Difference between revisions of "Audio Content"

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I wonder what it would be like to understand everything Nietzsche says. I bet he was the only person who ever did.
 
I wonder what it would be like to understand everything Nietzsche says. I bet he was the only person who ever did.
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====Snow Crash====
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Like any Stephenson novel, it's got a lot of good stuff going for it, but it's a lot more flawed than the others I've listened to, and some of these exacerbated by audio.
  
  

Revision as of 22:30, 9 December 2016

After becoming a truck driver, I began listening to many podcasts, lecture series, and audiobooks, forming many opinions. Here are some notes mostly for my own benefit which you may wish to peruse. They are sorted by type of thing, and then by quality.

Contents

Podcasts

Excellent

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

This is my favorite podcast. The host is droll often enough, and true to its name it covers its entire subject matter. There are a lot of boring episodes, especially the interviews, which tend to actually bring forth the philosopher stereotype of endlessly discussing what some obscure figure meant by some arcane phrasing. Listen to this podcast. But skip episodes that bore you. Boredom is the enemy! Don't build a habit of zoning out while listening to stuff. Peter Adamson talks very slowly, so this one is particularly important to speed up. I listen at 1.9x in most situations, 1.5x while driving.

I actually lament having gotten all the way caught up to it before I started listening to other podcasts on any sort of regular basis. Maybe I'll wait until 2165 when it's finally finished and listen to it all again.

Also, it acronyms to hopwag, which is fun to say. Hopwag.


Good

Hardcore History

Despite charging ridiculous prices for episodes and having ads, and not trying for high degrees of factual accuracy, this is way too good not to recommend. If you listen to podcasts and one of them isn't Hardcore History, you're making a mistake.


EconTalk

If you plan on listening to this, you better start early, because there's so damn much of it. It's been going since 2006 nonstop. And unlike many podcasts, it focuses on timeless things, so the old episodes aren't simply irrelevant. Furthermore, unlike most interview show hosts, Russ Roberts focuses on asking informative questions of his guests instead of just praising them for their new book or whatever. So there's a lot of stuff worth listening to. At the same time, it's one of the shows where you lose little by skipping episodes that bore you or where the speaker's accent is incomprehensible. Any time Mike Munger is on, the episode is great.

I first listened to the first episode in late 2014, I think. I remember thinking, wow, these people don't know what they're talking about, and I could totally make a better podcast than them. Then I thought about it some more and realized their failure to comprehend the situation they were analyzing was a bit more sophisticated than my intuitive understanding of it. Sometimes it takes a nuanced understanding to realize that something is puzzling. And it was forgivable for two economists in 2006 to be ignorant of the literature in behavioral economics, and I'd already familiarized myself with it.

Other recurring guests who are great include Arnold Kling, Nassim Taleb (when he's making any sense), Dan Klein, Robin Hanson, Robert Frank, Bryan Caplan. There are plenty of great episodes with guests who only appear once. The quality of an EconTalk episode is directly proportional to the quality of the guest, but there are a lot of guests and you can skip the crummy ones and probably never run out.

I highly recommend this podcast. You'll learn how to take a fruitful perspective which Roberts likes to say centers around the writings of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek. The only thing I think is missing is more of an appreciation of Goodhart's Law.

I found the podcast kind of boring as a whole until I started skipping episodes that sounded like they wouldn't interest me. I started having a much better experience with it after that. I recommend you do this with every podcast, not just EconTalk.


Algocracy and the Transhumanist Project

The format is "standard interview podcast". What distinguishes it enough to be so high on this list is that usually both the host and the guest know the subject matter, maintain high levels of depth and nuance, and discuss an interesting, important, complex subject matter without dropping the ball. Thus it demands a lot of the listener: high levels of philosophical and scientific vocabulary, ability to follow complex chains of thought without pen and paper. I learned about it via Review the Future, below, and thus they showed me their superior in the futurism podcast niche. One of my great lamentations is that nothing in audio format goes into much depth. This is the only exception.

Note that the RSS feed inexplicably only goes back 9 episodes. Because of this, I started with episode 3, and I'm not even sure how to get the first two on my podcatcher. Someone tell the host to fix this.


Douchy's Biology Podcast

Despite being aimed at the Australian equivalent of high school kids, this is the most educational podcast I've ever found. The host is an actual biology teacher, so he knows exactly how to explain what he's explaining in a way that can be easily understood. It's also really entertaining. Sadly he only ran it for a little while. It's so good that I actually emailed a podcaster for the first time, asking him to resume making episodes.


Meh

Review the Future

When I first started listening to this because Sarah Perry and Robin Hanson happened to be guests on it, I was a bit shocked that the hosts were Ted Kupper and Jon Perry, two of my very first ever Twitter followers. It hurt when they unfollowed me, because they were there at, essentially, my beginning. I guess they did so because, essentially because, I more or less stopped tweeting about transhumanism. I am still a transhumanist but I mostly stopped waving the flag after the six months or year of enthusiastically reading tons of transhumanist stuff wore off. So it goes.

Anyway it's a really good podcast. The first 41 episodes are just the hosts talking together, sometimes in lecture mode and sometimes in conversation, about futurism. They are smart, and they think more about the future than I do about anything, so they're worth listening to. Half the time it seems like they save me time by coming up with the same things that I would if I had just thought about it longer. Alas some of the time they reveal their ignorance about some topic with their speculations. But no one could blame them. The future includes every topic imaginable; who can be an expert on everything?

After episode 41 they start having guests most episodes and become a more traditional interview show. Quality suffers as a result, so I bumped it down several notches on the list after making it that far. At least one of their guests was so stupid it pissed me off, and yet they took him seriously. Still highly recommended overall.


The GiveWell Podcast

Woe! Nothing was higher quality than this. It seems that everyone at GiveWell is brilliant and intellectually honest. Exactly the sort of people I want to listen to as much as possible. They started the podcast as an experiment and ended it after just three episodes due to insufficient interest. If you care about my intellectual quality of life, tell them to start it back up again! Tell them podcasts take a while to gain traction! I want to listen!!


The Eastern Border

Really entertaining look at Soviet life and history. The host sometimes makes linguistically interesting speech mistakes.

Originally I had this in the Good category out of pure Russophilia.


[TLDR]

I used to have this podcast about internet culture in the Good category, but then one episode inexplicably seemed to be from a completely different podcast. That was the most recent one I listened to. Who knows what the next episode will be. Also, it seems to suddenly unceremoniously end at some point.


The History of Rome Podcast

I used to have this in the Good category, for being decent without having ads, but then it started having ads. God damn I hate ads. Fucking ads are everywhere! Mercifully an actually finished podcast means that, having caught up on it, I can reduce clutter on my podcatcher, which right now has 116 "podcasts" displayed. The main problem here is that the host is so boring. Peter Adamson of the hopwag doesn't try to be exciting, but he doesn't speak in a dreary monotone like Mike Duncan, either.

In addition to having a boring voice, Duncan has a boring writing style. He's boring! But for someone who listens to as many podcasts as I do, that's fine. Switching from exciting people to boring people adds variety, which overall leads to less boredom.


Hello Internet

The ads in this podcast are more annoying than in any other podcast I listen to. I listen anyway, skipping them, because I like it a lot. It's not educational at all, just two dudes talking. But the dudes are likeable. That's all there is to it.


Very Bad Wizards

The first episode of this podcast was one of the first episodes of any podcast I'd ever listened to. I'd planned on starting a podcast and wanted to learn something about the medium. It took three and a half minutes before the hosts actually started talking about their topic. This sent me into a paroxysm; I really REALLY hate having my time wasted like that. Now that I've listened to lots more podcasts I can see that my standards were far too high. They aren't trying to have high level intellectual debates on important topics. They're trying to have a light conversation, and I understand that now. They talk about things I care about a lot, which gets them a lot of points from me. And for some reason, it's better than any other podcast at causing me to actually think. I can't account for this at all.


ycombinator

I have no idea how I found this. I can't seem to find it again by googling, so I provided the rss feed I'm using. It's great stuff but unfortunately for me it's all stuff I already know from reading Paul Graham essays, and not the really good stuff about rationality and living a good life, but about starting startups. Poor Elon Musk is competent at everything except public speaking. He's as inarticulate as a stupid person.


The Pirate History Podcast

Unfortunately, it seems like almost all the educational podcasts are about history. For me, this one is useful, because something about the host's intellectual style leads to his conveying more about the general air of the time instead of the "one damn thing after another" style the others have all adopted. It's a good complement. Yarrr

Also, he has a really nice voice. That counts for a lot.


Rationally Speaking

This podcast would definitely be higher on the list if it didn't spend its first hundred and thirty-two episodes with obnoxious idiot co-host Massimo Pigliucci. Once he finally leaves the show, the quality shoots up dramatically, but that long backlog of episodes with him will permanently leave the average episode quality at mediocre at best no matter how long Julia Galef puts out good episodes on her own. I really like the post-massimo episodes because almost unique among show hosts, Galef actually thinks. She doesn't do it consistently brilliantly, but you can tell from her questions that she does actual independent thinking about the subject matter. Another reason it's good is that she somehow manages to find a lot of worthwhile guests I've otherwise never heard of, like one of the scientists who figured out how to get much better estimates for the number of neurons in various mammal brains.


The Knowledge Project

I skipped some of the earliest episodes because I couldn't care less about finance. The ones that remained were good enough. It's a pretty standard interview podcast I guess.


Talking Machines

Long ago this was in the Good category, back when this list had like 20 total items on it. The reason I demoted it so much is because it slowly devolves into having nothing whatsoever that I can understand, except the hosts taking every opportunity to bash AI risk concerns and manipulate their guest into doing the same. Evil and misleading. Still probably worth listening to if you can understand the technical stuff.

Like AstronomyCast below, it has the problem that one of the cohosts understands technical details and knows what he's talking about, and the other is a journalist. The journalist adds nothing of value.


The Skullscast

Let me tell you a story.

In perhaps 2008 or 2009, I discovered the phenomenon of "Let's Play", a thing where people record themselves playing video games and talking over the footage of that, usually live and preferably with buddies around. Some of these can get really entertaining. Kaz and medibot were some of the first LPers that I discovered. I went and watched everything they'd ever done. And I watched everything their friends had done, because they sometimes appeared in those things. And I tried to find everything they were in and watch it. I think there might have been a point at which I succeeded. I still spend spare time watching Kaz play video games on stream, as well as his friend Slio9.

So it's really nice for me that there's this podcast by Kaz and medibot. Unfortunately I have no interest whatsoever in most of the episodes because they're about Magic: the Gathering, a game I absolutely refuse to get sucked into. The ones that aren't, though, warm my heart.

This podcast probably won't interest very many people. Skulls.


The Infinite Now

TIMESCANNER's podcast is this new genre of silly science fiction. I don't usually care for fiction, but I like how short the episodes are. That really helps break up time between really long sessions of other things.


Science, Ethics, and the Future

This... "podcast" is just Brian Tomasik reading his own essays in the whingiest most boring voice he can muster. Also, it seems to be dead with just five episodes. Still goes above bad because he's able to think of the important considerations and he thinks about really important things.


You Are Not So Smart

I was bamboozled by the excellent first episode. It's so good, full of nuance and interest (entirely because of the unique guest) that I held out hope for a long time with subsequent episodes that it would stop sucking. But it never did. YANSS has always been a poor man's Less Wrong. The "cookie" gimmick in every episode is completely horrible; not only do I not want to hear about cookie recipes, I don't want to hear about bullshit news in psychology about studies which aren't going to replicate anyway. The host has a nice voice though.


A Brief History of Mathematics

The title is misleading; it's really tiny biographies of some mathematicians. Its main flaw is in giving the sort of standard lies that popular presentations of math by large news organizations always do.


Great Moments in History

Made in the 1920s, which automatically makes it great. It's a series of fake news broadcasts of some of the most momentous occasions ever. Because they're so old, they seem cheesy, but they're cool just the same.


Indie Game: The Podcast

Just regular layfolk talking about video games and not being obnoxious. Turns out that's good enough for me. Stopped after six episodes.


Bad

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Some of the episodes of this are actually good. I skipped a lot of them because they're about stuff I have no interest in. In the ones I didn't skip, Harris spends sooo much time detailing his petty squabbles. I don't understand why he's so popular. It's like his only unusual quality as an intellectual is unlimited endurance for rapid engagement with other people. Maybe that (and a large dose of luck) quite suffice. Anyway, because he's so popular, he's able to pull in some really high quality guests, which honestly is enough reason for me to listen to this podcast. And I must admit, his intellectual integrity is endearing. I was impressed when his conversation with Paul Bloom led him to actually start changing his dietary habits back to a more vegan one. I was impressed that he managed to get roughly the correct view on AI safety issues, though he probably got there via social proof from Elon Musk and Max Tegmark, neither of whom got it by independent thinking either.


AstronomyCast

This one is bad because it's aimed at a completely lay audience with no scientific literacy whatsoever. It has the EconTalk issue of having run continuously since 2006, with the associated endless backlog. I still listen to it because it seems relatively free of bullshit, although the misleading metaphors and summaries that leave out most scientifically relevant information, the lies to children, are quite irksome. Also, there are two hosts, an actual scientist, Dr. Pamela Gay, and a...nother person. I don't know what the other person's doing there. He never says anything interesting. It should just be the scientist.


The Tim Ferriss Show

This is surprisingly okay. Like Sam Harris, Ferriss is famous enough to pull in some high-quality guests. I skip most of the episodes but I continue to listen because he does manage to talk about some neglected important things. The reason it's bad is that Ferriss, like most people, suffers from the delusion that productivity advice isn't a worthless black hole for cognitive activity. Self-help. What a fucking sham.


The Cracked Podcast

Yeah, it's funny, but so much of what they say is wrong or misleading that I can't in good conscience recommend anyone listen to it. Yes, even David Wong. Though not as much when he's just poking at widely-held wrong beliefs. But make no mistake. This is not an educational podcast. It's more important than you might realize to avoid listening to false statements. People tend to end up remembering as true even those statements which are explicitly labeled as false, especially under cognitive load. I know this because I read it somewhere. It's a phenomenal act of hubris to think you are immune to this effect and won't be thus making the world worse in expected value by exposing yourself to entertaining bullshit.


Psychology of Video Games

God, so much self-promotion. No, I am not going to support you on Patreon, you whiny-sounding son of a bitch. It's an odd choice to start a podcast when your voice is as whiny-sounding as the host's.

This podcast was helpful to me in reminding me how non-fluent in concept-wielding the average social scientist is. Most of the podcasts on this list have the audience and breadth of subject matter to pull in star social scientists like Paul Bloom, Andrew Gelman, Roy Baumeister, Robin Hanson, Philip Tetlock, George Ainslie, Dan Ariely. These are not average social scientists. The qualities which make them popular are not entirely inversely correlated to those qualities which make a social scientist smart, so with that selection effect in place you might think that most social scientists are interesting people with something to say, if not necessarily brilliant minds to fawn over. Not so. Due to its limited subject matter, this podcast seems to have no choice, since there's always a guest, to pick an average psychologist or video-game-psychology-adjacent (e.g. ergonomics) guest, and that gives a more accurate impression of the practitioners as a whole probably. It's not that optimistic a picture, because yes of course these are smarter than average humans but they aren't nearly smart enough. Terrible to think that science is in the hands mostly of these people.


The Co-Optional Podcast

This is the lowest item on the list I continue to listen to. I'm clearly not in the target audience. It seems this podcast is only intended for people who already follow TotalBiscuit in some manner, since he constantly references his videos and writings. I don't understand why you'd make a podcast and then assume everyone listening is also reading your writing and watching your videos. They're completely different mediums; maybe some people are truck drivers and have a LOT more time to listen to stuff than watch and read stuff?

Anyway, I'm kind of lost as to what the hell he's talking about most of the time, but I keep listening because the episodes are short and so they make good breaks between longer things, and because the host is impressively intellectually honest for someone in his field.


The British History Podcast

The host spends a LOT of time on personal speculations and on trying to sound cool. I had this in the Meh category until I did a quick estimate for how much time he spends on his on personal and not very intelligent speculations. It's like half the podcast. Also the host spends increasing amount of time per episode on obnoxious self-promotion, trying to get you to listen to his other podcast, as if you really wanted to even listen to all of this one. I moved this further down the list when I realized the host is kind of a derp, repeating himself a lot and structuring his sentences in paragraphs in ways that don't make any sense and represent muddled thinking. Still, I can't really have enough different educational podcasts to fill the time, because there aren't really any good ones. This list is graded on a curve, sadly.

Some trivia. In the first episode, the host claims that half of your ancestors are women. This is not true. A lot more than half of your ancestors are women.


The History of the Mongols

I gave this an honest shot. I listened to several episodes. But I had to stop because the host's voice sucks so much.

Listen. If your voice sucks, don't start a podcast. It's not what you're meant to do.


Lore

Similarly, the host of this one's voice sucks. I can't really remember why else this one was bad, but I remember continuing to give episode after episode a try, and then realizing after every single one that the podcast was just bad.


Cortex

Ugh. Completely devoid of value. It doesn't matter that I want to smear CGP Grey's voice on pancakes. There's nothing of interest here. The hosts just talk about their workflows. You might be able to glean one tiny speck of useful information from there, but if the signal to noise ratio is too low for even me to gain enough from it for it to be worth listening to, who could possibly benefit from it?


Partially Examined Life

This podcast actually started out pretty good. The first several episodes I liked a lot and am glad I listened to them. But then there's like 50 episodes in a row that are members-only, and of course I'm not going to fork over money to listen to a bunch of dudes who aren't as smart or philosophically sophisticated as I am (though, much more philosophically knowledgeable and conscientious) talk about shit. Then it turns out that, despite explicitly saying they DON'T do this, they assume you've listened to all of those episodes when the free ones resume, and I can't understand a single word they're saying. I kept trying with many episodes, but couldn't. Yeah. Anyway my favorite is their episode on Camus. You might try that one. God they were unfair to Peter Singer. But then, most people are.


Intelligence Squared

The people who are interested in "debate" for its own sake are so much stupider than the people who are interested in the things people debate over. This podcast is for the former.

And it's nothing but politics. Politics. Not even once. The first episode that wasn't about politics was full of bullshit. Some business and politics presentation and speech writer talking about the """science""" of """"buoyancy"""", referencing nothing but bullshit papers that happened to be in vogue at the time, which were later overturned. Hearing that made me really appreciate Rationally Speaking and Very Bad Wizards, who have much higher (though, of course, still not sufficiently high) standards.

The episodes that aren't debates are TED-style talks, mostly nonsense, and given with necessary visual aids that are of course absent in the podcast form.


Pragmatic

I'm really sorry I tried this. It's just two people talking about Apple products, which I have no interest in. One of them is merely not very smart and the other is a blubbering idiot.


The Memory Palace

I almost want to like this one. But over 40% of the space in each episode is taken up by ads. Unacceptable.


Bruce Lee Podcast

This is run by Bruce Lee's daughter, and I'm a fan of the man himself, so I had high hopes going in. Well, I had hopes. Turns out the hostesses are obnoxious, stupid, self-interested fools with nothing interesting to say. A shame they're in charge of his legacy.

You could totally get something out of this if you had your brain tuned to the right frequency. Sort of like how Marcus Aurelius's Meditations work for me as a reminder to Become Stoic regardless of whether the claims therein make sense or are true. But it doesn't work for me. And I'm the one making this list. Bad it is.

The main technical flaw is that the hostesses' obnoxious chittery laughter is WAY louder than their speech, so if I turn the volume up enough to understand what they're saying, the laughter, which happens all the time (why? what's so damn funny? nothing. nothing at all.) hurts my ears. Another is the constant background hum that could easily be removed with Audacity's Noise Reduction filter. It's interesting how many podcasts are run by people who don't know what they're doing.


The Countryside Hour

This was one of the last BBC podcasts I ever tried, and it turned out to be just as unlistenable as the rest of them. Who thinks it's a good idea to interrupt every thirty seconds with a phone number?


Stuff You Missed in History Class

It was so long ago, I can't remember why this one is bad. Just trust me on it.


Stuff to Blow Your Mind

Same. Don't listen to anything by NPR or the BBC.


Radiolab

It infuriates me that this one is so popular, because it's one of the worst podcasts of all time. All the super-obnoxious genre conventions of a radio show, put into a podcast for scientifically illiterate people to feel like they're learning. I hate it. It's sometimes nominally about things I'd actually like to hear about, too. Such a shame.


SciFri

Basically, same deal. Interrupting with phone numbers. Why?


The Nerdist

Can't remember anything about this one.


The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe

It's just a circlejerk with no information in it. I guess this is as good a place as any to soapbox about the skeptic movement in general. I used to see them as sort of doing good on average, because they're one of the few groups on earth that even purports to care about epistemology. But they really don't. They're just a tribe like any other, making noises about epistemology but no more. The closest thing to a principle that differentiates their belief-generation procedures from any other group's (as opposed to the usual arbitrary process that determines the memetic makeup in a cohesive group of humans) is the absurdity heuristic, which, you'll be shocked to find out, is a heuristic. Not a rule of inference. The Less Wrong community, such as it is, does a lot better with its cargo cult Bayesianism.


Breaking Bio

I could not get two minutes into the first episode. After hearing something like 10 people introduce themselves, I realized I was not going to be able to follow the conversation. I looked at the episode list and realized the expected net value of information from listening to even one episode to determine its quality was negative.


The Bayesian Conspiracy

If you wanted to sabotage the rationalist movement, making this podcast, telling people about this podcast, allowing this podcast to exist, would be a good start. Maybe I've spoiled myself by limiting myself to talking to mostly high-quality members of the movement. If the average members are basically as awful as the people in this podcast, which I guess they are, then the movement as a whole does deserve to be destroyed, and has earned every bit of disapprobation hurled upon it, even by the uncomprehending outsiders.

I hate these people for being the first "rationalists" to start a podcast. If it were me instead... Man...


A History of the World in 100 Objects

Can't remember why it was bad. If memory serves, this was one of the BBC or NPR ones, so probably for the same reason all the other ones are bad.


Historicool

There are too many good and decent podcasts to bother listening to any where the audio quality is this bad. I tried listening to the first episode and basically couldn't understand what they said over the sound of the engine running. I don't care if the audio quality improves later, because the hosts sounded like they were mostly bullshitting and wasting time anyway.


The Patch

Can't remember.


The Most Useful Podcast Ever

Can't remember.


No Such Thing As A Fish

Can't remember.


Awful

Freakonomics Radio

This one is bad for exactly the same reasons Radiolab and The Cracked Podcast are bad, except cranked up to 11 and put together.


This American Life

It's totally content-free. I don't see how you could listen to it and think you've listened to anything. I listened to some of the first episodes ever. It's a very old podcast, so maybe I thus haven't given it a fair shake and should try the newer ones. If there's anything there, let me know and maybe I'll give it another try. Or let me know if this evaluation is correct so I can remove this disclaimer.


The Economist Radio

Episodes did not play on my podcatcher. I don't know where the problem lies, but since this list is for my own use, that rates an Awful.


Queued

  • Revolutions
  • History of World War II
  • History of the 20th Century
  • This Week in Microbiology
  • This Week in Virology
  • Twilight Histories
  • War Time
  • History On Fire
  • The History of English Podcast
  • The History of Alchemy Podcast
  • Inward Empire
  • STEM-talk
  • WTF Do We Know?
  • Histories of the UNEXPECTED
  • China History Podcast
  • Futility Closet
  • Seminars on Long-Term Thinking


Lectures

Excellent

TTC--The Story of Human Language

I don't have much to say about this lecture series, except that I really want you to listen to them. Its great virtue is in lacking the serious flaws that make every other lecture a poor choice for trying to listen to them while driving as part of my self-education.

They're really interesting. I can't explain why exactly. It's not the subject matter. The lecturer seems to know how to hold attention.

They're pretty old. It's interesting that he once uses the phrase "it's pretty much proven at this point that" regarding a claim that has since been disproven. Knowing things is hard.

They are so good that I got sad when I was down to three lectures left.

Despite all this approbation, I think you'd be insane to pay for them. $200? Who does The Teaching Company think they're kidding? Luckily, my copy fell off the back of a truck.


Good

Astronomy 162: Stars, Galaxies, & the Universe

You might think that stripping the visuals from astronomy lectures would make them suffer greatly. Well, of course you'd be right, but you wouldn't be so right that Richard Pogge's experiment podcastifying the lectures for the second half of an intro astronomy course doesn't work well. These were some of my favorite things to listen to once per day until I ran out. I liked them so much that I tried to find them again, and to my delight discovered that the same person did the same thing with the first half of the course, and his lectures on astrobiology, which I now have queued. Man, if only graduate courses or at least higher level undergraduate courses did this. Then I could really get some depth.


Meh

Six Not So Easy Pieces

These Feynman lectures seem like they're brilliant, but I can't tell, partly because I'm not familiar enough with the calculus, but mostly because they really need the visuals of the chalkboard he's writing on. Also, they seem to be a sequel to "Six Easy Pieces", which I didn't find.


Bad

TTC - Philosophy of Science

I wanted these to be interesting. They would have been if the speaker understood how words work. Instead he falls into the most obnoxious philosophical trap there is, spending endless amounts of time discussing what words "really mean". It's a shame because if he had just stuck to the arguably easier task of detailing what others thought, these could have been pretty interesting as history of philosophy of science. Before giving up out of sheer boredom, the one thing I learned that stuck with me was that operationalism was this actual philosophical school, not just a toolkit, which is more or less what remains. And I understood it better. So these aren't completely worthless if you can slog through them. But you probably can't.


TTC - Games People Play

Here's what I expected to say about these lectures, after listening to the first two: These are probably a pretty good introduction to classical game theory if you know actual nothing about it, and it's nice to know that the lecturer is actually informed by Schelling, still the greatest of game theory writers. But he just doesn't understand something really important, which I poorly tried to explain here and which is much better explained here, about the nature of rationality.

I endorse all of that as true. But here's what I'm going to say instead. He constantly makes references to visuals! All the time! And you need to see them to understand the lectures! Why did The Teaching Company sell these as an audio set if you need to see things to understand? What's wrong with them?


Awful

Econ 109 - Game Theory

Unlistenably boring.

BIMM 124 - Medical Microbiology

The worst thing I've ever attempted to listen to. Complete waste of time for a whole lot of reasons which I'm not going to even bother to try and explain. Bodes ill for other lecture series from UC San Diego, but I'll keep trying them unless they're universally bad after a lot of tries.


Queued

LibriVox audiobooks

The quality of an audiobook depends on three things: the quality of the book, the quality of the oration, and the listenability of the text. LibriVox, having volunteer readers and almost solely books from before 1923, tends to utterly fail the second and third criteria. As often as not, the volunteers are worse readers than brute text-to-speech software.

Good

The Early History of the Aeroplane by Orville and Wilbur Wright

This would rate an Excellent if not for the poor reading. It's such a fantastic personal account of manly science and engineering, using ingenuity and dedication to figure out experiments to perform and things to try. It's brilliantly written. I urge you to read or listen to this. It will take less or slightly more than an hour, depending on which method you choose! I've listened to it several times. So good.

The only problem with the reading, really, is that the speaker's microphone picked up every sibilant and they get delivered harshly to the ear. This could be fixed with a simple low pass filter, but the person recording evidently didn't know shit, and neither does anyone else at LibriVox. They'll probably keep plodding along with their useless task even after text-to-speech software surpasses decent readers.


The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

Peter Yearsley does a better reading of this book than most professionals. Seriously, this one's almost worth listening to for the oration alone. But even if it had a crummy reader it'd be worth listening to for the historical information and to learn to get into the head of a group of people who think VERY differently from how you and I do. That sort of thing is always useful.


How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

As far as I can tell, this is the only good self-help book ever written. It's mercifully short, brilliantly written, and contains good and actionable advice mysteriously absent in the millions of pages of bull-, horse-, and goat-shit always flowing forth from contemporary inspirational gurus.

I'd already read the book several times before listening to the audiobook, but was pleased to learn that the recording is good! The reader does a good job, only rendering a couple of sentences with wrong emphasis and giving a pronunciation of Epictetus I find distasteful (though I can't claim it's a mistake, since no one knows how it would have been said in Epictetus's time).

There is also another version, if for some reason you find this one objectionable. You could easily listen in one sitting or spread out the 7-or-so-minute recordings to different sittings.


Meh

Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita is awesome! I confess I listened to a version I got from some torrent, which isn't either of the librivox versions. The version I listened to had a lame reader and the librivox versions seem worse. Even so, this is such a cool text. Like 80% of it is devoted to Krishna talking about how awesome he is, which I doubt you could get away with in any form in a modern text, and interspersed throughout are all these awesome quotes about conquering and uniting the self. Awesome.


Marcus Aurelius's Meditations

If you're confronted with a travesty and you ask yourself, "What would Marcus Aurelius Antoninus do?" you will not have to think very hard. The answer is always, "he would stoically embrace it." For instance, if you were to tell him that some day his private journal would be read and recorded by a bunch of incompetent dweebs, you could expect him to stoically embrace it.

The readers are nearly all terrible, but at least I can understand what they're all saying, so this book has that going for it.

What to make of the book itself? The stoic metaphysics which Marcus Aurelius uses to justify his ethical proclamations are entirely either known today to be false or philosophically untenable. And when he doesn't use metaphysics, he says other untenable things, like repeatedly making reference to how your soul cannot be stained by any external force. 1700 years before the behaviorist revolution in psychology he can be forgiven for not knowing how easy it is to warp a human's soul to whatever ends, but does that mean his words are no longer worth hearing?

I think The Meditations are still worth listening to. It's not about the factual correctness. Stoicism is still a valuable ethic, and probably will be for a very long time. Because none of the librivox volunteers screwed up so bad that I have to skip any section entirely, I see no reason not to listen to the book over and over, trying to glean new inspiration each time.

You never read the same book twice because each time you read something, you are different. You have different things on your mind, different connections will form. The Meditations are personal enough that they should connect to something in your life.


Bad

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Let me emphasize straight away that the book itself is brilliant and, having listened to most of this, I believe incredibly important. All aspiring moral psychologists should read it. It is so much more interesting than Smith's other opus. It's Bad because the readings are nearly universally terrible. Some sections are so bad that I had to just skip them because I couldn't understand a word they said. God damnit, why do you bother publishing oration categorically worse than even outdated text to speech software?


An Essay on the Principle of Population

I listened to this before I became a truck driver, so it took me a while to remember that I'd done so and add it to this list. I thought that Malthusian reasoning was underrated, and wanted to learn about whence they came. I still think Malthusian ideas are underrated, but I can assure you that the source of them is not. He was not a very good thinker. He wrote a lot of words and delivered very little that was interesting. The reading is tolerable, not good. There's not enough good stuff in there to be worth the time.


Cicero's Philippics

The reading is tolerable. These are a mildly interesting lesson in rhetoric and history, but you're not missing out on much if you skip these, unless you're just suuuper into Roman history.


Russia in 1919

I liked the sound of the book and if I had an infinite amount of free time I should like to read it some day; it sounded like a very interesting set of observations. But, I don't know why, I couldn't keep focus on it at all. No point in listening to things that can't hold my attention.


An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Of course the book is brilliant, and the reading isn't even that terrible, but it fails the listenability criterion for being full of this overly flowery and ornate language that characterized the period. Weirdly, Smith's other opus doesn't have this problem as bad.


The Iliad

I loved reading the Iliad, but I couldn't stand listening to it. I guess it really needs to be sang, not spoken. And there's no good verse translation. Alas.


Queued

  • Anna Karenina
  • History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  • The French Revolution, by Blaire Helloc
  • Reflections on the Revolution in France
  • On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
  • The Story of Electricity by John Munro
  • On the Origin of Species
  • Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder
  • Of Peace of Mind by Seneca
  • The Art of War
  • Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Other Audiobooks

Excellent

The Blind Watchmaker

Hands down, the best thing I have listened to. Before committing to ruining his reputation with politics and militant atheism, Richard Dawkins was a brilliant popular science writer. In this book, especially in the earlier more philosophical sections, he touches upon a somewhat large number of very deep issues which very few people understand. For instance, his definition of complexity is very close to a correct understanding of the nature of optimization. For another instance, in the middle of the book he comes very close to independently inventing the anthropic principle. Very little here new to me, but still way farther than most people get!

AND. Half the book was read by the man himself! He has a nice voice and accent. One thousand percent recommended. I will probably listen to it several more times.

Now if only The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins's best and most important work, had an audiobook...


Good

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

This is an excellent and super important book, which somehow managed to teach me things I didn't know even though I avidly followed the field up to its publication. It would be a shame if it remains for a long time the canonical text on the subject, since it's so provisional and timeful and the state of the art moves forward so quickly, but I don't know of anyone who exists whose comparative advantage is constantly pumping out updated editions. So it goes. If you want a book about impending AI doom, Superintelligence is the best there is.

I listened to this one while reading it, so I can't vouch for the listenability. This worked really well as it almost forced me to focus on the dry text. Having to close *two* programs to stop listening made me disinclined to. I wasn't able to read footnotes that way, but something had to give. The alternative was likely not reading anything at all.

Now, this audiobook is in the Good category because the book itself is so good. But the reading has a lot of mistakes, which I only was able to notice because I was simultaneously reading. Including at least one where the reader says the exact opposite of what Bostrom actually wrote. This makes me wonder if there are similar numbers of mistakes in all the other readings. There probably are...


Seveneves

The first two thirds are amazing, truly epic in a way few things are, and include a character I managed to hate more than any other fictional character EVER. The last third is a lot like a mediocre sequel. The average quality of the book would have gone up if that part of the book were removed, but I don't regret listening to it. It wasn't *bad*.

The lady who reads the first part tries to sound like a man for the male characters, and it doesn't work. People shouldn't do this.


REAMDE

This is the first thing I listened to as a truck driver. My trainer had it on a set of 31 CDs, and this was before I had my phone fully set up for listening to stuff, so I listened to it. Some parts were too scratchy to listen to, including the entirety of the final CD, so I still don't know how it ends. It was a lot of fun! Some parts felt like lazy writing, but that's 100% forgivable in a novel of this length.


The Lord of the Rings

I'd read half of this before. I expected it not to work well in audio, since it's so dense, but it actually did. Nothing needs to be said here about the text. The version I listened to was fine. Very glad this job gave me the chance to finish the book.


Discworld

Of course, this is many books, not one, but they are so close in quality that it certainly wouldn't be worth it to have a million lines about each one. They are great! They translate surprisingly well into audio, and the alternating male and female readers are both excellent. The audio quality is pretty poor, though.

Nigel Planer is a genius at reading, probably the best reader out of everyone on this whole list.


Meh

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Went into this with low expectations because of its deceptive title. Thought it was going to be a sweeping overview of world history a la Guns, Germs, and Steel, but no! It should have been called A Short History of Science. I would have been excited to listen to this if it were titled accurately! He covers physics, astronomy, taxonomy, paleontology, and some others. It's not an exhaustive tour-de-force, but it's about as close as you can get. Probably the most important omissions, for a 21st century book, is computer science, which isn't even mentioned.

It's a book with the misfortune of benefiting from being read near-contemporaneously with its publication. It was published in 2003 so lots of stuff is out of date. I would really like this book to be rewritten every decade or so to keep up with advances.

As a work of popular science, it has all the standard flaws, for instance giving all the usual wrong misleading crap about quantum physics and string theory. But where the author doesn't try to explain things he doesn't understand and instead just gives accounts of kickass scientists doing fascinating research, the book is GREAT! Engaging, fun, interesting, all the adjectives that book reviewers use to fellate their allies.

The theme running throughout the book is the precariousness of life, which is something I want more people to appreciate. There are also a number of very important other lessons in it which the author himself wasn't smart enough to realize. I've forgotten what they are. Some day I'll give it another listen and try to remember.

One small anecdote is of a researcher offering a constant reward for each bone fragment found in some small village. The locals broke up the bones into pieces to maximize their profits, illustrating a really important principle related to Goodhart's Law and the principal-agent problem, the perverse incentive.


Nudge

Nudge deserves to be influential and you probably need to read it if you think "libertarian paternalism" is a contradiction in terms. You are just misunderstanding the thesis. But most of the content is just an introduction to heuristics and biases, which I'm already familiar with. The authors do more than most books on the subject, though. They apply it to real life. They provide a very large number of examples of nudges in three major contexts and argue pretty persuasively that each individual one is net positive.

They take a rather unenlightened prog attitude toward most things: everyone should eat mostly vegetables and avoid fats (uh...), women are harmed more by divorce than men (WHAT?????), etc. But just because they're wrong about a bunch of empirical stuff doesn't mean the thesis is wrong. The whole point of libertarian paternalism is that the people doing the nudging are supposed to account for the possibility that they're wrong by not imposing themselves.

Here's an example of a failure to do just that. My phone won't let me have the volume turned up all the way with headphones in without warning me that listening at high volume for extended periods can damage ears. Okay, but what if I want to use the volume control on my headphones? What if I'm not actually using headphones, but have the phone plugged into a truck's stereo system? This is actually the case most of the time. The warning still pops up every so often, and I have to look away from the road to dismiss it, then turn the volume back up, every single time. Bad, bad Samsung Galaxy S5. Bad. Don't impose a certain volume on me. Or jeez, at least only warn once instead of randomly while I'm fucking driving.

Back on topic. The book ultimately presents an incomplete vision lacking nuance. People respond to their environments in ways that people like Sunstein and Thaler don't expect if they blindly accept the conclusions of research papers as unalterably given. I recommend reading Jason Collins for a more complete perspective. His original view of the (audio!)book is here.


Beyond Good and Evil

I listened to the Ian Johnston translation read by Alex Jennings. I probably can't usefully comment on whether you should read Nietzsche, but I can say that this audiobook is an excellent way to do it, preferably as a second or third go-through rather than a first, like I did, but you do what you can, not what you wish you could.

I wonder what it would be like to understand everything Nietzsche says. I bet he was the only person who ever did.


Snow Crash

Like any Stephenson novel, it's got a lot of good stuff going for it, but it's a lot more flawed than the others I've listened to, and some of these exacerbated by audio.


The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

It's so much easier to pirate the super popular things than non-super-popular things, or else maybe I'd never have to listen to such unenlightening pop science. I don't find Pinker's style offensive, so I listened to this. It's mostly an antidote to stupid memes about how humans are infinitely malleable and entirely culturally determined. It's good as an antidote, but I never fell into that stupidity in the first place, so the book was mostly only of use to me for the admittedly interesting speculations on culture and ethics.

Oftentimes the BS-peddlers justify their denial of human nature by saying that if we learned that humans really did have a nature, then that would justify atrocities. Pinker has sufficiently good arguments against that, but one he doesn't notice is that biology is easier to change than society. Drugs and genetic engineering work; activism and politics don't. More people should understand this.


On Bullshit

This short work, which I recommend actually reading, almost ought to be in the Bad category for failing the listenability test. Maybe it was my cognitive state at the time, but I couldn't maintain focus on it, which I tend to believe is usually the audio's fault, not my own. It's a good book though.


Bad

What If? Serious Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Pointless. It is an entertaining way to pass the time, and Wil Wheaton does a good job reading, but there's very little of interest here, and the audiobook skips over the footnotes, the images, and the hover text on those images, which are the best parts of what-if. Also, I found myself not remembering any of it, even though I'd already read all the articles on the website.


Night School: Wake up to the power of sleep

Richard Wiseman is unintentionally good at reminding the astute reader that most pop science is nonsense and bullshit. Sigh. I care a lot about this topic. This book is only acceptable as an introduction to the science of sleep and dreaming if you plan on reading much better, more serious works. Otherwise I expect you know less after reading it than before.

In case you are not convinced away, here is the exhaustive list of useful things I got from this book:

  • Imagine a happy place while trying to fall asleep. Not an exciting or sexual one; arousal is counterproductive
  • Only use the bed for sleep and cuddling and sex
  • Avoid light
  • Avoid caffeine and other stimulants; they last much longer in the bloodstream than you think

That's it. I knew about all but the first of those already. He mentions a lot of dubious or counterproductive techniques. He doesn't mention any of these which I find useful:

  • low-dose melatonin
  • earplugs
  • iterate over all the muscles in the body and relax them one by one

In his interview in the You Are Not So Smart podcast, which is how I learned about the book in the first place, he claims to have discovered "super-sleepers", people who can fall asleep whenever they want. This is a straight-up lie. No one can do that, not even narcoleptics. He just takes the range of people who have more or less trouble falling asleep, and calls the top 5% of them super-sleepers. Tetlock does something similar with "superforecasters", but is a HELL of a lot more honest about it.

Read books by honest people, not dishonest people, and maybe you'll actually learn.


Flatland

I'd heard the book was sexist, but I didn't realize the book was almost nothing other than a lengthy description of some unimaginative caste system, with particular emphasis on how stupid and dangerous women are. A shame that I somehow stumbled into someone doing a good reading of it, because the book itself is a waste of time.

I am all for preserving history. But I don't understand why people still talk about this book. It was groundbreaking for the time, I guess. But this is not that time. There are many more books now. This one cannot be worth your time.


Queued

  • A Brief History of Time
  • Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
  • Foundation - Isaac Asimov
  • Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
  • 1984
  • Cryptonomicon
  • The Diamond Age
  • A Fire Upon the Deep
  • The Age of Em
  • Snow Crash
  • The Selfish Gene
  • Crime and Punishment
  • Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
  • This Is Your Brain On Parasites
  • The Martian
  • The King James Bible
  • The Art of War
  • The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
  • Mastery by Robert Greene
  • On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson
  • Neverwhere
  • American Gods
  • Mastery by Robert Greene
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People
  • Everything Is Obvious (once you already know the answer)
  • On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
  • The Power of Habit
  • The Second Machine Age
  • The King James Bible
  • How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg
  • Alexander Hamilton by Chernow
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People
  • Success and Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert Frank
  • Free Will by Sam Harris
  • many more, tbh


Final Thoughts

If you like something that's not on this list, especially if it's educational, feel free to tell me about it and I'll put it on the appropriate queue. youtube (and elsehwhere, probably) videos and playlists are acceptable, because I can convert them into audio files and send them to my phone.

Alas, overall I don't think listening to things is an effective way to learn anything at all. I want skills! I want to learn useful things, not just be able to talk about books and whatnot. But I suppose that's the best I can do.

Something I noticed is that it is impossible to stay focused on anything. No matter what I'm listening to, my mind inevitably wanders. It happens much less often with fiction. I've decided to accept this as inevitable.