What are some inspiring biographies of people for us LessWrong types?
So like many LWers, I’m primarily interested in what Robin Hanson calls “foragers”, as opposed to “farmers”. By LW standards, even most Nobel laureates are “farmers”.
However, there are some exceptions (and some farmers can be interesting, too).
Anyways, which ones are your favorites? I’m starting to *really* like all the biographies of Watson and Crick (especially Olby’s biography of Crick), since they were both iconoclastic foragers (Crick, in fact, seems uncannily similar to Feynman). Crick also has an autobiography but it isn’t that insightful about his life.
And then there are the Feynman and Einstein biographies—Olby’s biography of Feynman being the prototypical example. I’m checking out an Einstein biography right now—I’ll see how that goes.
Among people who are especially underrated—I think Herbert Simon’s autobiography (http://www.amazon.com/Models-My-Life-Herbert-Simon/dp/026269185X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1310586938&sr=8-3 ) might be particularly interesting. I just checked it out from the library.
Then there’s Elizier Yudowsky’s autobiography.
Don’t know what a forager is by Hanson, but I find Curchill very interesting ind insightful. His history of WWII is sort of autobiographical, and he is an awesome writer.
I was never interested in reading biographies, but when I came across Churchill’s biography I was impressed. It has become one of my favorite book in my collection.
http://feelday.com/