⭐⭐ The Box by Levinson
| Full Title | The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger |
|---|---|
| Authors | Marc Levinson |
| Year Published | 2006 |
| Date Read | November 01, 2022 |
| Rating | 2/5 stars |
Kind of cool to learn about how containerization changed the game in the physical world, especially after seeing how impactful it’s been in the software world. However, the book spent too much time on regulations, standardization, etc. Wish it had rather focused on something like a case study of a business that it enabled. Probably would not recommend.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Art of Gathering by Parker
| Full Title | The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Authors | Priya Parker |
| Year Published | 2018 |
| Date Read | July 15, 2022 |
| Rating | 4/5 stars |
Really great book. Not only has it changed the way that I think about how I’d like to host my own events, I think just as importantly it has really put how I perceive others’ efforts for events I attend in a new light. For example, many events that bring people together that may be essentially strangers use “icebreakers” and equivalent tools to try to create bonds between attendees. My prior perception of these kinds of events was pretty cynical, and typically I wouldn’t necessarily participate fully.
Parker helped me understand that these are just portions of the larger event, and if they go poorly (for example, if a big enough proportion of participants don’t buy-in), it may put the entirety of the experience at risk. We cannot simply isolate a pre-conference dinner from the conference itself, or a scavenger hunt portion of a team off-site from the talks that surround it.
It also helped me understand that not all people are welcome at all events. My mental model
previously was that, hey, why not invite this friend or that significant other. However, the specific participants of an event are probably the most important factor that determines how the event itself goes. We must take care to select this grouping carefully, lest we lose our control over where the event is going.
Had to really go back-and-forth between 4 and 5 stars. Highly recommended.
⭐⭐⭐ Against the Gods by Bernstein
| Full Title | Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter L. Bernstein |
| Year Published | 1998 |
| Date Read | July 04, 2022 |
| Rating | 3/5 stars |
Some cool explorations here. It’s crazy how recent our thinking on risk and probability is — basically just starting in the Renaissance. Funny too how the first forays into this area came from trying to optimize gambling or as a result of playing with toy math problems, not really as a way to solve problems in economics, finance, or business (which I perceive to be today’s biggest users of the innovations discussed).
Bernstein does a good job of investigating reasons as to why even otherwise-advanced cultures earlier didn’t make the leap to probability, in particular focusing on the Greeks’ obsession with truth as derived from proofs rather than from experimentation. To come up with the concept of chance, you’re thinking less from first principles and moreso observing results of trials and trying to deduce what that might mean empirically. Of course, having a better numbering system than Roman numerals would have helped too. But even without such a numbering system the
conceptualization of risk and “this event is more probable than this other one” could have been possible.
I am only giving three stars because I found there to be too many threads going on at once across the length of the book. The number of individuals that are presented — ancient Greek philosophers, Renaissance mathematicians, economists from the 1900s… keeping the competing concepts from each of these individuals in my head proved to be difficult. Perhaps I can return to this book and get more value once I gain more familiarity with the character set.
Recommended in particular for folks with an existing good background in at least two of the three aforementioned groupings of individuals. Maybe a skip until then for others.
⭐⭐ Educated by Westover
| Full Title | Educated |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tara Westover |
| Year Published | 2018 |
| Date Read | May 23, 2022 |
| Rating | 2/5 stars |
Got through about 20%, but could never really get into it; found my attention drifting very often. Perhaps I didn’t wait long enough to get to the good part, but the story just never got interesting enough to keep going.
⭐⭐⭐ Breaking Smart - Season 1 by Rao
| Full Title | Breaking Smart - Season 1 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Venkatesh G. Rao |
| Year Published | 2015 |
| Date Read | May 10, 2022 |
| Rating | 3/5 stars |
Overall would recommend to those that are interested in technology and business, but only after reading the excellent Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy.
Here’s a selection of highlights that I found compelling:
Pastoralists can imagine sustaining changes to the prevailing social order, but disruptive changes seem profane.
This general principle of fertility-seeking has been repeatedly rediscovered and articulated in a bewildering variety of specific forms. The statements have names such as the principle of least commitment (planning software), the end-to-end principle (network design), the procrastination principle (architecture), optionality (investing), paving the cowpaths (interface design), lazy evaluation (language design) and late binding (code execution).
Traditional processes of consensus-seeking drive towards clarity in long-term visions but are usually fuzzy on immediate next steps. By contrast, rough consensus in software deliberately seeks ambiguity in long-term outcomes and extreme clarity in immediate next steps.
Enhanced information availability and lowered friction can make any field hacker-friendly
If pastoral visions are so limiting, why do we get so attached to them? Where do they even come from in the first place? Ironically, they arise from Promethean periods of evolution that are too successful.
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
⭐⭐⭐ Breath by Nestor
| Full Title | Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art |
|---|---|
| Authors | James Nestor |
| Year Published | 2020 |
| Date Read | May 01, 2022 |
| Rating | 3/5 stars |
Recent research (Craighead 2021) coming out about potential links between breathing and blood pressure is what originally piqued my interest in this book. For pop-sci, I’d say Breath is pretty decent.
It seems like the science still has a ways to go here. The speed with which your body can change structurally in response to altering breathing patterns was quite surprising to find out. There’s also a few passages that were a good reminder of how interlinked everything in the health area is — individual breathing habits have big impact on athletic performance, sleep quality, dental outcomes, even some early stuff showing it can be used as a sort of psychological tonic.
The book got me to change my behavior (seems the arguments for exclusive nose-breathing are pretty compelling) and wasn’t excessively long, at least when compared with the status quo in this genre. But not really worth more than 3 stars as
the storytelling was mostly flat. Recommended for folks with a particular interest in holistic health, but probably not worth for others.