Resolves YES if the book is listed in the New York Times "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" series. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.html
Resolves No otherwise
Their methodology was: "In collaboration with the Upshot — the department at The Times focused on data and analytical journalism — the Book Review sent a survey to hundreds of novelists, nonfiction writers, academics, book editors, journalists, critics, publishers, poets, translators, booksellers, librarians and other literary luminaries, asking them to pick their 10 best books of the 21st century.
We let them each define “best” in their own way. For some, this simply meant “favorite.” For others, it meant books that would endure for generations.
The only rules: Any book chosen had to be published in the United States, in English, on or after Jan. 1, 2000. (Yes, translations counted!)
After casting their ballots, respondents were given the option to answer a series of prompts where they chose their preferred book between two randomly selected titles. We combined data from these prompts with the vote tallies to create the list of the top 100 books."
1,000
3.00Some EA/rationalism-adjacent option suggestions in case anyone can afford the creation costs:
The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer (2009)
Animal Liberation Now by Peter Singer (2023)
The Precipice by Toby Ord (2020)
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014)
Doing Good Better by William MacAskill (2015)
Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark (2017)
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky (2015)
Rationality: From AI to Zombies aka The Sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky (2015)
Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky (2017)
Unsong by Scott Alexander (2017)
Is there a non-paywall way to see which are already on the list so far?
I asked claude to extract the list from a saved html and got this (did not double check it but I think it is right): Here are the book titles ranked from 81 to 100 extracted from the file:
81. Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
82. Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
83. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
84. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
85. Pastoralia by George Saunders
86. Frederick Douglass by David W. Blight
87. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
88. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
89. The Return by Hisham Matar
90. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
91. The Human Stain by Philip Roth
92. The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
93. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
94. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
95. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
96. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
97. Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
98. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
99. How to Be Both by Ali Smith
100. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
I didn’t bet that much Mana to raise the odds… a lot of them are books I read and loved… some heart bets over head bets maybe… like not sure sally Rooney will get in but it was a good book, Cormac McCarthy I voted for the road but maybe no country for old men will get in? Same as Colm Tobin maybe the master will get in the top 100 instead of Brooklyn! So many choices so I added ones I like. I loved 1Q84 but not many else did…