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@@ -12,17 +12,19 @@ This page holds a list of the books I am reading, and a list of books I have rea
* [Don't Shoot the Dog] - Nonfiction book on animal training and operant conditioning: the art of getting obedience (from animals and humans alike) without using punishment. It has clarified my understanding of a whole variety of phenomena related to motivation and so on.
* [Inadequate Equilibria](https://equilibriabook.com/), by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Fascinating look at why everything is broken and nobody can fix anything. I'm a sucker for ideas presented as Socratic dialogue.
* [A Person Paper on Purity in Language][Person Paper], by Douglas Hofstadter (linked to the Wayback Machine version) - it is pretty shocking to realise just how much the English language discriminates against females, and how routine it is. Whether or not you think it's an issue, this is an excellent satire.
* [Gödel, Escher, Bach], by Douglas Hofstadter (an incredible book on pretty much everything - possibly the most meta thing I've ever read). Revisiting it now, I realise that I already know quite a lot of the mathematical content from different sources, but then to the extent that I specialised in anything during Part III, I specialised in logic.
* The [LessWrong] entry on [Cached Thoughts] - of the many fascinating LessWrong entries, this is probably the one that had the most profound and immediate effect on my thinking. I don't know if that effect was just a culmination of my previous readings, but this was the moment that I really got the idea that "human thinking was not designed, it's a bit of a miracle that we can think at all, and there are steps we can take to make our thinking less sloppy".
* [Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality][HPMoR] - it's a very long fanfic about what might happen if Harry came from a different intellectual background and if every character were actually *trying* at life. It successfully manages to find coherent explanations for many of the random inconsistencies of the original. Give it a try - if you don't like it by the time we reach Hogwarts, feel free to stop. It's got its own subreddit, of which the most pertinent post is probably [what HPMoR is about][HPMoR subreddit]. People either find HPMoR horribly dull or absolutely incredible, as far as I can tell.
* Another LessWrong entry, this one on [effective altruism][EA LessWrong] ([factual summary][EA Wikipedia] at Wikipedia) - the holy grail of charitable giving is surely to get maximum bang for your buck. (On a vaguely related note, a link that for ethical reasons doesn't make it onto the list but seems worryingly insightful is a post from some random blog describing a horrible unit of currency, the "dead child", being the amount of money required to save the life of one child's life through charity - it makes very uncomfortable reading, so consider yourself duly warned that you might not want to read it. The idea is to make numbers like "£250,000 spent on a luxury dog kennel" make *sense* to us. The link is [this post on a horrible unit of currency][dead child].)
* [The Name of the Wind] by Patrick Rothfuss is the fantasy book with the best story I've ever read. It's the start of a trilogy (the Kingkiller Chronicle) and, if you like fantasy (and maybe even if you don't), is a stupendously well-told book. I gave it to a friend who professes never to read, and I didn't see em again for another week. It's not uniformly liked, though: another friend described it as an obvious self-insert wish-fulfillment fantasy from beginning to end.
* [Three Men in a Boat] - the funniest book I've read. After the first two pages, I can barely move after having dissolved in laughter, and it just gets better. I was banned from reading this in the presence of other people, probably because I was having too much fun.
* [Midnight's Children] - justly famous mystical fiction, set in twentieth century India. Wonderful book, beautiful turns of phrase and awe-inspiring plot.
* [Flowers for Algernon] - possibly the saddest book I've ever read, and at least one other person has agreed with me.
* [Turn The Ship Around!] - book on the nature of leadership. Central thesis: if a great commander leaves a ship and the ship falls apart straight away, in what sense is it reasonable to say they were a "great" commander? Its teachings are weirdly similar, in fact to [Never Split the Difference], though they're approaching two very different problems.
* The Debt to Pleasure, by John Lanchester - fiction/cookbook. One of the most erudite books I've read; this book really benefits from being read on a Kindle, with its inbuilt dictionary. A joy to read, excellent characterisation of the narrator. I'd advise not Googling the book before you read it (and ideally don't even read the blurb); there are spoilers to be found, and I think the best experience of this book would be to go in completely blind. Do read it, though; it has many beautiful turns of phrase, and is just generally extremely well written.
* [Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell], by Susanna Clarke. This book alternates between hilarious, whimsical, and deeply ominous or wild (like you're seeing the tiniest cross-section of a huge incomprehensible thing). In general style it's like E Nesbit if she were writing extremely competently for non-children. I was glued to it, and laughed out loud at regular intervals.
* [The Name of the Wind] by Patrick Rothfuss is the fantasy book with the best story I've ever read. It's the start of a trilogy (the Kingkiller Chronicle) and, if you like fantasy (and maybe even if you don't), is a stupendously well-told book. I gave it to a friend who professes never to read, and I didn't see them again for another week. It's not uniformly liked, though: another friend described it as an obvious self-insert wish-fulfillment fantasy from beginning to end.
* [Gödel, Escher, Bach], by Douglas Hofstadter (an incredible book on pretty much everything - possibly the most meta thing I've ever read). Revisiting it now, I realise that I already know quite a lot of the mathematical content from different sources, but then to the extent that I specialised in anything during Part III, I specialised in logic. For some reason many people don't like this book, and it is certainly very long, but decades later I still remember e.g. the Contracrostipunctus as being just mind-blowing.
* [Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality][HPMoR] - it's a very long fanfic about what might happen if Harry came from a different intellectual background and if every character were actually *trying* at life. It successfully manages to find coherent explanations for many of the random inconsistencies of the original. Give it a try - if you don't like it by the time we reach Hogwarts, feel free to stop. It's got its own subreddit, of which the most pertinent post is probably [what HPMoR is about][HPMoR subreddit]. People either find HPMoR horribly dull or absolutely incredible, as far as I can tell.
[Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Strange_%26_Mr_Norrell)
[Gödel, Escher, Bach]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
[LessWrong]: http://www.lesswrong.com
[Cached Thoughts]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/
@@ -40,8 +42,6 @@ This page holds a list of the books I am reading, and a list of books I have rea
# Currently reading
* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.
# Bought and ready to read
* The Attention Merchants, by Tim Wu
@@ -79,6 +79,7 @@ This page holds a list of the books I am reading, and a list of books I have rea
# Have read
* [Folding Beijing](https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/folding-beijing-2/), by Hao Jingfang. Interesting short story, although really I think it could have been half the length without losing much; the premise is not exactly complicated, and the story is really just a brief exploration of the premise.
* Permutation City, by Greg Egan. Cool book! It's interesting to think about why I find the core premise implausible, but it certainly seemed novel to me. Pretty gripping. It seems to pair quite nicely with Robin Hanson's _The Age of Em_, which would be a nonfiction accompaniment.
* Building Secure and Reliable Systems, by the Google SRE team. This is genuinely a textbook, so it's quite slow going. A lot of this is *very* Google-centric, where it's assumed that everything is a microservice and any given query to a service will require hundreds of RPC calls. However, the general lessons seem to be valuable.
* A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh. Good Lord this is bleak. The kind of book which would definitely reward rereading; I feel like I got about a quarter of what was going on, there was so much subtext. Oddly a fun read, though!