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Five Books: The best books on everything

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Re: Five Books: The best books on everything

#81

Post by abecedarius »

kragen wrote: post #63

i struggle to find categories on the front page containing falsifiable assertions where are the best five books on linear algebra, on signal processing, on control theory, on equid phylogeny, on group theory, on energy-efficient architectural design, on civil engineering? they do have https://fivebooks.com/best-books/artificial-intelligence-gpt... to be fair, and all five seem to actually exist, but kahneman is in th…

This is a respectable try at a better crowdsourced collection (if you haven't seen it): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t...

To do better I'd want to sort/filter at least semiautomatically by personal taste/judgement -- that could use a UI along the lines of the one I prototyped for a client for image search in the late 2000s, maybe mixed with ideas from Advogato. That's starting to sound like work, to make a new system and get it to be popular enough to accumulate enough data to work with. I wonder if there's an open-data form of something like this five-books site (not this one: https://fivebooks.com/Terms-of-Service/)

Re: Five Books: The best books on everything

#82

Post by mananaysiempre »

consilient wrote: post #69
latexr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m having a hard time parsing your complaint. > This is not how to learn anything. You don’t learn anything by reading books? So if you have an interest in astronomy you don’t learn by reading books on astronomy? How do you learn, then? Must one go study to become an astronomer as the first step? Won’t you have to read a book on it at some point? > It's way more meaningful to understand and pursue your own actual in…

> Must one go study to become an astronomer as the first step? Ideally yes, but failing that you learn from text books. Popsci books, at their best, get people interested and maybe manage to convey a few only moderately distorted factoids. They don't teach anything of substance.

Perhaps the “Best textbooks on every subject” thread[1] at Less Wrong will be more to your liking?

(I have found good popsci books to sometimes be better at conveying historical context, though, simply because textbooks may consider that context to be out of scope, and in a formal settings your professor’s asides would compensate for that. Then, of course, there are textbooks disguised as popsci ones, like Aaronson’s quantum computing one.)

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t...

Re: Five Books: The best books on everything

#83

Post by Name_Chawps »

harry8 wrote: post #61
nindalf wrote: post #5

The Economist does something similar with their Economist Reads column. Their topics are more esoteric though. The best books to understand - The Scottish Independence Movement - https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/05/02/wha... - Poker - https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/04/16/wha... - Florida - https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/04/16/wha... - Investing - https://www.e…

The economist writers are like chatGPT of journalism. It all sounds fine and you think it's great right up to the point it's on a topic you know /anything/ at all about. Suddenly every single time, just on the topics you know just something of it has no depth, no understanding and has no idea what facts it just made up. The writers are clearly intelligent and literary it's just they genuinely don't care to understand…

Can you give one example of a fact that was entirely made up by an Economist article?

Re: Five Books: The best books on everything

#84

Post by kragen »

abecedarius wrote: post #81
kragen wrote: post #63

i struggle to find categories on the front page containing falsifiable assertions where are the best five books on linear algebra, on signal processing, on control theory, on equid phylogeny, on group theory, on energy-efficient architectural design, on civil engineering? they do have https://fivebooks.com/best-books/artificial-intelligence-gpt... to be fair, and all five seem to actually exist, but kahneman is in th…

This is a respectable try at a better crowdsourced collection (if you haven't seen it): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t... To do better I'd want to sort/filter at least semiautomatically by personal taste/judgement -- that could use a UI along the lines of the one I prototyped for a client for image search in the late 2000s, maybe mixed with ideas from Advogato. That's starting to sound l…

this is great, thanks!

we miss you on irc

Re: Five Books: The best books on everything

#85

Post by akkartik »

kragen wrote: post #84
abecedarius wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a respectable try at a better crowdsourced collection (if you haven't seen it): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t... To do better I'd want to sort/filter at least semiautomatically by personal taste/judgement -- that could use a UI along the lines of the one I prototyped for a client for image search in the late 2000s, maybe mixed with ideas from Advogato. That's starting to sound l…

this is great, thanks! we miss you on irc

Where do you tend to hang out since the death of freenode? (I'm not sure you're receiving my emails but feel free to reply over email.)

Re: Five Books: The best books on everything

#86

Post by kragen »

akkartik wrote: post #85
kragen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is great, thanks! we miss you on irc

Where do you tend to hang out since the death of freenode? (I'm not sure you're receiving my emails but feel free to reply over email.)

libera! freenode didn't die, it just had to change its name

Re: Five Books: The best books on everything

#90

Post by sophiestephanie »

I'm one of the founders of the site. We set it up in 2009 and have kept it going by using affiliate links. The affiliate links cover some of the costs, but not all. We interview people who know about a field (often professors) either via Zoom (now, it used to be Skype or phone) or in person, as my background is in journalism. Feel free to ask questions!
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