Book and Essay Recommendations

This is a list of books and essays that I've especially liked or that have otherwise had a strong impact on me.

#Books

Edmonds, Parfit

Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

Pinker, The Sense of Style

Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus

Chalmers, The Conscious Mind

Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

Banerjee and Duflo, Poor Economics

Banerjee and Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times

Acemoğlu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail

Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine

Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

MacAskill, Doing Good Better

Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Harari, Sapiens

Bostrom, Superintelligence

Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Isaacson, Steve Jobs

Hawking, A Brief History of Time

qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk

Yudkowsky, Rationality: A-Z

Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Orwell, 1984

Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Huxley, Brave New World

Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Golding, Lord of the Flies

#Short Stories

Borges, The Library of Babel

Borges, The Aleph

Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

Borges, Funes the Memorious

Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

Borges, Death and the Compass

Borges, The Lottery in Babylon

Chiang, Story of Your Life

Chiang, Understand

Chiang, Hell is the Absence of God

Chiang, Seventy-Two Letters

Ngo, The Ants and the Grasshopper

#Essays

Aaronson, The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine

Aaronson, Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity

Gwern, Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning

Hamming, You and Your Research

Feynman, Cargo Cult Science

Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Alexander, Meditations on Moloch

Alexander, Schelling fences and slippery slopes

Alexander, Proving too much

Alexander, The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world?

Alexander, If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics

Alexander, Stop confounding yourself! Stop confounding yourself!

Alexander, 1960: The year the singularity was cancelled

Norvig, On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning

Soares, On Caring

Soares, Rest in Motion

Kokotajlo, Immanuel Kant and the Decision Theory App Store

Sustrik, Soviet-era Jokes, Common Knowledge, Irony

Sustrik, Inadequate Equilibria vs. Governance of the Commons

de Menard, When the Worst Man in the World Writes a Masterpiece

de Menard, The Alchemist and His Quicksilver

Sutton, The Bitter Lesson

Sutton, Verification, The Key to AI

Atiyah, Mathematics in the 20th Century

Harth, Why it's so hard to talk about Consciousness

Singer, The Triviality of the Debate over "Is-Ought" and the Definition of "Moral"

Graham, Cities and Ambition

Lyons, The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning

Graham, How to Work Hard

Wentworth, Being the (Pareto) Best in the World

Gwern, Are Sunk Costs Fallacies?

Gwern, Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning

Turner, Do a cost-benefit analysis of your technology usage

Turner, Lessons I've Learned from Self-Teaching

Nintil, Massive input and/or spaced repetition

Karlsson, How to Think in Writing

Byrnes, Changing the world through slack & hobbies

Matuschak and Nielsen, How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

Borges, Kafka and His Precursors

Borges, The Scandinavian Destiny

Borges, Blindness

Borges, Pascal's Sphere

Borges, The Enigma of Shakespeare