Dan Luu’s blog, where he dismantles lazy cached answers that people often believe in, argues that a bunch of things are actually pretty good, argues that a bunch of things are actually pretty bad, measures some things to an extent I wouldn’t bother to do, and sometimes just goes in-depth about things he was interested in. Good technical content.
Nikhil Suresh’s blog, where a guy vehemently vents his frustrations with a mostly non-functional tech industry, grows to pursue positive change in a practical way, and encourages others to do the same.
Gwern Branwen’s site. He does a very thorough job of explaining what his site is about himself. I would say that independently of the content, the care that has gone into collating and organizing the content and into the UX/design is inspiring.
ACX, formerly SlateStarCodex, which I won’t bother to explain.
For books in book-format, here’s a link to my GoodReads. It’s not at all comprehensive, but it’s where I’ve cared to write about books I’ve read. I will single out a couple of books below for having a disproportionate impact on me:
Ender’s Game, which was the first work I read where the characters seemed to be thinking realistically and intelligently in a situation with significant moral stakes, and which contained such raw human and emotional elements. It probably helped that the characters were systematically-underestimated child geniuses. The followup book Speaker for the Dead was also important to my development as a person as an example of radical empathy and responsibility, and the less-popular Xenocide helped me with a religious struggle when I first read it; recently I’ve learned that quite a few people have had similar experiences, sometimes even with the same book. These books filled for me a role that I have heard HPMoR did for others I’ve talked to.
Inadequate Equilibria: I spent a lot of my life suffering under various delusions of market efficiency, but I never had a good conversation that could break down the concept for me; arguably I didn’t try to ask anyone with an adequately nuanced notion of what market efficiency was in the first place. A lot of the pieces were already in place for me, e.g, I knew about Nash equilibiria and could observe that the world seemed to be much worse than I’d expect in some places, but I didn’t connect these ideas and had no model for where to expect suboptimality or what mechanistic analysis I could apply to it. Sometimes, a painstakingly thorough elaboration of an idea from premises to conclusions is actually exactly what someone needs. (To this day I still systemically don’t seem to appreciate just how much low-hanging fruit there is for a human being to try to pick in improving the world. It’s something I’m working on.)
Other single pieces of work that I have a special appreciation for:
How much do you believe your results? on LW: At the time of reading this, despite taking courses in mathematical statistics in university, I had a sense that I had no idea what statistics was really about. Not that this managed to teach me all about that, but it illustrates an elementary, counterintuitive but important, thing in that field very instructively, and I imagined that deeply understanding 10-30 things like this might make me feel that I knew what statistics was about.
The classic advice on research and doing great work by Richard Hamming and this lesser-known talk
This relatively obscure comment on the SlateStarCodex subreddit. It gave me hope about some form of goodness in human nature, even in the midst of apparent mind-viruses. More generally, if this problem has always existed, maybe we will make it through despite it. (Conversely, it’s probably very hard to be rid of the problem, though…)