Philosophy

A Roman emperor's private notes reminding himself to live by Stoic principles.

An almanac of proverbs and maxims urging thrift, industry and courtesy.

How moral judgement grows from sympathy and an imagined impartial spectator.

Rent, wages, profit and comparative advantage, reasoned from first assumptions.

Why states rise and fall, explained through asabiyyah, the cohesion of a group.

How a search for a philosophy of his own led him to Christian theology.

Capitalism runs on creative destruction, and its success may lead it to socialism.

Essays on self-knowledge and how unreliable one's own judgement is.

Falsifiability as the line between science and non-science.

Science moves through long stretches of normal work broken by paradigm shifts.

Knowledge grows by bold guesses that we then try to refute, not by proof.

How a mind could arise from parts, traced through Godel, Escher and Bach.

How television turned public discourse from argument into entertainment.

How shared fictions such as money, nations and gods let humans cooperate at scale.

End-of-life and hospice care, and why medicine should aim at well-being.

Books One to Three: division of labour, money, prices, wages, profit and capital.

Books Four and Five: the case against mercantilism, and the role of the state.

Language, logic and the limits of what can be said about the world.

The one pattern of the hero's journey that runs through myths across cultures.

Recurring patterns drawn from world history: biology, morals, religion, economics.

A father and son's motorcycle trip framing an inquiry into what Quality means.

Mimetic rivalry, where rivals grow alike, and the violence it unleashes in societies.

Finite games are played to win; infinite games are played to keep playing.

Applies the Seven Habits to organisations: lead by fixed principles, not by values.

How cooperation and morality evolved from self-interest, via the prisoner's dilemma.

Reality through four strands: many-worlds physics, computation, evolution, Popper.

How the sciences and humanities can be unified by causal links from physics up.

A dialogue on thinking clearly: reality is simple, conflicts can be resolved.

How humanity and technology together keep widening the opportunities open to people.

Knowledge can grow without limit through good explanations that are hard to vary.

Why societies should put sustainable long-run growth almost above all else.

Why economics misapplies probability to problems where the future is unknowable.

The struggle to make machine learning systems do what people actually intend.

Short pieces of advice on living, goals, generosity, careers, family and money.

Bacon's utopia of organised research; science as an institution

Elite theory: who actually rules, and why stated aims mislead

Girard reading Dostoevsky; mimetic rivalry and resentment

Campbell on the recurring stories cultures tell themselves

The plateau and long practice; mastery as a delayed reward

Genes as a river of digital information; a short Dawkins primer

Diamond's central question — why did some civilizations come to dominate others over 10,000 years? — is precisely the kind of question that requires long-term thinking to even ask. The answer, rooted in geography and biology rather than culture or intelligence, is a model for how to reason about slow causes and fast effects.

Eco on how we categorise the world and where categories fail

Brand's book is the founding document of institutional long-term thinking. It proposes a 10,000-year clock as a forcing function for civilizational patience, and along the way develops the concept of pace layers — the idea that different structures (fashion, commerce, governance, culture, nature) change at radically different speeds, and that confusing these speeds is the root of most short-termism.

History read as an expanding series of non-zero-sum games

History of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance

Nozick on objectivity and what stays invariant across perspectives

How evidence and probability were reasoned about before formal statistics

Elster on mechanisms rather than laws in the social sciences

Meadows wrote this before systems thinking became a popular phrase, and it remains the clearest account of why short-term interventions in complex systems so often backfire. The chapter on leverage points is the conceptual core of what long-term thinking actually requires from decision-makers.

Modern Stoicism; desire management and negative visualisation

A quant on confusing models with reality, in finance and life

Short essays on the scientific concepts most worth adopting

Spier on the psychology and habits behind durable value investing.

The limits of scientific knowledge and what cannot be measured

When the simpler theory is the better one: the principle of parsimony tested.

How present certainties will look to the future; outside view applied

Wallace-Wells's inventory of worst-case climate projections is included here not as a climate book but as a case study in what happens when institutions consistently discount long-term risk. The scenarios he describes are already visible in the data; they were predictable decades ago. This is what the failure of long-term thinking looks like from inside it.

Burkeman's book on finitude is the necessary counterweight to grandiose civilizational thinking. Four thousand weeks is approximately an 80-year life, and Burkeman's argument — that productivity systems typically function as denial mechanisms against this fact — forces the question of how a mortal agent ought to orient toward long-term causes. The tension between personal finitude and multigenerational obligation is never fully resolved here, which is exactly right.

MacAskill's longtermist argument, grounded in effective altruism, is the most rigorous philosophical case for prioritizing future people. His core claim — that if the future contains vast numbers of people, influencing its trajectory matters more than almost anything we might do for the present — is informed by Derek Parfit's work on personal identity and is the most demanding version of the long-term thinking argument.

Dawkins narrates the whole of evolutionary history as a pilgrimage backward in time, meeting ancestors at each branching point. The cumulative effect is a felt sense of deep time that no abstract statement about 'billions of years' can produce. Reading this first recalibrates everything that follows.

Six ways of thinking that help people plan for generations ahead.

Examples showing what the logical-analytic method in philosophy can and cannot do.

A psychologist's study of modern people's spiritual search.

A novel in which industrialists vanish from an economy run by government directives.

A novel of an architect who will build only by his own judgment, whatever it costs.

A reading of Xenophon's Hiero, where a tyrant and a poet weigh the uses of tyranny.

A poem arguing that all is atoms and void, the soul dies, and religion breeds fear.

Essays, talks and letters from 1934 to 1950 on social, religious and school issues.

Ways to end humanity's conflicts with nature, with other people and within the self.

Argues that scientific knowledge joins personal experience, moral judgement and data.

Creativity in humour, science and art as 'bisociation': joining two unrelated frames.

The forces that have shaped technology since prehistory and now shape modern people.

Life in Nazi concentration camps, and logotherapy: finding meaning to survive.

How people and cultures react to death, and what that reaction does to them.

Freud, Marx and Lévi-Strauss as cases of the Jewish struggle with Gentile civility.

The theory that consciousness is learned, arising from a once two-chambered mind.

Metaphor as a basic mechanism of thought that shapes how people understand the world.

Thirty selections from Popper's writings, chosen to show the range of his ideas.

Analytic philosophy and logic presented through humour

A philosophy student marries a math prodigy and weighs the mind against the body.

A critique of socialism: why morality and markets are not products of reason.

Information theory as a unifying idea across three scientists' work

Myth, psychology and Sufi wisdom on how money can become a means of self-knowledge.

Talks and writings on religion and the search for the sacred.

Talks and writings on relationship as a basis for solving the world's crises.

How a culture hands its judgement to machines, statistics and technical experts.

Why liberal democracy may be the end state of political change, and how people react.

Talks on how fear and dependence shape lives and keep people from seeing themselves.

Talks on intimate relationships, isolation and self-knowledge, and facing loneliness.

A writer's fifty-year path from Trappist monk to a forgotten universal religion.

Plays, memoirs, letters, essays, stories, poems and songs, many from the Bengali.

Suffering comes from identifying with the mind's chatter; freedom from living now.

A collection of Richard Feynman's best short works.

The causes of instability in the global economy and the open society as a remedy.

825 aphorisms on 72 topics, from spirituality to personal liberation and family.

A venture adviser on startups and the trap of the deferred life plan.

An attack on Western beliefs, from Plato to Marxism, about humanity's place.

Where the worry about others' judgement of us comes from, and how people overcome it.

A professor living with ALS sets out his philosophy of living and of letting go.

A philosopher defines bullshit by setting it apart from lying and humbug.

An optimistic view of old age: virtue and a well-spent life bring happiness.

Ancient wisdom on happiness tested against modern psychology and brain research.

A poet's life told from his own writings: family, loss, school reform, East and West.

Argues that string theory is not a theory at all, since it makes no predictions.

The idea of ugliness through history, as shown in art, literature and architecture.

Rare, unforeseen, high-impact events drive history, explained only after the fact.

You are the awareness watching your thoughts and feelings, not those thoughts.

Montaigne's life and essays, read as answers to the question of how to live.

Aphorisms stating Taleb's ideas on randomness, knowledge and modern life.

Philosophical treatment of contingency and the practice of option trading

Courage, compassion and connection as choices that lead to wholehearted living.

Edwardian essay on living deliberately below your means

Business strategy theories applied to career, family and integrity.

Short illustrated catalogue of the common logical fallacies

Thought experiments and other tools a philosopher uses to reason carefully.

A short case against all lying, white lies included.

Alfred Adler's psychology taught through five nights of dialogue.

A method for finding the few activities that matter and dropping the rest.

Plato brought into today's debates on religion, morality, politics and science.

How to make sense of the daily torrent of news, and what it does to our minds.

Twelve rules for living, each drawn from clinical practice, biology and myth.

Letters on how to live, a course in Stoic philosophy written to a friend.

Portraits of people living lives of extreme ethical commitment to helping strangers.

Life is not short; people waste most of it, and how to use it well.

An engineer's approach to happiness: the illusions and brain flaws behind suffering.

From the origin of the universe through life and consciousness to what it all means.

The nature of space, time and the quantum world, on the road to quantum gravity.

A grieving man walks the Camino de Santiago after scattering his father's ashes.

Eighty-one short chapters on the Tao, the founding text of Taoism.

Quotation collection with commentary; thin, but the quotes are sourced.

Subtitled A Guide to Clear Thinking About Wall Street, Investing, and Life.

Leadership treated as the creation of meaning inside organisations

Published in the UK as In Defence of Open Society.

The rationalists around LessWrong and their fear of artificial intelligence risk.

Naval Ravikant's ideas on building wealth and being happy, gathered from his talks.

Rene Girard's theory that people imitate each other's desires, applied to business.

Standalone edition of the 2023 a16z essay; Andreessen has written no conventional book