As a fellow “back reader” of Yudkowsky, I have a handful of books to add to your recommendations:
Engines Of Creation by K. Eric Drexler
Great Mambo Chicken and The Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis
EY has cited both at one time or another as the books that ‘made him a transhumanist’. His early concept of future shock levels is probably based in no small part on the structure of these two books. The Sequences themselves borrow a ton from Drexler, and you could argue that the entire ‘AI risk’ vs. nanotech split from the extropians represented an argument about whether AI causes nanotech or nanotech causes AI.
I’d also like to recommend a few more books that postdate The Sequences but as works of history help fill in a lot of context:
Both of these are thoroughly well researched works of history that help make it clearer where LessWrong ‘came from’ in terms of precursors. Kodish’s biography in particular is interesting because Korzybski gets astonishingly close to stating the X-Risk thesis in Manhood of Humanity:
At present I am chiefly concerned to drive home the fact that it is the great disparity between the rapid progress of the natural and technological sciences on the one hand and the slow progress of the metaphysical, so-called social “sciences” on the other hand, that sooner or later so disturbs the equilibrium of human affairs as to result periodically in those social cataclysms which we call insurrections, revolutions and wars.
… And I would have him see clearly that, because the disparity which produces them increases as we pass from generation to generation—from term to term of our progressions—the “jumps” in question occur not only with increasing violence but with increasing frequency.
And in fact Korzybski’s philosophy came directly out of the intellectual scene dedicated to preventing World War 2 after the first world war, in that sense there’s a clear unbroken line from the first modern concerns about existential risk to Yudkowsky.
Great Mambo Chicken and Engines of Creation were in my reference list for a while, until I decided to cull the list for more direct relevance to systems of training for rationality. It was threatening to get unmanageably long otherwise.
I didn’t know there was a biography of Korzybski. Thanks!
As a fellow “back reader” of Yudkowsky, I have a handful of books to add to your recommendations:
Engines Of Creation by K. Eric Drexler
Great Mambo Chicken and The Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis
EY has cited both at one time or another as the books that ‘made him a transhumanist’. His early concept of future shock levels is probably based in no small part on the structure of these two books. The Sequences themselves borrow a ton from Drexler, and you could argue that the entire ‘AI risk’ vs. nanotech split from the extropians represented an argument about whether AI causes nanotech or nanotech causes AI.
I’d also like to recommend a few more books that postdate The Sequences but as works of history help fill in a lot of context:
Korzybski: A Biography by Bruce Kodish
A History Of Transhumanism by Elise Bohan
Both of these are thoroughly well researched works of history that help make it clearer where LessWrong ‘came from’ in terms of precursors. Kodish’s biography in particular is interesting because Korzybski gets astonishingly close to stating the X-Risk thesis in Manhood of Humanity:
And in fact Korzybski’s philosophy came directly out of the intellectual scene dedicated to preventing World War 2 after the first world war, in that sense there’s a clear unbroken line from the first modern concerns about existential risk to Yudkowsky.
Great Mambo Chicken and Engines of Creation were in my reference list for a while, until I decided to cull the list for more direct relevance to systems of training for rationality. It was threatening to get unmanageably long otherwise.
I didn’t know there was a biography of Korzybski. Thanks!