201–210 of 454 posts
My favorite on this topic is The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. It’s a deep dive into the emergence and evolution of the oil industry. Technological innovations, financial developments, political shifts and so on.
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Back in the day, when authors were afraid of negative (public perception) pushback, they used to write and publish under pseudonyms. Not sure it'd work today, everyone and their mother seems so focus on building their "personal brand" and attaching their name to everything that it seems impossible for an author to not take credit for something that would surely make big waves.
Unraveling a person behind a pseudonym and Doxing is much easier nowadays though. But I guess a self hosted blog would work just fine
For state level actors, sure. But generally? I don't think that's necessarily true, as long as you come up with a pseudonym that is unique, not related to anything in your real life, and you haven't already published a lot of prose under your real name.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes! Lots of detail, but it also shows how many geniuses it took working over years to really make it work.
Reading some of these books recommended here, perhaps the most shocking thing is that so much is due to randomness: an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not get completed. I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations? "How we could NOT g…
[0]: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/448140/the-bill-gates-proble...
It is based on ~20 years of research about Robert Oppenheimer, and is the inspiration for the movie Oppenheimer. Robert Oppenheimer is the scientist who lead the development of the first atomic bomb.
> Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.
In this case, the "people and character studies" are very critical to understanding "the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like". The early part of the book goes in depth to Oppenheimer's social ties to communist groups, which is critical to understanding the reason why he was forbidden from continuing research in the latter part of his life.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Prometheus-Triumph-Tragedy-O...
(To make a long story short, the American Communists, and their sympathizers, in the 1930s were blissfully unaware that the Soviet Union was an authoritarian hellhole. Many of the people involved in the Manhattan project had ties to those American Communists, and thus scientists in the Soviet Union. Because, for them, the Manhattan project was an academic endeavor, they wanted to share their results with their Soviet collogues. And that's how the nuclear race started... Information was leaked to the Soviets in the name of science. Oppenheimer was a victim of the resulting witch hunt; which requires understanding the "people and character studies" part of the book.)
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“Check out something other than books” is a hilarious response to a request for book recommendations, though I would have included a specific example of a non-book, like “I see you mentioned private equity, have you listened to the songs of Jim Croce? He often writes about love and getting into bar fights, which are things that some people have difficulty with”
I remember a few years ago Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters rock band died unexpectedly and the cause of death was not immediately revealed. I was disappointed to learn sometime later that the cause had been heart failure. If I were a member of the Foo Fighters and had to die at the relatively early age of 50, of course I would have wanted it to be in a bar fight. Come to think of it, Bar Fighters might be a good n…
That might depend on how you feel about 'Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991', which is a book about bands starting.
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I share your thoughts. Sometimes you just need to be at the right place, at the right time, solving the exact problem and this is troublesome, especially in this era when so much is already invented. Maybe I just have a wrong view, but I don't know how to decouple from this.
The fact that capitalism can be modeled by pure random chance only drives the point home, in my opinion. So much depends on luck... That being said, luck can be engineered, to a degree: - meeting people; networking - having access to resources - recognizing potential opportunities and taking advantage of them That being said, I'm by no means "successful" but I'm also not a "failure" ... I win some, and I lose some.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/61327449-how-big-thin... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34921647-built [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59696349-build