Library
Bookshelf
hey! This is my public facing bookshelf. My digital home library. Books I am happy to display to others as a conversation starter. If you have any recommendations based on my taste, please let me know!
Currently Reading
Reasons and Persons
Derek Parfit
Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior
Thomas Parr
Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Read
10/10
Rationality: From AI to Zombies (The Sequences)
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Notes from Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Stay or Leave: Essays On Relationships
The School of Life
9/10
Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
Jorge Luis Borges
Beyond Good and Evil
Friedrich Nietzsche
On The Shortness Of Life
Seneca
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Richard P. Feynman
Unsong
Scott Alexander
There Is No Antimemetics Division
qntm
Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Brief History of Intelligence
Max Solomon Bennett
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
Nick Bostrom
Making Sense
Sam Harris
8/10
Something to Do with Paying Attention
David Foster Wallace
The Death of Ivan Ilych
Leo Tolstoy
The Stranger
Albert Camus
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The Sense of Style
Steven Pinker
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
David Foster Wallace
Why I Write and Other Essays
George Orwell
Permutation City
Greg Egan
Red Heart
Max Harms
Worm
Wildbow
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Tao Te Ching
Lao Tzu
Apology
Plato
Discourses and Selected Writings
Epictetus
The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
Aldous Huxley
1984
George Orwell
Animal Farm
George Orwell
Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman
Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
The School of Life
Quantum Computing Since Democritus
Scott Aaronson
Our Mathematical Universe
Max Tegmark
The Blind Watchmaker
Richard Dawkins
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Otherness and Control in the Age of AGI
Joe Carlsmith
Inadequate Equilibria
Eliezer Yudkowsky
7/10
Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future
Dan Wang
Zero to One
Peter Thiel
The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Franz Kafka
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
David Foster Wallace
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Stories of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
Richard P. Feynman
Ketamine
Bita Moghaddam
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Richard P. Feynman
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories
H.P. Lovecraft
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
Ecce Homo
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Denial of Death
Ernest Becker
The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus
On Bullshit
Harry G. Frankfurt
Free Will
Sam Harris
Waking Up
Sam Harris
This Is Water
David Foster Wallace
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
The School of Life: An Emotional Education
Alain de Botton
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf
Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast
Oscar Wilde
6/10
Neurolinguistics
Giosuè Baggio
The MANIAC
Benjamín Labatut
Simulacra and Simulation
Jean Baudrillard
Man and His Symbols
C.G. Jung
A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking
Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letter to a Christian Nation
Sam Harris
Twelve Angry Men
Reginald Rose
The Crucible
Arthur Miller
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Ursula K. Le Guin
Holes
Louis Sachar
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
Year of Wonders
Geraldine Brooks
Nine Days
Toni Jordan
The Great Zoo of China
Matthew Reilly
5/10
The Symposium
Plato
The Frogs
Aristophanes
White Nights
Fyodor Dostoevsky
4/10
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett
3/10
The Time Machine
H.G. Wells
2/10
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
All About Love
bell hooks
Other Influences
non-book texts which I find frequently resurfacing in my mind
Scott Alexander
nostalgebraist
janus
Gwern
- Spaced Repetition
A small system for making useful ideas stick. The interesting part is what happens after keeping it up for years.
- Long Content
Something to return to rather than finish in one sitting.
- The Scaling Hypothesis
- The Melancholy of Subculture Society
A name for a pattern that is easy to notice and surprisingly hard to describe.
Paul Graham
- How to Do Great Work
Useful questions about what to spend attention on, and how to tell the difference between work that is merely impressive and work that is genuinely interesting.
- The Age of the Essay
Writing as a way of finding out what a thought actually is.
- Keep Your Identity Small
Bret Victor
- Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
A good example of an explanation that needs to be played with, not just read.
- Inventing on Principle
A different way to think about tools: start with what a person should be able to do, then work backwards.
Ted Chiang
- Exhalation
A very quiet way of making a very large idea feel close.
- The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
The gap between remembering an event accurately and understanding what it meant. A longer note can live here without needing its own box or separate page.