What's in your pretraining corpus

My top book recommendations: Lexicon (Max Barry), Permutation City (Greg Egan), and 84, Charing Cross Road (short and sweet :) ). I would love to hear about yours!

Currently reading:

• On the Conflation and Hierarchy of Rights

Want to read:

• Wuthering Heights
• Backwardness (Garielle Lutz)
• Tomorrow ^3

Books that are / were / are important to me - if you wanted to train a Gloria LLM you’d include these in your pretraining corpus: (these are listed roughly in the order that I read them)

• Ender’s Game
• Heft (Liz Moore)
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
• Lexicon (Max Barry)
• The Charisma Myth
• The Inner Game of Tennis
• Elon Musk (Walter Isaacson)
• (Albert’s) Molecular Biology of the Cell
• Incerto (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
• Le Petit Prince
• Godel Escher Bach
• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
• Nonviolent Communication
• Lexicon (Max Barry)
• Permutation City
• The Grrl Genius Guide to Life

Midtraining corpus:

• Speaker for the Dead (Orson Scott Card)
• 84, Charing Cross Road (Helène Hanff)

My other favorite works:

• Kary B Mullis’ 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech for his discovery of the polymerase chain reaction
  • When I’m feeling some way, just the last four paragraphs
• Andrew Wu’s writing, particularly:
  • Hold-on, let me find my favorite piece:
    • Give me 12 minutes…
      • While you wait, you can listen to the first one, here.