I'd also appreciate additional guidance on "books for getting literate in the stuff you need in order to understand the recommended books." Sometimes the stuff that follows "lemme just do a little back-of-the-envelope math here" kinda runs away from me. (e.g. https://rationalaltruist.com/2013/05/10/what-is-the-return-on-giving/)
I do quite like Robert Ornstein's The Evolution of Consciousness.
Could you speak a little to the adversarial nature of nuclear war adaptation? (Apologies if it’s already discussed and I missed it, I’m quite bad at tracking the maths often used in the EA community.)
As far as I know, a full-scale nuclear exchange is still understood strategically as mutually assured destruction. If agricultural adaptation becomes a confounding factor for MAD, then would this not just increase pressure to increase stockpile sizes/yields, or encourage the use of deadlier alternatives (e.g. cobalt-60 weapons, or the effective equivalent thereof), until MAD is achieved again? It strikes me as a situation somewhat analogous to ICBM shields - in a vacuum it’s a countermeasure to the status quo, but there’s an obvious counter-countermeasure available.