This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules:
- Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
- If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
- Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
- If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
Non Fiction Books Thread
In descending order of how much I liked them, I read in October nonfiction:
The Personal MBA
Generally I hate business stuff but this book presents it really well, references modern cognitive science and avoids the bullshit management speak. Were I feeling cheesy I'd call it "a business book for rationalists" (they even quote Eleizer).
Disclaimer, since I've never read any other proper business books so I don't know how someone with more domain specific knowledge would find it.
Doom: Repercussions of Reaction
Multiheaded waited. The posts above him got downvoted and hidden from view. There were reactionaries on Less Wrong. He didn't see them, but had expected them now for years. His warnings to Konkvistador were not listenend to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway. Multiheaded was a neurotic leftist for four years. When he was young he watched the internet debates and he said to dad "I want to be on the net daddy."
Dad said "No! You will BE TROLL BY REACTIONARIES!"
There was a time when he bel... (read more)
Fiction Books Thread
I recommend Harry Potter and the Natural 20. I noticed a recommendation for it in a thread somewhere here, then there was another recommendation at HPMoR. It's quite good, even if it requires an understanding of D&D.
Television and Movies Thread
I, Robot is a stupid movie, but I'll always remember what Will Smith says to one of the robots:
Not even a decade after the film's release and robots are already writing symponies and turning blank canvases into masterpieces.
I like the robot's response:
Even if robots fail to reach the peak of human capability, so do most ordinary people.
I actually liked the movie quite a bit. The antagonist follows a really weird and bad strategy for the sake of creating an action movie (a much subtler take-over of humanity would have made far more sense). But I think it's a decent stab at Friendly AI difficulty, in a way the general public can understand - you can give a machine several rules that theoretically make it perfectly safe for humans, but those rules can still have ramifications you didn't expect, leading to actions you wouldn't have wanted.
Agreed that if it wasn't called "I, Robot" it would have been "better."
Music Thread
Other Media Thread
Meta Thread