Consider a book-Books worth reading

I picked this book up because I've been wanting to read something by Voltaire ever since I heard Hugo throwing his name around in Les Miserables. Since then, the desire to read Voltaire has been stocked by  Tolstoy ,  C. S . Lewis ,  Ben Shapiro , and Stefan Zweig. He's a classic author that merits some attention. I must say this is not what I was expecting. I listened to the whole thing in just a few days, it was only a few hours long. I think the simplest way to describe it is  The Alchemist  in Satire. Here's a more broken down version. Candide grew up in a castle in Germany with the core philosophy that "this is the best of all possible worlds" caricaturized by the statement "Observe, that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles-this we have spectacles." obviously confusing cause and effect. the rest of the book revolves around this premise. His adventures include getting kicked out of the castle for kissing the resident Princess (He'...

I've read a fair bit of Malcolm Gladwell and I'm having a hard time de-homogenizing "what the Dog saw" from Blink , and some of his other stuff. In general, my conclusions from this book are very similar to Blink. So let me just expound a little bit on that. Gladwell does a superb job making dry, academic work, very readable. He weaves together interesting anecdotes and empirical evidence into a very readable piece. Unfortunately, his approach is not rigorous and his conclusions are therefore dubitable if not entirely worthless. His ignorance is most prominent when he starts talking about the disciplines that I have studied the most (Business and Economics). A sociology professor I know thinks the same thing when he talks about sociology. I can only conclude that Gladwell is suffering from skimming the shallows without delving the depths. ( "Death of expertise" and " the shallows ") Still, there are some use cases for reading his work. It...

I really thought I was going to hate this book, and at first, I did. Nichols' premise is that people trust experts less today than they did before. I haven't seen any proof of that, and I have seen some evidence to the contrary (2009 replication of Milgram's famous authority experiment). I thought the thesis was something along the lines of "trust experts" but it's more like. "Everybody's an idiot sometimes, here are some examples". Which is actually something I sympathize with quite a bit. For the first half of the book, Nichol's bashes on the self-educated, and the hobbyists. I wasn't a fan of this stuff. Yes, well-educated people tend to be right more often than the average hobbyist but the ratatouille doctrine actually holds up pretty well in this regard. "Not everyone can be a great artist, but great artists can come from anywhere." An illustrative case study evidencing this point is NASA's 2010 open innovation pla...

In my opinion, Lev Nikolayevich  Tolstoy  is one of the great authors of all time. In my  post  on my philosophy of reading, I distinguish between valuable and worthless fiction. A major piece of the distinction is how well the characters in the story imitate real human thought, action, and feeling. Tolstoy is a  master  at capturing thought and feeling in a way history never can. Anna Karenina isn't something that can be summed up or skimmed; you have to step into the pages and live the richly complex lives of each of the interwoven characters to extract the benefit of this masterpiece. I'll admit, the book is massive, it took me a month to get through it (normally I take 3-4 days per book). The journey is well worth the reward. I'm not going to try to even hit the main points of the book. Suffice it to say it focuses on the meaning and importance of relationships but is also full of sociological, governmental, philosophical, and historical n...