Books

I love to read, and try to get through a couple dozen books a year. I didn’t always keep a list so there are plenty missing. I’ve also been going back and adding a meaningful quote or two.

I also collect people’s recommended reading lists

Some favorites

• Antifragile

• Boyd

  One of the most valuable aspects of “Patterns of Conflict” was that it laid out a framework for assessing different technological approaches. It promoted the application of scientific and engineering knowledge to human needs. “Patterns” is about the mental and moral aspects of human behavior in war. That technology should reinforce that behavior, not drive it, was the argument of the Reformers. Boyd’s mantra was “Machines don’t fight wars, people do, and they use their minds.” He also preached, “People, ideas, hardware—in that order.” Thus, machines and technology must serve the larger purpose.

  Boyd, borrowing from Sun Tzu, said the best commander is the one who wins while avoiding battle. The intent is to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis, and bring about collapse of the adversary by generating confusion, disorder, panic, and chaos. Boyd said war is organic and compared his technique to clipping the nerves, muscles, and tendons of an enemy, thus reducing him to jelly.

• Blindsight

  Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Norretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn’t even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn’t explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: No system can fully understand itself.

• Complexity a Guided Tour

• Exhalation

• Finite and Infinite Games

• Gödel Escher Bach

• Lessons of History

  Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

• A Man for all Markets

  We didn’t ask, Is the market efficient? but rather, In what ways and to what extent is the market inefficient? and How can we exploit this?

• Man’s Search for Meaning

• Meditations

  The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

• The Most Important Thing

• The Moves that Matter

  Similarly, if you ask a Grandmaster about the chessboard in their head, you will find it doesn’t have a size or a shape or a colour. What we have is an implicit sense of the rules of the game, the relationships between the pieces and the prevailing strategic purposes.

• The Obstacle is the Way

• Outliers

• Sapiens

• Seveneves

• Siddhartha

• Stories of Your Life and Others

• Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman

• Thinking in Bets

• The Three-Body Problem Trilogy

• Zero to One

Somewhat chronologically

• Gödel Escher Bach

• On the Edge

• Dune

  Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

  A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

  For the others, we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

• Poor Charlie’s Almanack

  Change – Live with change and accept unremovable complexity Recognize and adapt to the true nature of the world around you; don’t expect it to adapt to you Continually challenge and willingly amend your “best-loved ideas” Recognize reality even when you don’t like it – especially when you don’t like it.

• The Wandering Earth

  Indeed, it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains, to strive to stand on ever higher ground to gaze farther into the distance. It is a drive completely divorced from the demands of survival. Had you, for example, only been concerned with staying alive, you would have fled from this mountain as fast and as far away as you could. Instead, you chose to come and climb it. The reason evolution bestows all intelligent life with a desire to climb higher is far more profound than mere base needs, even though we still do not understand its real purpose. Mountains are universal, and we are all standing at the foot of mountains.

• Reflections on Net Assessment

  …poor, mediocre answers to good questions are more important, more useful than splendid answers to poor questions. That means that getting the questions right is very, very important. Most analysis spends far too little time on what the real questions are. Also, of course, most analysis tends to gravitate, to focus on the questions the analysts can answer, not what the real questions are.

• Foundry

  “People who manage people live on calendar time,” said Jerry. “People who solve problems live outside time, at least temporarily. When people who manage people who solve problems forget that interruption is sabotage, things fall apart.”

• Conflict

  Leaders, some of whom are politicians in this book while others are soldiers, must be able to master four major tasks. Firstly, they need comprehensively to grasp the overall strategic situation in a conflict and craft the appropriate strategic approach – in essence, to get the big ideas right. Secondly, they must communicate those big ideas, the strategy, effectively throughout the breadth and depth of their organization and to all other stakeholders. Thirdly, they need to oversee the implementation of the big ideas, driving the execution of the campaign plan relentlessly and determinedly. Lastly, they have to determine how the big ideas need to be refined, adapted and augmented, so that they can perform the first three tasks again and again and again.

• Reap3r

  Everyone worried about the future. You obsessed over how tomorrow might be different. But it was the things that did not change that mattered most. If you wanted to make sense of the world, you had to focus on the finding the constants.

• Net Assessment and Military Strategy

• The Maniac

  “Cavemen created the gods,” he said. “I see no reason why we shouldn’t do the same.”

• Mastery

• 2034

• Every Life Is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things

• The Jungle Grows back

• The Theoretical Minimum: Quantum Mechanics

• Chaos Kings

  The problem: The variable is extremely hard to compute. “Instead of wasting my time trying to compute the statistical properties, which I’ll never get, I can change my exposure.” Measuring specific risks and making forecasts didn’t matter when unpredictable Black Swans can smash you or your portfolio like a fragile teacup. You need to have zero (or near-zero) risk of getting smashed. Exposure—the nature of the investments in your portfolio and their sensitivity to extreme events—mattered. “I could care less about risk,” Taleb said. “I care how it affects me.”

  It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down.”

• The Art of Learning

• Blindsight

  Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Norretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn’t even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn’t explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: No system can fully understand itself.

• The Theoretical Minimum: Classical Mechanics

• The Player of Games

• The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy

• Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

  The problem is that the stepping stone does not resemble the final product.

• Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd

  The dominant and overarching theme in Boyd’s work is not the narrow interpretation of rapid OODA looping, or “decision superiority”, but rather the ability to adapt to the unfolding, multidimensional events, which occur at different time scales.

• The Mind of War

  What Boyd is all about is a way of thinking and the creation of organizations and organisms that are adaptive and capable of rapidity, variety, harmony, and initiative. Only in this way can they hope to survive and prosper in the face of complex change and uncertainty.

• The Kill Chain

  In reality, true military innovation is less about technology than about operational and organizational transformation. Indeed, history is replete with examples of military rivals that had the same technologies, and what set them apart is how they used them and organized themselves differently.

  Our focus must be on building and buying integrated networks of kill chains, not individual platforms and systems. We need to buy outcomes, not things.

• Market Tremors

  If we had to write a rough prescription for adjusting risk estimates in the presence of a Dominant Agent, it would be guided by the following questions. Who are the main players in a given market or asset class? How big are they, in terms of balance sheet size, ownership or percentage of volume traded? What is their typical behavior? Do they trade in the direction of a price move, trade against it or do they display chameleon-like behavior based on prevailing market conditions? How much will they be forced to trade, given a sufficiently large price shock in a specific direction? What is the likely price impact of forced rebalancing of fixed size?

• Red Blooded Risk

  Taking less risk than is optimal is not safer; it just locks in a worse outcome. In competitive fields, doing less than the best often means failing completely. Taking more risk than is optimal also results in a worse outcome, and often leads to complete disaster.

• Ball Lightning

• The Silk Roads

• Price Wars

• Ball Lightning

• Draft No 4

• Finite and Infinite Games

• Boyd

• Exhalation

• working backwards

• Earth unaware

• How to take smart notes

• Genome

• Cryptonomicon

• Complexity a Guided Tour

• Thinking in Systems

• Thinking in Bets

• Arrival

• The Man Who Solved the Market

• Good omens

• Dark Forest

• Superforecasting

• Training for the Uphill Athlete

• Seventh Sense

• Way of the Peaceful Warrior

• Left of Boom

• Emotional Intelligence (Goleman)

• Leonardo da Vinci

• Homo Deus

• Influence

• The Rise of Money

• Outliers

• David and Goliath

• Tipping Point

• 12 Rules for Life

• Stealing fire

• The Three Body Problem

• Zero to One

• The First Tycoon

• First Man

• Iron Gold - Red Rising 4

• Small Puddles

• Irrational Exuberance- Jan

• Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynmann

• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

• Seveneves

• Seeking Wisdom

• Man for All Markets

• Double Government

• Fooled by Randomness

• The Undoing Project

• The Afghan Campaign

• The Most Important Thing

  Risk means more things can happen than will happen.

  The process of intelligently building a portfolio consists of buying the best investments, making room for them by selling lesser ones, and staying clear of the worst. The raw materials for the process consist of (a) a list of potential investments, (b) estimates of their intrinsic value, (c) a sense for how their prices compare with their intrinsic value, and (d) an understanding of the risks involved in each, and of the effect their inclusion would have on the portfolio being assembled.

• Destined for War

• 33 Strategies of War

  In strategy all of life is a game that you are playing.

• The Effective Executive

  The effective executive is concerned first with understanding. Only then does he even think about who is right and who is wrong.

  I have never encountered an executive who remains effective while tackling more than two tasks at a time.

• Grokking Algorithms

• Lessons of History

• Principles (Dalio)

• Code

• Foundation

• Artemis

• Tribe

• Letters from a Stoic

• Meditations

• Antifragile

• The War of Art

  The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.

• Man’s Search for Meaning

• Intelligent Investor

• Random Walk down Wall Street

• How to not be wrong

• Game of Thrones

• Ego is the Enemy

• Sapiens

• Failure is not an Option

• Elon Musk

• The Obstacle is the Way

  What we can do is limit and expand our perspective to whatever will keep us calmest and most ready for the task at hand. Think of it as selective editing—not to deceive others, but to properly orient ourselves.