Ali
An amusing yet sobering read on how small errors lurk into seemingly routine or simple engineering work and sometimes lead to tragic results.
Nice to read, good ideas how to run a small to medium calm business, as the authors point out pure anecdotes.
It was good reading a deep dive into one of my favorite TV shows, had to re-watch some repeatedly mentioned episodes.
A concise book with to the point argument and examples and with a pretty good narrative. Most if not all of arguments can be made for incident management and firefighting in IT and Software industry as well.
It started rather slow, in a childish world, I know the writer meant to make Ender's world believable, but it was somehow dull.
Development of the story in battle-school was more interesting, but after all it was on Eros that I began to enjoy the story.
I was disappointed though, that the whole point of the book -training a kid to be the commander of human fleets- was finally described in less than a paragraph in last chapters, left obscure and unbelievable.
If it wasn't for the last chapter -the bugger's point of view- I would have gave it 2 out of 5!
To be honest I didn't understand most of statistics formula explained, however insights into use case of causal models and differences were truly amusing.
Concrete advice and tangible examples on how to make better decisions. This book offers a practical view for day to day life on top of findings of behavioral-economics giants like Kahneman.
There are a lot of unpopular ideas in this book, even more than previous works of Taleb. It challenges some of my dearly held beliefs acquired through reading science books and skepticism!
I like Taleb's works mostly because he challenges ideas and beliefs from a novel point of view, even if I don't end up agreeing with his views, it is a good practice to expose my ideas to that challenge from time to time.
I barely understood half of it, the parts that didn't involve math!
It is a fascinating subject though and I have seen getting dismissed as coincidence or data fluke, but inspected closely it reveals some astonishing patterns about everyday phenomena.
Far from previous works of Stephenson. The parts about bit-world are a little bit amusing at first, but that quickly wears off, and you get stuck with 60 percent of the book exploring on that. Those parts felt more like mysticism than SciFi.
There are lots of wisdom shared in this book a some novel perspective for looking at things. Some sounded like collection of anecdotes or (relatively hasty) generalizations, others were rooted in research.
Overall, timing IS important in most human endeavors, so include it in your equations or plans.
Well, all I can say is that I didn't grok it in fulness, or I would have enjoyed it more.
I have never been fan of mysticism, and I might never be!
A good read on characteristics, effects and mis-conceptions around intangible (knowledge based?) assets. It's not that easy to balance (or nudge for/against) tangible and non-tangible assets, but there are ways governments and big corporations can do.
The author provides some OK narratives on the big four (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple) but all through some anecdotes or overstretched, often remotely relevant facts. For example he stipulates that homo-sapiens were hunter gatherers (a fact) hence they like shopping and physical stores (gathering in this age), and builds a chapter on this.
Useful topic, good round about of the issues by a great lecturer with delicate sense of humor.
I was getting the vibe that this is just a “privileged people's guide to mourning”, but then there came references to some studies and acknowledgement that less privileged people have more challenges.
So this is still basically a narrative of a privileged person going through loss of a loved one, and it is touching and sad in that, since the core feeling of losing someone doesn't consider bank account balance or social status. Yet there are few takeaways in it for common folks with less privilege.
I do agree with a premise in the book, that adversity can be the fuel for growth and people that do grow after facing an adversity, often shift their focus to less mundane matters in life.
There were some painful moments, about individual's social class and cultural heritage, that somehow found it's way to my feels (ouch!)
I guess some of over-generalization can be scrutinized by someone like N.N.Taleb, but it tries to introduce a new perspective that is valuable on it's own, mostly regardless of statistical accuracy of examples.
Since it assumes readers have some background in philosophy, it shouldn't be used as text book for an introductory course.
Despite the new editions it is outdated and some of the humor is not that funny anymore.
I am biased toward linguistics and Prof. McWhorter, that being said, it was a good read on background and controversies of English language.
I liked this more than ‘Foundation and Empire' beacause of it's more developed individual characters.
Just like the first novel, Foundation, Characters have background and their actions count.
Meh!
The fable was almost sleep inducing, good for late night reads.
The conclusion was filled with narrow takes on reality of workplace and positive anecdotes that were stretched beyond reach.
So, as I said, meh :)