README

The form of this README is shamelessly poached from Zhengdong Wang. He starts his README with the following:

Instead of attempting the daunting task of writing about myself (I am perennially unhappy with the results), here is a collection of things I want to associate myself with. They are things I like, things I think about, things that have influenced me. You can interpolate the rest.

I’ll add that writing about yourself also fossilizes one possible story. A person is too complex to fit in even their own mind, so while you must distill that into a story to make yourself legible to others, an expansive life requires that you retain internal narrative dynamism. There are many stories implicit in this list, but let us live out a better one.

Ayy lmao meme

The Collective

  • More Money Than God is awesome and fun.
  • The Prize is technically a history of oil, but it’s really a wonderful depiction of “economics” and “politics” as they exist at the more granular level of individual interactions and choices.
  • Varieties of Capitalism is a “classic political science text.” In the “ayy lmao” between grand theories and small experiments, it’s a “new theorization of the grand theory of institutions.” I liked its relatively expansive reach and tolerance of gray areas between its categories.
  • Poor Economics is a “small experiments” volume. I ended up going through their development economics certification too, and there’s something wonderful about the thought that you can make incremental progress towards solving the big problems of hunger and disease.
  • Faith in Moderation from Jillian Schwedler is somewhere in between. I don’t remember most of the claims, but I remember it as the first book that connected it theorization to the specificity of the real world, moved between layers of abstractions, and was incredibly granular and precise in its analysis and claims.

Progress

  • Samantha Power’s Chasing the Flaame
  • Vannevar Bush’s Pieces of the Action
  • Jobs
  • Michael Nielsen’s Augmenting Long-term Memory. Spaced repetition flash cards might not seem so related to “progress,” but as gwern says, “It’s a testament to the Enlightenment ideal of improving humanity through reason and overcoming our human flaws…it’s really nice to just have a small example like this in one’s daily life, an example not yet so prosaic and boring as the lightbulb.”

Godhead

  • Rob Burbea
  • Bhagavad Gita. I read the Easwaran translation.
  • Nick Cammarata
  • mistranslating the buddha: most of the problem is your reaction to it

  • Visakan Veerasamy

  • Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
    There is no such thing as excerpting propositions, but here are some: > *5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.* > *6.5 When an answer cannot be stated, neither can the question be stated.* >> *There is no such thing as the riddle.* >> *If a question can be posed at all, then it can also be answered.* > *6.521 The solution to the problem of life is found in the vanishing of the problem.* >> *(Is this not the reason why those to whom the meaning of life became clear after prolonged doubt, could not then say in what this meaning consisted?)* > *6.522 There is, though, the ineffable.* >> *This shows itself, it is the mystical.*
  • bookbear express
  • be well tuned. I actually encountered this very recently, but it’s an accurate and synthesized representation of many other ideas.

Some titles on beauty.

Math We can all be transformed with the really unmatchable sensation of “understanding truth” and seeing the world in a new way.

  • A Mathematician’s Lament from Paul Lockhart on the terrible way math is usually taught. What might it mean to actually understand something?
  • Andrew Neitzke’s class notes for Real Analysis.

Literature

  • Gabriel García Márquez’ A Hundred Years of Solitude.
    An excerpt Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers.
  • David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, This Is Water (video here), and “Roger Federer as a Religious Experience” (works not named are because I haven’t read them).
  • Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Lolita.
  • Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.
  • Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea.
  • Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
  • Frank O’Hara’s Mayakovsky.

Music

  • Radiohead’s album In Rainbows. Notably, “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”.
  • Chick Corea’s Spain. The life! The fun!

Visual Arts

  • Rothko
  • Monet
  • Kandinsky
  • Picasso’s Repose. She’s perfect.
  • Anna Laura
  • Joan Miró
  • [insert calligraphy]