Category: Books

  • Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future

    Jeff Howe and Joi Ito

    Multiple waves of technological advancements, chief among them the internet and manifestations of Moore’s law, have rendered the world a complex place. Asymmetry, complexity and uncertainty are the defining ethos of this era, and not necessarily by choice. How can one navigate these times, that’s the theme of the book.

    Joi Ito and Jeff Howe have divided their approach into nine themes. Less prescription, more direction and food for thought. Many of them share an undercurrent of thought, or are even directly linked to each other. Emergent behaviour over institutional authority (Arab Spring and crowdsourcing are disparate examples of this), on-demand pull over push (e.g. Netflix over TV, and even large scale manufacturing) and the importance of weak ties, compasses over maps (direction more than a specific plan – this is my favourite, though I’d have liked more pages devoted to this), focus on risk over safety (the nimble nature of Shenzhen and its rapid development from knock offs to cutting edge tech), disobedience over compliance (the creation of Nylon at DuPont is a good example), practice over theory (there is an interesting sub-topic on privilege in this chapter), diversity over ability (“Ability matters, but in the aggregate, it offers diminishing returns” – Scott Page), resilience over strength (another favourite, and has parallels with Taleb’s anti-fragile), and finally, systems over objects (and understanding the larger implications of one’s work).

    The narrative zooms from physics to philosophy and biology to bitcoin in a matter of few seconds. Sometimes one feels that this is a book about the MIT Media Lab, or maybe it’s because it embraces all these principles in varying degrees.

    But whatever be the cause and effect relationship, it does serve as a good example of the principles in action.
    What the book stresses is the kind of adaptive thinking that will be required of the species and the individuals therein to continue thriving in a world that’s undergoing a profound structural change.

  • It Can’t Happen Here

    Sinclair Lewis

    A political novel written in 1935, “It can’t happen here” is quite amazingly (almost) prescient about how an authoritarian regime could happen in the USA. Based on a populist platform that promises prosperity and a return to traditional values, Buzz Windrip first beats his (fellow) Democrat Roosevelt and then his Republican opponent.

    But though it all begins with a perfectly democratic victory, the Chief, as he is known, soon begins a “corporatist” regime with its own paramilitary force called Minute Men, and systematically starts dismantling individuals and structures that oppose him. Funnily enough, most of the public continues to support the “Corpos” despite their dictatorial moves, and when those who don’t bring up the spectre of Fascism, they’re told “It can’t happen here”. (more…)

  • The Happiness Hypothesis

    Jonathan Haidt

    I don’t remember how I discovered this book, but when it arrived, I really liked the title. Mostly because of the word “hypothesis”, because it signals a scientific approach to a challenge. And that’s exactly what the book sets out to do – take ten of the best ideas/concepts from history, religious texts and philosophers, and scrutinise it through a science filter. Positive psychology is the genre.

    The author begins with the idea of the divided self, and then goes deeper. Into the inbuilt “affective style” that plays a huge part in one’s personality and how that can be changed, the role of reciprocity, and our tendency towards hypocrisy – seeing the small faults in others while ignoring our own bigger ones. At a third of the book, we even come across a formula for happiness, which makes a lot of sense when viewed rationally.

    My only concern with the book started around this point. The author seemed to have reframed the original thought (happiness) and moved it to meaning, and he didn’t let me in on the reasoning. He tries to bridge this in the last chapter, but to me it seemed forced.

    If that is set aside, the rest of the book does an excellent job of parsing the “meaning of life” into two parts and answering the more important one. The author actually spells out the parsing only towards the end – “why are we here” and “how can I find meaning”? But the chapters before that do give a bunch of perspectives on the second – love and attachments, virtue, adversity, and divinity (agnostic of God).

    There are several ideas that I could take away from the book. Though the metaphor of the elephant and the driver is not original, the idea of approaching them in tandem and making them work towards a harmony has been elaborated well. It also serves as a good reminder that evolution is only interested in our “success” (survival) and happiness is only a nice-to-have. The framing of questions as metaphors is also something I found useful. e.g. What is life? Life is like a journey.

    Another very interesting concept was the the three layers of personality – basic traits, “characteristic adaptations” and “life story”. To me, it provides a clear actionable on how to approach meaning and happiness. The related concept of “arête”, as well as the nuanced difference between character and personality were also good finds.

    It takes a lot of intellect, experience and effort to get the Bhagavad Gita, St.Paul, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Buddha, Nietzsche, Benjamin Franklin, Epicurus etc to align in a book that’s only 240 pages. The good news is that the book does this quite well.

  • Other Minds

    Peter Godfrey-Smith

    A subject that has not ceased to fascinate me is Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. I read the book less due to the octopus and more for the evolution of intelligent life.

    I found the first few pages of the book very encouraging. The author notes how the cephalopods (which include the octopus) were an independent experiment by nature in the evolution of large brains, nervous systems and complex behaviour, and thus it is possible that this is the closest we will come to meeting an alien. Also, as we move further in the study of the mind’s evolution, it begins to touch upon philosophy, and I enjoy reading a “science book” which understands this mix. Later in the book, the discussion around subjective experience, sentience and consciousness was exactly this, and I relished the few pages that were devoted to this.

    In the book’s second half, a section I enjoyed was around the entropy of living beings – a tree vs a cephalopod vs a human. How do they have fundamentally different lifespans? The explanation around mutations and how nature’s machinations result in different ways of living, reproducing, and dying were excellent perspectives that aided my understanding of evolution.

    What didn’t work for me though was (what I thought) a lack of coherent structure. That resulted in multiple detours from the subjects at hand, some of which, especially if you’re not fascinated by octopus and cuttlefish, would make you wonder when we’d get back on track.

  • Principles: Life and Work

    References to Principles have been appearing in many of my favourite blogs and newsletters for a while now, and all the bits and pieces I managed to pick up from them were thought-provoking. The blurbs feature Bill Gates and Tony Robbins. So, expectations from the book were sky high, and I was looking forward to reading it!

    Did it deliver? Yes, in parts. Speaking of parts, the book is divided into two – life and work, with more pages devoted to the second. The book begins though, with a “Where I’m Coming From” section that gives the reader a background of the author’s life and does a good job of setting context for both the life and work sections. (more…)