Although I think this is a great list of books to have on LW, is anyone else vaguely disturbed by this idea that you can't contribute meaningfully unless you know about all of these topics? Isn't LW supposed to be about raising the sanity waterline by making rationality more accessible? Posts like this, while useful to people already interested in LW, probably sound extremely off-putting to new users.

It would be good if one could separate these lists into free online material and links to online bookstores. Also, it would be nice to list popular and semi-formal material separate from real rigorous stuff, or to add some annotations to that effect.

Regarding quantum theory, these are the best introductory online materials I've found:

• Quantum Mechanics and Philosophy: An Introduction by Ezio Vailati. (A gentle introduction, with lots of philosophical talk, but still presented using no-nonsense math.)

• Consistent Quantum Theory by Robert Griffiths. (Rigorous, but limited to toy models in finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. Presented using the consistent histories approach. Makes a good job of clarifying some points I found awfully confusing elsewhere.)

• "Quantum Computing since Democritus" course notes by Scott Aaronson. (Lots of fun to read, semi-rigorous, touches on many computability/complexity/foundations topics.)

Also, general relativity isn't really discussed here much, but still, here are some online materials I can recommend, so you can consider adding that to the list:

• Lecture notes by Stefan Waner. (Basic introduction, rigorous. The best free online text I've seen.)

• Lecture notes by Sean Carroll. (Basic introduction, rigorous.)

• Tutorial by John Baez. (A casual, semi-rigorous tutorial that developed out of an old online discussion. Excellent for building up intuitions when used alongside a more rigorous text.)

• Lectures by Leonard Susskind. (Basic introduction, rigorous. A very good lecturer.)

As far as Python goes, the best resource for me while learning it was http://diveintopython.org/

This is great, thanks. Although I don't agree all of this is prerequisite for reading/participating/benefitting from Less Wrong, I'm sure it will useful for anyone autodidactically inclined, and I like how you've categorised and explained them according to how they pertain to topics discussed here.

I would add to the list: http://academicearth.org/ (similar to, but of a much higher quality than Khan Academy)

Excellent post. Thank you.

I think this would be worth moving to the main LW.

Also, if you're going to read only one book about linguistics, I'm not sure if The Language Instict is a good choice. It's very fun and informative, but Pinker does a very bad job of clarifying which claims are a matter of consensus, and which ones his own, at least somewhat controversial opinions. Also, linguistics is a wider field than you might conclude from the book, with lots of fascinating insight about all kinds of things that Pinker doesn't talk about.

For a good introduction to linguistics, I recommend R.L. Trask's Language: the Basics instead. It's much shorter, but definitely better as a primer.

While I understand where you're coming from, I was disappointed to not see much about how to better participate on LW. Some elucidation of the implicit norms of what kind of posts or comments are worthwhile could be useful to newcomers. I also expect to find this useful. It may be difficult to make such norms explicit though.

The not reading the sequences thing probably comes from there being several ways to use a list like this. People who are already familiar with most of the stuff can use it as a handy index to find that one thing they were looking for or the subject they wanted to refresh their skill on. People just browsing randomly can pick something that sounds interesting and go off reading that. People who don't know the stuff and figure they need to learn it look at the length of the list, do some quick estimate of the amount of text involved and go "goddamn fuck it".

It's a lot of stuff, it's immediately obvious it's a lot of stuff, and there are few clues to the relative importance of the bits. The layout is also topic-based, which is nice for the first two groups, but doesn't really help in figuring out what would be a good order in which to read the stuff when coming from zero familiarity.

I thought about something like an university curriculum, where you would have units like Background Reading 1, with a well-picked set of definition articles for common concepts and introductionary sequence posts, followed by Background Reading 2 and so on. These would be composed with the assumption that many people will read through Background Reading 1 and stop there, and the same will happen further in the chain, so better try to get at least some broad overview in early on.

The problem with this of course is that it would be a lot of extra work (someone'd have to decide on unit contents in addition to putting the index together), wouldn't even work with things that can't easily be chopped up into bits such as online textbooks, and it's not clear if it would be that much more useful than the current sink-or-swim style.

Colorblindness check: I'm not sure how many people would be affected, but your F and E wash out for some forms of colorblindness. I'm thinking about this as "you might care", not as "you've gotta do it".

Definitely some Vinge on the fiction list-- Marooned in Real Time introduced the idea of the Singularity, and leaves it as a Rorschach blot for the reader. A Fire Upon the Deep has somewhat about why you should be nervous about the Singularity.

Actually, there's quite a bit to learn from here and enjoy without the math. I might be better off if I knew more math, but meanwhile, I skip the equations and a lot of the more technical discussions.

To judge by my karma (steady upward creep, average somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 point per post, very few downvotes as far as I can tell), I'm participating adequately.

I'm guessing you meant "read math and science", not "eat math and science".

There's a comment or link with what looked like a very good description of how to approach math problems in general. Anyone remember it?

No idea what's wrong but formatting is failing on me right now. I had to fix a whole category and many spaces are gone. It also seems to add double letters on a few occasions.

If you find any errors, let me know. :-(

Hmm...something went wrong. When I hit submit there were already 4 comments?! It looks like I mistakenly published this post before it was finished. Please look at it again if you read it earlier, I'm not sure what you saw.

How about a list of recommended fiction? My background in science fiction and fantasy is more than sufficient, but the anime and manga references go right by me.