Which five books would you recommend to an 18 year old?

I don't think the idea Anna suggests is to pick books you think young people should read, but to actually ask the best people what books they read that influenced them a lot.

Things that come to my mind include GEB, HPMOR, The Phantom Tolbooth, Feynman. Also, which surprises me but is empirically true for many people, Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape" seems to have been the first book a number of top people I know read on their journey to doing useful things.

But either way I'd want more empirical data.

I think the challenge with a project like this is that it is not 'neutral' in the way most EA causes are.

Most EA causes I can think of are focused on some version of saving lives or reducing suffering. Although there may be disagreement about how to best save lives or reduce suffering (and what things suffer), there is almost no disagreement that we should save lives and reduce suffering. Although this is not a philosophically neutral position, it's 'neutral' in that you will find a vanishingly small number of people who disagree with the goal of saving lives and reducing suffering.

To put it another way, it's 'neutral' because everyone values saving lives and reducing suffering so everyone feels like EA promotes their values.

Specific books, unless they are complete milk-toast, are not neutral in this way and implicitly promote particular ideas. Much of introductory EA literature, if nothing else, assumes positive act utilitarianism (although within the community there are many notable voices opposed to this position). And if we move away from EA books to other books we think are valuable, they are also going to drift further from 'neutral' values everyone can get behind.

This is not necessarily bad, but it is a project that doesn't seem to fit well to me with much of the EA brand because whatever impact it has will have to be measured in terms of values not everyone agrees with.

For example, lots of people in the comments list HPMOR, The Sequences, or GEB. I like all of these a lot and would like to see more people read them, but that's because I value the ideas and behaviors they encourage. You don't have to look very far in EA though to find people who don't agree with the rationalist project and wouldn't like to see money spent on sending people copies of these books.

In a position like that, how do you rate the effectiveness of such a project? The impact will be measured in terms of value transmission around values that not everyone agrees on spreading. Unless you limit yourself to books that just promote the idea that we can save lives, reduce suffering, and be a little smarter about how we go about that, I think you'll necessarily attract a lot of controversy in terms of evaluation.

I'm not saying I'm not in favor of people taking on projects like this. I just want to make sure we're aware it's not a normal EA project because the immediate outcome seems to be idea transmission and it's going to be hard to evaluate what ideas are even worth spreading.

We got close to doing this when I was at MIRI but just didn't have the outreach capacity to do it. The closest we got was to print a bunch of paperback copies of (the first 17 chapters of) just one book, HPMoR, and we shipped copies of that to contacts at various universities etc. I think we distributed 1000-2000 copies, not sure if more happened after I left.

Love this exercise (I read a non-fiction book a week, so I think about this a lot!). I'd definitely put an EA book in the top 5, but I think we get more differentiated advantage by adding non-EA books too. My list:

1. On Direction and Measuring Your Impact—Doing Good Better
2. On Past-Facing Pattern Matching from History—Sapiens
3. On Future-Facing Tech Trends—Machine, Platform, Crowd
4. On Prioritization and Process—Running Lean
5. On Communication—An Everyone Culture

Honorable Mentions:

1. Influence/Hooked/Thinking Fast and Slow (on behavioral psychology)
2. World After Capital/Homo Deus/The Inevitable (more macro trends)
3. Designing Your Life (process)
4. Nonviolent Communication (communication)

1- The Singularity is Near changed everything for me, made me quit my job and go to med school. I've since purchased it for many people, but I no longer do. Instead, I have been sending people copies of Home Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. Broader scope, more sociology, psychology and ethics. 2- The Selfish Gene (I think this moored me to reality closer than Steven Pinker's work) 3- The Black Swan (Thinking Fast and Slow, Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational etc are probably better explications of irrationality, while Taleb is a pretty clear victim of his own criticisms, but Taleb's style really shook me and I think it is the best for changing minds.) 4- Waking Up (A careful reading of Ken Wilber has been most influential for me, but I don't recommend it because it needs a very skeptical eye. I've been lucky. Waking Up does most of the same work, but doesn't get lost in the rabbit hole.) 5- Doing Good Better (not a shocker, but it really is an accessible slam dunk)

I could really have benefited from a list like this three or four years ago! I wasted a lot of time reading prestigious fiction (Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses) and academic philosophy – none of which I liked or understood – as well as a lot of sketchy pop psych.

If Doing Good Better, 80,000 Hours, The Life You Can Save, Animal Liberation, and Superintelligence are already taken, then I’d say the five most influential works I’ve read are: All of Steven Pinker’s books The Art and Craft of Problem Solving Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity Nick Bostrom’s Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?, Infinite Ethics, and Astronomical Waste, (I would add Anthropic Bias if I could understand it) The Tell-Tale Brain

Runner-ups include: To Be a Machine, Freakonomics, 1984, Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms, The One World Schoolhouse, Computability Theory, Human Accomplishment, Linear Algebra and Its Applications, Spivak’s Calculus, The Willpower Instinct, Thinking Fast and Slow, The Nurture Assumption, Introduction to Algorithms, Practical Programming (this is about weightlifting – not CS), Surely You’re Joking, Innumeracy and also Beyond Numeracy, An Anthropologist on Mars, The God Delusion, The Righteous Mind, Poor Economics, Mathematics 1001, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, and Reasons and Persons. It’s not a book, but I feel like SlateStarCodex also belongs on this list.

Another good vegan book is Eating Animals.

I imagine I would also have been enthralled by a book like Soonish about emerging technologies (it hasn’t come out yet.)

For me personally, and sticking just to originals, and not compilations, it would be:

1. Rationality from A to Z by Eliezer Yudkowsky
2. Practical Ethics by Peter Singer
3. Surely You Must be Joking Mr Feynmann by Richard Feynman
4. Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins
5. Elbow Room by Daniel Dennett

I'll give a shout out to A Farewell to Alms (2007) by the economist Gregory Clark.

It's something of a precursor to the more often read The Better Angels of Our Nature, Sapiens and Capital in the 21st Century, and in important respects better than all of them. It really changed my view of the world and history when I was young.

The later sections are speculative at best, but the first two thirds on a long term history of how humanity has gradually escaped poverty are top shelf.

If you want to dig deeper into this topic and especially the under-rated endogenous growth theory I can strongly recommend reading Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz.

I should also give a shout out to the book that got me into EA when I was 13: Writings on an Ethical Life by Peter Singer.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - Read it in high school and found it's influenced my thinking since, especially the part about keeping promises to yourself. Persepolis - Read it when I was 18 and found it a useful fictional introduction to a culture very different from my own. Many other books could do a similar job. Getting to Yes - Changed how I think about negotiation. The Gospel of John - Changed how I think about everything. Deep Work - I read this recently, and while I don't agree with everything (I think the author overreaches occasionally), I do think it would have been useful at 18.

That's a damn good list. Would anything from the poverty world make sense? There's More Than Good Intentions and Poor Economics. The latter probably gets too into nitty gritty and the former may be too repetitive, but something from that area that does not come pre-digested by a philosopher might make sense.

Nick Beckstead reviews audiobooks here.

His top 8 (in rough order):

1. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

2. The Power Broker by Robert Caro

3. Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall

4. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

5. Science in the Twentieth Century: A Social-Intellectual Survey by Steven Goldman (The Great Courses)

6. The Moral Animal by Robert Wright

7. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman

8. Honorable mention: The podcast EconTalk by Russ Roberts

Another idea for reaching out to young people.

Here are some of my favorite books.

Before you get too excited about this idea, I want you to recall your days at school and how well it turned out when the last generation of thinkers tried this.

I'd also appreciate additional guidance on "books for getting literate in the stuff you need in order to understand the recommended books." Sometimes the stuff that follows "lemme just do a little back-of-the-envelope math here" kinda runs away from me. (e.g. https://rationalaltruist.com/2013/05/10/what-is-the-return-on-giving/)

I do quite like Robert Ornstein's The Evolution of Consciousness.

Thinking of books that had a big impact on me, and that I think I would endorse:

• Godel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
• The Sequences, Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
• The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins
• Diaspora, Greg Egan

I also think the Culture novels, and the 80,000 Hours book, could be good.

Lots of books about which direction you might want to self modify in. Are there good books about the outside view on self modification? What are metrics that people have tried? (And importantly what are popular ones we know don't work?) What effect sizes are reasonable given heritability and how can you measure them?

Even just a collection of which things with have evidence of high vs low malleability would be great.

What other considerations are relevant? This seems like 80ks wheelhouse.