Sandy

My fiancee and I went to a weird one-man show, discussing author's relationship with his mothers and with books. It was beautifully written, and, because he got sick last minute, beautifully read by an old friend of his. We came away with a yearning to go explore used book stores, and it was there that I came across a copy of About a Boy.

It's been about five years since I was last unable to put down a book, but this one did it. About a Boy has been one of my favorite films for nearly twenty years now, but I'd never gotten around to reading the book. What a mistake! The film manages to capture a good chunk of the book's charm, but only covers about half the story, and the omitted bits are the real heart and soul here. The shlock Hollywood ending was always the weakest part of the film, and now I know why.

On a more personal level, I think I always liked About a Boy because I identified with Marcus — a weird, bullied kid who didn't really fit in and didn't know why. But re-experiencing the thing twenty years later, and I now find myself identifying with Will. Weird. Over the story, Marcus learns how to be comfortable in his own shoes, and stand up for himself, and although I didn't know it, those were the things I was trying to learn. Will's arc has him shedding his aloof, devil-may-care armor, letting himself be vulnerable and discovering how to make community when your life doesn't fit into the familiar buckets. Funny I should pick this book up on a whim when that's the sort of thing I'm now trying to work out.

Anyway, delightful book, five out of five, best thing I've read all year.

This book is showing its age – although the algorithms are solid, I find it unlikely that the author would make it through a modern technical interview. Software engineering has evidently come a long way in 15 years.

A short and sweet book about the adventurer's lifestyle—about facing your fears and accomplishing great things. I read it in about half an hour, and it lands at exactly the right length. Invaluable advice for taking risks and achieving greatness.

EDIT 2021-12-22:

Well, I finally got around to finishing this book, and it's actually fantastic if you can slog through it. This is the first book I've seen in a long time that has any coherent view of what the future should be, that isn't just that our phones will get faster and our cameras will have more megapixels. It's inspiring as hell, though not without flaws.

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Started off great, but it meanders aggressively and was unable to maintain the author's or my attention. His claim is that the technology exists for flying cars today, but the political wherewithal for them hasn't kept up. Regulations and environmentalism have gotten in the way. This corresponds well to my priors, but he downplays environmentalism more than I think is deserved; when I dug into his citations they were of poor quality, which unfortunately makes me shift away from the bit of his premise that I agree with. 2/5 due to abandonment.

What a delightful read. It's a time travel plot that doesn't immediately unravel itself with shitty paradoxes. It's a nice deep dive on “what if this technology existed,” tackling the question with bigger and bigger scenarios. Strongly recommended.

A begrudging 5. There's a lot of inspiring stuff here about how suffering is a choice.

There's a lot of good memes here, things like how we have an internal limitor that says “yeah, ok, that's good enough. You've tried now.” The few times I've pushed through that feeling, I've unlocked a lot of new potential, and realized that I was way more capable than I thought before.

The begrudging is because ultimately, it's hard to be inspired by someone who needs to prove it to himself so badly that he turns his hands into raw hamburger and finishes running through renal failure, having shit himself in front of his wife and mom.

If you're interested in extreme success, this book is mandatory reading, if for nothing other than getting a sense of what it means to really try.

It's refreshing to have an engaging novel whose protagonist uses her brain instead of her FISTS to solve problems. The Queen's Gambit is a great and inspiring read about a prodigy making her way up through the chess world.

I just read this a few days ago and can't even remember enough of it to write a real review. Not a good sign. The entire book is an argument that a strong economy is the only thing that matters, and it presents it pretty OK. I wasn't convinced, but did move slightly towards his point of view. I originally rated this 3/5 when I finished it, but in retrospect am giving it a 2/5 because if it were so good I probably would have remembered it.

Short review: it's garbage.

Longer review, originally posted at http://sandymaguire.me/blog/utopia-for-realists/:

Rutger Bergman's Utopia for Realists is a book whose primary thesis is that we should have a guaranteed minimum income (GMI).

I must admit, I was pretty sold on a guaranteed minimum income before reading this book. I hadn't thought too much about it, besides the fact that lots of smart people I know say it's a good idea, and that obviously we're going to need a solution to what happens to humans after we automate away all of the jobs.

After reading this book, I am significantly less on-board with the idea.

What it boils down to is that Utopia for Realists isn't very good. If these are the best arguments for a GMI, well... let's hope that they're not the best arguments for a GMI.

I can't make up my mind on whether this book is merely incompetent or actively dishonest.

For example, the book discusses the Speenhamland system, which it describes as an early form of GMI, and then discusses a contemporary report which described it as a failed experiment. But then Utopia for Realists turns around with the sentence “more recent research has revealed that the Speenhamland system was actually a success.” A description of how the original study was supposedly flawed, but no citation to back it up. No reference to which “more recent research” reveals resounding success. There are lots of other citations in the book. Why not one here?

Utopia makes some other bold claims without backing them up; here's a few that bothered me enough to mark them down:

“Ultimately, the perfect, self-regulating market proved an illusion.”
“The historian Brian Steesland... emphasizes that, had Nixon's plan gone ahead, the ramifications would have been huge... No longer would there be such a thing as the ‘deserving' or ‘undeserving poor' [no citation]”

There was another time I wanted to check a source. The book makes a case for “giving housing/money to homeless people is cheaper than dealing with the consequences of not” via a case study. I'm willing to believe this; prevention is usually a better strategy than treatment. OK, fine. What I wanted to check was the cost breakdown; Utopia describes the project as costing $217 million, and being responsible for getting 6,500 people off of the streets over nine years. This struck me as being exorbitantly expensive, and I wanted to check their methodologies and math.

The given citation for this “unmitigated success” was to a random pdf on the Utrecht municipal website which doesn't exist anymore. I didn't try any harder than this to find the document. The citation describing the experiment points to a Dutch news site (that Google annoyingly refuses to translate) that looks more like an op-ed than anything official, but more damningly, doesn't provide any links closer to the original source.

Bregman's grasp of economics is pretty tenuous. For example:

From a certain perspective, [Bastiat] says, breaking a window sounds like a fine idea. “Imagine it costs six francs to repair the damage. And imagine that this creates a commercial gain of six francs—I confess there's no arguing with this reasoning. The glazier comes along, does his work, and happily pockets six francs...” [emphasis mine]

No arguing? Except that the glazier charges a fair price to replace the window, so he is only marginally better off after replacing the window, but the world has lost one window and the owner is the worse-off for it.

He goes on:

Unlike the manufacture of a fridge or a car, history lessons and doctor's [sic] checkups can't simply be made “more efficient.”

This is absurdly stupid. We've all taken classes that were long-winded and boring. The quality of a teacher has a huge bearing on how efficiently we learn from them. Websites like Khan Academy are teaching entire university courses in a fraction of the time it would take to do through the usual channels. Doctors' checkups can and have been made more efficient; it's not an accident that doctors carry stethoscopes and have access to MRI machines.

But Bergman persists:

... the government is gobbling up a growing share of the economic pie... this phenomenon is now known as “Baumol's cost disease,” basically says that prices in labor-intensive sectors such as healthcare and education increase faster than prices in sectors where most of the work can be more extensively automated... shouldn't we be calling this a blessing, rather than a disease? After all, the more efficient our factories and our computers, the less efficient our healthcare and education need to be; that is, the more time we have left to attend to the old and infirm and to organize education on a more personal scale.

When you're obsessed with efficient and productivity, it's difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only the costs. They don't realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors.

No no no no no no. Cost disease doesn't say “we spend too much on healthcare and education.” It says “we spend too much on healthcare and education on the margin.” Which is to say that in less cost-diseased countries, spending an additional $1,000 will buy you a lot more than the same additional $1,000 in a more cost-diseased place.

Cost disease is the phenomenon that we're paying more to get less. For example, Thailand has a booming dentistry industry among Australians because you can get the same quality work done for significantly less money. This isn't “exploiting Thai workers” nor is it “taking jobs away from Australians”—it's just Australian cost disease.

A significantly smaller portion of the book describes the fifteen-hour workweek is an ideal one. Sure! Sounds good! But, Bergman says, “breaking the vicious cycle [of the 40 hour workweek] will require collective action—by companies, or better yet, by countries.”

I don't get this one. If you want to work less than 40 hours, just... work less than 40 hours? Nobody is forcing you, except your spending habits. As it happens, life is actually pretty cheap. Find a small apartment, share it with some roommates, and eat a lot of rice. You can definitely manage to do it for less than $800 a month if you're willing to shop around—and especially if you're willing to move.

The secret is to just not spend money. That means stop eating lavish meals. Don't get a pet. Don't buy a vehicle. Stop drinking and smoking and give up whatever other vices you have that cost a bunch of money. It sounds dumb, but the secret to not working very much is to not need a lot of money.

And then use your extra time to learn how to do something valuable so that you can work even less.

At the end of the day, I get the strong impression that this book was written backwards. Bergman very clearly believes in his cause, and has worked backwards trying to find arguments that support it—as evidenced by the sloppy citation work, numerous straw-men and gross-misunderstanding of the arguments against his point of view.

It's a particularly bad sign when a book is so bad that it makes people on your side agree with you less after reading it. Give this one a miss, but if you're looking for a significantly better resource championing MGI, look no further than Slate Star Codex's take on same.

The main character's mom is the single likeable character in this book, and I lost count of how many times I sighed with frustration. Perhaps worse, there isn't a single quotation mark.

Slightly interesting, but mostly just modern geopolitics, and not in fact “everything about the world.” I didn't care enough to finish it, and can't remember anything about it a month later.

Update 2023 — I reread this, and liked it again. It was interesting to see how much of it I'd adopted without realizing. The salient takeaways this time around are that one should be much more focused in how they spend their leisure time; it's not enough to remove digital crap; you actively need something to replace it with.

—

Ever since I learned that people's score on an IQ drops by 15 points if they're regularly distracted during it (eg. by a phone), I've been pretty wary of my attention. 15 points of intelligence is a big price to pay for anything! About a year ago I got rid of my smart phone, and downgraded back to a flip phone. It's been working pretty well for me.

Digital Minimalism is Cal Newport's take on this phenomenon, and what to do about it. It gave me some vindication that maybe I'm not crazy for not wanting to sign up for instagram. Perhaps more importantly, it discusses a significantly less-haphazard-than-mine-was approach to weening yourself off these services.

The thesis of the book is “your smartphone provides much less value than you think,” but even if you already agree with that, there is value to be found in this book. Newport successfully argues that we've collectively lost the idea of active leisure and do-it-yourself-edness as a society, and suggests that these activities are a healthier substitute for mindlessly dicking around on our phones/netflix/what-have-you.

It's not Newport's best book (So Good They Can't Ignore You is), but it's worth a read.

I read this on the recommendation of a good friend. It was fine—gripping enough to pull me through it, and short enough to have been read in a day. While there might be some chicken-soup-for-the-soul stuff here for someone, that person wasn't me. It's a nice reminder that nobody is an island and that being a bitter, curmudgeonly old man is no way to live your life. Also, go give your dad a call.

Most examples of “beautiful code” in this book are “look at this janky implementation I did.” There are a few gems in here, but the most fun I got out of it was critiquing the bad decisions in the book.

At the very least, there are lots of good discussion topics in here! The book itself is pretty meh, and is directly responsible for the creation of the Sarin Board of Relationship Growth and Development.

My mom recommended this to me as a quick book to read on the flight to Istanbul. I didn't end up reading it on the flight to Istanbul, but about a week afterwards. Thankfully I had nothing to fear; there was no Turkey-necessitated context that I needed to make use of.

The book itself though, ehh. We have two characters whose initials are AZ and ZA, and AZ gets some sort of immediate, incurable disease that's going to kill him in a month. The rest of the book is reflections on their marriage, and coming to terms with the end. Perhaps it's more salient in ones golden years; the message didn't connect with me, but I can see how it might in thirty years or so.

I really like Parker's youtube content, and decided I should support him by buying his book! Unfortunately there is no kindle version available, and shipping of physical books doesn't work during CoVID, so I had to pirate it. Sorry Matt, though if you read this, I'd be more than happy to send you (or a charity) the cash!

Writing about math is a terribly difficult job. The vast majority of the population doesn't give a shit, and the people who do probably already know the things you're going to tell them. We're all starved for good math content! Humble Pi's target audience appears to be “people who liked math in high-school, and haven't touched it since. “ It's got enough detail of the math problems to catch your attention, but not enough to actually help you understand what's really happening here. You won't learn any math here, but you'll probably learn about some things to wikipedia later. I liked a lot of the intuitive explanations of some of the described phenomena, but overall felt the book was lacking in substance.

If you follow Parker on youtube, this book doesn't have much to offer you, and his book persona doesn't come off as being as fun as his online one. I'd suggest giving this book a skip, but checking out his videos online instead.

The first half is dull, describing in excruciating detail a shitty work environment. But then the author (and LOTS of lawyers) gets personally involved, and I found myself caring again. I wouldn't recommend this book, but I also wouldn't slap it out of a stranger's hands if I saw them reading it.

It's exactly what it says on the tin—a grade-school math teacher rambling about pop-psych. I picked it up hoping that umm, well I'm not entirely sure what I hoped to be honest with you. Maybe that it would give me some good insights into communicating why I like math to people. Maybe it's psych would generalize away from grade-school students to twentysomething autodidacts.

Nope.

I mean, really, it's my fault. The title can't get any clearer about what this book is about. If you don't know any psychology from the last 30 years, you'll learn some neat stuff by skimming the capstone sections at the end of each chapter “three things I'll remember.” If you do, and you don't care about the intricacies of how 13 year olds approach fractions, you'll probably be fine to give this one a miss.

Reread this after a disappointing experience with Xenocide. It's still amazing, even though I'm no longer a child.

This is a pretty good read! It was hard to put down—I devoured it in less than 24 hours.

Thiel has some poignant arguments in Zero to One. There's a lot of good takeaways for people who want to change the world and shape the future. But there's also chapter 10, which focuses on ways in which companies fail. This was particularly interesting to me in that it perfectly described my last company—we all knew it was fundamentally dysfunctional, but Thiel somehow managed to describe almost every single problem we faced.

I get the impression that Thiel knows what he's talking about. Combined with an inspiring message, it's worth your time.

Probably an interesting book but it certainly could be a blog post and thus I don't care because she's wasting my damn time.

Excellent wisdom, writing not so much. In true Yudkowsky fashion, this book comes with some good mental handles—things like the distinction between “efficiency”, “unexploitability”, and “inadequacy.” The gist is that most inadequate systems are that way because they are unexploitable—that is to say, that an outsider can't make money by coming in and putting things right.

He makes an analogy to hungry agents, running around eating up free energy. Thus, if you're in a domain where you'd expect a lot of agents eating up free energy, you shouldn't expect to do any better than average, since you will require a PARTICULAR, SPECIFIC ADVANTAGE in order to beat all the other smart agents who are eating up the free energy.

What I like most about the book is the stuff against modesty but I realize I shouldn't have started writing this review because it's late and I should go to bed because my thoughts here are jumbled. GOODNIGHT

Full disclosure: I only got a few chapters in. The book was far too verbose, both in actual prose and in getting to the damn point. I left with a vague sense that whatever it was Fromm was trying to tell me, he could have done it in about a thousand words if he cared more about getting his point across.

Somewhat relatedly, why do liberal arts majors always care so much about what Freud thinks?

This book takes its time in world-building, and sets up a truly magnificent mystery! And then it all goes to shambles when [SPOILERS] a fucking alien ghost did it. [/SPOILERS] What a stupid ending! I have the suspicion that this book would be 2x as good if it had been cowritten with someone who had said “No, Doug, let's not put aliens into our great murder mystery story.” But not if that person were Max Landis.

I read this book as a kid, and vaguely enjoyed reading it. I reread it now after having watched a bit of MAX LANDIS' TV ADOPTION OF DIRK GENTLY. And man, the book is so much better. I know that I'm supposed to be talking about the book and not about Max Landis, but jesus that guy is a hack fraud. How could he have possibly messed up such a great book into such forgettable TV?

Anyway anyway, with that in mind, I guess the book is actually pretty good! Or at least, so much better than it might have been in the hands of someone else. I dunno. Go read it I guess.