Scott Young’s The Little Book of Productivity is a self-help gem. I strongly recommend reading the book in full, and periodically going through the summary below to identify productivity techniques that you haven’t yet tried.
This summary of The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal, by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, draws heavily on the “Bear in mind” subsections at the end of each chapter.
An up-to-date list of all apps currently installed on my Android phone can be found here. Please note that you need an AppBrain account to see the list (the service is free, and you can easily create a new account by linking it to your Google or Facebook profile).
As I no longer use AppBrain, this post is now out of date. See this post for my current list of Android apps.
When Luke Muehlhauser updated his website at the end of 2011, many of his essays ceased to be available. I tried to persuade him to put them back online, but I didn’t succeed. Fortunately, the Internet Archive keeps cached versions of the old site, and the essays can still be accessed there. Here are links to the ones I found most useful:
The old site also featured a section on Self-help Guru Ratings. Years ago, I recommended this list to a friend of mine, with the following comment:
I actually clicked on every single review to see which authors were rated positively (only Cudney, Dunnan, and Gilbaugh were, I believe). Maybe he errs on the side of harshness, but at least this criterion makes you quite confident that if a book managed to please him it probably has something good to offer. Elsewhere on his site, he also praises John T. Reed’s book Succeeding.
Update: Peter Hurford points out that “The Art of Plain Talk” was reposted to Common Sense Atheism.
A professor of economics is planning to give a course on effective altruism in the coming academic year, and he asked me and others for a brief list of relevant scholarly writings. Here’s what I suggested [I have since revised and updated the list—PS, April 2020]:
A few days ago, I stumbled upon a copy of Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noël Thomas & Mark Turner. The book was on top of one of the shelves of the Future of Humanity Institute, where I spend most of my working time these days. I have been meaning to take a look at this work since 2009, when I read an enthusiastic blog post about it by Robin Hanson (“the best book I’ve read in years”). Below is my summary of Part one of the book (the first 120 pages or so). Part two is a “museum” of classic texts and part three is a guide to further reading. The summary quotes liberally from the original; I restate a point made in the book with my own words only when I feel that this aids clarity or concision.
Update (September 14th, 2017): I just discovered that a second edition of this book was published in 2011. The summary below was made based on the first edition, published in 1994. The second edition includes an entire new section (“The studio”) with exercises for the reader. Continue reading
This list of resources revises and expands a document that my friend Aron Vallinder created a while ago. The hyperlinks go to the corresponding Amazon.com pages. The average Amazon customer review score appears in brackets, followed by the total number of reviews. If the book is available in electronic format for free, a separate link is provided. A few items are also accompanied by brief annotations. If you think I’m missing some good resource, please let me know.
This bibliography was prepared for a research project on California Proposition 2 that I undertook a while ago, while volunteering for Effective Animal Activism. As I became increasingly busy with many other activities, the project was eventually put on hold. I hope to resume work at some point in the future; in the meantime, I thought I should at least make this material public, in the hope that it might inspire others to do research in this and related areas.
This bibliography is primarily based on Oscar Horta’s Publications in English on wild animal suffering and intervention in nature (for and against), Daniel Dorado’s Ethical interventions in the wild: an annotated bibliography, and the research that Aron Vallinder and I did for a paper on wild animal welfare that we once planned to write. If you know of relevant material not included in the list below, please let me know.
Update April 2022: The list has now become ea.news. The post below is archived, and all future updates will be made on that site only.
What follows is a list of blogs of potential interest to effective altruists. I tried to include all blogs that either feature EA content on a regular basis or are officially linked to an existing EA organization. (Inactive blogs are listed in italics.) If you think I’m missing something, please let me know.