91–100 of 101 posts
Ready Player One seems to be the weakest thing on the list, read it recently and I was very disappointed.
Anyone 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.
“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.
To offer some alternatives here are three books which I believe are relevant given these challenging times: * Enlightenment Now ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35696171-enlightenment-n... ): Offers a defense that our current institutions have delivered the goods and should be defended. The left doesn't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should continue improving the system we've got -- especially…
This is Vis a Vis your first recommendation, and how it's associated with "left wing" politics. Its fascinating to me that I have a fairly sepcific idea of what you are talking about, without being able to specifically define the key concepts. Wtf is left/eight anyway, and how come we can classify politics this way in polities and topics that are novel to us? Anyone got a "history of the left and the right" thats a g…
"If we attempt to define the political left by its proclaimed goals, it is clear that very similar goals have been proclaimed by people whom the left repudiates and anathematizes, such as Fascists in general and Nazis in particular. Instead of defining these (and other) groups by their proclaimed goals, we can define them by the specific institutional mechanisms and policies they use or advocate for achieving their goals. More specifically, they can be defined by the institutional mechanisms they seek to establish for making decisions with impacts on society at large. In order to keep the discussion manageable, the vast sweep of possible decision-making mechanisms can be dichotomized into those in which individuals make decisions individually for themselves and those in which decisions are made collectively by surrogates for society at large." [1]
[1] https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/sowell-the-lef...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is Vis a Vis your first recommendation, and how it's associated with "left wing" politics. Its fascinating to me that I have a fairly sepcific idea of what you are talking about, without being able to specifically define the key concepts. Wtf is left/eight anyway, and how come we can classify politics this way in polities and topics that are novel to us? Anyone got a "history of the left and the right" thats a g…
Thomas Sowell splits it down collectivist lines: "If we attempt to define the political left by its proclaimed goals, it is clear that very similar goals have been proclaimed by people whom the left repudiates and anathematizes, such as Fascists in general and Nazis in particular. Instead of defining these (and other) groups by their proclaimed goals, we can define them by the specific institutional mechanisms and po…
“If we attempt to define the political left by its proclaimed goals, it is clear that very similar goals have been proclaimed by people whom the left repudiates and anathematizes, such as Fascists in general and Nazis in particular.”
The central unifying, defining goal proclaimed by leftists since the origin of the left is the achievement of a radical egalitarianism in the distribution of power in society.
To say that fascists in general and Nazis in particular did not proclaim such goals is, well, a massive understatement.
Under a book on Napoleon, Sam Altman says: > An incredible primary-source portrait on a brilliant (but obviously deeply flawed) individual. What is the obviously deeply flawed characteristic about him that Altman is referring to? I read Napoleon: A Life a few years ago and found him fascinating with character flaws like every other human being, but nothing that particularly struck me as "deeply flawed."
Maybe that whole lets conquer Russia thing that ended in the deaths of 400,000 of his countrymen (IIRC)? Have you seen the Minard plot? https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/229-vital-statistics-of-a-...
And thanks for the link.
Nobody going to mention Bad Blood - Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup?
I had it on my list. But wanted to include optimistic recommendations
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to go against the grain here regarding The Three Body Problem, not because it's a bad book, but because it fails to live up to its billing in a subtle but disappointing way. The book is often touted as a "hard sci fi" masterpiece, and to me (and wikipedia and most definitions I've seen), "hard" means remaining faithful to the boundaries of plausible physics. T3BP almost entirely respects these limits, even…
Can you Rot13 what you're talking about? It's been a while but not sure what you're referring to.
“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.
Ordered it. Thank you.