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This is: I scraped all public "Effective Altruists" Goodreads reading lists, published by MaxRa on the Effective Altruism Forum.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the idea of scraping the reading lists of the members of the Effective Altruists Goodreads group. The initial motivation was around the idea that EAs might be reading too much of the same books, and we might improve this by finding out which books are read relatively little compared to how many EAs proclaim that they want to read them. I got some positive feedback and got to work. Besides helping a little with improving our exploration of literature, I think the results also serve as an interesting survey of the reading behavior of EAs. Though we might want to keep in mind a possible selection bias for EAs and EA-adjacent people that share their reading behavior on Goodreads.
For those who don’t know Goodreads, it’s a social network where you can share ratings and reviews of the books you’ve read, and organize books in shelves like I have read this! or I want to read this!. It’s quite fun, many EAs are on there and I wholeheartedly recommend joining.
In total, there were 333 349 people in the Effective Altruists Goodreads group, and 257 275 of them had their privacy settings set to completely public, allowing anyone to inspect their reading lists even without being logged in. I checked the Goodreads scraping rules and was good to go.
Before you continue, I invite you to predict the following:
3 from the 10 most read books, except Doing Good Better
a book that relatively many EAs want to read, but few have actually read
Finally, if you have any further ideas for analysis, leave a comment and I’ll be happy to see what I can do. If you want access to the csv file or the Python script I used, I uploaded them here. In this screenshot you see the types of data I have.
Most read books
Here the books that our community already explored a bunch. I would not have expected 1984 and Superintelligence to make it to the Top 5. HPMOR being the least read Harry Potter novel is a slight disappointment.
Most planned to read
Many classics on people’s I want to read this! lists, maybe overall slightly lengthier & more difficult books? Though Superforecasting is not too long and very readable and very excellent in my opinion, so feel free to read this one.
Highest planned to read / have read ratio
These are the books that might be more useful to be read by more EAs, as many say they want to read them, but in proportion the fewest people have actually read them. Of course, there are good reasons why some of those books are read less, e.g. some of them, like The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Probability Theory or The Feynman Lectures on Physics would take me enormously more time to read compared to, say, 1984 (which still took me, a relatively slow reader, something on the order of 10 to 20 hours). Also, the vast majority of the books in this list have only been read by one person, so a score of 11 can be interpreted as one person having read the book and 11 people wanting to read it. Additionally, as of now this list excludes books that have never been read by any EA, as the ratio would be infinite. For those books, see the next section.
If we only allow books with at least 2 reads, we get this list:
Most commonly planned to read books that have not been read by anyone yet
I’ll consider it a big success of this project if some people will have read Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset Energy and Civilization next time I check.
Highest rated books
Here the highest rated of all books that were read at least 10 times. Not too many surprises here, EAs know what's good!
Lowest rated books
Here the same with the highest rated books. Before any fandom feels too ostracized (speaking as somebody who absolutely loved the Eragon saga), I should info...
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