Books
My reading list on thinking clearly and making better decisions, drawn from CFAR's rationality reading list. These are the books I keep coming back to and recommend most. Each cover links out so you can grab a copy.
The Pragmatic Programmer
David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
The habits that separate people who ship working software from people who write code. The one I'd hand to a developer starting out.
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Martin Kleppmann
What actually happens underneath a database, a queue, or a replica set. Changed how I think about every backend I've built since.
A Philosophy of Software Design
John Ousterhout
A short, opinionated case that complexity is the whole problem, and that deep modules with simple interfaces are the way out.
Refactoring
Martin Fowler
A catalogue of small, safe moves for improving code you're afraid to touch. Most of my work on legacy projects is in here.
The Mythical Man-Month
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Fifty years old and still right about why late software projects get later when you add people to them.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman
Less a programming book than a book about abstraction itself. Hard, and worth the difficulty.
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
Eliezer Yudkowsky
A distillation of the “Sequences” on how human reasoning works and where it goes wrong.
The Scout Mindset
Julia Galef
The difference between reasoning to find out what’s true (scout) and reasoning to defend what you already believe (soldier).
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
The definitive tour of the two systems behind human judgment, from the researcher who mapped the field.
The Holy Bible
The central scripture of Christianity: history, law, poetry, prophecy, and letters gathered into one book, and among the most influential ever written.
Focusing
Eugene T. Gendlin
A concrete introspection technique for surfacing thoughts and feelings you can sense but can't yet name.
The Qur’an
The central scripture of Islam, recited and studied by well over a billion people, and a profound counterpart to reading the Bible.
Rationality and the Reflective Mind
Keith Stanovich
A more rigorous model of human bias and what it takes to correct it.
Rational Choice in an Uncertain World
Reid Hastie and Robyn M. Dawes
A grounding textbook on judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.
Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky
The deep dive into the mental shortcuts we use and the systematic errors they produce.
Nonviolent Communication
Marshall Rosenberg
Practical strategies for saying hard things without triggering defenses. Useful far beyond conflict.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter
A sprawling connection between pattern, self-reference, and mind. Slow, strange, and worth it.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Fan fiction that turns Hogwarts into a laboratory for the scientific method. Free to read online, and a surprisingly good on-ramp to the ideas above.
Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
Keith Johnstone
On the unconscious mind’s role in creativity and performance.
The Inner Game of Tennis
W. Timothy Gallwey
Ostensibly about tennis, actually about getting your own head out of the way while learning any skill.
Bonds That Make Us Free
C. Terry Warner
On the patterns of self-deception that quietly damage our relationships.