Science & Theory

Mathematics, computer science and artificial intelligence

• Douglas Hofstadter (1979): Gödel, Escher, Bach.
• Robert Axelrod (1984): The Evolution of Cooperation.
• Valentino Braitenberg (1984): Vehicles.

More technical material

I believe that in technical fields, unless you are willing to accept a very superficial understanding, one should start out by taking university courses or reading textbooks. Most technical fields have a canon of core subjects that usually cover those topics that are most useful and most widely used throughout the disciplines. In pure mathematics, these seem to be (linear) algebra, calculus/analysis, combinatorics/discrete math, logic, geometry/topology, and number theory. In computer science, they might be combinatorics/discrete math, logic, theoretical computer science, practical computer science/algorithm design, technical computer science (hardware and operating systems), etc. Any of these subjects are ripe with amazing insights and so time spent on learning these areas is generally spent well, especially if you aspire to work in some technical discipline. Nevertheless, I am not going to recommend a textbook for many of these subjects. This is mostly because I usually do not know sufficiently many textbooks to add anything to the recommendations you can find elsewhere. Also, for many readers it’s probably better to take university courses, anyway. Still, here are a few recommendations where either the topic is underappreciated or I do feel qualified to recommend a text over its alternatives.

• Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.
• Marcus Hutter (2004): Universal Artificial Intelligence.
• The no free lunch theorems

  • David H. Wolpert and William G. Macready (1997): No Free Lunch Theorems for Optimization.

Decision theory

• Martin Peterson: An Introduction to Decision Theory.
• Arif Ahmed (2014): Evidence, Decision and Causality.

Evolution

• Richard Dawkins (1976): The Selfish Gene.
• Joseph Henrich (2015): The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. (I didn’t find ch. 14-17 quite as interesting as the rest.)

How to do science

• Eliezer Yudkowsky’s sequences, edited into the book Rationality: From AI to Zombies.
• Lueke Muehlhauser (2011): Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently.
• Ole Bjørn Rekdal (2014): Academic Citation Practice: A Sinking Sheep?

Human mind and society

• Before being impressed by all the interesting empirical results of the other references in this section, the reader should learn about the replication crisis in science, in which many famous and long-standing results (especially in psychology and medicine) turned out to be hard to replicate and thereby potentially invalid. Examples of famous theories that turned out to be hard to replicate are given here.
• Steven Pinker (1997): How the mind works.
• Steven Pinker (2011): The Better Angels of our Nature – Why Violence has Declined.
• Daniel Kahneman (2011): Thinking, Fast and Slow.
• Trope and Liberman (2010): Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance.
• Moral foundations theory.
• Robin Hanson (2016): The Age of Em. (Even though this book is not focused on current people and societies, it taught me a lot about them.)
• Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels (2016): Democracy for Realists. (summary)
• Angus Deaton (2013): The Great Escape. Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality.

Ethical Theory & Consciousness

• Brian Tomasik: Hedonistic vs. Preference Utilitarianism
• Brian Tomasik: Which Computations do I care about?
• Brian Tomasik: Dissolving Confusion about Consciousness.
• Daniel Dennett (1991): Consciousness Explained.
• Douglas Hofstadter (2007): I am a strange loop.
• (Bengt Brülde (1998): The human good.)
• (My own paper on Formalizing preference utilitarianism in physical world models.)

Effective Altruism

The following two texts present introductions to effective altruism.

• Scott Alexander: Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others…
• William MacAskill (2015): Doing Good Better.

There are also some particular cause areas that people should read about. Much of this is essentially moral philosophy.

• Factory-farming is obvious…
• Brian Tomasik: The importance of wild-animal suffering
• Artificial Intelligence
  • Tim Urban: The AI Revolution, pt. 1 and 2.
  • Nick Bostrom (2014): Superintelligence.
• (Brian Tomasik: Is There Suffering in fundamental physics?)
• Digital sentience
  • Brian Tomasik: Do Video-Game Characters Matter Morally?
  • Brian Tomasik: A Dialogue on Suffering Subroutines.

Rationality, Cognitive Biases & Personal Effectiveness

Note that while I do think that some “productivity hacks” etc. are better than others, what works for me often won’t work for you.

• Eliezer Yudkowsky’s sequences, edited into the book Rationality: From AI to Zombies.
• The writings of Scott Alexander – an overview of which can be found here. Some examples of my favorites are:
  • The Noncentral Fallacy
  • Against Tulip Subsidies
• Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends and Influence People.
• John Perry: Structured Procrastination.

Biographies

I don’t recommend reading biographies all that much, because they don’t attempt to convey general-purpose transferable knowledge and are thus usually ineffective. However, some biographies do teach quite a lot. Also, many people (including myself) find biographies more fun to read. So, here are some of the most informative biographies I have read:

• Richard P. Feynman: “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character.
• Richard P. Feynman: “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”: Further Adventures of a Curious Character.
• Kevin Mitnick with William L. Simon: Ghost in the Wires.
• Doxiadis et al.: Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

Other Interesting Resources On What to Read

• Brian Tomasik: A Few Useful Topics to Read About.
• The LessWrong community: The Best Textbooks on Every Subject.
• Julia Galef: A taxonomy of ways books change your worldview.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky’s recommendations.
• Luke Muelhauser’s recommendations.
• Robin Hanson: Read a Classic.
• I don’t know other services for exchanging book recommendations, but I like Goodreads, which helps me record what I plan to read, see what others read and also recommends books. Diigo also performs the two former tasks, but I only have one “friend” there. I also find Amazon’s recommendations useful.