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2023 reading list
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2023_reading.md

[This page is best viewed with https://github.com/ludios/expand-everything, which will load all the comnents below.]

Wherein I try to prioritize reading for the limited amount of time I have this year, and to remind myself to read more than just comments on the Internet. Because of problems of time and shifting interests, I will consider this a success if I read a third of the list. I'll reflect on the reading and deviations from the plan in Jan 2024.

{+} = added after initial planning

  • Albert Camus - The Fall/ audio
  • {+} John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces/ audio, go to 6m44s to skip past the introduction spoilers
  • {+} pirate aba - The Wandering Inn/ audio
  • William Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker/ audio, go to 12m35s to skip past the introduction spoilers
  • Tae Kim - A Guide to Japanese Grammar
  • Noboru Akuzawa - Japanese Sentence Patterns Training Book for JLPT N5
  • Noboru Akuzawa - Japanese Sentence Patterns Training Book for JLPT N4
  • Jay Rubin - Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You/ the romaji is miserable; may have useful grammar insights
  • struggle through Japanese Wikipedia for some topics I know about
  • Daniele Minnone - A learning handbook for Joyo Kanji/ the first third, pg. 1 - 98

(my initial source for learning Japanese is https://cijapanese.com/ and not any of the reading.)

Lectures

maybe in 2024? not sure

  • {+} Paul Bourke - Fractals, Chaos, Self-Similarity
  • {+} Alex Komoroske - The Compendium / after I convert the Firebase export in code/websites/compendium-cards-data/db.json to a single HTML page
  • {+} James Betker - Non_Interactive
  • {+} Denny Britz’s Blog
  • {+} Robert Root-Bernstein - Discovering: Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge
  • {+} Steven H. Strogatz - Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
  • {+} Lexi Mattick & Hack Club - Putting the “You” in CPU
  • Lou Keep - The Uruk Series
  • Knut Schmidt-Nielsen - How Animals Work (via)
  • Edward O. Wilson - The Diversity of Life
  • James L. Gould, Carol Grant Gould - The Animal Mind (via)
  • Symbols and mental programs: a hypothesis about human singularity/ printed
  • Robert Yarham - How to Read the Landscape
  • Richard Powers - The Overstory/ audio
  • Rigdzin Shikpo - Openness Clarity Sensitivity/ printed
  • Michael R. Canfield (editor) - Field Notes on Science & Nature (via)
  • Sabine Hossenfelder - Existential Physics
  • George Soros - The Alchemy of Finance/ printed
  • Eric Gill - An Essay on Typography/ printed; I know he's bad
  • {+} Richard Hamming - The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

unplanned cool things read

unplanned and abandoned

  • Chuck Klosterman - The Nineties/ audio
  • Rick Rubin - The Creative Act/ audio
  • Mike Rinder - A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology/ audio
  • Sarah Steel - Do As I Say: How Cults Control, Why We Join Them, and What They Teach Us About Bullying, Abuse and Coercion/ audio
  • Benjamín Labatut - When We Cease to Understand the World/ audio
  • Kathryn Petras, Ross Petras - Awkword Moments: A Lively Guide to the 100 Terms Smart People Should Know/ audio
  • Adam Galinsky, Maurice Schweitzer - Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both/ audio
  • Han Kang - The White Book/ audio
  • Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince/ audio
  • Anthony Bourdain - Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly/ audio
  • Kristie Macrakis - Espionage/ audio
  • Christopher Winn - Legal Daisy Spacing (via)
  • Justin E. H. Smith - The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is/ audio
  • Alice Schroeder - The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life/ audio (~77% in)
  • Morgan Housel - Same as Ever/ audio
  • Amanda Montell - Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism/ audio
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ivan commented Jan 20, 2024

"If you don't look, you won't find."

[...]

I would argue that in practical life, you want to succeed. You got to do two things. You got to have a certain amount of competence and you have to know what you know and what you don't know. You have to know the edge of your competency. And if you know the edge of your competency, you're a much safer thinker and a much safer investor than you are if you don't know it. And I constantly meet people, better to have an IQ of 160 and think it's 150 than an IQ of 160 and think it's 200. That guy's going to kill you because he doesn't know the edge of his own competency and he thinks he knows everything.

[...]

The reason capitalism works as well as it does is so much of it is win-win, but there are all kinds of people that are looking for ways to cheat people. We had a guy with us when I was in the military, everybody called him Honest John, and of course, they called him that because he was totally crooked. And if it wasn't dishonorable and crooked, he didn't make a sound. He wouldn't consider any proposition that wasn't sleazy and never really been crooked. He was trying to screw people out of money. But how much better if you have a voluntary transaction where both sides are happy on a win-win basis? That's perfect. And capitalism in such a system causes this flourishing civilization. Of course, that's the way to go.

[...]

That's the beauty of capitalism. It makes win-win transactions very easy and almost automatic. It's such a hugely important idea and people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom I regard as quite talented in some ways, but they just don't get it.

[...]

And so we have to go to something else, and of course, that's harder. A lot of people have that problem, and yet they go to new systems and new ways. I've always liked the quote, "Capitalism is how we take care of people we don't know." It's utterly remarkable how it works.

[...]

Collison: It feels like a lot of the objections you have to, say, professional money managers or Wall Street or whatever can be summed up by people should be more cognizant of principal-agent problems. Is that fair?

Munger: You can hardly imagine a field more full of principal-agent [problems] more than wealth management. Of course the wealth managers take care of themselves. That includes the foundation manager. A foundation manager is basically - he wants to get $400,000 a year when a professor gets $110,000. He's got one way of picking money managers who get 3% off the top.

[...]

Collison: Is the secret of Berkshire's culture just the anti-bureaucracy bent? Could you sum it up in that way?

Munger: Berkshire's pretty extreme in culture. We are deeply aware of how bureaucracies tend to create their own internal dynamics so that everybody protects everybody else and nobody changes anything, ruffles any feathers. And the net result is that a lot of bureaucracies make some very stupid decisions, and we try and avoid that. But the way we've done it mostly is by not having anybody around. They can't be bureaucratic if they're not there. There is nobody in the head office. So we avoid the bureaucracy. We just don't want people to do it. Nobody else is as extreme as we are in that. A huge advantage to us. And another thing is we like very trustworthy people. I'd rather have a brief telephone [with] somebody I trust than I would have a 40-page contract prepared by the finest law firm in the world with somebody I don't trust. And so we like to deal with trustworthy people and to be able to count on their oral promises.

[...]

Poor Charlie's Almanac is a lot like the guy who created modern Singapore. And what he always said was, "Figure out what works and then do it. Figure out what works and then do it." And he just did that more relentlessly than anybody else and more intelligently. And he was probably the greatest nation builder that has ever existed in terms of quality of leadership. He's probably the greatest nation builder that ever existed, including Pericles and everybody in all history. And it's very much like Poor Charlie's Almanac, "Figure out what works and do it. Figure out what doesn't work and avoid it." And he just was relentless. That's all he did. And he started as a left-wing labor lawyer. And to start as a left-wing labor lawyer, he ended up creating modern Singapore just by, "Figure out what works and do it. And figure out what doesn't work and avoid it." Just keep doing that over and over again. So as far as I'm concerned, the politician who looks the most like Poor Charlie's Almanac is Lee Kuan Yew. And I'm not surprised that he got ahead better than any other nation builder that ever lived. That was all he did. It was pretty goddamn simple.

https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/76168278/munger-a-conversation-with-charlie-munger-john-collison 'Charlie Munger - A Conversation with Charlie Munger & John Collison'

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