A Reading List for Rationality
(that is Not LessWrong/CFAR — or, perhaps more bluntly, which renders The Sequences superfluous)
As I have made a video criticizing many aspects of the LessWrong subculture and have said that the Sequences are a suboptimal way to learn rationality, it would be reasonable to prompt me to make a list of texts where one can do that.
(Note: I don’t wholly disapprove of the CFAR list, and have made a post evaluating it.)
Regardless, here are my recommendations, in order of foundational importance: the material is less essential as the list descends. I emphasize reasoning over decision-making much more than CFAR does, because reasons precede decisions — or ought to, when possible — and reasoning is in many ways more important.
While unorthodox, I usually suggest this above everything else: the PowerScore Logical Reasoning Bible, while meant as LSAT prep, is the best test of plain-language reasoning that I am aware of. the kinds of questions you are meant to do will humble many of you. You can take a 10-question section of practice questions at https://www.lsac.org/lsat/taking-lsat/test-format/logical-reasoning/logical-reasoning-sample-questions — many of you will *not* get every question right, in which case there is room to sharpen your ability and PowerScore’s book helps do that. If you want additional practice tests, there are a lot of them.
Understanding Arguments by Sinnott-Armstrong/Fogelin is, in my view, the best book on argumentation that exists; worth reading either alongside PowerScore’s book, or directly after it.
Pinker’s “Rationality” is an excellent next step after learning how to reason through the previous two texts, since you will establish what rationality actually *is* and, as the book clearly says, why it is important.
Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” is a standard text that established “irrationality” as a mainstream academic concept. Despite being a psychologist, some of Kahneman’s work won him the Nobel prize in economics in 2002, shared with Vernon Smith.
Priest’s “Complete Collection of Cognitive Biases and Heuristics” is exactly what it says: a list of about 100 cognitive biases. Many of these biases are worth rereading and/or flashcarding, because this tends to be the thing that is not applied for-real in everyday life until it’s deeply ingrained in memory. There is also, of course, Wikipedia’s list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases.
Vleet’s “Informal Fallacies” is also exactly what it says, but with logical fallacies rather than biases. (A bias is an error in weight or proportion or emphasis; a fallacy is a mistake in reasoning itself.) There is also, once again, Wikipedia’s list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies.
Knauff’s “Handbook of Rationality” is a wonderfully integrated work spanning psychology, philosophy, law, and other fields with 806 pages of content. It is also quite expensive — no one will blame you if you pirate it from libgen.
The Routledge International Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is also great. It is a reference text, meaning it’s not meant to be read front-to-back, but you sure can if you want; at about 638 pages of content it’s one of the most comprehensive of its kind.
Gabbay’s Handbook of the History of Logic to some might not sound as enlightening given that it is a history, but understanding how logic itself developed is significantly insightful. (This is another book here that is both prohibitively and ludicrously expensive, so you will probably need to pirate it.)
Ariely’s Predictably Irrational is another widely-read text that expands on the mainstream concept of irrationality. I see it as a continuation of similar themes in “Thinking Fast and Slow”.
I have said before that LessWrong is less of an environment for learning rationality and more of a subculture for nerds who want a hangout group to play board games with. This disparity between claimed purpose and actual purpose produces most of the objections people have and many of my objections as well, and it’s why I have created this alternate reading list: to really learn how to be less wrong.
You WILL learn more through these texts than through the LessWrong Sequences. As mentioned more than once already, many of these are expensive, and no one will blame you if you need to pirate/libgen them. Many or maybe even most of these you will need to reread; some perhaps multiple times. That is perfectly okay, and part of mastering knowledge rather than just dabbling in it.