Sam’s 2019 Book List
Wow; 2019 was quite a year. Our family officially started our kids in “real” school, meaning that weekday mornings have their own whole new routine. I started the year managing a fairly intensive project, and ended the year stepping into another major effort; all while leading our statewide team through corporate restructuring and aggressive performance goals. Oh, and we decided to do some major remodels to our house.
Yes, 2019 was a busy year for me and our family, as I’m sure it was for many other people. That’s why I so enjoy the few moments each day that I get to read. Usually on the train or bus on my way to and from work, or between meetings. I make it a point to read every day, and I find it a great way to clear my head and relax.
As I’ve done for the past two years, here is a summary of all the books I read in 2019. Note that this doesn’t include about 12 volumes of “Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew,” which my daughter enjoys hearing me read a chapter of each night before bed. The list also doesn’t include “Swampy Alligator,” which is the only book my son wants me to read to him. Every. Single. Night. Same for the magazines I subscribe to and read regularly — The Economist and Rolling Stone — and the Sunday Los Angeles Times.
Please note: I had every intention of writing a brief summary of each book. Then two things happened. First, I realized that it would take me about two months to finish a summary for everything. Second, I saw Barack Obama’s lists of favorite books and movies for 2019 and realized I didn’t need to summarize each one — if you’re interested, check it out yourself. I did include some of my favorite highlights from each book, to give a flavor of what the book is about. In the case of the fiction I read, I hope the short descriptions work.
I hope that this list provides some inspiration for anyone who is seeking it, and I hope others enjoy these books as much as I did!
History
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
What a way to start our 2019 — something light and breezy. Scratch that; this was a very intense read that went way in-depth in the study of a single French family during the14th century. The book makes a case that the 14th century represented a true turning point in history, when the intersection of advancing technology and global pandemics (i.e. the Black Plague) worked together to realize the emergence of a new class — the “middle” class. The book touches on the emergence of new financial systems, such as large scale debt financing, and notes that “No economic activity was more irrepressible than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes — and it was based on the sin of usury.”
The book discusses the fact that before the 14th century, most people were either royalty or peasants. For the peasants, life was hard, short, and not expected to amount to much. In fact, “Progress, moral or material, in man or society, was not expected during this life on earth, of which the conditions were fixed.” However, due to the death of nearly a third of the population of Europe, peasants with skills in trades like garment making or blacksmithing suddenly found themselves in higher demand, and could therefore charge higher rates and start to advance their station in life. The book notes, “the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.”
This lead the way to not only the creation of a new class of people between peasants and royalty, it also set the stage for the Reformation. The Reformation resulted in people developing new ideas for how their lives might progress. For example, a line in the book states, “Catherine of Siena said ‘For each man that shall be damned shall be damned by his own guilt, and each man that is saved shall be saved by his own merit.’ Unperceived, here was the start of the modern world.”
If you’re interested in history, I recommend this book.
Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants
“Calhoun would construct a philosophy demanding respect for political minorities, but while he was in the majority, he demanded that the minority sit down and shut up.”
“Strikingly — and fatefully — most of the industrial development occurred in the North. The saving of labor had little appeal in slave-based economies, where labor was a fixed cost rather than a variable one.”
“Commerce is not a gambling among nations for a stake, to be won by some and lost by others,” Webster said. “It has not the tendency necessarily to impoverish one of the parties to it, by which it enriches the other. All parties gain, all parties make profits, all parties grow rich, by the operations of just and liberal commerce.”
“The protectionists spoke as though every dollar paid by an American for a foreign item went to foreign producers; rather, much of that dollar paid the wages of American sailors, shipbuilders, dockworkers and the like…the protectionists dreamed of an uncertain world to come; Webster defended the world as it existed, a world in which the United States was doing very well.”
“As a group they resented the elites who had controlled the government since the founding.”
“Most Southern trade with the world was conducted through Northern merchants and financial houses; those individuals and firms would be commercial shadows of their current selves if not for Southern slave labor.”
“Mexico’s president and commanding general, Antonio López de Santa Anna, alarmed at the unruliness of the Americans who poured into Texas in defiance of Mexican immigration laws…”
“Slavery was being barred from California not by Congress but by the people of California themselves. Moreover, the vote in the constitutional convention in Monterey had been unanimous, with more than a dozen delegates from slaveholding states voting against slavery in California.”
“The Constitution of the thirteen states was made not merely for the generation which then existed but for posterity — undefined, unlimited, permanent and perpetual.”
“Clay and Webster, with Lincoln’s help, won the argument that the Union must be unbroken, but Calhoun’s insistence on the need for balance between the states and the nation found adherents on matters that ranged, during the next several generations, from civil rights and business regulation to school funding and the environment.”
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
“There is no question, certainly, that the financial revolution preceded the industrial revolution.”
“One of the great puzzles is that the world’s most successful capitalist economy seems to be built on a foundation of easy economic failure.”
“The modern-day dollar bill acquired its current design in 1957. Since then its purchasing power, relative to the consumer price index, has declined by a staggering 87 per cent.”
“During Bush’s time in the White House, his administration ran a budget deficit in seven out of eight years.”
“It is the company that enables thousands of individuals to pool their resources for risky, long-term projects that require the investment of vast sums of capital before profits can be realized.”
“Since 1959, the total mortgage debt outstanding in the US has risen seventy-five fold.”
“The English-speaking world’s passion for property has also been the foundation for a political experiment: the creation of the world’s first true property-owning democracies…”
“Before the 1930s, little more than two fifths of American households were owner-occupiers.”
“As Bush put it in December 2003: ‘It is in our national interest that more people own their home.’”
“By June 1840 all the naval preparations were complete. The Qing Empire was about to feel the full force of history’s most successful narco-state: the British Empire.”
“At Bretton Woods, in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the soon-to-be-victorious Allies met in July 1944 to devise a new financial architecture for the post-war world. In this new order, trade would be progressively liberalized, but restrictions on capital movements would remain in place.”
“The consequences for the United States, where the crisis had originated, were paradoxical. The political backlash against the incompetence of the financial and political elites produced not Sanders but Trump.”
The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
“The Civil War crystallized in the minds of northerners the idea of a powerful national state protecting the rights of citizens. The second founding not only put abolition, equal rights, and black male suffrage into the Constitution, but in its provisions for national enforcement made the federal government for the first time what Sumner called ‘the custodian of freedom.’”
“Mississippi did not get around to ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment until 1995.”
“‘…true republic,’ said William Windom, a Republican congressman from Minnesota, ‘rests upon the absolute equality of rights of the whole people, high and low, rich and poor, white and black.’”
“Federalism endured, but a deeply modified federalism, which recognized the primacy of national citizenship and saw the states, not the national government, as most likely to infringe on Americans’ fundamental rights.”
“Proposals also circulated to change the way presidential electors were chosen, or do away with the Electoral College entirely.”
“(In the 1880s, the Court had declared corporations legal ‘persons’ entitled to the protection of the amendment’s Due Process Clause.”
“The country has come a long way toward fulfilling the agenda of Reconstruction, although deep inequalities remain.”
“…to this day, when conservative jurists discuss federalism, they almost always concentrate on the ideas of eighteenth-century framers, ignoring those of the architects of Reconstruction.”
Fiction
The Road
A good, quick, read; although as a fan of AMC’s The Walking Dead, I can see where they got some of their inspiration. There’s a scene where they stumble upon a family cooking “meat” over a fire that is downright chilling, in the same way I love AMC’s TWD: to what depths will a human sink to when society and its norms crumble?
Childhood’s End
1950's sci-fi, and the title to a song by Pink Floyd.
Parable of the Sower
Parable of the Talents
These books represent the first two parts of a series, and there may be more. Some of the best science fiction I’ve ever read, because it is very believable. To read about how the world falls into chaos because of a number of factors, including climate change, feels real. And its set in Los Angeles, which literally hits close to home. I am so happy my colleagues at Studio-MLA recommended this book to me!
Autobiographies/Memoirs
Educated: A Memoir
An amazing book and read. No wonder so many people recommend this book. So well written — I felt like I was there every step of the way. A very interesting read in the sense of learning how the author came to understand how her upbringing had formed her world view:
“I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others — because realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others.”
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography
Eric Idle sums it all up nicely:
“You don’t have to believe me, but who could make this shit up?”
The Greatest Love Story Ever Told: An Oral History
Note: I feel like less of a man when I read about Nick Offerman in his tool shed.
“That’s the best part of this technique. Get out of your house, get off of your phone, then go and participate in things that thrill you.”
“…as it turns out that you can purchase different types of sheets, sorted not just by mattress size but also by quality. What the F? There is a thing called ‘thread count’ that I still can’t quite wrap my head around despite a great love of arithmetic, and I thankfully don’t have to because my bride has that shit on lockdown.”
“…finding creativity in every part of life that you can. That has done me a lot of good. You can find the creativity in everything, and you can find the humor in everything.”
Acid for the Children: A Memoir
“There are things in life that you remember with different senses, some by image, some by sound or talk, some by physical sensation.”
“I love it; I love how we are all the same, eating… and sleeping; yet the way we feel and act is profoundly different from place to place.”
“Peace and love, dude. The world is cruel enough as it is. Everything that is not love is cowardice.”
“I had a good sense of self, yet I was often inexplicably blue, reaching hard for camaraderie, love, and understanding. I was ready to get crazy to prove I was something real.”
“I knew the peace and satisfaction that came from being of service. I wanted to be good so bad. But my moral compass was just so damn wacky, I veered from the path of kindness into dishonesty and exploitation with just a modicum of provocation. Like I had something to prove to my friends.”
“The universe gives us the ones we need. And the ones we deserve.”
“Nothing special about me, we’ve all got our own sacred place, but to access it, your mission must be pure and your aim true.”
“I’ve been insensitive and offensive to many human beings. For every act when I’ve made somebody feel bad, I’ve felt bad myself a hundred times over. Such is the way of the universe.”
“I’ve always been an earner, be it a substantial job or hustle.”
“Dear God, thank you for my survival, my benevolent guardian angel watching over me, thank you. Wow. Shit.”
“And the absolute knowledge that love is the only thing that counts in the end.”
“All music has magic in it ya know, even shitty pop music.”
“Thelonious Monk was once asked about what kind of music he liked to listen to, and he replied, ‘I love all music.’ The journalist persisted, asking, ‘Even country music?’ Monk said, ‘What part of what I just said do you not understand?/”
“I’ve been saved again and again by angels all around me.”
“I went through a few years where it was an absolute physiological impossibility for me to stay awake in a movie theater.”
“For years and years, I made the mistake of trying to run away, before I learned to surrender, accept my pain as a blessing, trust in the love, and let it change me.”
“All my life I have wrestled with the shadow part of myself, and then miraculously been rescued.”
Non-Fiction
Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World
This was a cool read, and focuses on the very long-term history of our planet and universe. It points out that “we are now almost three-quarters of the way through Earth’s habitable period.” The book also provides some stark warnings, like “the last time CO2 concentrations were this high was Pliocene time, more than 4 million years ago.”
The message of the author is clear: “It is also not the ‘end of nature’ but, instead, the end of the illusion that we are outside nature,” and “Dazzled by our own creations, we have forgotten that we are wholly embedded in a much older, more powerful world whose constancy we take for granted.”
The book does end on a positive note, with the author hoping that “We might learn to place less value on novelty and disruption, and develop respect for durability and resilience.” The book closes with a line that resonated with me:
“Understanding how historical happenstance is written into each of our personal lives might cause us to treat each other with more empathy.”
The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great
“We need government to protect individuals’ free right to choose.”
“Paine argued that private property was a mere convention, and that all private property was actually the work of society at large: ‘Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.’”
“Material human progress in the absence of spiritual fulfillment isn’t enough. People need meaning. When the highest moral cause is material success, it looks a lot like having no morals at all.”
“The more minority groups to which you are a member, the more you have been victimized; the more you have been victimized, the more your opinion about the innate institutional bigotry of the United States ought to carry weight.”
Personal note: I don’t necessarily agree with all the quotes in this book. In many cases, I highlight something as it allows me to better understand an author’s point of view.
Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt
“I saw for myself that kindness, reconciliation, and connection — not contempt, division, and isolation — are what our hearts really desire.”
“In his celebrated pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine held that ‘it is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies.’”
“James Madison, in the fourteenth Federalist Paper, warned that the ‘most alarming of all novelties, the most wild of all projects, the most rash of all attempts, is that of rendering us in pieces, in order to preserve our liberties and promote our happiness.’”
“The way to influence — and to lead — is to begin with warmth. Warmth is the conduit of influence: It facilitates trust and the communication and absorption of ideas.”
“For me, the last part is key to national unity: gratitude based on a recognition that we need others, even — perhaps especially — those with whom we disagree.”
“There’s an old joke: ‘My wife says I’m consumed with thoughts of vengeance, but I say . . . we’ll just see about that.’”
Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America
“This is a nation built not upon heritage but a common idea. It is an idea built upon the concept that all men and women are created in God’s image, equal and free.”
“Progress toward true equality in America is a project that will, in all likelihood, never be complete.”
“Too many on the right confuse ‘political correctness’ with simply not being a quarrelsome jackass.”
“The fad of ‘urban planning,’ typified by a mid-twentieth-century love affair with the idea of the ‘radiant city’ promoted by, among others, architectural theorist Le Corbusier, did not result in radiant cities.”
“In the process of deconstructing centuries of organic, incremental social evolution, the central planners empower government to engage in what government does best: boondoggles. Even the history of the practically sanctified national highway system has been whitewashed. ‘Haste, waste, mismanagement, and outright graft are making a multibillion-dollar rat-hole out of the Federal Highway Program,’ wrote Karl Detzer in 1960.”
“Hanlon’s Razor posits that it is a fallacy to presume malice when incompetence suffices for a comprehensive explanation of events.”
“Identitarianism and vindictive social justice are radical philosophies, antithetical to the American idea. But rank-and-file social justice advocates must be handled with sympathy and care. They are not anti-American insurgents; they are our neighbors with valid concerns about the future of the country. They have been led astray.”
Personal note: I don’t necessarily agree with all the quotes in this book. In many cases, I highlight something as it allows me to better understand an author’s point of view.
How To Win Friends and Influence People
“The next time we are tempted to admonish somebody, let’s pull a five-dollar bill out of our pocket, look at Lincoln’s picture on the bill, and ask, ‘How would Lincoln handle this problem if he had it?’”
“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain — and most fools do.”
“As Dr. Johnson said: ‘God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days.’”
“There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.”
“One of the most neglected virtues of our daily existence is appreciation.”
“People are not interested in you. They are not interested in me. They are interested in themselves — morning, noon and after dinner.”
“The chairman of the board of directors of one of the largest rubber companies in the United States told me that, according to his observations, people rarely succeed at anything unless they have fun doing it.”
“To be interesting, be interested.”
“…probably the most important rule in the world: ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.’”
“Few people are logical. Most of us are prejudiced and biased. Most of us are blighted with preconceived notions, with jealousy, suspicion, fear, envy and pride.”
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
“Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others and divert attention to external threats, either real or imaginary.”
“If the nation is facing external invasion or diabolical subversion, who has time to worry about overcrowded hospitals and polluted rivers? By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.”
“It is debatable whether it is better to provide people with universal basic income (the capitalist paradise) or universal basic services (the communist paradise). no matter which paradise you choose, the real problem is in defining what ‘universal’ and ‘basic’ actually mean.”
“…in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job.”
“Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst political system in the world, except for all the others.”
“Human power depends on mass cooperation, and mass cooperation depends on manufacturing mass identities — and all mass identities are based on fictional stories, not on scientific facts or even on economic necessities.”
“Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history…”
“As long as you define yourself as ‘an individual possessing inalienable natural rights,’ you will not know who you really are, and you will not understand the historical forces that shaped your society and your own mind (including your belief in ‘natural rights’).”
“What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.”
“We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them.”
“in the end you realize that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks…everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. The more closely you observe yourself, the more obvious it becomes that nothing endures even from one moment to the next. Yet in truth, consciousness is the greatest mystery in the universe, and mundane feelings of heat and itching are every bit as mysterious as feelings of rapture or cosmic oneness.” — Note: This theme came back in other books I read in 2019.
“A wise old man was asked what he learned about the meaning of life. ‘Well,’ he answered, ‘I have learned that I am here on earth in order to help other people. What I still haven’t figured out is why the other people are here.’”
“If by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to do what you desire, then yes, humans have free will. But if by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to choose what to desire, then no, humans have no free will.”
“It is particularly noteworthy that our fantasy self tends to be very visual, whereas our actual experiences are corporeal.”
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
“In Flynn’s terms, we now see the world through ‘scientific spectacles.’ He means that rather than relying on our own direct experiences, we make sense of reality through classification schemes, using layers of abstract concepts to understand how pieces of information relate to one another.”
“Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted for complexity, and that has manifested as flexibility, with profound implications for the breadth of our intellectual world.”
The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life
Note: The author — this dude — was clearly going through something; using this book as a way of working things out. I think it was a divorce and maybe a failed stent with a much younger employee. This cast a weird veil over everything I read.
“A life of ease is not the pathway to growth and happiness.”
“You have to lose yourself to find yourself, give yourself away to get everything back.”
“Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism. Tribalism is community for lonely narcissists.”
“As the Augustinian scholar James K. A. Smith writes, ‘To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live.’”
“In our culture we think of freedom as the absence of restraint. That’s freedom from. But there is another and higher kind of freedom. That is freedom to.”
“You have to chain yourself to a certain set of virtuous habits so you don’t become slave to your destructive desires — the desire for alcohol, the desire for approval, the desire to lie in bed all day.”
“Community builders believe in radical mutuality. They utterly reject the notion that some people have everything in order, and others are screwups. In their view, we are all stumblers.”
“Martin Luther King, Jr., once advised that your work should have length — something you get better at over a lifetime. It should have breadth — it should touch many other people. And it should have height — it should put you in service to some ideal and satisfy the soul’s yearning for righteousness.”
“Leadership, Peter Drucker wrote, ‘is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, of building a personality beyond its normal limitations.’”
No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future
Note: A quick read providing some opinions on Automated Vehicles (AVs), and like his prior book, I do recommend some more time editing (not that I’m one to talk).
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
“Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted.”
“Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff.”
“Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas — to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere.”
Sextant: A Young Man’s Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who Mapped the World’s Oceans
A fascinating read! It really makes you understand how “new” the world we live in today is. It really wasn’t that long ago that no one knew what was over the next horizon.
“Most books on the subject of marine navigation emphasize the great conservatism of sailors. Once they had learned how to do something, and provided it worked, they would doggedly go on doing it that way and would not trouble to seek improvements.”
It’s the Manager: Gallup finds the quality of managers and team leaders is the single biggest factor in your organization’s long-term success
“…inevitably, everyone will leave your organization. The exit is one of the most critical moments to get right in the employee life cycle.”
“Except in cases of terminations due to unethical behavior, make sure everyone who leaves your organization knows what they contributed and that you appreciated it.”
Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World
“Crime is, for a society, an unproductive activity that forces people to spend money on guards and fences and locks, rather than on things that lead somewhere useful. It is therefore in all our interests to be governed.”
“It was London companies that first conquered India, and Africa, and North America, not the British state.”
“In the early hysteria over President Donald Trump’s Russia ties, a Reuters investigation into Russian investment in the Trump Organization found sixty-three Russians among the owners of 2,044 units in seven different Trump-branded developments in Florida. Far more remarkable was the fact that fully 703 of the units were owned via corporate vehicles, meaning there were no real people attached to their title deeds at all, and their ownership was completely obscure. They might have belonged to Vladimir Putin, for all anyone else could know.”
“The real threat to the liberal order is not the poor immigrants, but unaccountable money. Offshore bandits are looting the world, and this looting is undermining democracy, driving inequality and sucking ever-greater volumes of wealth into Moneyland, where we can’t follow it.”
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
“Experience and professional affirmation matter, but it’s also true that there is considerable wisdom in the old Chinese warning to beware a craftsman who claims twenty years of experience when in reality he’s only had one year of experience twenty times.”
“In day-to-day matters, common sense serves us well and is usually better than needlessly complicated explanations. We don’t need to know, for example, exactly how fast a car can go in a rainstorm before the tires begin to lose contact with the road. Somewhere there’s a mathematical formula that would allow us to know the answer with great precision, but our common sense needs no such formula to tell us to slow down in bad weather, and that’s good enough.”
“The new culture of education in the United States is that everyone should, and must, go to college. This cultural change is important to the death of expertise, because as programs proliferate to meet demand, schools become diploma mills whose actual degrees are indicative less of education than of training, two distinctly different concepts that are increasingly conflated in the public mind. Young people who might have done better in a trade sign up for college without a lot of thought given to how to graduate, or what they’ll do when it all ends.”
“…respecting a person’s opinion does not mean granting equal respect to that person’s knowledge.”
“When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise.”
“‘Ninety percent of everything,’ Sturgeon decreed, ‘is crap.’”
“The Internet is the printing press at the speed of fiber optics.”
“The challenges to expertise and established knowledge created by modern journalism all flow from the same problem that afflicts so much of modern American life: there is too much of everything.”
“This is crucial because laypeople too easily forget that the republican form of government under which they live was not designed for mass decisions about complicated issues.How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say? How can a republic function if the people who have sent their representatives to decide questions of war and peace cannot tell the difference between Agrabah, Ukraine, or Syria? Democracy, as practiced in the United States in the early twenty-first century, has become a resentful, angry business.”
“Every single vote in a democracy is equal to every other, but every single opinion is not, and the sooner American society reestablishes new ground rules for productive engagement between the educated elite and the society they serve, the better.”
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
“So we can be confident that, after thousands of such generations, we see reality as it is. Not all of reality, of course. Just the parts that matter for survival in our niche. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness…natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naïve view of mental evolution.”
“Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) Theorem: Seeing truth hides fitness, and seeing fitness hides truth.”
“…each perceptual system is a user interface, like the desktop of a laptop. Ignorance of reality can aid command of reality. This claim, out of context, is counterintuitive. But for an interface it’s obvious.”
“…as Einstein put it ‘Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.’”
“The proper target of this objection is panpsychism, which claims that some physical objects also have consciousness. An electron, for instance, has unconscious properties such as position and spin, but may also have consciousness; a rock, however, might not be conscious, even if it consists of particles that are each conscious.”
“To know other agents, you must also know yourself. All knowledge is, in this sense, embodied.”
“Science is not a theory of reality, but a method of inquiry. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.”
The Infinite Game
“Between the time Glass-Steagall was passed until the 1980s and ’90s, when the act was virtually gutted in the name of opening up the financial markets, the number of stock market crashes that happened was zero. Since the gutting, however, we have had three: Black Monday in 1987, the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the financial crisis of 2008.”
“Any leader who wants to adopt an infinite mindset must follow five essential practices: Advance a Just Cause Build Trusting Teams Study your Worthy Rivals Prepare for Existential Flexibility Demonstrate the Courage to Lead.”
“Infinite-minded leaders understand that ‘best’ is not a permanent state. Instead, they strive to be ‘better.’ ‘Better’ suggests a journey of constant improvement and makes us feel like we are being invited to contribute our talents and energies to make progress in that journey. In the Infinite Game we accept that ‘being the best’ is a fool’s errand and that multiple players can do well at the same time. The infinite-minded players understood that the best option for their own survival, and indeed the ultimate goal of an infinite leader, is to keep the game in play.”
“The three pillars — to advance a purpose, protect people and generate a profit — seem to be essential in the Infinite Game.”
“…leaders are not responsible for the results, leaders are responsible for the people who are responsible for the results.”
“In an instant I understood the reason why I felt so competitive with him. The way I saw him had nothing to do with him. It had to do with me. In an infinite game, we can both succeed.”
“An infinite mindset embraces abundance whereas a finite mindset operates with a scarcity mentality.”
“Our lives are finite, but life is infinite. We are the finite players in the infinite game of life.”
Random
Strange Stars: How Science Fiction and Fantasy Transformed Popular Music
A short read, kind of random. Lots of great recommendations for other science fiction books to check out, or music to listen to.
