Reading
from https://tim.blog/2018/12/24/the-tim-ferriss-show-patrick-collison/
Patrick Collison: Yes. Okay. So first off, I think you should mostly ignore the books that are published every year and take advantage of the fact that quite a lot of books have been published up to 10 years ago. But the books published up to 10 years ago, people have had a lot of time to filter through them and try to select the real gems there. And of course, there are other false negatives. There are a lot of great books that just never, for whatever reason, got the attention they deserved. Or maybe that they don’t have the salience that they ought to have for you. But I really think people should be much more biased towards older books than they are. I think The Dream Machine is a good example of this.
It was out of print. There were a couple of copies on Amazon. After I finished it, I was so excited about it that I went and bought a whole bunch of them to give away to people at Stripe, to give away to my friends and fairly quickly, we exhausted Amazon’s pretty limited supply. I think I first heard about it from I think some combination of Bret Victor and Alan Kay. Alan Kay many of your listeners will already know about. For anyone who doesn’t, he was a researcher who worked at – he was best known for working at Xerox PARC, which was this amazing industrial research lab that played a formative role in the creation of the GUI, the graphical computer interface and ethernet, one of the main networking technologies, and object-oriented programing, which is the main programming paradigm that’s used today.
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Tim Ferriss: Can you define holacracy for a second?
Patrick Collison: Well, I don’t deeply understand it. But I think it is – as I understand it, the core idea is having differing decision-making bodies, like groups of people that are responsible for major areas of the company rather than having a more traditional hierarchy. Again, this is my superficial understanding. But so perhaps you might have some set of people who are responsible for making compensation decisions, some other set of people who are responsible for deciding what the product strategy should be for next year, and some other set of people who are responsible for figuring out how the office should be decorated. But those sets of people don’t need to map onto some traditional hierarchy.
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Y Combinator,
Y Combinator is the SEAL Team Six Harvard of let’s just call it startup incubators, of sorts. They accept a class. It is a very small percentage. I want to say single-digits at this point. It would have to be, in terms of the number of applicants. And there are many, many well-known companies that have come out of Y Combinator. And Paul has many fantastic essays online which people should read.
Patrick Collison: YC is one of the most amazing inventions of the past 20 years. And I think PG’s essays are still a goldmine that, like Alan Kay, I think are – people know they’re great. But I think they’re even better than people appreciate.
Tim Ferriss: They’re based on first principles. And an example of that – I always mess up the headline, but I think it’s the maker’s schedule versus the manager’s schedule, something along those lines.
Patrick Collison: Well, I remember a guy who worked at Stripe and who still works at Stripe. His name is Evan. He wrote a blog post about how to debug Python, which is a programing language, with GDB, which is a debugger. It didn’t really have much to do with Stripe, but it actually was a really good blog post. And this is probably back in 2012. And that got a whole bunch of traffic. And as a consequence, people found out about Stripe and maybe realized that we knew something about what we were talking about from a technical standpoint. And it moved the needle for us back at a time where really, nobody had heard of us.
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Patrick Collison: Right. So I think happiness is certainly a tricky measure. And as you say, this sociological comparative version of it – and the phenomenon is seen where to some degree – there’s another way of saying what you just alluded to, which is that the happiness you have with your level of wealth is a function of the wealth of those around you. And so if you find out about people who are above you in some income table, that might actually depress your happiness slightly. However, it’s also pretty robustly the case that there are some things that are just absolute inputs into happiness. And your health or chronic pain or whether your kids die or not or whatever, these really do matter. And in the example of Ethiopia, while on the one hand, I think, as I guess you saw, it’s not like this is a country where everyone is in a perpetual depth of despair, it does rank in the bottom half of global happiness surveys.
And actually, Max Roser has this – he does a lot of data visualization around development economics. And he has this wonderful visualization, this scatter plot of happiness against per capita income. And sure enough, what you see is it’s certainly not a perfect correlation. There are all these other factors, maybe cultural effects, or these comparative questions, and so on. But broadly speaking, the correlation really is very, very strong.
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Patrick Collison: Yes. Actually, Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex, has a really good blog post about just the trickiness of these happiness surveys where I think the core message and data from them is correct.
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Having said that, there’s actually a really good book on this topic called How Asia Works by Joe Studwell, I believe. And basically, he tried to answer exactly this question of why did South Korea and Taiwan and China and Vietnam and so forth – why did they diverge from Philippines and from Indonesia and to a significant degree, from India and so forth? And basically, the answer he gives – and he marshals fairly compelling evidence for it – is the following: Land reform, protected but competitive industrial and expert industries, and then third, tight control over the consumer credit sector. And that obviously seems like a very arbitrary basket of things, but he makes a pretty strong case for it.
And just to provide a little bit of color on that, the idea is that first, you want to make sure that people own their own land, so they can farm it more effectively, they can reap the rewards, the fruits of their own labor. And so that gives you this immediate bump in national income when people can invest in something they really own themselves.
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recommends https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/12/how-the-world-works/305854/
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There’s a really good book that I very highly recommend called The Inner Game of Tennis. It’s –
Tim Ferriss: Timothy Gallwey, right?
Patrick Collison: Yeah, exactly. And obviously, one of the general messages of that book is that so much of doing things well is about being really good at seeing just what is happening and then training your conscious and subconscious to make the requisite corrections. And that intuition really resonated with me.
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And I think also – well, there’s another fabulous book that touches on some of this, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming.
Tim Ferriss: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering?
Patrick Collison: Yes, that’s right. And the last chapter especially – the whole book, to some degree, but especially the last chapter is I think really applicable to and relevant to really almost anyone. The last chapter is called “You and Your Research.” It’s actually a talk that I’m sure a lot of people listening to the show have previously read or heard. But Hamming worked at Bell Labs.
And he, in the book, often quotes and cites John Tukey, this amazing guy who also worked at Bell Labs and is the father of data visualization. And a lot of data visualizations and analyses that we’re familiar with, that we think of as being standard, John Tukey actually invented. But there’s this Tukey line that it’s far better to have an approximate answer to the right question which is often vague than an exact answer to the wrong question which can always be made precise. And again, I think this gets back to the same idea that it’s somehow more important to be making the right decisions, to have the right options than to be perfect at choosing between a specific set of options.
also recommended by Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz died on January 11, 2013.
Here is a link to his blog.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/
H He was also light years ahead of most people in noticing people like Yudkowsky and Taibbi (in the news today because of the twitter files).Duflo and Banerjee- long before they won the Nobel prize. And recommending Gallwey a long time before Bill Gates! Lean business methods, Christopher Hitchens, Joan Didion, Tony Blair and how accounting firms work- this was just one year for Swartz!
QED by Peter Parnell
Not bad, by any stretch, but on the page, for anyone who’s familiar with Feynman’s actual writings, this can’t help but feel thin.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky
The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames
Matt Taibbi is my favorite political journalist. He writes with a raw honesty that manages to be both politically biting and hilarious.
Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
God, what a book! Poor Economics is a series of tales of foreigners trying to save the far-flung poor, while failing to realize not only that their developed-country ideas are terrible disasters in practice, but also that everything they've learned to think of as solid—even something as simple as measuring distance—is far more fraught, and complex, and political than they ever could have imagined. It's a stunning feeling to have the basic building blocks of your world questioned and crumbled before you—and a powerful lesson in the value of self-skepticism for everyone who's trying to do something.
The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey
This book touched me deeply and made me rethink the entire way I approached life; it's about vastly more than just tennis. I can't really describe it, but I can recommend this video with Alan Kay and the author that will blow your mind.
video
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2577-a-hacktivist-reading-list-aaron-swartz-s-recommended-reading
The conversation eventually turned to the fact that Palanpur farmers sow their winter crops several weeks after the date at which yields would be maximized. The farmers do not doubt that earlier planting would give them larger harvests, but no one, the farmer explained, is willing to be the first to plant, as the seeds on any lone plot would be quickly eaten by birds. I asked if a large group of farmers, perhaps relatives, had ever agreed to sow earlier, all planting on the same day to minimize losses. “If we knew how to do that,” he said, looking up from his hoe at me, “we would not be poor.”
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/bowles
Haiti: After the Quake by Paul Farmer
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens
Mother Teresa is a byword for saintliness, but have you ever stopped to ask why? Christopher Hitchens makes a convincing case that she’s something closer to a monster. Everyone I’ve told about this book is shocked by the concept, but it’s a short book with a pretty compelling argument.
Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion by Sara Davidson
It’s hard to shake the feeling that this book is merely the author attempting to cash in on their minor friendship with Joan Didion, but I love Didion so much that I’m just grateful for the stories.
The Ghost [Writer] by Robert Harris
It’s hard to shake the feeling that a big part of the appeal of this book is watching Tony Blair get arrested for war crimes, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a first-rate political thriler.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Ries presents a translation of the Toyota Production System to startups — and it’s so clearly the right way to run a startup that it’s hard to imagine how we got along before it. Unfortunately, the book has become so trendy that I find many people claiming to swear allegiance to it who clearly missed the point entirely.
The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen
A dreadful little book, which boils down to nothing more than a vast tract of economic illiteracy. Take just the insanity that is chapter 2. Cowen takes as his dictum:
The larger the role of government in the economy, the more the published figures for GDP growth are overstating improvements in our living standard.
For example, as government-insured health care takes up a larger proportion of our country’s spending, we can’t accurately measure how our living standards are improving since it’s paid for at set rates by government instead of through a competitive market process to set accurate prices.
Private Firms Working in the Public Interest by Abigail Bugbee Brown
Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Olympus — why is there so much accounting fraud? Why isn’t this stuff caught? In this serious but briskly-written work, Abigail Brown explains the incredible story of how accounting firms actually work. Paid by the people they’re supposed to be auditing, accounting firms have developed an elaborate culture of corruption, letting them aid and abet the most egregious forms of dishonesty.
(Disclosure: Ms. Brown and I were lab fellows together at the Harvard Center for Ethics.)https://abigailbrown.wordpress.com/
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2011
writing
Paul Graham
https://x.com/readswithravi/status/1798527709838238104
thinking
Elon Musk first principles
Richard Feynman
https://fs.blog/richard-feynman-what-problems-to-solve/
https://fs.blog/an-algorithm-for-solving-problems/
https://proftomcrick.com/2011/04/26/feynman-problem-solving-algorithm/