The worry about EAs reading too much of the same ideas is a good point. I wonder if there are strategies that could help us as a community to explore more literature. For example somebody could scrape the reading lists from members of the EA goodreads group and create an exploration reading list with the books that many people have on their reading list but haven’t actually read. Or maybe a reading list with non-fiction books that are suspiciously lacking from EA reading lists.
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.
The worry about EAs reading too much of the same ideas is a good point. I wonder if there are strategies that could help us as a community to explore more literature. For example somebody could scrape the reading lists from members of the EA goodreads group and create an exploration reading list with the books that many people have on their reading list but haven’t actually read. Or maybe a reading list with non-fiction books that are suspiciously lacking from EA reading lists.
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.