I'm glad I could help. Feel free to quote me in the annual Rethink Priorities impact analysis.

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.

Regarding your first point, I do worry that strong community norms against having book lists include only male authors risks the perception that female authors that do get included are only there to fulfill some imaginary quota rather than on their merits. Not saying that there isn't an important conversation to be had about fostering diversity of viewpoints and representation along gender or other demographic lines, but in my view that is at least a pretty strong downside to this approach.

First I want to say that I think your original comment and this one both express reasonable views, and do so in a civil manner. (Also, just in case you or anyone else was wondering, I've neither upvoted nor downvoted either comment.)

Also, while I think I disagree with you to some extent on some points, I think your comments have made me think more about things worth thinking about. I think they've also improved this post, via prompting me to add the following to the introductory section:

(Edit: I think that recommendations that aren't commonly mentioned in EA are particularly valuable, holding general usefulness and EA-relevance constant. Same goes for recommendations of books by non-male, non-white, and/or non-WEIRD authors. See this comment thread.) 

(I added part of that after your first comment, and the second sentence after reading your second comment.)

Also, I acknowledge that there are two separate (though related) points you're highlighting, and that my reply didn't explicitly address the gender diversity part. 

You only list male authors and lists that only feature male authors: all of them are [also] WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic).

I believe this is indeed true. (The part I'm slightly unsure of is whether all authors meet all WEIRD criteria, but in any case it definitely heavily skews WEIRD.) I also hadn't specifically noticed that this was the case for all/almost all of these listed authors, so it does seem useful to me that you highlighted it. And I do agree that, all else equal, it'd be better to have more diversity on each of these dimensions on someone's reading list.

One thing I'd say in response is that there's more demographic diversity in the other forms of content I consume (in particular, papers, podcasts, and posts) than in these books. Though those other forms of content I consume do still skew somewhat towards male and WEIRD (and also white).   

I think three ways to address that are for me to:

1. Get more recommendations for content to consume that's by authors (or podcasters, or whatever) with other demographic characteristics
2. Make more effort to actively seek out ideas for content to consume that's from authors with other demographic characteristics
3. Factor in the demographic characteristics of an author when deciding which of multiple specific pieces of content I should spend time consuming

I'd be very happy if (1) happened. And I think hopefully this post should contribute to it happening, especially now that I've added an edit prompted by your comments. I think your own first comment already helps with that, which I appreciate. 

I think I should also do a bit of (2) and (3). (For a start, I've just now downloaded Obama's A Promised Land, and made a note to maybe read Strangers Drowning.) But I'm unsure how much, because I'm unsure how much weight I should give to demographic diversity relative to other factors when making tradeoffs about how I spend my time. And it just does seem to be the case that, in many of the fields I want to learn about, most of the most prominent authors - meaning prominent among e.g. the relevant academics, not just EAs - are male, WEIRD, and white. And I think there's value in reading things from the most prominent authors. 

But I'm personally inclined not to debate here precisely how much of (2) and (3) people should do, and the precise extent to which the prominent authors in these fields skew male, WEIRD, and white. This is because I'm concerned that that might result in a long and tense thread, partly due to this being a written medium with an audience and a lot of people not personally knowing each other, rather than a face-to-face conversation. 

(I'm not trying to silence such a debate; it can be had here; I'm just personally inclined for it to not happen here. Readers may also be interested in posts tagged diversity and inclusion.)

(I'd also like to pre-emptively ask readers to keep in mind that it's easy to interpret things overly harshly when they're written down on the internet by someone you don't know personally. If you think I or Hauke are saying things that are stupid or horrible, please seriously consider the hypothesis that that's not really what I or Hauke mean, or that we just phrased things poorly, or something like that.)

But on the margin, if this particular long general list became another canonical one as had been suggested...

Do you mean suggested by me? I definitely didn't mean to suggest that. My hope is that this list will be useful for some people, and that it'll prompt more people to publish book recommendations/anti-recommendations, not that this comes to be one of 4 lists that pretty much all EAs draw from. As I say near the start:

These rankings are of course only weak evidence of how useful you'll find these books

[...]

I'd welcome comments which point to reviews/summaries/notes of these books, provide commenters' own thoughts on these books, or share other book recommendations/anti-recommendations. I'd also welcome people making their own posts along the lines of this one.

And I think it should be easy to avoid this list becoming overly canonical; I think it'd be really easy for a lot of people to make lists like this. I think most people could put together something like a scaled-down version of this (perhaps as a shortform) in ~30 minutes if they wanted to, especially if they don't try to include all relevant books but rather just the top picks, and don't try to rank them all but rather use rougher buckets like "top" and "also good". And people who've read a lot could put together something as extensive as this post is a couple hours.

Or people could even just post on the Forum links to Goodreads profiles, or things like that. (Personally, I'd be more likely to look at such profiles if they were highlighted on the Forum.)

And I think that doing the above things is also probably one of the best ways to address the fact that "The previous Wiblin, etc. lists are already pretty canonical in the community".

(Edit: Oh, maybe you were referring to Aaron Gertler's comment? If so, I'd point out that he's commenting at a point when very few lists like this exist on the Forum; if more people create lists like this - which I hope happens - then that'd reduce the special prominence that this particular list gets.)

But I think when prioritizing their reading lists people should add a "neglectedness in the EA community score" to avoid echo chambers. 

Yeah, I agree with this.

Consider how much original insight and valuable disentanglement research you can really add if you spend years reading the same 50 pop non-fiction books that everyone else has read. 

As noted in my other comment, I really don't think that all things on this list are widely read in EA. 

And I think that reading (let's say ) 5-30 books on lists like this one (of which there will hopefully be more in future!) can also be seen as somewhat akin to doing an undergrad unit or two to get up to speed on a new field. It seems worth noting that:

• Many fields have a set of works that most people working in that field are expected to have read some fraction of
  • although people can each read different particular works from that set
• EA contained a lot of very unfamiliar ideas to me when I first joined. 
  • I actually did almost immediately start thinking of original research and post ideas, but it turned out that most were reinventing the wheel or missing key considerations. I think reading books from this list really did help me "get up to speed" and start contributing in better ways.
    • I acknowledge that it's possible I could've gotten similar or better gains from reading books that are currently less often recommended. But I do think some of the often recommended books are unusually useful for the sort of work I want to do. And I think I would've almost certainly been worse off if I'd had no recommendations from EAs (as opposed to "the standard recommendations plus additional, carefully chosen but less common recommendations"; I'd be keen to see us move towards that state, as noted elsewhere).
  • It may be worth noting that I got into EA from Western Australia and without having studied much university-level econ, philosophy, math, computer science, etc. The process I went through might be less necessary for someone based in Oxford, London, or San Francisco, or someone with a more math-y background.

Generally, people should read more papers and write more literature reviews themselves than reading more popular non-fiction.

For me, there's hardly a tradeoff between these things: I listen to audiobooks in times of my day when I can't do much else, e.g. when doing chores or on public transport. I could consume papers during this time using text-to-voice, but obviously text-to-voice isn't as good as an actual voice actor. (I do spend a decent chunk of the rest of my time reading papers.)

Also, that comment seems to presume that most or all readers of this list will want to be researchers? I think a lot of EAs should be doing things other than research. And for them, it may really make sense for them to: 

• mostly consume nicely packaged and engaging summaries of key ideas from a wide range of fields
• sometimes supplement that by reading papers on particular things
• rarely or never write literature reviews.

(Less importantly, although this reading list does lean heavily towards popular non-fiction, it isn't entirely popular non-fiction. E.g., it includes MacAskill's thesis and The Strategy of Conflict.)

Not only are all the authors male and WEIRD, they're also all white presenting. 

I haven't read everything on your list, but I broadly agree with your rankings for the things I have read (with some tweaks - e.g. I'd probably put Inadequate Equilibria higher and Thinking Fast and Slow lower). 

I feel a bit confused still about how many/which things should be canonical. Maybe I want canonical ideas rather than canonical books? E.g. I think some of the ideas in the sequences are  important, and should be more widely known/used even in EA. But I also think it contains some less important stuff, and some people find the presentation offputting (while others love it). So I guess I'd ideally like there to be a few different presentations of the same ideas, and people can read the presentation that works best for them (bold academic book, super-well-evidenced academic papers, spicey blog posts, fanfic etc.). Maybe we now have this in some domains - e.g. you listed several presentations of AI safety?

I won't do a full  list of things I like right now, but some quick thoughts: 

• I think The Great Courses can sometimes be great: I remember particularly liking one on biology. My understanding of biology overall is still quite imprecise, but the course gave me images of how a bunch of cellular biology works mechanistically which I think would be good scaffolding for a better understanding. I also really liked one on Chinese history (I think this one, which is a bit broader but still quite China-focused). I think the quality varies a bit between courses though.
• I also love the In Our Time podcast . Especially the science ones - they have a version of the podcast that's only science. I like that they have several academics, which means you can get a variety of perspectives, and which makes me less worried that I'm only hearing one side of a debate.

P.s. I agree with a lot of your points in the other comment too, and I'm glad you posted this list!

Yeah, I'm unsure, and think it's a good question. I'm also guessing it's been discussed on the Forum before, though I can't recall such discussions off the top of my head. How to use the Forum seems to not mention this issue - which is understandable, as it's not one of the most important things about how to use the Forum.

I think I usually just vote based on my own views, without taking into account the current karma level of the post/comment. 

I think the exception is when a post/comment is at negative karma. (Though, off the top of my head, I can't remember the last time I upvoted to "correct" a post having negative karma - perhaps it actually hasn't happened before.) The difference between -7 and 1 (for example) feels much larger the difference between 1 and 9; hitting the negatives seem to send a strong signal that the community really doesn't like this, which is sometimes warranted, but I feel like there should be a relatively high bar for that. I think this is partly but not only because negative karma means a comment isn't visible by default (without actively expanding the box). 

I guess there are probably also cases where I think a comment is bad enough to warrant a downvote, but not so bad that it warrants being pushed into the negative. Then I'd probably downvote if the current karma is above 1, but not if the current karma is 1 or below. (I can't remember specific instances of this, but I'm guessing it happens.)

One thing that seems worth noting is that I suspect that it's already the case that people aren't simply judging comments and posts on their merit. Instead, I suspect there can be positive or negative momentum, either from the fact that things with more karma appear higher up or from the same things that drive information cascades and fads. And I think negative karma is a somewhat stable equilibrium, partly because the comment isn't visible by default. If these things are true, then pushing karma back up from negatives or down from quite high positives might in a sense make it so that other people assess the comment in a more "independent" way. 

(Though I'm not sure I'd ever be inclined to push karma down from quite high positives solely for this reason; I think I'd only do it to push things up from negative.)

(Also, I acknowledge that this comment is just a long discussion of the dynamics of somewhat meaningless internet points!)

I was an early voter and gave a weak upvote, so I think there is probably a single individual who strongly downvoted. I wouldn't worry about it or take too much from it. It's dangerous to extrapolate too much from a single individual and I think you'll find people will quite like this post overall if you give it a bit more time.

I liked this post because I think it probably has helped me decide a few things where I was previously unsure:

• I've been thinking about reading Rationality: From AI to Zombies but wasn't too sure if it was worth it, but now I think I will just do it.
• I've also been quite unsure about Human Compatible vs The Alignment Problem but I think I may go for the latter. I am somewhat familiar with the AI arguments but certainly not "4 books familiar".
• I have The Precipice and have read some of it which I found useful, but I may now delve in again to ensure I've got everything of use. Also I want to have a look at what you've written about it (given that it has been so useful to you).