Principles by Ray Dalio (I read the PDF that leaked from bridge water. I haven’t even looked at the actual book.)
My starter kit for people who want to build the core skills of the mind / personal effectiveness stuff (I reread all of these, for reminders, every 2 years or so):
Getting things Done: the Art of Stress-free Productivity
Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff — Totally changed the way I think about language and metaphor and frames when I read it in college. Helped me understand that there are important kinds of knowledge that aren’t explicit.
I really like Language, Truth and Logic, by A.J. Ayer. It’s an old book (1936) and it’s silly in some ways. It’s basically an early pro-empiricism manifesto, and I think many of its arguments are oversimplified, overconfident, or wrong. Even so, it does a great job of teaching some core mental motions of analytic philosophy. And its motivating intuitions feel familiar—I suspect that if 25-year-old Ayer got transported to the present, given internet access etc., we would see him on LessWrong pretty quick.
Do you have any non-fiction book recommendations?
The two best books on Rationality:
The Sequences
Principles by Ray Dalio (I read the PDF that leaked from bridge water. I haven’t even looked at the actual book.)
My starter kit for people who want to build the core skills of the mind / personal effectiveness stuff (I reread all of these, for reminders, every 2 years or so):
Getting things Done: the Art of Stress-free Productivity
Nonviolent Communication: a Language for Life
Focusing
Thinking, Fast and Slow
I note that Principles and Getting things Done are not on CFAR’s reading list, even though the rest are.
But we’ve already read all of those!
Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff — Totally changed the way I think about language and metaphor and frames when I read it in college. Helped me understand that there are important kinds of knowledge that aren’t explicit.
I really like Language, Truth and Logic, by A.J. Ayer. It’s an old book (1936) and it’s silly in some ways. It’s basically an early pro-empiricism manifesto, and I think many of its arguments are oversimplified, overconfident, or wrong. Even so, it does a great job of teaching some core mental motions of analytic philosophy. And its motivating intuitions feel familiar—I suspect that if 25-year-old Ayer got transported to the present, given internet access etc., we would see him on LessWrong pretty quick.