Booknotes

This book details how our personalities and behavioral traits such as intelligence are influenced by our genes. Mitchell argues that we have traits that are to a certain degree *innate* and dives deep into the scientific literature explaining *how we know* that this is true.

The Web of Meaning by Jeremy Lent is trying to give people a new worldview focusing on harmony, interconnection and cooperation, instead of competetion and exploitation.

In this book Kevin Mitchell explains how evolution produced living things that can make choices *for their own reasons* and why this means that we have free will, even if our cognitive machinery is entirely based on the physical instantiation of our brains.

The Unicorn Project is a book about organizational change and the improvement of working conditions within tech organizations. It's about strategies and ideas that engineers can employ to maximize their and their teams' contributions to the company.

In this book, Robert Sapolsky is attacking the notion that free will exists. He does so by looking at the brain, the environment, and the interactions between the two.

Awareness is a book about waking up and realizing what we truly are. About stopping to identify ourselves with our desires and becoming free of the restrictions that our minds place upon ourselves. But at the same time it is about realizing that we are selfish beings.

In this book Derek Sivers tries to answer the question of how to best live life. The funny thing is that each answer is contradictory to the previous ones.

In Mind and Cosmos Thomas Nagel argues that there needs to be a fundamental part of reality that corresponds to consciousness. Something like an atom of consciousness from which everything else derives its conscious properties.

This book is a guide to living a long and healthy life. It is about increasing lifespan, our "good decades", more than it is about living longer per se. It focuses on the four horsemen (cancer, metabolic syndrome, alzheimers and cardiovascular diseases).

In this book Carlo Rovelli takes us on a journey through the nature of time, from the perspective of physics, philosophy, and human experience and shows how the three differ wildly. What we think time is like, is nothing like what it actually is. Time in a way does not exist.

In this book Alan Watts, in essence, argues that by ceasing the relentless striving for control and allowing ourselves to simply be, we can rediscover the wonder of our existence and our unity with the world around us.

This book is a philosophical exploration of identity, self-awareness, and the nature of reality.

This book by Alan Watts is trying to present Zen Buddhism in a way that it makes sense for the Western Mind.

A good book on effective management. For me it is not too applicable right now, since I am not managing people, otherwise, this might have deserved a better rating even. Very likely something that I am going to revisit a few years down the road.

This book is a collection of quotes and teachings from the Dalai Lama. It covers a wide range of topics, from the nature of desire to the importance of being content with what you have. The Dalai Lamas teachings are simple and profound.

In Mind Children, Hans Moravec describes how humans will, eventually, create machines that are able to think, reason and feel, just like we do.

This book is truly wonderful. A quick read, filled with extremely beautiful, almost poetry-like prose, and small short stories, about deeply human desires, fears and ideas, woven into small short stories about different universes.

I have read this book in German, so the detailed notes contain a bunch of quotes in German, but the book itself was amazing. The idea of the Magical Theater that shows you different alternate versions of how your life could have gone is powerful. So is the image of the lonely.

Guns Germs and Steel tries to answer a single question: why did Europe come ahead technologically compared to the other continents and go on to dominate and exploit them? There were civilizations in other places long before.

The Biology of Desire is a book diving into the neurobiology that underlies addiction.

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov is a science fiction mystery novel set in a distant future where Earth's population lives in sprawling underground cities to protect themselves from environmental challenges.

This book has a lot of detailed notes, but overall I didn't like it *that* much. Many of the ideas are better covered in other works, even by the same author, such as [The Red Queen](/booknotes/the-red-queen).

A book about how the human immune system works. It goes over the different cell types and how they work together to fight off diseases of all kinds. The body is an incredibly machine, and even though the immune system is just a part of it, it's mindbogglingly complex.

A book about attention and techniques that help focusing our attention, when faced with the diversions of a modern life. It's explaining many basic ideas about how to live a more productive life, by restricting time spend mindlessly engaged with media in various ways. To me.

A classic that has shaped a lot of thinking in economics over the last centuries. Adam Smith describes how markets interact with one another and how countries should be governed so that the market can flourish.

Epictetus is one of the great stoic writers and this book is a collection of his work. He emphasizes personal responsibility, virtue, and understanding what is within our control as *the keys* to a good life.

Consciousness is something measurable and we are beginning to understand what it is. But there is still a lot left to learn and uncover. Theories like Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and the Free Energy Principle are promising starts.

This book is a fun little read. It's about how we have lost the character values of the enlightened era and how that leads to slow corrosion of best practices in the market as well. It's about how all of this can be transformed back to resemble more how things have been.

The Brain by David Eagleman dives deep into how our brains work, covering key insights of neuroscience, that tell the fascinating story of what makes us *us*. It is a story about how our brains are re-wiring themselves constantly.

Max Tegmark wants the reader to think about the problems of AI safety and the thorny questions related to creating machines that surpass us in intelligence someday.

This is a book about a few very deep and important questions - how can physics give rise to life? And how can life give rise to intelligent, comprehending minds? The short answer to all of these questions is . . . evolution. The longer answer.

A bit too heavy on biographical details and the history of the Santa Fe institute, and not going deep enough into the weeds of complexity theory as I was hoping, when I first picked it up. This is a wonderful introduction to all the people that contributed to the field.

In this book Nick Lane explores the profound impact that the oxygen molecule had on the history of life and how it changed everything. He covers a lot of ground, how the energy that oxygen makes possible to harvest lead to multicellularity.

This book moved me. Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar shares the wisdom he gained while running this groundbreaking company, trying to innovate and make beautiful movies. It goes against the spirit of this book to summarize it, because the insights from the book.

In the hard sci-fi novel Rocheworld, Robert L. Forward explores the scientific exploration of a distant star system by a crew of human scientists. Center to their exploration is the double planet system Rocheworld, two planets orbiting each other very closely.

The Beginning of Infinity is jam-packed with amazing ideas. It's so dense, that these book notes are a source of a vast amount of thoughts and models of how the world works. To me, this book is simply insane.

The Fabric of Reality presents a bold, interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of reality. In it Deutsch tries to merge concepts from quantum physics, epistemology, computation, and evolutionary biology into a singular explanation of the world.

This book is about how to build a business in a non-traditional way. It is based on the experiences of the authors founding and running their company 37signals and how they did that from first principles. Rework promotes a lean, efficient.

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the most influential books in history I would argue. And for that reason alone it's worth reading, to get a broader idea of different cultures and see where ideas come from and how old some of them are.

A small book filled with wisdom from long ago. Written in China it focuses on the idea of the Tao, the underlying force of nature, of the universe. It is about aligning yourself with Tao and working in the same direction as it, without resisting it.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is one of the best books I have ever read and one I am going to re-read over and over and over again, simply because it is packed so full of wisdom that it's unbelievable. A collection of quotes.

I think the main insight from Poor Charlie's Almanack is that one needs to have *strong* mental models in order to deal with the world effectively. This is analogous to an idea from [Principles by Ray Dalio](/booknotes/principles).

The Enigma of Reason by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier offers a provocative and scientifically grounded exploration of the human capacity for reasoning. The authors challenge the traditional view that reason evolved to help individuals make better decisions or discover truth.

A very short book. It might take you an hour or so to read in full, so the summary is quite short as well. Lying (intentional deception) erodes trust on both sides. It damages relationships in unforeseen ways, needs maintenance and leads to psychological stress.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb writes a lot of good books. This is one of them. In Antifragile, Taleb tries to push one central idea: The difference between Fragile and Antifragile Systems. Antifragile systems learn and improve over time.

This book provides an accessible and comprehensive exploration of neuroplasticity => the brain's remarkable ability to reorganize and adapt by forming, pruning, enhancing, weakening, destroying and sculpting neural connections throughout life.

Disturbing the universe is an autobiography written and lived by Freeman Dyson, who worked on the Los Alamos team alongside Richard Feynman.

This book is an attempt at describing basic problem-solving strategies. Based on puzzles and mathematical riddles the author tries to teach the general approach of problem-solving.

This book is an engaging exploration of structural engineering and the science behind why everday buildings, like bridges, roadways, or churches don't collapse in on themselves.

Algorithms from computer science are a source of knowledge that can be used to improve our lives. Problems like optimal stopping, exploration vs. exploitation tradeoffs, or how to sort things, are ubiquitous not just in computer science but also in real life. To me.

A rather short book about a dystopian world. The people in this world live miserable lives in small rural communities. Every little bit of individuality is artificially repressed and held down. They have forgotten words such as "I".

The Diamond Age is as crazy as Neal Stephensons other books. It is set in a slightly dystopian world, where everybody has access to nanotechnology and people can print anything they want from "the feed". The world is divided into classes. Each has it's own zone of influence.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is a fast-paced, dystopian cyberpunk novel that combines high-tech intrigue, ancient history, and biting social commentary. Set in a near-future world dominated by corporate-controlled city states, the story follows a hacker and swordsman.

The story is about how computation is supreme, and how reality might be a construct that is very different from what we think it is. The crazy idea in this book is that a simulation might continue running, if it is sufficiently complex enough.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is a darkly satirical and anti-war novel that follows the life of Billy Pilgrim, a disoriented and passive man who becomes "unstuck in time. " The book weaves together themes of war, trauma, free will.

Brave New World is a novel set in a dystopian society, where people are replacable cogs in a machine–everyone is constantly bubbly, happy and social, because they take a drug called Soma.

A dystopian novel, set in a totalitarian society where "the Party" completely controls everything its citizens do. The idea of "big brother" constantly watching you originates from this book. In the world of 1984 every *thought* of disobedience is a punishable offence.

This book is a concise and accessible introduction to fundamental principles of physics by Richard Feynman, drawn from his famous Feynman Lectures on Physics. This book distills key topics into six chapters, making complex ideas understandable to a broad audience.

This book is a biography of Richard Feynman, detailing his quirky character, what got him into physics and how he became entangled into the Manhattan project in Los Alamos, where he helped to build the atomic bomb.

Mastery is something everybody can achieve if working hard towards it. And the way towards mastery is rewarding and beautiful. A life of striving, is a life well lived and worth living. What we strive towards is not important, the striving itself.

Gödel's Proof by Ernest Nagel and James Newman is a concise and accessible explanation of Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem, which is among the most important and profound results in mathematics.

Permanent Record is a memoir that details Snowden's journey from growing up in a patriotic, government-oriented family to becoming a whistleblower who exposed the U. S. government's mass surveillance programs. The book provides insights into Snowden's personal life.

This book heralds the arriving of nanotechnology in the future and tries to show the endless possibilities that could exist, once we have mastered atomic manufacturing. It proposes to build structures out of carbon, so that they have extremely strong bonds.

To me this book can be mostly summarized by its own title and subtitle. It's about how people often behave irrationally, but how there is still method to the madness. We are not just irrational, we are predictably so.

Manual for Living (also known as the Enchiridion) by Epictetus is a concise guide to Stoic philosophy and how to live a good, fulfilling life. It provides practical advice on how to achieve inner peace, resilience.

Complaining against fate and what the future holds, is not valuable. You should instead take everything the world throws at you with grace and humility. Staying in one place, reading the same books, not jumping around, is a source of strength and personal growth.

Stoicism is a philosophy that is concerned with one question: How to live a good life? It's about being resilient against outside influences, mentally and physically. And about preparing for the worst, keeping death in mind, but being content with whatever happens.

*Man and His Symbols* by Carl Jung is a fascinating exploration of the world of symbols and their role in the human unconscious. Symbols come up everywhere, in dreams, in culture, in art, in thoughts, in conversations, in the ways that we live our lives.

This is one of my most favorite books of all time. Tough to read, even harder to summarize. But worth to read, and then re-read. And re-read. The dialogues where the turtoise discusses important riddles and philosophical questions alone, make this book worthwhile.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss is a self-help and productivity book that challenges traditional notions of work and success.

The Better Angels of Our Nature is a book by Steven Pinker that argues that violence in the world has been in decline over time. The world is becoming a more peaceful place, and this is due to a number of factors, including the rise of the nation-state, the spread of democracy.

In Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky explains the neurobiological underpinnings of how stress works in the human body.

Companies that are built to last have things in common. And this book looked at a lot of companies successful over longer time frames to find out what. One idea is that business ideas don't matter.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a classic dealing with the philosophical idea of what Quality is and how it is necessary in our world for anything to work. It tries to show how both art and engineering can go hand in hand.

In Good to Great Jim Collins looks at what makes good companies great. For this Jim Collins and his team analyzed a lot of different great companies and looked at what they had in common. They then identified key ideas that all the great companies share. So.

Robots and Empire by Isaac Asimov is a science fiction novel that serves as a bridge between Asimov's Robot series and his Foundation series. The novel explores the tension between humans and robots as they navigate political, ethical.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell explores the phenomenon of how small changes can have a big impact and lead to significant shifts in society. Malcolm Gladwell identifies three key factors that contribute to a tipping point: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor.

Habits are a powerful way to shape behavior towards living a better life. Atomic Habits are about preparing yourself and the environment for a better life. The goal is to make good habits easy and bad habits hard. Good habits should be obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.

Focus on what is important and declutter your life. The title summarizes this book almost perfectly. Basically declutter your life from things you don't need, focusing on what you want to have in your life. And try to reduce the amount of things that you want to a minimum.

Deep Work is the most important work you want to do, but it is also the hardest work to do and make time for. It's easy to seem busy and be always working and stressed out, without making any progress. That's because one is not doing enough deep work.

This is the book that popularized the ten-thousand hours idea. The main idea behind the rule is this: There exists a level of mastery that can be achieved for any kind of subject, after having deliberately practiced and studied it for at least ten-thousand hours.

Why We Sleep is an exploration of why and how humans need to sleep and an ode to all the beneficial aspects that sleeping has on our health. Healthy sleep (enough and good quality) is probably the single biggest contributor to a good life that we know of.

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky is an exploration of existentialism, free will, and the human condition. It is about *chosing* to withdraw from daily life, to *not do anything* because the world is fundamentally flawed. The novel is narrated by an unnamed.

The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a psychological novella that explores themes of identity and self-perception through its story. It tells the tale of Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a government clerk in St. Petersburg.

How to Read a Book is a Book about how to retain more from reading texts - it is about reading a book, not for the sake of passing time but for the sake of gaining insights from it. To do that it details 4 different levels of reading.

Malcolm Gladwell details the same idea as in another book, but with less insights and clarity, but more stories and fluff than Daniel Kahnemann in his [Thinking Fast and Slow](/booknotes/thinking-fast-and-slow). The main idea of the book is simple yet profound.

The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith is a provocative exploration of the rules that govern political power. The authors argue that whether in democracies, dictatorships, or corporations.

The contents of the mind are within our control, whereas the outside environment is not. Stoics become happy by focusing on and learning how to control their internal state, no matter the external state. Once this control exists, the outside does not matter anymore.

*Man's Search for Meaning* by Viktor Frankl is a profound and influential book that reflects on Frankl's experiences as a Holocaust survivor and the psychological insights he gained from them. This book to me, puts into perspective *how good life is*, almost all the time.

This is a magical little book, about traveling, about life, about spirituality and about self-discovery. The story follows a shepherd boy Santiago, who embarks on a journey to pursue his Personal Legend to find his life's purpose. Set in a mystical, symbolic world.

The book is split into 3 parts - the personal history of Ray Dalio, his work principles and his life principles. To me, the most interesting part of the book is, where he details his life principles. Beautiful ideas and mental models of how to live a good life fill the pages.

The last book of the 7 foundation novels. It's about how Hari Seldon develops his plan and psychohistory. And how he has to deal with the power struggles of Galactic Politics and the Empire. In the process he loses everybody close to him, finally continuing almost alone.

Hari Seldon first develops his mathematical idea of psychohistory and becomes the target of the Galactic Emperor because of it. The emperor thinks he could use this as a tool to gain better political control over his empire.

This is a Sequel to the Foundation Series. Some people from the Foundation find out that, according to their knowledge, there has to be a point of origin for humanity. A planet, somewhere in the galaxy, from where all humans came from.

The leaders of the Second Fondation are worried that another "power" is trying to push along the Hari Seldon plan, benefiting instead of destroying it. Yet, they are worried and want to know who and why they are doing it, and send out a mission to the closest lead.

Hari Seldon's plan is rumored to have secretly involved not only the scientificly minded foundation to preserve knowledge and steer humanity into a better and brighter future, but also a Second Foundation, one where the people are rumored to have magic powers.

As the Empire is dying and the Foundation is gaining more power, due to their advancement of understanding in science and Engineering, the two factions struggle over power and fight against each other. A new ruler in the Empire, seems to win that struggle in his favor.

This is Part 1 in the series. The Foundation is about a galactic empire that's about to end, and a mathematician that calculates that this is going to happen, who then goes on to devise a plan of creating a "Foundation" that keeps science and knowledge alive.

There are two mindsets – growth and fixed mindset. Growth Mindset is the one you want to have. It's enabling you to learn, and to achieve mastery over time. The fixed mindset on the other hand, prevents you from challenging yourself.

A rehash of learnings from the inner workings at 37signals. Basically, remote work is good for everyone involved and therefore it is what people should be doing.

Hands down one of the best books I have ever read. I very very strongly recommend picking up a copy. Robert Sapolsky is one of the most knowledgeable people on the topic of human behavior and this book is a tour de force display of that knowledge.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn challenges traditional views of scientific progress as a linear, cumulative process. Kuhn introduces the concept of paradigm shifts to describe the sudden.

Grit is a [branch book](https://commoncog. com/the-3-kinds-of-non-fiction-book/#branchbooks), exploring one core idea, namely that of "Grit" over and over again from different perspectives.

One of the best books in existence. Highly creative, highly unique, and extremely thought-provoking. How startups work, and how they don't. Why good ideas are important, and how to find them, and why we have to build the future ourselves, or else it won't happen.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini is a groundbreaking book that explores the psychological principles behind how people are persuaded. Cialdini, a social psychologist.

Chess, learning, climbing, swimming, playing music, coding, parkour, conversations, skiing, philosophizing, proving mathematical theorems, painting and a host of other activities can lead to the same cognitive and mental state => Flow.

When AI takes off and becomes more intelligent than Humans, there are a lot of scenarios that are potentially wiping out humans. This is a detailled analysis of how these scenarios might unfold, discussing strategies and ways to potentially avoid them. The main takeaway.

One of my favorite books of all time. I grew up reading Michael Ende, but this is one of the books, which changes it's meaning as you grow up. It's about appreciating the small, but important things in life. Savouring the moments, and not forgetting.

Drive introduces 3 concepts of motivation, motivation 1. 0, 2. 0 and 3. 0 and argues that we are thinking about using motivation the wrong way. Essentially, intrinsic motivation is what matters most in modern day tasks, and that is what he terms motivation 3. 0.

Shantaram is a wonderful book. It details the story of somebody who fled from a prison in Australia and made his way to India, where he found shelter in the gangster underworld of Mumbai and started to live his life there.

Chaos: Making a New Science is a non-fiction book by James Gleick that introduced the principles and early development of chaos theory to the public. In it he details the history of chaos theory.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb at his best. A little angry on the state of the world, and knowing that he often knows better. To me the most memorable idea from this book is the allegory of the Turkey.

12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson is a book about how to live a good life. The most memorable thing about it is that you should have a resemblance of order within your life. Because without order, everything else quickly falls to pieces and problems arise. And problems hurt.

Humans play all kinds of games with each other and with themselves. Most of human activity can be looked at through this lens of "games that we play". There are status games, money games, games of friendship and family. Games can be divided into two broad groups.

An incredible biography of the life of "the raddest man alive" - Elon Musk. To me the most important takeaway from this book is this: If you want to have an amazing future, you have to go out and build it yourself. No matter what it takes.

Sapiens is a book about how humanity became what it is today. It's a book about history, about the big picture view of how we got here. In answering this question, it shows four major revolutions that shaped our history: the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution.

Life, the Universe and Everything is the third book in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, continuing the comedic and absurd adventures of Arthur Dent and his friends across the cosmos. In this installment, the stakes are higher.

In this last book of the trilogy in five parts, Douglas Adams answers many of the questions still left open by the other books, in a grand finale. Known for its darker and more existential tone compared to the other books in the series.

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish is the second to last installment of the famous Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series. The title is the message that the dolphins left to the humans before they teleported away from the planet before it got destroyed.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is one of my favorite books of all time. It is a story, written from the perspective of death, who is narrating the events of the life of a little girl Liesel. Liesel grows up in the middle of Nazi Germany with a new family.

This book is worth it if you don't yet know how to travel on a budget and still need that paradigm shift of: "Oh wait, you can travel the world while spending less money than what you would have spent when you stayed at home in Europe or the US" If however.

Greg Bear writes some of the best sci-fi out there, and this is some of his best work. Blood Music, without spoiling anything, is about different forms of intelligence, about something alien to us, about biotechnology and experiment.

The main idea of this book is that Rational Egoism is virtuous and necessary. We need to take accountability of our own future. When doing so, we improve the future for everybody. Out of egoism flows altruism. But the book packages and weaves this idea into a gripping story.

This book aims to explain and demistify how a computer works under the hood. It tries to remove the layers and layers of abstraction and jargon that computer science has come up with over the years and focus instead on the core ideas of what a computer *really* does.

We are on a route of exponential growth in technology. At some point this growth will be so quick, that there will be extreme advances each and every day and eventually every hour. This point coincides with the invention of general AI.

This is the second part to a series, it starts with [**The Dragons Egg**](/booknotes/the-dragons-egg). In this science fiction novel humans explore a neutron star and find life on it. The catch is, the life on the neutron star experiences time a lot differently.

In this book, humans plan and execute a scientific mission to a neutron star, where they discover, that on the planet of the neutron star exists a species of life. This species however, lives orders of magnitude faster than humans.

Seven Habits is one of the most influential books I have read in my whole life. I think it's the best self-help book out there and if internalized and incorporated into your life, the principles from this book have the potential to change your life drastically.

Snow Falling on Cedars follows the complex relationships between Kabuyo Miyamoto, Hatsue Imada and Ishmael Chambers. In doing so, the novel weaves together themes of love, prejudice, and the lingering effects of World War II.

This is one of the best self-help books in existence. The insights are incredibly powerful ideas about how humans interact with one another. The title puts a bad wrap on the whole book because it makes it seem to be about manipulation. But in reality.