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 business (such as trying to let your body heal itself rather than using a doctor right away), but I didn’t come away with any specific action items. Nor did I have an epiphanies that would influence my future decisions or behaviors. Overall I think it was a lot of fluff, as I had expected after reading “The Black Swan”.
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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.
Read more from the Personal Development 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.
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 old, perhaps partly because they were so drawn out with narration, but also I think because the stories themselves weren’t that interesting.
Read more from the Business and Marketing 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.
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 circumstances. I liked how this book talked about how the imperialism and capitalism basically steamrolled the planet, crushing many resistant societies in the process. The book had an interesting perspective that emphasized that many successful ideas were not the best ideas for the benefit of the people; happy tribes were forced to try to conform to capitalist society and basically became depressed. I would have liked it if the book focused on this topic more, but instead it dabbles in a variety of ideas that are very loosely tied by the theme of things that humans construct with their minds.
Read more from the Anthropology 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.
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 topic more thoroughly.
Read more from the Economics and Finance 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.
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 perhaps I just didn’t understand fully on my first read. But even if these proofs are not rigorous, the argument of the book is still quite convincing, though I had already come to the same conclusion independently before ever reading the book or hearing about the idea. The book is definitely short on details about the solution to the problem. The author also gets unnecessarily verbose in some parts. Despite these shortcomings, the core thesis is persuasively presented. Given that the topic is so little known and yet so important, I think this original presentation of it is a definitely worth reading.
Read more from the Economics and Finance 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.
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 me that there is something awesome behind the idea of non-duality and that I should try to understand it. Despite the books attempts at explanation, I still don’t understand what non-duality really means, but it did provide some good analogies, like the optical blind spot.
You can really tell that the author is very intelligent and rational, though he discusses some things that are typically associated with irrationality. It was very interesting seeing such a clear-minded approach to the topic of spirituality.
Read more from the Psychology 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.
The Pessimism Bubble
Economist Robert Shiller was recently quoted by Business Insider as saying
So there is a bubble element what [sic] we see. But I’m not sure that the current situation is a classic bubble because I’m not certain that most people have extravagant expectations. […] In fact, the current environment may be driven more by fear than by a sense of a new era. I detect a tinge of anxiety and insecurity now that is a factor in markets, which is quite different from other market booms historically.
As I discussed in Why is it so hard to find good investments lately?, I also believe we are currently in an asset bubble in which it is particularly challenging to find good investments. In that post I argued that consumer prices were undervalued, but I never felt satisfied with that statement because it didn’t point to an actionable way to profit from the current situation.
I think Shiller and other commentators are correct that the current bubble is fundamentally different than most prior bubbles. The typical bubble is driven by irrational optimism and exuberance (see Shiller’s book: Irrational Exuberance). The current bubble seems to be driven by pessimism. There is some economic research to support the idea of pessimism-based bubbles and the idea is plausible in the sense that any kind of irrationality can lead to mis-pricing, though intuitively pessimism would lead to asset lower prices. Below I’ll try to explain how pessimism might lead to higher asset prices.
Economically, we can divide all the things you can do with wealth into the following categories:
- Consume it
- Store it (gold, cash, land)
- Loan it (investing)
- Use it as capital for new enterprise
In a pessimistic environment, people tend to reduce consumption and new enterprise. The most defensive approach is to store wealth, but some forms of investment like treasuries are possibly even safer than storage and provide a better return, so they can also be very defensive.
After the recent financial crises, people started to shift more of their wealth into conservative investments, creating large bubbles in gold, treasuries, and investment grade corporate bonds. As the crisis abated, asset allocation started to move up the risk spectrum into stocks and real estate.
Risk Spectrum:
- Treasuries, cash (lowest risk)
- Investment-grade corporate bonds (low risk)
- Stocks, real estate, and high-yield bonds (medium risk)
- New enterprise (highest risk)
All the savings that people were hoarding started to make treasuries, cash, and investment-grade bonds so expensive that investors got crowded out into medium risk investments. But based on the current low interest rates, the economy as a whole is still avoiding the highest risk investment in new enterprise. If there were a lot of new enterprise formation, there would be high demand for capital, which would drive interest rates up. The Federal Reserve has some influence over interest rates, but they do not have the power to counter the global economy. The global economy’s pessimism is the only reason why the FED is able to keep their rates so low.
The problem with this situation is that people don’t want to store their wealth because with negative real interest rates, they will be losing value. So everyone wants to loan their money to someone else to do something productive with it. But if not enough people are creating new enterprise, there’s a lot of wealth that can’t find productive uses. Loaning money around doesn’t create new wealth unless it ends up in the hands of the people who have productive uses for it. So the actionable way to profit from the current bubble is to borrow a lot of money and use it for new enterprise. Just as those who moved into stocks ahead of the curve in 2011 made a lot of money, if you stay one step ahead on the risk spectrum, you have the best chances.
Read more from the Economics 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.
Getting Things Done & Subjective Freedom
I read David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done” several years ago and I’ve been using a simplified version of his system ever since. It feels efficient and I think it’s probably necessary to have a system like it to be highly productive.
The book doesn’t discuss the psychological implications of productivity optimization, however. At one point I took a step back and noticed that for the prior six months I had felt busy nearly every day. At the beginning of that period I had moved to a new city, so I thought it made sense that I would have a lot to do to settle in. But after six months, that excuse didn’t make sense anymore. In fact, not only did I feel busy, but I felt almost like a robot that was just executing the orders on the task list whenever I had any available time. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to get the list of important action items below 8-10 items, and that just felt like too much. It actually discouraged me from doing other activities because I felt that I would prefer to get the tasks out of the way first.
One thing I noticed was that I was putting some tasks on the list that I never needed written down before, like getting groceries, doing laundry, cleaning, and buying supplies. Sometimes these would linger on the task list for a while because I didn’t have the energy or it wasn’t convenient. All of these were things that were important to do, but the act of planning them actually made me feel more busy.
The lesson I learned is that planning something in advance actually feels quite similar in many cases to having an obligation, even if you yourself made the plan. So for example, if you make plans to meet with your friends every day, you might still enjoy seeing them, but you will likely feel quite “busy” because you don’t get the feeling of subjective freedom that you would get if you had done the exact same thing spontaneously.
Unfortunately, most people are objectively fairly busy, which means it might be difficult to have a social life that doesn’t involve making advance plans. But we can try to be more spontaneous with our personal tasks.
I think everyone acknowledges that spontaneity is desirable, but the important observation for me is that spontaneity is the primitive mind’s definition of freedom. We may think that following our own plans is freedom, but the more primitive parts of our minds might not see it the same way that our conscious minds see it.
Read more from the Efficiency 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.