Yale
Max Tegmark thinks big. In his first book, Our Mathematical Universe, Max walked through a modern cosmological conception of our universe. Now he is describing the kind of life that might expand through it. And one cannot help but be inspired by the potential that Tegmark sees in this next step of life:
“After spending billions of years as an almost negligibly small perturbation on an indifferent lifeless cosmos, life suddenly explodes onto the cosmic arena as a spherical blast wave expanding near the speed of light, never slowing down, and igniting everything in its path with the spark of life”
Sorry Nick Bostrom, but Superintelligence was just dethroned as best “future of AI” book
This book raises many good points. It presented me with the best arguments for organic food I have yet encountered. It convinced me that the modern science of nutrition stands on ground as shaky as psychology or economics; in that we can't run controlled experiments on any of those fields and they are probably wrong about many things.
Where I disagree with the author is that I don't think natural foods represent the best possible sustenance for humans. I think that eventually nutritional science will advance to the point of bettering our natural diets, even though I don't think we are there right now
This book was a long time coming, and it was definitely worth the wait. The work of Kahneman and Tversky sits just under the surface of all my favorite Michael Lewis books. Moneyball in particular left me wondering about the systematic biases in human thought, and soon enough I ended up in front of a copy of “Thinking Fast and Slow.” I was floored by what I read. I had always considered psychology a “soft science,” incapable of making real predictions about reality. The catalog of biases that K&T described cut right through my disbelief as I fell for each of their cleverly constructed cognitive illusions. Michael Lewis puts the story of these scientists into a package that is informative and engrossing, I would highly recommend it to anyone
Quality overview of modern energy generation, storage, and use. The last two chapters on energy storage and future energy sources were the most interesting to me, they both introduced me to concepts that I had not previously encountered. Also, bonus points for using my hometown St. Louis for most of the example data
Douglas Hofstadter has discussed consciousness in his previous work, but this time he is serious. I Am A Strange Loop starts off slow, the first 275 pages set up large collection and metaphors and analogies that are then beautifully woven together in the book's main dialogue to lead you to his conclusion. What we call “I” is a mirage, a kind of feedback loop that arises when a system which can devise arbitrarily complex representative symbols forms a representation of its self.
Good overview of the modern state of science. I liked the exploration of scientific history, and the ‘atomistic -> relational -> holistic' view of scientific progress is very interesting. However, the author's musings at the end of the book about a unified theory of psychology smells like the psychological utopianism that Asimov beautifully displayed in the Foundation series, a view which was popular when the field of psychology was young but has since fallen out of style. I think that the author fails to distinguish systems that are chaotic but amenable to statistical modeling (thermodynamics, the weather, etc.) from the vastly more complicated second order chaotic systems which change in reaction to theories you make about them (psychology/economics)
Powerful, Poignant, Poetic... I have trouble categorizing this book. The world lost much when [a:Paul Kalanithi 14031444 Paul Kalanithi https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1456068631p2/14031444.jpg] passed away, but the influence of this book is going to outlive us all
Ashlee Vance paints the picture of a man who is driven by an unshakable need to change this world for the betterment of humanity. Elon Musk's determination and pragmatism are obvious to anyone that has been following tesla, solar city, or spacex. I used to wonder if Musk had professed idealistic goals as a management or marketing tactic, now I'm pretty sure he won't stop working until we have a Mars colony.
Superforcasters opens by comparing the state of forecasting in our current society to that of medicine in the premodern world. Practitioners of forecasting today are not judged on their performance or accuracy, but on the strength of the hindsight aided narrative they can put together. Telling a compelling story that plausibly explains how your specific prediction may have been wrong but your narrative is still generally correct is what kept medicine examining humors and bloodletting for centuries. The message is clear: Look for your failures. Seek out ways to improve your performance. Get prompt feedback. Don't ever get complacent. The state of “perpetual beta” is key, according to the authors, to achieving maximum performance in any field. A notion that we apply to the training of doctors and professional athletes, but not the people whose prognostications drive the behavior of everyone from corporate giants to you and me. We should test those who claim to have insight into complex systems, and look at a forecaster's past record before blindly accepting their story
Wonderful collection. The universes of these stories are all fascinating in their own right. And when you look at them all together it becomes clear that Chiang is extremely skilled at building worlds around concepts. Each story is an exploration of some idea put into a concise and evocative format that sticks with you far better than a dry explanation. I would recommend this to any sci-fi fans, especially if you liked the movie Arrival. “Story of Your Life” was the short that inspired Arrival, and reading it definitely added to my appreciation of the film
The plot didn't catch me, but the world building was fascinating. Philip K. Dick's incredible imagination brings this alternate history to vivid life
This book takes a far broader approach to the topic than I was expecting. The breadth of scope helped me understand WWII society in a much more nuanced way; how different things are when our world devotes itself to destruction. I recommend wholeheartedly.
Fantastic ideas abound. This feels like a modern update of Snow Crash with the VR swapped for a neural interface. The Nexus series manages to be thought provoking and have great action/thriller elements at the same time. I highly recommend checking it out
The hour between dog and wolf is a fascinating view of the financial world through the lens of biology. Coates describes a myriad of ways that our behavior and actions are influenced by bodily processes that happen under the level of consciousness. Then he proceeds to lay out his argument that financial bubbles are the result of a vicious cycle that consists of two phases. On the way up traders win often, each win increases the body's levels of testosterone and norepinephrine which leads to increased confidence and riskier and riskier trades. This can't last forever, and when the bubble pops many traders experience a spate of losses, which reduce the levels of the aforementioned hormones and increase cortisol levels. This glut of cortisol (you might know it as the “stress hormone”) causes traders to ignore appropriately risky opportunities and the resulting lack of investment throws the market into a recession.
This book is a great layman's introduction to the field of epigenetics. Nessa discusses several physical mechanisms that allow genes to regulate the expression of other genes. Turning each other on and off, responding to environmental differences; these are a new set of tools we can use to explain how we bootstrap up from a single cell to the wonderful complexity that is a person, all while using the same underlying genetic code
I like the ‘grand unified theory of politics' feeling that this gives. Most political theories treat democracy and monarchy as apples and oranges, there are separate approaches to describe each with some discontinuity at an unspecified point in the middle. Here, the author applies their ideas to democracy and monarchy on the same footing and views them as either end of a spectrum. Despite the elegance of this approach, it seems a bit reductionistic. Politics is a very difficult subject to nail down.
Recommended for anyone interested in political theory
Mary Roach continues to impress. Fast, funny, and fascinating jaunt through space history