While I appreciate Ted’s mathematical style and perspective as a highly intelligent outsider, I don’t agree with his value judgements and thus his conclusions. I’m on team technology. Nevertheless, many of his observations were prescient and remain thought-provoking. Quotes without further comment below. What the principle of technological autonomy asserts is that the overall development […]
Category Archives: Book-Notes
Bhagavad Gita (-200) Translation by Stephen Mitchell
“As unnecessary as a well is to a village on the banks of river,so unnecessary are all scripturesto someone who has seen the truth.” {Humility or self-referential undermining? Either way I like it.} *** “What a great man doesordinary people will do;whatever standard he setseveryone else will follow. In all the three worlds, Arjuna,there is […]
The Hard Thing About Hard Things (2014) Ben Horowitz
Paraphrases and genuine quotes completely jumbled together. Chaos. Why it’s hard to bring big company executives into little companies When you are building an organization, there is no organization to design, there are no processes to improve, and communicating with the organization is simple. On the other hand, you have to be very adept at […]
The Glass Bead Game (1943) Hermann Hesse
For after all, the maximum integration of the individual into the hierarchy of the educators and scholars, has ever been one of our ruling principles. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of […]
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Ernest Hemingway
A classic for a reason and a bargain at 127 pages. The style fits the story. Hemingway’s prose never breaks character. The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea […]
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) Milan Kundera
I tip my bowler hat to Mr. Kundera. This was artful. While I’ve never been a romantic, perhaps I even learned something about love in this novel. The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to […]
Disunited Nations (2020) Peter Zeihan
National success requires achieving both continuity and economies of scale. Those big enough to have economies of scale rarely have good borders – think Russia. Those sufficiently isolated to have long continuities rarely have scale – think New Zealand. The Americans have changed their mind about their alliance and have turned sharply more insular. There […]
Coming Apart (2012) Charles Murray
I don’t endorse Charles Murray. But as a man with no reputation points left to lose, he can be a particularly free thinker! In the early 1990s, Bill Gates was asked what competitor worried him the most. Goldman Sachs, Gates answered. He explained: “Software is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war, or […]
Has The West Lost It? (2018) Kishore Mahbubani
I first discovered Kishore on the Sinica Podcast (highly recommended). His eloquence and sharp takes on America and China inspired me to read some of his work. Being from Singapore, a country born of Chinese and British influences, Kishore provides a balanced (or at least, a fresh) view on Sino-Western relations. I enjoyed his constructive […]
Whiteshift (2018) Eric Kaufman
Whites are already a minority in most major cities of North America. Together with New Zealand, North America is projected to be ‘majority minority’ by 2050, with Western Europe and Australia following suit later in the century. If you’re white you may think, ‘I don’t identify as white, only as British.’ This arises because being […]