Introduction
The Best Textbooks on Every Subject is the Schelling point for the best textbooks on every subject. My The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject is the Schelling point for the best tacit knowledge videos on every subject. This post is the Schelling point for the best reference works for every subject.
Reference works provide an overview of a subject. Types of reference works include charts, maps, encyclopedias, glossaries, wikis, classification systems, taxonomies, syllabi, and bibliographies.
Reference works are valuable for orienting oneself to fields, particularly when beginning. They can help identify unknown unknowns; they help get a sense of the bigger picture; they are also very interesting and fun to explore.
How to Submit
My previous The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject uses author credentials to assess the epistemics of submissions. The Best Textbooks on Every Subject requires submissions to be from someone who has read at least three textbooks in the textbook domain.
It is more difficult to assess the epistemics of reference works than tacit knowledge videos and textbooks due to the breadth of the category “reference work”. That being the case, reference works are selected and included based on my judgment. The key question I intend to answer in selecting reference works is: “Does this reference work feel useful and interesting for giving me orientation in a domain?”
If you know of any reference works, I warmly invite you to submit them in the LessWrong comments with the following structure:
Domain: Philosophy
Link: History of Philosophy—Summarized & Visualized
Author(s): Deniz Cem Önduygu, Hüseyin Kuşçu, and Eser Aygün
Type: Interactive Chart
Why: Cool, comprehensive, interactive chart that shows the history of philosophy along a diagonal line.
The List
Humanities
History
Histography by Matan Stauber [interactive timeline] — Wikipedia‑driven interface plotting 14 billion years of events; scale toggles from decades to geological eras and updates daily.
Timeline of World History Poster by UsefulCharts [chart] — wall chart aligning all major civilizations 3300 BCE – present with consciously reduced Euro‑centric bias.
Timeline of US History Poster by UsefulCharts [chart] — 2025 update spans colonial era to today; features two overview maps plus photos of all 47 presidents, color‑coded by party.
Technology over the long run by Max Roser [chart] — Interactive spiral and linear timelines tracing 3.4 million years of technological milestones to illustrate accelerating change.
HyperHistory Online by Andreas Nothiger [interactive timeline] — “Synchronoptic” lifelines, timelines, and maps condensing 3,000 years of world history into a single navigable view.
Adams Synchronological Chart (Map of History) [chart] — 23‑ft illustrated timeline spanning 4004 BC → 1881 AD; America’s 19th‑c. “grand synthesis.”
Religion
World Religions Family Tree Poster by UsefulCharts [chart] — 4,000 years of Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and other lineages on a single branching timeline.
Philosophy
History of Philosophy by Deniz Cem Önduygu, Hüseyin Kuşçu, and Eser Aygün [interactive chart] — Cool, comprehensive, interactive chart that shows the history of philosophy along a diagonal line.
The Internet Philosophy Ontology project: The Taxonomy [taxonomy] — A nested-list-tree of philosophical ideas.
Literature
Great English Literature by Henry Oliver [syllabus] — Canon‑focused roadmap from Homer to Hilary Mantel, outlining genre taxonomy, foundational works, and anthologies.
Formal Sciences
Computer Science
Teach Yourself Computer Science by Oz Nova and Myles Bryne [syllabus] — Computer science textbooks and resources from people who have credibly curated computer science resources.
What every computer science major should know by Matt Might [syllabus] — List of subjects that CS majors should learn and why.
AI safety map [chart] — AI safety organization map.
Mathematics
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics by Timothy Gowers (ed.) [reference book] — 1034‑page 2008 encyclopedia of modern mathematics: 133 expert contributors survey key concepts, research fields, famous problems, history, and applications; winner of the 2011 Euler Book Prize.
Timeline of Mathematics by Mathigon (Philipp Legner) [interactive timeline] — Zoomable scroll tracing 20,000 BCE to present with 200 + mathematicians, discoveries, and artefacts, each linked to bite‑size bios and context.
Natural Sciences
Physics
Landmark Numbers by Miles Kodama [list] — Order‑of‑magnitude figures (Earth radius, US population, etc.) for mental estimation.
Earth Science
Water Librarians’ Home Page by Robert Teeter [directory] — Since 1996, a curated link hub for water‑science librarians: agencies, utilities, catalogs, publishers, associations.
Astronomy
Johnston’s Archive by Wm. Robert Johnston [directory] — Independent trove on astronomy, nukes, terrorism, casualty stats, and more.
Professional and Applied Sciences
Library and Information Sciences
UDC Consortium (paywalled, but here’s a summary version) [classification system] — Interactable knowledge classification system.
List of academic fields from Wikipedia [glossary] — Wikipedia article sorting knowledge by academic field.
Fields of Knowledge by Things Made Thinkable [interactive chart] — Zoomable map of Wikipedia’s academic fields.
Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books by Geoffrey Roberts [book] — Yale‑published study of Stalin’s marginalia and 25,000-volume personal archive.
Education
Open Syllabus: Galaxy [interactive graph] — Database of syllabuses, with usage data.
syllabi.directory [directory] — Project having experts create syllabi from their fields.
UT Austin Access Syllabi & CVs [database] — Searchable archive of undergraduate course syllabi and instructor CVs.
Research
Connected Papers [interactive chart] — Tool that helps navigate paper references using a tree of nodes.
Gap Map by Convergent Research [interactive map] — Visual catalogue of “fundamental‑development” R&D gaps, needed capabilities and resources.
SpringerLink Journals A‑Z [journal index] — Alphabetical browser for 10M+ Springer Nature articles and 3,000 titles.
Finance
Economic Sectors by TradingView [classification system] — Clickable of all economic sectors and industries in the U.S.
Stock Heatmap by TradingView [interactive chart] — Heatmap of public company stocks sorted by industry.
Medicine and Health
Drugs@FDA Databases [database] — Official queries for Drug Approvals, Orange Book, NDC codes, guides, and post‑marketing data.
Improving Clinical Trial Design by Saloni Dattani [syllabus] — Crash‑course + deep‑dive readings on RCT history, regulation, platform/adaptive designs, and statistical power for faster, cheaper drug discovery.
Meditation
Places To Meditate by Peter Stuckings [directory] — Blog rating meditation retreat locations, mostly in Asia.
Listing of Dharma Retreat Centers and Teachings by Wolf [directory] — Google doc with reviews of meditation retreat locations.
Suggested Retreat Locations by Contemplative Studies at Brown University [directory] — Meditation retreat locations recommended by Brown’s program.
Urban Planning
Cities by Devon Zuegel [syllabus] — Urbanism primer spanning agglomeration economics, planning ideologies, and new‑city experiments, with walking‑tour heuristics and essential texts.
Housing Supply by Sam Bowman, Ben Southwood, and John Myers [syllabus] — Evidence‑packed guide to YIMBY economics: supply‑demand fundamentals, “housing theory of everything,” NIMBY politics, and global case studies.
Forecasting
Map of the Prediction Market & Forecasting Ecosystem by Saul Munn [directory] — Reasonably comprehensive mapping of the prediction market/forecasting ecosystem, including prediction markets, forecasting platforms, research/consultancy firms, tools, resources for learning, community infrastructure, and media/news/journalism.
Social Sciences
Economics
EconGraphs [glossary] — A bunch of economics graphs like supply and demand, production possibilities frontier, etc.
Political Science
Atlas of Live Players & Institutions and Geographical Bismarck Brief by Samo Burja [list, map] — A continuously updated map of power‑wielding individuals and orgs.
By Medium
The Best Maps of Every Subject by Parker Conley [directory] — Reference works sorted by domain.
The Best Textbooks on Every Subject by Luke Muehlhauser [directory] — Textbooks vetted by people experienced in a field.
The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject by Parker Conley [directory] — Tacit knowledge videos vetted by expertise.
Other Lists like This
Britannica Propaedia [classification system] — Outline of Knowledge volume that structures the entire Encyclopædia Britannica.
List of lists of lists from Wikipedia [directory] — Wikipedia has lots of lists.
Outline of outlines from Wikipedia [directory] — And lots of outlines.
List of Lists of Concepts by Romeo Stevens [taxonomy] — IIRC, Romeo Stevens categorized all the frameworks that arose in his mind for a week or two in this document.
Overlooked Links by Collisteru [directory] — Valuable links that search engines don’t typically reach.
UsefulCharts—YouTube [charts] — YouTube channel with charts like these.
Links to interesting things online by Logan Graves [directory] — More interesting links that search engines don’t necessarily capture, similar to Collisteru’s.
Recommended by Gavin Leech [directory] — A bunch of things Gavin Leech recommends.
100+ Interesting Data Sets for Statistics by Ryan Smith [curated list] — Pirate Bay logs, global health, Reddit dumps and other real‑world practice sets.
Further Reading
A Guidebook to Learning: For a Lifelong Pursuit of Wisdom by Mortimer J. Adler. outlines the history of knowledge classification schema and gives advice for being a lifelong learner (with knowledge classification schema in mind).
I often use my keyword map LLM prompt to achieve a similar feeling of orientation to new domains.
In Praise of Reference Books by Daniel M. Rothschild. Some more thoughts on reference works as a thing.
“Encyclopaedias in general” by Britannica surveys the encyclopaedia genre, scope, and editorial models.
Exercises in Comprehensive Information Gathering speaks to the benefits of engaging with fields broadly.
Big Understanding by Ethan M. Edwards speaks in favor of projects like this.
How Math Academy Creates its Knowledge Graph by Justin Skycak, on the idea of knowledge graphs.
Burny’s digital garden.
Thanks to Saul Munn and Collisteru for conversations that inspired this post. Thanks to Skyler Crossman and nomagicpill for helpful feedback on this post. Thanks to ChatGPT o3 for helping me generate descriptions for some of these links and Claude for helping me rewrite some sentences.
Domain: Prediction Markets
Link: predictionmarketmap.com
Author(s): Saul Munn (self)
Type: Mapping of an ecosystem
Why: Reasonably comprehensive mapping of the prediction market/forecasting ecosystem, including prediction markets, forecasting platforms, research/consultancy firms, tools, resources for learning, community infrastructure, and media/news/journalism.
Thanks, added!
The link seems broken
hmm, it works for me — in what way does it seem broken to you?
predictionmarketmap.com works, but is not the link used in the post.
ahh, thanks! @Parker Conley please fix the hyperlink in your post :)
Domain: Mathematics
Link: Teach Yourself Logic
Author(s): Peter Smith
Type: Study Guide
Why: Extremely thorough guide to logic textbooks from start to finish. Compares pros and cons of various books, tells you what parts you can skip, and identifies books with good exercises.
Domain: Mathematics, linear algebra
Link: Matrix Computations
Authors: Gene H. Golub, Charles F. Van Loan
Type: Textbook
Why: This is the most comprehensive book I’ve found on the algorithms of numerical linear algebra
Any love for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?
Domain: (Applied) Bayesian Statistics
Link: Statistical Rethinking (free pdf), My Less Wrong Review, The 2017-2023 Lectures*
Author: Richard McElreath
Type: Book, YouTube lectures and less wrong post about Bayesian Statistics books in general
Why: Modern Bayes relies on HMC sampling, this book goes all in on this approach, this allowed you to focus on how to build the model and allows you to skip all math (except for the link function), by sacrificing a little bit of mathematical rigor this book covers more than all other popular books on the subject, to the point where you can stop 2⁄3 way trough and consider the last 1⁄3 “advanced optional topics”.
*The 2017 and 2019 were great, I have not watched the newer versions of the course, the older versions of the book uses ulam a pedagogical STAN wrapper powerful enough for most of the the exercises in the book, written by the author, I would advice serious students to do all the models in Stan, pymc or a wrapper that uses those.
Curated. At first it seems a little odd to recommend lists of content in this day and age when for many or most purposes, you’ll go to your local shoggoth. This compilation is pretty good though. I think there’s something to be said for human works and “cleanliness” of the process that produced them, but also this list contains a number of resources that LLMs just aren’t making yet: some pretty neat visualizations, and e.g. lists of of lists (of lists). An approach I like is to take a reference work and load it into an LLM as context before getting tutoring on a topic. LLMs being able to surface diagrams and images from the text will make this even better.
Here are some of my favorites (though I haven’t look through them all):
Histography by Matan Stauber [interactive timeline]
Landmark Numbers by Miles Kodama [list]
Technology over the long run by Max Roser [chart]
EconGraphs [glossary]
I’m glad this exists and I think is worth taking a look for most people. Kudos!
I would add best literature survey piece for the given subject area as another type of reference material people should submit.
Domain: History
Link: Chronozoom
Author(s): Microsoft Research, UC Berkeley, Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Lomonosov Moscow State University, etc.
Type: Interactive Timeline
Why: Cool, scrollable/zoomable timeline that shows the history of the universe at scales of the cosmos, Earth, life, prehistory, and humanity. Some parts are no longer under maintenance unfortunately
Domain: Religion
Link: source
Author(s): Simon E Davies
Type: Chart
Why: Best chart I’ve seen on the historical development of religions. More comprehensive than UsefulCharts.
Domain: Computer Science, AI Safety
Link: AI Safety Graph
Author(s): Savva Lambin, Matin Mahmood, Samuel Ratnam, Sruthi Kuriakose, Pandelis Mouratoglou
Type: Interactive Map
Why: Intuitive to navigate, comprehensive semantic mapping of research across the AI safety field, thorough representation of subfields.
Domain: Biology
Link: LifeMap
Author(s): Damien de Vienne, Joaquim Martin, Julien Barnier
Type: Interactive Chart
Why: An interactive, zoomable map depicting the phylogenetic relationships between known (extant) species on the tree of life. Currently contains over 2,000,000 species.
> The Best X for every Y
Man, people really love listicles, don’t they?
It’s not a listicle. It’s a crowd-contributed repository.
Domain: History (or Social Sciences)
Link: calculatingempires.net
Authors: Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler
Type: Historical chart
Why: This map traces the history of technical and social structures and how they have co-evolved over five centuries. If we are to address the urgent challenges of the contemporary time—including technocratic fascism, climate catastrophe, colonial wars, and wealth inequality—we need to contend with the interwoven nature of their histories.
Domain: Forecasting
Link: Forecasting AI Futures Resource Hub
Author(s): Alvin Ånestrand (self)
Type: directory
Why: A collection of information and resources for forecasting about AI, including a predictions database, related blogs and organizations, AI scenarios and interesting analyses, and various other resources.
It’s kind of a complement to https://www.predictionmarketmap.com/ for forecasting specifically about AI
Domain: Physics
Link: How to Learn Physics for Free
Author(s): Alastair Williams
Type: Study Guide
Why: Your physics section is sadly underpopulated and this site is a maintained and comprehensive list of resources for studying many different areas of physics.
A Schelling point is something people can pick without coordination, often because it feels natural or obvious.
Domain: Other Lists like This
Link: Map of Reddit (warning: pressing enter does not work in the search box, you have to click on a suggested subreddit in the dropdown)
Author(s): Andriy Kashcha
Type: Interactive Chart
Why: Groups Reddit’s subreddits into categories & shows subreddits related to a given one.
Domain: Linguistics
Sub Domains: Psychology, Neuroscience, Epistilography, Etymology
Link: How Language Works
Author(s): David Crystal
Type: Book
Why: Covers every part of language you can dream of. The author is obsessive and meticulous. From hieroglyphs to Heschl’s gyri, Crystal covers it all.
Domain: Statistics
Link: Statistics for the Rest of Us
Author(s): Albert Rutherford
Type: Book
Why: I do not recommend this to anyone familiar with statistics. But, I do recommend this as an introduction to many basic topics in stats. I had studied a bit of stats before reading the book, but found it pretty illuminating. I read the entire thing in the course of 1h plane trips. It puts a lot of the abstract math into clear scenarios.
Author(s): 80000 Hours, Siliconversations, Metaculus, Rob Miles.
Type: list
Why: To use as a quick intro
Complete garbage, sorry. It is “funny animated charts”, not “reference works”. List of things with almost zero benefit that I will never read, like the 99.9% who saw this post. Couldn’t find ANYTHING useful, really , e.g.:
1) “The Princeton Companion to Mathematics”—is not about math but about “history of math”. Not even on subject. Math is not “collection of biographies of nearly 100 famous deceased mathematicians”
2) “Meditation”—give me books on HOW TO meditate, not on meditation locations lol. Location doesn’t mean anything, the process is essential. Whole topic is misguided
3...inf) same problems as for examples above
I agree that you can’t learn a subject from using reference works, and that they are very supplemental, but this comment comes off as pretty harsh! See Exercises in Comprehensive Information Gathering if you want to understand more where I’m coming from in the benefits of reference works.