Readings
Books, essays, and internet writing that have shaped how I think. Philosophy, fiction, psychology, and whatever else caught my attention.
Philosophy
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Letters to a Stoic
Seneca
The Republic
Plato
The Stranger
Albert Camus
Notes from Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche
Twilight of the Idols
Friedrich Nietzsche
Bronze Age Mindset
Bronze Age Pervert
Sci-Fi & Fiction
Neuromancer
William Gibson
Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson
White Noise
Don DeLillo
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand
Psychology & Strategy
Influence
Robert Cialdini
The Elephant in the Brain
Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler
Essentialism
Greg McKeown
Internet Reads
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
Roger Williams
A hard sci-fi novella about a superintelligent AI that fulfills the Three Laws of Robotics to their logical extreme.
Map and Territory
Eliezer Yudkowsky — LessWrong
The foundational LessWrong sequence on the gap between our mental models and reality.
The Grug Brained Developer
grugbrain.dev
Complexity very, very bad. A layman’s guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained.
Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions
Farnam Street
~100 mental models explained — from first-principles thinking to inversion and second-order effects.
The Six Pillars of Mental Health
Infographic (PDF)
A one-page visual framework for the foundational pillars of mental health.
Scraping Training Data for Your Mind
Henrik Karlsson
On finding good influences, shaping your taste, and why the quest for greatness is a search problem.
Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice
Cedric Chin — Commoncog
Knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone — and why it matters more than 10,000 hours.