This is a post listing all the books (and book equivalents) that I’m currently reading, as well as a little bit about each one of them. It’ll be continuously updated over time. Inspired by Melting Asphalt.
Update (July 2023): This post is now deprecated. I’ll be sharing what I read in each update, rather than continuously updating this post.
Current
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Fourth Edition) by Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig
A more than a thousand-page-long behemoth textbook on AI. It’s an excellent book, but is very technical and requires knowledge of basic programming, data structures, and calculus. (not finished)
One Piece by Eiichiro Oda
One of the most popular and longest-running manga series in the world, currently at 1,079 chapters (as of March 26, 2023) and still going. It follows the quest of Monkey D. Luffy, a boy who wants to become the next Pirate King.
June 2023
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
One of the greatest books I’ve ever read. Expect a much longer write-up shortly.
May 2023
This month, I started seriously building my Twitter account. To see who I follow, click here.
Some of my favorite accounts include @tszzl, @gfodor, @perrymetzger, @naval, @DavidDeutschOxf, @krishnanrohit, @Rainmaker1973, @micsolana, @RichardHanania, and @alexandrosM.
March 2023
What’s Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies by Tim Urban
This book, written by the author of WaitButWhy (one of my favorite blogs of all time), answers the question of why political discourse has gotten so awful recently (largely because of what he calls Social Justice Fundamentalism). His concept of the “thinking ladder” is one of my new favorite mental models.
A blog focusing on human rationality, decision-making, biases, and related topics created by Eliezer Yudkowsky. In practice, nearly every post these days is about AI, and the community is generally pessimistic and focused on alignment, so it’s an interesting place to watch for AI doom predictions.
A website where people post, in the words of its creator Paul Graham, “Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.” A good resource for AI news, but also every other type of news you wouldn’t find much of in mainstream media.
Various AI-Related Resources
You can plot these on a “political compass” where the axes are AGI timeline (imminent to very far away) and level of optimism (optimistic vs. pessimistic).
Astral Codex Ten by Scott Alexander (prominent rationalist blogger and psychiatrist): timeline-neutral, mostly optimistic
World Spirit Sock Puppet by Katja Grace (lead researcher at AI Impacts and researcher at MIRI): timeline-neutral, mostly optimistic
Shtetl-Optimized by Scott Aaronson (researcher at OpenAI): AGI close, optimistic
Overcoming Bias by Robin Hanson (econ professor at George Mason University and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute): AGI farther away, mostly optimistic
The Road to AI We Can Trust by Gary Marcus (author, NYU neuroscience professor, founder of Geometric Intelligence): AGI farther away, neutral
David Shapiro ~ AI (YouTube channel) by David Shapiro (cognitive AI researcher and product designer): AGI imminent, very optimistic
Writings by Paul Christiano (head of the Alignment Research Center): AGI close, cautiously optimistic
Cold Takes by Holden Karnofsky (CEO of Open Philanthropy): AGI close, pessimistic
One Useful Thing by Ethan Mollick (entrepreneurship and innovation professor at Wharton): AGI close, optimistic
Various Twitter accounts:
OpenAI accounts: AGI close, mostly optimistic
Anonymous accounts: AGI imminent, extremely optimistic
roon (@tzssl)
gfodor (@gfodor)
Beff Jezos (@BasedBeff)
Smoke-away (@SmokeAwayyy)
Entrepreneur accelerationists: AGI imminent, very optimistic
Academic AI experts: AGI farther away, optimistic.
David Deutsch (@DavidDeutschOxf): Physicist and author
Yann LeCun (@ylecun): Chief AI Scientist at Meta, NYU professor, Turing award laureate
Francois Chollet (@fchollet): Software engineer, AI expert, creator of Keras deep learning framework
Doomers: AGI close, extremely pessimistic
Eliezer Yudkowsky (@ESYudkowsky): Founder of LessWrong and co-founder of MIRI
Liron Shapira (@liron): Entrepreneur, angel investor
Roko.eth (@RokoMijic)
Other good accounts:
Naval (@naval): Entrepreneur (AngelList), VC investor, philosopher. AGI farther away, mostly optimistic.
Anthropic (@AnthropicAI): Safety-focused AI lab. Timeline-neutral, cautiously optimistic.
February 2023
An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives by Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin)
Moldbug’s self-proclaimed magnum opus, where he builds his views on government, history, and law from the ground up. Moldbug attempts to convince the reader (an open-minded progressive) to open their mind and re-evaluate their most fundamental beliefs. I like this book, but I liked the Gentle Introduction more.
More by Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin)
Moldbug on Carlyle: All about forgotten 19th-century Scottish writer and political philosopher Thomas Carlyle.
Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot: Moldbug’s views on economics.
A formalist manifesto: The first-ever UR post, a short-ish introduction to Moldbug’s beliefs.
Technology, communism, and the Brown Scare: Moldbug’s views on political philosophy.
Essential Computer Science: A Programmer’s Guide to Foundational Concepts by Crutcher, Singh, and Tiegs
The opposite of the above textbook: an entire computer science degree squished into less than 300 pages, in a dense but readable style (not finished).
CS50’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python
A MOOC covering search, knowledge, uncertainty, optimization, learning, neural networks, and language. It tracks the AI textbook I attempted (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach), but is much more manageable and approachable. You also get actual coding experience, rather than just math and pseudocode.
January 2023
You Can Be a Stock Market Genius: Uncover the Secret Hiding Places of Stock Market Profits by Joel Greenblatt
A guide on investing in spinoffs, merger securities, bankruptcies, recapitalizations, and other special corporate situations from a Columbia Business School professor and head of Gotham Capital, who averaged a 50% compound annual return for 10 years, after fees.
The Story of Us by Tim Urban (WaitButWhy)
A story of how American political discourse got to the awful state it is today, but really a deep explanation of human psychology and tribalism - all written at a level a middle schooler can understand.
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell
Part memoir, part instruction manual from the co-creator of the iPod, iPhone, and Nest thermostat (not finished).
Lessons from venture capitalist and OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman.
December 2022
Blog written by investor and Microsoft executive Tren Griffin. Full of brilliant, common-sense advice. His “12 Things I Learned” format is my favorite. Bonus articles on the a16z website.
The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch
David Deutsch, a physics professor at Oxford and quantum computing pioneer, writes about his idea of a Theory of Everything: a combination of the “four strands” of quantum physics, epistemology, computation, and evolution. It’s eye-opening in a way that few books I’ve read are.
The Pmarchive
An archive of a blog written by pmarca, better known as Marc Andreessen. On top of being extremely intelligent in a wide range of fields, a rare skill, he is well-known for founding Mosaic and Netscape (two of the first major web browsers), and co-founding Opsware (which sold to HP for $1.6 billion) and Ning. He also co-founded Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most successful venture capital firms of all time. This blog collects his teachings on startups (among other things), and he’s one of the most qualified people on Earth to teach about it.
Business Law (Barron’s Business Review, 6th Edition) by Robert W. Emerson, J.D.
An “ideal classroom text or self-teaching handbook” of American business law. I’m reading this book because business law is a field about which I know very little, and it’ll be very useful to know when I start a business someday. I like reading intro textbooks to learn about concepts—they have a huge scope of well-researched information and tons of exercises with solutions. (not finished)
November 2022
Everything I could find by Paul Graham and Y Combinator.
Paul Graham is a hacker, painter, writer, entrepreneur, and VC. Y Combinator is the now world-famous startup accelerator that he co-founded in 2005 and has since helped launch the likes of Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe, Twitch, Dropbox, and many more extremely successful companies. Pretty much everything on these two pages is worth reading.
Business Adventures by John Brooks
With a glowing recommendation from both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, how could I resist getting this book? Business Adventures consists of twelve essays published in The New Yorker and released as a book in 1969. Each essay tells a story about a different business topic, and despite being over 50 years old, each essay is surprisingly topical—human nature doesn’t change over time. (not finished)
My University Courses (Fall 2022, Semester 1):
COP3504C: Advanced Programming Fundamentals
This is a very tough class that delves into a lot of computer science topics. We learn about syntax, types, control flow, functions, and object-oriented programming in two languages: Python and C++. We also go into more advanced C++ topics: pointers, dynamic memory, multiple inheritance, and I/O streams; and we briefly cover algorithm analysis and software engineering. We write a lot of code over the course of this class, something I find useful, but I’m not a big fan of multiple-choice tests in computer science—I think CS education has not adapted the way it should to the ability of developers to Google anything they need.
COT3100: Applications of Discrete Structures
This class is basically a mathematical grab bag of concepts that are generally useful for computer science. This is potentially my favorite math class that I’ve ever taken, as it is more relevant to real-world topics than anything else past middle school. Logic teaches us how to understand arguments and reason, combinatorics has surprising applications wherever you have to arrange or select things from a group, and probability is useful in virtually every field. Discrete is also an important pre-requisite for Data Structures and Algorithms.
MAC2312: Analytic Geometry and Calculus 2
This is a fairly standard undergrad Calc 2 course, focusing on integrals and series. The class focuses mostly on pure math, and more on computation than concepts (unlike Calc 1, which I enjoyed more). I’ve never been the biggest fan of pure math—I’ve always found applications (finance, computer science, physics, etc.) to be much more interesting. Like my programming class, Calc 2 is not well-adapted to the ability of programs like Wolfram Alpha to solve difficult integrals and series, leaving the higher-level conceptual thinking to the humans.
IDS2935: The Idea of Happiness
This class focuses on the question of “how are we to live?” We have weekly readings, write short answers and longer papers, and have three lectures a week. What we don’t have is the ability to really discuss amongst ourselves our own ideas of happiness and living well. This is a class that lends itself very well to seminar format, yet is unfortunately in lecture format. I prefer reading about humanities topics on my own.
PHI2010: Introduction to Philosophy
This class focuses on philosophy of religion, knowledge and its limits, the mind and self, free will, and ethics. Similar to Idea of Happiness, we have readings, papers, and lectures but little actual discussion. There are also little to no readings from my favorite philosophers (more on that in a future article!)
October 2022
How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil
An overview of seven topics that Smil thinks are crucial to understanding our world: energy, food production, materials production, globalization, risks, the environment, and the future. The first three in particular are very interesting—and not often talked about.
A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin)
This treatise about why American democracy is broken and how it can be improved with an accountable monarchy is unlike anything you’d hear in mainstream politics, and definitely convincing in parts. I like to read political views from across the spectrum, even if I don’t agree with everything.