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WillowOne's Positions

Recomended Books

The books I would point someone to, and the few I have written up in order to say why I would not. Each has its own note, which gives an overview of the book and then what I think of it; the one-line reasons here are drawn from those notes. The test is not that I agree with the book. Several of the authors below reach conclusions I reject, and some of them are here precisely because they argue the other side well enough to be worth arguing with. The test is whether the book teaches a method, shows its working, or changed how I think or behave, and whether it is honest about what it does not know.

The list leans towards epistemology, religion and the thinking tools that run through this vault, because that is what the vault is for, but it is not only that. Comedy, fiction and books about words are part of how I think too, and a book that makes you laugh while teaching you to hear pomposity in prose is doing real work.

For the channels, see Recomended YouTube Channels.

Philosophy

  • Apology by Plato (c. 399 BCE) – thirty pages, and the origin of the method I try to use: ask people what they mean, keep asking, and see whether the claim survives.
  • Republic by Plato (c. 375 BCE) – a book to argue with; follow the argument for the city step by step precisely so you can see where it goes wrong.
  • De Rerum Natura by Lucretius (c. 55 BCE) – two thousand years old and closer to my world view than most of what has been written since; wrong about the physics and right about the shape of the answer.
  • Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651) – the first modern attempt to derive morality and political obligation from human interests and nothing else, which is the project I think is right.
  • On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859) – the source of most of my views on free speech and the proper reach of the state, and of the habit of steelmanning the positions I reject.
  • Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche (1886) – got to several of my conclusions first and then kept going; he saw the problem with objective morality clearly, and he is very funny when he wants to be.
  • The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (1912) – the best first book of philosophy I know, and the one I would hand to anyone who wanted to understand why I keep saying certainty is not available.
  • A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (1945) – the map; nearly every position in this vault has a history, and this is the quickest honest way to learn it.
  • The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris (2010) – I agree with the destination and have reservations about the route, but it is the clearest modern statement that you do not need a god to tell right from wrong.
  • Lying by Sam Harris (2011) – the book that changed my behaviour more than any other on this list, which is a strange thing to say about a book this slight.

Religion and atheism

  • Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell (1957; title lecture 1927) – short, plain, and still the clearest version of most of the objections to the standard arguments for God.
  • The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006) – thinner on philosophy than on biology, but the central move, treating "God exists" as a claim about the world that needs evidence like any other, is the right one.
  • God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (2007) – less rigorous than Dawkins and far better written; the individual charges mostly stick.
  • The Portable Atheist by Christopher Hitchens (editor, 2007) – a corrective to the idea that atheism was invented in 2006; the older, quieter voices are the more persuasive.
  • Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens (2010) – here for the man rather than the arguments, and a lesson in how a formidably honest mind can still reason its way into a mistake.
  • Drunk with Blood by Steve Wells (2010; second edition 2013) – every killing God commits or orders in the Bible, with citations and a running tally; the primary-source companion to Hitchens.

Science and scepticism

  • The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976) – the book that made natural selection make sense to me as a mechanism rather than a slogan, and the biological groundwork for my view of morality.
  • The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan (1995) – if I had to pick one book from this list to explain how I think, it would be this one; the baloney detection kit is most of the thinking tools in this vault in a single chapter.
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (2003) – the book to give someone who thinks science is a list of facts; nearly every one was once a contested claim that won on evidence.
  • Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (2008) – the most useful book on this list, because it teaches a method rather than a conclusion: how to read a health claim and ask the right questions.
  • Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre (2012) – taught me that survivorship bias can be built into an entire evidence base, and why "the studies show" is the beginning of a question rather than the end of one.
  • What If by Randall Munroe (2014) – the scientific method in miniature: state the assumptions, estimate, check the estimate against something known, and admit where the model breaks.
  • What If 2 by Randall Munroe (2022) – everything I said about the first book applies, and this one is more careful; the soup chapter is a small masterpiece on orders of magnitude.

Thinking and psychology

  • The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman (1988, as The Psychology of Everyday Things; revised 2013) – changed what I blame: "human error" is nearly always a system that invited the error.
  • The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007) – the best treatment of survivorship bias I know, and the correct way to think about tail risks and the part luck plays in success; read it despite the rudeness.
  • Drive by Daniel H Pink (2009) – an honest popularisation that changed how I think about work: reward a measurable proxy and you get the proxy.
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (2011) – most of the Thinking Tools folder in this vault traces back to it; the feeling of certainty is a product of System 1 and is not evidence of anything.
  • Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012) – a genuinely useful idea I find myself reaching for: a population is antifragile precisely because its individuals are not, and so is a science.
  • Make Your Bed by William H. McRaven (2017) – the one exception I make to my suspicion of self-help: an hour long, no claims it cannot back, and the advice is sound.

History, economics and society

  • The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley (2010) – the first two-thirds are excellent on exchange as the engine of progress; the last third, on climate, is where I get off.
  • Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (2011; English 2014) – here for the "imagined order": religion, money and the limited company in the same category, real because they are believed.
  • The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (2011) – the empirical case that morality is a set of tools that pay off and that the tools have been improving; the strongest argument I know against moral progress needing a divine lawgiver.

Fiction

  • Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605; part two 1615) – the best portrait of a mind that has arranged its perceptions around a belief: confirmation bias and the unfalsifiable hypothesis in a single character.
  • Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (1889) – still funny after a hundred and thirty years, and the best description of hypochondria ever written.
  • The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943) – the only sentimental book on this list; kept for the fox, and for the reminder that meaning is made rather than found.
  • Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945) – the shortest and clearest account of how a revolution in the name of equality produces a new ruling class, and the book behind my view of communism as a critique rather than a programme.
  • 1984 by George Orwell (1949) – here for the epistemology, not the politics: the horror is the destruction of the idea that there is a fact of the matter about the past.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979) – the Babel fish is a sharper parody of the ontological argument than most of the serious rebuttals, and it has not got worse with age.

Language and writing

  • Made in America by Bill Bryson (1994) – American history told through its vocabulary, and a cheerful corrective to British feelings of superiority about words we exported.
  • On Writing by Stephen King (2000) – the best short book on writing plainly that I know, and the one that most shaped how I write these notes.
  • The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth (2011) – pure pleasure, and a reminder that etymology tells you where a word has been and nothing about what it must now mean.
  • The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth (2013) – how persuasion works at the level of the sentence; half the quotations people mistake for wisdom are tricolons.

Comedy and fun

  • Ayoade on Ayoade by Richard Ayoade (2014) – one of the funniest books on this list, and a lesson in the self-important narrator who does not know he is the joke.
  • The Grip of Film by Richard Ayoade (2017) – a field guide to every confident fool who has ever explained a subject to someone who knows it better.
  • Ayoade on Top by Richard Ayoade (2019) – an unintended demonstration that an intelligent reader can construct a satisfying interpretation of almost anything; I think of it whenever someone explains the hidden meaning of a scripture.
  • This Way Up by Map Men (Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman, 2025) – a pleasure, and a book about how a confident, official-looking representation of the world can be wrong and stay wrong for a very long time.

To read

  • Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953, posthumous) – on my reading list rather than my read list; I expect it to matter to my positions on knowledge and on moral claims, and will write it up when I have read it.

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