Blog posts

I’ve now put my blog posts into a sortable table, and highlighted a few recommended posts (most of which don’t relate to any particular book). Click here for the old archive.

There are a few duplicates because some posts relate to more than one book, and this was the cleanest way I found to show that.

Date	Post title	Relevant book	Recommended
2024-10-02	Criticisms (Pt 3 — Checking the Math)	The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan
2024-09-23	Criticisms (Pt 2 — Inflated Signalling Estimates)	The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan
2024-09-18	Criticisms (Pt 1 — it’s The Case Against Higher Education)	The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan
2024-09-05	Thought Experiment: Would You Give Up the Ability to Enjoy Food?	None
2024-08-26	Is it better to be WEIRD?	The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich
2024-07-24	Getting Things Done vs Deep Work	Deep Work by Cal Newport
2024-07-24	Getting Things Done vs Deep Work	Getting Things Done by David Allen
2024-05-21	Criticisms of “The Righteous Mind”	The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
2024-04-21	Environmental myths debunked	Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie
2024-04-21	Solutions discussed	Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie
2024-03-25	The most underrated part of Costco’s business model	None
2024-01-21	“Thinking in Systems” and Economics	Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
2023-12-26	2023 round-up	None	Yes
2023-12-17	Are Self-Improvement Books Worth Reading?	None	Yes
2023-10-24	Problems with “The Paradox of Choice”	The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
2023-09-19	Can maximisers become satisficers? If so, how?	The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
2023-09-19	Why should you want to be a satisficer?	The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
2023-09-16	Why I write criticisms of books	None	Yes
2023-09-04	Why you have so many unnecessary or ineffective meetings	Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni
2023-07-13	My experience with time-blocking	Deep Work by Cal Newport	Yes
2023-07-04	Criticisms of Ha-Joon Chang’s “Economics”	Economics: The User’s Guide by Ha-Joon Chang
2023-06-19	Summaries are not substitutes for books	None	Yes
2023-06-05	Criticisms of “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”	So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
2023-06-01	Is using ChatGPT cheating? How ChatGPT helped me write a blog post	None
2023-05-24	Range at an individual level vs a societal level	Range by David Epstein
2023-05-18	Anecdotes are not Evidence	None
2023-05-16	Could ChatGPT End Up *Raising* the Quality of Writing and Public Discourse?	None
2023-05-08	The 48 Laws of Power vs The Prince	The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
2023-05-08	The 48 Laws of Power vs The Prince	The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
2023-04-13	Criticisms of “Talking to Strangers”	Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
2023-04-10	Why ChatGPT Will NOT Replace Human Writing	None
2023-02-22	Motivation, Morality and Demandingness	None
2023-02-07	Atomic Habits vs Tiny Habits: Which is Better?	Atomic Habits by James Clear
2023-02-07	Atomic Habits vs Tiny Habits: Which is Better?	Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg
2023-02-02	Problems with “Atomic Habits”	Atomic Habits by James Clear
2023-01-06	Living in the future vs the present	Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
2023-01-03	Is the quest for “productivity” misguided?	Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
2022-12-28	2022 Roundup	None
2022-11-07	The 48 Laws of Power is not a “How To” book	The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
2022-11-05	Should we even seek power?	The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
2022-10-26	Is “The 48 Laws of Power” Evil?	The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
2022-08-28	Problems with the Total View of Population Ethics	None
2022-07-31	Sapiens vs Guns, Germs and Steel	Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
2022-07-31	Sapiens vs Guns, Germs and Steel	Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
2022-06-12	Criticisms of Guns, Germs and Steel	Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
2022-06-08	Causality is so much harder than we normally think	None
2022-05-18	The “Shock Test”	How to Decide by Annie Duke
2022-04-27	Criticisms of “Bullshit Jobs”	Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
2022-04-24	What Graeber got right	Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
2022-04-15	My 7 categories of “bullshit jobs”	Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
2022-04-14	Why I started this site	None
2022-03-27	Decision Hygiene	Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein
2022-03-25	Objective ignorance	Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein
2022-03-22	How to reduce noise and objections to reducing noise	Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein
2022-03-13	Prosecutor’s fallacy and base rate fallacy	Calling Bullshit by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West