Panashe Fundira
Perhaps useful if you're new to attempting to improve your ‘critical thinking' skills, but the advice is very basic, and this reads like a long blog post. I didn't need to pick up a book to tell me not to automatically trust what I read in the news.
Such a simple and powerful method
The method of inquiry discussed in this book is so simple and powerful, I'm surprised that I'd never really come across the Work before reading it. I felt a shift in my mental/emotional world, right from the first exercise. Highly recommended.
Straight forward, accurate, no nonsense nutrition guide for performance and aesthetics (not health focused). Been following the Renaissance folks for a while, they know their stuff
Excellent primer on neuroplasticity
This book deals with many of the same topics you'll find in modern self-help books, but from the perspective of examining physical and chemical changes in the brain. The lone major criticism I have is the level lack of citations.
Ok, a lot of very clear, actionable advice here about replacing guilt as the basis of your motivational system. I imagine that Yudkowsky's binned Art of Rationality would have been quite similar, this reminds me of [b:Rationality: From AI to Zombies 25131230 Rationality From AI to Zombies Eliezer Yudkowsky https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440562023l/25131230.SX50.jpg 44828040]. I haven't implemented the advice within yet. If I do, and find it personally effective, I'll add the fifth star.
A thoroughly argued manifesto for suffering based ethics that challenged many of my intuitive ethics (not least my anthropocentricity). One of a handful of books that I would call worldview shaping for me.
This was really good, and felt much more consistent than the first book. Crystal's internal war makes for a fascinating plot point.
Really short book, worth a quick skim read (consumed in a single sitting over a couple of hours).
The author assumes a particular organizational context - lots of emails and unclear expectations, you don't already regularly meet with your manager, people regularly work late, presentation is a central part of your work - that sort of thing. As such, it doesn't seem super applicable to my day job as a software engineer. Still some, things are here are useful.
Overcommunicate. If your boss/peers have to ask about the status of a project, it signals some anxiety on their part, and a missed opportunity to proactively communicate on your part. Increase your outbound communication to limit the need for inbound communication (questions, follow ups, etc).
Set the agenda and take the lead in your meetings with your manager. I do wonder how one generates good agenda items every week, especially if you're already giving daily updates to your team in a standup.
If you want to be promoted, set clear goals and check-in with your manager frequently (you set up a weekly 1:1, right?) Track your accomplishments against these goals, and build a ‘case' for your promotion like a case lawyer would .
A really good guide to advancing in a software career. Draws back the curtain on how senior engineers approach their craft. This book particularly shines in its discussion of soft skills - leadership, setting an example, effective communication, project management, and so on.
It does have some weaknesses: there's a lot of repetition around many of the core principles, and the section on software design is somewhat superficial (see The Art of Unix Programming or A Philosophy of Software Design for more on that topic).
A good case study on using PBT. I particularly liked the idea of generating outputs and then using them to generate inputs, that hadn't occurred to me to do.
I would have liked a discussion of the drawbacks of PBT, and more examples.
Finally finished the book... It was reeeaally long, maybe the longest book I've ever finished (1421 pgs). Really enjoyed it though, especially Harlod Lauder's character, maybe because I can identify with the character myself. I also found myself empathising with quite a few of the characters. This loses a star from me for the ending, it was a bit of a let down for me. But overall, really solid epic post apocalyptic fantasy novel. Next up, The Lord of the Rings :
As some have said, quite a few interesting facts in here, but the authors commentary just straight up sucks. Apart from that, some of these facts aren't particularly scary or special (e.g. The Vatican had 45,000 fans within a few days of launching their Facebook page - so?)
Excellent introduction to the field of forecasting, and what it takes to be a good forecaster. Tetlock is balanced on the strengths and weaknesses of his forecasting paradigm.
The core of this book is quite good:
- we assume our emotional concepts (happiness, fear, anger) are universal, and even extend to related mammals, when in fact they are socially constructed. I think the author does a good job of demonstrating the social nature of emotion, and tearing down the classical view of emotion
- emotions, feelings, affect originate from within, rather than being events that happen to us. Page 57: “Your river of feelings might feel like it's going over you, but actually you're the river's source”
- we can be misguided about the origin of our affect, and make fundamental attribution errors. This can negatively affect our decision making
- emotions don't have concrete ‘fingerprints', emotions are really statistical clumps with a wide range of variance
- emotions aren't rooted to a single part of the brain. I was quite surprised to learn that you can experience fear, even without an amygdala!
I do think this book could be much shorter than it is without losing it's essential points. Some of the chapters here are quite speculative, and much weaker than the early core. In ‘Mastering Your Emotions', she quotes the emotional intelligence guy saying “For star performance in all jobs, in every field, emotional competence is twice as important as purely cognitive abilities”. What is EI if not a cognitive ability? Assuming that he means IQ, I remain unconvinced that EI can account for any variance in job performance not already caught by IQ, agreeableness, and maybe conscientiousness. Our author then goes on to say we can improve our emotional regulation by learning more words and listening to ‘thought-provoking audio content like National Public Radio'. Ugh, ok? She does at least present a study in favor of the former, but it's not clear from the text whether the effect was due to more granular description of the participants' emotions, or them dissociating more from their affect/emotion (would also like to see replications).
I stopped during the legal system chapter, where a lot of strong claims seemed to be drawn from flimsy evidence (2017 was pre-replication crisis in social psychology, right?), and I figured I wasn't going to learn much more from the last few chapters.
A book with an interesting premise - one that makes you wonder “where is this going?” In the end, it doesn't lead to a whole lot, but it is an enjoyable read.
Extremely comprehensive tutorial, to the extent that I don't think tutorial is even the right name. It's more of a guide to building a full rails app from the ground up. Recommended for all rails developers.
Extremely well argued, the author paints a bleak (yet somewhat unsurprising) picture of the American justice system. I especially enjoyed her rationalization of ghetto culture and the potentially deleterious effects that affirmative action may have on African Americans in general. Her background as a lawyer is easily detectable in the rigor of the text. My single gripe is the infrequent appearance of typos. One of the best books I've read in the past several months. A must-read for anyone interested in race or justice.
A heart wrenching account of Jeffrey Haas' and many others' quest for justice following the brutal murder of Fred Hampton, the precocious Black Panther leader. Reading this will rob you of any illusion that America's justice system is just, or that the police are meant to serve and protect all of us. On the other hand, the book shows that justice is not impossible, even if only partial justice can be achieved in our current political framework.
There man of steel mysteriously appears in the city of Metropolis. Billionaire magnate and genius Lex Luthor quickly figures out that Superman poses a great existential risk to humanity, and attempts to figure out ways to kill Superman without his plots being detected. Smart and gripping.
Brilliant. A great resource for anyone who actively participates in romantic relationships (including monogamous people)
This isn't an especially well -wrotten book (the author basically directly quotes Naval for 100% of it's length, sorting the quotes thematically). The content is pretty good though. Going in, I had no idea who this Naval was, but it's pretty clear that he knows some things about business and happiness (even if I don't agree with absolutely everything, I find his perspective fascinating).