Recommended Readings
Most readings suggested here fulfill the “insight-a-minute” criteria. As a result, many of those are dense in information and some of the ideas presented may be significantly challenging or disorienting.
Outside of their great literary and informational value, these readings also serve as introductory material to the field of Existential Risk Research and Prevention.
Remember that whatever you read here does not change reality, only your understanding of it. To keep a healthy mind, listen to yourself and take breaks (ideally) before it is necessary for you to do so, spend time with those you love, and take time to recalibrate your thinking against that of reasonable people you know.
- by Scott Alexander – Online & Offline. Free. (150+ hrs). A blog about medicine, philosophy, politics, and futurism which distinguishes itself with its nearly irreproachable methodology, its witty literary style, but most of all with its exceptionally high epistemic standards.
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The US psychiatrist Scott Alexander is renowned for exploring issues in great depth in SSC through the lens of applied rationality, bridging the gap between logical abstract reasoning, contemporary understanding of human cognition, and concrete everyday issues.
If you’re interested in this blog but don’t know where to start, try reading any of these posts that sound interesting to you:
- Beware The Man Of One Study
- Meditations on Moloch
- I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup
- Book Review: Albion’s Seed
- Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable
- The Control Group Is Out Of Control
- Considerations On Cost Disease
- Archipelago And Atomic Communitarianism
- The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories
- Who By Very Slow Decay
The Library of Scott Alexandria, a compilation of Scott Alexander’s most influential articles, is often considered to be the most accessible resource to start reading SSC.
- by Eliezer Yudkowsky – Online & Offline. Free. (50 hrs). A collection of six volumes further broken down into 300+ essays, bringing forth the science underlying human irrationality in an attempt to fundamentally improve critical reasoning for generations to come.
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Bringing cognitive biases into light one by one, the decision theorist and researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky carefully works his way through the science — and the art — of human rationality. Topics range from computer science, physics, philosophy, to the future of artificial intelligence, and are interlaced with a mix of fables, argumentative essays, and personal vignettes.
- by Kevin Simler & Robin Hanson
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- by Philip E. Tetlock & Dan Gardner
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- by Robert B. Cialdini
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