Published on January 22, 2025 3:11 AM GMT
https://hal.science/hal-04206682/document
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/mastodon-posts/
https://x.com/eshear/status/1464729629013405696
https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1866257267517243790
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1865924776214327360
https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1858705160652071216
Daniel Yergin
>>cass sunstein
Propublica?
Francois Chollet mentioned a book in his “people of ai” podcast episode that was a landmark for him
Carl Shulman
One general heuristic is to find ways to hew closer to things that are rich and bodies of established knowledge and less impenetrable–I don't know how you've been navigating that so far but learning from textbooks and the things that were the leading papers and people of past eras I think rather than being too attentive to current news cycles is quite valuable. …Vaclav Smil’s books. I often disagree with some of his methods of synthesis but I enjoy his books for giving pictures of a lot of interesting relevant facts about how the world works that I would cite. Some of Joel Mokyr’s work on the history of the scientific revolution and how that interacted with economic growth as an example of collecting a lot of evidence, a lot of interesting valuable assessment. In the space of AI forecasting one person I would recommend going back to is the work of Hans Moravec. It was not always the most precise or reliable but an incredible number of brilliant innovative ideas came out of that and I think he was someone who really grokked a lot of the arguments for a more compute-centric way of thinking about what was happening with AI very early on. He was writing stuff in the 70s and maybe even earlier. His book Mind Children, some of his early academic papers. Fascinating not necessarily for the methodology I've been talking about but for exploring the substantive topics that we were discussing in the episode.
Shulman recommends: Intelligence and how to get it. review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2IB9VOK7J8S57/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0393337693
Shulman recommended Democracy for Realists
Other works from Shulman podcast episode listed: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/carl-shulman-common-sense-case-existential-risks/ (“Articles, books, and other media discussed in the show”)
Shulman cites Herculano-Houzel - The Human Advantage on scaling brains
Scott Aaronson
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=3679
Sarah Paine military history
Danielle Fong retweeted: https://x.com/AntonJaegermm/status/1855667817011704064 plough sword and book
Yudkowsky
“Adaptation and natural selection” recommended here Evolution is stupid | Eliezer Yudkowsky and Lex Fridman
Inadequate equilibria
On twitter Yudkowsky recommended The Symbolic Species (for some specific reason)
"Books that changed my life"
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis
Man: The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
True Names and Other Dangers by Vernor Vinge
Books of knowledge
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis
Man: The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences by Wilson and Keil
The Adapted Mind by Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby
Metamagical Themas by Douglas R. Hofstadter
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman
The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind by Sir Roger Penrose
Paul Graham
“Skunk Works, My Family and Other Animals, A Mathematician's Apology, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, Austen's novels, The Quest for El Cid, Wing Leader, A Time of Gifts, The Conquest of Gaul, Medieval Technology and Social Change, Franklin's Autobiography.”
"If you want to learn more about hunter gatherers I strongly recommend Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Harmless People and The Old Way."
What should I read to learn more about history?
Clark, Civilisation
White, Medieval Technology and Social Change
McEvedy, Penguin Atlases of Ancient and Medieval History
Laslett, The World We Have Lost
Bernal, The Extension of Man
Franklin, Autobiography
Girouard, Life in the English Country House
Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne
Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople
Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires
Hadas, A History of Rome
Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages
Vasari, Lives of the Artists
Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors
Caesar, Gallic Wars
Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution
https://x.com/paulg/status/1870456314427756743
Not born yesterday: the science of who we trust and what we believe
Maybe? https://x.com/paulg/status/1827561764596453598?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
Elon Musk
Penguin edition of the iliad is really good as an audiobook
“The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad
“The story of civilization” by Durant
"Destined for War" Thucydides Trap (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lQBsOT38sQY)
“I believed the arguments of Scott Sumner, who is not literally mainstream (yet), but whose position is shared by many other economists. I sided with a particular band of contrarian expert economists, based on my attempt to parse the object-level arguments, observing from the sidelines for a while to see who was right about near-term predictions and picking up on what previous experience suggested were strong cues of correct contrarianism.” - Yudkowsky
Discuss
