Reading List

I love reading, particularly books that take a cherished view of mine and rip it out of my hands with rigorous and logical argumentation.

Here I keep a list of books I've particularly loved and regularly cite in other articles and interviews.

Technology and futurism

• Where Is My Flying Car by J. Storrs Hall

Ethics (in the classical sense)

• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Naval Ravikant.
• A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine

Worldview solvents

Incerto by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Five volumes and 1872 pages of absolute brain-busting epistemic gold (at least for someone, like me, who came from a background in the social sciences, where a naive faith in quantitative modeling and the Normal Distribution pervaded everything).

Straw Dogs by John Gray

Civilized to Death by Christopher Ryan

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. A rigorous framework for thinking about and answering ancient philosophical questions about human nature by using the tools of science and rationality. Encountering this book in high school is what made me decide to study experimental psychology at university.

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. All knowledge begins here; nothing in the human experience makes any sense without it.

Love and human connection

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Novelization) by Gene Roddenberry.

Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation (Portraits of American Genius) by Yvonne Fern.

Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha.

A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam