I'm a person that struggles with boundary-setting and have spent numerous years in relationships that have left me as less-than I was before. Imagine people-pleasing to an absolute fault, and being more of a chameleon that adapts to avoid conflicts. This has led to problems of identity, and deriving my sense of worth through others which isn't healthy.
Fortunately, I do not have the same problems professionally and part of my people-pleasing skills have been put to good use there.
However, history continued and continues to repeat itself to this day. I'm more than half-way into this book and am not only seeing patterns from my childhood, my relationships with my parents, and my early relationships (platonic & romantic)
It's been eye-opening, and I consider it my first step in breaking this trend.
I would try the original book on people pleasing: "No more Mr. Nice Guy" by Dr. Robert Glover. The title may sound lousy
but is a very logical book. The author is a PhD in his 60s and he coined the concept. You can start by listening some podcasts where he was a guest. He's genuine and a great communicator. Definitely underrated.
After a short search for Dr. Robert Glover I'm getting all kinds of "red pill", "pickup advice", "men's rights" links etc, all of which are red flags to me for "incel" kind of stuff.
Is that also what I can expect from the book, or did I come to conclusions too quickly?
Huh, I searched and his brand seems to be about talking to the "nice guys" who are all like "Why do women always pick jocks and not the nice guys like me?"
Which is not a stereotype that I associate with compulsive people-pleasing, exactly... Compulsive self-pitying and limerence, more like.
In my case, the book has helped me to maintain my inner peace, which is really important when you want to get into the flow-state mind during programming. Emotional maturity is important for a work environment too, ability to handle the mental health of yourself and your teammates during long work hours gives a boost in productivity.
Certainly the problem couldn’t be the long work hours? No, it’s your emotional immaturity that’s causing you to not focus for long hours. This culture in tech is exactly why mental health issues in the industry are so prevalent. Put the blame on the individual for their reasonable emotional responses to ongoing stress.
What are the odds? I'm currently dealing with some relationship issues, part of that is codependency, and this is one of the books that's doing the rounds in those spaces. I've been reading Codependent No More myself, which is an older book, kinda preachy, kinda Alcoholics Anonymous, lots of religious undertones etc etc, BUT it also lists a lot of symptoms and behaviours that I've recognized in my personal life / relationship; self-sacrifice, "rescuing" behaviour, obsessing over the other, controlling behaviour, emotional self-deprivation (err, ignoring one's own feelings), anxiety, low self-worth / confidence, guilt, shame, etc.
I can't recommend the book per se, it's a bit dated, but it lays a lot of groundwork and identifies a lot of traits so it has its place.
This is a good book. Another one I would recommend from this genre is "The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now".
It's a book from the 1980's about operational management. In particular, it focuses on physical manufacturing.
It's in the form of a fictitious personal tale. A plant manager struggles to save his plant from closure, and his marriage from falling apart.
The lesson is about lean management.
My main takeaway is the realization that when we try to optimize something, we focus on how to do something more efficiently. What more often is a problem is that people and processes are blocked from doing work. They spend a lot of time waiting and doing nothing. Focusing on reducing waits will produce better results than focusing on doing the work faster. Of course reducing the waits might mean doing some targeted piece of work faster. It could also mean doing better scheduling or focusing on other resource contention.
Recently I used this mindset to optimize a legacy DB struggling under the weight of a hodgepodge of unmaintained code. It worked wonderfully. Instead of fixing the slowest queries, focused on fixing the ones that block the most often. The result was that the DB was able to handle the workload after all.
The book is mainly credited with introducing the Theory of Constraints [1], which asserts that any manageable system's throughput is limited by exactly one bottleneck.
He goes on to encourage us to instantiate operating (and thinking) processes whereby we repeatedly discover and mitigate this bottleneck as each mitigation may result in a migration of the constraint.
The main observation is that most of us are inclined and almost always incentivized to focus on local optima (our area, our lane, our discipline) and that this striving is a great way to destroy any given system, or at best, do nothing useful. Any small experience in the world of business will illustrate this quite clearly, IME.
The sequel to The Goal is also quite good and is called, "It's Not Luck." This book takes the same characters into a larger organization where the constraints are in how their products are marketed, rather than produced in order to more fully demonstrate how the Theory of Constraints is not limited to activities on a factory floor.
As mentioned elsewhere, the narrative and writing style can be distracting, but the concepts are timeless and extremely powerful.
I have re-read or re-listened to both books at least once every year or two since the early aughts and I learn something new and relevant with each pass.
IIRC, Critical Chain, the 3rd installment in that series, details transitioning from making widgets to a widget-as-a-service business mode. Radical at the time, the preferred strategy today. Talk about foresight.
Reading Goldratt, Deming, Drucker, Buckminster Fuller, and a few others, blew my mind. Most of my really good ideas and works were inspired by them.
Alas, being reality-based also impaired my career. Like during the dot-com bubble, the so-called New Economy, I just couldn't figure out wtf everyone was talking about. So I very pointedly did not jump on the crazy train.
My loss.
I wish there someone like Goldratt explaining grifts, cons, and investment banking.
I tried to read The Goal and bounced off due in part to the aforementioned writing style, which seemed super trite and straw-mannish. Does the fact that you keep re-reading the books suggests that you haven't found a better way to re-approach that material?
The Phoenix Project was in fact inspired by The Goal:
>
“The Phoenix Project”, a popular business fable about DevOps, is an adaptation of “The Goal” by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. They are virtually the same book. The twist it takes on “The Goal” is that instead of focusing on manufacturing, the “The Phoenix Project” focuses on IT.
I really enjoyed that book and how it attempts to simplify the nature of common supply chain constraints.
You probably know this already, but if not: Eli Goldratt (the guy that wrote that book) wrote an equally brilliant academic paper on the same subject - I think the title was ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’. Just passing it on in the event you’re looking for a good follow-up read.
Where the book is a story and does not mention Lean Management, Toyota, and Taiichi Ohno, "Standing on the shoulders of giants" is a clear description of TPS (Toyota Production System).
It's awesome how the two varied styles of writing describe the same "thing". Where the "thing" is "how to operate efficiently".
Previous attempts looked at the heaviest query in terms of processing time, IO, or execution count. Those certainly slowed the server down, but the really issue were application freezes of many seconds and even minutes. Fixing those unblocked the server. The heavy queries are still there, but no one cares.
More technically, before, people focused on individual queries with the hope of finding the one that is slowing down the server the most. When we instead focused on sessions, and which ones block others due to locks and DB transactions, we were able to fix the root causes.
I recently read two books about industries that previously seemed dreadfully boring: property/casualty insurance, and community banking. I'm not sure what possessed me to read these books but I was curious about both industries since they are significant parts of the economy but I knew next to nothing about them.
The banking book is called "The Most Fun I Never Want To Have Again: A Mid-Life Crisis in Community Banking"[0] and it tells the story of an attempted bank startup in Georgia just before the financial crisis. It has a very clear explanation of the bank business model and how small banks make money. One of the surprising things I took away from it is that bank founders think of starting a bank in ways that are very similar to how tech founders think of starting of company. The main difference is that the bank business model is already well understood to those in the industry and success depends much more on your positioning in the market than it does on innovation.
The insurance book is called "Risk & Reward: An Inside View of the Property/Casualty Insurance Business"[1] and is by Stephen Catlin, who founded an insurance company that he grew to several thousand employees with offices around the world and later sold for $4 billion. Very UK centered since that's mostly where his career took place but I don't think the fundamentals of the industry change that much around the world. Pretty detailed on the mechanics of how insurance underwriting works and what insurance underwriters think about when pricing risk. Made me realize insurance is much more like trading than I'd previously thought.
This was like the perfect HN recommendation -- something I never would have thought of, with enough context to show why I should care. Will read both these, thank you.
I've started with the banking one and love it so far. I never thought about what would be needed to start a bank, but now I know. A bunch of people, some of which having some banking experience, all putting down about 200k and convincing some agency that they will run a good bank.
Why we sleep. This book motivated me to change my sleep habits after decades of being a night owl. I’m starting to love early mornings, and I feel so much better. This was a hard change.
How to do nothing. About resisting the attention economy and reorienting one’s relationship with technology and the environment. A very thought provoking and timely read, especially while I’m on sabbatical.
Flow. Explores the psychology of optimal experience, and again has been rather applicable while I’m on sabbatical trying to recover from burnout. It explores the flow state: how people achieve it, why it’s so enjoyable, and shifting towards a mindset that seeks to find flow in everyday moments.
Learned Optimism. Explores the original research that revealed the concept of Learned Helplessness, provides tools to assess one’s own level of optimism/pessimism (this was…revealing), and makes a strong case for replacing certain pessimistic defaults through simple retraining exercises. Really helpful if you grew up in an environment that hammered pessimism into your core. Has been life changing.
Caveat: I would not recommend Why We Sleep for anyone suffering from insomnia.
When I was dealing with sleep issues I tried reading it, hoping I'd learn something useful. But the book just kept hammering home how badly it screws you if you're not getting enough sleep. As I was trying all the recommended steps (good sleep hygiene, CBT, exercise, did an overnight sleep study, etc.) with only modest results, this basically just fueled my anxiety -- which is itself a known trigger for insomnia.
I also have dealt with sleep issues. A few notes in case anyone is the same and looking for ideas.
The thing that had the biggest effect for me is eliminating caffeine. It has a pretty long half life and I believe I metabolize it slower than the average person. Most sources say it is ok to consume it in the morning, but in my case even morning consumption was enough to significantly disrupt my sleep. When I got to the point that even a can of coke was stimulating, I observed a complete cessation of night time restlessness.
The other thing that helped reliably, although to a lesser degree, was getting ~15 minutes of natural sunlight in the morning. In terms of supplements, a combination of lemon balm (mildly increases gaba) and agmatine sulfate (mild nmda antagonism) occasionally helps. I try to use supplements as a last resort, as I try to fix the issues upstream.
I think this speaks to the complexity of our bodies, something you do in the morning can have a significant effect in how you feel at night. It is also wild how our culture normalizes things that go against the healthy functioning of our bodies. I know many people who only get sunlight walking to their car. The human body is amazingly complex, there is certainly much more for us to understand.
Walker agrees with you! He has said[1] he's going to add a cautionary note at the beginning of the book in a future version to warn people of the risk.
As per CBT, you fuel your own anxiety. This book is not empowered the ability to fuel people's anxiety. It is more easily exacerbated when we are sleep deprived, but ultimately you have to address it as just about any abrasive information then can equally kick off insomnia.
I think the book did lean too heavily on proselytizing that insufficient sleep is not healthy, and not heavily enough on advice, but it was mostly decent. One thing Huberman mentions in his podcast that is typically understated is the impact of sunlight (get some in the morning/day, limit blue light at night). In the main, though, being solid with the head game and limiting total time in bed to 8h strengthen sleep pressure / adenosine will do most of the work. But conditioning is such that it can take time to recover in a sustainable way.
Cannot agree more about Why we sleep. I thought feeling tired and low energy was really the natural state of my body until I was recommended this read. As stated, this is not a trivial change but I believe the author does a great job in infusing a (correct imo) sense of urgency on the lack of attention to sleep in the modern times.
The original article was fantastic and I kept coming back to it. The book was unreadable. After a hundred pages of academic own-fart-smelling, I had to put it down.
Speaking only for myself, I did find this to be a “preaching to the choir” type of book - probably not something that’s going to change the minds of a skeptic - but still had enough nuggets of value to be worth a read. It’s directed at Silicon Valley. It levels some accusations that are a bit hard to swallow. But probably necessary.
She admits very early on that it’s kind of a meandering exploration of ideas, so I came in not expecting some masterpiece and instead found it to be a collection of thoughts worth considering.
It does require some trudging through a bit of preaching, but at the same time, if one takes seriously the crises that are likely around the corner, I don’t think these objections hold water given the broader context.
To each their own, though, and I can understand why the book would rub some people the wrong way. But that’s why I found it worth reading.
Refutes most of the claims made by Harari in Sapiens, and shows everything you though you knew about prehistory is plain wrong. It's a great book, very well written and well informed.
Made me think that humanity's history isn't an arrow pointing in the direction of progress; we make experiments. Our current way of life is not the "best so far", it's but one arrangement among many other possible configurations. The alternative between this and going back to living in caves is a false choice.
The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops.
It's an engaging book. It's also really, really rejected by historians from just about every possible angle. The AskHistorians subreddit has an entire "frequently asked questions" section dedicated to it:
And don't let the reddit part fool you, AskHistorians is arguably one of the most high quality history forums out there, as the mods mercilessly enforce really, really strict rules that demands giving in-depth answers with sources. That page has lots of other in-depth answers on other popular "big history" books too, quite a sobering read honestly.
Thomas Sowell makes similar arguments on why most of Africa has stayed poor, it's mainly due to geography and environment that is not conducive to economic activity.
It's excellent. The quality of DoE demolishes by example the flimsy narrative in Harari's books. I like Sapiens from the point of view of being a lens about specific things in human condition - our capability to take imaginary things as hard truths for example - but Sapiens is closer an autofictional narrative of human condition, than any proper study of what history actually tells us.
For what it's worth, sapiens was generally hated by academic anthropologists but Dawn of everything is generally hated by everyone else. Graeber was always expressly advocating for one specific (anarchist) viewpoint in his work, and that book suffers mightily for it.
Don't take anything in that book as true, because I've read lots of academics losing their minds over how much he glossed over or just ignored contrary evidence.
> Dawn of everything ... one specific (anarchist) viewpoint in his work
Anarchism means without a ruler, and there is scarce if any evidence that migratory hunter-gather bands at the dawn of history had rulers in one class expropriating surplus from another class. We can look for historical, or pre-historical evidence, but we can also observe the few remaining migratory hunter-gather bands remaining in the Amazon and such that have not been killed off by mining companies.
Modern authors don't impose an anarchist viewpoint on such groups, this is how they lived, and still live.
Dawn of everything is exquisitely quoted, everything has a source and a sound argument, like if Graeber really expected these people to go after him.
Now, about the 'anarchism', I don't feel that at all. He simply is having a non euro-western centric viewpoint, and that's precisely the underlying theme of the book. Most of the time he chooses to highlight a source that has largely been ignored by the academics, for not being European or maintaining the status quo. So he is actually the only one not ignoring contrary evidence.
If the other anthropologists want a good refutation, I welcome their books with their own explanations and analysis of these anthropological findings.
I'm not the author, but obligatory "not sure why this is being down-voted." I've been wondering about Graeber for a while, since his work seems suspiciously close to "messages certain people desperately want to hear" and I have strong priors against those accounts, regardless of which "side" they come from.
Would love to hear perspective on this. The book would be a serious investment.
An interesting pair is Saloons of the Old West (Richard Erdoes) and Jacob Hamblin Peacemaker (Pearson H. Corbett), not for contrasting views but rather contrasting visions of the U.S. West. Saloons details the all purpose role of the saloon, as social center, post office, traveling preacher's pulpit, etc, in support of a rapacious gold rush mentality to extract each resource as quickly as possible and move on. Hamblin, by contrast is an early Mormon pioneer repeatedly sent by Brigham Young to establish new towns in West as the Mormons made a bid for their own Zion. The early Mormons really were different from the rest of the folks heading West, very much intending permanent settlements and a farm based economy. The book title comes from Hamblin's command of Native American languages and ability to regularly make peace with the Native Americans.
Peacemaker has references to the laying on of hands and other religious hoo-haw, but just ignore that and read it for the interesting historical document that it is.
That's usually a good approach, especially scientific. When it comes to morals though, take heed. I'm not going to recommend anyone read Mein Kampf if they find the person behind it morally reprehensible.
>> Refutes most of the claims made by Harari in Sapiens
Can You elaborate on this? - I quite liked Harraris book, especially his ideas about stories driving human cooperation and expansion. Does this false claims invalidates the main message of Sapiens?
"Most" is an exaggeration; "many" would have been fine; it's been a while since I read Sapiens, sorry about that.
I was mainly referring to how he talks about the invention of agriculture.
There has never been an agricultural "revolution". Cultivation was practiced for at least 3,000 years (probably much longer) before some human groups decided to make it their main mode of subsistence, while many others, already familiar with the concept, decided not to.
Dawn of Everything does a fantastic job of demonstrating how what is currently considered enlightened thinking derives largely from American Indians and their debates with Jesuit priests as the Indians pushed back against the Jesuits demanding conversion to Christianity by the Native Americans. If you like philosophy debate, the book is a treasure.
Harari doesn't pose the question to the reader! Europe's obsessions with exploration and conquests were driven by the scientific revolution. He does say that China could have very well done they part in it, but the Chinese rulers had no such global ambitions. With all this, it is a little premature to conclude that we are what we are because of our history. Although that is apparent if you look at it with that kind of objectiveness. But it could have been very well the Chinese if fate wanted it to be.
I've been slowly going through Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry, by Norman J. Wildberger.
Wildberger is a mathematician, and a finitist. This means that he doesn't believe in infinity in the modern mathematical sense (I'm sure he won't dispute that the integers are unbound, for example). Which means he does not believe that Real numbers are properly defined either, or that limits are really a thing.
So he put his money where is mouth is and invented a branch of trigonometry that only uses rational numbers, by replacing length and angle with square distance (which he calls "quadrance") and the square of the sine (which he calls "spread").
All of the above is just what motivated him, what's interesting is that the resulting maths itself is all correct and quite nice to go through. It basically boils down to saying "hey, it's called trigonometry for a reason, so maybe it makes more sense to make actual triangles the fundamental unit, not circles," and working your way from there.
Personally I'm kind of curious if his approach might be more practical for computer implementations too, since all number representations on computers are either rational numbers or approximations of other numbers via rational numbers.
Yes, his YT channel is lovely - that's how I originally discovered him actually! That's why I decided to give his book a try, despite having a title that evokes worries it's a "Sacred Geometry" type of thing. Luckily it isn't like that at all.
I was thinking about this just the other day. If infinity isn't actually a thing in our universe, then maybe we're taking some risks by using math with all these infinite limits and integers. Maybe if we look at theorems without using infinity, we'd stumble upon new or different equations.
I just read Outlive by Peter Attia and Bill Gifford [0] and liked it for how it made me think about fitness as part of life into old age and not just a specific thing to do in order to accomplish something (run a race, climb a mountain, etc). So I’ve incorporated some shifts in training to prepare for the “Centenarian Olympics.”
Kind of long and seems like a book just as a focal point but give Attia a break because he has hundreds (thousands?) of hours of podcasts and blog posts as well.
Although it must be nice to do the expensive tests his clients do, the book did give me some affordable tests that I ran to identify additional cholesterol labs beyond what my doc normally runs (Lpa and ApoB) and that was an immediate help. Also while I won’t pay for a proper VO2Max test, I do pay more attention to my watches estimation.
I second this recommendation. I listened to it on my long runs and now I am highlighting through the print copy because it has so many important insights for health and wellbeing through dietary, sleep, emotional and movement interventions.
He was just on Sam Harris's podcast talking about the book - I learned a lot from him. Good stuff. Now I just need to lose 50 pounds and get back on the wagon with exercise again ...
It’s been probably a year since I read The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich, but the ideas in there have really stuck in my head.
The WEIRD acronym stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The thesis is that the Christian Church inadvertently created modern society by prohibiting polygamy and cousin marriage.
The topic of polygamy is what’s really stuck in my head. Polygamy is a more natural state for civilized human societies than we think it is. It may be to women’s advantage to choose an “elite” spouse she has to share because it could mean a better quality of life for her and her children than the alternatives. Chris Hemsworth could have two dozen wives if it were legal and social acceptable (and he wanted to), and his wives might be happy with that. But the downside (or one of them) is that it creates huge imbalances in society—men find it really hard to find a mate. They then do risky stuff to make it into the elite to try to attract a mate—steal to accumulate wealth or kill potential romantic rivals.
This isn’t in the book, but it made me think—are we back in that same position now? Polygamy isn’t *technically* legal or common, but you still have plenty of people who have many romantic partners—just not at the same time. We know the what the activity of dating apps looks like—a very small subset of “elite” men get an outsized proportion of likes and matches from women. It’s slim pickings for the rest of the men. Are men, unable to find a mate, going to resort to risky behavior to try to make it into that subset that are able to attract women?
> Polygamy isn’t technically legal or common, but you still have plenty of people who have many romantic partners—just not at the same time.
I don't think those two are the same. Polygamy is a way to structure society and determine access to resources, whereas fooling around on Tinder is just a way to have fun with no questions asked. It might surprise you but the plebes of old were also promiscuous.
Maybe, maybe not. In relationships where a larger number of people competes for one partner you still have the same emotions of jealousy, insecurity etc. Everybody wants to be the favorite one.
It was interesting to observe the dynamics of such a relationship of my friend who dated two women (one white, one black) some years ago. When you asked them then, everybody would answer they were perfectly happy. Years later it turned out both women felt increasingly uncomfortable in the situation.
Polygamy was the norm for most of ancient/imperial China, Ottoman Empire, Mongols, Ancient Jews etc.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it was the norm for most people at most points in history, but considering the populations of the above civilisations it wasn't uncommon either.
Islam prohibits more than 4 wives and obliges the husband to treat every wife equally, so much so that most men who are even rich enough to marry more than one wife don’t due to of fears of not being able to treat them equally. (rich enough: women need not work in Islam. Their husband, relatives, and the state is obliged to provide for them in this order) That’s the best solution.
What do you mean "to deal with"? There's a lot of misconceptions about marriage, having to "manage" your spouse is one of them. You don't, they're their own person, they can take care of themselves, and if they're dependent on you it's not a healthy marriage.
Dating apps have created a kind of dynamic polygamy in the West, where a minority of 'single' men have many sexual partners per year, women have fewer, and the majority of single men have very few sexual partners.
I too find it funny when people use the naturalistic fallacy.
In my youth, I used to engage and try to retort about how brutal violence is also a more natural state. But now I just commiserate on HN.
What’s funny is that I do think that “natural law” is useful for reasoning problems in that equilibrium and natural forced impact on lives (eg, leverage gravity don’t fight it unnecessarily) and they frequently the invocation of nature isn’t accurate or isn’t particularly important. In that just because something occurs in nature doesn’t really mean much. And I don’t think there’s really any evidence that polygamy is a “natural state” only that some cultures practiced it and some didn’t. Even in the animal kingdom there’s polygamy and pair mating so it’s not even true that it is some expression of a natural law.
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I'm a person that struggles with boundary-setting and have spent numerous years in relationships that have left me as less-than I was before. Imagine people-pleasing to an absolute fault, and being more of a chameleon that adapts to avoid conflicts. This has led to problems of identity, and deriving my sense of worth through others which isn't healthy.
Fortunately, I do not have the same problems professionally and part of my people-pleasing skills have been put to good use there.
However, history continued and continues to repeat itself to this day. I'm more than half-way into this book and am not only seeing patterns from my childhood, my relationships with my parents, and my early relationships (platonic & romantic)
It's been eye-opening, and I consider it my first step in breaking this trend.
Is that also what I can expect from the book, or did I come to conclusions too quickly?
Which is not a stereotype that I associate with compulsive people-pleasing, exactly... Compulsive self-pitying and limerence, more like.
I can't recommend the book per se, it's a bit dated, but it lays a lot of groundwork and identifies a lot of traits so it has its place.
Deleted Comment
It's a book from the 1980's about operational management. In particular, it focuses on physical manufacturing.
It's in the form of a fictitious personal tale. A plant manager struggles to save his plant from closure, and his marriage from falling apart.
The lesson is about lean management.
My main takeaway is the realization that when we try to optimize something, we focus on how to do something more efficiently. What more often is a problem is that people and processes are blocked from doing work. They spend a lot of time waiting and doing nothing. Focusing on reducing waits will produce better results than focusing on doing the work faster. Of course reducing the waits might mean doing some targeted piece of work faster. It could also mean doing better scheduling or focusing on other resource contention.
Recently I used this mindset to optimize a legacy DB struggling under the weight of a hodgepodge of unmaintained code. It worked wonderfully. Instead of fixing the slowest queries, focused on fixing the ones that block the most often. The result was that the DB was able to handle the workload after all.
The book is mainly credited with introducing the Theory of Constraints [1], which asserts that any manageable system's throughput is limited by exactly one bottleneck.
He goes on to encourage us to instantiate operating (and thinking) processes whereby we repeatedly discover and mitigate this bottleneck as each mitigation may result in a migration of the constraint.
The main observation is that most of us are inclined and almost always incentivized to focus on local optima (our area, our lane, our discipline) and that this striving is a great way to destroy any given system, or at best, do nothing useful. Any small experience in the world of business will illustrate this quite clearly, IME.
The sequel to The Goal is also quite good and is called, "It's Not Luck." This book takes the same characters into a larger organization where the constraints are in how their products are marketed, rather than produced in order to more fully demonstrate how the Theory of Constraints is not limited to activities on a factory floor.
As mentioned elsewhere, the narrative and writing style can be distracting, but the concepts are timeless and extremely powerful.
I have re-read or re-listened to both books at least once every year or two since the early aughts and I learn something new and relevant with each pass.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/157385.It_s_Not_Luck
Reading Goldratt, Deming, Drucker, Buckminster Fuller, and a few others, blew my mind. Most of my really good ideas and works were inspired by them.
Alas, being reality-based also impaired my career. Like during the dot-com bubble, the so-called New Economy, I just couldn't figure out wtf everyone was talking about. So I very pointedly did not jump on the crazy train.
My loss.
I wish there someone like Goldratt explaining grifts, cons, and investment banking.
https://itrevolution.com/product/the-phoenix-project/
> “The Phoenix Project”, a popular business fable about DevOps, is an adaptation of “The Goal” by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. They are virtually the same book. The twist it takes on “The Goal” is that instead of focusing on manufacturing, the “The Phoenix Project” focuses on IT.
https://sobination.com/2017/08/08/the-goal-and-the-phoenix-p...
"Goldratt's Rules of Flow" https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B9VH7TTZ
You probably know this already, but if not: Eli Goldratt (the guy that wrote that book) wrote an equally brilliant academic paper on the same subject - I think the title was ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’. Just passing it on in the event you’re looking for a good follow-up read.
The paper is in the appendix of the book.
Where the book is a story and does not mention Lean Management, Toyota, and Taiichi Ohno, "Standing on the shoulders of giants" is a clear description of TPS (Toyota Production System).
It's awesome how the two varied styles of writing describe the same "thing". Where the "thing" is "how to operate efficiently".
More technically, before, people focused on individual queries with the hope of finding the one that is slowing down the server the most. When we instead focused on sessions, and which ones block others due to locks and DB transactions, we were able to fix the root causes.
I am simplifying a bit, but that is the jist.
The banking book is called "The Most Fun I Never Want To Have Again: A Mid-Life Crisis in Community Banking"[0] and it tells the story of an attempted bank startup in Georgia just before the financial crisis. It has a very clear explanation of the bank business model and how small banks make money. One of the surprising things I took away from it is that bank founders think of starting a bank in ways that are very similar to how tech founders think of starting of company. The main difference is that the bank business model is already well understood to those in the industry and success depends much more on your positioning in the market than it does on innovation.
The insurance book is called "Risk & Reward: An Inside View of the Property/Casualty Insurance Business"[1] and is by Stephen Catlin, who founded an insurance company that he grew to several thousand employees with offices around the world and later sold for $4 billion. Very UK centered since that's mostly where his career took place but I don't think the fundamentals of the industry change that much around the world. Pretty detailed on the mechanics of how insurance underwriting works and what insurance underwriters think about when pricing risk. Made me realize insurance is much more like trading than I'd previously thought.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ELPOA3S/
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B073NRDNSC/
Thanks for sharing the suggestions!
How to do nothing. About resisting the attention economy and reorienting one’s relationship with technology and the environment. A very thought provoking and timely read, especially while I’m on sabbatical.
Flow. Explores the psychology of optimal experience, and again has been rather applicable while I’m on sabbatical trying to recover from burnout. It explores the flow state: how people achieve it, why it’s so enjoyable, and shifting towards a mindset that seeks to find flow in everyday moments.
Learned Optimism. Explores the original research that revealed the concept of Learned Helplessness, provides tools to assess one’s own level of optimism/pessimism (this was…revealing), and makes a strong case for replacing certain pessimistic defaults through simple retraining exercises. Really helpful if you grew up in an environment that hammered pessimism into your core. Has been life changing.
When I was dealing with sleep issues I tried reading it, hoping I'd learn something useful. But the book just kept hammering home how badly it screws you if you're not getting enough sleep. As I was trying all the recommended steps (good sleep hygiene, CBT, exercise, did an overnight sleep study, etc.) with only modest results, this basically just fueled my anxiety -- which is itself a known trigger for insomnia.
The thing that had the biggest effect for me is eliminating caffeine. It has a pretty long half life and I believe I metabolize it slower than the average person. Most sources say it is ok to consume it in the morning, but in my case even morning consumption was enough to significantly disrupt my sleep. When I got to the point that even a can of coke was stimulating, I observed a complete cessation of night time restlessness.
The other thing that helped reliably, although to a lesser degree, was getting ~15 minutes of natural sunlight in the morning. In terms of supplements, a combination of lemon balm (mildly increases gaba) and agmatine sulfate (mild nmda antagonism) occasionally helps. I try to use supplements as a last resort, as I try to fix the issues upstream.
I think this speaks to the complexity of our bodies, something you do in the morning can have a significant effect in how you feel at night. It is also wild how our culture normalizes things that go against the healthy functioning of our bodies. I know many people who only get sunlight walking to their car. The human body is amazingly complex, there is certainly much more for us to understand.
[1]: https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-...
As per CBT, you fuel your own anxiety. This book is not empowered the ability to fuel people's anxiety. It is more easily exacerbated when we are sleep deprived, but ultimately you have to address it as just about any abrasive information then can equally kick off insomnia.
I think the book did lean too heavily on proselytizing that insufficient sleep is not healthy, and not heavily enough on advice, but it was mostly decent. One thing Huberman mentions in his podcast that is typically understated is the impact of sunlight (get some in the morning/day, limit blue light at night). In the main, though, being solid with the head game and limiting total time in bed to 8h strengthen sleep pressure / adenosine will do most of the work. But conditioning is such that it can take time to recover in a sustainable way.
The original article was fantastic and I kept coming back to it. The book was unreadable. After a hundred pages of academic own-fart-smelling, I had to put it down.
https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f5...
She admits very early on that it’s kind of a meandering exploration of ideas, so I came in not expecting some masterpiece and instead found it to be a collection of thoughts worth considering.
It does require some trudging through a bit of preaching, but at the same time, if one takes seriously the crises that are likely around the corner, I don’t think these objections hold water given the broader context.
To each their own, though, and I can understand why the book would rub some people the wrong way. But that’s why I found it worth reading.
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
It's unfortunate that he hasn't added a disclaimer to the original post since it is shared so widely.
EDIT: fixing autocorrect
Some of the criticism he rebuts and some he accepts and says he will deal with it in a future version of the book.
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Refutes most of the claims made by Harari in Sapiens, and shows everything you though you knew about prehistory is plain wrong. It's a great book, very well written and well informed.
Made me think that humanity's history isn't an arrow pointing in the direction of progress; we make experiments. Our current way of life is not the "best so far", it's but one arrangement among many other possible configurations. The alternative between this and going back to living in caves is a false choice.
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
Borrowed from wikipedia:
The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
And don't let the reddit part fool you, AskHistorians is arguably one of the most high quality history forums out there, as the mods mercilessly enforce really, really strict rules that demands giving in-depth answers with sources. That page has lots of other in-depth answers on other popular "big history" books too, quite a sobering read honestly.
Don't take anything in that book as true, because I've read lots of academics losing their minds over how much he glossed over or just ignored contrary evidence.
Anarchism means without a ruler, and there is scarce if any evidence that migratory hunter-gather bands at the dawn of history had rulers in one class expropriating surplus from another class. We can look for historical, or pre-historical evidence, but we can also observe the few remaining migratory hunter-gather bands remaining in the Amazon and such that have not been killed off by mining companies.
Modern authors don't impose an anarchist viewpoint on such groups, this is how they lived, and still live.
Now, about the 'anarchism', I don't feel that at all. He simply is having a non euro-western centric viewpoint, and that's precisely the underlying theme of the book. Most of the time he chooses to highlight a source that has largely been ignored by the academics, for not being European or maintaining the status quo. So he is actually the only one not ignoring contrary evidence.
If the other anthropologists want a good refutation, I welcome their books with their own explanations and analysis of these anthropological findings.
Would love to hear perspective on this. The book would be a serious investment.
Peacemaker has references to the laying on of hands and other religious hoo-haw, but just ignore that and read it for the interesting historical document that it is.
Great idea! Now we need a seperate thread or spreadsheet of books by eminent authors that present contradictory viewpoints!
Can You elaborate on this? - I quite liked Harraris book, especially his ideas about stories driving human cooperation and expansion. Does this false claims invalidates the main message of Sapiens?
I was mainly referring to how he talks about the invention of agriculture.
There has never been an agricultural "revolution". Cultivation was practiced for at least 3,000 years (probably much longer) before some human groups decided to make it their main mode of subsistence, while many others, already familiar with the concept, decided not to.
Then you have the master to judge the (accidental) student.
Wildberger is a mathematician, and a finitist. This means that he doesn't believe in infinity in the modern mathematical sense (I'm sure he won't dispute that the integers are unbound, for example). Which means he does not believe that Real numbers are properly defined either, or that limits are really a thing.
So he put his money where is mouth is and invented a branch of trigonometry that only uses rational numbers, by replacing length and angle with square distance (which he calls "quadrance") and the square of the sine (which he calls "spread").
All of the above is just what motivated him, what's interesting is that the resulting maths itself is all correct and quite nice to go through. It basically boils down to saying "hey, it's called trigonometry for a reason, so maybe it makes more sense to make actual triangles the fundamental unit, not circles," and working your way from there.
Personally I'm kind of curious if his approach might be more practical for computer implementations too, since all number representations on computers are either rational numbers or approximations of other numbers via rational numbers.
Kind of long and seems like a book just as a focal point but give Attia a break because he has hundreds (thousands?) of hours of podcasts and blog posts as well.
Although it must be nice to do the expensive tests his clients do, the book did give me some affordable tests that I ran to identify additional cholesterol labs beyond what my doc normally runs (Lpa and ApoB) and that was an immediate help. Also while I won’t pay for a proper VO2Max test, I do pay more attention to my watches estimation.
[0] https://peterattiamd.com/outlive/
The WEIRD acronym stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The thesis is that the Christian Church inadvertently created modern society by prohibiting polygamy and cousin marriage.
The topic of polygamy is what’s really stuck in my head. Polygamy is a more natural state for civilized human societies than we think it is. It may be to women’s advantage to choose an “elite” spouse she has to share because it could mean a better quality of life for her and her children than the alternatives. Chris Hemsworth could have two dozen wives if it were legal and social acceptable (and he wanted to), and his wives might be happy with that. But the downside (or one of them) is that it creates huge imbalances in society—men find it really hard to find a mate. They then do risky stuff to make it into the elite to try to attract a mate—steal to accumulate wealth or kill potential romantic rivals.
This isn’t in the book, but it made me think—are we back in that same position now? Polygamy isn’t *technically* legal or common, but you still have plenty of people who have many romantic partners—just not at the same time. We know the what the activity of dating apps looks like—a very small subset of “elite” men get an outsized proportion of likes and matches from women. It’s slim pickings for the rest of the men. Are men, unable to find a mate, going to resort to risky behavior to try to make it into that subset that are able to attract women?
I don't think those two are the same. Polygamy is a way to structure society and determine access to resources, whereas fooling around on Tinder is just a way to have fun with no questions asked. It might surprise you but the plebes of old were also promiscuous.
Here's an interesting discussion on the topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/5rre85/sexuality_d...
Maybe, maybe not. In relationships where a larger number of people competes for one partner you still have the same emotions of jealousy, insecurity etc. Everybody wants to be the favorite one.
It was interesting to observe the dynamics of such a relationship of my friend who dated two women (one white, one black) some years ago. When you asked them then, everybody would answer they were perfectly happy. Years later it turned out both women felt increasingly uncomfortable in the situation.
I think Esther Perel has written the best stuff on modern relationships. Read her.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it was the norm for most people at most points in history, but considering the populations of the above civilisations it wasn't uncommon either.
I really don't think it is, but I also disagree with using the word "natural" in a way to argue its merit.
In my youth, I used to engage and try to retort about how brutal violence is also a more natural state. But now I just commiserate on HN.
What’s funny is that I do think that “natural law” is useful for reasoning problems in that equilibrium and natural forced impact on lives (eg, leverage gravity don’t fight it unnecessarily) and they frequently the invocation of nature isn’t accurate or isn’t particularly important. In that just because something occurs in nature doesn’t really mean much. And I don’t think there’s really any evidence that polygamy is a “natural state” only that some cultures practiced it and some didn’t. Even in the animal kingdom there’s polygamy and pair mating so it’s not even true that it is some expression of a natural law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyamory
"Natural" state. For "civilized" societies.
Do you realize just how stupid it sounds?