Frankly, don’t let this place dictate your reading habits either.

This is a place to sneer at the delusions of rationalists, and to articulate (through jokes and jeers) why their influence should be minimized.

You’re in college, don’t pick up habits from reddit. Focus on creating serious intellectual relationships with your peers and school faculty.

My advice, stop reading themotte and neolib focus on your studies and make more diverse irl friends, if you still want some reading advise talk to your local socialist group and ask them for advice. You are wasting so much of your potential reading the online rationalist crap.

E: you are juat going to spread yourself to thin by trying to do all of this, have a burnout, then you will fail your studies and you will get firsthand exp on why neoliberalism sucks.

a stereotypical rationalist

neoliberalism (which I’m proud to identity as tbh

It really bothers me when people use these terms so matter-of-factly. Obviously you mean in the sense of the way these terms are used online, such as LessWrong and /r/neoliberalism, but those senses, too, are vague as hell. I assume this is all based on an appreciation, in some ways normative and others descriptive, of rationality writ large: I want to be as rational as possible but also economics is explained by idealized rational individuals, or something? While I suppose there’s overlap, there’s not really enough to conflate them in the way the OP does, and both are too broad for me to think of relevant contrasting reading recommendations.

I don’t know, read Thinking, Fast and Slow and Freakonomics. A lot of the armchair psychology and fetishism of ‘weird but smart’ takes seem to me, from my chosen distance, attempting to imitate these popular books.

For recommendations, I suggest just learning more about psychology, economics, and philosophy in your classes and not internet blogs and fanfics. Someone at some point put the it succinctly of internet rationalism: where it isn’t bad, it’s unoriginal. And you’ll see how this is the case after a formal education on the subjects.

Stop frequenting those subs is more or less all I’ll say, you’re not learning anything on either

/r/TheMotte goes without saying, but /r/neoliberal is where you’re just picking up half-remembered hearsay - you’ve heard of Chinese whispers? - not anything like academically informed opinion the way its presented as

Since you’re a STEM undergraduate with an interest in classics and - presumably since you browse the neolib subreddit at least partially interested in economics - (I’m so sorry you have to be 19 years old studying right now btw), look up the Otto Neurath SEP pages, and consider reading an Amartya Sen book, to get a more rounded understanding of how political economy works than you’d pick up from that or any other subreddit

If you’re into classics, take as many classes as you can there, the only real limit is what’s available: since you’re already majoring in CS you’ll want to take whatever you can get that isn’t CS

However, if it’s on offer consider supplementing with medievalism, a field poorly understood by outsiders that - once I got into it - had a significant impact on my historical outlook

Kind of you to ask.

By any chance are you a fan of Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, or Charles Murray?

One of the worst things about the ratsphere is that its inhabitants genuinely believe they’re exposed to a diverse spectrum of views that are being objectively interrogated by dispassionate reason, when really it’s a safe space where you’re not allowed to suggest that e.g. racism might still exist post-2008 or post-1964 or post-1865 or whenever and everything is evaluated according to the socially acquired biases Bayesian priors of its extremely narrow demographics, on the premise that both credentialed expertise and lived experience are false authority because any layperson from any kind of sheltered life can use their bafflegab to derive all valid opinions from first principles. So it’s a good sign that you’re aware you’re in an echo chamber. I hope you find the exit.

as far as classes go – take things in your uni’s comparative literature department. complit depts tend to emphasize continental phil / critical theory far more than most American philosophy departments.

you’re going to get a lot of people who’ll tell you to start with some canonical frankfurt skewl text or marx’s economic & philosophical manuscripts or whatever. my personal opinion is that this is poor advice with good intentions. you can get into the deep theory stuff once you dip your toes in the water. right now, I’d say to focus on things that broaden your worldview – things that argue neoliberalism is not the end of history, that utilitarianism may not be irrefutable, that capitalism may not be the best way to run things, that sort of stuff. you don’t have to agree with it, but you seem like an open-minded person, so try to charitably engage with it and don’t listen to the little “this is OBVIOUSLY false” monkey that will start to talk as soon as you get outside of your bubble. (remember: you’re in a bubble. how would you know if it’s false or not?) tons of the capital-r Rationalistsphere just… doesn’t ever mention that there’s another way to see the world beyond neoliberalism. again, the goal now is just to see that r/ssc’s opinions are not the only way to see the world.

to this end! don’t be afraid to poke around on the YouTubes and the Internets. Oliver Thorn’s “PhilosophyTube” and Natalie Wynn’s “Contrapoints” are two leftist channels that do longform (30mins - 2hrs) content. (PhilTube just did a video on mass surveillance titled “Data” that may interest you as a CS student.) otherwise just scroll thru their videos and pick whatever looks interesting, honestly. if you’re super intrigued by their content then check out the books/articles they cite in their descriptions and go from there. I’m a pretty big fan of youtube as an intro to hard stuff like this, and I think Wynn/Thorn do an excellent job.

tl;dr; u/Soyweiser is right don’t go too hard or you’ll burn out, go outside and make friends, seek out intro content, try to see that there are other ways of seeing the world beyond the one you’re used to. also take complit classes. also, for the love of god, never say “worldbuilding” ever again

I’m very disappointed to see everyone here recommending boring, dry, and dense ass Marxist theory. No. Bad! That shit is boring, but more importantly it’s all been superseded by more current scholarship anyway. Learn where things are now and work your way back. Too many people on the left read theory from the 1800s and their intellectual development seems to get stuck somewhere around where the world was in the mid 1920s because the canon fractures too much after that to have an obvious “this is what everyone is reading now” list.

Read something that forces you to sympathize with people who aren’t like you. Go read some James Baldwin. Giovanni’s Room is a great start.

If you must read some non-fiction, go read something modern and relevant to current events, like Naomi Klein.

I don’t think it’s bad to value reason and thinking, which those places tend to take to the extreme. But you should make sure you have a wide range of experiences yourself. Talk to people you normally wouldn’t. Listen instead of thinking about your response. You’re young, and a lot of this will happen naturally; it’s good you’re asking these questions.

You got a lot of advanced philosophy suggestions, but I could recommend a couple more recent lightweight books (as in, written for a general purpose audience but still important and well researched):

• Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil
• Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

I’ve just started critically reading Principles of Communism, and it seems like a pretty clear introduction to anti-capitalist economics.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

Karl Marx - Capital

Some readings that should help:

• A People’s History of the United States - Zinn
• The Death and Life of American Cities - Jacobs
• Evicted - Desmond
• Discipline and Punish - Foucault
• Heart of Darkness - Conrad
• Nickled and Dimed - Ehrenreich
• The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart - Phillips
• Confessions of an Economic Hitman - Perkins
• Capital in the Twenty first Century - Piketty
• Predictably Irrational - Ariely
• The Shock Doctrine - Klein
• Globalization and its Discontents - Stiglitz
• Animal Spirits - Akerlof
• The New Jim Crow - Alexander
• The Color of Law - Rothstein
• Orientalism - Said
• Black Skin, White Masks - Fanon
• Dying of Whiteness - Metzl
• Racism without Racist - Bonilla-Silva
• A Letter from a Birmingham Jail - MLK
• The Second Sex - de Beauvoir
• Emotional intelligence - Goleman
• The Mismeasure of Man - Gould
• Assholes a theory - James
• The Poverty of Historicism - Popper
• Meditations - Aurelius
• The Plauge - Camus
• The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
• Siddhartha - Hesse
• Robin Crusoe - Defoe
• Cat’s Cradle - Vonnegut
• The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck

although i personally dislike them, analytical marxists like G.A. Cohen might interest you. i haven’t read it, but my more analytic-leaning friends have recommended Cohen’s “Why Not Socialism?”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say while Marx is great you should also read a little bit more modern stuff about race and gender. I think in general getting more historically literate on that stuff is a good way to get out of the rationalist mindset. Maybe check out Black Reconstruction by W.E. Du Bois, Wages of Whiteness by David R. Roediger or American Holocaust by David E. Stannard. Racecraft is on sale on verso books website, I’m waiting for it to get here so I can’t tell you how it is but it looks great.

I think if you just read dead Germans you end up with this very narrow and Eurocentric view of class. It’s good to immediately start with more modern sociology and labour history so you don’t end up an anti idpol leftist.

Just want to say I’m in a similar boat. 19 studying CS and part of me still subscribes to rationalism I still read SSC posts occasionally. Just funny that it feels like a pattern. Try and diversify. I’ve really been making a concious effort recently to be open to other ideas. If I can offer any advice metacognition really helps. To be thinking about why and how’re you’re thinking.

Take advantage of being in college. If you want to learn about something, take a class on it. If you want to go beyond that, go to office hours and build a relationship with your professors. Otherwise, spend time making friends and being social (and dating). Student groups can be a great place to learn and socialize at the same time.

And think about taking a foreign language class so you can study abroad.

This advice is for you too, u/Fevorkillzz .

the autobiography of malcolm x

black reconstruction in america by w.e.b. dubois

delete your reddit account

I have a few suggestions. They’re perhaps a bit more idiosyncratic than some of the others though. I’ll try and keep my suggestions to a minimum, mainly focused on classes:

• Take a class on combinatorics, combinatorial game theory, or at least number theory. This style of mathematics is likely very different from what you have previously encountered in school. I found this style of mathematics to be deeply interesting and profoundly beautiful in a way that I find has few analogies. My mind often returns to thinking about it, despite it having minimal actual relevance to my life in a day to day work sense. Related: try the textbook Lessons In Play, if you are the sort to tackle math texts on your own. It’s not easy but it’s not too hard either.

• Take a class on religion and take it seriously. I recommend one that very seriously studies the Bible plus another on later theology (ymmv but Niebuhr is often a nice choice), but local variation in offerings and your preferences should be factored in. I recommend this for a few reasons. First, if you come from an internet rationalist tradition, the material will challenge you pretty severely and likely not match what you expect. You will probably encounter more depth than you expect, more diversify of perspectives than you expect, and more thoughtful and empathetic contemplation of life, death, and the human condition than you expect. In a sense, this shouldn’t be surprising: an atheist confronted with the observation that the world is rife with ancient religious traditions should probably conclude that a lot of human thought and effort has gone into making them meaningful and capable of speaking to people. But somehow rationalists often instead conclude that they were a thing because people were dumb before Newton. As a side note, I find that serious engagement with religion classes often in turn opens the door to a more open mind for philosophy, art, and literature…. but ymmv. Tangentially related: give the book I and Thou by Martin Buber a try.

• You seem to have an interest in policy. I recommend looking for an upper level seminar economics class on public economics. Though really, my only intent is to shepherd you past the more theory based classes and to the modern, heavily empirical ones. Probably, your priors will be wildly challenged.

Mathematics has, throughout the ages, given philosophers inspiration for their own thinking. I should be more precise, though, and say “what philosophers think mathematicians do”, because there is a certain false view of mathematics that has held sway in philosophy for a long time: mathematics is the unique science in which everything is demonstrated from self-evident principles in an absolutely rigorous way. The LessWrong approach to knowledge (praxxing everything out) is also inspired by this. Now, to be clear, no book is going to help you grow up (which is what you essentially want to do), but ideally, you’ll consider enough outside perspectives so that one day, you’ll find yourself looking back at this phase and asking yourself what you were thinking. To that purpose, I think reading Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and Refuations could prove tremendously helpful. The lesswrong worldview will seem much less convincing when you see that not even mathematics can be made sense of on this conception of reason. On top of that, it’s an outrageously entertaining read and not very long either.

I was in a similar boat as you in terms of seeing myself as hyperrational, but in college I read Heideggers Being and Time (among other things), and that knocked me off pretty hard, although due to the texts difficulty I wouldn’t recommend it, although continental philosophy is great for deconstructing hyperrationalized selves if you can get a decent book to introduce you to what it’s trying to do. John Caputo’s short little Hermeneutics was a pretty good introduction, and if you want something more substantial (but still written with a good deal of clarity) I found Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World to be pretty solid. Jan Rehmann’s Theories of Ideology was also great and will introduce you to a lot of continental and Marxist thought on subjectivity, ideology and related issues. (It also comes from the book series Historical Materialism, which is one of the best places to get really well done Marxist analysis and research). For deconstructing the relationship between politics and rationality, I’d recommend Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos, Melinda Cooper’s Family Values and John McCumber’s The Philosophy Scare. You’d also likely get a lot out of Malcolm Harris’ Kids These Days which does a leftist/Marxist analysis of the millennial generation, and deconstructs the various myths and tropes rightwingers often have about them (lazy, entitled, etc) and shows how misleading those stereotypes are.

Learn about things from people who actually have background in those areas, rather than from rationalists.

[deleted]

I think you should read the books such that, by listing them here, I would make myself look as cultured and educated as possible.

Robert Anton Wilson

If you’re interested in economics read some of the modern classics of political economy (e.g., Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History). But really the best thing to do is log off for a while and not filter everything through internet subcultures. Get outside the college bubble – find a community garden, get involved in local politics, volunteer somewhere, go to the historical society, whatever. Just go out in the world.

Well judging from your username this might be redundant but maybe consider studying German Idealism. Theres a lot of interesting stuff there. And since I’m a history major of course I have to recommend a history book so I would say that a good introduction to a major ‘continental’ trend that’s likely to be very different to what you’re used to would be ‘The German Conception Of History’ by G.G Iggers.

[deleted]