Principles
Although a fairly dry read, I found this book valuable for providing a counterargument to some other management theories. Many people advise others to pick their battles and let people get away with being irrational if the decision is not obviously critical to the big picture. Furthermore, people often assume that this advice is objectively […]
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Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State
This book had more mystical and religious content than other books on this topic that I’ve read. Aside from a few good points which can be found elsewhere, this book wasn’t very helpful.
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Roaring Silence: Discovering the Mind of Dzogchen
I heard about Dzogchen from Sam Harris’ book Waking Up in which he said that it was the best form of Buddhism that he came across because it was the most direct and had the least religious distraction. Roaring Silence seems mostly consistent with that. The biggest thing I learned from this book was the […]
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The Ego Tunnel
This is a pretty deep book about the nature of consciousness. I sometimes found it hard to tell if what I was hearing was profound or obvious. I still don’t understand the central analogy with a tunnel: what specific properties of a tunnel map to specific properties of consciousness? I may have missed it, but […]
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Antifragile
Something is “antifragile” if it gains from disorder/uncertainty/randomness, as opposed to “robust” things that neither gain nor lose from disorder/uncertainty/randomness. I think this is an interesting concept that I hadn’t heard of or thought about before reading this book. Taleb discusses some ideas for how to apply the concept of antifragility to your life and […]
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Radical Acceptance
This book is about a Buddhist-inspired approach to self-acceptance. I got the feeling that I wasn’t really in the target audience because I couldn’t relate to a lot of the material. I can see how it might be helpful for others, but in the end I don’t think I got much out of it.
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Business Adventures
I read this book because I heard it was Bill Gates’ favorite business book. It is a collection of true stories about business events in the 1960s. The narration is quite detailed, sometimes describing the appearance of the scene and feelings of individuals. I found the stories pretty boring, partly because the stories are so […]
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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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