The Best Of Other People’s Ideas: 2016/17
In advance of summer vacation season, I wanted to refresh my once-annual update of some favourite books, articles and podcasts. They have all helped me better understand the world in small but interesting ways.
Since last summer’s edition, I have managed to tackle another 50 or so books, the overwhelming majority recommended by you. Once again, THANK YOU! And please keep the recommendations coming!
Some favourite books- and why:
1. ‘Stealing Fire’ by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal (notes on request). The pursuit of ‘altered states’ (everything from drunkenness to prayer) is currently a multi-trillion dollar market. But technology has only just started getting involved. The book is a bit gimmicky, and there’s probably some dodgy science, but it’s still readable and interesting. When coupled with Wait But Why’s massive Neuralink article, I am becoming increasingly convinced/concerned that brain-computer interfaces are going to be the next ubiquitous topic like AI. For example, the WSJ also recently did an article and podcast on the early-stage medical applications and which companies are in the lead.
2. ‘Everybody Lies’ by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz (notes on request). The results of a data-scientist’s 5yr project to examine what Google search data can tell you about human behaviour. It’s full of fun facts and counterintuitive conclusions. Stephens-Davidowitz isn’t exactly underselling this data: ’I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche…..In fact, at the risk of sounding grandiose, I have come to believe that the new data increasingly available in our digital age will radically expand our understanding of humankind.’ The value vs social media comes from anonymous honesty: ‘I think the only real competition is Facebook, and I don’t think that’s as interesting a data set because people are so much less honest on Facebook. People are really, really honest on Google, so they tell Google things that they don’t tell anybody else.’ [This was a good companion piece to Hit Makers by Derek Thompson- on what becomes popular and why true virality is mostly a myth]
3. ‘Adaptive Markets’ byAndrew Lo (notes on request). The most directly markets-related of the favourite books. It’s an excellent description of the complexity of modern markets and the increasingly diverse disciplines needed to navigate them. Essentially it’s a summary of the direct market applicability of behavioural economics, complexity theory, neuroscience and technology. But leavened with some fun anecdotes too. Lo’s Adaptive Markets Hypothesis ‘is based on the insight that investors and financial markets behave more like biology than physics….the principles of evolution — competition, innovation, reproduction, and adaptation — are more useful for understanding the inner workings of the financial industry than the physics-like principles of rational economic analysis.’ His prescription is therefore a hybrid “quant psych” approach that accounts for both rational mathsand irrational biology. [Additional reads on markets and complexity: The End of Theoryby Richard Bookstaber,Overcomplicated by Samuel Arbesman, Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Seventh Sense by Joshua Cooper Ramo, Scale by Geoffrey B. West- notes on all on request.]
4. ‘Tribe’ by Sebastian Junger. The rise of global populism has obviously prompted a lot of reading on proposed causes (eg Hillbilly Elegy, Coming Apart, The People’s Money, The Fourth Turning, Dreamland, No Ordinary Disruption). My bottom-line takeaway echoes Tyler Cowen’s view that nebulous cultural causes may be underplayed relative to more quantifiable economic causes.Tribe was a very short book addressing the consequences of the decline of modern community. Junger also believes that hardship, disaster and war cointerintuitively lead to an significant increase in social welfare and mental health. Junger did a FANTASTIC interview with Joe Rogandiscussing the book. This plays into one of my favourite articles of the year. Raj Chetty with Tyler Cowen talked about the amazing economic mobility in Utah relative to other US states. Megan McArdle wrote a great in-depth report for Bloomberg what Utah & Salt Lake City is doing differently. This had as much profound explanatory power on the sources of populism as anything I’ve read on this topic. I think there has been a systematic underestimation of the socioeconomic implications of the decline of community in shaping populism. Yet, despite not being religious myself, it’s been fascinating to examine the link between the loss of US community/religion and socioeconomic decline. This is something Professor Jordan Peterson has eloquently discussed- in one of my favourite podcasts of the year- ‘I’m not arguing for the existence of God. I’m arguing that the ethic that drives our culture is predicated on the idea of God and that you can’t just take that idea away and expect the thing to remain intact midair without any foundational support.’.
5. ‘Tools of Titans’ by Tim Ferriss (notes on request). Yes, I completely get it- Tim Ferriss’ overly-promotional focus on ‘life-hacking’, nutritional supplements and short-cuts can be fairly grating. But I have to admit I absolutely love the central idea behind Tools of Titans. Essentially it’s a summary of the ‘best of other people’s ideas’ from the 200 high performers he’s interviewed for his podcast. We are in the business of ‘deployable knowledge’ and this book is packed full of it. Like the equally polarizing Joe Rogan, Ferriss’ phenomenal reach means a consistently high quality of guest. The book is over 700 pages, but it’s episodic and easy to read.
“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.” — Bertrand Russell
Some Favourite Articles, Podcasts & People:
· Podcast: Naval Ravikant on the Knowledge Project along with Rogan/Peterson above it’s the only podcast I’ve listened to twice this year. Dense with accumulated wisdom. Transcripthere if you prefer.
· Obsession interlude:anyone who reads any of my output will know one of my favourite thinkers and commentators is human historian Yuval Noah Harari. I’ve read both his books, listened to 30–40hrs of his talks and seen him interviewed in person in Manhattan. I find he has an unusual clarity of thought and speech, bolstered by an intimidatingly committed meditation practice (2hrs a day & a 60 day retreat every year!). The principal insight in Sapiens(explained quickly here) is that ‘we control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers.’ In Homo Deus he writes ‘Over those 20,000 years humankind moved from hunting mammoth with stone-tipped spears to exploring the solar system with spaceships not thanks to the evolution of more dexterous hands or bigger brains (our brains today seem actually to be smaller). Instead, the crucial factor in our conquest of the world was our ability to connect many humans to one another.’ The way we motivate this cooperation is through stories and fictions. Thus believing in a common fiction that forms a solid social group has been evolutionarily much more important than any objective truth or reality. Once you notice our susceptibility to narratives and stories it becomes genuinely transformative to the way you see the world. (Homo Deus notes and his best podcasts on request!)
o Harari’s broad perspective on what’s happening right now is typically interesting. ‘I think the basic thing that happened is that we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories. And for the last few decades, we had a very simple and very attractive story about what’s happening in the world. And the story said that, oh, what’s happening is that the economy is being globalized, politics is being liberalized, and the combination of the two will create paradise on Earth, and we just need to keep on globalizing the economy and liberalizing the political system, and everything will be wonderful. And 2016 is the moment when a very large segment, even of the Western world, stopped believing in this story. For good or bad reasons — it doesn’t matter. People stopped believing in the story, and when you don’t have a story, you don’t understand what’s happening…….The old 20th-century political model of left versus right is now largely irrelevant, and the real divide today is between global and national, global or local. And you see it again all over the world that this is now the main struggle. We probably need completely new political models and completely new ways of thinking about politics. In essence, what you can say is that we now have global ecology, we have a global economy but we have national politics, and this doesn’t work together. This makes the political system ineffective, because it has no control over the forces that shape our life. And you have basically two solutions to this imbalance: either de-globalize the economy and turn it back into a national economy, or globalize the political system.’
· Related Article: Anyone who doesn’t think we are looking for a replacement ‘story’ hasn’t noticed the quasi-religious subtext of the godlike-AI and singularity debate. On that topic,Kevin Kelly in Backchannel refutes the 5 myths of superhuman AI. It isn’t that often you read something new on the topic of AI, but then Kevin Kelly is a superior thinker and writer- The Inevitable was a 2015–16 favourite book. ‘The evidence so far suggests AIs most likely won’t be super-human but will be many hundreds of extra-human new species of thinking…none that will be an instant god solving major problems in a flash’.
· Article: An account in Nautilus about an aneurysm sufferer who lost her inner monologue, and found it…..strangely refreshing! The idea is that self-minimization is a counterintuitive path to happiness. It keeps recurring in everything I read. This is also consistent with the conclusions of 3 of this year’s books: Stealing Fire and 2 Western interpretations of Eastern philosophy, Sam Harris’ Waking Up and Michael Puett’s The Path. ‘Our habitual identification with thought — that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness — is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one’s head…..The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world.’- Sam Harris, his podcast is a firm favourite.
· Some interesting people worth following: Sam Harris, Russ Roberts (Econtalk podcast), Matt Levine at Bloomberg- I think Money Stuff is the best daily email in finance, The Browser website (3 amazing curated articles a day), Tyler Cowen- podcast In Conversation & his blog Marginal Revolution,Edge.org, Khe Hy’s weekly RadReads email, Wired’s Kevin Kelly, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, Ben Hunt @ Epsilon Theory, McKinsey Global Institute Research, Wait But Why, Alain de Botton, Jaron Lanier, Jordi Visser @ Weiss, Jordan Peterson, Artemis Capital.
· [I have been listening to about 12hrs of podcasts a week- and have a list of all my favourite podcasts and individual episodes, on request!]
