Eli's starter kit for being an effective whole-human

These are the books that I recommend to someone starting on the path of personal development, who wants to learn to use their mental faculties more, and take action in the world, more effectively than the default.

Huge swaths of practical mental skill is not codified and/or not written down anywhere, and these books are not sufficient on their own. But almost no one makes the simple, known, and codified techniques into habitual practice.

The Less Wrong Sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky

A wide-ranging discussion of formal and applied epistemology, covering philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, the hard problem of consciousness, interpretations quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, metaethics, Artificial Intelligence, and what it means to think well as a human being. This "book" has changed and my thought process, and the trajectory of my life, more than anything else I've ever read.

There are a number of ways that default human reasoning is either fundamentally confused (e.g. relying on incoherent primitives) or optimized for something other than getting the correct answer. The sequences can help you notice and clean up a bunch of those specific classes of cognitive bug.

But even more critically, they convey a spirit and a rhythm of aspiring for precisely correct reasoning, and a striving for excellence as a mind.

As a supplement, you should also read the Arbital Bayes guide (now hosted on LessWrong), and play around with some simple Bayes problems, until you can visualize what it means for something to be “evidence.”

[Note: Despite the word "sequences", I wouldn't worry about reading these posts in order. Start with some post, and follow up on all the hyperlinks that seem interesting to you.]

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity by David Allen

I reread this book ever few years. It outlines a flexible system for staying in skillful control of one's attention, rather than having one's mind constantly yanked about by one's environment and implicit commitments. Along the way it highlights a number of important general principles of human cognition.

Focusing by Eugene Gendlin (audiobook version)

Focusing is a core introspection technique that I use on a weekly basis. CFAR used to recommend the Audiobook (which is how I originally learned), rather than the printed book, because the audiobook can guide you through the exercises. If you prefer a physical book, you should read The Power of Focusing by Ann Weiser Cornell instead.

How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas W. Hubbard

This book is effectively "how to do quantitative empiricism, in practice."

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall Rossenberg

Most people's relationships are rife with conflict and emotional coercion. NVC is a simple framework for getting our needs met more honestly, more cooperatively, and more efficiently. It takes skill and practice to reliably hold the the spirit of NVC, but if you get there, you can pretty much avoid ever having a fight with someone you care about ever again, if you want that.

The book is mostly examples of NVC in practice, and so is pretty "fluffy". Reading through those examples is helpful for getting a handle on the spirit of NVC, which is most of the point (one can perform the steps without the spirit, "weaponizing NVC", as well as holding the spirit without any of the steps, which generally works).

But the first two chapters are only 8 pages long, and outline the basic algorithm. So in a pinch, you can start with that.

For a number of years, I developed and taught Double Crux, a techniques for epistemically resolving disagreements. But in my experience, most people, for most of their in-pracitce disagreements, need something like NVC more than they need something like Double Crux.

Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It by Kenneth L. Higbee

This is the best introduction to the psychology of memory that I've read (and I've read several), covering both theory and techniques.

Atomic Habits by James Clear or Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg

I haven’t read either of these books, and can’t speak to how good either one is (someone I trust thought that Tiny Habits was better). I learned most of my behavioral change techniques elsewhere. But some kind of introduction to Trigger Action Planning or Implementation Intentions is an absolutely necessary.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams

Adams seems to have discovered and articulated a bunch of important practical ideas / principles that I independently converged on, including “systems over goals” (what I call "input goals vs output goals"), and optimizing for personal energy. His epistemics are mixed, and some of his systematic thinking is sloppy, but this book is a great collection of pointers to valuable concepts to put into practice.

[Less important] Superreading for Success by Ron Cole

The summer after my senior year of high school, I read a bunch of books on speed reading and speed learning. Of that survey, I thought this was the best one because 1) it focused on comprehension first (most speed reading programs do increase reading speed, but at the expense of understanding, which defeats the purpose), 2) it included a technique that you and start using immediately (and which I still use to this day), and 3) it included tests for measuring your progress.

This is less relevant now, since almost all my reading is on my laptop. I read almost everything, following a cursor visually while listening to spech to text in parallel, which is an application of one of the central principles in this book, but which obviates most of the specific techniques.

Note: I believe this book touts a bunch of basically false woo (learning styles, photoreading, etc). Don't take everything in it seriously.