Sandy
Ehh. It's alright. The first few chapters definitely gave me a feeling of having been ghostwritten—they don't come off in Craig's voice whatsoever, and often end in obviously false feel-good sorts of fluff writing. One chapter ends, for example, “[When I was a kid, I used to think my dolls could talk.] I'm not sure either one of us has properly grown up or completely left the attic. Lynn, like me, still believes the toys can talk.” Nope. No you do not. This is awkward pandering, and unfortunately isn't by any stretch the only example.
But if you can ignore that, which I had a problem doing, the rest of the book is fine I guess. It has an interesting arc about Craig's alcoholism which paints it less gloriously than most authors do. But at the end of the day, there are no insights and no takeaways from this book. It's just a bunch of uninteresting stories about a relatively uninteresting man, but told in a funny sort of way.
It really and truly feels like the book version of late-night television, so that's something.
In fiction, an unreliable narrator is a fun twist that makes you think twice about what you just read, and reanalyze it through that lens. In an autobiography it makes it awfully hard to maintain your suspension of disbelief. Iceberg makes a lot of claims that are hard to swallow. For example, quoting the lyrics to whatever song was on the radio at the time—which are always thematic to the plot. Every character in the book talks in his voice; even supposed squares routinely refer to all women as “bitches” and talk in jive. As such, I decided to read the rest of the book in the frame of mind that it's fiction.
And as fiction, it's actually not that bad. I mean, it is—if it were published as fiction it wouldn't have been published. But it's interesting. It's not a story you've heard before. It's told by a disgusting, terrible human of an antihero, but I sorta found myself rooting for him anyway. It presents a view of the world I'd never seen inside of: that everyone is fundamentally out to get you, that loneliness is the only possible way to live, and that if you don't outsmart everyone all the time they'll outsmart you. Honestly it sounds like a pretty terrible life, but a lot of the intrigue is watching someone strive so hard for such vapidness.
If you're looking for something different and aren't going to be triggered by the protagonist being proud of himself for having beaten a woman with an unraveled coathanger, you might give this a go. It's by no means a great use of your time, but at the very least you'll pick up some cool pimp lingo.
I bought this book thinking it was a biography of Riemann. It's not. Riemann shows up for a little bit at the beginning, but the vast majority of this book is not about him. Fair enough, allegedly he kept no diary and made no friends, so there's very little known about him. But the title is exceptionally misleading.
My second concern is “who is the intended audience of this book?” Like, it goes through exceptional trouble to explain natural numbers, but a few chapters later assumes you're capable of following difficult arguments requiring calculus over infinite series. It goes on forever about what a matrix is, but then completely glosses over eigenvalues, despite using them heavily for its later arguments. The final chapter is just one huge derivation of a result that nobody outside of analysis would ever care about.
If you're a math hobbiest, this book is going to be too hard for you. If you have a math undergraduate degree, this book is going to be both too hard for you AND immensely boring at the beginning. The history presented is grantedly interesting. I'd suggest just skipping over the math bits regardless of your skill and skimming through the history. Save yourself some time and frustration.
If you are informed, your investment strategy is to buy real-estate because “it's the best investment.” If you're better informed, your investment strategy is to put all your money in ETFs because “nobody can't beat the market in the long-run.” But if you're Elon Musk, you invest all of your money into yourself—often to the brink of bankruptcy—and it keeps paying off.
Holy shit is this ever an inspiring book. Musk is doing disruptive innovation in like what, five?, distinct industries right now, and he somehow continues to keep hitting them out of the park. At this point I'm not sure even the biggest cynic can put that down to luck.
While Musk is clearly a bright dude, he doesn't come off as having superhuman intelligence. His comparative advantages seem to be WORKING REALLY HARD and BEING COMPLETELY FEARLESS. The book presents a narrative of Musk as being this guy who doesn't have much trouble raising money, and so he's never afraid to just spend all of it trying to make things happen—critics be damned. My takeaway is that whoever cares most wins, and that if you're capable and smart, investing everything you've got in yourself is probably the best strategy you can ever play.
If you know what the word “agency” means with respect to your life, you're not going to get anything out of this book. Thankfully it's short, but what I wished I had known is that the last three pages are literally an entire recap of the important concepts in the book. Don't read this book, but if you do, just read the synopsis and save yourself an hour of wishy-washy advice for highschool students.
I never know how to review books like this. On one hand, some chapters were brilliant and got my mind spinning in a way that most books don't. On the other, my god was most of this book a slog. It suffers from the usual pop-sci problems: dumbed-down enough to not really represent the subject very well, but not far enough to be interesting to a layperson. As such it wobbles uneasily in limbo; taking four of its thirteen chapters to describe different kinds of multiverses—most of which turn out to be indistinguishable in the end :/
The first two chapters are quite good, and answered some of my burning curiosities in life. “How do we /know/ the universe is 14 billion years old?” It also presented quantum lensing in a way that really connected with me, along with some tests we can run to convince ourselves about it (though, interestingly, not tests we can ever tell anyone else about. Quantum weirdness at its weirdest!!!!)
It ends in a philosophical mess of “maybe our universe IS REALLY MATH” and kind of waffles its way through what this means and what it would look like to humans. As best I could tell (I started skimming around here because boooooooring) the argument double- or triple- counts the anthropic principle as evidence for WE ARE REALLY AND TRULY MATH. And even if it does, like, who cares? There doesn't seem to be any testable hypothesis here, and Tegmark's beliefs don't seem to be paying rent.
I'll leave you with this: if you're REALLY EXCITED about this book, you'll probably find something of value here. Don't be afraid of skimming along though; Tegmark sure could have used an editor who was sympathetic to the reader. If you're not REALLY EXCITED (or if you've read any amount of Yudkowsky/Bostrom) you're probably not going to find a lot here.
There's an old warning passed down in STEM circles. Back when the loom was the most advanced machine on the planet, the leading metaphor for how brains worked was as a loom. As telephones began being strung across the country, the this metaphor shifted—now the brain was like a telephone switchboard. These days the brain is like a computer, but I'm reasonably sure it's going to stay a computer. My point is that our familiarities inform the metaphors we use, but it's worth keeping in mind that these things are just metaphors.
Wolfram falls victim to this. Not only are brains computers, but they are in fact /computation itself/. Intelligence is merely computation. Weather systems are merely computations. Thus, Wolfram says, weather systems are intelligent too. This is a neat trick of semantics, but it's ultimately useless. The word “intelligence” refers to human-like-things, and not to weather-like-things, regardless of any computational similarities they have under the surface. Wolfram eventually concedes the point, but it left a sour taste in my mouth. If he's going to argue in clear circles like this one, why should I trust his reasoning on other things where I find the causal relationships less clear?
“Everything is computation” is the claim, and Wolfram follows this argument to its limit—that Godelian proofs are thus a limiting factor in every endeavor. We're unable to predict the future because of the halting problem. We're unable to distinguish meaning because doing so is equivalent to solving the halting problem. Et cetera.
This all may be true, but it seems like grasping at straws from a man who has this to say about mathematics: “what I've concluded is that actually the mathematics we have today is really just a historical accident: the direct generalization of the arithmetic and geometry that happened to be used in ancient Babylon. So it's just history that makes the particular axiom systems we're using seem meaningful to us.”
Yes, the halting problem is a very real phenomenon, but the vast majority of the time it doesn't strike in full generality; we can often approximate solutions. And, this is all based on the assumption that the universe itself is subject to Curry-Howard. Maybe, but then again the only evidence we have is that there don't appear to be any NP-complete problems in nature.
Computation and the Future of the Human Condition isn't all bad though. It's a short enough read that you can get through it in one sitting, and it'll definitely provoke interesting thoughts. That being said, it's not Wolfram's best work. A better read is his blog post Showing Off to the Universe (http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2018/01/showing-off-to-the-universe-beacons-for-the-afterlife-of-our-civilization/) which better details his arguments and is free.
The first three parts are quite good, describing the personal account of the author and his experience with the low-IQ section of the US milliary. After that, the rest of the book is just short, disorganized anecdotes from people he interviewed years later. There's a lot of “not his real name” and “he declined to give specifics,” which combined with the fact that these anecdotes simply rehash the author's experiences, don't lend much. It's an interesting read, but there weren't many takeaways other than “don't let idiots handle grenades.”
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.
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 is a fantastic, highly-actionable book that you won't regret reading. Insofar as it's a guide to the good life, it boils down to a few high-level principles:
* Be happy with what you've got
* Don't worry about things you can't change
* Strive to become stronger by intentionally putting yourself into uncomfortable situations
They're great high-level goals, and the remainder of the book is tactics for achieving them (and some boring history stuff.)
This book is so good that I'll buy you a copy—even if I don't know you :) Just ask!
Life's too short for lots of things, and this book is one of them. It doesn't get around to explaining what the vienna circle was, or why I should care. There are some amusing anecdotes about some neat people, but the majority of it is banal discussions of their early lives, the girls they dated, and such blither. What's worse is Sigmund is an English professor, and needs to prove it by writing in a style so affected it actually pained me to read.
UPDATED REVIEW, 2023.
This book is fucking mind poison. On my second read through, I couldn't tell if it was good advice presented poorly, or bad advice presented well. Turns out its the latter. Lots of bad advice caged in new-age wisdom, that makes claims without ever being unfalsifiable. Stuff like, “do X and she will love it. And if she doesn't, it's because you didn't do X with enough love.”
Stay clear of this one. It might be OK if you're a single man, but in a happy, loving relationship, it can only bring pain and suffering.
—
ORIGINAL REVIEW, 2018. Originally 4 stars.
This is a hard book to review. It's got some fantastic advice in it, and also has a lot of shit. Some of the great stuff is about making moves in the world even if you're not super sure where you're going, being confident in your relationships and striving to be true to your purpose above all else.
And then it gets to the “women” portion. The Way of the Superior Man comes off as a book written by a guy who has never once been in a healthy relationship; it's full of advice like “if you come too quickly, your woman won't respect you and will attempt to undermine you at every turn” and “if she doesn't sound happy about your accomplishments, it's because she's testing you to see if you give a shit what she thinks.” This is some dark red pill shit dressed up in language about love and “her positive feminine energy.” Nah, Deida, just stop dating terrible humans and things will be alright.
Rating this a 4/5 because of it's good advice for taking care of yourself; skim the stuff about women.
I read this on a pirate ship. It was pretty alright; I liked a lot of Hardy's descriptions of what it feels like to be a mathematician. In terms of content, there's not much here for a non-mathematician. A light read that I enjoyed but didn't feel as though it improved my life in any way.
Somewhat recommended if you're already interested, skip it if you're not.
What a neat guy! There's a lot to say here about the value of honesty and industriousness. The book is feel-good chicken soup for the soul and the first 65% of this book is utterly fantastic. You should go read it now. Go!
And then it gets boring and starts talking more about events than about the man himself. The ending is unsatisfying. Blue-balled by Benjamin Franklin again.
Ugh. Despicable characters who feel like being queer gives them a license to be assholes. If you're into casual theft, break-and-enters, assault, planned rape of underage adolescents, vandalism, drug abuse, and kidnapping, despite none of it being in pursuit of your goals—you might like this book. I didn't.
I'm writing a math book, and after I published the first few chapters, someone offered to buy me a copy of this book. It's a nice gesture if you don't think very hard about it.
Anyway, on to the book. It's got some good points: write for yourself, ruthlessly trim prose, and decide on a consistent tone before getting started. That's it; now you don't need to buy this book as I did.
Zinsser goes on several tirades about the sanctity of language, about how he refuses to use any neologisms, and so too should you. The book suddenly begins to show its age; none of his examples were words I had ever considered to be problematic. Maybe “trek” was once contested, but finds itself safely ensconced in the language today.
The majority of “On Writing Well” is “how to write newspaper articles about topic X.” Business, news, artistic reviews, you name it. I briefly skimmed over the science section, thinking it might be helpful in my pursuits. It wasn't. Zinsser takes the viewpoint that science is scary, audiences don't care, and so a writer must do ones best to handhold the reader along. Science reporting at its finest.
In conclusion, I learned a few things, but it wasn't worth my $14. Guess I should have let that guy buy it for me instead.
The first half of this book is a phenomenal introduction to thinking about /how to live in a city./ On every page I was struck by an insight that codified what was the difference between cities I loved living in, and ones I didn't. Furthermore, the same analysis can be viewed as advice about how to choose a place to live, and what to do when you get there. As someone working on a big, unstructured move of my own in the next few months, this is particularly timely advice.
The second half is very clearly not meant for me; it talks about what to do with a city in order to avoid its death and promote its liveliness. While this is certainly an interesting topic, it's not one I have much agency over, nor do I plan to ever be in such a situation. After several chapters with low insight density, I decided to skim the remainder of the book, and I don't feel like I missed much.
Jacobs' argument rests on four pillars:
1) city streets are not just thoroughfares, they are where life in the city is /actively lived/
2) a neighborhood must bring in diverse people for diverse reasons in order to make streets safe
3) blocks must be short in order to facilitate many paths through them
4) there is a critical mass of humans necessary for city life, and thus high density residences are a necessity
Amidst these points, Jacobs discusses how parks fail, raising children in urban environments, what's wrong with housing projects, the ruinous effects of borders on neighborhoods and districts, along with a bevy of other somewhat tangential points. I suspect if I were a city planner I would have found a lot more value in these sections, but, well, I'm not and so I didn't.
In terms of how this book actually changed my thoughts on choosing a place to live, the following insights were particularly influential to me:
* When choosing where to live, work top down. Select a city based on stereotypes about the people who live there, and then drill down from there. Don't begin with the question of “what do I like in a city” and find a place that optimizes that.
* Life occurs in densely populated streets. Find a neighborhood that reflects this, and make an effort to spend your time outside.
* Neighborhoods run by way of an implicit, unofficial local government of citizens who have the interests of the neighborhood at heart. Think small business owners, church leaders, home owners, postal workers, etc. Being such a public figure is not a particularly hard thing to do, and should be strived for if you're looking for a sense of belonging, because everybody knows these people.
* Take responsibility for your neighborhood. Help people who look lost, even if they don't ask for it; keep an eye out for suspicious characters; let people know if they've missed the last bus; etc.
* Avoid places with large amounts of concurrent growth; these places will lose their diversity and die sooner than later.
* Old buildings gain economic value over time, in terms of the riskier ventures their low rent can afford.
* Aim to live on the seam between two neighborhoods; the juxtaposition of the two cultures is what creates an interesting place to live.
I'd rate the first half of this book as one of the top five books I've ever read. Very strongly recommended.
I'm giving up on Cryptonomicon. It's fine I guess–the prose is solid, most of the characters are interesting, and there is lots of engineering–but I just can't for the life of me get into it. The good stuff is few and far between, with lots of long-winded unexplained homages to crypto-guys to pad the length. And fuck me is the length padded.
After pounding away on it for a month I realize that I just don't care. I'd been reading it to see how everything tied together, but a quick google search suggests the ending does not pay off. Anathem had the same problem, except that it was an interesting read the whole way through – something that unfortunately can't be said of Cryptonomicon.
It's just a bunch of Paul Graham's superb essays collected into one book. Unfortunately the selection of technical posts is showing its age. I'd give the first half of the book five stars and the latter half three, so decided to settle on four. You probably aren't going to have your toes tickled by the second half if you aren't ROBUSTLY INTO LISP.
This is a hard book to review. The first half is economists being genuinely surprised that humans aren't homo economicus, accompanied by bad pop-cogsci for why this might be, and a laughably bad understanding of mathematics (they routinely discount base rates, and call all sorts of things “s-curves”, none of which are remotely s-shaped). This section is full of boring anecdotes there presumably to add a human touch to an otherwise dry book, but all that accomplishes is wasting the reader's time. (Un)notably, there are no proposed solutions to the problems described, nor any data that would be helpful to anyone in the First World. Maybe it's interesting if you're an economist, but I'm not.
The second half of the book is where things start to get interesting. The discussion becomes more abstract and starts talking more about how to actually solve some of these problems, about how economics can be used to incentivize some (but not all) solutions in the domain, and about where the standard economic tools will fail. This stuff is fascinating, and presents a lens through which we can inspect our own society—where we succeed and where we do not. The final chapter is on corruption and policies, and I would recommend the chapter to anybody who cares about social change (though I would not recommend the book itself.) The description blurred the stark line I had in my head about what constitutes corruption, and why it's not always necessarily a bad thing (eg. inappropriately funneling resources towards people who need them.)
All in all, 3/5. If you're particularly interested in pop-economics, you could do worse than this book, but I'd recommend Yudkowsky's Inadequate Equilibria over it any day.
It's a great account of Feynman, and comes off feeling like less of a facade than Surely You're Joking or his other autobiographical works. It's not a life-changing book by any account, but it's a fascinating read for any researcher; in my opinion, the history presented in the book is completely paled by the glimpses we get into the governing dynamics of Feynman's mind.
You're not going to learn any science here, but you might get an inkling into how to actually do science. And that's a wonderful thing.