well um one thing that shaped me as a little tiny person of like age nine or so was a book by Jerry Pornell called A Step Farther out. A whole lot of engineers um say that this was a major formative book for them. It's the technopile book um as written from the perspective of the 1970s the book that's all about asteroid mining and all the mineral wealth that would be available on Earth if we learn to mine the asteroids.
Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “How Afraid of the A.I. Apocalypse Should We Be?” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-eliezer-yudkowsky.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.
Book two, judgment under uncertainty, an edited volume by uh uh Kaman Ferski and I think Slovik um had a huge influence on how I think how I ended up thinking about where humans are on the cognitive chain of existence as it were. It's like here's how the steps of human reasoning break down step by step. Here's how they go astray.
Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “How Afraid of the A.I. Apocalypse Should We Be?” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-eliezer-yudkowsky.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.
Book three, um I'll name probability theory, the logic of science, which was my first introduction to there is a better way. Like here is the structure of quantified uncertainty. If you can try different structures, but they necessarily won't work as well. And we actually can say some things about like what better reasoning would look like. We just can't run it, which is probability theory, the logic of science.
Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “How Afraid of the A.I. Apocalypse Should We Be?” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-eliezer-yudkowsky.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.
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