The visual guide to a PhD: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Nice map–territory perspective.

Non-Fiction

Proofs and Refutations by Imre Lakatos, seconding JoshuaZ's recommendation

Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, and Science and Method by Henri Poincare

The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee

Journey through Genius and Euler: The Master of Us All by William Dunham

The Book of Numbers by John H. Conway and Richard Guy

Fiction:

The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano

Never Let Me Go and An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

Contact by Carl Sagan

Niels Lyhne by Jens Peters Jacobsen

Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Songmaster by Orson Scott Card

When I moved back to the US from Japan, I made an ordered list of the books I had to determine which ones to ship home. This is the top ten:

• Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
• Taleb, The Black Swan
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
• Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• Thomas & Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth
• Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
• Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
• Wolferen, the Enigma of Japanese Power
• Chabon, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Makes sense. I suppose that my objection is not to idea fiction being done by literary types (I like Borges a LOT) but to world-building done by literary types (other than David Foster Wallace, but he's more the 'genius-polymath' type), which is what I really think gets the critical acclaim despite being pretty uniformly awful when compared to even competent SF.

I can see how the Curse of Knowledge could be a powerful idea. I will dwell on it for a while -- especially the example given about JFK, as an example of a type of application that would be useful in my own life. (To remember to describe things using broad strokes that are universally clear, rather than technical and accurate,in contexts where persuasion and fueling interest is most important.)

For me, one of the main viewquakes of my life was a line I read from a little book of Kalil Gibran poems:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

It seemed to be a hammer that could be applied to everything.. Whenever I was unhappy about something, I thought about the problem a while until I identified a misconception. I fixed the misconception ("I'm not the smartest person in graduate school"; "I'm not as kind as I thought I was"; "That person won't be there for me when I need them") by assimilating the truth the pain pointed me towards, and the pain would dissipate. (Why should I expect graduate school to be easy? I'll just work harder. Kindness is what you actually do, not how you expect you'll feel. That person is fun to hang out with, but I'll need to find some closer friends.) After each disappointment, I felt stronger and the problem just bounced off me, without my being in denial about anything.

The "technique" failed me when a good friend of mine died. There was a lot of pain, and I tried to identify the truth that was cutting though, but I couldn't find one. Where did my friend go? There is a part of my brain, I realized, that simply cannot except on an emotional level that people are material. I believe that they are (I don't believe in a soul or an afterlife) but I simply couldn't connect the essence of my friend with 'gone'. If there was a truth there, it couldn't find a place in my mind.

This seems like a tangent. .. but just to demonstrate it's not all-powerful.

My essay on the topic:

http://alife.co.uk/essays/the_singularity_is_nonsense/

See also:

"The Singularity" by Lyle Burkhead - see the section "Exponential functions don't have singularities!"

• http://www.geniebusters.org/29_singularity.html

It's not exponential, it's sigmoidal

• http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/11/its-not-exponential-its-sigmoi.html

The Singularity Myth

• http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil.htm

Singularity Skepticism: Exposing Exponential Errors

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_svQQ5g2hk

IMO, those interested in computational limits should discuss per-kg figures.

The metric Moore's law uses is not much use really - since it would be relatively easy to make large asynchronous ICs with lots of faults - which would make a complete mess of the "law".

Basic sanitation!

Yes, this is in fact connected to a general problem that Nick Bostrom has pointed out, each time you try to go back from stone age tech to modern tech you use resources up that you won't have the next time. However, for purposes of actually getting back to high levels of technology rather than having a fun reality show, we've got a few advantages. One can use the remaining metal that is in all the left over objects from modern civilization (cars being one common easy source of a number of metals). Some metals are actually very difficult to extract from ore (aluminum is the primary example of this. Until the technologies for extraction were developed, it was expensive and had almost no uses) whereas the ruins of civilization will have those metals in near pure forms if one knows where to look.

In his bio over at Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson writes:

I am addicted to “viewquakes”, insights which dramatically change my world view.

So am I. I suspect you are too, dear reader. I asked Robin how many viewquakes he had and what caused them, but haven't gotten a response yet. But I must know! I need more viewquakes. So I propose we share our own viewquakes with each other so that we all know where to look for more.

I'll start. I've had four major viewquakes, in roughly chronological order:

• (micro)Economics - Starting with a simple approximation of how humans behave yields a startlingly effective theory in a wide range of contexts.
• Bayesianism - I learned how to think
• Yudkowskyan/Humean Metaethics - Making the move from Objective theories of morality to Subjectively Objective theories of morality cleared up a large degree of confusion in my map.
• Evolution - This is a two part quake: evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. The latter is extremely helpful for explaining some of the behavior that economic theory misses and for understanding the inputs into economic theory (i.e., preferences).

I have a (I suspect unusual) tendency to look at basic concepts and try to see them in as many ways as possible. For example, here are seven equations, all of which could be referred to as Bayes' Theorem:

However, each one is different, and forces a different intuitive understanding of Bayes' Theorem. The fourth one down is my favourite, as it makes obvious that the update depends only on the ratio of likelihoods. It also gives us our motivation for taking odds, since this clears up the 1/(1+x)ness of the equation.

Because of this way of understanding things, I find explanations easy, because if one method isn't working, another one will.

ETA: I'd love to see more versions of Bayes' Theorem, if anyone has any more to post.