@bhorowitz has written about this dynamic. Technology as a pro-social channel for revolutionary energies.

There’s a continuum between individual-level prescriptive & cohort-level descriptive analyses. Just knowing what actions correlated with life improvement for folks with similar starting conditions may be helpful. A personalized version of @tferriss’s book.

Billions of human lifetimes have passed. You have only one. You can try to figure it out all for yourself in your limited time. Or you can gain some leverage from the lessons of history.

@kmele Yeah, but they intentionally swallowed their pride & started out making plastic stuff. Then they ascended the value chain. Now they are world leaders in areas like drones (DJI) & have leverage over physical manufacturing. They aren’t to be underestimated.

We’ve all read Grove. Only the paranoid survive.

The Network State is available in three formats. Read it on your phone right now: Download a PDF: Or get it on Amazon if you want the full Kindle experience:

I’d seen Anscombe’s quartet many times before, but was reminded of it when flipping through this fun new book on deep learning [1]. It intentionally eschews equations, but has nice visuals like this one on conditional probability. [1]

Read it in combination with David Reich's work from a few years prior, which focuses much more on prehistory than the present day.

Ok, here's one. For any sufficiently complex process (manufacturing, support queues, etc) you want at least one person with no assigned task, standing back and staying flexible like a free safety. Goldratt's book is excellent on this non-obvious concept:

New book by Matt Mochary came out today. Preprint went viral on Hacker News a while back. @brian_armstrong and I used parts of this at Coinbase and @naval has used this at several of his companies. We found it helpful!

WTF happened in the early 1970s? Vaclav Smil argues that it was the oil crisis.

As we entered the 20th century, mass media centralized, so a few liars at the "paper of record" could fool millions. Our saving grace is that we're in the age of decentralization now. Social media lets us piece together a true history. This is part of it:

Four books on the Spanish Flu. 1) The Great Influenza: 2) Pale Rider: 3) Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918: 4) Pandemic 1918:

I know it sounds kind of corny to talk about a "serious relationship" with a community. But Putnam and others have documented how important this concept is to people's well being. And how a sense of belonging has been vanishing.

“The authors present evidence that refutes almost every aspect of the Chinese Communist Party’s account, from the claim that the Party fought the Japanese to Mao’s role in the Long March.”

In this pod, I reference Carlota Perez. She documents a common pattern across multiple tech revolutions, going back to the age of steam, steel, & oil. A financial crash happens midway, followed by adoption. This may just be how humans install new tech.

@aeyakovenko 🙂I like cartoons too, but here are some real-life references: 1) Der Judenstaat: 2) Imagined Communities: 3) Invisible Countries: 4) Communistic Societies of the United States:

Exit isn’t just escape, it’s freedom. Voice isn’t just bureaucracy, it’s reform. Loyalty isn’t just jingoism, it’s faithfulness. It’s trivial to say it, but each has their place. Hirschman’s triad identifies different tools to try at different times.

Last year, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe coauthored a fictional book. It was about a China/US skirmish that escalated quickly, culminating in cities getting nuked in tit-for-tat fashion. He's said it was meant as a warning.

You laugh, but the SF model is being exported all over the US, from Seattle to LA. It's legalized graft, on an enormous scale, always in the name of the people, at the expense of the people. Read @ShellenbergerMD's book about this catastrophe of a city.

Even more recent history is forgotten. Tech wasn't culturally central in 2008! It was only after the iPhone and the financial crisis that the true rise of the internet happened. McCullough's book is good on the lead up to this.

@DylanRaithel This book is almost 25 years old (sheesh!) and there are now more modern methods for some of the topics discussed, but in terms of just packing a punch per page I really enjoyed this back in the day.

@davidnevue @bennjordan This scam is just an unusually explicit version of their usual practices. Read the Journalist and the Murderer, by Janet Malcolm of the New Yorker. Rated one of the top 100 nonfiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library.

Did Christianity take down the Roman Empire? Two canonical sources on this are Gibbon [1] and Nietzsche [2] (“Christianity…undid the tremendous deed of the Romans”). See also Nixey [3]. [1]: [2]: [3]:

Bet on technological progress.

See also @arianapekary on cable news [tweet below], @mtaibbi’s book Hate Inc [1], @bungarsargon’s recent book Bad News [2], and how hate drives clicks [3]. [1]: [2]: [3]:

If you only had one book.

Actions are in general more costly than words, but not always. In communist countries, there were plenty of things you couldn't say without punishment, but that you could act on, kind of. Public lies, private truths.

The virtualization of reality is a thesis that @MacaesBruno has explored at length. But the degree to which every behavior these days (politician, media, social media) is optimized for consumption on a screen is perhaps still underestimated.

This is now out on Kindle for $10. Nadia is very smart and it’s worth reading anything she writes on open source.

Four books on the Spanish Flu. 1) The Great Influenza: 2) Pale Rider: 3) Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918: 4) Pandemic 1918:

Four books on the Spanish Flu. 1) The Great Influenza: 2) Pale Rider: 3) Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918: 4) Pandemic 1918:

@rajatsuri I agree with you generally. I do think however that autarky-as-backup-plan may come into vogue. Not the same standard of living as free trade, but not zero either in a supply chain disruption situation. It’s not easy but may be easier than people think.

What actually happened: Blockbuster tried to buy Hollywood Video, but the FTC called this off on antitrust (!) grounds. By 2010 Blockbuster was bankrupt and Netflix was soaring. In retrospect, state action was completely rearward looking and unnecessary.

Hackathons are a good start. Maybe there’s more we can do in terms of harnessing all that brainpower in one place? As an example, the Little Bitcoin Book was written in a few days by N people, one chapter each, and then published on Amazon. @calilyliu @jimmysong What else?

Ron Paul was to Bitcoin what Andrew Yang is to startup societies. Mainstreams ideas, prepares the ideological battlefield.

@fmbutt I agree that those pressures were present. I find books like this useful as an alternate perspective on the era:

As the saying goes, a federal prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich. A tangle of laws allows them to target even innocents, so a truly guilty party should be easy. And they're normally driven by headlines. But some force is holding them back.

Nothing against Stephenson, he’s amazing. But the inspiration for the Network State is not really the fictional Snow Crash, it’s the very real state of Israel. That country was started by a book. And Herzl’s original is worth rereading today.

What I like about Turchin & Dalio is that they're at least *trying* to be numerical in a field (history) that has resisted this. Soft sciences may get harder now that we have decades of data from billions of people. Moretti's lit history is also relevant.

The main knock on Turchin & Dalio is that their quantification is imprecise. What's the y-axis here? Seems like a weighted sum of many variables. I couldn't find the raw data. Still, I think it's directionally interesting… [1] [2]

@SarahTheHaider Beyond a small social circle, you need some distribution to be “cool” on a mass scale. That means elite support. Good book on how the studios worked to manufacture stars.

@aeyakovenko 🙂I like cartoons too, but here are some real-life references: 1) Der Judenstaat: 2) Imagined Communities: 3) Invisible Countries: 4) Communistic Societies of the United States:

By the way, @tanvi_madan, your book looks very interesting. Just bought it. The three-way relationship between the Western, Indian, and Chinese spheres is worth much more study.

There's a book on this that does mention Soviet biological weapons facilities in Ukraine. The US apparently funded former biowarfare scientists in Ukraine to disincentivize them from emigrating to places like Iran. Part of nonproliferation strategy.

The book version really does help understand what it means to "live through history", where the events of the future are not known to the characters of the present. And where things could have taken another turn. Thanks to @_lordmax_ for the reference.

"In ancient China, Confucian doctrine considered dissection [of cadavers] a defilement of the human body and forbade its practice. This posed a problem for the Father of Chinese Medicine, Huang Ti..."

This is a really fun book that does for programming what Queneau did for prose. It rewrites the same simple program over and over again in 40 different styles. The embedded version The imperative version The functional version The ML version And so on.

Anyone working on NFT collections should understand the history of the Freemasons. Many of their rituals could be usefully updated for the digital era. With modern technology, could feel like real magic.

Fun book proposes plotting all complex functions as colored contour plots. Kind of an obvious idea, but it's carried through systematically here. See sin(z) and cos(z) as you've never seen them before...

New book by @andrewchen. Useful for anyone trying to bootstrap a new community or network, which is virtually every founder these days.

"He created the world's greatest trading network and drastically lowered taxes for merchants, but he knew that if his empire was going to last, he would need something stronger and more binding than trade. He needed religion."

Did Christianity take down the Roman Empire? Two canonical sources on this are Gibbon [1] and Nietzsche [2] (“Christianity…undid the tremendous deed of the Romans”). See also Nixey [3]. [1]: [2]: [3]:

@gladstein referred me to this interesting book called Super Imperialism by Michael Hudson. Here’s his bit on Japan vs China:

There is a set of Japanese comic books that explains many technical concepts at an undergraduate level, with illustrations. It’s called the “Manga Guide” series and it is surprisingly good.

@isabelleboemeke @tferriss Wrangham makes the case for one form of techno-biological co-evolution. His thesis is that cooking made us human. By outsourcing some human metabolism to the fire pit, natural selection had more slack capacity to work with for brain development.

See also @arianapekary on cable news [tweet below], @mtaibbi’s book Hate Inc [1], @bungarsargon’s recent book Bad News [2], and how hate drives clicks [3]. [1]: [2]: [3]:

McMeekin's book links up with Koster's Operation Snow [1] which goes into detail on how[2] and why the Soviets managed to get their Japanese and American rivals to fight. Just an under-theorized aspect of the whole thing. [1] [2]

Sean McMeekin's latest tour-de-force makes a strong case that Stalin should be thought of as the main actor in WW2 — not Hitler or the US.

@JackNaneek You don’t achieve world domination by accident. Nothing inexorable about it. Read this interesting account of the foreign policy hands who (successfully!) turned the US into a global empire.

From @paragkhanna’s new book, Move.

Excellent new book by @kph3k. Recommended reading for all biomedical founders.

Hopp and Spearman's Factory Physics is also excellent on this general topic. It's much easier to push a button on an assembly line than to design an assembly line. And many digital processes can be understood in part as assembly lines.

"Anticipating a new dawn of freedom and democracy after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russians instead find themselves in a country desperately impoverished and controlled at every level by criminals."

I recall someone once wrote a good book on this! @paulvigna @mikejcasey

What’s the next step for the global freedom class, for all the people who called crypto early, for those deploying adventure capital? Read this after you read the Sovereign Individual. The future we will fund after correcting the fiat deviation of 1971.

The 2nd is the Tinley Park Lights. Crucially, this wasn't just a mass sighting. Different people actually caught a UFO on camera from multiple angles. With three video clips, these guys tried triangulating & doing image processing. The results were odd.

@firasd

@matthewhughes Jill Abramson, former editor of the New York Times, on how business imperatives and pageviews drove the editorial process. From her book Merchants of Truth.

Four books on the Spanish Flu. 1) The Great Influenza: 2) Pale Rider: 3) Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918: 4) Pandemic 1918:

@ErikVoorhees @matthewstoller 🙂

@lorakolodny I love @dansenor's book! But I think we are going to see this trend accelerate. Just like there were Palm Pilots in 2000, but iPhones were bigger in 2010 and huge in 2020.

“[NYT reporter Herbert Matthews’] heroic portrayal of Castro, who was then believed dead, had a powerful effect on American perceptions of Cuba, both in and out of the government, and profoundly influenced the fall of the Batista regime.”

If only Jack London’s Frisco was still au courant as a term for SF, this would be slightly more catchy Costco vs Frisco!

@js_horne This author’s work is a lot of fun. Not exactly art, but novel approach with a lot of visual inspiration.

The American century is ending. The Asian century is beginning.