As I note in my reply to Hauke, I think another thing we can do is have more people to do things roughly like how I’ve recently started making posts to solicit recommendations on a particular topic (e.g.), 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).
And another option (perhaps the most obvious one) is to take the same approach but without soliciting recommendations from EAs at the first step—instead soliciting recommendations from non-EA friends or other communities one is part of, or just googling for books on a given topic. I’d guess that that will tend to result in less useful reading for the individual and/or involve a more time-consuming screening process, but that cost might be made up for by the benefits on a community level. This could be seen as providing a public good.
Both of those ideas seem good to me.
As I note in my reply to Hauke, I think another thing we can do is have more people to do things roughly like how I’ve recently started making posts to solicit recommendations on a particular topic (e.g.), 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).
And another option (perhaps the most obvious one) is to take the same approach but without soliciting recommendations from EAs at the first step—instead soliciting recommendations from non-EA friends or other communities one is part of, or just googling for books on a given topic. I’d guess that that will tend to result in less useful reading for the individual and/or involve a more time-consuming screening process, but that cost might be made up for by the benefits on a community level. This could be seen as providing a public good.