When I finished writing “Some things I’ve learned in college,” I thought it was one of my least interesting posts to date. Surprisingly, it was one of my most viewed and has generated the most discussion of all (as measured by Reddit comments, here).
As has been noted by many a wise sage, page views and comments are not a perfect measure of a piece of writing’s quality, or overall value. However, the value of writing to someone who never sees it is zero, so the two do have something to do with each other.
In hindsight, this shouldn’t have been so surprising. Of course I already know what I’ve learned in college, so I’m not going to find it particularly interesting to write down. On the other hand, I often learn quite a bit by writing blog posts, both through object-level research and simply by spending time thinking about a topic.
But, of course, no one else knows I learned in college. So, I am currently trying to consider which aspects of my own life, despite being “obvious” to me, others might find interesting. The lowest hanging fruit is media recommendations. Tons of blogs have lists of favorite books, articles, or other blogs, and, as I’ve noted before, I spend a little too much time listening to audiobooks and podcasts.
So, here are some things I recommend you read or listen to. But first, how to listen to them:
Programs
Pay especially close attention if, like me, you prefer listening to reading.
Libby
- A gem of the internet: tens of thousands of free books and audiobooks, and not just boring old ones in the public domain.
- You need a library card, but it took me about five minutes to get for someone else when helping him set up the app.
- Digital copies are limited for most books, so the popular ones can take a while. But there are always quite a few good nonfiction audiobooks available,and some have unlimited copies so there is never a wait.
- Also, it lets you adjust the reading speed in 5% increments (1x, 1.05x, 1.1x, …), which is surprisingly useful. Any app that still limits you to 1.25x or 1.5x speed needs to learn this lesson.
- Most of the books below I listened to on Libby, so I won’t bother finding the link to them. Search for “Libby” in the App Store, and then search for the book there.
- Super clunky 90s-looking website that makes up for aesthetics with utility.
- Input a list of books you like, and get an instant list of recommendations.
- There are a million programs for saving links that you want to (i.e. will probably never) read later.
- But its secondary function is awesome: the iPhone iOS app automatically generates an audio recording of any article you save. Not ideal for pages with lots of graphics or important formatting, but super convenient for walls of text.
- For some reason, the mac version of the app doesn’t have this feature. Damn.
- This is my go-to text-to-voice program for miscellaneous articles I don’t need to focus on super well.
Speechify
- Nice, free text-to-voice software.
- The Good: super fine-grained speed adjustment up to incomprehensibly fast, pretty good automated reading voice, highlights words as it reads them.
- The bad: kinda glitchy, for me anyway. Just stops reading once in a while and sometimes hard to edit copy-and-pasted text.
- I use this one for longer texts (long articles, entire books) that don’t have important graphics. Will often read and listen at the same time if it is important.
- My go-to text-to-speech for reading shorter webpages or those with important graphics.
- The good: reads directly from a webpage so you don’t have to switch into another program; much better for pages with important graphics. Highlights sentences as they are read.
- The bad: the fastest reading speed isn’t that fast. It’s ok, but I could see someone with a better-oiled brain than my own unsatisfied. Also kinda glitchy - sometimes takes me back to the top of the article after I pause for more than a few seconds.
Books
Cream of the crop: my strongest recommendations
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Ian McGilchrist.
- Perhaps my strongest recommendation on the list. Completely worldview-shifting, with implications for every facet of human life, psychology, culture, and society, not to mention philosophy and artificial intelligence. Deserves a careful read by virtually everyone.
- Central claim: our two brain hemispheres process information in fundamentally different ways, which correspond to competing worldview, conscious experiences, ontologies and epistemologies.
- Fair warning: a very dense book. I did not listen to this one, and doubt that I could have. Listening < reading << careful reading with notes.
The Precipice by Toby Ord
- A last-minute addition to the list, I started reading after beginning to write this post and am now nearly finished.
- Basic claim: humanity could have an awesome future, but there’s a substantial chance (around one in six, according to Ord) we’ll suffer an “existential catastrophe” — basically extinction or something similar — within the next century.
- Ord is meticulous and rigorous, considering natural risks like supervolcano explosions, existing anthropogenic risks like nuclear war, and risks from future technologies like artificial intelligence. He considers weird anthropic principle observational biases, what conclusions we can draw from our past survival, the implications of risks being correlated or anti-correlated, and more.
- It’s worth a read if only as an exemplar of what a really earnest (and IMO successful) effort to answer one particular question (namely, determining the probability of humanity losing its potential in the next century) looks like.
- Written pre-internet and around the peak of television’s cultural dominance, the book is an unapologetic diatribe against TV as a source of information.
- Main claim: whereas the written word is a medium optimized for transmission of a particular set of ideas, or “rational argumentation,” TV encourages information—including news and ‘educational’ programming—to be packaged as entertainment. The result is a culture with lower quality discourse and shorter attention spans.
- Although TV has ceded its hegemony to the internet, the larger point remains as valid as ever: a medium of communication (writing, speaking, TV, Twitter) has not only first-order consequences on the information being transmitted, but far-reaching second-order consequences on society at large.
- The most memorable part of the book is Postman’s description of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Not that the politicians debated for 3 hours using complex sentence structures and forms of argumentation, but that completely normal people voluntarily and enthusiastically watched the whole thing! Not scholars or elites - just regular old farmers and blacksmiths or whatever. Not going to lie, this made me jealous. Like many of us in the internet age, I wish my attention was stronger and more robust. Despite being more educated than most of the debate audience, random 1860s farmers apparently had much stronger attention spans than my own.
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells
- I don’t usually read books that are preaching to the choir (i.e. just convincing me of what I already believe), but even us follow-the-science liberals or progressives probably tend to underrate the importance of climate change. However bad you think it is going to be, it will probably be worse.
- Also, Wallace-Wells’ writing itself is off-the-charts eloquent and poetic. Even if you think climate change is a Chinese hoax, this book is valuable if only as an exemplar of poetic prose.
