Richard Ngo Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Richard Ngo

Just read Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, and... wow, what a book. He so succinctly captures the cocktail of pride, resentment and underlying self-loathing which leads to self-destructive behaviour. Read it if you want to understand misanthropy.

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Richard Ngo

Just read Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn. It's very sweet, and wistful. I would've enjoyed it more a few years ago, though. Now I want to be shown why I should care about unicorns and their ethereal aesthetic, not just told of their LOTR-elf-style serene beauty and timelessness.

Richard Ngo

As Stuart Russell argues in Human Compatible, we should think of the problem of AI as the problem of building agents which help achieve our actual desires, rather than just achieving a limited and biased proxy for those desires (namely reward). https://t.co/zEMRrKp0Oo

Richard Ngo

We'll be able to study edge cases of the theory in top nightclubs, as Ashley Mears did in Very Important People. Actually, someone once convinced me that you can energize people at clubs by focusing on positive-sum status microtransactions (like high-5s). https://t.co/SeJBeSxNcV

Richard Ngo

@jacobmbuckman A lot! I recommend De Waal's Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? "For most of the last century, science was overly cautious and skeptical about the intelligence of animals. Attributing intentions and emotions to animals was seen as naïve ‘folk’ nonsense." https://t.co/lum2L0i4Fl

Richard Ngo

Just read Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, and... wow, what a book. He so succinctly captures the cocktail of pride, resentment and underlying self-loathing which leads to self-destructive behaviour. Read it if you want to understand misanthropy.

Richard Ngo

@somajourn Internal family systems! My go-to book recommendation for it is You are the one you've been waiting for by Richard Schwartz. https://t.co/HsiyogWHXg

Richard Ngo

@hyperdiscogirl I liked The Modern Mind, an intellectual history of the 20th century. Also the ancient philosophy section of Russell's History of Western Philosophy (the rest seemed dull) (https://t.co/rHsSCkKnAq) and Koestler's The Sleepwalkers: related to Kuhn (https://t.co/tdGLWOY0CJ)