books
These are my notes from books I read. Each page’s title is also a link to the corresponding GoodReads entry. You can see my GoodReads lists here.
This book was a good one for quotable critique of modern capitalism. Here are some good ones:
These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.
Read moreThe book is divided into 3 parts, covering the value of rethinking, how to help others rethink, and how to help communities rethink.
the value of rethinking permalink Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what you believe.
When people change their answers on a test, they’re far more likely to change to the right answer than a wrong answer. Rethinking is effective!
helping others rethink permalink Good families allow for healthy conflict, rather than avoiding it.
Read moreThe examples in this book make it clear that there is no easy line we can draw between autonomous and non-autonomous weapons (and by extension, autonomous AI agents). There is a smooth gradient of autonomy, which makes the question of allowing autonomous weapons much more nuanced. It’s probably the case that higher-level alignment becomes important proportionally to the level of autonomy and intelligence.
He analyzes the Patriot fratricides,In a military context, the word fratricide means the killing of someone on the same side of a conflict.
Read moreThe first thing you should know is that this book is only 2 hours long in audio form. That’s short! She managed to get into the difficult details while keeping the jargon accessible. (It helps that we literally know nothing about consciousness.)
This book argued alternately for neuroscientific, illusionist, and panpsychist theories of consciousness. It explains the hard problem of consciousness, and then later really explains why it’s so hard. As a science-oriented person, t’s so easy to forget why it’s hard and start to explain things purely physically.
Read moreRead this book before you turn 60. In fact, read it before you’re 40. Read it before your parents are 60. Read it if you have parents! Read it if you’re a person who is likely to die sometime in the future.
This book gave me tools for the hard decisions that exist for people in the last decade(s) of their lives. Before reaching this stage of life ourselves, we don’t think about it much because we’ve tended to separate the aged from our communities.
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