideas for content to consume that’s from authors with other demographic characteristics
Factor in the demographic characteristics of an author when deciding which of multiple specific pieces of content I should spend time consuming
I’d be very happy if (1) happened. And I think hopefully this post should contribute to it happening, especially now that I’ve added an edit prompted by your comments. I think your own first comment already helps with that, which I appreciate.
I think I should also do a bit of (2) and (3). (For a start, I’ve just now downloaded Obama’s A Promised Land, and made a note to maybe read Strangers Drowning.) But I’m unsure how much, because I’m unsure how much weight I should give to demographic diversity relative to other factors when making tradeoffs about how I spend my time. And it just does seem to be the case that, in many of the fields I want to learn about, most of the most prominent authors—meaning prominent among e.g. the relevant academics, not just EAs—are male, WEIRD, and white. And I think there’s value in reading things from the most prominent authors.
But I’m personally inclined not to debate here precisely how much of (2) and (3) people should do, and the precise extent to which the prominent authors in these fields skew male, WEIRD, and white. This is because I’m concerned that that might result in a long and tense thread, partly due to this being a written medium with an audience and a lot of people not personally knowing each other, rather than a face-to-face conversation.
(I’m not trying to silence such a debate; it can be had here; I’m just personally inclined for it to not happen here. Readers may also be interested in posts tagged diversity and inclusion.)
(I’d also like to pre-emptively ask readers to keep in mind that it’s easy to interpret things overly harshly when they’re written down on the internet by someone you don’t know personally. If you think I or Hauke are saying things that are stupid or horrible, please seriously consider the hypothesis that that’s not really what I or Hauke mean, or that we just phrased things poorly, or something like that.)
Thanks for the courteous reply. Agree with much of this!
To be clear, I didn’t mean to criticize you or anyone personally. Though judging by the downvotes I got, people might think that I’m EA’s wokest and hardest virtue-signalling SJW, but I actually only realized and was able to flag this issue because I’m guilty of recommending a very similar set of male authors too much myself. So this is something that should be improved more generally (in the community). Also, I agree that we shouldn’t spend much time on finding a precise ‘quota’ and I’m not saying that we should have 50% of women on AI safety syllabi (which would probably leave people scrambling and is more a society-wide issue) or cancel Toby Ord, but on current margin, we should probably err on the side of having a little more diversity in what we recommend. Not upvoting a list with 50 white males trending on the front page and implicitly endorse this as the EA cannon seems a really low bar. Hence the initial downvote, which I’ve now changed to an upvote, given that there’s a productive discussion in the comments, in particular thanks to Michael.
Yeah, to be clear, I didn’t get the impression of being criticised in a way that singles me out quite specifically, and my points about being inclined not to discuss the precise amount of (2) and (3) I should do was not me saying “You’ve said too much about this already!”, but rather “I’m a little concerned that this thread could become overly spicy and contentious” (and I primarily had in mind other people jumping in; I wasn’t worried about comments you’d write). I think the comments so far have been civil, as I mentioned.
Agreed.
I’m not totally sure I agree, partly because every Forum post starts out on the front page, and I think it’d be really easy for EA to be flooded with a bunch more recommendation lists. So I think (a) I estimate a lower chance that this list ends up being extremely prominent than you do, and (b) if we’re worried about this list being too prominent, I think the best solution is just to vigorously encourage the posting of more lists (including ones with more demographically diverse authors).
As you noted, the Wiblin, Beckstead, and Muehlhauser lists are already quite prominent, and also skew towards male, white, WEIRD, etc. So I think it may be the case that “the only way out is through”—i.e., the best way to prevent there being too much focus on a small set of lists is to post more, not to avoid posting.
But, that of course wouldn’t fix the demographic diversity issue, unless those other lists either happen to include or are encouraged to include more demographic diversity. So you highlighting this with your comment seems useful.
(But I genuinely just mean “I’m not totally sure I agree”; I think your sentence is a reasonable claim.)
Yeah, I don’t like that your comment is currently on net negative karma. I’m going to strong upvote it for balance’s sake, and make a separate comment about that.
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.
Yeah, I agree with this.
As noted in my other comment, I really don’t think that all things on this list are widely read in EA.
And I think that reading (let’s say ) 5-30 books on lists like this one (of which there will hopefully be more in future!) can also be seen as somewhat akin to doing an undergrad unit or two to get up to speed on a new field. It seems worth noting that:
Many fields have a set of works that most people working in that field are expected to have read some fraction of
although people can each read different particular works from that set
EA contained a lot of very unfamiliar ideas to me when I first joined.
I actually did almost immediately start thinking of original research and post ideas, but it turned out that most were reinventing the wheel or missing key considerations. I think reading books from this list really did help me “get up to speed” and start contributing in better ways.
I acknowledge that it’s possible I could’ve gotten similar or better gains from reading books that are currently less often recommended. But I do think some of the often recommended books are unusually useful for the sort of work I want to do. And I think I would’ve almost certainly been worse off if I’d had no recommendations from EAs (as opposed to “the standard recommendations plus additional, carefully chosen but less common recommendations”; I’d be keen to see us move towards that state, as noted elsewhere).
It may be worth noting that I got into EA from Western Australia and without having studied much university-level econ, philosophy, math, computer science, etc. The process I went through might be less necessary for someone based in Oxford, London, or San Francisco, or someone with a more math-y background.
For me, there’s hardly a tradeoff between these things: I listen to audiobooks in times of my day when I can’t do much else, e.g. when doing chores or on public transport. I could consume papers during this time using text-to-voice, but obviously text-to-voice isn’t as good as an actual voice actor. (I do spend a decent chunk of the rest of my time reading papers.)
Also, that comment seems to presume that most or all readers of this list will want to be researchers? I think a lot of EAs should be doing things other than research. And for them, it may really make sense for them to:
mostly consume nicely packaged and engaging summaries of key ideas from a wide range of fields
sometimes supplement that by reading papers on particular things
rarely or never write literature reviews.
(Less importantly, although this reading list does lean heavily towards popular non-fiction, it isn’t entirely popular non-fiction. E.g., it includes MacAskill’s thesis and The Strategy of Conflict.)
Yes agree with much of this!
I see your point and agree to an extent. My point was that I recommend people to focus more on active learning is often better than passively consuming content, even if they do not want to be a researcher. Just like at university you do not merely read things but also write essays.
I think the best way to learn things is roughly:
write a review of something yourself
read papers
read (popular) non-fiction books
listen to podcasts
But I agree that podcasts and non-fiction books can be more entertaining and not as cognitively demand especially when you have some time to while doing chores etc.
The point about active rather than passive learning, even just for learning’s sake rather than producing original work, is a good one. But I think there are many more ways to do that than writing literature reviews.
One way that seems especially time efficient is making Anki cards (as I suggest in this post), since that can be done quickly in little gaps while doing chores etc.
Another is writing up “key updates” from a thing one has read—not just copying key passages, but saying how the ideas in the book have changed one’s beliefs or plans. This is something I’m now trying out, and an example can be seen here.
Another way would be writing relatively low-effort commentaries, criticism, analysis, original thoughts, etc. as EA Forum posts, without doing proper literature reviews.
So maybe we can imagine a dimension from very active to very passive learning, and another dimension for how much non-background time is required, and we’d like people to find activities that hit the best tradeoffs on those two dimensions for the various parts of their day/week.
These are indeed the main benefits of podcasts for me, but one other benefit is that they sometimes contain ideas that haven’t yet been properly written up anywhere. (That obviously doesn’t apply to non-fiction books.)
I agree that active learning and writing doesn’t have to be a literature review-and all these formats actually also work. Perhaps we’re coming full circle and it does actually connect to the point in the other thread: we need to encourage people to write more commentaries.
Not only are all the authors male and WEIRD, they’re also all white presenting.
(Just wanted to quickly say that, FWIW, I think that this is true and worth noting. I’d guess you and I would disagree about precisely how worth noting it is, but I do think it’s worth noting.
A fuller picture of my views are contained in my replies to Hauke.)
Thanks Michael! And I should note that FWIW I think my observation is more of a commentary on the “EA canon” than your list per se.