SneerClub

Since Adam Becker apparently has a new book out that lays into TESCREAL-ism and Silicon Valley ideology, I'm going to give an anti-recommendation regarding his prior book, What Is Real?, which is about quantum mechanics. Unlike the Sequences, it's not cult shit. Instead, the ambience is more like Becker began with the physicist's typical indifference to history and philosophy, and he somehow maintained that indifference all the way through writing a book about history and philosophy. The result fairly shimmers with errors. He bungles the description of the Einstein--Podolsky--Rosen thought experiment, one of the foundational publications on quantum entanglement and a major moment in the "what is quantum physics all about?!" conversation. He just fails to report correctly what the Einstein--Podolsky--Rosen paper actually says. He makes a big deal about how "hardly any women or people who aren't white" appear in the story he's told, but there were plenty of people he could have included and just didn't — Jun Ishiwara, Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen... — so he somehow made physics sound even more sexist and racist than it actually is. He raises a hullaballoo about how Grete Hermann's criticism of von Neumann was unjustly ignored, while not actually explaining what Grete Hermann's view of quantum mechanics was, or that she was writing about quantum entanglement before Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen! His treatment of Hermann still pisses me off every time I think about it.

For an exposition of Bayesian probability by people who actually know math, there's Ten Great Ideas About Chance by Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms (Princeton University Press, 2018). And for an interesting slice of the history of the subject, there's Cheryl Misak's Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (Oxford University Press, 2020).

For quantum physics, one recent offering is Barton Zwiebach's Mastering Quantum Mechanics: Essentials, Theory, and Applications (MIT Press, 2022). I like the writing style and the structure of it, particularly how it revisits the same topics at escalating levels of sophistication. (I'd skip the Elitzur-Vaidman "bomb tester" thought experiment for reasons.)

be like me and read the critique of pure reason and pierre bourdieu's distinction, you'll be ready for anything forever

The description of "The questions ChatGPT shouldn't answer" doesn't seem to go with the text. Did you mean to link something else?

The Wikibooks book on statistics is surprisingly decent. Hopefully it inspires the reader to acknowledge that there are a lot more things to study apart from Bayes.

The reanimation of pseudoscience in machine learning and its ethical repercussions (pdf link, open-access) is a wonderful take down of the epistemic abuses widespread in much of ML/AI.

Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guide to the Computer is in part a time capsule from a bygone age, and also an introduction to topics of enduring importance. It's a comic book that explains how to design a Boolean circuit to implement an arbitrary truth table.

One area where I don't know of good recommendations is theoretical computer science. I am not sure what to suggest that would accessibly teach topics like algorithmic/Kolmogorov information theory without sliding downhill into "we can automate the scientific method" crankery. Or, perhaps, which teaches the relevant concepts clearly and solidly enough to make it obvious that LW use of them is crankery.

Ran across a BlueSky thread that fits this perfectly - its a social sciences and humanities reading list on AI in education.

Does this need to be marked NSFW? I think the joke about tagging the more serious posts that way ran its course a while ago, and we haven't been sticking to it.