Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
The greatest book yet written, Atlas Shrugged is a foundational text of the philosophy of life, reason, and reality. It is dedicated to those who want to "win" and "do the right thing" in general.
The book's philosophy is expressed in a deep, self-consistent context, and the rationalist reader will find that much of the material is consistent with many other things rationalists will read in completely different subjects along their journey.
It is a book all about rationality, in the LW sense of "rationality", and the antithesis philosophies thereof, and it draws the logical conclusions of these opposing philosophies out in the full context of the world at large through a terrific story.
This book is a classic. If you are a rationalist, you would be crazy to ignore it if you haven't read it yet.
Well, I didn't think that Atlas Shrugged was very good (way, way, way too long), let alone the "greatest book yet written". But she certainly did do a good job of cataloging the crazy anti-Enlightenment, anti-reason philosophies that seemed to be sweeping the globe at the time of her writing.
This has been discussed in passing several times, but I thought it might be worthwhile to collect a list of recommended reading for new members and/or aspiring rationalists. There's probably going to be plenty of overlap with the SingInst reading list, but I think the purposes of the two are sufficiently distinct that a separate list is appropriate.
Some requests:
Happy posting!
PS - Is there a "New Readers Start Here" page, or something similar (aside from "About")? I seem to remember someone talking about one, but I can't find it.
1"Everything Eliezer has ever written (since 2001)... twice!" while likely a highly beneficial suggestion for every single human being in existence, is not an acceptable entry. A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation is fine. If you're not sure whether to classify something as "an essay" or "a blog post", there is a little-known trick to distinguish the two: essays contain small nuggets of vanadium ore, and blog posts contain shreds of palladium. Alternatively, just use your best judgement.