Books

As of October 2024, I’ve migrated away from Goodreads and host everything myself here on my personal site. Like Gwern, I think you should backup/export your books. Goodreads is seemingly trying to make this increasingly difficult to find: Try goodreads.com/review/import/

I’ve posted the code and instructions for how I did all of this to github.com/gianlucatruda/goodreads-to-md

2024 (17 books and counting)

Not Till We Are Lost (Bobiverse #5) (2024)

Dennis E. Taylor

• Completed: 2024-10-01
• My Rating: 3/5

Was so looking forward to this, but ended up a bit disappointed by the plotlines. So much setup teasing and then it just doesn’t resolve. I guess the upshot is that it means future books in the series.

Still good vibes and so cozy and fun, especially with Ray Porter’s excellent narration on the audiobook.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)

Robert A. Heinlein

• Completed: 2024-09-07
• My Rating: 4/5

Charmingly old-school. A vision of a future on a different timeline, but a classic for sure.

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout (2024)

Cal Newport

• Completed: 2024-08-08
• My Rating: 5/5

I’ve read almost all of Cal’s books and this is probably my favourite. It’ll definitely resonate with some more than others, depending on where you’re at in your life and career. The book is 60% anecdotes, but I find Newport’s fascinating and novel, which I can’t say for most authors in non-fiction. And the other 40% is well-structured and actionable advice. Sit under a tree on a weekday afternoon and read this in paperback and it makes a lot more sense.

Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You (2023)

Ali Abdaal

• Completed: 2024-08-07
• My Rating: 2/5

I like Ali and enjoy the candour and clarity of his YouTube videos and podcasts, so I was quite surprised and disappointed to find this such a slog. It’s the same anecdote-idea-example formula repeated a hundred times in sequence. The actual content didn’t feel like it was particularly fresh or helpful either. I had to have GPT-4o finish this one for me. Oh dear, Ali…

Outland (Quantum Earth, #1) (2015)

Dennis E. Taylor

• Completed: 2024-06-30
• My Rating: 3/5

Feedback (2020)

Dennis E. Taylor

• Completed: 2024-06-24
• My Rating: 2/5

Meh. Taylor’s longer stuff is great. This was interesting, but didn’t quite land for me. Doesn’t world build as much as others in the time/multiverse shorts subgenre (e.g. Tchaikovsky) and didn’t have as satisfying a twist for a short (e.g. Andy Weir’s shorts).

Nexus (Nexus #1)

Ramez Naam

• Completed: 2024-06-18
• My Rating: 4/5

Fascinating and jammed full of provocative ideas about cognition, minds, meditation, and transhumanism. Yet it reads like an action thriller. Had some parts that dragged and ended a bit abruptly — to set up the sequel — so loses points. 4.5 stars.

Use of Weapons (Culture, #3) (1990)

Iain M. Banks

• Completed: 2024-05-10
• My Rating: 4/5

Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire: Everything I know about Autism, ASD, and Asperger’s that I wish I’d known back then… (Optimistic Autism Book 2)

David William Plummer

• Completed: 2024-05-09
• My Rating: 3/5

Charming, informative, and autistically rigorous. The first third is mainly his autobiography, which I enjoyed the most. Dave is an interesting guy! Got a bit too formulaic and monotonous in the last third.

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1) (2017)

Martha Wells

• Completed: 2024-03-28
• My Rating: 3/5

Permutation City (1994)

Greg Egan

• Completed: 2024-03-25
• My Rating: 3/5

7/5 on concept. Truly mind bending. But 1/5 on plot depth, characters, and general execution. Probably would have been better read as text than listened as audiobook. Preferred Diaspora.

Sea of Tranquility (2022)

Emily St. John Mandel

• Completed: 2024-02-13
• My Rating: 1/5

Mere Goodness (Rationality From AI to Zombies Book 5) (2015)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Completed: 2024-02-06
• My Rating: 3/5

Paradox Bound (2017)

Peter Clines

• Completed: 2024-02-04
• My Rating: 3/5

The Player of Games (Culture, #2) (1988)

Iain M. Banks

• Completed: 2024-01-16
• My Rating: 4/5

One Day All This Will Be Yours (2021)

Adrian Tchaikovsky

• Completed: 2024-01-09
• My Rating: 4/5

Freedom™ (Daemon, #2) (2010)

Daniel Suarez

• Completed: 2024-01-04
• My Rating: 3/5

2023 (15 books)

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2015)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Completed: 2016-09-13
• My Rating: 5/5

My 4th read. Still an absolute banger!

The Andromeda Strain (Andromeda, #1) (1969)

Michael Crichton

• Completed: 2023-12-07
• My Rating: 4/5

Daemon (Daemon, #1) (2006)

Daniel Suarez

• Completed: 2023-11-18
• My Rating: 4/5

Diaspora (1997)

Greg Egan

• Completed: 2023-11-18
• My Rating: 4/5

The Singularity Trap (2018)

Dennis E. Taylor

• Completed: 2023-09-29
• My Rating: 4/5

Fear the Sky (The Fear Saga, #1) (2014)

Stephen Moss

• Completed: 2023-09-12
• My Rating: 5/5

Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1) (1987)

Iain M. Banks

• Completed: 2023-08-19
• My Rating: 3/5

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (2014)

Ben Horowitz

• Completed: 2023-08-16
• My Rating: 4/5

20000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869)

Jules Verne

• Completed: 2023-07-15
• My Rating: 5/5

Artemis (2017)

Andy Weir

• Completed: 2023-04-24
• My Rating: 4/5

Roadkill (2022)

Dennis E. Taylor

• Completed: 2023-04-01
• My Rating: 4/5

The Egg and Other Stories (2017)

Andy Weir

• Completed: 2023-04-01
• My Rating: 5/5

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win (2013)

Gene Kim

• Completed: 2023-03-01
• My Rating: 4/5

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (2013)

Nir Eyal

• Completed: 2023-02-21
• My Rating: 2/5

Hooked will blow your mind if you’ve never heard of the Fogg behaviour model or Skinner boxes. But if you’re already versed in the psychology and know a bit about how it is incorporated into software, Hooked really only adds some case studies and exercises.

The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

Matt Mochary

• Completed: 2023-01-01
• My Rating: 4/5

Second half has tons of useful tactics and recommendations I’ll be coming back to. Worth the read for anyone managing people.

2022 (13 books)

The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you (2013)

Rob Fitzpatrick

• Completed: 2022-10-10
• My Rating: 3/5

TODO

How to Be a Founder: How Entrepreneurs can Identify, Fund and Launch their Best Ideas

Alice Bentinck

• Completed: 2022-10-01
• My Rating: 4/5

TODO

Dark Matter (2016)

Blake Crouch

• Completed: 2022-07-28
• My Rating: 4/5

A charming and profound love story wrapped up as a sci-fi thriller.

I’m normally more into “hard sci-fi.” Dark Matter is not that. But it uses its core premise to ask interesting questions about reality, identity, and sacrifice. It takes the sentiment of “what if I’d made a different choice in life?” and rides it to the cosmic extremes.

Crouch loses some points on execution — it felt watered down, popularised, and too optimistic. For me, that diluted the impact. But it was a gripping and thoughtful read.

Models: Attract Women Through Honesty (2011)

Mark Manson

• Completed: 2022-05-30
• My Rating: 4/5

The current go-to book for men looking to attract women, this is well worth a listen. It’s refreshingly modern and actionable at the same time.

Key ideas (the three fundamentals):

1. Honest living: Create an attractive and enriching lifestyle.

2. Honest action: Overcome your fears and anxiety around women.

3. Honest communication: Master the expression of your emotions and communicate effectively.

Manson uses a number of helpful metaphors and mental models to expound on these fundamentals. I’ll forgo a full breakdown in this review. Either read the book or check out Graham Mann’s extensive summary.

Structure:

Part 1: Reality

• 1. Non-neediness
• 2. Power in vulnerability
• 3. The gift of truth

Part 2: Strategy

• 4. Polarisation
• 5. Rejection and success
• 6. The three fundamentals

Part 3: Honest living

• 7. Demographics
• 8. Lifestyle and presentation

Part 4: Honest action

• 9. What are your stories
• 10. How to overcome anxiety

Part 5: Honest communication

• 11. Your intentions
• 12. How to improve your flirting
• 13. The dating process
• 14. Physicality and sex

The Martian (2011)

Andy Weir

• Completed: 2022-05-19
• My Rating: 5/5

The hardest of hard sci-fi. Totally geeky and detail oriented and fantastic. I absolutely loved it! The movie was fun, but doesn’t do the book justice.

I think I enjoyed Weir’s Project Hail Mary more than this — it has a number of story/character elements that The Martian lacks. But both are genuinely brilliant and enthralling if you’re at all into this genre.

Heaven’s River (Bobiverse, #4) (2020)

Dennis E. Taylor

• Completed: 2022-05-09
• My Rating: 4/5

This instalment took the series in an interesting and fresh new direction. It’s kind of a fantasy story within a sci-fi story — which I found both clever and entertaining. It’s longer than the previous books and focusses on a smaller group of characters with more traditional resource constraints and challenges. As always, it was perfectly delivered with Ray Porter’s narration and I thoroughly enjoyed being lost in the world Taylor has created.

This is, however, no master work. I don’t think it’s trying to be. Moreover, the ending is a little anticlimactic and does the (somewhat irritating) setup for further instalments. Regardless, if you were thinking of giving up on the series after book 2 or 3 (as I was), then seriously give this a go.

Mere Reality (Rationality From AI to Zombies Book 4) (2015)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Completed: 2022-05-05
• My Rating: 3/5

This has been my least-favourite instalment in the series so far. That probably explains why I’ve been slogging away at it for two years now. Or perhaps the fact that I’ve been sporadically slogging through is why I enjoyed it less. It’s excessively long — about double the length of most other books in The Sequences.

The earlier essays examine the nature of truth and the beauty of reality, which is largely a defence of reductionism and an exploration of the idea that reality is “mundane.” What followed was a series of painfully esoteric essays on P Zombies and a severe bludgeoning on why Many Worlds is so obviously more plausible than Quantum Decoherence from a Bayesian perspective. The book then returns to its earlier form with the essays on science and rationality, which were fascinating and thought-provoking — particularly as someone currently attempting novel scientific research.

The book ends with A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanations, a 16000-word monster that is both deeply insightful and crushingly extensive. I was relieved to be done with it and with this instalment as a whole.

Sections in Book IV: Mere Reality

O Lawful Truth

P Reductionism 101

Q Joy in the Merely Real

R Physicalism 201

S Quantum Physics and Many Worlds

T Science and Rationality

Section Q (Joy in the Merely Real) and Section T (Science and Rationality) are the real gold of this book, in my opinion. But the standout essays were probably Einstein’s Speed, That Alien Message, Mind Projection Fallacy, and Mundane Magic. (But there are some other good ones that don’t spring to mind).

All These Worlds (Bobiverse, #3) (2017)

Dennis E. Taylor

• Completed: 2022-03-31
• My Rating: 3/5

It’s lost much of the magic that the series had from the first instalment. At this point it just feels like lateral world-building and mediocre character arcs.

The plot lines aren’t complex. The characters are numerous, but all permutations of the same core Bob. The writing focuses on scenes between characters, and explicitly brings the reader up to speed on the developments each time.

All of this (with Ray Porter’s calmingly-eccentric narration) makes for a fun and easy audiobook to listen to in bed, but lacks the mindbending idea flow of the first instalment.

Before & Laughter: A Life Changing Book (2021)

Jimmy Carr

• Completed: 2022-03-31
• My Rating: 5/5

tldr; If you have 4-6 hours to spend, you’ll learn a lot and laugh a lot from this audiobook.

I find Jimmy’s standup and hosting really engaging — lots of double-twist punchlines and superb use of dark humour. After I listened to his conversation with Jordan Peterson, I became more intrigued by his approach to life and work, so I checked out his new book.

I was expecting to find it reasonably good, but ended up immensely enjoying it. Listening to the self-narrated audiobook version is essential — you get his real delivery of each line. I frequently laughed out loud.

It’s not the most profound piece of literature ever produced, but the 40% of it that’s self-help-ish was actually deeply insightful, and the 50% that’s autobiographical was mostly interesting showbiz anecdotes — especially if you follow British panel shows. The remaining 10% is a sprinkling of one-line zingers that brought a levity and energy to the audiobook and made it impossible to quit listening to.

If you don’t like Jimmy and his humour, this might not be your thing. But his life journey has had a lot more to it than I expected and his approach to handling the highs and lows was refreshing to me.

For instance, he spent a lot of time exploring the differences between “sadness” and “depression” in a very helpful way, before pointing out that suicide doesn’t make the pain go away, it just spreads it out over the surviving loved ones. I’d never seen the topic explored from that angle before and it resonated with me.

He also has some great perspectives on making radical life pivots later in the game. That was quite helpful as I go through my “quarter-life crisis” years.

Carr has great dichotomies

• Decide if you’re charismatic or charming (Trump vs Obama, Jolie vs Anniston, McConaughey vs Harrelson) and then focus on that.

• Fame vs celebrity (famous for what you’ve done, celebrity for who you are).

• Fair-weather friends vs foul-weather friends. Who calls you when you get cancelled for tax avoidance?

• Jealousy makes you bitter, but envy makes you motivated.

Jimmy succumbs to the trope of using extensive quotes between subchapters. In this case, it totally works for two reasons. Firstly, he picks absolute zingers! Secondly, he does little additional comments when reading them which broke me out in laughter several times.

One section in particular challenged me — a high-performing dilettante — to question my whole philosophy on skill development. Jimmy encourages the listener to identify their edge and then specialise ferociously. Generalists almost never make it to the big leagues.

(Your edge is the thing other people are jealous/envious of. When you’re young, add energy and optimism to that.)

For We Are Many (Bobiverse, #2) (2017)

Dennis E. Taylor

• Completed: 2022-02-22
• My Rating: 3/5

A fun and relaxing read for me — not too stimulating, but a nice bit of escapism. It didn’t excite me quite as much as We Are Legion (We Are Bob), the first instalment in the series. That’s likely because the main premise was already spent and the scope required increasing suspensions of disbelief from what began as fairly grounded sci-fi.

The middle section is a bit tedious, but Ray Porter’s lively narration makes for a some casual fiction in the evenings. I’ll take a break before continuing with the series.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse, #1) (2016)

Dennis E. Taylor

• Completed: 2022-02-10
• My Rating: 4/5

Entertaining and intriguing. Speculative and wide in scope. The scenes flow like the author is writing just for himself and Ray Porter’s narration is perfect for this story.

Only loses a star for ending like a chapter instead of as a stand-alone story. I’m already onto the next in the series.

I Will Teach You to Be Rich: No Guilt. No Excuses. No BS. Just a 6-Week Program That Works (2009)

Ramit Sethi

• Completed: 2022-01-24
• My Rating: 3/5

[3.5 stars] Despite a sometimes-irritating tone, Sethi provides a lively and thorough plan for growing your financial life from 0-85%. It’s a great read for anyone just starting to take control of their finances for the first time, but for those with an analytical background and previous investing experience, it’s fine to just skim or skip it. Note that the specific recommendations are US-focused and need some adapting if you’re from another region, but the key principles should generalise.

Topics covered include:

• The psychology of money and spending (i.e. what is your “rich life?”)

• How to optimise credit cards and make them work for you, instead of leaving you in debt.

• How to manage and prioritise paying off debts (of different kinds).

• Choosing the best banks.

• Choosing bank accounts: checking, savings, etc.

• Investment accounts.

• Automatic payments and savings contributions.

• Passive investment strategies: 401k, Roth IRA, index funds, dollar-cost-averaging.

• Negotiations for big-ticket items (car, house, etc.) and job offers.

Project Hail Mary (2021)

Andy Weir

• Completed: 2022-01-09
• My Rating: 5/5

I won’t say too much about it to prevent any spoilers — there’s a lot more to this than the blurb hints at. This is the kind of sci-fi that I absolutely relish and I loved every minute of it. I was as intrigued by the grounded science as I was captivated by the storytelling. More personal than Seveneves and absolute gold for anyone who enjoyed Children of Time.

RE: Audible version: At first, I was a bit sceptical of the writing style and Ray Porter’s impassioned narration, but it pretty quickly made sense and by the end made for a gripping and emotional experience. The production value of the audiobook version is excellent and they make some great choices for adapting it to the medium.

2021 (18 books)

The Prince (1513)

Niccolò Machiavelli

• Completed: 2021-12-21
• My Rating: 3/5

The George Bull translation of this classic, I found it far more interesting as a historical and cultural artefact than as a manual for leadership.

The Prince is fascinating from the perspective of Renaissance history, allowing us a glimpse of how the greatest political minds of the time viewed the unfolding power-plays of a divided Europe. Moreover, I found it an enlightening reminder of just how much of humankind’s story is one of zero-sum interactions. Without a doubt, very little of The Prince is even relevant to modern leadership, let alone helpful. But this is precisely because humanity has come so far in the past few centuries. In Machiavelli’s time, power and control were the only means to stability. Nowadays, through social and technological innovation, we are constructing a world where people benefit far more from cooperation than competition.

From its reputation, I was expecting far more cruelty and cunning than what is actually recommended in The Prince. It read more like a case study in applied Game Theory with some group psychology thrown in. In fact, I found that Machiavelli was surprisingly restrained in his prescriptions of violence, seldom failing to enumerate its downsides. Despite a reputation for ruthless cunning that elevated the term “Machiavellian” to modern parlance, Machiavelli’s extended letter contains a reasonable set of operating procedures for its target audience — the newly-empowered leader of the principality of Florence, during the unending conflicts of 14th-century Italy.

Amidst the historical case studies and recommendations for what type of military units to deploy against different enemy factions, there are certainly a few nuggets of practical insight in The Prince. These mainly involve how a leader should conduct themselves and interact with the public and their advisers.

… the only way to safeguard yourself against flatterers is by letting people understand that you are not offended by the truth; but if everyone can speak the truth to you then you lose respect. So a shrewd prince should adopt a middle way, choosing wise men for his government and allowing only those the freedom to speak the truth to him, and then only concerning matters on which he asks their opinion, and nothing else. But he should also question them thoroughly and listen to what they say; then he should make up his own mind, by himself. And his attitude towards his councils and towards each one of his advisers should be such that they will recognize that the more freely they speak out the more acceptable they will be. Apart from these, the prince should heed no one; he should put the policy agreed upon into effect straight away, and he should adhere to it rigidly. Anyone who does not do this is ruined by flatterers or is constantly changing his mind because of conflicting advice: as a result he is held in low esteem. […] A prince must, therefore, never lack advice. But he must take it when he wants to, not when others want him to; indeed, he must discourage everyone from tendering advice about anything unless it is asked for.

If you want to manipulate people (ethically or otherwise), don’t read The Prince. Read Never Split the Difference or How to Win Friends and Influence People instead. But if you want to understand the history of Europe’s maturation and the instability of the antiquity, then The Prince is well worth your time.

I listened to the audiobook (~4 hours) and found Simon Callow’s narration utterly gorgeous — from his vocal timbre to his Italian pronunciation, it’s truly outstanding.

The Overstory (2018)

Richard Powers

• Completed: 2021-12-21
• My Rating: 4/5

(4.5 stars — would read again)

An excellently-crafted and thought-provoking work, the Overstory follows eight different storylines over many decades as they eventually coincide and disperse.

The novel is structured like the lifecycle of a tree: the roots begin with independent characters, the trunk brings everything together into a single plot line, the crown explodes with a dramatic series of events that fragment the characters into their own separate paths, and the seeds hint at hopes for the future.

The audiobook, narrated by Suzanne Toren, is highly recommended. Relax, reflect, and get lost in the stories. It’s a little harder not to confuse the characters — especially when they get nicknames in parallel to their real names — but makes for a more engaging a visceral experience.

It comes across that the author, Richard Powers, has done his research. It was also evident that he has experience programming computers, and I particularly liked the plot line exploring the duality of the Silicon Valley tech revolution and the deforestation of California’s incredible trees.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Completed: 2021-11-24
• My Rating: 4/5

Taleb is undoubtedly one of the great philosophers of our age. Unfortunately, he seems to know that better than anyone else, so if this is your first exposure, Antifragile will likely rub you the wrong way. But if, like me, you are already familiar with his persona, then you will love this instalment in his Incerto series.

Antifragile follows on from Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan by considering their natural extension — how to avoid being ruined by tail risks and, ideally, benefit from them. Taleb posits that the opposite of fragile is not robust. Robust things are merely less fragile. Instead, he inverts the properties of the fragile and presents the antifragile — things that aren’t just resilient, but actually benefit from stressors.

It is only about 3/4 of the way through the book that he presents the clearest definition and examples: Fragile things are those which are relatively unharmed by the cumulative effect of small shocks, but destroyed by a single large one (e.g. a cup can withstand millions of tiny knocks, but breaks with one big one). Antifragile things are the inverse — they are unaffected by small doses, but gain massively from a large dose (e.g. lifting 1kg grows virtually no muscle, but lifting 200kg to failure grows a lot of muscle).

Beyond antifragility, I found three other major ideas in this book:

(1) Hormesis: a multi-phase response to increasing amounts of a substance or condition. (i.e. a little bit is good, but a lot is bad). This opens the book and builds to the idea of antifragility.

(2) Iatrogenics: when a treatment causes more harm than benefit. (Greek: “caused by the healer”). This is used throughout the book to illustrate the problems with “naive interventionism” (e.g. regulatory interventions in the US economy) but is investigated quite literally in the chapters on medicine and healthcare.

(3) Optionality: having the option, but not the obligation; giving you limited downside with large, open-ended upside. Identifying options when others don’t lets you exploit antifragility to your advantage. Look for non-linear (i.e. convex) responses.

A Goodreads friend of mine, Gavin, has a superb review of Antifragile (you should read it). I especially liked:

… this is the upswing, a chaotic attempt to give general positive advice in a world that dooms general positive advice. […] Every other page has something worth hearing, for its iconoclasm, or a Latin gobbet, or catty anecdote, if not something globally and evidently true.

I think this sums up Antifragile perfectly. Taleb’s style is more like that of a fascinating dinner companion than a dispassionate academic — as playful and uninhibited as it is brilliant. So I unconditionally recommend enjoying this in audiobook format, if you can. I think I have as much fun listening to his words as he has writing them. Without a doubt, listening to Antifragile whilst going about daily life is the best way to absorb both its epistemological insights and its subversive witticisms.

What follows are the notes I took whilst listening:

Antifragility of information: banning books or making things secret actually makes them more popular and widespread.

The author or artist is antifragile to reputational attacks, the bus driver is merely robust, but the mid-level bank manager is vulnerable.

Mental model: complicated vs complex.

“In the case of tonsillectomies, the harm to the children undergoing unnecessary treatment is coupled with the trumpeted gain for some others. The name for such net loss, the (usually bitten or delayed) damage from treatment in excess of the benefits, is iatrogenics.”

Adding randomness often solved problems and allows structure to form (e.g. tapping a barometer to unstick the needle before taking a reading, simulated annealing, etc.)

Taleb’s barbell for investing: first, make catastrophic ruin impossible, then upside is kinda inevitable.

Taleb’s Barbell strategy in non-investing areas: read trashy magazines and the classics, but nothing middle-brow; talk to cab drivers or top-tier scholars, not career academics;

“Options, any options, by allowing you more upside than downside, are vectors of antifragility.

If you “have optionality,” you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, and these complicated things that take place in our brain cells. For you don’t have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself (some acts of omission) and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur. (The key is that your assessment doesn’t need to be made beforehand, only after the outcome.)”

Options are a powerful way to make use of Antifragility. But once they’re recognised as options — formalised and named (like insurance contracts or financial instruments) — they become overpriced. Because of domain-dependence in the human mind, most people fail to identify optionality in the world and therefore fail to exploit it.

For thousands of years, nobody thought to put wheels on luggage. All these great minds at their conferences discussing Gödel and Turing had to schlep their luggage around.

In part 7 of Antifragile, Taleb talks about how theory is often worked out after the invention (by trial and error) and then history is rewritten by academics to invert the order. Jet engine, architecture, derivatives pricing, etc. where else has this happened? Deep/machine learning?

With asymmetric payoff, you decide based on fragility, not on probability. (E.g checking every passenger for weapons, investing in nuclear reactor safety)

“The fragile is what is hurt a lot more by extreme events than by a succession of intermediate ones.” — Taleb

Antifragility and non-linearity of effects: fragile things are those which are relatively unharmed by the cumulative effect of small shocks, but destroyed by a single large one (e.g. a cup can withstand millions of tiny knocks, but breaks with one big one). So antifragile things are the inverse — they are unaffected by small doses, but gain massively from a large dose. (e.g. lifting 1kg grows virtually no muscle, but lifting 200kg to failure grows a lot of muscle). “Fragility is simply vulnerability to things that affect it”. One large stone vs a thousand small pebbles.

“All kinds of exercise are just explorations of convexity effects” — NN Taleb

Size brings efficiency (economies of scale) at the cost of fragility.

“Time can act as a cleanser of noise.” — Taleb, on publications and the Lindy effect

“What Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise. What humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.” — Taleb

Taleb has a nice heuristic for health/diet/exercise: as a prior, don’t do anything that your own ancestors wouldn’t have done. He doesn’t eat non-Mediterranean fruits, use weight machines at the gym, or drink anything younger than 1000 years—wine, coffee, water. You need very strong evidence to the contrary before throwing our nature: e.g. penicillin.

Taleb: wine is the strongest argument for small-business / artisanal products.

Taleb: you probably don’t want anything that has to be advertised. (E.g. Coca-Cola)

Taleb: why do we deplore boastful people, but tolerate boastful corporations?

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics (2020)

Tim Harford

• Completed: 2021-09-14
• My Rating: 4/5

This is an entirely non-technical book and it starts off slowly — considering the various motivations and self-deceptions involved in data analysis. But as you stick with it, Harford builds a superb picture of the ways statistics can fool us, and 10 rules for trying to mitigate them.

The fact that the book is non-technical was initially a disappointment, but I came to realise that it was more a feature than a bug. Technical rigour obfuscates meaning and interpretation. The upshot is that Harford has written an exceptionally accessible book. Combined with his stylistic knack (and superb narration of the audio version), this makes The Data Detective easy to recommend to anyone from professional statisticians to your antivaxer great aunt.

As a data scientist, I was familiar with some of the case studies discussed. However, even for those I was dangerously misinformed about the details that weren’t widely reported in mass media. Harford did an outstanding job of highlighting those and offering insightful juxtaposition. Remember that time that Google could predict flu outbreaks weeks before the CDC using just search queries? Okay, but did you hear about how it spectacularly backfired a few years later when they failed to predict a wave of “summer flu” and had to scrap the project because they had no idea why? Oh and you know all those famous psych studies that teach us about our cognitive biases? Ash, Milgram, etc.? Yeah, many of them never included women in the studies and nobody has seemed to factor this obviously-skewed sampling into the popular interpretations.

The 10 rules (along with some personal notes):

1. Search your feelings

“The aim of this book is to help you be wiser about statistics. That means I also need to help you be wiser about yourself. All the statistical expertise in the world will not prevent your believing claims you shouldn’t believe and dismissing facts you shouldn’t dismiss. That expertise needs to be complemented by control of your own emotional reactions to the statistical claims you see.”

2. Ponder your personal experience

The average train can be nearly empty, whilst the average commuter always feels like they’re on an overcrowded train. When your personal experience seems to conflict with the statistics, look deeper and see if there is more to learn. This doesn’t mean drawing conclusions from anecdotes, though. People feel like vaccines are causing autism because the most common times for autism diagnoses to occur in development are very close to the times MMR vaccines are administered. Always beware of self-deception!

3. Avoid premature enumeration

“How many sheep in the field? Two, of course. Except that one of the sheep isn’t a sheep, it’s a lamb. And the other sheep is heavily pregnant—in fact, she’s in labor, about to give birth at any moment. How many sheep again? One? Two? Two and a half? Counting to three just got difficult. Whether we’re talking about the number of nurses employed by a hospital (do two part-time nurses count as two nurses, or just one?) or the wealth of the super-rich (is that the wealth they declare to the taxman, or is there a way to estimate hidden assets, too?), it is important to understand what is being measured or counted, and how.”

“many of the problems I encountered were because people had taken a wrong turn right at the start. They had dived into the mathematics of a statistical claim—asking about sampling errors and margins of error, debating if the number is rising or falling, believing, doubting, analyzing, dissecting—without taking the time to understand the first and most obvious fact: What is being measured, or counted? What definition is being used? Yet while this pitfall is common, it doesn’t seem to have acquired a name. My suggestion is “premature enumeration.””

4. Step back and enjoy the view

“Try to get a sense of the trend. “Another terrible crime has occurred!” is perfectly consistent with “Overall, crime is way down.” Look for something that will give you a sense of scale, such as comparing the situation in one country with the situation in other countries, or figuring out the cost per person of some proposed government expenditure.”

5. Get the backstory

“Billions of dollars are misspent and hundreds of thousands of lives lost because of survivorship bias, when we make decisions without seeing the whole story—the investment funds that folded, the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who never got beyond the “junk in the garage” stage, the academic studies that were never published, and the clinical trials that went missing in action.”

6. Ask who is missing

“Unless we’re collecting data ourselves, there’s a limit to how much we can do to combat the problem of missing data. But we can and should remember to ask who or what might be missing from the data we’re being told about. Some missing numbers are obvious—for example, it’s clearly hard to collect good data about crimes such as sex trafficking or the use of hard drugs. Other omissions show up only when we take a close look at the claim in question. Researchers may not be explicit that an experiment studied only men—such information is sometimes buried in a statistical appendix, and sometimes not reported at all. But often a quick investigation will reveal that the study has a blind spot. If an experiment studies only men, we can’t assume it would have pointed to the same conclusions if it had also included women. If a government statistic measures the income of a household, we must recognize that we’re learning little about the sharing of that income within a household."

7. Demand transparency when the computer says no

“The simple statistical tools used to analyze small datasets are usually easy to check; pattern-recognizing algorithms can all too easily be mysterious and commercially sensitive black boxes.

I’ve argued that we need to be skeptical of both hype and hysteria. We should ask tough questions on a case-by-case basis whenever we have reason for concern. Are the underlying data accessible? Has the performance of the algorithm been assessed rigorously—for example, by running a randomized trial to see if people make better decisions with or without algorithmic advice? Have independent experts been given a chance to evaluate the algorithm? What have they concluded? We should not simply trust that algorithms are doing a better job than humans, nor should we assume that if the algorithms are flawed, the humans would be flawless.”

8. Don’t take statistical bedrock for granted

“Even when official statistics are produced as skillfully and independently as we’d hope, they will never be perfect. Some things we care about are simply hard to measure, such as domestic violence, tax evasion, and rough-sleeping. There is, no doubt, plenty of scope for official statisticians to make the data they collect more representative, more relevant, easier to reconcile with everyday experience, and fully transparent. The more they are able to do this, the more they will deserve our trust.

Yet for all their problems and weaknesses, official statistics are still the closest we have to data bedrock. When a country picks and defends a team of skilled, professional, and independent statisticians, the facts have a way of making themselves known. When a country’s national statistics fall short, an international community of statisticians will complain. When an independent statistician is attacked or threatened by politicians, that same community will rally to his or her defense. Statisticians are capable of greater courage than most of us appreciate. Their independence is not something to take for granted, or to casually undermine.”

9. Remember that misinformation can be beautiful, too

“First—and most important, since the visual sense can be so visceral—check your emotional response. Pause for a moment to notice how the graph makes you feel: triumphant, defensive, angry, celebratory? Take that feeling into account.

Second, check that you understand the basics behind the graph. What do the axes actually mean? Do you understand what is being measured or counted? Do you have the context to understand, or is the graph showing just a few data points? If the graph reflects complex analysis or the results of an experiment, do you understand what is being done? If you’re not in a position to evaluate that personally, do you trust those who were? (Or have you, perhaps, sought a second opinion?)

When you look at data visualizations, you’ll do much better if you recognize that someone may well be trying to persuade you of something. There is nothing wrong with artfully persuasive graphs, any more than with artfully persuasive words.”

10. Keep an open mind

“Fisher and Keynes were equally expert, and they had the same statistical information at their fingertips—data they themselves had done much to collect. Just as with Abraham Bredius, the art scholar so cruelly tricked by the forger Han van Meegeren, their fates were determined not by their expertise but by their emotions. This book has argued that it is possible to gather and to analyze numbers in ways that help us understand the world. But it has also argued that very often we make mistakes not because the data aren’t available, but because we refuse to accept what they are telling us. For Irving Fisher, and for many others, the refusal to accept the data was rooted in a refusal to acknowledge that the world had changed.”

The golden rule: be curious

See the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.

“I hope that I have persuaded you that we should make more room both for the novelty-seeking curiosity that says “Tell me more” and the dogged curiosity that drove Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll to ask why so many people were dying of lung cancer, and whether cigarettes might be to blame. If we want to make the world add up, we need to ask questions—open-minded, genuine questions. And once we start asking them, we may find it is delightfully difficult to stop.”

Thinking In Systems: A Primer (2008)

Donella H. Meadows

• Completed: 2021-09-02
• My Rating: 3/5

I was expecting something a little more technical from this book and had been looking forward to it for a while. However, it overlaps a great deal with some of my favourite books and didn’t offer much additional insight. But, for a general audience, it’s a pretty great synthesis of why achieving our goals in organisations and societies is more challenging than we’d like to believe.

Part one presents the basic system model: A system has “stock”, inflows, and outflows. This is true of a bathtub, central heating, car dealerships, the natural environment, etc. There can be multiple stocks, inflows, and outflows. Stocks act as delays/buffers in the system, allowing inflows and outflows to be temporarily out of balance. Feedback loops are when changes in stock affect inflow or outflow of the stock. These feedback loops can either balance (e.g. thermostat) or reinforce (e.g. interest payments) the system stock.

I really enjoyed this abstract notion of a “system” and the examples given. It’s a valuable mental model. In particular, Meadows offers useful heuristics that emerge from this model, my favourite example being environmental resources in a two-stock system: “Nonrenewable resources are stock-limited. The entire stock is available at once, and can be extracted at any rate (limited mainly by extraction capital). But since the stock is not renewed, the faster the extraction rate, the shorter the lifetime of the resource. Renewable resources are flow-limited. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate. If they are extracted faster than they regenerate, they may eventually be driven below a critical thresh- old and become, for all practical purposes, nonrenewable.”

This got me excited for the rest of the book. Unfortunately, part two was mostly recap of familiar ideas, and part three felt like a quasi-philosophical rant only loosely based on the core concepts of system dynamics. Perhaps this has something to do with the manuscript only being at the draft phase when the author died. Nevertheless, if you’ve played some simulation games, have a background in (software) engineering, and know how to recognise a Nash equilibrium, then most of this book won’t be new to you. If not, you’ll get a good intuition for system dynamics by playing Universal Paperclips and giving the first two parts of this book a skim.

In other words, if you’re like me, much of what you’ve already read echoes or underpins Thinking in Systems. But for a more general audience, this book offers quite a bit of insight from across many domains (dynamical models, Game Theory, etc.) in a single package. If you’ve never heard of “tragedy of the commons” and don’t see why incentivising people with transparent KPIs is a bad idea, then chapters 5-7 are worth your time.

Some of my (other) takeaway ideas from the book:

“Modern systems theory, bound up with computers and equations, hides the fact that it traffics in truths known at some level by everyone. It is often possible, therefore, to make a direct translation from systems jargon to traditional wisdom.

Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve.— A stitch in time saves nine.

According to the competitive exclusion principle, if a reinforcing feedback loop rewards the winner of a competition with the means to win further competitions, the result will be the elimination of all but a few competitors. — For he that hath, to him shall be given; and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath (Mark 4:25) or The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

A diverse system with multiple pathways and redundancies is more stable and less vulnerable to external shock than a uniform system with little diversity. — Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

Doubling time ~ 70/(growth rate x 100)

if A -> B, does B also cause A? e.g. poverty and overpopulation.

Delays in feedback loops and/or inaccurate information are the cause of many issues in the real world. Like trying to get the temperature right in a shower with very long pipes. This causes oscillations in the “stock.”

Resilience is a set of feedback loops (with meta-levels of feedback loops that restore others) —> self-organisation. Stability is not resilience, but is often mistaken for it.

Systems often surprise us because:

1. we see events, not trends (in systems)

2. we have linear minds in a nonlinear world

3. of nonexistent boundaries (like national borders)

4. of layers of limiting factors

5. of ubiquitous delays

6. we have bounded rationality

The traps/opportunities of systems (mostly Game Theory):

1. policy resistance

2. the tragedy of the commons

3. drift to low performance

4. escalation

5. success to the successful

6. shifting the burden to the intervenor

7. rule beating

8. seeking the wrong goal

Blindsight (Firefall, #1) (2006)

Peter Watts

• Completed: 2021-08-16
• My Rating: 5/5

Blindsight took a while to build up, but the twists of the last three chapters were brilliant! This is clearly a very well-researched work that drew from the fascinating findings of modern psychology and neuroscience to build a startling narrative and deliver a frightening idea.

For a much better, more detailed, and spoiler-rich review, see here.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (1973)

Burton G. Malkiel

• Completed: 2021-07-26
• My Rating: 4/5

tldr; Modern financial markets are highly efficient and (even with the right combination of genius, timing, capital, and luck) it’s highly unlikely you’ll consistently outsmart the market average. Instead, you should passively invest in a broadly diversified portfolio with index funds at its core. Contribute regularly to these investments to average out volatility (dollar-cost averaging). Over time, this strategy produces the highest returns. The earlier you start, the more that growth compounds. Select funds with the lowest fees and defer paying tax by keeping your money invested. Risk and long-term returns are inextricably linked. Start with a higher-risk portfolio when you are young and gradually reduce the risk of the portfolio as you age, by shifting to asset classes with lower volatility.

If you’re going to read just one book on investing or finance, this should probable be it. A Random Walk Down Wall Street strikes a great balance between building concepts and extracting useful heuristics.

What follow are my takeaway lessons:

Currency inflation decreases your purchasing power over time. When factoring in taxes, the interest on savings accounts is often not enough to outpace this inflation. Instead, investing in assets like stocks, bonds, and property allow you to grow your money by taking on additional risk. In this book, Malkiel outlines the various ways this can be achieved and how they compare, both in theoretical analysis and through the lens of history.

The two theories at the core of investing are:

(1) “the firm foundation theory,” in which investors assess the intrinsic value of businesses and search for those that are undervalued by having deeper insights and better information than the rest of the market. This is the basis of the fundamental analysis used by the likes of Warren Buffet.

(2) “the castle in the sky theory,” where investors try play the psychology game one level above the naïve and exploit their reactive trends. This is where the much-maligned “technical analysis” comes in — advocates attempt to spot patterns in the pricing histories of assets and exploit short-term price changes.

Malkiel presents a number of arguments why both (1) and (2) are losing strategies for the vast majority of investors. He then presents the core theme of the book: modern portfolio theory — where investments are diversified across (uncorrelated) assets in an attempt to maximise returns for a given risk level. Malkiel maintains that passively investing in low-cost index funds over decades is the only reliable strategy for long-term growth. He notes that most mutual/hedge funds don’t add much value for their fee and generally underperform compared to the market average.

Over the various editions of this book, Malkiel hasn’t wavered in his core advice, but did add a number of additional notes to address recent anomalies like the 2008 market crash and the advent of cryptocurrencies.

In the final chapter he reconciles his index-centric advice with Efficient Market Theory: EMT works because some active investors keep the market efficient and allow the passive (index) investors to enjoy consistent long-term growth. I interpret this to mean something along the lines of the minority who chase alpha enable the majority to achieve beta.

For a detailed summary of all the major principles in the book, see here. It’s about a 15-minute read.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (1999)

Richard P. Feynman

• Completed: 2021-07-15
• My Rating: 3/5

This one is only for the diehard Feynman fanatics. It overlaps a fair bit with Surely You’re Joking, but is nowhere near as entertaining or well-structured. If you absolutely must absorb everything Feynman put into the world, this collection of interviews and talks will be of interest. For anyone else, read Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman instead.

That said, I really enjoyed a few of the chapters. In particular, the talk on the future of computing (given in Tokyo) and the famous nanotechnology talk (that spawned the field). Those had the greatest added value.

The audiobook version is narrated in a similar voice and accent to Feynman’s speaking voice, so it feels pretty authentic. I recommend that medium. You can also pump it up to 2x speed for the less interesting chapters.

The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t

Julia Galef

• Completed: 2021-06-25
• My Rating: 4/5

I’m a big fan of Julia and her podcast, but I wasn’t expecting too much from Scout Mindset because it’s clearly written for a more general audience and was largely based on ideas that Julia had already discussed online. I updated from that prior pretty fast. Scout Mindset is a valuable addition to an aspiring rationalist’s bookshelf — both for its content and for Julia’s impeccable writing style, which I aspire to.

Those familiar with the OSI model of internet infrastructure will know that there are different layers of protocols. The IP protocol that dictates how packets are directed sits at a much lower layer than the HTML protocol which dictates how applications interact. Similarly, Yudkowsky’s Sequences can be thought of as the lower layers of rationality, whilst Julia’s work in Scout Mindset provides the protocols for higher layers. The Sequences are largely concerned with what rationality is, whilst Scout Mindset presents tools for practically approximating it in the real world. It builds on the “kernel” of cognitive biases and Bayesian updating by considering what mental “software” we can run on a daily basis.

The core thesis of the book is that humans default towards a “soldier mindset,” where reasoning is like defensive combat. We “attack” arguments or “concede” points. But there is another option: “scout mindset,” where reasoning is like mapmaking.

The Scout Mindset is “the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were. […] Scout mindset is what allows you to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course.”

I recommend listening to the audiobook version, which Julia narrates herself. The book is precisely as long as it needs to be, with no fluff. The anecdotes are entertaining and relevant and were entirely new to me. Overall, I think this book is a 4.5/5, especially if you actively try to implement Julia’s recommendations. Try out her calibration exercise, for instance.

UPDATE: See this awesome summary of the book by Rob Bensinger.

Overview:

Part 1: The case for scout mindset

Part 2: Developing self-awareness

Part 3: Thriving without illusions

Part 4: Changing your mind

Part 5: Rethinking identity

I particularly enjoyed parts 4 and 5 and believe this is where Julia adds the most novel contributions. Check out this review for other reasons you might want to read Scout Mindset.

What follows is a collection of notes I jotted down while listening to the book:

The opposite of the sour grapes fallacy is the “sweet lemons” fallacy.

Status quo bias test: when making a trade-off decision, pretend you were in the other position already and see if you would switch to the current position.

Thought experiments when making decisions:

• Double standard test: how would I evaluate this if the roles/sides were switched?

• Outsider test: how would someone else teleporting into my position handle this?

• Conformity test: imagine someone you admire adopted the opposite view, would you defend your view against them?

• Selective skeptic test: imagine the evidence supported the other side, would you still find it credible?

• Status quo bias test: imagine the the alternative was already implemented, now would you choose to go back?

Scout Mindset’s biggest takeaway so far: Epistemic confidence is not actually important to convince people. It’s actually social confidence.

Concept of non-diversifiable risks. (Climate change? AI?)

Having a rationalist (scout mindset) identity as primary one allows you to “keep your identity small” whilst being able to re-evaluate your positions and beliefs. It makes the human bias to tribal identity work for you instead of against you.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2015)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Completed: 2016-09-13
• My Rating: 5/5

Update after 3rd read: HPMOR is probably my favourite fiction book. I just inhaled it again and it’s like a mental metamorphosis each read-through.

Chaos: Making a New Science (1987)

James Gleick

• Completed: 2021-04-29
• My Rating: 3/5

I was underwhelmed by this book. Perhaps that’s partly my fault, as I listened to the audio version and so (presumably) missed out on the equations and figures contained in print/ebook. Gleick writes well, but the ratio of story to substance was too high for my liking. I recall enjoying the first few chapters and making a few notes on them, but the latter half of the book was a bit of a slog. The personalities of Chaos Theory are somewhat interesting — it was, for a long time, an underdog of science — but not enough for me to love this book.

I think Chaos Theory is really cool, but I’m not sure that books are the ideal medium. Given dynamical systems, it seems that modern video-based simulations would be far better for conveying concepts in this field. In fact, I discovered this book via this excellent Veritasium video on YouTube. To be honest, I think I gleaned more total value from that than I did from this book.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Completed: 2021-04-22
• My Rating: 4/5

I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as Taleb’s previous book, Fooled by Randomness. Black Swan is much longer (repeating many of the ideas from Taleb’s earlier work) and his flavourful writing borders on irritating at times. It makes sense if you view it more as a sequence of interconnected essays than as a structured book.

On the whole, Black Swan is a worthwhile read. If you’re familiar with the core concept (or have a background in statistics), you should definitely skim the book, or listen to the audiobook, as I did. There are a few subchapters that present the main points, but much of the rest is repetition and anecdotes. Unlike many non-fiction authors, Taleb’s filler is actually quite entertaining, but it’s certainly not worth taking notes on.

So, stylistically, this is not up to scratch with Taleb’s earlier work and it’s a bit over-the-top at points. But in terms of substance, it introduces or popularises a number of high-value ideas.

• Black swans: Events that are (1) a surprise (to the observer), (2) have a major effect, and (3) are rationalised in hindsight. Covid-19 was not a black swan. The 9/11 attacks and the rise of the Internet were black swans.

• Mediocristan vs. Extremistan: Taleb’s metaphor for Type 1 (Mediocristan) and Type 2 (Extremestan) randomness. Type 1 gives normally-distributed samples (human height, calories consumed, etc.). Type 2 gives high-scaling distributions (net wealth, book sales, death toll, etc.). Both can produce Black Swans.

• Black swans are relative to knowledge (The parable of the Turkey): Every day, for a thousand days, the turkey sees the sunrise and knows that he will be fed and cared for. Every day is additional evidence that this will be true in the future. But for the butcher, each day is additional evidence that the turkey will soon be ready for the slaughter. To the turkey, slaughtering day is a black swan. To the butcher, it is a white swan.

• Disconfirmatory evidence: Humans tend to look for instances that confirm our story (“naive empiricism”), but seeing another white swan does not prove the nonexistence of a black swan.

• Selection bias (“invisible evidence”): Professional swimmers all have a “swimmer’s body,” but the act of swimming will not transform your body to look like theirs. They are professional swimmers because they have the genetics for a swimmer’s body. Only the minority of people who are initially lucky when gambling will be motivated to continue gambling. So all experienced gamblers will testify about the existence of “beginner’s luck.”

• The ludic fallacy: Taleb laments that much of probability theory and risk assessment is based on thinking about games – roulette, blackjack, poker. This doesn’t capture real-world risk, as there are no black swans in games.

• Information is bad for knowledge: Taleb discusses many psychology studies that find participants have higher confidence in their predictions when they have access to more information, even though this makes their predictions no better (or worse). [See Thinking Fast and Slow for a full treatment of these ideas.]

• Weak vs. strong uncertainty: These are my terms for a theme that I found recurring throughout the book. Weak uncertainty is being unsure whether the guy across the table is holding a pair of aces or not. Strong uncertainty is trying to determine if humanity is likely to go extinct in the future. These are very different. Weak uncertainty (in both games and the physical world) is easily modelled and managed with Gaussian techniques. Strong uncertainty (in pandemics and wars) is

impossible (?) to model. The black swans make estimation useless. The only defence is being robust to the uncertainty. Taleb argues that markets are closer to strong uncertainty, despite the fact that financial practice treats them with the tools of weak uncertainty.

• Benefit from uncertainty (barbell strategy): don’t try predict random events. Instead, build robustness to negative events and set yourself up to exploit positive events. Be simultaneously hyperaggressive and hyperconservative. Avoid the middle ground. Take lots of small bets.

• Gray swans: These are unexpected (like black swans), but known (like white swans). Examples: Trump winning the US election, volcanic eruptions, etc.

• Gaussian vs. Mandelbrotian: Statistics based on the normal distribution are widely used, but are based on the assumption that probability decreases exponentially as you go away from the mean. Under “fractal” distributions (which Taleb names in honour of Mandelbrot), this is not the case. There, probabilities decrease linearly. This results in “fat tails.” Unfortunately, estimating exponents on fractal distributions requires far far more samples. Taleb’s conclusion seems to be that

we should just give up trying to model and revert to our intuitions. The tools of risk assessment all seem to rely on standard deviation, which breaks down when Gaussian assumptions don’t hold.

Mathematical Fallacies and Paradoxes (Dover Books on Mathematics) (1982)

Bryan Bunch

• Completed: 2021-03-30
• My Rating: 3/5

I read this on a plug from Grant Sanderson (of 3Blue1Brown fame). It didn’t really live up to my hopes and generally lacked consistency. There are certainly some interesting takeaways and highlights in the later chapters — relating to Gödel Incompleteness, General Relativity, and Set Theory. However, the parts that felt most interesting to me are the ones that draw heavily from Douglas Hofstadter’s work. I think I would be better served reading those sections of GEB again instead of having Bunch interpret them. But this version is certainly far more concise (and so might make for a decent primer for some readers).

The first 4 or 5 chapters felt overly simplistic and featured excessive arithmetic working. I enjoyed much of the following chapters, though:

6. The Limits of Thought

7. Misunderstanding Space and Time

8. Moving Against Infinity

Most readers with a decent background in theoretical CS or mathematics would probably be best served just skipping forward to chapter 5 or 6 right away.

Selected highlights from the book:

“What to do with a paradox ? If you are sure that no contradiction results, incorporate the paradox into mathematics and declare it a paradox no longer.”

“the real numbers cannot be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. There are two kinds of infinity after all!”

“the Cantor paradox. Cantor had shown that for any set whatsoever, the set of subsets of the set contains more members than the set itself. What about the set of all sets? Since the set of all sets includes all possible sets, each of its subsets must be members of it. So there cannot be more subsets than there are members of the set of all sets.”

“Axiomatic set theory explicitly eliminates the known paradoxes, but cannot be shown to be consistent. Therefore, other paradoxes can occur at any time.”

“you can show that if you can compute the Gödel number of a particular proof by following the rules for computing Gödel numbers from the axioms, then that statement can be proved. What Gödel did, however, was to compute the Gödel number of a statement that says “This statement cannot be proved.” […] there exists, for any axiomatic system that is strong enough to derive the natural numbers, a statement such that neither its truth nor its falsity can be proved, unless the system is inconsistent. The last sentence is Gödel’s theorem—technically, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, since he is responsible for several other important results of modern mathematics.”

“Instead of very restrictive methods, such as the straightedge and the compass, mathematicians began to show that problems existed that could not be solved by very general methods. In fact, several mathematicians described such general methods that they came to believe that these methods were equivalent to all possible methods. This belief, known as the Church-Turing thesis (after Alonzo Church and Alan Turing), can be more specifically stated as “The only method of calculating a number or set of numbers in a finite number of steps is to use the class of methods that have been identified already.” […] most mathematicians believe that the Church-Turing thesis is true (although it cannot be proved to be true).”

“What Banach and Tarski showed is that: If you have two geometric figures in a Euclidean space that consist of an ordinary outside surface and some points inside, then there is a finite decomposition that shows that they are equivalent. (The same situation exists for the surface of a sphere.) When this result is reported to nonmathematicians, it is often stated something like this: Banach and Tarski proved that it was possible to disassemble a small sphere, such as a pea or a grapefruit, and reassemble it with no interior gaps into a sphere the size of the earth or the sun. Indeed, that is one of the consequences of the theorem.”

“according to Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, you do not live in Euclidean three-space. You live in Minkowski four-space. […] Although Minkowski space resembles Euclidean space in many ways, the concept of length is quite different.”

“The Dichotomy paradox concerns a traveler who is to walk a certain distance. First, he or she must walk half the distance, then half of what remains, then half of what remains, and so forth. It is clear that there will always be half of the remaining distance to go to any point during the walk. Thus, the person can never complete the walk.”

“The mathematician’s view depends again on the reality of the continuum. But what physicists have found out about the real world casts great doubt on that point of view. In 1900, Max Planck discovered—somewhat to his regret—that energy is not continuous. Instead of being available along the continuum (in any amount one could calculate), energy is only available in small packets—quanta.”

“Zeno recognized early on that the mathematical way of looking at the world and the scientific way of looking at the world produced contradictory results. As mathematics has grown independently (to some degree) over the centuries, it has been necessary again and again to change the rules slightly so that mathematical paradoxes will become mere fallacies. But from the beginning, from Zeno’s time, it was clear that mathematics does not correspond exactly to the real world. Of course, this does not mean that mathematics is in any way not useful in describing or discovering the real world. It certainly is. But what is discovered, as in the case of quanta, may not fit with mathematics. If you assume that an arrow behaves like a collection of mathematical points, you can use mathematics to describe its motion. If you concentrate on the arrow being a finite collection of small packets of energy, none of which can be located at a particular mathematical point, then you are up the creek. This situation remains an unresolved paradox.”

Game Theory at Work: How to Use Game Theory to Outthink and Outmaneuver Your Competition (2003)

James D. Miller

• Completed: 2021-03-28
• My Rating: 4/5

“if you end up enjoying this book, it’s not because I wrote it for the purpose of making you happy. I wrote it to maximize my own payoff. I don’t care, in any way, about your welfare. It’s just that the capitalist system under which books are produced in the United States creates incentives for me to seriously attempt to write a book that customers will enjoy and perhaps even benefit from reading.”

I read this over several months in small chunks — the structure of the book is quite amenable to that strategy. Miller applies key ideas from Game Theory to topics in enterprise, investing, and organisational management in an accessible, non-technical style.

The book delivers on what it promises and contains interesting scenarios to illustrate different results in Game Theory. However, it isn’t exactly a gripping read and fails to flow between (sub)sections. As a technically-oriented reader, I found it leaned too much towards listing scenarios, for my liking. I would have preferred more general concepts about how Game Theoretic results apply to business, paired with more applications of mechanism design.

Children of Time (Children of Time, #1) (2015)

Adrian Tchaikovsky

• Completed: 2021-03-24
• My Rating: 5/5

This was an excellent and thought-provoking story — just the kind of speculative, deeply-cerebral sci-fi that I love. Tchaikovsky weaves (pun intended) nuanced biological and sociological concepts into plot points that resonate with everything right, and wrong, with humanity.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto) (2001)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Completed: 2021-03-16
• My Rating: 5/5

One tangent Taleb explores in Fooled by Randomness is that reviews tell you more about the reviewer than the product they are reviewing. So reviewing the book is pretty meta. But I write these for my own future reference anyway, so I guess that makes this some kind of introspective exercise.

Regardless, I was surprised to really love this book. Taleb has a reputation on Twitter for being as preference-polarising as Marmite, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Fooled by Randomness is a great examination of intuitive probability theory and sampling effects, mainly applied to financial markets. It echoes (or likely inspired/propagated) many of the ideas about probabilistic reasoning and cognitive biases that I’ve read about in more recent work. I also quite enjoyed Taleb’s loose and witty writing style, which stands apart from the bland non-fiction style adopted by many modern authors. I inhaled the audiobook in less than a week and am looking forward to diving into The Black Swan.

Some things I noted down while listening:

1. Don’t decide if you’re “bullish” or “bearish.” That’s only considering the distribution of the odds. Also consider the distribution of payoffs. If you’re 75% sure the market will go up by 1% next week then most would call you somewhat bullish. But if you think that there’s 25% chance it’ll fall by 10%, then shorting is the far better side of the bet to take. Expected value is what we are concerned with.

2. Herbert A. Simon’s ideas about Satisficing. Apparently satisficers in life are happier than optimisers.

3. Taleb’s Generator: “We favour the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible. We scorn the abstract. Everything good — aesthetics, ethics — and wrong — fooled by randomness — with us seems to flow from it.”

The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win (2020)

Maria Konnikova

• Completed: 2021-01-14
• My Rating: 4/5

I really enjoyed listening to this on my walks these past few weeks, particularly as I’ve been getting more into poker myself. Konnikova weaves great anecdotes about poker culture into the gritty details of her training and broader themes from the psychology literature.

Although I was familiar with most of the standard cognitive biases already, it was still interesting to see how they might apply to poker. Half of the reason I play poker myself is as a means of training my intuitions and self-discipline within a system of tight feedback loops. The Biggest Bluff paired nicely with my own bitter lessons from online play and gave me some things to reflect on.

If you’re of the rationalist persuasion and not into poker, you might not enjoy this as much. Conversely, if you think poker is just gambling and has no lessons to offer, you should definitely read this book!

For me, the book seemed to end quite abruptly and erred a bit too much towards a journalistic exposition style. However, that may just be a matter of taste. The story and the content are solid.

I highly recommend the audio version, which the author narrates herself.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (2018)

Eric A. Posner

• Completed: 2021-01-01
• My Rating: 4/5

2020 (15 books)

A Study in Scarlet (Sherlock Holmes, #1) (1887)

Arthur Conan Doyle

• Completed: 2020-12-23
• My Rating: 4/5

The underlying case is interesting and this seminal story presents the rough character of the original Holmes, but the meandering middle tangent of the book was dull and unnecessary.

Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career (2019)

Scott H. Young

• Completed: 2020-12-13
• My Rating: 4/5

Ultralearning delivers what is says on the tin and does so in a slick and enjoyable fashion.

Scott Young is probably best known for his MIT challenge. He defines ultralearning as “a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.” Indeed, my main takeaway from the book was intensity.

The book goes on to describe what ultralearning looks like, why it’s useful, how it can be performed, and what comes after. I found it low on fluff and enjoyed all of the extended anecdotes — rare for this genre of book.

There are 9 principles of ultralearning:

1. Metalearning: research how you are going to learn.

2. Focus: start, sustain, optimise.

3. Directness: learning by doing.

4. Drilling and repetition.

5. Retrieval: generate, don’t review.

6. Feedback: outcome, informational, corrective.

7. Retention: spacing, proceduralisation, overlearning, mnemonics.

8. Intuition (Feynman Technique)

9. Experimentation: resources, technique, style.

These are summarised in more detail at codywest.com/ultralearning.

My favourite technique was full-immersion language learning: Scott travelled to foreign countries and didn’t speak English for a year whilst rapidly acquiring proficiency in various local languages.

My favourite extended anecdotes were those on Richard Feynman (legend) and the Polgár sisters.

The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life (2017)

Kevin Simler

• Completed: 2020-09-06
• My Rating: 5/5

This thing red-pilled the hell out of me!

I’m pretty familiar with Hanson and his blog, as well as the concept of social signalling. However, the examples and nuances in the book truly hammered home how pervasive and powerful signalling and self-deception is in human behaviour. This book is less than 10% fluff and definitely worth the time to read. I was particularly taken by the sections on politics/voting, education, and healthcare — my views on these topics are irrevocably shifted.

I almost regret listening to this instead of reading the ebook, as I missed out on making notes for excerpts I’ll certainly wish to return to. That said, the audio version is well-made and very digestible.

If you have a very rosy view of humankind, this might upset you and leave you quite cynical. But, for those who are well-versed in the Litany of Gendlin, it’s a must-read.

Infinite Jest (1996)

David Foster Wallace

• Completed: 2020-08-24
• My Rating: 3/5

This book is really clever and unusual and superbly written. But I just couldn’t get through it. It’s not a story, it’s a tapestry. Nothing actually happens. It felt like a snapshot of some other world, frozen in a short window of time. Brilliant as a concept, but not the kind of fiction I enjoy. I gave up around a quarter of the way through.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work (2017)

Steven Kotler

• Completed: 2020-07-14
• My Rating: 2/5

This was (as expected) quite nebulous. I suspect it’s quite hard to talk about these kinds of topics in concrete ways. After reading The Rise of Superman a few years ago, I knew that I should expect this book to be comprised mostly of anecdotes. That it delivered upon, but very few were new or interesting to me. The connections between ideas also came across as highly speculative.

Despite my deep interest in Flow states and biohacking, this book didn’t really push me towards new behaviours or strategies. It also spent an inordinate amount of time morally justifying psychotropic substance usage and glorifying Burning Man, which I could have done without.

My favourite anecdote was about Navy SEAL teams, who seem to employ some kind of dynamic/fluid leadership structure when on active missions:

“When SEALs sweep a building,” says Rich Davis, “slow is dangerous. We want to move as fast as possible. To do this, there are only two rules. The first is do the exact opposite of what the guy in front of you is doing—so if he looks left, then you look right. The second is trickier: the person who knows what to do next is the leader. We’re entirely nonhierarchical in that way. But in a combat environment, when split seconds make all the difference, there’s no time for second-guessing. When someone steps up to become the new leader, everyone, immediately, automatically, moves with him. It’s the only way we win.”

The final chapter is probably the most useful (if you’re already sold on the premise). It provides guidelines for implementing Flow-inducing practices into your lifestyle, with some variations depending on your risk tolerance.

One idea that stuck out was the analogy of being a colander: when you’re in an altered mental state, it’s like running the faucet on full — you fill up with water and have the perception that you’re a cup containing deep truths, but when it stops flowing, you drain and it’s mostly lost. The authors caution that we should not just strive to be under an open faucet, but also to patch our holes.

Foundation (Foundation, #1) (1951)

Isaac Asimov

• Completed: 2020-07-14
• My Rating: 3/5

I really didn’t get this one. I like Asimov’s writing and subject matter in general, but Foundation just didn’t live up to its immense reputation for me.

The Machiavellian scheming — the main appeal of this anthology — doesn’t compare to that of Dune, and the absence of female characters is such a notable anachronism that it consistently ejected me from the story.

The general themes and ideas are fascinating, but they’re bogged down by often-dull negotiations between characters that are hard to care about.

This collection is incredibly ambitious and would probably be well-suited to a TV series adaptation, but I’d have to recommend I,Robot and The Last Answer over it any day.

If you liked this, you’ll probably enjoy Dune far more.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (2016)

Brian Christian

• Completed: 2020-06-01
• My Rating: 5/5

Previously listened to the audiobook. Reread as an ebook to take copious notes. A non-fiction favourite!

The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase (2013)

Mark Forsyth

• Completed: 2020-05-01
• My Rating: 5/5

Reread as ebook to make detailed notes.

The Machine in the Ghost (Rationality: From AI to Zombies, #3) (2015)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Completed: 2020-04-24
• My Rating: 4/5

This has probably been my favourite book in the Rationality: From AI to Zombies series so far.

As always, Yudkowsky exposes nuances of human thinking that others completely overlook. This book focusses on evolutionary theory, values and anthropomorphism, and how our language can so often lead our thinking astray.

I’d really recommend section L—The Simple Math of Evolution—to anyone with a penchant for evolutionary biology or psychology. It’s also a great way to level up your thinking in general (if you’re already familiar with the basics of cognitive biases). You can read all the essays from this section here.

Sections:

L. The Simple Math of Evolution

M. FragilePurposes

N. A Human’s Guide to Words

Merged review:

This has probably been my favourite book in the Rationality: From AI to Zombies series so far.

As always, Yudkowsky exposes nuances of human thinking that others completely overlook. This book focusses on evolutionary theory, values and anthropomorphism, and how our language can so often lead our thinking astray.

I’d really recommend section L—The Simple Math of Evolution—to anyone with a penchant for evolutionary biology or psychology. It’s also a great way to level up your thinking in general (if you’re already familiar with the basics of cognitive biases). You can read all the essays from this section here.

Sections:

L. The Simple Math of Evolution

M. FragilePurposes

N. A Human’s Guide to Words

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #4) (1984)

Douglas Adams

• Completed: 2020-03-01
• My Rating: 3/5

Mostly Harmless (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #5) (1992)

Douglas Adams

• Completed: 2020-02-23
• My Rating: 3/5

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014)

Peter Thiel

• Completed: 2020-02-18
• My Rating: 5/5

This was way better than I expected it to be. I’ve always been interested in Thiel and found him fascinating in interviews, but expected that Zero to One would contain merely the conventional startup wisdom. Instead, I found it more of a collection of ideas about how we might use some of humanity’s established tools to build a future radically better than the present.

It’s hard to know if Thiel is right, but this book has certainly reframed some of my thinking about where to place my focus.

Zero to One is concise, clear, and (especially in audio) quite captivating. It’s probably worth your time. I think it’s also helpful to have a startup concept in your mind whilst listening, as it helps get ideas flowing.

Life, the Universe and Everything (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #3) (1982)

Douglas Adams

• Completed: 2020-02-12
• My Rating: 4/5

Although this isn’t quite on the same level as the original Hitchhiker’s (it’s tough to be the middle instalment of the series), it’s still completely fantastic.

Adam’s wit and rhetorical craftsmanship are immense and this book is no exception. Thinking about deep questions of existence has never been such fun!

Martin Freeman’s audiobook narration is a great format to enjoy this too! I highly recommend it.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (2011)

Greg McKeown

• Completed: 2020-02-10
• My Rating: 3/5

This book is a succinct and highly-readable distillation of much of the best advice in the self-help, business, and minimalism genres, all brought together under a framework for “the disciplined pursuit of less.”

McKeown’s writing is clean and his self-narration of the audiobook version makes for a very pleasurable listen.

I also appreciate that this book is concise. Unlike many books in similar genres, it doesn’t go for fluff. There’s repetition, sure, but it’s useful restating. There are anecdotes, of course, but they’re brief and serve the key themes. If you’re going to eschew Tim Ferriss, Cal Newport, Marie Condo, and Stephen Covey; and only read a single book in this genre, then Essentialism would be a great choice.

My only criticism (and the source of the lost star) was that it didn’t deliver anything that felt new. Essentialism is to its genre what a great meta-analysis is to scientific publication—useful and thorough, but lacking the novelty to captivate.

Overview:

1. The Essentialist (and the Paradox of Success)

2. Choose—The Invincible Power of Choice

3. Discern—The Unimportance of Practically Everything

4. Trade-Off—Which Problem Do I Want?

5. Escape—The Perks of Being Unavailable

6. Look—See What Really Matters

7. Play—Embrace the Wisdom of Your Inner Child

8. Sleep—Protect the Asset

9. Select—The Power of Extreme Criteria

10. Clarify—One Decision That Makes a Thousand

11. Dare—The Power of a Graceful “No”

12. Uncommit—Win Big by Cutting Your Losses

13. Edit—The Invisible Art

14. Limit—The Freedom of Setting Boundaries

15. Buffer—The Unfair Advantage

16. Subtract—Bring Forth More by Removing Obstacles

17. Progress—The Power of Small Wins

18. Flow—The Genius of Routine

19. Focus—What’s Important Now?

20. Be—The Essentialist Life

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It (2016)

Chris Voss

• Completed: 2020-01-21
• My Rating: 5/5

This book is superb. Voss does an excellent job of using stories from his career as a hostage negotiator to illustrate key tactics and make them more memorable. If what’s written in Never Split the Difference is true, Voss’ techniques hold immense value for one’s personal life and career.

Some of the major techniques are:

1. Mirroring

2. Labelling

3. Mastering “no”

4. “That’s right” over “you’re right”

5. Bending their reality

6. Creating the illusion of control

7. “How” and “what” questions

8. Negotiator types: Accommodators, Assertives, and Analysts

9. Finding “black swans”

If I had to fault the book on something, it’s that it can be difficult to distil the ideas down to a memorable set. I made extensive highlights on this one and will certainly need to refer back to them to recall some of the more advanced strategies. The bulleted summaries at the end of each section certainly help, but they were often too detailed to remember explicitly. A valuable exercise would be to make a personal summary of this book shortly after reading it.

The final section describes how to make a negotiating “one-sheet” for some specific situation you may encounter in the future. It ties all the major ideas together and helps the reader prepare. I think those few pages are a great reference to check back on when the need arises in future.

2019 (24 books)

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1) (2006)

Liu Cixin

• Completed: 2019-12-27
• My Rating: 5/5

A superb piece of cerebral sci-fi!

Given that this is written by a Chinese author and translated to English, it takes a fair while to pick up on the distinctive style (which I’d never experienced before). Once you do, you find yourself immersed in worlds within worlds—learning about everything from the Chinese cultural revolution to chaos theory to particle physics.

Three-Body Problem touches on so many fascinating ideas that I sometimes found it too stimulating for fiction. For me this is right up there with Neil Stephenson’s work, only with a completely different style.

Brilliantly written and cleanly translated. This was a real treat!

The 4-Hour Workweek (2007)

Timothy Ferriss

• Completed: 2019-12-01
• My Rating: 4/5

Re-read. Hadn’t held up as well as I remembered from 2016, but still pretty remarkable for its influence.

Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (2009)

Ray Kurzweil

• Completed: 2019-11-26
• My Rating: 3/5

In this 2009 publication, Kurzweil and Grossman provide “specifics for a comprehensive exercise program, sample menus and recipes, precise dosages for supplements, when and where to obtain blood tests, and many other helpful details.” Its goal is to be “bridge one” toward radical human life extension—a personalised approach to slowing down your ageing and avoiding major disease risks. Thereafter, they foresee bridge two (the biotechnology revolution) and bridge three (the nanotechnology revolution) ushering in an age of negligible senescence.

Their TRANSCEND programme advocates:

• Talking (candidly and pre-emptively) to your doctor

• Relaxation

• Assessment (of disease and risk factors)

• Nutrition

• Supplementation (esp. Omega 3, Vitamin D, and multi-vitamin)

• Calorie reduction

• Exercise

• New technologies

• Detoxification

I enjoyed the sections on supplements and diet in particular, as they did a good job of distilling key concepts from otherwise-overwhelming topics. Most other sections were reiterations of recommendations I’d encountered previously, only with much more specificity and detailed optimal ranges.

This book is clearly well-researched, pragmatic, and useful. However, it has a few drawbacks. The first is stylistic. The writing can come across as a bit “preachy.” Moreover, some of the literary gimmicks—like having Rays and Terrys from the future contribute to dialogue—fall flat much of the time.

The second downside is the heavy front-load that enumerates all the possible combinations of tests, blood panels, scans, etc. that Ray and Terry suggest to older readers looking to reach “longevity escape velocity.” Most readers will find this irrelevant and downright boring.

The third drawback is somewhat out of the authors’ hands—the book is now over a decade out of date. All the specificity of Kurzweil and Grossman’s recommendations is now at risk of being inaccurate or even dangerous in the light of new evidence. Moreover, many of the predictions of future breakthroughs clearly haven’t materialised (at least in most parts of the world). That said, Kurzweil does have a pretty decent track record with his predictions, so perhaps he’s beating the market here too, but the misses are just more poignant than the hits.

The authors’ website seems to provide a lot of the takeaways from the book and is presumably updated based on recent findings.

Overall, this book would have been 4-stars if I’d read it 8-10 years ago. Unless you’re super-into longevity and a discerning reader, this one can be safely skipped.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1) (1974)

Robert M. Pirsig

• Completed: 2019-11-26
• My Rating: 4/5

I enjoyed this and learned a lot—much of it in the form of aesthetic sensibility that I struggle to articulate. I suppose I now “feel” a greater sense of craftsmanship toward some pursuits. But that doesn’t do it justice. I guess this difficulty in describing the teachings is why many people just say “go read the book and you’ll understand.” I think that now I do.

Whilst this is undoubtedly a hugely influential book, I felt that the value I gained tapered off rapidly after about 60% of the way. The introduction of the Romantic-Classical dichotomy and the punch of the early Chautauquas was really impactful but the investigation of “quality” lost me in philosophical minutiae.

When doing research after completing Pirsig’s magnum opus, I was also startled to find out just how autobiographical it was—shock therapy, names, locations, and all. For some reason that robs this book of a lot of its charm.

The Replacing Guilt Series

Nate Soares

• Completed: 2019-11-18
• My Rating: 5/5

Update: I found this so valuable that I got permission to make the official audiobook version, which is freely available at https://anchor.fm/guilt

I think I came across this compilation of blog posts at precisely the right time in my life. Soares’ Replacing Guilt series makes for the kind of book that feels like it was written just for you. Of course, it has some imperfections and many caveats but, on the whole, this is one of the most valuable things I’ve ever read.

Soares is incredibly adept at writing with an accessible and motivating tone. Replacing Guilt not only points you in the right direction, but energises you to start moving forward. Until this series was recommended to me, I had no idea that it was guilt that was driving much of my self-defeating behaviour and dysphoria. I read this series daily over the course of a month and reflected on each post throughout the day. I can already notice how it’s reshaped my concepts and intuitions about personal values and motivation.

I know at least a dozen people who would benefit tremendously from Replacing Guilt.

Thank you, Nate.

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts (2018)

Shane Parrish

• Completed: 2019-11-12
• My Rating: 4/5

“The quality of your thinking depends on the models that are in your head.”

In this short read, Shane Parrish presents some of the most valuable mental models for critical thinking. I’ve really enjoyed reading his Farnam Street blog over the years and this had a similar tone and pace to it. (As an aside: honing one’s writing with many concise blog posts and only then turning to full-length books seems to be a good strategy for producing meaty-but-digestible material.)

Perhaps I’m too well-acquainted with the subject matter to be the ideal reader for this book, but I found it failed to provide me with any new models. It was, however, easy to read and compartmentalise. It certainly served to reinforce my understanding of the core mental models with relevant details, quotes, and qualifiers. Unfortunately, some of the more speculative historical anecdotes (e.g. Cleopatra’s strategising) felt forced and detracted from the material.

Overall, this is a useful read for anyone who enjoys upgrading their thinking with bite-sized models. That said, I still recommend Shane’s blog over this book—that should be the first port of call.

What follows is a breakdown of the contents and some of my favourite highlights:

1. Acquiring wisdom

2. General thinking concepts

3. The map is not the territory

4. Circle of competence

5. First principles thinking

6. Thought experiment

7. Second-order thinking

8. Probabilistic thinking

9. Inversion

10. Occam’s razor

11. Hanlon’s razor

12. Supporting ideas

“The first flaw is perspective. We have a hard time seeing any system that we are in. […] The second flaw is ego. Many of us tend to have too much invested in our opinions of ourselves to see the world’s feedback—the feedback we need to update our beliefs about reality. […] The third flaw is distance. The further we are from the results of our decisions, the easier it is to keep our current views rather than update them.”

“Only by repeated testing of our models against reality and being open to feedback can we update our understanding of the world and change our thinking.”

“The map of reality is not reality. Even the best maps are imperfect. That’s because they are reductions of what they represent. If a map were to represent the territory with perfect fidelity, it would no longer be a reduction and thus would no longer be useful to us. A map can also be a snapshot of a point in time, representing something that no longer exists. This is important to keep in mind as we think through problems and make better decisions.”

“We can think of stereotypes as maps. Sometimes they are useful—we have to process large amounts of information every day, and simplified chunks such as stereotypes can help us sort through this information with efficiency. The danger is when, like with all maps, we forget the territory is more complex. That people have far more territory than a stereotype can represent.”

“Building a circle of competence takes years of experience, of making mistakes, and of actively seeking out better methods of practice and thought. […] if you don’t have at least a few years and a few failures under your belt, you cannot consider yourself competent in a circle.”

“We tend to assume that the worst that has happened is the worst that can happen, and then prepare for that. We forget that “the worst” smashed a previous understanding of what was the worst. Therefore, we need to prepare more for the extremes allowable by physics rather than what has happened until now.”

“first principles thinking identifies the elements that are, in the context of any given situation, non-reducible.”

“Warren Buffett used a very apt metaphor once to describe how the second-order problem is best described by a crowd at a parade: Once a few people decide to stand on their tip-toes, everyone has to stand on their tip-toes. No one can see any better, but they’re all worse off.”

“In a bell curve type of situation, like displaying the distribution of height or weight in a human population, there are outliers on the spectrum of possibility, but the outliers have a fairly well-defined scope. You’ll never meet a man who is ten times the size of an average man. But in a curve with fat tails, like wealth, the central tendency does not work the same way. You may regularly meet people who are ten, 100, or 10,000 times wealthier than the average person. That is a very different type of world.”

“Most of us tend to think one way about a problem: forward. Inversion allows us to flip the problem around and think backward. Sometimes it’s good to start at the beginning, but it can be more useful to start at the end.”

“Simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones. This is the essence of Occam’s Razor, a classic principle of logic and problem-solving. Instead of wasting your time trying to disprove complex scenarios, you can make decisions more confidently by basing them on the explanation that has the fewest moving parts.”

“Hanlon’s Razor states that we should not attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity. In a complex world, using this model helps us avoid paranoia and ideology. By not generally assuming that bad results are the fault of a bad actor, we look for options instead of missing opportunities.”

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands (2015)

Eric J. Topol

• Completed: 2019-10-15
• My Rating: 3/5

Topol presents his views on how medicine can (and should) be revolutionised through digitisation, democratisation, and decentralisation. As a Quantified-Self enthusiast and often-frustrated patient, I can get behind a lot of what he advocates for here—an end to medical paternalism, accessible data, patient autonomy, and the general increase in efficiency that digitisation can provide. But whilst Topol makes a good case, he tends to over-advocate for his positions and the book does not adequately represent much of the nuance in the issues.

His cheerleading aside, Topol does perform much useful meta-analysis of the literature on digital medicine, next-generation testing, etc. Unfortunately, the book has a lot of “fluff” and I found myself racing through much of it at 2x speed. Some of the anecdotes and case studies were really interesting and put me onto new ideas but, for the most part, the book could have made its points in the length of a long blog post.

Topol highlights the history behind the paternalistic attitude of modern medical practice and presents his ideas for a future of patient-centred care. After all, as he says, nobody is more invested in your health than you are. He implies that this will produce better risk assessment—because doctors tend to fear retribution for doing too little, but patients would be better able to evaluate the tradeoffs. But this is one of many examples from the book where I felt like he overestimates the understanding and critical thinking of many patients.

He also advocates for more accessible and shareable health data (which I would personally stand behind) and the value of peer-to-peer medicine, such as online communities where people with similar conditions compare notes and help find solutions. He argues that democratising medicine will realise these ideals, as well as ushering in improvements from a wider domain of innovative minds.

Overall, I like many of the ideas Topol presents in this book and I really do enjoy the utopian vision he paints for the future of medicine. And the literature review has its merits too. The problem with the book, then, is that it flutters between a manifesto and a review article, and in so doing dilutes the impact of either. It was certainly a worthwhile read for me, but I wouldn’t recommend it to most other readers. This is exacerbated by the fact that the book is now around six years old, which is more than enough for much of the information in this domain to be invalid or overblown. No doubt, this is why he wrote a follow-up.

Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow (2015)

Yuval Noah Harari

• Completed: 2019-09-15
• My Rating: 3/5

For me, this pales in comparison to Sapiens. But that’s not to say it is without value. In Sapiens, Harari told the story of humankind—how we used shared myths to raise ourselves up from mere animals to a collective force that dominates the planet. In Homo Deus, Harari attempts to tell possible stories of humanity’s future.

The lengthy introduction frames Harari’s thesis quite well. It also gives good, high-level arguments to justify the position that humanity is more prosperous (and hungry for prosperity) than ever. Everyone should read this intro.

Part 1: Homo sapiens conquers the world

The first part of the book is mostly a justification of why Harari believes “immortality, bliss, and divinity” will be the obsession of humankind going forward. He spends a good deal of time recapitulating how we came to where we are now as a species and what key aspects of our psychology, technology, and society will shape the world going forward. If you’ve read Sapiens and you already agreed with everything in the introduction, there isn’t all that much value to be gained from this part of the book.

Part 2: Homo sapiens gives meaning to the world

This section felt very much like a re-working of Sapiens to me and was thoroughly disappointing. If you haven’t read Sapiens or aren’t already persuaded by Harari’s style of argument then maybe this section is worth reading. For everyone else, you can happily skip this with the summary: Humanism is the world’s dominant religion at present. Humanity will now try to secure immortality, happiness, and unimaginable power.

Part 3: Homo sapiens loses control

In this section, it finally felt like the book got going. Harari presents arguments for how our shared myth/religion of Humanism is already beginning to shift to either Techno-Humanism or Dataism. Each has its own strengths and caveats. Most notably, Dataism will eventually lead to humans becoming irrelevant as algorithms and raw information become more valuable than the illusion of human identity. Harari does an expert treatment of this section and presents some fascinating and unsettling ideas. This is the only part of the book that I truly found value in, but that value was quite significant.

In summary, a lot of this book felt like fluff and recycled Sapiens. If you’re already familiar with the arguments of Transhumanism/Futurism and have read Harari’s previous book, then just read the introduction and Part 3. That’s where all the real value lies.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990)

Terry Pratchett

• Completed: 2019-09-09
• My Rating: 5/5

An utterly delightful read. The combination of Pratchett and Gaiman is wondrous to behold—every second sentence is a punchline and every character is memorably bizarre.

I opted for the audio version and was not disappointed, but I feel like this would be great however consumed. It’s thoroughly witty, well polished, and full of sentiment.

The Graveyard Book (2008)

Neil Gaiman

• Completed: 2019-07-10
• My Rating: 5/5

A fascinating premise explored with storytelling mastery. Gaiman certainly lives up to his reputation as both a writer and a narrator. Such wonderful characters and a brilliant duality of telling a child-like story imbued with adult sentiment.

Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck (2017)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Completed: 2019-06-09
• My Rating: 5/5

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Yudkowsky’s writing and singular style of critical thinking. This book gave me no reason to change that.

In the words of the author himself: “This is a book about two incompatible views on the age-old question: When should I think that I may be able to do something unusually well?” Those two views are epistemological modesty and inadequacy analysis, and the book opens by contrasting them through various examples.

Yudkowsky examines the topic of civilisational inadequacy using the terminology of contemporary economics. In particular, the concepts of ’efficiency’ and ’exploitability’ are used to provide a framework through which the shortcomings of incentive structures can be understood.

Yudkowsky’s most poignant example of this is how, in the US, babies with digestive problems are intravenously fed formula with an imbalanced lipid profile, leading to liver damage and death. See here. Whilst superior formula exists and has been demonstrated to drastically reduce mortality, the only way for babies in the US to receive it is if (1) they already have liver damage, (2) the doctor/parents are aware of the problem and the superior formula, (3) the hospital is legally allowed to import the superior formula. Yudkowsky then challenges the reader to explain this to a visiting alien race and defend humanity’s apparent disregard for the lives of babies.

The book goes on to examine the different elements of “Moloch’s Toolbox,” how inadequate systems can be identified, and the challenges faced by those attempting to remedy the shortcomings of society.

Whilst this work definitely appeals to a Rationalist worldview, I suspect that anyone with an interest in basing their decisions in reality will find it not only fascinating but also truly useful. It’s also freely available online.

Some of my favourite extracts follow:

“Efficiency: “Microsoft’s stock price is neither too low nor too high, relative to anything you can possibly know about Microsoft’s stock price.”

Inexploitability: “Some houses and housing markets are overpriced, but you can’t make a profit by short-selling them, and you’re unlikely to find any substantially underpriced houses—the market as a whole isn’t rational, but it contains participants who have money and understand housing markets as well as you do.”

Adequacy: “Okay, the medical sector is a wildly crazy place where different interventions have orders-of-magnitude differences in cost-effectiveness, but at least there’s no well-known but unused way to save ten thousand lives for just ten dollars each, right? Somebody would have picked up on it! Right?!””

“If you want to outperform—if you want to do anything not usually done—then you’ll need to conceptually divide our civilization into areas of lower and greater competency. My view is that this is best done from a framework of incentives and the equilibria of those incentives—which is to say, from the standpoint of microeconomics. This is the main topic I’ll cover here.”

“If I had to name the single epistemic feat at which modern human civilization is most adequate, the peak of all human power of estimation, I would unhesitatingly reply, “Short-term relative pricing of liquid financial assets, like the price of S&P 500 stocks relative to other S&P 500 stocks over the next three months.” This is something into which human civilization puts an actual effort.”

“A market that knows everything you know is a market where prices are “efficient” in the conventional economic sense—one where you can’t predict the net direction in which the price will change.”

“We can see the notion of an inexploitable market as generalizing the notion of an efficient market as follows: in both cases, there’s no free energy inside the system. In both markets, there’s a horde of hungry organisms moving around trying to eat up all the free energy. In the efficient market, every predictable price change corresponds to free energy (easy money) and so the equilibrium where hungry organisms have eaten all the free energy corresponds to an equilibrium of no predictable price changes. In a merely inexploitable market, there are predictable price changes that don’t correspond to free energy, like an overpriced house that will decline later, and so the no-free-energy equilibrium can still involve predictable price changes.”

“I’ve seen a number of novice rationalists committing what I shall term the Free Energy Fallacy, which is something along the lines of, “This system’s purpose is supposed to be to cook omelettes, and yet it produces terrible omelettes. So why don’t I use my amazing skills to cook some better omelettes and take over?” And generally the answer is that maybe the system from your perspective is broken, but everyone within the system is intensely competing along other dimensions and you can’t keep up with that competition. They’re all chasing whatever things people in that system actually pursue—instead of the lost purposes they wistfully remember, but don’t have a chance to pursue because it would be career suicide. You won’t become competitive along those dimensions just by cooking better omelettes… What inadequate systems and efficient markets have in common is the lack of any free energy in the equilibrium. We can see the equilibrium in both cases as defined by an absence of free energy. In an efficient market, any predictable price change corresponds to free energy, so thousands of hungry organisms trying to eat the free energy produce a lack of predictable price changes. In a system like academia, the competition for free energy may not correspond to anything good from your own standpoint, and as a result you may label the outcome “inadequate”; but there is still no free energy. Trying to feed within the system, or do anything within the system that uses a resource the other competing organisms want—money, publication space, prestige, attention—will generally be as hard for you as it is for any other organism.”

Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to KnowR (What Everyone Needs To Know®) (2016)

Jerry Kaplan

• Completed: 2019-06-08
• My Rating: 4/5

This is not aimed at more technical readers, but instead offers a suitable background in AI principles and history, before speculating how AI is likely to influence society in coming decades.

If you have little to no background in AI/ML and are looking for a short read that will help you make career or policy decisions, then this would be a pretty good start. For readers interested in the more technical slant, Pedro Domingo’s The Master Algorithm is a better place to turn.

I was surprised by the author’s positions against transhumanism and concerned by his dismissal of AI Alignment challenges. He comes across like the opposing voice to Nick Bostrom and, though I’m not convinced by many of his arguments, it has certainly provided a good counter-point to recalibrate my weightings on many of these topics. More reading here is needed on my part.

The Paper Menagerie (2011)

Ken Liu

• Completed: 2019-06-06
• My Rating: 5/5

A brief and elegant musing on identity, loneliness, and a mother’s love. At only 20 pages, this packs quite an emotional punch.

The Baron in the Trees (1957)

Italo Calvino

• Completed: 2019-06-02
• My Rating: 4/5

A delightful and engaging tale of childish defiance and raw humanity woven into the history and culture of 18th-century Italy.

The first half of this story is fantastic, but it does begin to feel quite tired towards the end—which itself is undramatic. But this isn’t too much of a loss when enjoying the audio version, which is expertly narrated with Italian, French, Spanish, and Russian sequences and pronunciation.

I would highlight recommend listening to the audio as a wind-down story in the evenings.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (2019)

Cal Newport

• Completed: 2019-05-22
• My Rating: 3/5

Digital Minimalism: “A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”

This is not Newport’s greatest book—the content is sparse and the execution is underwhelming—but it’s one of his more important ones. The concepts and behaviours underpinning the digital minimalism movement are truly valuable. This book is absolutely worth reading if you find yourself feeling short of time or constantly distracted.

Newport starts by providing context to the issue—“people don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable”—and then outlines his recommendations for drilling down to only the essentials, based on feedback from his many readers. His approach is to first perform a Digital Decluttering, in which one defines strict rules (e.g. no social media outside of a 10-minute window) and embarks on a 30-day break from the deluge, after which one gradually introduces the most valuable tools one at a time. I found this exercise is extremely valuable.

Newport also describes how the 30-day break is a good opportunity to develop high-value leisure practices that will continue afterwards: “If you begin decluttering the low-value digital distractions from your life before you’ve convincingly filled in the void they were helping you ignore, the experience will be unnecessarily unpleasant at best and a massive failure at worse.”

To help select leisure activities, he suggests The Bennett Principles:

1. Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption;

2. Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world; and

3. Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

The remainder of the book feels a lot more like filler, but looks at:

1. The impact of constant “connection” vs. meaningful “conversation.”

2. Solitude Deprivation: A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

3. Using long walks (without phone) to clear and revitalise the mind.

4. Not clicking “Like” and other ways to make social media less addicting.

5. How to join the “Attention Resistance” by deleting social media from your phone, turning your devices into single-purpose computers, using social media like a professional, embracing slow media, and dumbing down your smartphone.

There are numerous anecdotes, bits of research, and useful lifehacks in the book. Some of my favourites are:

“The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.”

“On one extreme, there are the Neo-Luddites, who advocate the abandonment of most new technologies. On another extreme, you have the Quantified Self enthusiasts, who carefully integrate digital devices into all aspects of their life with the goal of optimizing their existence. Of the different philosophies I studied, however, there was one in particular that stood out as a superior answer for those looking to thrive in our current moment of technological overload. I call it digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools.”

“Scientists have known since Michael Zeiler’s famous pecking pigeon experiments from the 1970s that rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern. Something about unpredictability releases more dopamine—a key neurotransmitter for regulating our sense of craving.”

“the notification symbol for Facebook was originally blue, to match the palette of the rest of the site, “but no one used it.” So they changed the color to red—an alarm color—and clicking skyrocketed.”

“Another optimization that was common among the digital minimalists I studied was to remove social media apps from their phones. Because they can still access these sites through their computer browsers, they don’t lose any of the high-value benefits that keep them signed up for these services. By removing the apps from their phones, however, they eliminated their ability to browse their accounts as a knee-jerk response to boredom. The result is that these minimalists dramatically reduced the amount of time they spend engaging with these services each week, while barely diminishing the value they provide to their lives—a much better personal technology process than thoughtlessly tapping and swiping these apps throughout the day as the whim strikes.”

“The Amish prioritize the benefits generated by acting intentionally about technology over the benefits lost from the technologies they decide not to use. Their gamble is that intention trumps convenience—and this is a bet that seems to be paying off. The Amish have remained a relatively stable presence in America for over two hundred years of rapid modernity and cultural upheavals.”

“The Digital Declutter Process Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life. During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful. At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate. For each technology you reintroduce, determine what value it serves in your life and how specifically you will use it so as to maximize this value.”

“I also noticed a lot of creativity surrounding how people throttled back streaming media in contexts where they didn’t want to eliminate it altogether. A college freshman named Ramel abstained from streaming media except when doing so with other people, explaining: “I did not want to isolate myself in social situations where entertainment was playing.” A professor named Nathaniel, on the other hand, didn’t mind high-quality entertainment in his life but worried about binge-watching, so he adopted a clever restriction: “no more than two episodes of any series per week.””

“My first indication that this hyper-connected generation was suffering came a few years before I started writing this book. I was chatting with the head of mental health services at a well-known university where I had been invited to speak. This administrator told me that she had begun seeing major shifts in student mental health. Until recently, the mental health center on campus had seen the same mix of teenage issues that have been common for decades: homesickness, eating disorders, some depression, and the occasional case of OCD. Then everything changed. Seemingly overnight the number of students seeking mental health counseling massively expanded, and the standard mix of teenage issues was dominated by something that used to be relatively rare: anxiety.”

“in 90 percent of your daily life, the presence of a cell phone either doesn’t matter or makes things only slightly more convenient. They’re useful, but it’s hyperbolic to believe its ubiquitous presence is vital.”

“abandon the belief that not having your phone is a crisis. As I argued above, this belief is new and largely invented, but it can still take some practice before you fully accept its truth. If you’re struggling at first, a useful compromise is to bring your phone where you’re going, but then leave it in your car’s glove compartment. This way, if there’s an emergency that requires connection, you can always go retrieve your device, but it’s not right there with you where it can destroy solitude at a moment’s notice. If you’re not driving but out with someone else, it can work just as well to have them hold your phone for you (assuming you can convince them to do so)—as before, you have emergency access, but not easy access.”

“After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that the more someone used social media, the more likely they were to be lonely. Indeed, someone in the highest quartile of social media use was three times more likely to be lonelier than someone in the lowest quartile. These results held up even after the researchers controlled for factors such as age, gender, relationship status, household income, and education. Primack admitted to NPR that he was surprised by the results: “It’s social media, so aren’t people supposed to be socially connected?” But the data was clear. The more time you spend “connecting” on these services, the more isolated you’re likely to become… if you increase the amount of likes or links clicked by a standard deviation, mental health decreases by 5 to 8 percent of a standard deviation. These negative connections still held when, like in the Primack study, they controlled for relevant demographic variables.”

“The philosophy of conversation-centric communication takes a harder stance. It argues that conversation is the only form of interaction that in some sense counts toward maintaining a relationship. This conversation can take the form of a face-to-face meeting, or it can be a video chat or a phone call—so long as it matches Sherry Turkle’s criteria of involving nuanced analog cues, such as the tone of your voice or facial expressions. Anything textual or non-interactive—basically, all social media, email, text, and instant messaging—doesn’t count as conversation and should instead be categorized as mere connection. In this philosophy, connection is downgraded to a logistical role. This form of interaction now has two goals: to help set up and arrange conversation, or to efficiently transfer practical information (e.g., a meeting location or time for an upcoming event). Connection is no longer an alternative to conversation; it’s instead its supporter.”

“Don’t click “Like.” Ever. And while you’re at it, stop leaving comments on social media posts as well. No “so cute!” or “so cool!” Remain silent. The reason I’m suggesting such a hard stance against these seemingly innocuous interactions is that they teach your mind that connection is a reasonable alternative to conversation. The motivating premise behind my conversation-centric communication philosophy is that once you accept this equality, despite your good intentions, the role of low-value interactions will inevitably expand until it begins to push out the high-value socializing that actually matters. If you eliminate these trivial interactions cold turkey, you send your mind a clear message: conversation is what counts—don’t be distracted from this reality by the shiny stuff on your screen.”

“a technology executive in Silicon Valley who innovated a novel strategy for supporting high-quality interaction with friends and family: he tells them that he’s always available to talk on the phone at 5:30 p.m. on weekdays. There’s no need to schedule a conversation or let him know when you plan to call—just dial him up. As it turns out, 5:30 is when he begins his traffic-clogged commute home in the Bay Area.”

“the value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested. We might tell ourselves there’s no greater reward after a hard day at the office than to have an evening entirely devoid of plans or commitments. But we then find ourselves, several hours of idle watching and screen tapping later, somehow more fatigued than when we began. As Bennett would tell you—and Pete, Liz, and Teddy would confirm—if you instead rouse the motivation to spend that same time actually doing something—even if it’s hard—you’ll likely end the night feeling better.”

“In 1727, Franklin created a social club called the Junto, which he describes as follows in his autobiography: I had form’d most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the Junto; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss’d by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased.”

“a nontrivial percentage of people who deleted the apps discovered that they essentially stopped using social media altogether. Even the small extra barrier of needing to log in to a computer was enough to prevent them from making the effort—revealing, often to their admitted surprise, that services they claimed were indispensable were in reality providing nothing more than convenient hits of distraction.”

“It’s a general rule of slow movements that a small amount of high-quality offerings is usually superior to a larger amount of low-quality fare.”

How to Actually Change Your Mind (Rationality: From AI to Zombies Book 2) (2018)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Completed: 2019-03-25
• My Rating: 4/5

This second instalment of Yudkowsky’s Sequences is a lot more practical than the first. Where Map and Territory focussed on the fundamentals of cognitive biases, models, and beliefs, this collection presents heuristics for avoiding pitfalls, integrating evidence, and updating your beliefs like a good rationalist.

Whilst an incredibly valuable piece of work, it still loses a star for its inaccessibility to the uninitiated and being (at times) deliberately confusing. It’s also really long.

Sections:

E. Overly-Convenient Excuses

F. Politics and Rationality

G. Against Rationalization

H. Against Doublethink

I. Seeing with Fresh Eyes

J. Death Spirals

K. Letting Go

The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny Beyond Earth (2018)

Michio Kaku

• Completed: 2019-03-23
• My Rating: 4/5

This was a comprehensive summary of the science and technology of humanity’s possible futures — mainly focussing on space travel, life preservation, and resource harvesting.

Kaku does a superb job of translating his on-camera style to a long-form work. In fact, while reading, it’s quite easy to imagine narrating and gesticulating in his characteristic style, with B-roll of cosmic phenomena flashing past. That said, what is gained in accessibility and unintimidating metaphors is exchanged for what is occasionally lost in nuance and specifics. For instance, I found his sections on the history of rocketry and the logistics of asteroid mining fascinating and informative, but his detours in artificial intelligence and gene editing technologies presented somewhat naive arguments and second-hand opinions. It would be unreasonable to expect someone to be an expert in all domains, but those where Kaku has less personal experience are plain to see.

If you are looking for an approachable entry-point to the topics relating to humanity’s interplanetary future, you won’t go too wrong here. But for the more seasoned in these topics, you can pass over this safely.

Universe In A Nutshell (2001)

Stephen Hawking

• Completed: 2019-03-14
• My Rating: 3/5

It’s very possible that some of this went over my head. It’s also very possible that this book is not well suited to audio format. Regardless, I found this a little disappointing. I’m a fan of both Hawking’s work and the man himself, but I found this book didn’t captivate me or make a significant change to my model of reality. It’s well written, detailed, and often quite witty — “black holes are not hairy” — but left me unsatisfied and quite confused.

A pretty decent overview of the structure and contents can be found at http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-the-universe-in-a-nutshell/#gsc.tab=0

The Last Question (1956)

Isaac Asimov

• Completed: 2019-02-24
• My Rating: 5/5

This classic sci-fi short from Asimov was written in the 1950s, but remains just as relevant today as ever.

Humanity faces many challenges to persisting as a species and exploring the universe, but Asimov presents a multi-trillion-year dialogue that highlights our ultimate peril — entropy.

Being as short and yet as poignant as it is, this is a must-read.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018)

James Clear

• Completed: 2019-02-20
• My Rating: 5/5

A superb summation of the top research on behaviour and habit forming/breaking wrapped up with actionable advice and enjoyable anecdotes. If you’re going to read only one book about lifestyle improvement or habits, this should probably be it.

I liked this for its candour, clarity, and general accessibility.

I especially enjoyed how Clear summarised the key ideas of each chapter at its end, and I have compiled those into a brief-but-useful document for regular review when designing new habit routines.

HOW TO CREATE A GOOD HABIT

The 1st Law: Make It Obvious

1.1: Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them.

1.2: Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].”

1.3: Use habit stacking: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”

1.4: Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible.

The 2nd Law: Make It Attractive

2.1: Use temptation bundling. Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.

2.2: Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.

2.3: Create a motivation ritual. Do something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit.

The 3rd Law: Make It Easy

3.1: Reduce friction. Decrease the number of steps between you and your good habits.

3.2: Prime the environment. Prepare your environment to make future actions easier.

3.3: Master the decisive moment. Optimize the small choices that deliver outsized impact.

3.4: Use the Two-Minute Rule. Downscale your habits until they can be done in two minutes or less.

3.5: Automate your habits. Invest in technology and onetime purchases that lock in future behavior.

The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying

4.1: Use reinforcement. Give yourself an immediate reward when you complete your habit.

4.2: Make “doing nothing” enjoyable. When avoiding a bad habit, design a way to see the benefits.

4.3: Use a habit tracker. Keep track of your habit streak and “don’t break the chain.”

4.4: Never miss twice. When you forget to do a habit, make sure you get back on track immediately.

HOW TO BREAK A BAD HABIT

Inversion of the 1st Law: Make It Invisible

1.5: Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.

Inversion of the 2nd Law: Make It Unattractive

2.4: Reframe your mind-set. Highlight the benefits of avoiding your bad habits.

Inversion of the 3rd Law: Make It Difficult

3.6: Increase friction. Increase the number of steps between you and your bad habits.

3.7: Use a commitment device. Restrict your future choices to the ones that benefit you.

Inversion of the 4th Law: Make It Unsatisfying

4.5: Get an accountability partner. Ask someone to watch your behavior.

4.6: Create a habit contract. Make the costs of your bad habits public and painful.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (2016)

Brian Christian

• Completed: 2019-02-02
• My Rating: 5/5

As a CS grad, I absolutely loved this book! The systematic problem-solving approach applied to human endeavours was refreshing and stimulating; as were the historical notes, witty quips, and well-rounded technical background. I think most computer scientists would highly enjoy this and most fans of non-fiction stand a good chance of enjoying it too. It really is full of brilliant insights and superb mental models.

The audiobook version read by one of the authors is great, but some may find it hard to follow the technical sections without text. There are definitely parts I’ll be returning to in writing.

Seriously, this is an awesome book and was one of my favourite non-fiction reads in a while.

The chapters break down as follows:

1. Optimal Stopping

2. Explore-Exploit

3. Sorting

4. Caching

5. Scheduling

6. Bayes’ Rule / Uncertainty

7. Overfitting

8. (Constraint) Relaxation

9. Randomness

10. Networking

11. Algorithmic Game Theory

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (2016)

Mark Manson

• Completed: 2019-01-18
• My Rating: 4/5

A reasonably quick read that skillfully uses dark humour and a wry tone to deliver useful self-improvement concepts in a palatable manner. If the typical self-help book makes you cringe, this may be the one that works for you.

Many of the suggestions are simplified versions of concepts I’ve encountered elsewhere — deep work, explore-exploit, etc. — but the delivery is quite effective and the examples are quite interesting anecdotes in their own right.

My favourite takeaway from this book is that the values we define for ourselves are often more important than the actions we take. Manson uses the example of his stalker to illustrate how someone can be doing all the right things to achieve their goals in life, but those goals may be awful and detrimental to many. A lot of the time our focus is on the lifehacks when it should instead be on the underlying values and objectives.

James Clear’s summary notes for this book are pretty good:

https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/the-subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-fck

Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time (2001)

Brian Tracy

• Completed: 2019-01-14
• My Rating: 3/5

A quick and lean summary of some of the top force-multipliers in the realm of personal productivity. If you’re already well organised and a bit of a productivity nerd, then little here will be new to you. It does, however, make for some good recap. I think this would be better suited for those who are unfamiliar with the current best practices of self-organisation and efficient work.

Smash this in one sitting, preferable as an audiobook on 1.5x or faster.

Key points:

1. Set the table — decide exactly what you want (goals)

2. Plan every day in advance

3. Apply 80/20 rule to everything

4. Consider the consequences (of tasks and actions) and focus on most important

5. Practise creative procrastination — put off low-value tasks

6. Use ABC method — prioritise tasks

7. Focus on key result areas

8. Apply the law of 3 — identify the 3 things you do that account for 90% of your contribution and focus exclusively on those

9. Prepare thoroughly before beginning (organise)

10. Break things down and take them one step at a time

11. Upgrade your key skills constantly

12. Identify your key constrains / bottlenecks and alleviate or remove them

13. Put the pressure on yourself — work as if you’re leaving town

14. Motivate yourself (optimism)

15. Technology is a terrible master — break tech addictions

16. Technology is a wonderful servant — use your tools to enhance your work

17. Focus attention and prevent distractions

18. Break tasks down into bite-size chunks and get started (Pomodoro?)

19. Create large chunks of time and plan them in advance

20. Develop a sense of urgency — move fast on key tasks

21. Single-handle every task — set priority and then work until 100% complete

The Metropolitan Man (2014)

Alexander Wales

• Completed: 2019-01-04
• My Rating: 5/5

A superb deconstruction of the traditional Superman narrative set in 1930s Metropolis.

This rational fanfic is gripping, morally challenging, and intellectually stimulating. I have now doubt that fans of Dune and HPMOR will love this short read — peppered with plotting and multi-level strategy.

Whilst the original text is free online, the audio version (serialised on the Methods of Rationality podcast) is incredibly well produced and comes highly recommended.

2018 (20 books)

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (2015)

Philip E. Tetlock

• Completed: 2018-12-11
• My Rating: 5/5

A comprehensive and change-inspiring presentation of Tetlock’s research on predictions. A superb read for anyone with an interest in Bayesian reasoning or simply improving their analysis and judgement.

The book reads very well — accurate, yet intelligible and flowing. It lacks none of the technical detail that I so enjoy in a book of this nature, whilst providing superb metaphors, examples, and stories to illustrate its points in a visceral way.

Tetlock gives context to his work, then systematically outlines the traits and practices of superforcasters. Finally, he summarises the changing tides in forecasting practice and defends his research against constructive critiques from Nassim Taleb and others.

The appendix outlines “Ten Commandments for Aspiring Superforecasters”:

1. Triage — Pick questions in the Goldilocks Zone of difficulty.

2. Break seemingly intractable problems into tractable sub-problems [and use Fermi estimations].

3. Strike the right balance between inside and outside views.

4. Strike the right balance between under- and over-reacting to evidence.

5. Look for the clashing causal forces at work in each problem.

6. Strive to distinguish as many degree of doubt as the problem permits but no more.

7. Strike the right balance between under- and over-confidence, between prudence and decisiveness.

8. Look for the errors behind your mistakes but beware of rearview-mirror hindsight biases.

9. Bring out the best in others and let others bring out the best in you.

10. Master the error-balancing bicycle — “perpetual beta”.

Three Worlds Collide (2009)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Completed: 2018-12-10
• My Rating: 4/5

Thought-provoking, gripping, and deeply unsettling.

This short rationalist story should not be the first avenue for those unfamiliar with Yudkowsky’s writing, but nevertheless offers a mind-bending commentary on human psychology, meta-ethics, and the troubles of interstellar game theory.

It lost a star for less-than-ideal execution and an unsatisfying ending (logically and emotionally). Perhaps that was the point, but this is generally not up to the same exacting standard as Harry Potter and the Methods or Rationality.

If none of what I’ve written makes sense, don’t read this story yet.

Principles: Life and Work (2017)

Ray Dalio

• Completed: 2018-10-25
• My Rating: 4/5

There is a tremendous amount of value in a book like this. Dalio has hopefully started a trend whereby successful people will share their mental models and heuristics once they have moved on to a new stage in life. That’s a world I’d like us to live in.

As for the book itself, Principles is the rare exception in its class where there is too little padding between key ideas. Typically, non-fiction books in the self-improvement / business genre can be summarised down to a list of 5-10 ideas. The ideas are padded with (usually helpful) anecdotes and extended explanations to provide credibility and enhance recall. With Principles, the book itself is that summarised list — Dalio has so many operating principles that he’s essentially filled a book with the summarised version of them. Whilst the first third and last chapter of the book do help balance this with context and some recapitulation, the body of the book is a bit too dense to follow and recall in a meaningful way. That said, I believe this to be a very important book. I simply can’t help but feel that this content would benefit from a different medium — something Dalio himself has said and tried to implement.

The section on life principles flows much better than the work principles and is relevant to more people.

I would recommend this to anyone who’s interested in systematic investing and those with a desire to add mental models to their life and work.

Some of my takeaways:

The best tool to be an effective organisation is an Idea Meritocracy, where decision making is believability-weighted. This requires intense transparency and honesty between all individuals in the group and, to make it really work, a thorough understanding of different personalities and skill sets. Dalio also maintains that finding the best people (and refusing to settle) is essential.

In terms of making predictions of the future, Dalio’s approach is to be so systematic in one’s thinking that it’s possible to directly encode one’s models as computer code / formulae. He then emphasises how crucial it is to test and revise any models.

Dalio presents his own version of personality types, the most notable of which is Shapers. These are people like Gates, Musk, Jobs, etc. who shape reality to match their vision, with little regard for those trying to dissuade them or temper their ambition.

Making a handful of good uncorrelated bets that are balanced and well-leveraged is the surest way to make a lot of upside with minimal downside. This is true in investing and in life.

A good, thorough summary is found at: https://www.nateliason.com/notes/principles-ray-dalio

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (2017)

Matthew Walker

• Completed: 2018-10-01
• My Rating: 5/5

In this book, sleep scientist Matthew Walker presents a masterclass in the field of sleep. His detailed technical writing is both precise and accessible – with more than enough wit to go around.

Why We Sleep is a substantial tome, but one of immense value. Apart from being smooth reading, it is a fascinating account of how we came to know what we currently know about sleep. Walker’s capacity for explaining complex sleep studies in understandable ways is substantial and is part of what separates this from an academic textbook.

The book is structured in multiple parts. The first part provides an overview of sleep — it’s physiology, evolutionary origins, and characteristics. Part two asks “why should you sleep?” and examines the benefits of sleep on the body and brain from a range of perspectives. Part three looks at how and why we dream, with some of the most fascinating chapters in the book. Part four discusses the detriments of modern society on our sleep — from LED lighting to workday schedules to the lie of sleeping tablets. It then outlines how organisations like NASA and Google are making big changes to improve the sleep of their employees and presents the author’s ideas for making societal improvements through the use of technology and policy.

Before reading this book, I was aware of the importance of sleep and had some exposure to the genetics and physiology of it. That paled in comparison to the education I was soon to receive. Why We Sleep is tantamount to a diploma in sleep science — with the details of hundreds of studies, yet the overarching narrative of a coherent essay. Anyone with the desire to understand more about their body and brain will likely love this book, and everyone who values their health or productivity should take the time to read it.

Sleep, as Walker meticulously details, is the closest thing to a silver bullet — improving cardiovascular performance, muscle gain, weight loss, mood, appetite regulation, hormone levels, sexual performance, cognition, memory, creativity, immunity, and overall productivity. Given all that, you do yourself a great disservice by not reading this book — possibly the greatest single work on sleep currently in existence.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (2015)

Pedro Domingos

• Completed: 2018-09-22
• My Rating: 5/5

Domingos has compiled the most effective overview of machine learning I have encountered. Where scientific papers will fill in the fine details of the coastline, The Master Algorithm gives a high-altitude perspective of the territory. What makes it especially effective, is the manner in which it builds up from a layperson’s knowledge and uses powerful metaphors to cement key principles in the mind. No doubt, Domingos’ understanding of the field and subtle humour are responsible.

The author presents background on modern machine learning, investigates the history of the field (from the roots in pre-1900s philosophy and mathematics), and outlines potential roads to the ultimate learning algorithm and the future of human-machine cooperation.

I would recommend The Master Algorithm to anyone with an interest in Machine Learning or AI, and especially those whose fields of expertise are threatened or enhanced by this rapidly-advancing technology. This book is best consumed in large (1-3 hour) doses of undivided attention and pairs well with learning to implement basic learning algorithms in side projects — as I did.

It will get quite heavy at points, but stick with it. I’m so glad I found this book when I did.

I, Robot (Robot, #0.1) (1950)

Isaac Asimov

• Completed: 2018-09-05
• My Rating: 5/5

You can tell pretty quickly why this is a sci-fi classic. Asimov tells a collection of short stories woven into an overarching narrative, as relayed from a future vantage. Not only does this serve as a superb storytelling device, but the element of isolation between each sub-story is a fantastic means of distilling what is important in each turn of events.

The central focus of this novel is the now-famous “Three Laws of Robotics” and how they interact under different circumstances to cause mysterious and dangerous consequences. It’s up to the protagonists to use their understanding of the laws, rational deduction, and the odd experiment to uncover the source of the mayhem and rectify the situation. It’s very satisfying.

Despite a few stand-out anachronisms — like still using film cameras and smoking indoors in the 22nd century — this work has aged remarkably well. Having been written in the 1940s, when computers were only just being devised, it’s hard to fathom how Asimov produced ideas that are still relevant to AI research in 2018. Moreover, one of the key protagonists is a brilliant robo-psychologist and a woman, which is delightfully refreshing from a male author born a century ago.

Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) (2017)

Joli Jensen

• Completed: 2018-08-29
• My Rating: 3/5

As with a lot of content these days, the advice in this book is padded — in this case with verbiage and unnecessary embellishments. Despite that, the advice itself is well-founded and specific. In my opinion, it would be best presented in a 90 minute talk.

As the title suggests, the book is aimed at academics. Doubtless, if I were a frustrated academic who’d never encountered such advice, I would have rated this higher, with the embellishments serving as catharsis. As a junior postgrad student, I’m primarily concerned with the style of my writing (advice for which is sparse in this book). As a computer scientist, I’m concerned with how to write technical documents that are easily interpreted and understood — this book, coming more from a humanities perspective, barely covers that. What this book ostensibly is about is “The Process.”

I would not particularly recommend this book to my peers and would not have the audacity to recommend it to my supervisors, but I do think it holds significant value and (given that it’s a quick, undemanding read) is worth most people’s time.

To the author’s credit, the flow and structure of the book is of a very high standard.

MY NOTES ———————————————

Let go of the academic dream — writing will always be hard to do and to make time for.

Develop a craftsmanship attitude about your writing — hone the quality by practising.

Use the 3 taming techniques: (1) create a project box or directory, (2) use a ventilation file to air your frustrations and stop stagnation, (3) write for just 15 minutes every single day (ventilation counts).

Give writing your “A” time (not B or C) and use a designated space only for your writing — but keep it simple and humble, not fancy and unused.

Notice and avoid common myths (similar to cognitive distortions) like “magnum opus”, “hostile reader”, “imposter”, and “compared to X”.

It’s important to accept that writing ebbs and flows. Deal with it by (1) “following the lilt of excitement in your voice” – it’s much easier to write about subjects you’re passionate about; (2) know when to stop — use the Hemingway method and never write until exhaustion; (3) use the right metrics — things like word count might lead to waffling; (4) meet with trusted advisors to get feedback and stay accountable.

“Treat being reviewed as a gift, even when it feels otherwise”

Focus on the revisions that the editor suggests, not every single reviewer’s nitpicks.

Relinquish toxic, stalled projects and move on.

Have a backburner project, but be careful where you devote your “A” time.

Learn to value both rest and “time different” in vacations and sabbaticals. Don’t try do all your writing then.

Build support networks for your writing: (1) get help from those you aim to emulate (start by praising the work of theirs you’ve internalised and admire). (2) have a group of 4-6 to discuss the process of writing, not the content. Use public goals and accountability.

When communicating to peers, evidence is usually the emphasis. When communicating to public (which is arguably your most important job) anecdotes and arguments are the emphasis. Use the structure Anecdote-Evidence-Argument in every book chapter and every article.

Snow Crash (1992)

Neal Stephenson

• Completed: 2018-08-03
• My Rating: 4/5

Whilst this is not up to the same incredible standard as Stephenson’s later work, Seveneves; it’s still highly entertaining, stimulating, and thought-provoking. Snow Crash features a rich spectrum of diverse characters and subplots, making it confusing at times but resulting in a storyline that’s quite engaging. Unfortunately, the book ends a bit abruptly, with less of a payoff than I had hoped for.

For modern readers, many concepts in Snow Crash will be familiar. This is likely a result of it inspiring many future Sci-Fi works. Whilst this is certainly notable and fascinating, it may have the unfortunate effect of making Snow Crash feel clichéd or dated. If you enjoyed the Matrix and other works by Stephenson, this modern Sci-Fi classic is a must read, but for the unacquainted, Seveneves is a more relevant and gripping introduction to the author’s work.

This story is highly enjoyable in audiobook form but does require quite a bit of concentration, so it’s not ideal to listen to when doing anything remotely engaging.

The concepts of nam-shubs, viruses (biological and technological) and the entire Sumerian history that underpins the neurolinguistic programming motif of this novel are all somewhat similar to the study of Dawkin’s Memes — brain viruses that replicate through their hosts based on their fitness.

Map and Territory (Rationality: From AI to Zombies Book 1) (2015)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Completed: 2018-08-01
• My Rating: 4/5

An intense baptism into Yudkowsky‘s thinking in its most concentrated form. Mind-opening and reality-bending, but perhaps enough to scare off a casual reader.

Very good intros to biases, “bias blindspot,” fake beliefs, and the real meaning of evidence.

RE the title: The “map” refers to one’s mental model or belief network, whilst the “territory” is the reality itself — the thing we are trying to model.

Sections:

A. Predictably Wrong

B. Fake Beliefs

C. Noticing Confusion

D. Mysterious Answers

The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase (2013)

Mark Forsyth

• Completed: 2018-07-07
• My Rating: 5/5

A brilliant concoction of knowledge and wit that incited more snorts, chuckles, and grins than I can now recall.

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love (2012)

Cal Newport

• Completed: 2018-06-16
• My Rating: 4/5

This book is yet another example of Newport’s effective writing style and problem-solving approach. Despite a few minor shortcomings, this book succeeds in detailing the flaws of the “passion hypothesis”, the need for career capital, and the advantages of cultivating a craftsman mindset. Newport also presents more esoteric concepts, such as the “adjacent possible,” which highly resonated with me at this junction in my own life.

I would recommend this to anyone planning their career (17-25) and even those considering career switches later in life.

Detailed summaries can be found at the following pages:

https://alexvermeer.com/so-good-they-cant-ignore-you-by-cal-newport-review-and-summary/

http://www.kevinhabits.com/1-page-summary-so-good-they-cant-ignore-you-by-cal-newport/

Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold (Stephen Fry’s Great Mythology, #1) (2017)

Stephen Fry

• Completed: 2018-06-13
• My Rating: 5/5

Not only does reading this book feel like the classical education I always wished to receive, it’s also filled with the wonderful traits that make me so fond of Stephen Fry. Indeed, I highly recommend the audiobook version, which the legend himself narrates.

You will discover the Greco-Roman origins of words in modern parlance whilst learning the tales of love, loss, life, and legend that make these myths so human. Mythos reveals the stories that shaped so much of humanity’s narrative, highlighting the essence of what our existence means to us. From the origins of our universe to the great conflicts to insatiable love, Mythos is an enthralling retelling of the oldest stories we know, sprinkled with the wit and rhetorical craftsmanship for which Fry is known. Expect to laugh, blush, and sigh as Fry recounts the irony, debauchery, and cosmic inevitability of these tales from the depths of antiquity.

CONTENTS

The Beginning part 1

• Out of Chaos

• The First Order

• The Second Order

The Beginning part 2

• Clash of the Titans

• The Third Order

The Toys of Zeus part 1

• Prometheus

• The Punishments

• Persephone and the Chariot

• Cupid and Psyche

The Toys of Zeus part 2

• Mortals

• Phaeton

• Cadmus

• Twice Born

• The Beautiful and the Damned

• The Doctor and the Crow

• Crime and Punishment

• Sisyphus

• Hubris

• Arachne

• More Metamorphoses

• Eos and Tithonus

• The Bloom of Youth

• Echo and Narcissus

• Lovers

• Galateas

• Arion and the Dolphin

• Philemon and Baucis (Hospitality Rewarded)

• Phrygia and the Gordian Knot

• Midas

10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades (While Studying Less) (2015)

Thomas Frank

• Completed: 2018-06-06
• My Rating: 4/5

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984)

Robert B. Cialdini

• Completed: 2018-05-31
• My Rating: 4/5

Whilst I didn’t find this quite as good as I was expecting, it still deserves its place given that it predates the breakthroughs in behavioural economics, with which many modern readers are already familiar. Cialdini keeps it simple and concise, with sufficient examples (dated though they are) to solidify his points. Being such a quick read, it is recommended for anyone interested in improving their social prowess. My favourite tip was the use of the phrase “you would do the same for me” in lieu of “don’t mention it” in order to (ethically) establish a need for reciprocation in the future.

The key points of the book were:

1. Reciprocation

2. Scarcity

3. Authority

4. Social Proof

5. Commitment & Consistency

6. Liking

A reasonable summary can be found here: https://slooowdown.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/summary-of-influence-the-psychology-of-persuasion-by-robert-b-cialdini/

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2015)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Completed: 2018-06-01
• My Rating: 5/5

Second read. This time from the excellent audiobook.

How to Win at College: Surprising Secrets for Success from the Country’s Top Students (2005)

Cal Newport

• Completed: 2018-05-09
• My Rating: 4/5

A pretty good collection of well-chunked advice. This can be read in a single sitting, but also makes a good daily habit of 2-5 minutes.

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future (2012)

Chris Guillebeau

• Completed: 2018-04-03
• My Rating: 4/5

Delivers what it promises. This is a worthwhile read for budding entrepreneurs and reluctant artists alike.

All the best tools and notes are found at http://100startup.com/

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016)

Cal Newport

• Completed: 2018-03-17
• My Rating: 5/5

Newport delivers. He writes cleanly, efficiently, and (when warranted) elegantly. He presents a concise, well-substantiated argument for the power of deep work in the knowledge economy, as well as some practical tips to implement it.

Some great summaries (https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/business/deep-work/) exist online, but I would recommend actually reading (or listening to) the whole book. I was already familiar with his ideas, but found the structure and details the book provides surprisingly valuable. Unlike many self-help-type books, there isn’t fluff here. The details truly add to the meaning.

Whilst not the central thesis of the book, my favourite section was as follows:

“Any pursuit, be it physical or cognative, that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness. To elaborate this point let’s jump from the old fashion examples of carving wood or smithing metals to the modern example of computer programming. Consider this quote from the coding prodigy Santiago Gonzales describing his work to an interviewer: “Beautiful code is short and concise so if you were to give that code to another programmer he would say ‘Oh, that’s well written code.’ It’s much like as if you were writing a poem.” […] “The Pragmatic Programmer”, a well regarded book in the computer programming field makes this connection between code and old style craftsmanship more directly by quoting the medieval quarry workers creed “We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.” The book then elaborates that computer programmers must see their work in the same way. Within the overall structure of a project, there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship. […] You don’t, in other words, need to be toiling in an open air barn for your efforts to be considered the type of craftsmanship that can generate […] meaning. […] Throughout most of human history to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn’t glamorous. But this doesn’t matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship, not the outcomes of their work. Put another way a wooden wheel is not noble but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don’t need a rarefied job, you need instead a rarefied approach to your work.”

Lying (2011)

Sam Harris

• Completed: 2018-03-13
• My Rating: 5/5

This brilliant extended essay is Sam Harris in his most raw. I would recommend this to both those familiar with his work and those with no knowledge of him.

Dune (Dune, #1) (1965)

Frank Herbert

• Completed: 2018-01-16
• My Rating: 5/5

Don’t think Sci-Fi. Instead, think politics, strategy, body language, game theory. I greatly enjoyed this as an audiobook and would recommend it to fans of Sherlock Holmes stories and Game of Thrones for its critical writing and power plays.

2017 (15 books)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes, #3) (1892)

Arthur Conan Doyle

• Completed: 2017-12-04
• My Rating: 4/5

An entertaining, yet eventually formulaic, collection of classic detective stories; this original compilation is a must-read for any fans of Sherlock Holmes and his powers of deduction.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (2016)

Timothy Ferriss

• Completed: 2017-11-09
• My Rating: 5/5

Don’t be under the impression that this is a book. It’s a structured summary of notes and ideas from conversations with some of the world’s thought-leaders in various fields. Despite this, it managed to be very readable from cover to cover as a supplement to other reading undertaken. A few chapters a day from this allowed the ideas to take hold and be mulled over, so that is definitely the way I think it is best enjoyed. For any listeners of Tim’s podcast, this saves you the trouble of taking notes yourself and for any who are new to his interviews, this provides a “best of” catchup.

I really enjoyed this and hope to revisit it regularly in the future.

You Are Not So Smart (2011)

David McRaney

• Completed: 2017-09-14
• My Rating: 4/5

A great compilation of the core cognitive biases and mental heuristics that both lead us astray and make us ineffably human.

This book is accessible, yet still sufficiently detailed, with aspects and anecdotes that appeal to both seasoned armchair psychologist and the unacquainted.

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business (2016)

Charles Duhigg

• Completed: 2017-09-03
• My Rating: 3/5

Normally, books like this really annoy me—the takeaways can be summarised in a few hundred words, yet have been stretched out and peppered with narrative so as to extract a book-worth of content. In this case, however, the anecdotes were actually my favourite part. I really enjoyed hearing about some less well-known examples of breakthrough, team success, and innovation. They really captured the details for me.

Don’t waste your time reading this in print. Instead, cruise your way through the Audible version at 1.5X speed whilst walking, driving, or folding laundry. It’s not breathtaking, but it’s worth a listen. The content itself seems well-enough researched and is summarised in the Appendix at the end. My notes follow:

1. Motivation : Internal locus of control

• Generate motivation by asserting control

• “Why am I doing this?”

• e.g. marines

2. Goal setting

• Stretch goal — dream big, long term

• SMART goal — quantifiable and achievable

• Plan using Stretch goal + sub-goals that are SMART

3. Focus : Mental models (stories) of our expectations

• Visualising the future allows pre-emotive risk manipulation

• e.g. airline pilot in emergency situation

4. Decision making : use probabilistic thinking and envision multiple possible futures

• Bayesian thinking

• Use expert opinions to help assign probabilities

• e.g. Female poker champion

5. Managing People

• Manage the “how” not the “who”

• Psychological safety = equal speaking and sensitivity to feelings

• When leading a team, encourage equality of speaking and repeat what people said + respond sensitively and set a good example

• Lean and Agile management techniques

• Take advantage of all expertise by allowing those closest to a problem to work on it (empower those closest to the problem)

• Suggestions never ignored and mistakes never held against anyone

• e.g. Research at Google, Toyota method, Frozen, West Side Story, etc.

6. Learning and Innovating Faster

• Creativity is combining old ideas in new ways

• Innovation “brokers” are key

• Be sensitive to your own experiences (thinking and feeling)

• Study your own emotional reactions

• Creative desperation is often critical

• Critique what you have already done by shuffling authority and changing perspectives

• Absorb data better by engaging with new information (draw if, plot on paper, etc)

• See the data and get hands-on

• e.g. high schools improving grades not with student data, but with hands-on engagement with that data

The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships (2015)

Neil Strauss

• Completed: 2017-07-05
• My Rating: 3/5

Aside from gleaning a few useful cognitive techniques, I can’t say this book provided me with much that is applicable to my life; but viewed as a memoir, it is thoroughly well executed and highly engaging. The narrative threads held my interest and I found myself enjoying the story far more than the insights. Additionally, as an audiobook listener, I always appreciate the author reading their own work and thus found the Audible version (read primarily by Strauss) very satisfactory.

My key takeaway is each person having three unique roles they can play—needy child, sarcastic teen, mature adult—and that a relationship is always stable if at least one person is in the mature adult ego at any given time.

Some meaningful quotes follow:

“Lying is about controlling someone else’s reality, hoping that what they don’t know won’t hurt you.”

“Most people seem to believe that if a relationship doesn’t last until death, it’s a failure. But the only relationship that’s truly a failure is one that lasts longer than it should. The success of a relationship should be measured by its depth, not by its length.”

“A healthy relationship is when two individuated adults decide to have a relationship and that becomes a third entity. They nurture the relationship and the relationship nurtures them. But they’re not overly dependent or independent: They are interdependent, which means that they take care of the majority of their needs and wants on their own, but when they can’t, they’re not afraid to ask their partner for help.” She pauses to let it all sink in, then concludes, “Only when our love for someone exceeds our need for them do we have a shot at a genuine relationship together.”

“I used to think that a good relationship meant always getting along. But the secret, I realize, is that when one person shuts down or throws a fit, the other needs to stay in the adult ego state. If both people descend to the wounded child or adapted adolescent, that’s when all forces of relationship drama and destruction are unleashed.”

“Many women think that if they put out too quickly, their partner won’t respect them. This is not the case. It’s not about waiting for a certain quantity of time before having sex, it’s about waiting for a certain quality of connection.”

“How you do anything is how you do everything”

“Intimacy is sharing your reality with someone else and knowing you’re safe, and them being able to share their reality with you and also be safe.”

I Am Pilgrim (2013)

Terry Hayes

• Completed: 2017-06-27
• My Rating: 3/5

This novel is incredibly gripping and speckled with moments of deductive genius (e.g. developing the mirrors), but shoots itself in the foot by being cringey and clichéd in its Americana. I don’t think the narrator of the audiobook version helped the cause with his mediocre accents (a large portion of the speech) and cheesy “superspy” voice, but it was still very annoying that Hayes couldn’t top off this engaging thriller with some literary tact.

This is an entertaining read for the most part, but I found myself shuddering more often than I marvelled.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006)

Jonathan Haidt

• Completed: 2017-06-19
• My Rating: 4/5

In this wholistic work, Haidt takes the somewhat refreshing approach of drawing on ancient wisdom to complement psychological research. Whilst some of the historic quotes and references were, at times, rather cheesy, the overall tone of the book made its principles graspable.

The analogy of a rider (the conscious self) and an elephant (the more primal, subconscious mind) is used with great success throughout the book and conveys, very visually, even the more abstract concepts.

Haidt presents happiness hypotheses throughout the book and refines them at each step. By the conclusion, he remarks that happiness “comes from between”, going on to say that it is not something that is acquired directly—instead, one sets up the right conditions and then waits.

Internal conditions include coherence between layers of personality; whilst external conditions include love of others, engaging work, and connection to something larger. Ultimately happiness is found in the interactions between these layers and aspects.

Seveneves (2015)

Neal Stephenson

• Completed: 2017-06-04
• My Rating: 5/5

This novel is a masterclass in hard science fiction—traversing from orbital mechanics, engineering, and genetics, to politics, psychology, and catastrophe.

I deeply loved this book.

SPOILERS ———-

Part 1 — the moon is broken into pieces by The Agent. Society scrambles to find meaning and a means to survive as the fragments begin to collide and spiral out of control.

Part 2 — the earth is decimated by the millions of moon fragments in the “hard rain”, with only a few thousand humans safely in orbit. But the politics of space and the hostility of their trajectory result in chaos and devastation. By the time the “Big Ride” to a safe haven on Cleft is complete, only seven eves remain.

Part 3 — 5000 years later, a band of characters (one from each of the seven races) ventures to earth in search of mysterious persons. They discover that the space voyage was not the only part of humanity to survive.

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (2014)

Jordan Ellenberg

• Completed: 2017-05-26
• My Rating: 4/5

This book is an awesome rant about the mathematics (mostly statistics) that touches our daily lives. Inspired to answer the all-too-common “but when will I ever use this”, the narrative that Ellenberg constructs weaves its way through both history and disciplines, whilst still managing to be rather entertaining and witty.

Topics covered include: expected value and the “Cash Winfall” lottery tricks of MIT students; p-hacking and the concept of confidence in results; pseudoscience; deriving the formula of a circle from first principles and the technique behind it; coding systems (Hamming) and error correction; and election mathematics.

A more comprehensive review I liked:

https://goo.gl/CK2Roo

How to Win Friends & Influence People (1936)

Dale Carnegie

• Completed: 2017-04-18
• My Rating: 3/5

Given that this book was first published in 1936, it is remarkable how insightful it was and how relevant it still can be in the modern world. In fact, the passage of time may even mean that many of these “skills” have been forgotten by most.

Whilst the information is valuable and the stories/case studies help illustrate the points, the density of actionable information is quite low. It could easily be skim read, or (as I did) enjoyed on 1.5X speed in audio form.

This is Dale Carnegie’s summary of his book, from 1936

Part One

Fundamental Techniques in Handling People

1. Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.

2. Give honest and sincere appreciation.

3. Arouse in the other person an eager want.

Part Two

Six ways to make people like you

1. Become genuinely interested in other people.

2. Smile.

3. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.

5. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.

6. Make the other person feel important - and do it sincerely.

Part Three

Win people to your way of thinking

1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.

2. Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, “You’re wrong.”

3. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.

4. Begin in a friendly way.

5. Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.

6. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.

7. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.

8. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.

9. Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.

10. Appeal to the nobler motives.

11. Dramatize your ideas.

12. Throw down a challenge.

Part Four

Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offence or Arousing Resentment

1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation.

2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.

3. Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.

4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.

5. Let the other person save face.

6. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.”

7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.

8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.

9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)

Carl Sagan

• Completed: 2017-04-13
• My Rating: 4/5

A beautifully concise summation of the core points of skeptical thinking and the scientific method, with a specific focus on communication and society.

Whilst this book does focus heavily on the United States as a case study, the lessons can (and should) be adapted to any free society.

Sagan’s Boloney Detection Kit:

1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”

2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

3. Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.

5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.

6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.

7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.

8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.

9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-kit-carl-sagan/

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance (2014)

Steven Kotler

• Completed: 2017-04-11
• My Rating: 4/5

A detailed look at how flow has driven performance in extreme and adventure sports through the roof, embedded with nuggets of wisdom based on the latest flow research.

Whilst the ways of cultivating flow and the affects of the state could be summarised in a page of bullets, in this case I found the sub-stories and “case studies” of the book to be a great way of solidifying the key ideas and creating call-back memories—I feel as though the likelihood of me recalling information about flow is increased.

I enjoyed this in audiobook form.

Sherlock Holmes: The Rediscovered Railway Mysteries and Other Stories (2010)

John Taylor

• Completed: 2017-04-05
• My Rating: 4/5

Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)

Ted Chiang

• Completed: 2017-02-23
• My Rating: 5/5

Nothing short of exceptional! This collection of classical-style science fiction shorts is both cognitively expanding and gripping. A superb collection of literature!

I particularly enjoyed ‘Understand’ and ‘Story of your Life’. Both completely reframed the way I view reality and the nature of my consciousness.

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph (2014)

Ryan Holiday

• Completed: 2017-02-17
• My Rating: 3/5

A stimulating read peppered with usually-interesting anecdotal flourishes. Although repetitive and overly rhetorical at moments, these pages contain an easily digested summation of stoicism in the modern context.

“See things for what they are.

Do what we can.

Endure and bear what we must.

What blocked the path now is a path.

What once impeded action advances action.

The Obstacle is the Way.”

2016 (9 books)

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character (1985)

Richard P. Feynman

• Completed: 2016-12-21
• My Rating: 5/5

Because this book is mostly a transcription of Feynman’s casual conversation, it is incredibly easy reading and, thanks to his brilliant wit and superb intellect, an entertaining one too!

I would recommend this book to almost anyone, especially scientists and storytellers, but it is a must read for all those who, like Feynman, tread the mischievous line between genius and insanity.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2015)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Completed: 2016-09-13
• My Rating: 5/5

This begins as witty. Evolves to charming. Crescendos into brilliance and cadenzas with what I know to be beauty.

In this, what is technically fan-fiction, Yudkowsky delivers a world class education in rationality, philosophy, and critical thinking; whilst exciting the inner Potterphile with the magic of his language. He weaves emotion and witticisms through a plot more elaborate than that of any Sherlock, and all the while moves the reader to tears, laughs, and sighs.

This should be required reading for all young adults, but especially aspiring thinkers—which all young adults, Yudkowsky makes me believe, indeed should be.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)

Nick Bostrom

• Completed: 2016-09-08
• My Rating: 4/5

Thorough almost to the point of saturation, this book is essentially a long-form academic paper. Whilst it has odd glimmers of wit and humour, it is quite appropriately serious and detailed. It’s not necessary enjoyable, but it is incredibly informative, considerably comprehensive, and profoundly poignant.

It’s title describes its contents. It looks at the idea of superintelligence, the history of AI, the possible methods of developing it, and the numerous concerns regarding it—from perverse instantiation to utter annihilation. It concludes with what is the cutting edge in philosophical reasoning about the ways of mitigating these dangers and details what we, as humanity, need to do to prepare for the inevitable singularity.

Bostrom has compiled a superb document. This may not be the seminal work on AI philosophy, but its impact and eloquence will surely shape the future of the entire field.

How to Become a Straight-A Student (2006)

Cal Newport

• Completed: 2016-07-30
• My Rating: 4/5

An in-depth and specific description of the habits and behaviours that make academic work more efficient and enjoyable. This book is both succinct and thorough enough to convey its ideas without boring the reader or requiring too much time.

Contents:

1. Study Basics

• managing your time using the calendar and to-do list system and requiring only a few minutes once a day

• “time blocking” and overcoming procrastination

• working for the correct duration

2. Tests and Exams

• how to take notes in both technical and non-technical classes

• putting less focus on assignments and completing them quickly using group work and efficient behaviours

• preparing and managing study materials

• studying techniques

• “Academic Disaster Insurance” (answering all questions ahead of time in the most time-efficient way)

• giving A+ answers and managing time in the test

3. Writing essays and papers

• picking a topic

• research methods

• writing outline

• separate research from writing and writing from editing

• the three-pass editing process (once to review arguments, once out loud to review style, once for your sanity)

Introducing Infinity: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides) (2012)

Brian Clegg

• Completed: 2016-07-26
• My Rating: 0/5

The 4-Hour Workweek (2007)

Timothy Ferriss

• Completed: 2016-01-01
• My Rating: 4/5

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

Yuval Noah Harari

• Completed: 2016-01-01
• My Rating: 5/5

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman (2000)

Timothy Ferriss

• Completed: 2016-01-01
• My Rating: 4/5

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (2014)

Randall Munroe

• Completed: 2016-01-01
• My Rating: 4/5

2015 (3 books)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #1) (1979)

Douglas Adams

• Completed: 2015-01-01
• My Rating: 5/5

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010)

Sam Harris

• Completed: 2015-01-01
• My Rating: 4/5

Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014)

Sam Harris

• Completed: 2015-01-01
• My Rating: 5/5