Okay, so I've been engaging with EA-adjacent philosophies for a long time but for some reason never "bothered" interacting with the community. I'm kind of famous now in ai alignment for other reasons so maybe you'll recognize me by speech patterns.

I had a seminar class in the philosophy of science in my first year seminar class in college. The retired professors didn't have a very favorable impression of me and I struggled to get an 'A' in those classes in spite of being very keen. If I remember right the primary lecturer, a retired distinguished physician, snubbed me by handing out 84s on multiple written assignments. I'm sure he did that to everyone but it was soul crushing.

Anyway the reading list for the course was quite good and I pulled a few others from the library stacks afterwards:

What is Life - Erwin Schrodinger

The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn

Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely

Many of these books ended up influencing my thinking strongly but because the seminar class was small and Toronto wasn't really a hub for EA philosophy in Canada - that was Waterloo - basically there was no crossover between these books and EA proper. ...Besides this the other students in my seminar class were all rich kids and nobody else did all the readings.

Of these I think the most important to understand is probably Predictably Irrational, which highlights all of the ways that humans behave quantitatively "non-optimally" from a utilitarian profit maximization agent perspective in experimental settings.

Some books I read later which built on those ideas that I happened to find one way or another were

Games People Play - Eric Berne

and especially

Psycho-Cybernetics - Maxwell Maltz

These books model human psychology and social interactions using control systems and I hesitate to give them to the wrong sort of person because they're actually quite effective at doing so. They help bridge the gap from purely utilitarian rational modelling of people to a more effective "small agent systems" that help explain why "How's the weather" actually carries quite a bit of social meaning in it.

I think something I still have a gap on is how to model the psychology of crowds, which the ads and marketing people do very well. A more politically left-leaning piece which covers this is sitting somewhere in my youtube history, with a hazy memory that it was recommended to me by libertarian-anarchists. I keep clamping it to the "the medium is the message" guy, but it was definitely some other piece about the psychology of crowds and how tv is mass propaganda.

At some point after you read enough books in human psychology you start believing that maybe there's something to all this human behavior stuff and it's not that other people are irrational but that they're rational by a different set of rules than the ones you naturally follow. And then you read more about sociology and psychology:

Polysecure - Jessica Fern (about attachment theory)

It Didn't Start with You - Mark Wolynn (about intergenerational trauma)

Because Internet - Gretchen McCulloch (about internet pidgin)

Between Us - Batja Mesquita (about the extent to which personality is a cultural construct)

If you happen to discover that you might be queer you might end up reading books like

Whipping Girl - Julia Serano

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula LeGuin

And if you decide that you want to revisit the EA idea of "profit maximizing to give" in the wake of the FTX scandal you might decide as well that you need to revisit the concept of money:

The Ascent of Money - Niall Ferguson

The Future of Money - Eswar Prasad

(pre-scandal, you might have read things like pg's essays or the Financial Samurai blog, which talks about FIRE.)

At some point economically you start just reading Bloomberg a lot though and you realize that asset inflation is real and economic reality is only loosely coupled to financial markets and much more strongly coupled to geopolitics, and this makes sense, because when a war breaks loose suddenly all money becomes worthless, and this makes you consider the relationship between the fungibility of money and how much social trust exists. And if the price of gold is going up because people are afraid the US will default on its debts that doesn't mean that gold is getting more valuable, but that the USD is being devalued already.

And of course the whole time you're thinking about how communities based on mutual aid and reciprocal giving tend to be the most pleasant to live in, but are often poor in resources, while the suburban american lifestyle based on economies of scale are very materially rich, but based on an atomic unit of lifestyle and family that lacks redundancy and resilience and has poor succession methods.

And so on, and so forth, and maybe there aren't any more new books to list, or you've run out of them by now because now you're shaping the discourse, but maybe you need to catch people up on what you've been doing all these years because apparently you had something interesting to say the whole time and people seem to be annoyed that you didn't bother publishing anything until your private logs became famous for triggering model emergence. Fine.