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 optimal/correct and not a cultural or personal bias. This book explicitly recommends not picking battles, fighting all of them, and not letting people get away with irrationality. It is interesting in how explicit and extreme it is; you can’t really reinterpret what he’s trying to say as you can with many other sources that have enough qualifications so that it can be reinterpreted to mean almost anything reasonable. Given that this management style underlies one of the most successful investment firms in the world, it provides strong evidence that there is more than one option with regards to these questions, and should instill doubt in those who think that it is objectively wrong or suboptimal. Some parts of the book made me a bit concerned about the psychological implications of working in an environment of always being judged and under threat of termination. I don’t think the book addressed these psychological concerns, so I have a suspicion that the culture described in the book might not work well for all types of people, but may work particularly well for some types.
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Canyonlands National Park
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Arches National Park
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Capitol Reef National Park
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Great Basin National Park
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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 four naljors. The four naljors describe the stages of progression of meditation. After gaining the ability to quiet thoughts, one then learns to re-integrate thoughts while retaining non-dual awareness and then learns to live in the non-dual state at all times. There were some other thought provoking lines, but as usual, much of it seems either repetitive or perhaps difficult to grasp the full significance.
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Point Reyes Photo Gallery
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The Three Body Problem
I really liked how this book was super physics-centric. It was very unique in this regard; typically science fiction deals with far-fetched ideas, but this one centered around the three-body problem and it’s chaotic solutions, which is very old school classical stuff. The world that the book creates feels a bit drab, so it ranks somewhat low on the “fun” scale, but it makes up for this in the areas of creativity and cleverness.
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Agrarian Justice by Thomas Paine (1795)
In 1795, Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet containing an introduction to the foundational principles of geolibertarian political philosophy. This was 84 years before the publication of Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty”. Although Paine’s proposed remedy seems oversimplified and potentially problematic, his motivation is much more compelling.
“Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.”
“In taking the matter upon this ground, the first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period.”
“It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race.”
“Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.”
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