Prompted by a friend’s question about my reading history, I’ve been thinking about what shaped the worldview I have today. This has been a productive exercise, which I recommend to others. Although I worry that some of what’s written below is post-hoc confabulation, at the very least it’s forced me to pin down what I think I learned from each of the sources listed, which I expect will help me track how my views change from here on. This blog post focuses on non-fiction books (and some other writing); I’ve also written a blog post on how fiction has influenced me.
My first strong intellectual influence was Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writings on Less Wrong (now collected in Rationality: from AI to Zombies). I still agree with manyofhiscoreclaims, but don’t buy into the overarching narratives as much. In particular, the idea of “rationality” doesn’t play a big role in my worldview any more. Instead I focus on specific habits and tools for thinking well (as in Superforecasters), and creating communities with productive epistemic standards (a focus of less rationalist accounts of reason and science, e.g. The Enigma of Reason and TheStructure of Scientific Revolutions).
Two other strong influences around that time were Scott Alexander’s writings on tribalisminpolitics, and Robin Hanson’s work on signalling (particularly Elephant in the Brain), both of which are now foundational to my worldview. Both are loosely grounded in evolutionary psychology, although not reliant on it. More generally, even if I’m suspicious of many individual claims from evolutionary psychology, the idea that humans are continuous with animals is central to my worldview (see Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony and Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?). In particular, it has shaped my views on naturalistic ethics (via a variety of sources, with Wright’s The Moral Animal being perhaps the most central).
Another big worldview question is: how does the world actually change? At one point I bought into techno-economic determinism about history, based on reading big-picture books like Guns, Germs and Steel and The Silk Roads, and also because of my understanding of the history of science (e.g. the prevalence of multiple discovery). Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy nudged me towards thinking more about cultural factors; so did books like The Dream Machine and The Idea Factory, which describe how many technologies I take for granted were constructed. And reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy made me start thinking about the large-scale patterns in intellectual history (on which The Modern Mind further shaped my views).
This paved the way for me to believe that there’s room to have a comparable influence on our current world. Here I owe a lot to Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation (and to a lesser extent its sequels), Peter Thiel’s talks and essays (and to a lesser extent his book Zero to One), and Paul Graham’s essays. My new perspective is similar to the standard “SiliconValleymindset”, but focusing more on the role of ideas than technologies. To repurpose the well-known quote: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct philosopher.”
Here’s a more complete list of nonfiction books which have influenced me, organised by topic (although I’ve undoubtedly missed some). I’m no longer updating this post, but here’s a list of books I’ve enjoyed more recently. I welcome recommendations, whether they’re books that fit in with these lists, or books that fill gaps in them!
On ethics:
The Righteous Mind
Technology and the Virtues
Reasons and Persons
What Money Can’t Buy
The Precipice
On human evolution:
The Enigma of Reason
The Human Advantage
Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony
The Secret of our Success
Human Evolution (Dunbar)
The Mating Mind
The Symbolic Species
On human minds and thought:
Rationality: from AI to Zombies
The Elephant in the Brain
How to Create a Mind
Why Buddhism is True
The Blank Slate
The Language Instinct
The Stuff of Thought
The Mind is Flat
Superforecasting
Thinking, Fast and Slow
On other sciences:
Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies
Superintelligence
The Alignment Problem
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
The Moral Animal
Ending Aging
Improbable Destinies
The Selfish Gene
The Blind Watchmaker
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
My intellectual influences
Link post
Prompted by a friend’s question about my reading history, I’ve been thinking about what shaped the worldview I have today. This has been a productive exercise, which I recommend to others. Although I worry that some of what’s written below is post-hoc confabulation, at the very least it’s forced me to pin down what I think I learned from each of the sources listed, which I expect will help me track how my views change from here on. This blog post focuses on non-fiction books (and some other writing); I’ve also written a blog post on how fiction has influenced me.
My first strong intellectual influence was Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writings on Less Wrong (now collected in Rationality: from AI to Zombies). I still agree with many of his core claims, but don’t buy into the overarching narratives as much. In particular, the idea of “rationality” doesn’t play a big role in my worldview any more. Instead I focus on specific habits and tools for thinking well (as in Superforecasters), and creating communities with productive epistemic standards (a focus of less rationalist accounts of reason and science, e.g. The Enigma of Reason and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
Two other strong influences around that time were Scott Alexander’s writings on tribalism in politics, and Robin Hanson’s work on signalling (particularly Elephant in the Brain), both of which are now foundational to my worldview. Both are loosely grounded in evolutionary psychology, although not reliant on it. More generally, even if I’m suspicious of many individual claims from evolutionary psychology, the idea that humans are continuous with animals is central to my worldview (see Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony and Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?). In particular, it has shaped my views on naturalistic ethics (via a variety of sources, with Wright’s The Moral Animal being perhaps the most central).
Another big worldview question is: how does the world actually change? At one point I bought into techno-economic determinism about history, based on reading big-picture books like Guns, Germs and Steel and The Silk Roads, and also because of my understanding of the history of science (e.g. the prevalence of multiple discovery). Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy nudged me towards thinking more about cultural factors; so did books like The Dream Machine and The Idea Factory, which describe how many technologies I take for granted were constructed. And reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy made me start thinking about the large-scale patterns in intellectual history (on which The Modern Mind further shaped my views).
This paved the way for me to believe that there’s room to have a comparable influence on our current world. Here I owe a lot to Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation (and to a lesser extent its sequels), Peter Thiel’s talks and essays (and to a lesser extent his book Zero to One), and Paul Graham’s essays. My new perspective is similar to the standard “Silicon Valley mindset”, but focusing more on the role of ideas than technologies. To repurpose the well-known quote: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct philosopher.”
Here’s a more complete list of nonfiction books which have influenced me, organised by topic (although I’ve undoubtedly missed some). I’m no longer updating this post, but here’s a list of books I’ve enjoyed more recently. I welcome recommendations, whether they’re books that fit in with these lists, or books that fill gaps in them!
On ethics:
The Righteous Mind
Technology and the Virtues
Reasons and Persons
What Money Can’t Buy
The Precipice
On human evolution:
The Enigma of Reason
The Human Advantage
Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony
The Secret of our Success
Human Evolution (Dunbar)
The Mating Mind
The Symbolic Species
On human minds and thought:
Rationality: from AI to Zombies
The Elephant in the Brain
How to Create a Mind
Why Buddhism is True
The Blank Slate
The Language Instinct
The Stuff of Thought
The Mind is Flat
Superforecasting
Thinking, Fast and Slow
On other sciences:
Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies
Superintelligence
The Alignment Problem
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
The Moral Animal
Ending Aging
Improbable Destinies
The Selfish Gene
The Blind Watchmaker
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
Quantum Computing Since Democritus
On science itself:
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The End of Science
The Fabric of Reality
The Beginning of Infinity
Reinventing Discovery
The Dream Machine
The Idea Factory
On philosophy:
A History of Western Philosophy
The Intentional Stance
From Bacteria to Bach and Back
Good and Real
The Big Picture
Consciousness and the Social Brain
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
On history and economics:
The Shortest History of Europe
A Farewell to Alms
The Technology Trap
Iron, Steam and Money
The Enlightened Economy
The Commanding Heights
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Modern Mind
23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism
Why are the prices so damn high?
The Silk Roads
Sapiens
The Historical Figure of Jesus
On politics and society:
Destined for War
Prisoners of Geography
How Democracy Ends
Why Nations Fail
Factfulness
What Terrorists Want
The Lexus and the Olive Tree
Bowling Alone
Antifragile
The Female Eunuch
On life, love, etc:
Deep Work
Man’s Search for Meaning
More Than Two
Authentic Happiness
Happiness by Design
Written in History
Other:
Age of Em
Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization
Surely you’re Joking, Mr Feynman
Impro
Never Split the Difference