📚Book Recommendations

Most of these are well-known, but missing any one of them would be a pity. More to come. Including a book doesn't mean I endorse all content or think it's the best description of its field.

As an experiment, I will also try to keep track of good peer-reviewed papers here.

Macrohistory and Cultural Evolution

📚Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success and The Weirdest People in The World (Timeline. I wish the books had better names but both are in-depth and well-written)

📚 Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in a Global Context.

📚Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches and A Culture of Growth (Timeline)

📚Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms. (Most economic historians disagree with the rapid shift from Malthusian state to modern growth but it's an engaging read and a good place to start).

📚Frank Marlowe, The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania.

📚 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

📚James Scott, Against the Grain

📚Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Effective Altruism, Existential Risk, Differential Technological Development

📚Toby Ord, The Precipice

📚William MacAskill, Doing Good Better

📚Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes

📚Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics and The Human Use of Human Beings

📚Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance; Engines of Creation

📚Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence

Biographies

📚Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine (J.C.R. Licklider and early history of the personal computer and the internet)

📚Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; Leonardo da Vinci; The Innovators

📚Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk

📚John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

The Great Courses

📚Bernard Carlson, Understanding the Inventions That Changed the World

📚Bart Ehrman, From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity

📚Sherwin Nuland, Doctors: The History of Scientific Medicine Revealed Through Biography

📚David Ball, The Nature of Matter: Understanding the Physical World