If you understand German and these books are still on your reading list, here’s a convenient way to get familiar with their contents.
On Buchdialoge.de, I publish 15-minute podcasts on non-fiction books. Instead of a dry monologue, we use a casual dialogue format to summarize the contents, accompanied by a short article presenting the key points.
Our episodes with an EA / LessWrong background include:
- Benjamin Todd – 80,000 Hours
- Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares – If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
- Jobst Landgrebe & Barry Smith – Why Machines Will Never Rule the World (providing a counter-perspective to Yudkowsky's thesis)
- Toby Ord – The Precipice
- Julia Galef – The Scout Mindset
We also cover "EA-adjacent" books from authors who have written on similar topics or attended EAGs:
- Rutger Bregman – Humankind (Im Grunde gut)
- Sam Harris – Waking Up
- Michael Shellenberger – Apocalypse Never
- Dambisa Moyo – Dead Aid
- Steven Pinker – The Better Angels of Our Nature (Gewalt)
How it's made: The podcasts are generated using Google's NotebookLM with a customized prompt designed to steelman the author’s position and identify the core logical cruxes. Every episode is then proof-listened and edited by a human to ensure accuracy and quality.
What for: I think the podcast can be a helpful resource for a German-speaking audience to learn about EA-related issues. Especially the contrast between AI risk arguments (Yudkowsky vs. Landgrebe) helps to get a quick overview of the different positions in the field.
When exploring our archive, you'll find dozens of additional non-fiction titles, from current bestsellers to established classics. Broadly speaking, our mission is to raise the sanity waterline by presenting an author's ideas in their most honest and charitable form, providing you with the clarity needed to reach your own independent conclusions. We aim to make this level of insight a low-hanging fruit by condensing the core logic of each work into a digestible 15-minute dialogue.
Some episodes are part of our paid archive, but I’m happy to grant full access to readers from this forum. If you’re interested, just sign up for a free subscription on the site and then let me know here in the comments.