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.
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.