Farnam Street

It seems like most people come to this sort of thing to improve their lives. If your life is already fine, learning for the sake of learning is great. Most people whose lives need changing are stuck in habits and, speaking from experience, learning can come to replace the time spent on bad habits.

Which seems great, but it never gets applied, and your life continues to have the problems you set out to solve. It's easy to get stuck in a loop: If I just click through to this one article, maybe it'll have the answers...

Personally, I had a breakthrough in the last few weeks when I did the following:

* Instructed Firefox to not save history. Not being able to immediately jump to my go-to distractions with two keystrokes helped break the cycle, and not having sites in history adds just enough friction to keep me away. I also make heavy use of reader mode. This means I'm better able to focus on what I do end up reading.

* Switched to Microsoft Launcher, removed the Bing box, and installed DuckDuckGo. Stories disabled (they're getting rid of it soon anyway), JavaScript disabled. The abundance of sites that completely fail without JavaScript is a great habit breaker.

* Stopped saving articles to Pocket. Now I decide in the first paragraph if it's worth reading now, which is different from deciding whether it's worth reading. Farnam Street (https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/) has been tremendously helpful here because it's almost all good. Still, it's easy to get stuck in a loop…

Some titles I've recently read or at least have placed on my reading list.

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Philosohpy

Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium - Seneca

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (must read)

The Republic - Plato

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History

Five Chimneys - Olga Lengyel

The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (must read)

The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank

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Fiction

(particularly dystopian) 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451

(crime/action) Child 44, The Secret Speech, Agent 6 - Tom Rob Smith

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Economics

Capital in the Twenty-First Century - Thomas Piketty

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty - Banerjee, Duflo

Why Nations Fail - Robinson

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Economics/Decision making/Psychology

Undercover Economist, Freakonomics, Nudge, Thinking Fast and Slow

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Random titles

The Selfish Gene, Self-Reliance, The Elements of Style (about writing), Slaughterhouse-Five

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Some links to inspire your reading (though you may want to checkout the websites first to get an idea of the topics they cover)

http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books

http://bookpickings.brainpickings.org/

http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/reading/

http://www.ryanholiday.net/reading-newsletter

I’m just a working-class guy trying to take part in the conversation that all the smart people are having. What books should I read? -…

This is a nice and ambitious post. A few thoughts:

1. There are great insights in Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. The focus of that book is on Disruptive Innovation, where a new upstart with some new tech/angle crushes your business. A lot of your notes/principles here are captured in that book concisely.

2. One thing that is useful for employees to understand is how their company creates and executes on a strategy. It's crazy to me how many guides there are on strategy when most individuals do 0 strategy setting. The result is that you think of a great strategy, get shot down for whatever reason, and just grumble about how the "execs don't get it". It's much more fruitful to understand how the big dawgs are setting their strategy and what models they're using, and then you can figure out how to operate and innovate in that context.

3. Your comments on insight and research reminded me of Charlie Munger's talks on Mental Models. The basic idea is that you learn from a bunch of disciplines and your brain starts to tie things together and you'll produce insights. Shane over at Farnam Street (https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/) has a great guide and intro.

Overall, I enjoyed reading your post and am impressed by the level of research. Great job.

I double-checked the material, and you are right. The text and images in http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/09/what-if-serious-scientific-answers-to-absurd-hypothetical-questions/ are different than at https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/ , so not covered by the xkcd.com license.

More specifically, the original has text like "Each collision releases a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles." while the quoted text on that site uses the conditional mood "Each collision would release a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles."

Also, the end in the original is "A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests ..." while the blog uses "Major League Baseball Rule 6.08( b) suggests ..."; and the order of the baseball fusion zone images have been swapped.

Thus, this extensive quote did not come from xkcd.com and is not covered under the automatic license grant for non-profit use. I agree that it is copyright infringement and not covered under fair use - for what little that's worth. :)

(However, had the material on that blog been identical to xkcd.com then I believe there would not be an infringement.)

Could you check to see if that matches the book? There's a small chance that the blog cited something else; eg an older copy of the online page.

Yes, it's aways good to think about the cognitive biases we all have before assuming "GREAT NEWS" from a sample of dubious randomness ;-)

I'm much more attuned to these things from the following podcasts and blog:

https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/

http://theknowledgeproject.libsyn.com/

https://youarenotsosmart.com/

A few of my favourite episodes and articles:

- http://theknowledgeproject.libsyn.com/rory-sutherland-on-the-psychology-of-advertising-complex-evolved-systems-reading-decision-making

- https://youarenotsosmart.com/2017/01/13/yanss-092-avoiding-the-many-varieties-of-bullshit/

- https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/06/habits-vs-goals/

Most relevant I guess:

- https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/08/04/yanss-055-psychologys-long-obsession-with-the-weirdest-people-in-the-world/

This whole thing reminds of Buffett, Charlie Munger and the textile mill machinery story. I need to find the exact link for it though. Here's what I can remember from top of my head:

They were offered more "efficient" machinery, which could manufacture more textiles than the old machines. "It will pay for itself" was the pitch. But they refused as more efficient machines meant they had to pass on the savings to the customers. With lower prices, machinery was not exactly going to pay for itself.

I guess that will be the case for Uber and Lyft too. Any efficiency with low enough barrier will mean no one is reaping profits rather passing it on to the customers and hence making less money.

Edit:

Found the link:

https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/a-lesson-on-worldly-wisdom/