Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: A ranked list of all EA-relevant (audio)books I've read , published by MichaelA on the AI Alignment Forum.
Or: "50+ EA-relevant books your doctor doesn't want you to know about"
This post lists all the EA-relevant books I've read since learning about EA,[1] in roughly descending order of how useful I perceive/remember them being to me. (In reality, I mostly listened to these as audiobooks, but I'll say "books I've read" for simplicity.) I also include links to where you can get each book, as well as remarks and links to reviews/summaries/notes on some books.
This is not quite a post of book recommendations, because:
These rankings are of course only weak evidence of how useful you'll find these books[2]
I list all EA-relevant books I've read, including those that I didn't find very useful
Let me know if you want more info on why I found something useful or not so useful.
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. (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'll continue to update this post as I finish more EA-relevant books.
My thanks to Aaron Gertler for sort-of prompting me to make this list, and then later suggesting I change it from a shortform to a top-level post.
The list
Or: "Michael admits to finding a Harry Potter fan fiction more useful than ~15 books that were written by professors, are considered classics, or both"
The Precipice, by Ord, 2020
See here for a list of things I've written that summarise, comment on, or take inspiration from parts of The Precipice.
I recommend reading the ebook or physical book rather than audiobook, because the footnotes contain a lot of good content and aren't included in the audiobook
The book Superintelligence may have influenced me more, but that’s just due to the fact that I read it very soon after getting into EA, whereas I read The Precipice after already learning a lot. I’d now recommend The Precipice first.
See here for some thoughts on this and other nuclear-risk-related books, and here for some thoughts on this and other authoritarianism-related books.
Superforecasting, by Tetlock & Gardner, 2015
How to Measure Anything, by Hubbard, 2011
Rationality: From AI to Zombies, by Yudkowsky, 2006-2009
I.e., “the sequences”
Superintelligence, by Bostrom, 2014
Maybe this would've been a little further down the list if I’d already read The Precipice
Expert Political Judgement, by Tetlock, 2005
I read this after having already read Superforecasting, yet still found it very useful
Normative Uncertainty, by MacAskill, 2014
This is actually a thesis, rather than a book
I assume it's now a better idea to read MacAskill, Bykvist, and Ord's book on the same subject, which is available as a free PDF
Though I haven't read the book version myself
Secret of Our Success, by Henrich, 2015
See also this interesting Slate Star Codex review
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, by Henrich, 2020
See also the Wikipedia page on the book, this review on LessWrong, and my notes on the book.
I rank Secret of Our Success as more useful to me, but that may be partly because I read it first; if I only read either this book or Secret of Our Success, I'm not sure which I'd find more useful.
See here for some thoughts on this and other authoritarianism-related books.
The Strategy of Conflict, by Schelling, 1960
See here for my notes on this book, and h...
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