Here's a short list of some of the best books I read this year.

Exhalation

Ted Chiang's second collection of short stories. Sone of the best sci-fi short stories I’ve read in a looong time. They will really get you thinking about AI, time travel, the nature of reality, and writing as a way of changing your thinking. This is the guy that wrote the short story that became the movie Arrival.

Children of Time

One of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read in years. A story line the encompasses what it means to be human, empathy, bio-engineering, and intelligence itself. Intelligent spiders that use ants as computes are the real draw. The sequel is good too — The Children of Ruin. It adds some intelligent octopi to the mix.

How to Change your Mind

This book, by Michael Pollan, started my binge on reading more about psychedelics and how awesome they are. Big mental model — they could help reduce order in the mind — and when many disorders of the mind are about too much order, e.g. depression, anxiety, addiction — they could help. They help you learn more about yourself as well. Another quote from the book — psychedelics are wasted on the young, the old have the most to gain from it. Other good books in this thread include Breaking Open the Head and the Food of the Gods by Terrence McKenna.

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells’ deep dive into climate change and what it means. TL;DR. We’re basically f**ked and we’ve been ignoring it. It’s not the end of the human race — not like that — more like serious global instability coming in our lifetimes cause of climate change.

Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update

This is an old book, but I needed someone to tell me some solutios to climate change that were grounded in hard facts. This is the only book that I found that wasn't some techno-philic utopia pipe dream. They use system dynamics model human impact on the world. It was first published back in 1972. This is a rehash from 2004. The solution will consist of two major levers — (1) less people on this planet and (2) less consumption, of all forms, per person.

Range

This book by David Epstein argues against the modern pressure to over-specialize — especially from a young age. The basic thesis is that embracing experimentation and breadth of experience is often a better road to success than specialization. Range demands patience, open-mindedness and scientific curiosity. If we can foster and exemplify these, the chances that we will generate major innovations and contribute significantly to our economy and society increase. I especially liked the Kind vs Wicked Domains mental model he uses. Specialists flourish in such “kind” learning environments, where patterns recur and feedback is quick and accurate. By contrast, generalists flourish in “wicked” learning environments, where patterns are harder to discern and feedback is delayed and/or inaccurate. Within this model, technological innovation is “wicked.” Increasingly the advantage is going to generalists who have broad integrative skills.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

There’s a lot in there that’s hard to distill. A quick example of the concepts: “The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events,”. Everything is an event. Even an atom is an event.

Time comes from looking at the world in a “blurry way”. Time does not have an arrow in the quantum domain. The fact that time has a direction is related to entropy. Boltzmann has shown that entropy exists because we describe the world in a blurred fashion. He demonstrated that entropy is precisely the quantity that counts how many are the different configurations that our blurred vision does not distinguish between. It follows that the notion of certain configurations being more particular than others (twenty-six red cards followed by twenty-six black, for example in a deck of cards) makes sense only if I limit myself to noticing only certain aspects of the cards (in this case, the colors). If I distinguish between all the cards, the configurations are all equivalent: none of them is more or less particular than others. The notion of “particularity” is born only at the moment we begin to see the universe in a blurred and approximate way. This is why time has a directionality!

The Undoing Project

I'm a Michael Lewis fan – from Moneyball to Liar's Poker. This was my first intro to the thinking of Tversky and Kahneman that won the Nobel Prize in Economics. The story of how they collaborated and came up with their experiments and findings about how biased the human brain is. There are situations where it consistently does not make good decisions. Recognizing that is key to making better decisions. This human bias is why moneyball works. You can take advantage of these human biases.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k

This is a self help book, but has a great philosophy. Basic premise — you have a limited amount of fucks to give, so pick what you give a fuck about. Same story as Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Made me stop giving fucks about many things I have no control over directly — like US politics. I liked his second book too — Everything is Fucked — though that was more a group of essays about stoicism and Nietschze than a book.

Designing Data Intensive Applications

This is a great O'Reilly book to read through to get a full view of the landscape of data engineering. Surprisingly easy to read if you're in the field. I read it like a novel – a chapter per day.

Bad Blood

Just a good investigative journalism read about a truly f**ked up company. I don’t know why I’m so into large scale fraud stories, but I am. There’s something sickly interesting about them. The Fyre festival, Bernie Madoff, the college admissions scandal – all of these things are so intriguing.