20 hours of insights in 20 minutes
A Mind for Numbers is about learning how to learn. Oakley doesn’t just give study tips (though it certainly does include many). She also explains why those study tips or strategies work, and supports that with evidence.
Spoonley discusses the demographic challenges facing New Zealand over the next few decades. The book tackles an interesting and neglected topic and its overall message (i.e. that there need to be informed, national discussions about this) seems sensible enough. Unfortunately, however, Spoonley’s writing isn’t great, and he relies too heavily on secondary sources.
The premise of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone sucked me in. Unless you’re a therapist, you’ll never know what goes on in the therapy room. Even if you’ve been to therapy, you might wonder what other patients talk about in therapy, and what therapists really think of their patients. The premise piqued my curiosity, and Gottlieb delivered.
The Total View suggests that we should seek to maximise total wellbeing, including by creating new lives. There are problems with the Total View that have concerning implications in practice.
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.