I love Atlas Shrugged; it's a beautiful novel that's definitely worth reading, but I downvoted your original comment because it fails to recognize that Rand really was terrible at rationality, compared to what we know now. (ChronoDAS's analogy is perfect.) I agree that Atlas Shrugged is full of inspiring prose praising the ideals of reason and recognition of objective reality---but actually recognizing objective reality requires a certain, well, empiricism that Rand just utterly fails at. I mean---laissez-faire capitalism follows deductively from the law of identity and the choice to live? What? Sorry. "Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."
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.