Writing that has stuck in my mind.
V.S. Ramachandran
Dr. Ramachandran is a neurologist and neuroscientist who uses Sherlock Holmes-esque deductive reasoning to investigate the nature of the mind. Each chapter is a case study of what happens when our brains malfunction, and how this informs our understanding of consciousness.
Edward Slingerland
An exploration of ways of being, spontaneity, and skill, grounded in modern neuroscience and the history of eastern philosophy.
Rob Gray
An introduction to ecological dynamics, a framework for skilled movement as an emergent property of distributed, parallel processes interacting with the environment. Worth a read even if you're not into sport - you will see emergent organization everywhere.
Jenny Odell
What attention can become when it's directed toward place, community, and the act of noticing.
Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his research on judgment and decision-making, identifying two distinct modes of human thought: one quick and heuristic-based, the other deliberate, expensive and slow. A book that encourages humility about one's own rationality.
Edward Frenkel
There's a story in here about Frenkel's admission being sabotaged by two examiners. These were two people who were clearly proficient in math, and recognized his skill, but chose to use their knowledge for harm. I think about this a lot when I hear "teach kids how to think, not what to think." Merely knowing how to think is not enough.
Hugh Howey
A society is weathering a global catastrophe in an underground bunker. A meditation on how to act on imperfect information, as technology makes the magnitude and immediacy of those actions more and more intense.
Stanisław Lem
A vivid portrayal of a truly alien intelligence. The alien just exists, wholly independent and incomprehensible to the characters, the story and the reader. It is a distillation of the absurd.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Intelligent species evolve from different starting points, highlighting the evolutionary foundations of human society and morality.
William Gibson
My favorite science fiction book, and one of the few that I've re-read multiple times. Psychedelic, hallucinatory prose pulls you through a noir cyberpunk world. Simply cool.
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
Aliens have a pit stop on earth, leaving behind an incomprehensible and dangerous Zone. Stalkers are scavengers who gamble their lives to pick over the alien's trash. An exploration of human experience when faced with a perplexing and uncaring universe.
Russell Hoban
Set after a nuclear apocalypse, the novel is written in phonetic English that's gone through thousands of years of linguistic evolution. Pre-apocalyptic science and history have become mythology and lore.
Ursula K. Le Guin
A YA series about adolescence and positive masculinity. The writing is solid and deliberate. "Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience."
Gian-Carlo Rota · giancarlorota.org
Rota's observation that mathematicians succeed by deploying only a few tricks, paired with Feynman's method of always keeping a dozen of your favorite problems in mind. The takeaway: keep a bag of problems and a bag of tricks.
alkjash · lesswrong.com
Quite reactionary, and probably written by a younger person, so I don't agree with everything here. But it hits on something emotionally resonant that really stuck in my mind.
Richard Feynman · calteches.library.caltech.edu
Feynman's Caltech commencement address. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
David Foster Wallace · bulletin.kenyon.edu
Wallace's 2005 Kenyon commencement address. The most obvious, important realities are the ones hardest to see. Pairs well with Jenny Odell's book above.
Will Larson · lethain.com
It's in the title.
David R. MacIver · drmaciver.substack.com
I find David's writing very insightful, and think about a lot of his essays. But this one in particular, the concept of life-complete problems, has stuck with me.
Richard I. Cook · how.complexsystems.fail
Eighteen short theses on failure in complex systems. Cook was an anesthesiologist, software engineer, and researcher who studied failure across medicine, aviation, space operations, and software. He saw hospitals, cockpits and server rooms as complex systems and developed a general theory of resilience over this abstraction.
Dan Luu · danluu.com
A Goodhart's Law case study. When crash test criteria change, most manufacturers' scores drop because they were optimizing for the test, not for safety. Volvo is the exception that proves the rule.