201–210 of 434 posts
The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Literally destroyed left wing politics in my mind.
Since 2007, I've taken detailed notes on every book I've read, then posted them on my site with my top recommendations up top: https://sivers.org/book My top recommendations here for the Hacker News crowd - with a nudge for the under-rated, are: The Time Paradox - by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd https://sivers.org/book/TimeParadox Profound idea that everyone has a primary time focus: either Future-focused, Present-f…
Fooled by randomness- Nassim T
Principle - Ray Dalio
Drive - D Pink
The Laws of Human Nature -R Greene
Influence- Robert Cialdini
21st lessons for 21st century - Y. Harari
Why we sleep -M. Walker
Skin in the Game - Nassim T. Social Animal - David B.
Einstein - Isaacson
Steve Jobs - Isaacson
Blink - malcolm gladwell
Outlier - malcolm gladwell
The tipping point - malcolm gladwell
Game of Throne series
Tangent: doesn’t the decade end at the end of next year?
Principles by Ray Dalio changed my life and really helped me better understand that inwardly looking at and analyzing my emotional responses to problems at work and home set me up for failure and since reading it I've had such profound clarity of thought. I recommend that book to literally everyone.
Felt like this was helpful from a personal perspective. Not sure how many organizations could live up to this level of discipline.
Zen mind beginner’s mind: Highly recommended to anyone interested in meditation. Helped me understand the non-goal aspect of the practice. Gravity’s rainbow: Not the easiest read but immensely rewarding. For better or worse some of Pynchon’s vivid descriptions are burned into my soul. Crime and punishment: I’m not into literature but this one is worth it. A great dive into human psychology. Deliverance: intense story…
I read Crime and Punishment last year and found it incredibly disappointing, considering its massive reputation. Simpletons, idiots, caricatures, buffoons and victims performing lots of hand-wringing, posturing, dithering, swooning and assorted drama. Hard to identify with or care about any of them. Call it entertainment, but I prefer Dickens.
I found Crime and Punishment shallow in it's story and characters when compared to The Brothers Karamazov.
Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina, because it made me a better father; Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, because it taught me of the importance of something that I’d occasionally dismiss as a nuisance; Pain Free and Pain Free at Your PC by Pete Egoscue, because it completely changed the way I understood posture, pain, and how repetition influences my body; and Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, because it…
Re: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, this critique of the book is worth a read: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
Point 1: the chart bottoms out at 7, which falls within the range the book recommends. I'm fairly sure he recommends 7-9, and that the required amt varies from person to person. Another thought I had: metabolism and longevity go hand and hand. I mean, I just read a brand new paper from George Church's Harvard lab, showing that they reversed several chronic ailments in mice by inserting FGF21, which regulates glucose levels. And sleep absolutely regulates metabolism. Personally, I'm keeping my ears perked up when it comes to metabolism/circadian rhythms/homeostasis, etc.
Point 2: Depression is an incredibly complicated topic. It is a psychological construct, the net result of thousands and thousands of genes, filtered through a modern technological world, and then filtered through inventories, interviews, and assessments. For this reason, I am not at all surprised that Guzey was able to find studies that suggest that sleep deprivation might have some benefit for some people. I would HIGHLY recommend this new, open-access Nature review paper covering the genome wide studies on depression: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-019-0450-5. Its almost not worth pitting a complex phenotype like depression against another complex behavior like depression. But what the hell, let's brush with broad strokes: the significant genetic variants associated with depression have to do with regulating homeostasis (eg sirtuins). So I would not be surprised if good sleep is at least correlated with low levels of depression.
Point 3: I know almost nothing about FFI, but we have kept mice awake, and they do eventually die. I'm pretty sure humans would die too, but ethics precludes us from performing such a study.
Points 4&5: This is just fussing about Walker's writing and WHO. I'll have to agree with Guzey that Walker's citations and consistency are often weak. And I honestly couldn't care less about WHO. But I'm pretty confident that sleep quantity has declined with time across the world. I remain curious about the connections between light and circadian rhythms (I think retinal cells go straight to the superchiasmatic nucleus, the circadian rhythm controller). Also, sugar is a thing in the modern world.
So yeah, I'm just frustrated by his nitpicking, and his seeming lack of appreciation for sleep as an open biological question. We don't know why we sleep, really. If anything, the title is the worst part of the book. But at least the contents respect the question. This criticism does not. Nonetheless, I am a sucker for obsessive bloggers (eg slatestar, gwern, cowen, etc), so I will definitely be checking out Guzey's other writing. It looks interesting.
Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina, because it made me a better father; Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, because it taught me of the importance of something that I’d occasionally dismiss as a nuisance; Pain Free and Pain Free at Your PC by Pete Egoscue, because it completely changed the way I understood posture, pain, and how repetition influences my body; and Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, because it…
I also loved 7 Habits -- before reading it I had kind of brushed it off as just another wishy-washy self help book, but it exceeded all expectations. However, what I took away from it was nothing about productivity, but rather how to live a good life. Habits 1-3, 5, and 7 are all solid advice that have broad application far outside of the narrow domains of the workplace. The mental model in Habit 1 about the "circle…
I felt that it's too verbose (maybe okay for when it was written). I couldn't get myself to read beyond a point, when it felt like he is just going on and on about the same point in a lot of different ways.