Sapiens
This book talked about the human ability to collectively believe in ideas that are not necessarily true, but have important implications for society. For example, believing that fiat money has value is only true because so many other people believe it, but it is not objectively true because it would not have value under other […]
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Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor
Although Charlie Munger is really interesting, I didn’t get a whole lot out of this book. It is mostly a very basic introduction to Munger’s investing philosophy, which I’ve read about many times before. Even if I hadn’t been exposed to his investing philosophy before, I still think there are other books that cover the […]
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Progress and Poverty
The thesis of this book is very important. It argues that poverty and much human suffering is the direct result of private ownership of land. The author attempts to prove some basic theorems of economics, but I wasn’t convinced that these proofs were rigorous. I didn’t spend too much time thinking about them though, so […]
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The Myth of Freedom
Although this book was fairly down-to-earth relative to most Buddhist texts, I didn’t really get much out of it. It primarily focused on discussing psychological tendencies of people in general during the course of their daily lives. It had a more pessimistic/negative tone than other books of this type and I found it somewhat boring.
Read more from the Philosophy category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
What I found interesting about this book is that it seemed to make an honest effort to explain non-dual experience to the reader. Most books that discuss non-duality shroud the concept in mystery so it’s hard to even believe that they are talking about something really important. This was the first book that really convinced […]
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Guns, Germs, and Steel
This is a truly amazing book about why some societies are more successful than others at developing technology and conquering the world. The author explains how geographical and environmental factors are highly determinant, which implies that genetic and cultural factors are much less significant. The most important factor in the early stages of civilization was access […]
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Clean Code
This book provides a good overview of best practices for coding. I liked that it took concrete opinionated stances like: 1. “The only way to make the deadline—the only way to go fast—is to keep the code as clean as possible at all times.” (p6) 2. “Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading vs. writing is […]
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Dataclysm
Although this book wasn’t particularly entertaining, it did have quite a few impressive data-backed observations of human psychology that I’ve never seen before. It had a lot more content than the couple of blog posts I saw from the author, so it was worth the read.
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Deep Value
The thesis of this book is that the worst quality stocks have the best expected returns, as a portfolio. Even the these low-quality stocks have a much higher probability of going bankrupt individually, they also have a much higher probability of shooting up in price. So it sounds like a classic high volatility situation where […]
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The Last Firewall
Although I really like the author’s Avogadro Corp and this book had even better reviews, I was overall bored with the book. It is basically a Sci-Fi action book and I personally don’t like action books. The plot revolves around AI and a population that has neural implants to interface with the internet. AI generally […]
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