Meta-Tools for Progress

Philosophy of Science: Illuminating our Constraints

• Flatland - Edwin Abott. On the possibility of phenomena that are beyond our current ability to understand and what progress toward understanding may look like. Sci-fi content
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn. Rather than dripping along discovery by discovery, science jumps in paradigm shifts, each creating a new map that shapes our interpretation of the world. Book
• The Philosopher’s Toolkit - A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods - Peter Fosl. Gives a brief overview of the different tools at our disposal when making sense of the world. Book
• Opacity: Lindy Effect & Psychological Findings - Nassim Taleb. On scientific heuristics. Forum/Blog-post
• The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science - Harold Kindcaid. A good overview of major themes in the philosophy of science. Book
• The Open Society And Its Enemies - Karl Popper. On the importance of openness in society, science, and technology for resilience and progress. Academic paper
• The Use of Knowledge in Society - Friedrich Hayek. On human civilization as a superintelligence composed of individual problem-solving entities. Academic paper
• The Meaning Of It All - Richard Feynman. Collection of three lectures on the relationship between science and society. If you have superstitions to let go of, also read Cargo Cult Science. Book
• The Ghost in the Quantum Turing machine - Scott Aaronson. What physics can tell us about free will, chaos, the arrow of time, the holographic principle, Newcomb's paradox, algorithmic information theory, and more. Academic paper
• A Beautiful Question- Frank Wilczek. Uses the history of science, from Plato to quantum physics to answer the question if the world embodies beautiful ideas and what, if anything, this means for reality. Book
• The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe itself - Sean Carroll. Science-based exploration of the human position and history in the universe, including implications for our sense of meaning. Book
• Scale - Geoffrey West. On the fractal-like scaling laws that govern anything from cells to cities. Book
• The Best Books on Every Subject - LessWrong. List of books on various subjects, many of them scientific. Content list
• Creon's List of Profound Books - Creon Levit. Ordered according to math, physics, etc. Content list
• Bookshelf, People - Patrick Collison. Lists books and people, many with a science-focused long-termist bend. Content list

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The Mind: Who Is Looking Out

• The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory? - Karl Friston. While 20th century neuroscience thought the brain extracts knowledge from sensations, he argues for an inversion by which the brain is an inference machine, minimizing average surprise from sensory experience of the world. Academic paper
• Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter. A classic that uses principles like self-reference to show commonalities across consciousness, intelligence, math, music, art, and language and how simple elements can make up “meaning”. Book
• The Illusion of Consciousness - Daniel Dennett. In this TED talk he discusses a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness, in which there is no central consciousness, but a bundle of agencies that make up the story in which the central character is one's self. Video
• The Mind’s I - Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter. An oldie but goldie. Book
• Panpsychism & Protopanpsychism - David Chalmers. Contra Dennett, panpsychism is the idea that all things have a mind-like quality. Chalmers also wrote Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness, an updated take on his “hard problem of consciousness”. Academic paper
• On Possible Minds: Philosophy and AI - A conversation between Chalmers and Dennett, covering their disagreements about consciousness and what this means for AI. Video

• Anomalous Monism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A mind-body problem concept developed by Donald Davidson in Mental Events that attempts to reconcile the contradiction that mental events cannot be predicted by strict laws but seem to causally interact with predictable physical events. Academic paper
• What it’s Like to Be A Bat - Thomas Nagel. A contest classic that asserts that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism", doubting whether those phenomenological features of a subjective experience can be known by others. Book

• Waking Up - Sam Harris. A book on mind and meditation. Book
• REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of Brain Action of Psychedelics - Robin Carhart-Harris, Karl Friston. Combining Friston’s work on free energy with recent studies on psychedelics to explain their therapeutic effect. Also a shorter summary by the SSC Journal Club. Academic paper
• How To Change Your Mind - Michael Pollan. A mainstream-compatible perspective on the benefits of psychedelics. Book
• David Pearce on Understanding Psychedelics - Milan Griffes. An Effective Altruism post on the role of psychedelics in consciousness research. Also: Cash prizes for the best arguments against psychedelics being an EA cause area to solicit objections against making psychedelic research part of EA. Forum/Blog-post
• The Book Against the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are - Alan Watts. A Hindu-inspired account of personal identity. Book
• Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley. Autobiographical book on Huxley’s psychedelic experiences. Book
• The Ego Tunnel - Thomas Metzinger. About consciousness, the sense of self, and whether it exists. Forum/Blog-post‍
• Shulgin Archive - A research archive on psychedelics. Misc.

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Evolutionary Psychology: Unraveling Moral Beginnings

• Human Behavioral Biology - Robert Sapolsky. Entertaining lectures, explaining why and how we make decisions that he expands on in his book Behave by exploring human behavior from the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the moment the behavior occurs to factors in our evolutionary legacy. Video
• The Structural Evolution of Morality - Jason McKenzie. Explains the structural evolution of human-typical morals, such as fairness norms. He builds on Bryan Skyrms’ Evolution and the Social Contract by not only taking natural selection into account but including cultural evolution as well. For more background info on Skyrms’ evolutionary explanations of morality, see Darwin Meets the Logic of Decision. Book
• Game-theoretic Explanations and the Evolution of Justice - Justin D’Arms. Uses game-theory to show how our justice norms evolved from evolutionary stable strategies in resource distribution problems. For an expansion on this account, see Natural Justice  by Ken Binmore. Academic paper
• The Evolution of Cooperation  by Robert Axelrod is an analysis of the success of “tit for tat”, based on his game theory tournament to test different strategies for cooperation. The Grammar of Society by Cristina Bicchieri is a more detailed analysis on the evolution of reciprocity, fairness, and cooperation norms. Book
• Sense And Nonsense - Kevin Laland, Gilliam Brown. Introduction to five evolutionary psychology schools: sociobiology, human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution, and gene-culture co-evolution. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology - Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Jerone Barkow. Slightly dated but good primer of evolutionary psychology by the pioneers of the field. Especially good is The Psychological Foundations of Culture. Book
• Bret Weinstein’s Interviews and Bret Weinstein’s Youtube Channel - Bret Weinstein. For more easily digestible bits on evolutionary psychology. Video
• Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society - David Wilson. An evolutionary explanation of the cultural invention of religion. Book
• The Enigma of Reason - Hugo Mercier. Argues that our shortcomings in thinking rationally are not surprising, because rather than having evolved as bayesian updaters, our reasoning evolved as an interactive tool to better cooperate in groups. Book
• The Elephant in the Brain - Hidden Motives in Everyday Life - Robin Hanson, Kevin Simler. Explains why the reasons we use to justify our actions to ourselves and others are not why we actually act in certain ways in areas like religion, health, politics, and education. Book
• The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt. Explains how our political differences can be explained by moral foundations that themselves have an evolutionarily adaptive origin. Book
• The Strange Order of Things - Antonio Damasio. On how emotions are essential for all living organisms, the formation of our culture, and a force toward life. Book
• The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins. Articulates a gene's eye view of evolution, in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for their replication. Book‍
• The Blank Slate - Steven Pinker. Shows the biological roots of human behavior and morality. Book

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Value Differences, Drift, & Convergence: Which Way is Forward

• On What Matters - Derek Parfit. The successor to Reasons and Persons provides an overview of classic moral theories, such as deontology, consequentialism, contractualism, and of major moral issues, such as free will and responsibility. Book
• Meta Ethics Sequence - Eliezer Yudkowsky. Especially The Moral Void, Whither Moral Progress, Existential Angst Factory, Morality as Fixed Computation, Value is Fragile, Could Anything Be Right, and Changing Your Meta Ethics. Forum/blog-post 
• Report on Consciousness and Moral Personhood - Luke Muehlhauser. For figuring out which consciousnesses to include in your ethics and how. Forum/blog-post 

• Crucial Considerations - Nick Bostrom. By thinking a little harder we may often come to opposite conclusions about the desirability of our actions, so it’s worth thinking hard about which crucial considerations should be guiding our actions. Forum/blog-post 
• Facing the Unknown, Infinite Ethics - Nick Bostrom. Our epistemic limitations about the (long-term) consequences of our actions are problematic for making the right decision. In Problems And Solutions In Infinite Ethics, Ben West lays out a few strategies that may help us counter some of those epistemic limitations. Forum/blog-post 

• Normative Uncertainty - Will MacAskill. Argues that we should treat moral uncertainty and empirical uncertainty analogously, and use expected utility theory as framework to decide between our differing moral convictions. Academic paper 
• The Moral Parliament - Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord. Suggests to approach moral uncertainty across mutually exclusive moral theories by assigning each of them some probability and letting the theories send a respective number of delegates to a moral parliament. Forum/blog-post 
• Moral Trade - Toby Ord. Argues that we can trade our values similar to how we exchange goods: Just like people with different tastes or needs can exchange goods or services such that they each feel they have been made better off, people with different moral views may be able to exchange those when trying to improve the world. Academic paper
• Reflective Equilibrium - John Rawls. Another method for handling normative uncertainty. It suggests continuously working back and forth among our moral intuitions about actions, the principles that govern them, and the theoretical considerations behind them, revising them when necessary to achieve coherence among them. Academic paper
• In The Balance - Scott Alexander. Alexander presents a tongue-in-cheek narrative addressing the issue of infinite regress in moral decision-making. The story humorously depicts a character who, despite acquiring a universe-altering Artifact, opts for minimal contemplation on its use to avoid the annoyance of deep moral deliberation. Forum/blog-post 

• Fundamental Value Differences Are Not That Fundamental, The Whole City is Center, Value Differences as Differently Crystallized Metaphysical Heuristics - Scott Alexander. Argues that human value differences are more shallow than we commonly think and may track the same universal core values that could help us reconstruct a common crude human morality. Forum/blog-post 
• On Value Drift - Robin Hanson. Shows how much values may drift over time. In Let Values Drift, G. Gordon Worley III argues that this is not a cause for concern but only to be expected under the correct (Friston-aligned) conception of valuing. Forum/blog-post 
• Moral Progress vs. the Simple Passage of Time - Holden Karnofsky. How to potentially distinguish value drift from moral progress. Forum/blog-post 
• The Illusion of Moral Decline – Adam Mastroianni & Daniel Gilbert. Argues that the perception of moral decline is an illusion, and explores how psychological phenomena can create this illusion. Academic paper
• My Outlook - Paul Christiano. On the probability of civilizational survival, and the relative influence, distribution and entrenchment of human values. Forum/blog-post 
• Three Worlds Collide - Eliezer Yudkowsky. A novella about how much values can differ across different mind-architectures. Sci-fi content ‍
• Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment - Iason Gabriel. On AI Alignment but discusses the problem of different people with different values, and how Contractualism, Rights, Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance, or Social Choice Theory may help us reach overlapping consensus. Academic paper

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Rationality: Sharpening our Best Tool

• Rationality: From AI to Zombies - Eliezer Yudkowsky. Intro to rationality, divided into 6 books. See Heuristics & Biases for a shorter talk by Yudkowsky or Harry Potter And The Methods of Rationality for a fan-fictional account of rationality. Forum/blog-post 
• LessWrong - an online community dedicated to improving human reasoning and decision-making. A Map That Reflects The Territory - LessWrong book series on epistemology, agency, coordination, curiosity, and alignment. Forum/blog-post 
• Gwern, Overcoming Bias, Second Enumerations, Ribbonfarm, Nintil, MeltingAsphalt and especially AstralCodexTen are blogs that apply rational thinking to a plethora of long-termist topics. In podcast form, Rationally Speaking has excellent rationalist interviews with a range of thinkers. Graph Of The AXC Blogosphere - Jacob Wood. An overview of AXC- related blogs to get a sense of the space. Forum/blog-post 
• Crony Beliefs - Kevin Simler. Why do we find it hard to let go of some beliefs. Goes well with What You Can’t Say in which Paul Graham illuminates why it’s bad if we can’t discuss what we believe in. Forum/blog-post 
• Cognitive Biases in Catastrophic Risks Map - Alexey Turchin. How our biases can influence how we make sense of crucial risks to humanity. Other compilations of biases include List of Biases  by Rationalwiki and the Cognitive Bias Codex poster. Forum/blog-post 
• Incerto: Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Taleb. The whole collection is worth reading. Book
• Thinking Fast & Slow - Daniel Kahneman. A classic contrasting fast, instinctive, heuristic thinking with slow, reasoned thought, including when we use which one. Book

• Tools to Transform Our Thinking - Daniel Dennett, A talk on how to get better at reasoning, including popular methods such as the “intuition pump”. Video
• Arguably - Christopher Hitchens. An essay collection. Book
• Superforecasting - Philip Tetlock. Why we are bad at forecasting and how to get better. For more tips, see The Art of Predicting, a podcast with Anthony Aguirre and Andrew Critch, and Tetlock on Predicting, a podcast with Robert Wiblin and Philip Tetlock. Book
• Prediction, Replication, Decision Markets - Foresight Institute. Interview with Robin Hanson, Chis Hibbert, Anthony Aguirre and other prediction market builders on various versions of prediction markets. Video
• Clearerthinking.org - Offers mini-courses and provides tools using research about human behavior to improve our decision-making. Misc.
• Center for Applied Rationality - Offers workshops to improve people’s thinking and has this Rationality Reading List on further introductory material to rationality.
• Recommended Rationalist Reading - Eliezer Yudkowsky. Collection of rationalist resources. Forum/blog-post 
• Rational Choice in an Uncertain World - Reid Hastie, Robin Dawes. Coursework-style info on how to update your thinking. Similarly extensive resources on rationality include Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes, and Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving (dropbox). Book

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