The Courage to be Disliked

By Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

This book is written as a Socratic dialogue between a student and a philosopher. The books focus is Adlerian psychology and how it can be applied to ones life. A few core tenants of Adlerian psychology is that all problems are inter-personal relationship problems, we are in our current situation because of courage not causes (your past didn't cause you to live this way, you just lack the courage to live any other way), and separation of tasks. Separation of tasks is all about realizing what things are your tasks and what things are others, and never interfering in another persons task. If you write a book, it is not your task to react to that book. So if someone reads your book and reacts negatively and starts insulting you, with separation of tasks you can say that it is that persons task to react to your book and that you should not interfere.

I also found one part about feelings of inferiority quite interesting and here is a snippet of my conversation with Lee about it.

---

Most people think inferiority complex and superiority complex are polar opposites but this isn't the case. People have feelings of inferiority. This is natural and helps us excel and exceed. However if we don't have the courage to excel and exceed this leads to an inferiority complex.

Feelings of Inferiority >> inferiority complex.

An inferiority complex is the excuse we give for not having the courage to excel or exceed because perhaps we are fine or comfortable with our situation but don't want to admit it.

"If only I was smart enough to go to school I'd get a real job and move out of my parents basement." When in reality they actually quite like their life playing vidya and meme'in and they don't have the courage to try new things and introduce uncertainty in their life.

Then if you stay in an inferiority complex too long, some people can't handle it. They can't handle the feeling of being inferior and move further down the rabbit hole to the superiority complex.

Feelings of inferiority >> inferiority complex >> superiority complex.

A superiority complex is when you are sick of feeling inferior (despite the fact you don't have the courage to truly excel and exceed) so you create false superiorities to help yourself get over inferior feelings. This can be wearing branded clothes, taking pictures with celebrities to show off that your special, over doing facebook / showing off / boasting.

However these things are bad but the worst offender of all is when you go from boasting about how great you are (but actually aren't) to boasting about your misfortunes.

Feelings of inferiority >> inferiority complex >> superiority complex >> boasting of misfortunes.

Boasting of misfortunes allows you to further express superiority over other people "Oh you have no idea what its like to be short/a minority/fat" etc by boasting that you have a heavier cross to bear than other people. This allows you to not only boast but also control the people around you. And the worst part of the final stage is that its insanely difficult to escape because

"As long as one continues to use ones misfortunes to ones advantage, in order to be special, one will always need that misfortune."

---

Interesting quote I liked.

Do not look at the past and do not look at the future, one lives each complete moment like a dance. There is no need to compete with anyone, and one has no use to for destinations, as long as you are dancing you will get somewhere.

The Rational Optimist

By Matt Ridley

This book is an very interesting compare and contrast to Sapiens.

Earlier this year I gave up on Why Nations Fail a few hours in because the whole book was about how economic prosperity strongly corresponds to the "largest number of people having a say in political and economic decision-making, as opposed to cases where a small group of people control the institutions." I appreciate the effort, but at this point I don't need 15 hours of content to believe that. Why Nations Fail however ended with the conclusion (based on the summary I read) that Democracy is the most inclusive and therefore will have the most prosperity. Weak. If you are going to go over the top with driving your points home at least go all the way.

At first I thought this book was going to be the same of scratching the surface but not actually going deep, as the beginning of the book is all about the wonders of free trade and capitalism.

However, I decided to stick with it because so many interesting people recommended this book and I'm glad I did. In Sapiens, Harari talks about how due to our improved diet, our brains eventually got large enough so that we could learn new things (such as making new tools) by changing our software (in our brains) as opposed to only being able to learn new things by changing our hardware (our genes). He says how there is a big difference between a neanderthal using a bone tool and a human. The neanderthal is essentially showcasing what Dawkins calls the extended phenotype, an external expression of its genes, which is no different than a bird building a nest. Sapiens however were able to learn much faster by modifying our hardware which led to better tools, more free time, more time get ahead, etc, etc the rest is history.

Ridley argues in this book that what started the initial spark was not our ability to learn, but our ability to trade. Chimps can learn sign language but Ridley lists studies where chimps are unwilling to trade some food they kinda of like for a food they really like. They are unable to grasp the fact that you can give something up to get something better. It is not our ability to learn that has set us apart, but our ability to trade. He then proceeds to drive home the point that prosperous societies have little to no restrictions on free trade and how history has shown that the easiest way to torpedo your own economy is to close your borders.

As an aside I like this Naval quote on why blockchains are so interesting and feel its relevant to Ridleys whole trading thesis. "150 neanderthals could coordinate in battle because they had the same genetics. 5,000 humans could coordinate in battle because they all had the shared myth of christianity. Blockchains allow humans who don't know each other, who don't trust each other, and who may not reveal their identities to each other, to transact securely."

Slack

By Tom DeMarco

Tom DeMarco was a co-author on Peopleware which is why I decided to try this book.

I'm hilariously bad at explore-exploit problems. I get stuck in local minima all the time because I'm scared of "wasting time" in case exploring or trying new options yields no or negative results. I cook from a small subset of meals since I'm scared I'll waste my time making something I don't like when I could have just exploited the mediocre option I know. This doesn't make sense in a holistic view but when your living groundhog day, if you don't want to risk a bad meal today, you probably won't tomorrow either (and if nothings changed then even a year from now it won't be more likely). I do this with food, outdoor activities, video games, you name it.

It's why I decided to pick up this book as this books primary focus is on efficiency, specifically the elimination and reduction of efficiency in exchange for effectiveness.

Slack

Imagine a secretary who is busy for only 4 hours out of the day. The rest of the time he sits there and maybe wanders the halls looking for something to do. Perhaps one day an engineer walks up as asks if he can enter this data into spreadsheet or make some copies. Then next week a manager asks to book individual meetings with her and all of her staff. Each of these items takes up maybe 2 hours of the secretaries time. This isn't very efficient.

A outside efficiency consultant comes along and notices that there are multiple secretaries for each group that only is busy 4 hours of the day on average. The efficiency consultant advises the company to combine all the secretaries duties so that every secretary is busy for 7.5 hours each day (careful to leave that extra 0.5 hour to handle the 2 hour tasks that seem to pop up once a week) and to fire all the rest. Now the secretary is busy all the time and when an engineer or manager has some work for him to do, they now find that they have to wait 4 days for the 2 hours of work to be finished. 

This is certainly more efficient, but not effective. You have gained efficiency but you have lost responsiveness. Imagine at your job you are 100% busy for a whole year. New technologies arrive or new techniques are invented, but you don't have time to discover or train or use these new advances which could help you do your job, as you are too busy. This is where slack comes in.

A penny saved is not always a penny earned, but it is always a penny not invested. Investing in slack (which can take many forms such as of time, control, or power) may not seem efficient, but it can be effective.

Lost But Making Good Time

You and your manager sit down and open up the latest project planning software as you begin to plan out and schedule the latest project you are responsible for. As you create the project it asks you a question.

Do you want to:
-Minimize time
or
-Minimize cost

"God damnit!" You manager barks out. " I want you to minimize cost and time!"

When a person is told to complete two mutually exclusive goals, the result is stress. Stress is a sign of slack deficiency. If the manager gave you slack on the amount of time you could spend, you could minimize the cost. However giving you no slack in either direction just means at best you'll accomplish some weighted compromise of the two, and at worst the extra stress will cause you to use bad judgement in some other area that in the long run costs you and the company even more.

Most slack averse companies are plagued by a culture of fear. When you realize the root cause of most frustrating corporate decisions isn't stupidity but fear, a whole lot of absurdities (like the one above) begin to make sense.

For example at my current job, I am plagued and drowned by standardized processes. People who are vastly removed from the work are required to sign off on documents or decisions they know nothing about. I have to go through 30 step processes which give me specific guidance on how to do all the mechanically easy stuff but give no guidance on doing the actual core or hard part of the problem. I used to pull at my hair trying to figure how these rules could be created. When you realize its fear driving decisions like this, it all of a sudden makes sense.

Process standardization is a direct result of fearful management. As a defense against failure, a standardized process is a kind of armor. The more worried you are, the more armor and standardization you pile on. But armor has a side effect of reducing your mobility. 

If you're facing your problem head on and its coming right for you, perhaps this isn't so bad. But what if your real threat is an unknown (as it is most of the time) and its to your left, or ten steps to your right. Well if you can't turn and face it in time for it to stab you in the side, then all that armor didn't do you any good.

Change and Growth

If you never allow your employees any slack time to fail, learn, train, and most importantly spend time that could yield no benefit, the best case scenario is your company stays exactly where it is. The more likely case is it regresses.

Who can drive change in an organization? Can it be pushed down from the top executives down onto the plebs? No. Can the front line workers drive change? No, they don't have the power. Change will be primarily driven by the middle managers. Be sure to cut them some slack.

Risk Management

"Best case scenario I will finish this project in a year, however given the risks which will cost a certain amount of time if each risk materializes, peak probability is at 18 months, with the tail falling to 0% probability of taking longer than 24 months."

"Well lets aim for 12 months! I can't wait to tell the higher ups!"

"Remember, 12 months is possible but not probable. Like I said, peak probability is at 18 months."

...
2 days later
...

"Hey boss, listen I found that if I have all my workers spend a month doing this specific training we can reduce the impact if any of the risks end up materializing (think practicing fire drills in school or placing fire extinguisher). If the risks never happen it will have been a waste but it shifts my peak probability to the left quite significantly. However it means that if everything goes well 13 months is now the minimum time to complete the project."

You can guess how that would go over with the boss who just loudly proclaimed 12 months to the higher ups. Attached is a picture showing the probability distributions. Without any slack in the schedule, you can see how a boss would make a decision against the company's interest.

Originally posted on Facebook April 2, 2017.

Elon Musk

By Ashlee Vance

I felt this book was pretty poorly written in quite a few places. Grammatically there are a number of sentences that are so jarring you have to read them a over multiple times to get what he his saying. There's a few things that Vance mentions that I found quite creepy such as when he introduces Elon's future wife when they first meet as "Talulah Riley, a virgin." No body needs to know that man. Vance also struggles to really grasp some of the basic science Elon talks about and ends up giving cocked up or non-descriptive explanations that make it hard for anyone to understand what he's talking about.

For example, SpaceX flew one of their rockets in a military cargo plane as opposed to the usual method of transporting it by barge in order to save some time. Even though airplane cabins are pressurized, the cabin pressure still drops pretty significantly at cruising altitudes. As the plane started to descend for landing the rocket began collapsing inward on itself. This is because as they were flying at high altitude the pressure inside the rocket slowly dropped to this lower cabin pressure. Then when plane began descending rapidly the pressure outside the rocket began to increase faster than the pressure inside the rocket (as the rocket was more or less sealed). Low pressure inside the rocket and high pressure outside the rocket caused a net force pushing inwards to be exerted all over the rockets body in a manner it wasn't designed for, causing it to crumple. Vance describes this by saying

This would have been a fine idea except the SpaceX engineers forgot to factor in what the pressurized plane would do to the body of the rocket, which is less than an eighth of an inch thick. As the plane started its descent into Hawaii, everyone inside of it could hear strange noises coming from the cargo hold. “I looked back and could see the stage crumpling,” said Bulent Altan, the former head of avionics at SpaceX. “I told the pilot to go up, and he did.” The rocket had behaved much like an empty water bottle will on a plane, with the air pressure pushing against the sides of the bottle and making it buckle.

The pressurized plane helped, not hurt. And comparing the rocket crumpling on a plane to a empty water bottle crumpling on a plane isn't a very helpful analogy. And the air pressure is pushing against both sides of the bottle. If you want to read a great example of a biographer who truly grasps the basic science worked on by the subject, read Isaacson's Einstein biography. That book has my favorite explanation of special relativity.  

That all being said, this is a pretty good book. The amount of research and interviews Vance did to provide mutliple view points to key times in Elon's life is pretty astounding. I do feel I understand Elon much better. Below are the three things I feel made Elon as successful as he is. 

He is a nano-manager. However, he's not the micro-managing type who waits for you to finish your work and then nitpick all the details where he would have made a different decision. Instead he's right there over your shoulder the whole step of the way and he's not afraid to get his hands dirty. If you are on the critical path and you get stuck, he'll come find you personally and try to help. His classic line at SpaceX was "There are five hundred people at this company. What do you need?" He also never tells his employees to do what he himself wouldn't do. He always has his desk in the most visible area of the office so that everyone can see the hours and weekend shifts he's putting in. My favorite story in the book was

An employee could be telling Musk that there’s no way to get the cost on something like that actuator down to where he wants it or that there is simply not enough time to build a part by Musk’s deadline. “Elon will say, ‘Fine. You’re off the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time. I will deliver it,’” Brogan said. “What’s crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he’s fired someone and taken their job, he’s delivered on whatever the project was.”

Elon above everything likes for things to be resolved and then moving on. He doesn't like things lingering in limbo. When his marriage with his first wife was rocky, he came home one night and said, "we either decide to stay together or we breakup tonight." She gave him a non-answer saying how she wanted another week to decide. The next day Elon told her he was filing for divorce. At SpaceX there was mutliple times where employees would be weighing two paths of action and Elon would just pick one, and that was final. They could then move on. When he was ousted from PayPal as CEO, he didn't fight it. He knew the board was making a bad decision, he had plenty of grounds to fight it, but he decided to just accept their decision and move on.

He has insanely high intelligence.

Musk initially relied on textbooks to form the bulk of his rocketry knowledge. But as SpaceX hired one brilliant person after another, Musk realized he could tap into their stores of knowledge. He would trap an engineer in the SpaceX factory and set to work grilling him about a type of valve or specialized material. “I thought at first that he was challenging me to see if I knew my stuff,” said Kevin Brogan, one of the early engineers. “Then I realized he was trying to learn things. He would quiz you until he learned ninety percent of what you know.” People who have spent significant time with Musk will attest to his abilities to absorb incredible quantities of information with near-flawless recall. It’s one of his most impressive and intimidating skills and seems to work just as well in the present day as it did when he was a child vacuuming books into his brain.

Bit by Bit

by Jeffrey Tucker

70% Liberty, 30% Bitcoin. Both the liberty part and the Bitcoin part of this book are aimed at a mainstream audience so I gained a few new ways to articulate stuff I already knew but didn't really learn that much new information.

However one thing I did learn was a good argument for Bitcoin as money under the Mises regression theorem. Roughly, the expected future purchasing power of money explains its current purchasing power (the reason to collect money now, as opposed to collecting other goods, is the knowledge that you can use the money in the future to buy things you want). This would be a circular argument (it's purchasing power explains its purchasing power) unless by stepping back through time (the current purchasing power is explained by yesterday's purchasing power, and so on) we can find the point where the thing being used as money had some original value. That is it originally provided some value before being used as a means of exchange. I've heard plenty of arguments against Bitcoin strictly because it has never had any value in this sense unlike other forms of money like gold, sea shells, etc. You can't eat Bitcoin, use it in manufacturing, or make cool jewelry out of it, so why should we use it as money?

Tucker claims that Bitcoins original value is its unique payment system. Individual Bitcoins and the blockchain are intrinsically tied. You can't have one without the other. You can have cash without visa or gold without bullion, but you can't have Bitcoin without the blockchain payment system. Tucker points out that in the early days of Bitcoin before it was tied to any monetary value (before the 10,000 BTC pizza transaction) people were testing out sending Bitcoins to each other and begun to see value in the Blockchain payment system before there was any value in Bitcoin. And thus the root of the current purchasing power of Bitcoin is the blockchain payment system tied to it.

Will definitely be my go to recommendation to a future liberty and Bitcoin convert.

Flowers for Algernon

By Daniel Keyes

In this book the main characters IQ goes from 68 to 180. Since I've been interested in IQ recently I decided to pick this up for some relaxing nighttime reading.

This was a fun read which I didn't expect much out of and I got exactly that. The books most interesting parts are at the beginning and at the very end. At the beginning of the book Charlie has the slow burn of his IQ going from 68 to 180. The book is presented at the beginning as a series of progress reports where Charlie free associates and writes all his thoughts down. It's interesting to read his changing thoughts and the author does a really good job of having all the changes act like the minute hand on a clock. At the time your reading you don't notice any change but when you look back or think back you can clearly tell that there has been significant movement.

Once Charlie has a 180 IQ however he does classic smart person trope stuff which I don't find even remotely interesting or realistic. With nothing more than a piano in his apartment he goes from just messing around to writing an amazing symphony in about 2 days. He writes a linguistic paper in a few days and sends it off which he claims will set back the current research a few decades. It's all the typical "super smart just means doing what you would do but 1000x faster or 1000x better" stuff as opposed to doing something completely original. Even Charlies big revelation is the thing every book reader will have guessed not 5% into the book.

Can't really fault the author though as he doesn't have a 180 IQ but it's always nice to see some original thinking. It's a short read so crush it for fun but then follow it up with Understand by Ted Chiang for a story about real IQ gains. 

The Grapes of Wrath

By John Steinbeck

Some books help your mind float into the sky, others ground you. This book is the latter.

Not sure what to do since empathy isn't cool anymore? Come and get a years worth of rational compassion from this book.

Feel like life's problems are paralyzing you and stopping you from being happy? Read this book and gain some perspective on the types of problems your are facing.

Tough times, tougher people.

Originally posted on Facebook March 28, 2017.

Sleep

By Nick Littlehales

Seriously read this book. If you sleep, you should read it, no excuses. 

This book is the ideal self-improvement book to me for a number of reasons including: 

• Providing easily actionable and measurable steps to improve quality of life,
• bullet point summary of every chapter summarizing how you should act (the bulk of chapters is the why), 
• and doesn't break the time bank (I now devote less time to sleep and thinking about sleep than previously). Nothing worse than reading a self-improvement book that requires you to devote 4 hours a day and tons of mental energy to be successful at one specific thing, aintnobodygottimeforthat.jpg.

My new sleep schedule.

• My constant wake time is now 7:45 am. Doesn't matter if I go to bed at 4:30 am, I wake up at 7:45 am, and it really isn't bad.
• I only go to sleep at either midnight (5 cycles), 1:30 am (4 cycles), 3 am (3 cycles). If I'm not in bed ready to sleep (this includes mentally not just physically), I wait for the next cycle time.
• My ideal goal is 35 cycles a week (never going to happen), 30 - 34 is pretty good, and anything below 28 is really pushing it.

I'm more confident about sleep (no need to worry about not getting a full 8 hours before a big day), and I devote less time and mental energy to it as the system he proposes is so simple.

Originally posted on Facebook March 1, 2017.

Black Hawk Down

By Mark Bowden

You've probably seen or at least heard of the movie that is based on this book. The movie captures the essence of battle but theres only so much information that can be conveyed in a 2.5 hour movie. This book is a deep dive into the battle of Mogadishu and is a technical masterpiece given that, with few exceptions, every line of dialogue and event is either corroborated by multiple first hand sources or video / audio evidence.  The only area of the book where I wished there was more information was on the actions of Delta Force. Some of the Delta Force men don't even seem human. Their courage and resolve in battle can only be described as literally incredible (both extraordinary and difficult to believe). With the exception of the thoughts of MSG Paul Howe, all other accounts of Delta are from an outside perspective. The tradition of Delta Force is "silent professionalism" so it's understandable why so few operators were willing to talk to Bowden.

I'm bit of a military buff and I went into this book thinking that it would be an easy and familiar read. However, I was quickly floored by the detailed descriptions of death and dismemberment. The description of the lost convey that drove through the city under constant fire from all directions, made me feel on some small level the terror that was experienced by those present. Bowden tried to make the book read like fiction with more emotion than a more historical record keeping approach, and it shows.

Another part of the book that gave the story more teeth is the fact that I'm now older than a majority of those present at the battle. I first watched the movie when I was in my early teens, so it was easy to think that the people in the battle were adults who were more prepared to handle situations like this. Ranger Richard "Alphabet" W. Kowalewski, Jr was only 20 when he died during the battle of Mogadishu. With the exception of a few commanding officers, the Rangers all seemed like kids.

I think this a great book to expand a persons horizon on some of the harsher realities of life. We live in one of the most peaceful times in human history which makes it easy to forget some of things we take for granted. This book doesn't glamorize battle, but it does provide the thoughts and feelings of people not unlike yourself, in one.

Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

Interviewer: Is there no “ending” to “Infinite Book” because there couldn’t be? Or did you just get tired of writing it?

DFW: There is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an “end” can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you.

Reading the quote above (in a chapter on projective geometry in Not To Be Wrong) is what originally got me interested in Infinite Jest. A writer who's enough of a mathematician to know of projective geometry has written a book which has no ending. Sounds like something I would enjoy. And I did enjoy Infinite Jest, just not for the reasons I thought I would.

This book is not only long, but it's deep and dense. 1,000 different people could read this book and come up with a million different explanations of the plot or major themes. The list of things this book isn't about is probably shorter than the list of things it could be reasonably argued to be about. 

It would be very easy for me to write a very aloof review where I just touch the surface of a hundred different points without going into any sort of depth. Instead I'm going to focus on answering just one question. While most of the discussion online is on trying to unravel the plot of the book, I'm going to focus instead on why I believe Wallace wrote Infinite Jest. Then at the end I'll write about what I enjoyed most while reading it. 

It's however impossible to talk about the book without talking about some of the content, so I'm going to spoil things which will be obvious 100 pages (1/10th) into the book.

Why do I believe David Foster Wallace wrote this book?

The plot of the book revolves around an entertaining video tape that once you've seen it, you want nothing more but to watch it again and again. It's so entertaining that you'll forgo water and food and eventually die, eyes glued to the screen. 

Wallace seems to have a bone to pick with television or more specifically passive forms of entertainment consumption. Crutches we use to fill the empty parts of our lives as opposed to actively making things better. With Infinite Jest, Wallace wanted to create something that would require active participation in to enjoy. He wanted to make the reader an accomplice, not just someone who's along for the ride. I believe the book is trying to engage in a conversation as opposed to the one way flow of information from a TV screen.

I read lots of people calling this book pretentious, but I don't really see that at all (it's also hard to believe a truly pretentious author would say things like "fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being" and should help the reader "become less alone inside"). I can see how people mistake the books complexity and lack of a spelled out ending as pretentious though. They think that Wallace used his big brain to tie an immensely complex knot and he wants to see if your brain is big enough to unravel it. Re-read the quote I started this review with. I can certainly see how book could be perceived this way.

However I see it as Wallace tying the knot so that it can be unravelled in a large number of ways. Wallace is trying to encourage you to take an active role in enjoying the book. Notice how he says "the book's failed for you" not you failed to understand the book. When he says the books failed for you, I believe he means the book failed to convince you to take an active roll in enjoying it. I don't think he's telling the interviewer that they failed to piece together what happens between the last chapter of the book and the first. The book failed you because you are passively waiting for the book to give you a nice ending that will be accompanied by an endorphin rush as opposed to actively finding your own enjoyment.

What did I enjoy about / takeaway from the book?

In the end I didn't really care too much about the plot of the book. I mean it was interesting (and so deep that on the 4th re-read you'd still be discovering new aspects of it) but it wasn't what kept me coming back to the book. What I enjoyed about the book was depth to which it conveyed boring old every day life. There aren't really any epic/grandiose moments in this book. There are lots of memorable and hilarious moments, but they are still rooted in everyday life.

An addict attending AA meetings or a teenagers locker room conversation felt not only real but like they had real weight. They felt important but at the same time almost orthogonal to crucial. I'm trying to say that those moments felt like they mattered, but only when put together. Each scene isn't anything special, but when put together with all the others it is. Normal/routine/mundane days make up more of our existence than the grandiose ones.

I found the book made it very accessible to enjoy the seemingly mundane. The added appreciation for the everyday is my main takeaway from the book and if you happen to read it, yours will almost certainly be different.

Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor

By Tren Griffin

If you have no interest in economics or investing but you do you have an interest in rationality and learning how some extraordinary people think, you will enjoy this book.

Charlie Munger is Warren Buffet's partner in world of investing. His main approach investing is having a number of mental models (in different topics such as economics, management etc.) that consist of a few pieces "elementary worldy wisdom." These are essentially very simple statements, such as "Always have a margin of safety on an investment", which seem obvious but are surprisingly hard to follow without error for long period of time given that humans fall prey to cognitive biases, our emotions, or even just plain old laziness (thinking is hard).

My key takeaway from this book is knowing that you don't have be really intelligent as just consistently not being stupid can earn you massive long term rewards.

Also Tren Griffin's twitter is top notch.

Originally posted on Facebook January 11, 2017.

How Not To Be Wrong

By Jordan Ellenberg

NOT PART OF REVIEW

To start, reading non-fiction books almost always feels like a chore despite how much I enjoy them. With the completion of this book I feel I finally know a good way of enjoying and getting more knowledge gains from non-fiction audiobooks although how much I will follow the advice I'm about to outline remains to be seen.

My main time for audiobooks is in the evening once I get home from work. During the first half of this book I generally couldn't must the mental energy at this time to visualize the projective plane or other problems that are purposed in the book at a time when my mental energies seem to be at their daily low. After having started this book over 2 months ago and not yet having finished 6 hours of it (when I have no problem finishing a 50 hour Tom Clancy in a month) I decided to take a new approach. 

When I encounter something I don't understand (such as getting stumped visualizing the protective plane) I would rewind the troubling sentence over and over again while failing to grasp what the author is intending to convey (which usually ends with me pausing the book and moving onto something else). This makes the book feel like a chore and makes me not want to pick up where I left off since I know I'm at a mental roadblock and will require a great deal of thinking when I start the book again. This is why the first half of the book took so long for me to complete. 

For the second half of the book I took a new approach of simply mentally noting what I didn't understand and moving on. I would not rewind anything until I reached the end of the chapter. At that point I would decide one of three things: that I now understood what was stumping me before, that I no longer cared about what I didn't quite grasp (perhaps it was not that integral to understanding the rest of the chapter), or that I should start the chapter over and try again. I really loathed the 3rd option because it made me feel stupid (oh look at this guy, he has to read this chapter TWICE) and it made me feel inefficient. However I managed to argue (to myself) that having a book sitting idle in the library and wasting good listening hours because I'm scared of failing at learning something isn't very efficient either. Also I went through the second half of the book in about a week despite listening to multiple chapters multiple times.

Note: Acknowledging that I don't understand an aspect of a book and deciding to move on in the interest of time or mental energy is different than the Craig approach of just straight up not listening while the audiobook plays in the background and using this as evidence that you didn't enjoy the book (see his impending review of Red Storm Rising). 

In summary I need to get better at convincing myself that just because I burn an Audible credit doesn't mean I have to understand and remember every aspect of the book. If I approach every book like this I'll burn countless hours learning everything about one book when I could have learned a less perfect % of more books.

REVIEW BEGINS

This book is full of small consumable scenarios that showcase how using mathematical thinking can be beneficial. A few things I learned more about from this book are: p-value hacking, geometry of numbers, not all curves are lines (and other forms of non-linear thinking), and mathematical formalism (and it's relation to voting in democracy). 

I understand that the print version of the book contained multiple figures which might have helped my absorption of knowledge in the first half of the book, however there was no point in the second half of the book where I felt there was any content lacking by consuming the audiobook.

I'd recommend this book to anyone looking for a good non-fiction gain-fest.

Originally posted on Facebook December 28, 2016.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

by Robert Cialdini

Scott Adams listed persuasion as an essential skill and Influence is one of the books he recommends on the topic. This book is about compliance. It details methods for making people more compliant to your requests and also gives tips for resisting the compliance techniques of others. Overall I found the book very enlightening. Below I'll go over the main persuasion techniques covered by the book.

The book intros with details on how certain trigger features will start automatic responses in people. At some point in our evolution these the automatic responses to the trigger features were beneficial to our survival. However in modern life these trigger features can be abused to produce responses that aren't in the responders best interest.

The first persuasion technique introduced is the contrast principle. It's simple, effective, and can easily be used in combination with the 6 other techniques which make up the bulk of the book. The choice you want the person to make is first contrasted with a less desirable choice. A simple example is going to a bar with less attractive friend to appear more attractive in comparison. For a more complicated example, imagine you are a suit salesmen and a client wants to buy a suit ($$) and a sweater ($). Should you try to sell the suit or the sweater first? If you are trying to make as much money as possible, you should sell the client the suit first. This is because it will be easier to sell a more expensive sweater when it's price is contrasted against the more expensive suit the client just bought.

The other 6 persuasion techniques are:

• Reciprocation - When someone does something for us we feel obligated to reciprocate. This can be exploited by setting up an unbalanced reciprocation scenario where the initial favour is many times smaller than a presented opportunity to reciprocate. Reciprocation is essentially someone offering a concession and the other person feeling obligated to make a concession of their own. In this sense, if your initial offer for request is refused, you could retreat to a less beneficial request (ex. well if you won't do that would you at least consider) which is framed as a concession. The other person would then feel obligated to make a concession of their own. This is called the reject and retreat technique and it also gets benefit from the contrast principle.
• Consistency - People like to appear consistent, even if its against their own interest. This is obvious to anyone who has tried to get someone to change their mind on something they have been publicly vocal about. A study was conducted where the researchers asked home owners if they would place an obnoxiously large sign in their yard promoting some environmental cause. The sign was so large it was rejected by the vast majority of home owners. A different group of home owners were first asked if they would be willing to support environmental causes, which nearly everyone supported. They were then asked if they would allow the large sign to be placed on their lawn and the majority said yes. Even if they were asked about supporting the causes weeks before being asked to place the sign (by different people), they still allowed the sign to placed on their lawn. 
• Social Proof - Social proof is often far stronger than facts. If everyone else believes it, it must be true. Pluralistic ignorance is when an entire group is fooled in a situation where a single individual wouldn't be fooled. This is summarized as "no one believes but everyone believes everyone else believes so they follow the actions of everyone else." The bystander effect falls under this category. Convince others and you will become convinced (all those reports of gay hating preachers getting caught doing very gay things suddenly make sense). Increasing similiarly between the people increasing the potency of social proof. The chapters on social proof also had some incredibly scary statistics about the strong correlation of the news covering a suicide and the increase of plane crashes or single car collision fatalities. Check these out on your own.
• Liking - You are more likely to comply with someone you like. The halo effect means one aspect you like of someone can have you inflate their abilities in other areas (this good looking salesman must also be pretty smart). Good cop bad cop employs the contrast principle and liking to get compliance from suspects.
• Authority - Milgram experiments. A person with a perceived high status (even if unverified) can cause us to bypass our own thinking as following the prompts of authority is the path of least resistance.

• Scarcity - People tend to be motivated more by potential loss (FOMO) than by potential gain. Limited quantities, deadlines, banned views (teenagers and Streisand effect?), and exclusive information (conspiracy theories) are all techniques that can be used to increase compliance.

As always, here is a quote I found enjoyable.

When prestige, both public and private, is low we are intent upon using the success of associated others to restore our own image.

The Mysterious Island

by Jules Verne

This is an amazing book from the 19th century to read because you don't feel the time difference based on technology (wow life is tough without phones) or social/political stuff (wow they are sexist). Instead you get to feel the time difference directly through the characters.

At the very start of the book some prisoners of war (during the American civil war) escape in a balloon which ends up getting blown out to sea and eventually lands on an island. They then science the shit out of their situation and put survivor man to shame with their ingenuity and hard work. However the group soon discovers that there is something very mysterious about the island.

Imagine Lost but with a group of fully competent people and an emphasis on actually using what the island provides to survive. 

Also if you think theres isn't much you can learn from people from the 19th century, prepare to be surprised.

Originally posted on Facebook December 4, 2016.

How to Have a Good Day

by Carolina Webb

Most non-Fiction books I enjoy fall into two categories. They either leave me satisfied with the received knowledge of a few key ideas or they leave me slightly frusterated because even though I'll remember a few key points made by the book, it will also tons of contain smaller and more specific tidbits of knowledge that I'll no doubt forget the moment they could actually benefit me. I've tried combating this in many forms such as taking rigorous notes, loading my audible up with bookmarks and saved clips, making cheat-sheets of my favorite parts, and now writing a summary on the internet.

At the very start of the book the author lays out a few hard scientific results which have been replicated many times by psychology researchers. One of these is the difference between our deliberate thinking (conscious thought) and automatic thinking (sub-conscious thought). Generally people think that our deliberate thinking dominates how we perceive the world and how we act based on those perceptions, but in reality our automatic thinking can be more powerful (and rarely more beneficial in our current world, for example cognitive biases). One of the studies referenced which shows the power of the automatic thinking, is the selective attention test by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. This is where a gorilla walks in between a group of people passing a basketball around. Some 50% of people are found to have not seen the gorilla when told to count how many times the basketball is passed around. This is because their automatic system is filtering out unnecessary information. This is at the core of one of the key points I learned from the book which is setting your intentions.

Imagine that you are going into a meeting and you are told that the person leading the meeting is always mean and rude to others in these types of meetings. Just like the people who were told to count the basketball passes had their automatic system filter out the gorilla, going into a meeting with the intention of seeing someone being mean or rude could cause your automatic system to filter out things that don't fall in line with what you expect while emphasizing on what does. This could cause you and someone told to expect the meeting leader to be courteous and nice, to perceive the meeting in two totally different ways.

Setting your intentions is really as simple as pre-loading your attitude so that your automatic system will focus (and not filter out) what is important. The author suggests to not being shy to visualize exactly what you want in an attempt to make as clear communication as you can with your automatic system. Setting your intentions can also greatly effect our actions which our automatic system plays a strong role in also. Pre-load your intentions before a meeting by thinking how you want to appear confident, and the author suggests you'll naturally sit more upright, speak louder, and appear more confident to others.

The author suggests that cognitive biases are simply our automatic thinking doing tasks that really should be left with our deliberate thinking. When we perform confirmation bias for example, the author suggests that this is our automatic brain filtering out information that would force us to change our minds. The evolutionary argument is that changing our mental model requires our deliberate system to think hard which costs energy and resources. If you set your intentions right, you should be able to help fight this control of the automatic system. In fact this is what anyone who is trained in rationality does naturally. Hmm I'm about to do _____ and I know that generally the _____ bias could have a drastic effect on circumstances like this. I'll just try to make myself as aware as possible of the bias in the hopes I don't commit it. 

Intention setting and understanding how large of an impact our automatic system can have (and hopefully realizing when its taking control so you can combat it if you need to think deliberately) is definitely my key take away from the book. Here are some of the small but interesting tidbits of information I enjoyed and hopefully won't forget:

• Give up multitasking. Studies have shown repeatedly that multitasking makes your far less productive. In fact studies have also shown that thinking your great at multi-tasking means your even worse than most people at it. Focus on one thing at a time. Cut down on distractions and when some new tasks pops up, put it aside to finish when your done. Batching is also a good thing (saving all your laundry, bills paying, stuff like that for one set block of time every week).
   
• Take breaks often. At the very least every 90 minutes get off your ass and do something physical to give your body a refresher and also give your mind a break by thinking of something else. Your going to work even faster after your break and you'll end up being more productive than just powering through. You aren't wasting time either, think of it as a formula 1 car taking a pit stop. Even for cars that go 300 Km/h it makes sense to come to a complete stop, if that stop allows them to go even faster once they start up again. Also get your sleep if you have a mentally demanding job. The book references studies which show how just losing an hour of sleep each day reduce your mental performance drastically.
   
• Practice mindfulness. Google it, there's better info out there on it than I can provide.
   
• Extreme listening. For any of you with a long term girlfriend you can skip this part as you already know it. Just because someone is complaining to you about something doesn't mean the best course of action is to jump at them with solutions. In fact this usually has the opposite effect and puts them in sort of a defensive flight/fight mode (which is their automatic system taking over and stopping the deliberate thinking). When dealing with situations like this you have to be very careful to ensure your always dealing with the other persons deliberate system and by not putting them into a defensive mode where they feel like their intellect is being challenged.
   
• When struggling with a complex problem, try adding social context to it to help make it easier to think about. Studies have shown that we perform way better at games that have social context than games that don't. Ex. there are four cards in front of you. Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. The cards you see in front of you are [ D A 3 7 ]. Which cards do you need to flip over to confirm that the rule "All cards with a D on it, must have a 3 on the other side." The answer is that you flip cards D and 7. 75% of people decide to flip 3 as well, though its not needed. However add social context and the results improve so that only 25% of people get the wrong answer. For example, instead of letters use beer and water, and have the numbers represent a persons age. Then tell the person they are a bouncer and they must make sure that no one younger than 18 is drinking. [ Beer Water 20 13 ], see much easier.
   
• Procrastination is simply present bias (damn automatic system) mixed with a skewed cost/benefit analysis that under estimates the cost of not performing what you are procrastinating for. To help ease procrastination, un-skew the cost/benefit by making yourself painfully aware of the costs or add some extra benefit for yourself.

Originally posted on Facebook July 22, 2016.

The Art of Learning

by Josh Waitzkin

This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read. However it's not a book I would recommend to everyone and I certainly don't think it would be a good book for someone just getting into non-fiction books based on success or self-improvement. This book goes deep and could seem "woo wooey" to someone who isn't primed to be receptive to certain ideas. I believe if I read this book 3 years ago I would have at best thought it was meh and at worst thought that it was a bunch of BS. This is a book about how the mind learns. As a result, items such as subconscious, meditation, intuition, and visualization are touched on quite frequently. 

If sentences like "to be world class you need to express the core of your being through the art" or "the process of digesting knowledge over and over again shifts it from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind where it can connect with other chunks of knowledge and manifest as a burst of insight" sound odd to you, I'd consider saving this book for another time.

Josh Waitzkin was a chess child prodigy. He won 8 national championships in chess before the 10th grade. The book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer are based on his early chess life. This led to him being a national celebrity at age 15. Eventually Josh stepped away from chess and begun learning the martial art of Tai Chi. Noticing parallels between learning chess and Tai Chi, two seemingly different things, is what inspired him to write this book.

This book is about learning and optimal performance. This is not a pareto based book about how to get 80% of the way there. This book is about going from good to great or from great to elite. Josh is a national champion in chess and a world champion in Tai Chi. The topics of this book are about the techniques he found when becoming an elite level performer.

Below I go over a few concepts from the book I found interesting.

Entity vs incremental theories of intelligence and ability.

Before you can begin learning you must differentiate between entity and incremental theories of intelligence and ability. If you play a sport for the first time and suck, an entity theorist would attribute that failure to your lack of natural ability. An incremental theorist would attribute that failure to your lack of practice.

Incremental theorists generally accept challenges where they can fail. They believe they have the ability to grow and add to their knowledge through failure. Entity theorists will avoid challenges with a high chance of failure as they don't want to be made aware of their own intrinsic shortcomings.

An entity theorist believes your current level is indicative of who you are. An incremental theorist believes your current level is indicative of where you are.

Learning the Macro from the Micro

Bruce Lee said "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times." Depth is more important than breadth.

In Josh's words "Dive deeply into small pools of information in order to explore and experience the operating principles of whatever we are learning. Once we grasp the essence of our subject through focused study of core principles, we can build on nuanced insights and, eventually, see a much bigger picture. The essence of this approach is to study the micro in order to learn what makes the macro tick."

Investing In Loss

In order to improve you must be willing to invest in losing. If you are wanting to learn a new sport or activity, you have to be willing to be bad and lose for a long time. However even if you are an expert at something, you will need to invest in loss to move to a higher level. For example if you are a professional athlete and you change some aspect of your game, you need to try it out on real opponents in real games. If you were not willing to invest in losing a few games you would be unable to ever try new techniques.

Numbers to leave numbers

Numbers to leave numbers is about how learning a concept and then constantly practicing can ingrain and internalize that knowledge. This is required before we can move on to learning something more complex by using what we already know. 

"By studying discrete pieces of information thoroughly and practicing their application repetitively, they eventually shed their technical, nitty-gritty character. This happens because  the process of digesting small chunks of knowledge over and over again shifts it from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind where it can connect with other chunks of internalized knowledge and manifest as the sudden burst of insight we experience as free-flowing intuition. This high level of knowledge integration is what we should aim for—it allows us to access what we have committed to learning in a fluid, precise, and improvisational manner."

Making smaller circles

By focusing on a basic set of concepts or practices over a period of time, we can gradually internalize the knowledge. However, the next step in the learning process is slowly peeling away unnecessary weight and driving at the core of the concepts or techniques. You must turn the large into the small. Reviewing and creatively exploring the internals of these basics over and over again leads to a lighter but more potent understanding of them.

Making sandals

"To walk a thorny road, you don’t need to pave the entire road; just make sandals."

Often we try hard to fight off or ignore distractions or things that bother us. If something is rocking our boat we must first learn to flow with the motion. The second step is to use these distractions as inspiration to funnel and focus our ability. The final step is learning to cultivate these situations so we can achieve the focus of the second step without requiring something to rock our boat in the first place.

Conclusion

A few weeks have passed since I finished the book (and started this review) so I've been able to determine which aspects of the book I continue to think about. What I've found is I've spent little time reflecting on the major parts of the book (which I have gone into detail above). It's not that I see these parts of the book as uninteresting but rather they are not what I need at this point in my life. Instead the vast majority of my thinking has been on the more sublte aspects of the book where Josh conveys the core principles of how he lives his life.

These principles as I found them are:

• Cultivating empty space - If we are always reacting to input, we aren't able to create our own thoughts. Empty space helps calm the waters so you can listen to your subconcious in the silence. This empty space is needed for the development of ideas.
• Daily processes vs long term goals.
• Internal vs external framing - If your held by a sense of guilt whenever you are not working, then you are letting external pressures impact you. But if your nurturing from the inside out of your creative process, then you’ll be fine stopping your work with a sense of direction.
• Embracing your unique disposition.
• Seeking challenges head on - imagine where you'd be a year from now if you decided to steer into every insecurity or challenge you are worried about.
• Being content with disorder - you shouldn't try to block out noise or distractoin, instead become content with it.
• Most importantly living these principles during all the little moments of your life - see last quote below.

I highly recommend the audiobook as it's read by Josh himself. Tim Ferris (author of The 4 Hour Work Week) bought the rights and produced the audiobook because he enjoyed the book so much. As an added bonus, Tim included an hour of his podcast conversation with Josh at the end of the audiobook.

As always, here are a few quotes I found enjoyable or insightful.

Growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.

Tactics come easier once the principles are in your blood.

In my experience successful people shoot for the stars, put their hearts on the line in every battle, and ultimately discover that the lessons learned from the pursuit of excellence mean much more than the immediate trophies and glory.

In the long run painful losses may prove much more valuable than wins. Those who are armed with a healthy attitude and are able to draw wisdom from every experience, good or bad,are the ones who make it down the road. They are also the ones who are happier along the way.

I believe that one of the most critical factors in the transition to becoming a conscious high performer is the degree to which your relationship to your pursuit stays in harmony with your unique disposition. There will inevitably be times when you need to try new ideas, release our current knowledge to take in new information. But it’s critical to integrate this new information in a manner that does not violate who we are.

More often than not the climactic moments in our lives will follow many un-climactic normal hum drum hours, days, months, years. So how do we step up when our moment suddenly arises? My answer is to redefine the question. Not only do we have to be good at waiting, we have to love it. It's life. Too many of us live without fully engaging our minds, waiting for that moment when our real lives begin. Years pass in boredom but that's okay because when our true love comes around or we discover our real calling, we'll begin. Of course the sad truth is that if we are not present in the moment, our true love could come and go and we wouldn't even notice. And we will have become someone other than the you or I who would be able to embrace it. I believe in the appreciation of simplicity, the everyday. The ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life's hidden riches, is where success, let alone happiness emerges.

I'd also recommend Josh's second podcast with Tim.