I'm currently readin "Apache Wars" (can't remember the rest) so far, it's the best book on Iraq I ever read.
YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List
21–30 of 101 posts
Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List
#22“This is water” has to be one of my favorite short essays/speeches of all time. If you haven’t read it/seen it before so yourself a favor and go through it, it doesn’t take very long. Seriously wish I could get these ideas into everyone’s head.
FWIW, I have seen people use the image related to this piece (seen through a google search...) in the most annoying way to discredit peoples views on a subject because "they are a fish in the water." I have not known the source of this garbage, so I hope it's a simplification of the actual source, but I will listen carefully :)
We don't know who first said, "We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a fish", but we're pretty sure it wasn't David Foster Wallace. [1]
Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List
#23“This is water” has to be one of my favorite short essays/speeches of all time. If you haven’t read it/seen it before so yourself a favor and go through it, it doesn’t take very long. Seriously wish I could get these ideas into everyone’s head.
Seriously, excellent suggestion. Thank you.
I'm in the middle of making the switch towards maximizing positive outcomes for others, having realized that I have enough for myself. The author paints a description of self-awareness here that I'll be sure to return to every now and again.
Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List
#24> Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet
I was very disappointed with this book.
The book TLDR : Current solar technology is great but will flat-line at XX% of energy usage. We need new stuff.
In fact, this book could have been written 10 or 20 years ago. It pushes all sort of mythical solutions and still-in-lab technologies. And it hand-waves away the entire progress in solar/battery/EVs in the last 10 years.
Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List
#25Anyone else read "The Undoing Project" (a Michael Lewis book on Daniel Kahneman, which was on the list)?
I thought it sounded super interesting, but I'm getting mixed impressions from Amazon reviews.
Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List
#26> Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet I was very disappointed with this book. The book TLDR : Current solar technology is great but will flat-line at XX% of energy usage. We need new stuff. In fact, this book could have been written 10 or 20 years ago. It pushes all sort of mythical solutions and still-in-lab technologies. And it hand-waves away the entire progress in solar/batter…
"Sustainable Energy – without the hot air" is a much better book and available free to read online at https://www.withouthotair.com/
Whilst it's a bit out of date and focuses mostly on the UK, it contains a wealth of figures and references for all possible renewable sources. It covers the topic in a neutral and non-biased way presenting the numbers and graphs to make the point that the transition to renewable will have to require a number of technologies as well as huge energy savings in transportation and heating.
Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List
#27I saw someone mention it in a HN comment before, but I'd like to restate it here since it is definitely one of those perspective-altering books: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. The author is a professor and prolific researcher of the effects of sleep on the human body, and goes into nearly every nook and cranny of what sleep does for the human body. He has scared me off of my usual practice of sleeping 6 hours or l…
> Throughout the book, the author cites a scientific study and article on nearly every page, so you know that these are real hard facts.
This is almost discouraging to me. If spending too much time on HN has taught me anything, it's that citing a study (especially medical, nutrition, and psychology papers, among other fields I'm probably missing), is not nearly enough of a guarantee that some assertion should be called a 'hard fact'.
I tend to depend more on the force of overall coherence in an argument, as well as its fidelity with my own experiences. Of course this is a problematic heuristic in its own right, since it by definition limits your ability to believe counter-intuitive but true results—but I'm not sure what's better.
I think with enough reproductions of results in varied contexts, unintentional reappearance of results in overlapping or unrelated studies, applications being developed on top of results (treatments, engineering applications, other fields of study)—then you can start considering the result to be 'factual'.
But from the above description, the impression I get of the book is that it's probably one of these taking a bunch of new studies which can be read a certain way to push a hypothesis the author is in favor of, but it'll take a decade or more before we have a good sense of whether the whole thing was BS (or at least badly exaggerated) or not.
Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List
#28Anyone else read "The Undoing Project" (a Michael Lewis book on Daniel Kahneman, which was on the list)? I thought it sounded super interesting, but I'm getting mixed impressions from Amazon reviews.
Yeah, I liked it -- was a good mix of biography/personal stories about Kahneman and Tversky and brought in some real-world examples of applied topics covered in Thinking Fast And Slow.
Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List
#29I saw someone mention it in a HN comment before, but I'd like to restate it here since it is definitely one of those perspective-altering books: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. The author is a professor and prolific researcher of the effects of sleep on the human body, and goes into nearly every nook and cranny of what sleep does for the human body. He has scared me off of my usual practice of sleeping 6 hours or l…
> Throughout the book, the author cites a scientific study and article on nearly every page, so you know that these are real hard facts. This is almost discouraging to me. If spending too much time on HN has taught me anything, it's that citing a study (especially medical, nutrition, and psychology papers, among other fields I'm probably missing), is not nearly enough of a guarantee that some assertion should be call…
I prefer references so I have more information available to assess the validity myself. If an author makes assertions without evidence to back them up, then they are much less credible.
Having many recent studies available to back up a hypothesis at least informs us that it is credible, given our knowledge at the time.
Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List
#30Pretty cool of YC to link to the books on Amazon and not include affiliate links for monetization. Creates more trust in the "realness" of the creation of the list.