20 hours of insights in 20 minutes
William MacAskill is one of the founders of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. In Doing Good Better, he explains the reasoning behind a lot of EA ideas. The EA movement has changed a bit since 2015, when MacAskill wrote the book. But the core ideas in Doing Good Better are still very solid and worth understanding.
We can’t give a fuck about everything, so we have to choose our fucks carefully. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck suggests how we might make those choices.
Many people compare Sapiens to Guns Germs and Steel. In my opinion, GGS overall is a better book than Sapiens. But both are worth reading.
The Courage to be Disliked features a series of conversations between a youth and a philosopher. The philosopher has three central claims, based on the philosophy of Austrian psychiatrist, Alfred Adler: the world is simple, people can change, and everyone can be happy.
Evicted takes place in Milwaukee during 2008 and 2009. The author, Desmond, follows 8 different tenant families, their landlords, and the events in their lives related to housing. Their stories are interspersed with facts and statistics about housing and evictions more generally.
A very detailed summary of the book Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. Around 70,000 years ago, homo sapiens developed superior cognitive functions and wiped out other human species. Harari then describes our species’ changes throughout the Agricultural Revolution (around 12,000 years ago) and Scientific Revolution (500 years ago). He finishes by looking into the future, which may soon see the end of Sapiens as we know it.
There are many criticisms of Guns, Germs and Steel. This summary outlines, in hopefully a fair and balanced way, the key criticisms and responses to it.
I was listening to a podcast recently that talked about how people’s family situations and upbringings affected how they turned out. It […]
Originally intended to be a workbook, How to Decide is intended to be more practical than Annie Duke’s earlier book, Thinking in […]
Take this quick “shock test” from How to Decide to see if you are overconfident in your estimates (like I was!)