I’ve ranked about 500 as well and I also think the recommendation system sucks. The most common explanation it gives for a book recommendation is that I’ve added some other individual book. I would want it to give me recommendation based off of multiple books based off of what people on the site who also liked those same books also liked. It also almost never updates.
I just read Ben Franklin’s autobiography, aided by textcelerator (made by jimrandomh). I had only read bits and pieces before, and the whole is worthwhile. He was a definite precursor of the LW sort of rationality, and to read in his own words the epistemic and instrumental techniques he employed, and well as the virtues he sought after, is a delight. It was written over two centuries ago, and English has changed since then, but not unrecognizably.
I second the recommendation of Franklin’s autobiography. I also ask that you change rationalism to rationality, because the former refers to something completely different.
I liked that third one (“The 10,000 Year Explosion”), which suggests that human evolution has been very much happening in the last 10K years; I wonder if that’s a mainstream believe now, and/or if there other books about this.
“The Beginning and the End: The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective” by Clément Vidal. Technically this is just a “PhD thesis preprint” but it’s over 350 pages long. A sprawling manuscript in which the author devises a meaning-of-life philosophy based on systems theory, the conquest of the universe by superintelligence, and other ingredients. The discussions of physics and cosmology are unduly dominated by certain “alternative” theories and could have benefited by orthodox criticism, and no doubt much of the rest should be read skeptically too, but overall, this is worth knowing about, if you’re into transhuman cosmo-ethics.
Nonfiction Books Thread
In descending order (reviews on Goodreads):
Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity
Hoffer, The True Believer
Huxley, The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell
Montfort, 10 Print Chr$(205.5+rnd(1)); Goto 10
Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
Good, Good Thinking: The Foundations of Probability and Its Applications
Out of curiosity—you’ve ranked a lot of books on Goodreads. How well does its recommendations algorithm work for you?
Terrible. Their search is also pretty bad (colons, for some reason, are magical characters that make perfectly spelled titles match nothing at all).
I’ve ranked about 500 as well and I also think the recommendation system sucks. The most common explanation it gives for a book recommendation is that I’ve added some other individual book. I would want it to give me recommendation based off of multiple books based off of what people on the site who also liked those same books also liked. It also almost never updates.
I just read Ben Franklin’s autobiography, aided by textcelerator (made by jimrandomh). I had only read bits and pieces before, and the whole is worthwhile. He was a definite precursor of the LW sort of rationality, and to read in his own words the epistemic and instrumental techniques he employed, and well as the virtues he sought after, is a delight. It was written over two centuries ago, and English has changed since then, but not unrecognizably.
I second the recommendation of Franklin’s autobiography. I also ask that you change rationalism to rationality, because the former refers to something completely different.
Done; thanks for catching the typo!
Some non-fiction books I really liked recently that might interest Lesswrong:
Ubersleep: Nap-Based Sleep Schedules and the Polyphasic Lifestyle
Procrastination: Why You Do It, What To Do About It
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
I liked that third one (“The 10,000 Year Explosion”), which suggests that human evolution has been very much happening in the last 10K years; I wonder if that’s a mainstream believe now, and/or if there other books about this.
I tried briefly to find some similar books but couldn’t see any others.
“The Beginning and the End: The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective” by Clément Vidal. Technically this is just a “PhD thesis preprint” but it’s over 350 pages long. A sprawling manuscript in which the author devises a meaning-of-life philosophy based on systems theory, the conquest of the universe by superintelligence, and other ingredients. The discussions of physics and cosmology are unduly dominated by certain “alternative” theories and could have benefited by orthodox criticism, and no doubt much of the rest should be read skeptically too, but overall, this is worth knowing about, if you’re into transhuman cosmo-ethics.
Your description makes it sound like it would be mostly a waste of time and it should go on the very bottom of my reading list.