Blinkist is a company that produces summaries of books. You can read these summaries instead of buying and reading the full book. This saves you time and energy.
Shortform does something similar. (Personally, I've found the quality of the Shortform summaries much better than Blinkist - which, I thought, were often pretty bad/inaccurate.)
Most of the books on these platforms seem to be management, self-help and popular science titles.
It would be cool if someone could create a service which does similar (super-high-quality) summaries for key EA-relevant texts.
Ali Ladak of the Sentience Institute has produced something like this, for books related to consciousness/digital minds, which I found super useful.
It would also be super cool to have the option of doing this on demand. E.g., I come across a book that I'd like to read. I then send a request/instruction to the 'summariser' to produce a high-quality summary of the key ideas in the book.
It seems like it would be possible to do this on a paid-for model. Or on a philanthropically-funded model.
Maybe someone would like to implement this idea?!
I would be interested in writing summaries of books. I did this with two books that I read within the past two years, The Human Use of Human Beings and Beyond Good and Evil. I imagine that I might have excluded many things that I expected myself to easily remember as following logically or being associated with what I did write down. For The Human Use of Human Beings, I tried to combine several of the ideas into one picture. I think what I had in mind was to put all the ideas of the book into a visual dashboard (I did not complete such a visual dashboard). I don't think I still have the summary that I did of Beyond Good and Evil , but I imagine that for that one it is possible I wrote down many passages which I did not completely follow.
Writing a summary of a book can help to process the book more and in different ways.