Its been a good minute since the last thread like this, and with the techno-fascist dystopia being unleashed through the Trump administration, it felt like the time was right to bring this back.
Anyways, this is mostly the same idea as before - find books (or articles) that come down upon the superficial TESCREAL version of cool things like a ton of scientific bricks.
Gonna start this thread off with a few random examples I’ve already found:
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The questions ChatGPT shouldn’t answer (Elizabeth Lopatto) - Goes heavily into OpenAI’s non-existent understanding of ethics, with a paragraph noting AI’s links to LessWrong and effective altruism. (EDIT: Originally said “non-existent understanding of physics” - thanks to @blakestacey for catching that)
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The Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley (Lyta Gold) - A deep dive into Silicon Valley’s fundamental misunderstanding of sci-fi. Not directly about TESCREAL, but still works wonders against it IMO.
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“Main character syndrome” (Anna Gotlib) - Whilst primarily a critique of the titular phenomenon, it does also use longtermism/effective altruism as an example of such.
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.)