All The Books I Read In 2020

Some notes and quotes from the books I have read this year:

• The Meritocracy Trap - The meritocracy trap is basically a snowball effect in which middle class jobs get displaced by more highly skilled, higher paying jobs. Those with the higher paying jobs then use their money to ensure that their kids are able to get these high paying jobs starting with placing them in expensive pre-schools and high schools to give them the best chance to get into the highly regarded universities to give them the best chance at getting the high paying jobs. As a result, what the author calls the superordinate working class works harder and longer than they ever have before, essentially exploiting their own skills just to maintain their place. Another result is that innovations are more skewed towards the skills that the superordinate workers already have, making their skills even more valuable. In the end nobody wins.

  • “The division between gloomy and glossy jobs causes elites to give their children the extraordinary investments needed to get the glossy jobs.”
  • “The rise of an elaborately educated elite induces the innovations that bias work and income to favor the skills that this elite possesses.”
  • “What is conventionally called merit is actually an ideological conceit, constructed the launder a fundamentally unjust allocation of advantage.”
  • “Meritocratic inequality divides society into the useless and the used up.”

• Biased - This book was great at balancing academic studies on racial biases with personal anecdotes. I found it startling how much of an influence priming can have on racial biases (black faces are more likely to be picked out when induced to think about crime, aggressive words are more likely to be picked out after being shown photos of black faces) and the role that this can play in police being more violent towards black men.

  • There is less brain activity in the areas that process faces when someone sees a face of someone of a different race than their own.
  • “Categorization - grouping like things together - is not some abhorrent feature of the human brain, a process that some people engage in and other do not. Rather, it is a universal function of the brain that allows us to organize and manage the overload of the stimuli that constantly bombard us.”
  • “Bias, even when we are not conscious of it, has consequences that we need to understand and mitigate. The stereotypic associations we carry in out heads can affect what we perceive, how we think, and the actions we take.”
  • “In a series of studies, they asked people to rate the height, weight, and strength of young black and white men from photographs showing only their faces. Study participants consistently rated black men as taller, heavier and stronger than white men.”
  • In a study involving a mock altercation between a black man and a white man that students didn’t know was scripted “the students used a much lower threshold for labeling black actions as violent.”
  • “The same fear response that’s supposed to keep us safe can activate bias in ways that stigmatize and threaten others.”
  • “Research supports the notion that raising the issue of race and discrimination explicitly can lead people to be more open-minded and act more fairly, particularly when they have time to reflect on their choices.”
  • “Encouraging children to remain blind to race dampened their detection of discrimination, which had ripple effects. Color blindness promoted exactly the opposite of what was intended: racial inequality.”
  • “It’s true that we are wired for bias. But the problem with narrowly settling for that perspective is that it can lead us to care less about the danger associated with bias, instead of more. When something is regarded as a norm, people cease to judge it as harshly. … They feel less agency and less motivation to change.”
  • “The worry is that groups that sign on the the easy, socially responsible training might be less likely to attempt to mitigate bias and address inequities later, especially when it’s hard - when it involves changes in cultural practices and policies, for example.”
  • “When we are forced to make quick decisions using subjective criteria, the potential for bias is great.”

• Countdown to Zero Day - A detailed account of Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm, sabotaged an Iranian nuclear facility by targeting the programmable logic controllers in the facility to ruin their centrifuges. The book goes into detail on how it was discovered by a small group of security researchers and the level of sophistication that went into the attack and related intelligence gathering attacks as well as the sloppiness that lead to its detection after going undetected for years. It also touches on what it means for the future of cyber attacks.

  • “The targets most in danger from a digital attack in the United States are not just military systems but civilian ones - transportation, communication, and financial networks; food manufacturing and chemical plants; gas pipelines, water, and electric utilities; even uranium enrichment plants.”
  • “A bomb dropped on a target might cause collateral damage, but it would be local. Computer networks, however, are complex mazes of interconnectivity, and a cyberweapon’s path and impact once unleashed aren’t always predictable.”

• A Field Guide to Lies - A lot of the stuff in here as stuff I was already aware of but it’s always good be reminded to step back and think things through before accepting a claim as true, especially if it confirms your prior belief.

  • “But it’s important to remember that people gather statistics. People choose what to count, how to go about counting, which of the resulting numbers they will share with us, and which words they will use to describe and interpret those numbers. Statistics are not facts. They are interpretations.”
  • “We also have a tendency to apply critical thinking only to things we disagree with. In the current information age, pseudofacts masquerade as facts, misinformation can be indistinguishable from true information, and numbers are often at the heart of any important claim or decision.”

• The Fifth Risk - An alarming look at the potential risks of having so many incompetent people in major government positions under the Trump administration, whether it be at the Department of Energy or the Department of Agriculture. People with detailed knowledge on how programs at these places work got replaced by people who couldn’t even meet the most basic requirements for entry level positions. The general consensus on the most worrying thing for the former employees is the potential disasters that could stem from the commitment to scientific ignorance from people in positions of power. Things like scaling back environmental and food safety regulations, giving research money to those who will produce the political results you want and restricting access to data from government funded sources.

  • “At any rate, the serious risk in Iran wasn’t that the Iranians would secretly acquire a weapon. It was that the president of the United States would not understand his nuclear scientists’ reasoning about the unlikelihood of the Iranians obtaining a weapon, and that he would have the United States back away foolishly from the deal. Released from the complicated set of restrictions on its nuclear-power program, Iran would then build its bomb. It wasn’t enough to have the world’s finest forensic nuclear physicists. Our political leaders needed to be predisposed to listen to them and equipped to understand what they said.”
  • A Department of Energy loan program for early-stage businesses that was criticized as wasteful spending due to one big failure. “No one had paid attention to it successes, and its one failure - Solyndra - had allowed right-wide friends of Big oil to bang on relentlessly about government waste and fraud and stupidity.” After some digging it was discovered that they weren’t taking enough risk and “the fear of losses that might in turn be twisted into antigovernment propaganda was threatening its mission.” This program was canceled under Trump.
  • “Early-stage innovation in most industries would not have been possible without government support in a variety of ways, and it’s especially true in energy. So the notion that we are just going to privatize early-stage innovation is ridiculous Other countries are outspending us in R&D, and we are going to pay a price.”
  • “Here is where the Trump administration’s willful ignorance plays a role. If your ambition is to maximize the short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better to never really understand the problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge.”
  • “Junk science will be used to muddy issues like childhood nutrition. Maybe sodium isn’t as bad for kids as people say! There’s no such thing as too much sugar! The science will suddenly be ‘unclear’. There will no longer be truth and falsehood. There will just be stories with tow sides to them.”
  • “In the red southern states the mayor sometimes would say, ‘Can you not mention that the government gave this?’ Even when it was saving lives, or preserving communities, the government remained oddly invisible… We don’t teach people what the government actually does.”
  • “Without weather satellites, weather radar, weather buoys, and weather balloons, there would be no weather forecasting worth listening to, much less paying for. Whatever AccuWeather - and any other private weather forecaster - might be doing to refine the National Weather Service’s forecast also depended on having those forecasts in the first place.”
  • “That was the sad truth - the public servants couldn’t or wouldn’t defend themselves, and few outside the US government had a deep interest in sticking up for them.”
  • “Pause a moment to consider that audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the US taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the US taxpayer, and on international data sharing treaties made on behalf of the US taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the US taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.” That is what AccuWeather wants, and their CEO, Barry Myers, was Trump’s nomination to run the NOAA. Fortunately he has withdrawn. Essentially trying to take a public good, paid for with taxpayer dollars and restrict it to the few who profit off that data by privatizing weather forecasts.
  • “Virtually all the satellite data that came into NOAA wound up in places where no one could ever see it again. The Weather Company simply sought to render it accessible to the public. Myers threatened to sue the Weather Service if they did it.”
  • “The private weather industry, unlike the National Weather Service, has a financial interest in catastrophe. The more spectacular and expensive the disasters, the more the people will pay for the warning of them… The more they pay, the more the weather industry can afford to donate to elected officials, and the more influence it will gain on the political process… You know Hurricane Harvey is going to do to Houston before Houston knows: Do you help Houston? Or do you find clever ways to make money off Houston’s destructions.”
  • “While the tornado was touching down in Moore, AccuWeather’s network channel was broadcasting videos of … hippos, swimming.” This is after they sent out an alert to their paying customers 12 minutes before the tornado touched down.

• Bullshit Jobs - The book breaks down bullshit jobs into five categories - flunkies (jobs to make someone else look or feel important), goons (exist only because other people employ them and largely have a negative impact on society), duct tapers (solve a problem that should not exist in the first place), box tickers (allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something it probably isn’t doing) and taskmasters (two types, Type 1 are unnecessary superiors, the opposite of flunkies, Type 2 create bullshit tasks for others). It is more of a qualitative and anecdotal look at useless jobs with lots of personal stories from readers about their bullshit jobs. The psychological effects of a job we think is useless are damaging. People want to contribute something meaningful to society, and this could be why meaningful jobs tend to be low paying jobs.

  • “a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of the employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
  • “If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of financial capital, it’s hard to see how he or she could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the universally reviled unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.) - and particularly it financial avatars - but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.”
  • “While neoliberal rhetoric was always all about the unleashing of the magic of the marketplace and placing economic efficiency over all other values, the overall effect of the free market policies has been that rates of economic growth have slowed pretty much everywhere except India and Chine; scientific and technological advance has stagnated; and in most wealthy nations, the younger generations can, for the first time in centuries, expect to lead less prosperous lives than their parents did. Yet on observing these effects, proponents of market ideology always reply with calls for even stronger doses of the same medicine, and politicians duly enact them.”
  • “Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they not only work hard but they are also held in the lowest esteem for that very reason…. Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers… Yet secretly they are aware they have achieved nothing”
  • “When managers began trying to come up with scientific studies of the most time- and energy-efficient ways to deploy human labor, they never applied those same techniques to themselves - or if they did, the effect appears to have been the opposite of what they intended.”
  • “And being forced to pretend to work, we discovered, was the most absolute indignity - because it was impossible to pretend it was anything but what it was: pure degradation, a sheer exercise of the boss’s power for its own sake.”
  • “If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn’t capitalism”
  • “if the market can get things so wrong in the one area the worker knows best, then surely she can not just blandly assume the market can be trusted to asses the true value of goods and services in those areas where she lacks firsthand information.”
  • “To some degree, the skill at actually reading others’ emotions is just an effect of what working-class work actually consists of: rich people don’t have to learn how to do interpretive labor nearly as well because they can hire other people to do it for them. Those hirelings, on the other hand, who have to develop a habit of understanding other’s points of views, will also tend to care about them.”
  • “Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economies - but to an increasing degrees, all economies. They cause misery because human happiness is always caught up in a sense of having effects on the world; a feeling which most people, when they speak of their work, express through a language of social value. Yet at the same time they are aware that the greater social value produced by a job, the less one is likely to be paid to do it.”
  • “A case could be made that the great historical difference between what we call the Left and the Right largely turns on the relation between value and values. The Left has always been about trying to collapse the gulf between the domain dominated by pure self-interest and the domain traditionally dominated by high-minded principles; the Right has always been about prising them even farther apart, and then claiming ownership of both. They stand for both greed and charity. Hence, the otherwise inexplicable alliance in the Republican Party between the free market libertarians and the ‘values voters’ of the Christian Right. What this comes down to in practice has usually been the political equivalent of a strategy of good-cop-bad-cop: first unleash the chaos of the market to destabilize lives and all existing verities alike; then, offer yourself up as the last bastion of the authority of church and fatherhood against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed.”
  • “It’s hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem.” (ie. millions of medical insurance jobs lost if the US switches from private to public healthcare)
  • “much of the reason for the expansion of the bullshit sector more generally, is a direct result of the desire to quantify the unquantifiable. To put it bluntly, automation makes certain tasks more efficient, but at the same time, it makes other tasks less efficient. This is because it requires enormous amounts of human labor to render the processes, tasks, and outcomes that surround anything of caring value into a form that computers can even recognize.”
  • “The reason the current allocation of labor looks the way it does, then, has nothing to do with economics or even human nature. It’s ultimately political.”
  • “Finance works its way into everything, from car loans to credit cards, but it’s significant that the principle cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt, and the principle force drawing young people into bullshit jobs is the need to pay student loans.”
  • “Basic Income might seem like a vast expansion of state power,… but, in fact, it’s the exactly the reverse. Huge sections of government - and precisely, the most intrusive and obnoxious ones, since they are most deeply involved in the moral surveillance of ordinary citizens - would instantly be made unnecessary and could simply be closed down.”
  • “Universal Basic Income would mean millions of people who recognize the absurdity of this situation will have the time to engage in political organizing to change it, since they will no longer be forced to highlight forms for eight hours a day, or scramble around for an equivalent amount of time trying to figure out a way to pay the bills.”

• The Wisdom of Insecurity

  • “If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now.”
  • “So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live. Instead of earning a living they are mostly earning an earning, and thus when the time comes to relax they are unable to do so.”
  • “Here is a person who knows that in two weeks’ time he has to undergo a surgical operation. In the meantime he is feeling no physical pain; he has plenty to eat; he is surrounded by friends and human affection; he is doing work that is normally of great interest to him. But his power to enjoy these things is taken away by constant dread. He is insensitive to the immediate realities around him. His mind is preoccupied with something that is not yet here. It is not as if he were thinking about it in a practical way, trying to decide whether he should have the operation or not, or making plans to take care of his family and his affairs if he should die. These decisions have already been made. Rather, he is thinking about the operation in an entirely futile way, which both ruins his present enjoyment of life and contributes nothing to the solution of any problem. But he cannot help himself.”
  • “The miracles of technology cause us to live in a hectic, clockwork world that does violence to human biology, enabling us to do nothing but pursue the future faster and faster.”

• Digital Minimalism - Digital minimalism is a “philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.” The digital decluttering process is take a 30 day break from all optional technology and use that time to find meaningful activities. After the break is over, for each optional technology you reintroduce, determine what the value of it is in your life and how you will maximize that value. The book also stresses the importance of solitude: spending time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds. The suggestions for how to increase solitude are leave your phone at home, take long walks and write letters or notes to yourself. It also discusses research on how human brains are wired to be social because they have adapted to automatically practice social thinking during cognitive downtime. With social media conversation is being replaced with connection. To combat this we should adopt more conversation-centric-communication. The suggestions given are to stop clicking like (replace lots of low value, online interactions with fewer high value, in-person interactions), consolidate texting (texting can “give off the approximate luster of true conversation”) and hold conversation office hours (this negates the concern that unsolicited calls may be bothersome). Digital technology should help set up and maintain your leisure activities, not be the primary leisure activity itself. Some practices that can help you do this are: fix or build something every week, scheduling low-quality leisure (web surfing, Netflix, …), joining something (club, recreational sports league, …) and strategizing your free time. The core digital minimalism practices are: delete social media from your phone, turn your devices into single-purpose computers (general purpose != more productivity), use social media like a professional (follow a small, narrow list of people specific to what you value highly), embrace slow media (focus only on the highest quality sources, avoid following breaking news) and dumbing down your smart phone.

  • “the hot new technologies that emerged in the past decade or so are particularly well suited to foster behavioral addictions, leading people to use them much more than they think is useful or healthy. Indeed, as revealed by whistleblowers and researchers like Tristan Harris, Sean Parker, Leah Pearlman, and Adam Alter, these technologies are in many cases specifically designed to trigger this addictive behavior. Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan. We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.”
  • “How much of your time and attention, he would ask, must be sacrificed to earn the small profit of occasional connections and new ideas that is earned by cultivating a significant presence on Twitter. Assume, for example, that your Twitter habit effectively consumes ten hours per week. Thoreau would note that this cost is almost certainly way too high for the limited benefits it returns. If you value new connections and exposure to interesting ideas, he might argue, why not adopt a habit of attending an interesting talk or event every month, and forcing yourself to chat with at least three people while there?”
  • “It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.”
  • “Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.”
  • “When you spend multiple hours a day compulsively clicking and swiping, there’s much less free time left for slower interactions. And because this compulsive use emits a patina of socialness, it can delude you into thinking that you’re already serving your relationships well, making further action unnecessary”
  • “If you being decluttering the low-value digital distractions from your life before you’ve convincingly filled in the void they were helping you ignore, the experience will be unnecessarily unpleasant at best and a massive failure at worse.”
  • “Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.”
  • “Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.”
  • “Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interaction.”
  • “A foundational theme in digital minimalism is that new technology, when used with care and intention, creates a better life than either Luddism or mindless adoption.”

• White Fragility - One of the major obstacles for getting white people to understand racism is the binary good/bad view that only bad people can be racist. People are taught that racism is bad and think this means only bad people can be racist. They think racism is limited to intentional acts by bad people. They get defensive when being called out for something they did that someone else may view as racist because to them they are being called a bad person. This defensiveness prevents them from taking some time for self-reflection and they lose out on an opportunity to learn. White people are insulated from race-based stress. Being taught to treat everyone the same and not see color just lets white people ignore the racial dynamics that exist everywhere. It also can make white people unable to see themselves in racial terms which can result in them thinking they are being treated unfairly when they are pressed to see themselves in racial terms. All of this results in it being so difficult to confront white people about racism that many don’t even bother trying. Advice for combatting white fragility is to educate yourself on racism, acknowledging ourselves are racial beings with a limited perspective on race, develop authentic relationships with non-white people and stop being silent about race and racism when around other white people. It is important to take feedback as an opportunity to learn and be appreciative of it rather than getting defensive.

  • “White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives; engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice.”
  • “I can be seen as qualified to lead a major or minor organization in this country with no understanding whatsoever of the perspectives or experiences of people of color, and virtually no ability to engage critically with the topic of race.”
  • “Individualism claims that there are no intrinsic barriers to individual success and that failure is not a consequence of social structures but comes from individual character. According to the ideology of individualism, race is irrelevant.”
  • “If poor whites were focused on feeling superior to those below them in status, they were less focused on those above. The poor working class, if united across race, could be a powerful force. But racial divisions have served to keep them from organizing against the owning class who profits from their labor.”
  • “Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not.”
  • “Color-blind ideology makes it difficult for us to address these unconscious beliefs. While the idea of color blindness may have started out as a well-intentioned strategy for interrupting racism, it practice it has served to deny the reality of racism and thus hold it in place.”
  • “Whites rarely consider how sheltered and safe their spaces may be from the perspective of people of color(e.g., Trayvon Martin’s experience in a gated white community). Because it reverses the actual direction of the racial danger, this narrative may be one of the most pernicious.”
  • “This freedom from responsibility [not having to worry about how people perceive me because I’m white] gives me a level of racial relaxation and emotional and intellectual space that people of color are not afforded as they move through their day.”
  • [On speaking up about a racist comment when among a group of white people] “We might be accused of being politically correct or might be perceived as angry, humorless, combative, and not suited to go far in an organization. … Conversely, when I kept quiet about racism, I was rewarded with social capital such as being seen as fun, cooperative, and a team player.”
  • “white fragility enabled the white elite to direct the white working class’s resentment toward people of color. The resentment is clearly misdirected, given that the people who control the economy and who have managed to concentrate more wealth into fewer (white) hands than ever before in human history are the white elite.”
  • “The expectation that people of color should teach white people about racism is another aspect of the white racial innocence that reinforces several problematic racial assumptions. First, it implies that racism is something that happens to people of color and has nothing to do with us and that we consequently cannot be expected to have any knowledge of it. … Second, this request requires nothing of us and reinforces unequal power relations by asking people of color to do our work. … Third, the request ignores the historical dimensions of race relations. It disregards how often people of color have indeed tried to tell us what racism is like for them and how often they have been dismissed.”
  • “I was raised in a society that taught me that there was no loss in the absence of people of color - that their absence was a good and desirable thing to be sought and maintained - while simultaneously denying the fact [by making an effort to attend a better (whiter) school].”
  • “The simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on the topic. To move beyond defensiveness, we have to let go of this common belief.”
  • [On teachers calling a student’s complaint about an offensive remark made by a teacher an overreaction.] “These white teachers’ responses illustrate several dynamics of white fragility. First, the teachers never considered that in not understanding the student’s reaction, they might be lacking some knowledge or context. They demonstrated no curiosity about the student’s perspective or why she might have taken offense. Nor did they show concern about the student’s feelings. They were unable to separate intentions from impact.”
  • “White fragility functions as a form of bullying; I am going to make it so miserable for you to confront me - no matter how diplomatically you try to do so - that you will simply back off, and never raise the issue of race again.”
  • “White fragility is much more than mere defensiveness or whining. It may be conceptualized as the sociology of dominance: an outcome of white people’s socialization into white supremacy and a means to protect, maintain, and reproduce white supremacy.”
  • “When a white woman cries, a black man gets hurt.”

• The Four

  • “Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.”
  • “Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers.”
  • “Amazon business thinking: If we can borrow money at historically low rates, why don’t we invest that money in extraordinarily expensive control delivery systems. That way we secure an impregnable position in retail and asphyxiate our competitors. Then we can get really big fast.”
  • “In the first quarter of 2015, the iPhone accounted for only 18.3 percent of the smartphones shipped globally, but 92 percent of the industry’s profits. That’s luxury marketing. How do you elegantly communicate to friends and strangers that your skills, DNA, and background put you in the 1 percent, no matter where you are? Easy, cary an iPhone.”
  • “Steve Jobs’s transition from a tech to a luxury brand is one of the most consequential - and value-creating - insights in business history. Technology firms can scale, but they are rarely timeless.”
  • “Old-economy barriers that are expensive and take a long time to dredge (and for competitors to cross). Apple has done this superbly, continually investing in the world’s best brand, and in stores.”
  • “Facebook benefits from the ultimate jujitsu move: it will likely become the largest media company on earth, and it gets its content, similar to Google, from its users. In other words, more than a billion customers labor for Facebook without compensation.”
  • “Marketing to moderates is like fracking for gas. You only do it if the easier alternatives aren’t available. Thus, we are exposed to less and less calm, reasonable content.”
  • “Another reason they [Facebook and Google] don’t want to be positioned as media companies is more perverse. Respectable companies in the news business recognize their responsibility to the public and try to come to grips with their role in shaping the worldview of their customers. You know: editorial objectivity, fact-checking, journalistic ethics, civil-discourse - all that kind of stuff. That’s a lot of work, and it dents profit.”
  • “Given the polarization of our political climate and the backfire effect - where if you present someone with evidence against their beliefs, they double down on their convictions - a ‘disputed’ label won’t persuade a lot of people. It’s easier to fool people than to convince they they’ve been fooled.”
  • “To involved humans would supposedly being on implicit and explicit biases. But AI has biases as well. It’s programmed, by humans, to select the most clickable content.”
  • “Google also was learning - better than the Times itself - exactly what the paper’s readers wanted and were likely to want in the future. And that meant Google could target those Times readers with the far greater precision and make more money from each ad.”
  • “Google’s control of knowledge is now so complete, and the barriers to entry by competitors so great (look at the marginal success of Microsoft’s Bing), that the firm might maintain control for years.”
  • “Among the Four, these eight factors are prevalent: product differentiation, visionary capital, global reach, likability, vertical integration, AI, accelerant, and geography.”
  • “We used to admire firms that created hundreds of thousands of middle- and upper-class jobs; now our heroes are firms that produce a dozens lords and hundreds of thousands of serfs.”

• The Spy and the Traitor - The story of a Oleg Gordievsky, who worked for the KGB and became a British spy.

• How to be an Antiracist

  • “Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.”
  • “I had been taught that racist ideas cause racist policies. That ignorance and hate cause racist ideas. That the root problem of the racism is ignorance and hate. But that gets the chain of events exactly wrong. The root problem - from Prince Henry to President Trump - has always been the self-interest of the racist power.”
  • “Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world - it allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling.”
  • “We are not meant to fear suits with policies that kill. We are not meant to fear good White males with AR-15s. No, we are to fear the weary, unarmed Latinx body from Latin America. The Arab body kneeling to Allah is to be feared. The Black body from hell is to be feared.”
  • “To be antiracist is to see all cultures in all their differences as on the same level, as equals. When we see cultural difference, we are seeing cultural difference - nothing more, nothing less.”
  • “One of racism’s harms is the way it falls on the unexceptional Black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive - and, even worse, the Black screwup who faces the abyss after one error, while the White screwup is handed second chances and empathy.”
  • “Making individuals responsible for the perceived behavior of racial groups and making whole racial groups responsible for the behavior of individuals are the two ways that behavioral racism infects our perception of the world.”
  • “We must discern the difference between racist power (racist policymakers) and White people. For decades, racist power contributed to stagnating wages, destroying unions, deregulating banks and corporations, and steering funding for schools into prison and military budgets, policies that have often drawn a backlash from some White people.”
  • “Racist power, hoarding wealth and resources, has the most to lose in the building of an equitable society. As we’ve learned, racist power produces racist policy out of self-interest and then produces racist ideas to justify those policies. But racist ideas also suppress the resistance to policies that are detrimental to White people, by convincing average White people that inequity is rooted in ‘personal failure’ and is unrelated to policies. Racist power manipulates ordinary White people into resisting equalization policies by drilling them on what they are losing with equalization policies and how those equalization policies are anti-White.”
  • “White supremacists love that America used to be, even though America used to be - and still is - teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support.”

• Billion Dollar Whale - The story of Jho Low and how he effectively stole billions of dollars from the Malaysian taxpayers and fooled many in Wall Street and Hollywood into thinking he was the real deal.

• How to Do Nothing - This book was more of a philosophical one about abstract ideas than self-help book. One thing that stood out to me was the idea that the attention economy is taking so much of our time and creating a fractured society that we are unable to focus sustained attention together on common goals, making us unable to create real change.

  • “When overstimulation has become a fact of life, I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out, or if that bothers you, #NOSMO, the necessity of sometimes missing out.”
  • “Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of ‘arms race’ of urgency that abuses out attention and leaves us no time to think.”
  • “Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for use, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since that drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.”
  • “I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.”
  • “There is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that’s part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it’s even more important for anyone who does have a margin - even the tiniest one - to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line… If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should.”
  • “I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed”

• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

  • “Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as a free raw market for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to a product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence,’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior.”
  • “Surveillance capitalists know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but not for us.”
  • “The raw materials that had been solely used to improve the quality of search results would now also be put to use in the vice of targeting advertising to individual users. Some data would continue to be applied to service improvement, but the growing stores of collateral signals would be repurposed to improve the profitability of ads for both Google and its advertisers.”
  • “Ford’s inventions revolutionized productions. Google’s inventions revolutionized extraction and established surveillance capitalism’s first economic imperative: the extraction imperative. The extraction imperative meant that raw-material supplies must be produced at an ever-expanding scale.”
  • “Reinvestment is user services became the method for attracting behavioral surplus, and users became the unwitting suppliers of raw material for a larger cycle of revenue generation.”
  • “The last thing that Google wanted was to reveal the secrets of how it had rewritten its own rules and, in the process, enslaved itself to the extraction imperative. Behavioral surplus was necessary for the revenue, and secrecy would be necessary for the sustained accumulation of behavioral surplus.”
  • “together a convergence of political circumstances and proactive strategies helped enrich the habitat in which this mutation could root and flourish. These include (1) the relentless pursuit and defense of the founders’ ‘freedom’ through corporate control and an instance on the right to lawless space; (2) the shelter of specific historical circumstances, including the policies and juridicial orientation of the neoliberal paradigm and the state’s urgent interest in the emerging capabilities of the behavioral surplus analysis and prediction in the aftermath of the September 2001 terror attacks; and (3) the international construction of the fortifications in the worlds of politics and culture, designed to protect the kingdom and deflect any close scrutiny of its practices.”
  • “It is important to understand that surveillance capitalists are impelled to pursue lawlessness by the logic of their own creation. Google and Facebook vigorously lobby to kill online privacy protection, limit regulations, weaken or block privacy-enhancing legislation, and thwart every attempt to circumscribe their practices because such laws are existential threats to the frictionless flow of behavioral surplus.”
  • “The Constitution is exploited to shelter a range of novel practices that are antidemocratic in their aims and consequences and fundamentally destructive of the enduring First Amendment values intended to protect the individual from abusive power.”
  • “Fortifications have been erected in four key arenas to protect Google, and eventually other surveillance capitalists, from the political interference and critique: (1) the demonstration of Google’s unique capabilities as a source of competitive advantage in electoral politics; (2) a deliberate blurring of public and private interests through relationships and aggressive lobbying activities; (3) a revolving door of personnel who migrated between Google and the Obama administration, united by elective affinities during Google’s crucial growth years of 2009-2016; and (4) Google’s intentional campaign of influence over academic work and the larger cultural conversation so vital to policy formation, public opinion, and political perception.”
  • “Its dispossession operations reveal a predictable sequence of stages that must be crafted and orchestrated in great detail in order to achieve their ultimate destination as a system of facts through which surplus extraction is normalized. The four stages of the cycle are incursion, habituation, adaptation, and redirection.”
  • “For now, suffice to say that Street View and the larger project of Google Maps illustrate the new and even more ambitious goals toward which this cycle of dispossession would soon point: the migration from an online data source to a real-world monitor to an advisor to an active shepherd - from knowledge to influence and control.”
  • “This unprecedented concentration of knowledge produces an equally unprecedented concentration of power: asymmetries that must be understood as the unauthorized privatization of the division of learning in society.”
  • “Surveillance capitalists understood that their future wealth would depend upon new supply routes that extend to real life on the roads, among the trees, throughout the cities. Extension wants your bloodstream and your bed, your breakfast conversation, your commute, your run, your refridgerator, your parking space, your living room.”
  • “This is not the automation of society, as some might think, but rather the replacement of society with machine action dictated by economic imperatives.”
  • “Each smart object is a kind of marionette; for all its ‘smartness,’ it remains a hapless puppet dancing to the puppet master’s hidden economic imperatives.”
  • “We are left with few rights to know, or to decide who knows, or to decide who decides.”
  • “The need for scale drove a relentless search for new high-volume supplies of behavioral surplus, producing competitive dynamics aimed at cornering these supplies of raw material and seeking lawless undefended spaces in which to prosecute these unexpected and poorly understood acts of dispossession. All the while, surveillance capitalists stealthily but steadfastly habituated us to their claims. In the process, our access to necessary information and services became hostage to their operations, our means of social participation fused with their interests.”
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  • “Forget the cliche that if it’s free, ‘You are the product.’ You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The ‘product’ derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life.”
  • “Surveillance capitalists work hard to camouflage their purpose as they master the uses of instrumentarian power to shape our behavior while evading our awareness.”
  • “Social media is designed to engage and hold people of all ages, but it is principally molded to the psychological structure of adolescence and emerging adulthood, when one is naturally oriented toward the ‘others,’ especially toward the rewards of group recognition, acceptance, belonging and inclusion. For many, this close tailoring, combined with the practical dependencies of social participation, turns social media into a toxic milieu.”
  • “Both television and social media deprive us of real-life encounters, in which we sense the other’s inwardness and share something of our own, thus establishing some threads of communality. Unlike television, however, social media entails active self-presentation characterized by ‘profile inflation,’ in which biographical information, photos, and updates are crafted to appear ever more marvelous in anticipation of the stakes for popularity, self-worth and happiness. Profile inflation triggers more negative self-evaluation among individuals as people compare themselves to others, which then leads to more profile inflation, especially among larger networks that include more ‘distance friends.’”
  • “The greatest danger is that we come to feel at home in glass life or in the prospect of hiding from it. Both alternatives rob us of the life-sustaining inwardness, born in sanctuary, that finally distinguishes us from the machines.”

• Super Pumped - The story of the rise and fall of Uber, and their former CEO Travis Kalanick.

• North of the Color Line - Some history on racial segregation and civil rights activism in Canada in the late 1800s and early to mid 1900s.

• Parting the Waters - A timely historical read given the current state of the world.

• The Memory Illusion

  • Thinking we have early childhood memories is due to “forgetting the source of information and misattributing it to our own memory or experience.” - mistaking someone else’s stories for our memories or mistaking out imagination as a real memory.
  • Study where participants were asked to describe in detail two actual events and one made up event, not knowing it was made up. “Just by repeatedly imagining the event happening, and saying out loud what they were picturing, 25 per cent of participants ended up being classified as having clear false memories.”
  • “In the first study, the team asked participants who had previously been to a Disney resort as a child to read an advert that suggested they must have shaken hands with Mickey Mouse when they were there… In the second study the team asked different participants to read a different advert for a Disney resort, this time on that suggested they had shaken hands with Bugs Bunny.” Both time participants who read the advert were more confident they had shaken hands. Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros character, so would not be at a Disney resort.
  • “Researchers found that when participants experienced the same state at the time of learning as at recall, they performed significantly better. So those who experienced pain right before they learned the word list performed better if they experienced pain again right before they needed to recall the information. Similarly, those who experienced nice warm water before learning did better at the memory test if they had just placed their hands in warm water again. If we follow this through, it means that if we know we learned or experienced something during a particular type of arousal, by recreating that state we should be able to remember it better.”
  • Forgetting is super important: “Much like we need to be able to suppress distractors in our environment all the time - filtering out the conversations around us, the sights and sounds, other browser windows we have open, and so on - in order to focus on whatever task we may need to perform, we also need to avoid getting distracted by memories that are irrelevant to our current situation.”
  • In a study where people were asked to look at a person until they stepped out of sight and were then asked to pick the person out of a photo lineup and rate their confidence that they were right “almost half the participants failed to correctly pick the photo of the person they just saw…. The researchers found that while accuracy and confidence generally aligned, overconfidence was higher in more difficult conditions…. So we seem to generally overestimate how good we are going to be at identifying perpetrators in situations where the odds are particularly against us.”
  • “The current evidence from systematic and methodologically sound studies strongly suggests that memories of traumatic events are more resistant to forgetting than memories of mundane events.”
  • “We would expect that the more often we verbally rehearse and reinforce the appearance of a face, the better we should retain the image of it in our memory, However, it seems that the opposite is true. The researchers found that those who wrote down the description of the perpetrator’s face actually performed significantly worse at identifying the correct person out of a line-up.”
  • “It seems that photos can quite severely mislead our memories, especially when coupled with deliberate misinformation. One of the main reasons for this is presumably similar to the cause of verbal overshadowing; when we see a photo we create a new memory of that occasion which can interfere with our memory of actually experiencing (or not experiencing) an event. When we think about the event we may then have trouble distinguishing between our memory of the photo and our actual experience - possibly even entirely replacing a real visual memory with another.”
  • On task switching “And the consequences are not just limited to diminishing our ability to do the task at hand - they also appear to have an impact on our ability to remember things later. Task-switching also seems to increase stress, diminish people’s ability to manage a work-life balance, and can have negative social consequences.”
  • Post-event information “information that can influence our memories if we encounter it after we experience or witness an event. It might come from many possible sources - discussing the event with others in person or online, reading articles about the event or related events, seeing photos taken by ourselves or others, to name but a few. Any source of information has the potential to change our memories post hoc.”
  • “By having social media dictate which experiences count as the most meaningful in our lives, it is potentially culling the memories that are considered less shareable. Simultaneously it is reinforcing the memories collectively chosen as the most likable, potentially making some memories seem more meaningful and memorable than they originally were. Both of these are problematic processes that can distort our personal reality.”
  • “In seeking justice we must remember that as well as protecting the victims of abuse we must do our best to protect the falsely accused, and that means that statements must not be gathered using methods which could potentially seed false memories.”
  • “According to the international organization the Innocence Project, …, faulty memories, particularly of eyewitnesses, are the major contributing factor for wrongful convictions. For example, in 2015, out of 325 cases where modern DNA testing proved innocence beyond reasonable doubt, a whopping 235 cases involved eyewitness misidentification. This suggests that false memories play an absolutely critical role in the imprisonment of the innocent.”
  • “The more potential pathways there are to a memory (the more associative links), the faster and more likely we are to get to where we need when we try to recall it. This is really the core principle behind most memory aids; we want to make things vivid, bizarre, and part of a situation.”

• The Hot Hand - I was aware of most of the history of research on the hot hand and found the story telling really good in this book.

• Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - Stories from a career as an economic hit man from his work in places like Ecuador, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Panama. “Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign aid organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM.”

• Moral Tribes

  • “Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.”
  • Tragedy of the Commons and the prisoner’s dilemma both show the conflict between cooperating and not cooperating.
  • Reasons for cooperation include empathy, direct reciprocity, commitments to threats and promises, upholding your reputation (or fear of embarrassment) and tribalism.
  • “It seems that knowing which side of a dispute you’re on unconsciously changes your thinking about what’s fair.” This is biased fairness.
  • “One might think that mixed evidence would encourage more moderate views, but it appears to do the opposite. People found the evidence supporting their original views more compelling than the counterevidence, and as a result, both opponents and proponents of capital punishment became more confident in their views after considering the mixed evidence.”
  • “the lesson is that false beliefs, once they’ve become culturally entrenched - once they have become tribal badges of honor - are very difficult to change, and changing them is no longer simply a matter of educating people.” Ex. climate change.
  • A main idea of the book is dual-process morality; one is more automatic and emotional, the other is more controlled and rational, much like Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.
  • Lots of focus on the trolley problem and how people’s responses fit into the dual-process morality - distinction between personal force and no personal force, a means to an end and an end to a mean fit into the automatic process.
  • “They found people, after being forced to explain the mechanics of these policies, downgraded their estimates of their own understanding and became more moderate in their opinions.”
  • Suggestions:
    • “In the face of moral controversy, consult, but do not trust, your moral insticts.” When it’s Me vs Us use automatic mode, when it’s Us vs Them use manual mode.
    • “Rights are not for making arguments; they’re for ending arguments.” Rights tend to be used as shields.
    • “Focus on the facts, and make others do the same.” Force ourselves to know how policies are supposed to work and evidence about what works and what doesn’t.
    • “Beware of biased fairness.”
    • “Use common currency.”
    • “Give.”

• Good To Go

  • Performance tests in a lab setting my not be a good measure of what you actually care about in real life. Ex. Running on a treadmill to exhaustion is a mental exercise in addition to physical.
  • “Small studies are generally less reliable than larger ones, because they’re less likely to constitute a representative sample, and they’re known to have a bias towards showing a positive effect for the thing that they’re testing.” Lots of sport science studies have really small samples (~10 people)
  • “Sprinkle an appealing idea with a dash of science, and it can seem more powerful or true than the evidence really show. But good luck overturning an idea once it’s become sporting lore.”
  • Many studies are designed to find a result people want.
    • Recovery drink study comparing performance on empty stomach vs with recovery drink - of course you will get a positive result when compared to an empty stomach.
    • Study on timing of fuelling after workout comparing not eating vs eating right after - should compare eating at different intervals after workout, but when you do that you don’t get a positive result.
    • When placebo is obvious (ie you can tell that you are in the placebo drink if you drink water not not Gatorade) participants may be biased towards a positive result.
  • “We’re programmed to maintain homeostasis - a physiological state of equilibrium - even when conditions are less than optimal. Which means that it’s important to get the big picture right, but fixating on the smallest details won’t necessarily yield much payoff. The belied that there’s some absolute perfect physiological state you can reach, if only you do everything right, opens the way to dubious products that use the language and jargon of science to exploit our search for the ideal.”
  • Two competing theories regarding icing and ice baths. First is that inflammation is your body’s way of healing and icing can slow that down. Second is that icing can reduce pain and soreness allowing us to train harder, sooner. To ice or not depends on the individual situation ie. might not be good in the building phase of training, but might be between heats and finals of a track meet.
  • Hard to have good studies regarding icing and ice baths because control group knows they aren’t in an ice bath and just simply knowing that you are using something that is supposed to help recovery can influence results - placebo effect is real.
  • Massages, compression stuff and foam rolling are probably more just things that feel good than have an actual impact on recovery. Evidence is minimal at best that they have a physiological benefit.
  • Mental aspect of recovery is often ignored. Stress is stress even if it’s not related to exercise.
  • Sleep is super important.
  • A major reason people use supplements is out of fear of missing out.
  • “that’s the problem with many supplement studies - they’re not scientific quests for truth, but marketing exercises designed to sell products”
  • “Supplement makers bring money to the table, and they spread this money around - to organizations, coaches, trainers, teams, and individual athletes. Along the way, a lot of people get a chance to make a buck.
  • Overtraining syndrome is really about lack of proper recovery. Many people undervalue the value of taking time completely away from an activity.
  • “The problem with technology is that it can lure us into mistaking the numbers we can collect with answers to the questions that matter.”
  • “Rather than teaching athletes to read their bodies and understand when they’re tired and need to rest, these tests draw attention to numbers that may or may not be relevant.”
  • “In 2015, Australian sport scientist Anna Shaw and her colleagues gathered up the published studies on metrics used to quantify training load and response - everything from hormone levels to inflammation markers, blood cell counts, immune system markers, and heart rates. When they analyzed all the results, they found that subjective, self-reported measures trumped objective ones.”
  • “What makes tracking and data analysis so appealing is also what makes it dangerous - it conveys a sense of certainty that the science cannot yet deliver.”
  • “It doesn’t matter if there’s science to back it up. If an athlete strongly believes that something works, the belief effect can overwhelm the real effect.” The reverse is also true.
  • An open placebo (given the athlete the choice of which treatment to use that isn’t backed by evidence) can enhance the placebo effect.
  • Athletes want to feel like they have done everything they can to reach peak performance, so let them do all these things that don’t really have a physiological benefit (icing, ice baths, stretching, massages, …) because the mental benefit matters.

• The Confidence Game

  • “The simple truth is most people aren’t out to get you. We are so bad at spotting deception because it’s better for us to be more trusting. Trust, and not adeptness at spotting deception, is the more evolutionarily beneficial path.”
  • “Our impulsivity and appetite for risk are some of the only reliable indicators of fraud susceptibility… A victim isn’t necessarily foolish or greedy. A victim is simply more emotionally vulnerable at the exact moment the confidence artist approaches.” More susceptible after a major life change.
  • People are really bad at detecting deception.
  • A person having familiarity with you, even if it’s just knowing your name, makes you trust them more. Any piece of information about you a con artist can gather before ever talking with you can make a big difference in how you trust them.
  • Even just pretending you met someone before by knowing they were at an event (ex you are someone’s relative that you met at a wedding) can increase their level of trust in you.
  • Emotion often overrides rational thinking, so a good story can matter more than facts.
  • We ignore logical inconsistencies in a story if we are emotionally invested.
  • “The best confidence artist makes us feel not like we’re being taken for a ride but like we are genuinely wonderful human beings.”
  • “Irrational fears trump rational reasoning.”
  • “Someone who has already agreed to a small request - like opening the door for you - would become more, not less, likely to agree to a larger request later.”
  • “Even when we’re anonymous and the group not particularly desirable, we’d still like to be included more than not - and it hurts when we are excluded.” ex. people trying to get accepted with Madoff
  • “It doesn’t actually matter what you say, in what order, or how. All that matters is that you say a lot, quickly, and that it sounds convoluted and has many moving parts. Simply put, we tend to make worse decisions when we have a lot on our mids - even after that “lot” is removed.”
  • “We hold an unwavering commitment to the notion that we are special - and not just special, but more special than most anyone else.” - Leads to mentality of I won’t get conned, that’s something that only happens to others.
  • “Not only does our conviction of our own exceptionalism and superiority make us misinterpret events and mischaracterize decisions; it also hits us a second time long after the event in question. Because of this, we rewrite the past in a way that makes us less likely to learn from it, selectively recalling everything good and conveniently forgetting the bad.”
  • “Unrealistic optimism about the future doesn’t just make us think everything will continue to get well if we’re seeing returns at this very moment. It also make us complacent - and complacently overconfident - even when we have the chance to get out.”
  • “And that is precisely what the confidence artist is depending on in the convincer. That nagging feeling in your guy: what if you scream foul and it ends up that it wasn’t a con after all?”
  • “Confidence men are master storytellers, so by the time things appear to be getting dicey, they are perfectly placed to make us believe ever more strongly in their fiction rather than walk away, as we by any estimation should. They don’t just tell the original tale; they know how to make even the most dire seeming evidence against them look more likve evidence in favor of their essential trustworthiness and their chosen scheme’s essential brilliance.”
  • “Once we’re in the game, it’s easiest to follow the path of least resistance. It justifies what we’ve already done and reduces the effort we need to make going forward. The deeper we get, the more difficult psychologically it becomes to extricate ourselves, or to see that we’re even in need of extrication. All of the factors are aligned against us.”
  • “Almost no one is immune to reputational slights, despite what they may want you to believe. We all say we don’t care about what other people think, but when it comes down to it, most of us really do. We ourselves are the grifter’s best chance of a successful blow-off; we don’t want anyone to know we’ve been duped. That’s why the fix is so incredibly rare - why would it ever come to pressing charges, when usually all we want is for it all to quietly go away?”
  • To avoid being a mark “Know what people you’re likely to trust, what triggers are likely to catch you, whether positive or negative, and try to be aware enough of your own behavior that you won’t get swept up in it.”
  • “To avoid getting duped… have an escape clause, or a way of exiting any interaction with your dignity intact. We often are sucked up in cons because we don’t quite know how to disengage.”

• Whistleblower - A look at Susan Fowler’s story and the terrible culture at Uber (as well as other places she worked)

• Upstream

  • Downstream solutions are fixing a problem after it has happened. Upstream solutions are preventing the problem from even happening.
  • Harder to measure upstream solutions because it is hard to define success when success is something not happening.
  • Barrier to upstream thinking - problem blindness: that’s just how it is so nobody questions it.
  • Barrier to upstream thinking - lack of ownership: it’s not my problem to fix.
  • Barrier to upstream thinking - tunneling: when people are trying to juggle many problems they stop trying to solve them all and long-term planning goes away. You put off important, but not urgent things. “If you can’t systematically solve problems, it dooms you to stay in an endless cycle of reaction. Tunneling begets more tunneling.”
  • “The need for heroism is usually evidence of systems failure.”
  • Data for the purpose of learning vs data for the purpose of inspection - should be asking how will this data be used by teachers to improve their classrooms or by doctors to improve the health of their patients?
  • Ways to make mistakes when trying to measure success:
    • Mistakenly attributing success to your own work. “The team applauds itself for hitting more home runs - but it turns out every team in the league hit more home runs”
    • Succeed in short-term measures but those don’t align with long-term success. “The team doubled its home runs but barely won any more games”
    • When the measures become the mission. “The pressure to hit home runs led several players to start taking steroids, and they got caught”
  • Questions to ask ahead of time to make sure you can accurately measure success:
    • What else might explain short-term success other than our own efforts and are we tracking those factors?
    • What would allow us to figure out a misalignment of short-term measures and long-term success as quickly as possible?
    • How can these measures be gamed?
    • If our short-term measures are successful over a long period of time and out long-term mission hasn’t been met, do we know what happened?
  • Often times the entities paying for the upstream solution and the entities benefiting are different, so how to we figure out who pays for it?
  • 

• Dignity - Chris Arnade’s journey around America talking to the back row.

• Merchants of Doubt - Details of how a few “scientists”, backed by right wing donors, and aided by the media, mislead the public on some of the biggest scientific issues of our time.

• Active Measures - A good look at the history of disinformation and political warfare from the early 1900s to present. A lot of the stuff being done now is similar to what was done 50-60 years ago, just using a different medium.

• Evil - “Because of what I consider an insurmountable problem of subjectivity, I think that neither humans nor actions should be labelled as evil. Instead, I cannot help but see a complex ecosystem of decisions, cascades of influences, multifaceted social factors. I refuse to summarise all of this into a single hateful word, ’evil’. But not believing in evil as an objective phenomenon does not make me a moral relativist. I have strong views on what is objectively appropriate behaviour and what isn’t. I believe in fundamental human rights. I believe that intentionally causing pain and suffering is inexcusable. I believe we need to take action when individuals violate the social contracts we make when we live as part of a society.”

• Moneyland - A look at how the super rich hide their money to avoid paying taxes, hide the source or preserve anonymity and the big picture impact allowing this to happen has on society.

• Don’t Be Evil

  • In the US Supreme Court rulings monopoly occurs when a company unfairly raises prices it charges consumers. By this logic, if a company doesn’t raise prices it is not engaged in a monopoly. Big tech companies have a business model that does not need to raise prices - they are paid in data and attention. This is why it is so hard to go after big tech companies for engaging in a monopoly.
  • “Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, believed that you needed transparency, equal access to information, and a shared moral framework for markets to work. In the digital age, those three things are rarely, if ever, in force.”
  • “Surveillance capitalism would become the best and fastest way for companies to grow - not just the platforms themselves, but all the other sorts of businesses that would advertise through them. That’s a key point. While it would only be a matter of time before companies like Google would enter all kinds of other industries - from healthcare to transportation - the business interests that might have protested their increasing power in the marketplace remained silent, because they were benefiting from the targeted advertising model that the platforms delivered. Companies of all sorts could now spy on customers 24/7 and target them even more precisely. It was a Faustian bargain, since they were giving up more control than they were getting, and allowing the Big Tech firms to grow fat in ways that would eventually come back to bite them, as Silicon Valley began to enter their markets.”
  • Big tech lobbied hard to change patent laws in their favour. “I can’t tell you how many technologists and venture capitalists I’ve spoken to in the past several year who say that they simply won’t invest in areas that Google or Facebook or Amazon or Apple are likely to play in, because of the difficulties inherent in protecting open-source technology, and/or defending patents against the big guys, who inevitably have more time and legal muscle on their side.”
  • “Big Tech firms push open-source to the extent that it aids their ability to profit from others’ innovation, but rarely let competitors anywhere near the code that powers their own key technologies.”
  • Putting content online benefits the platforms more than the creators. There was an information asymmetry early on which resulted in the settlement in the Google Books lawsuit being a complete coup for Google.
  • “Funny how we pride ourselves in our suspicions of salesmen, but let down all our usual defenses when some glittering new piece of technology comes calling.”
  • “The networking platforms and software of this new digital economy are resulting in cheaper prices for consumers, cost reductions for employers, and higher wages for the most skilled and educated workers, who can do more highly paid work in less time. But they have also contributed to the concentration of wealth in fewer hands, in part because there is a large body of less-educated people who are left at the mercy of technology - and those who leverage it.”
  • “Consumers are giving up more value in personal data than they receive in services - indeed, vastly more. Which means that the true price of Big Tech to each of us has been rising sharply - in lockstep with the amount of time we spend on our devices and this the amount of data we’ve generated over twenty years. And if that can be shown to be the case, then regulators can make a strong argument, even with the current Chicago School thinking, that Google, Facebook, Amazon and others giants fail to meet the standard of consumer welfare and should be regulated in new ways, or broken up.”
  • “if the 2008 economic crisis didn’t put the final nail in the coffin of the Chicago School’s own monopoly of ideas in economics, then the rise of the digital giants certainly should. Both have contributed to the feeling among many ordinary Americans that the system is rigged. And that’s not good for the economy or for our democracy.”
  • “Big Tech and big banks are also similar in the opacity and complexity of their operations. The algorithmic use of data is like the complex securitization done by the world’s too-big-to-fail banks in the subprime era. Both are understood largely by industry experts who can use information asymmetry to hide risks and the nefarious things that companies profit from, like dubious political ads.”
  • “Companies tend to prioritize what can be quantified, such as earnings per share and the ratio of the stock price to earnings, and ignore(until it is too late) the harder-to-measure business risks.”
  • “The fact is that the public debate around monopoly, privacy, cybersecurity and so forth (to the extent that we are even having a public debate) is largely orchestrated by the very companies upon which the debate centers.” There is really no truly independent research or studies because everything on funded, directly or indirectly by both sides of the debate. Big tech supports researchers working in areas that help their business interests. Support could be via direct grants, funding their labs, conferences, research groups, etc.
  • “Large fines as the cost of doing business had become status quo for Big Tech, just as they are for Big Finance. Silicon Valley was learning that it could simply shell out cash from its growing coffers, and regulatory problems would go away… In fact, in many cases, it seemed that the interests of the companies and the policy makers were quite closely aligned.”
  • “Part of the tech and trade war is about China playing by its own rules. But another part is about the United States allowing the largest Big Tech companies like Apple to become so large and powerful that they can set their own terms in the marketplace in a way that may be economically and politically disruptive to the country at large.”
  • Big Tech like to argue against being broken up by saying it hurts America competing against China. “Large US incumbents are crushing innovation. Educational reform is desperately needed to train workers for jobs in which they will not be displaced by robots. America’s largest and richest companies are keeping the vast majority of their cash abroad, where it can’t help fund the very things that the industry claims it needs from the public sector. We can best bolster growth not by protecting US companies from overseas buyers, but by addressing these concerns and creating a fairer marketplace.”
  • Ideas to improve things - don’t let industry self-regulate, oversight that protects consumer and societal interests, separating platforms and commerce (can’t own a platform and be a participant on that platform), change anti-trust policy to care about societal welfare not just consumer welfare, some sort of tax on data that is used to either pay people for their data or pay for stuff like education and societal improvements, creation of some sort of digital FDA for the brain to study and regulate technology usage on mental health

• The Inner Game of Tennis

  • Problems arise when you try to hard or overthink things.
  • Self 1 is the “teller” and Self 2 is the “doer”. When “I’m talking to myself” the “I” is Self 1 and the “myself” is Self 2.
  • Key to quieting Self 1 is letting go of judgments and allowing yourself to learn naturally.
  • Learning naturally is done by watching and absorbing visually the image and feeling out how to imitate those images. Letting tour body figure things it on its own rather than letting Self 1 take over by giving yourself instructions. It is important to trust Self 2 in figuring it out.

• Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World - A fun read on different math and engineering mistakes. Everything from overflow errors to Excel thinking everything is a date to time to rounding. Some of the errors are funny and inconsequential and some are deadly.

• In Defense of Elitism - Entertaining read. More of a case against anti-elitism than a case for elitism.

• The Black Box Society

  • “Failing clear understanding of the algorithms involved - and the right to challenge unfair ones - disclosure of underlying data will do little to secure reputational justice.”
  • “There’s little to stop them from compiling digital dossiers of the vulnerabilities of each of us. In the hall of mirrors of online marketing, discrimination can easily masquerade as innovation.”
  • “one data broker (ChoicePoint) incorrectly reported a criminal charge of ‘intent to sell and manufacture methamphetamines’ in Arkansas resident Catherine Taylor’s file. The free floating lie ensured rapid rejection of her job applications. She couldn’t obtain credit to buy a dishwasher. Once notified of the error, ChoicePoint corrected it, but the other companies to whom ChoicePoint had sold Taylor’s data file did not necessarily follow suit.”
  • “A civil engineer might use data from a thousand bridges to estimate which one might collapse; now financial engineers scrutinize millions of transactions to predict consumer defaults. But unlike the engineer, whose studies do nothing to the bridges she examines, a credit scoring system increases the chance of a consumer defaulting once it labels him a risk and prices a loan accordingly.”
  • “An unaccountable surveillance state may pose a greater threat to liberty than any particular terror threat. It is not a spectacular danger, but rather an erosion of a range of freedoms. Most insidiously, the ‘watchers’ have the power to classify those who dare point this out as ’enemies of the state,’ themselves in need of scrutiny. That, to me, is the core harm of surveillance: that it freezes into place an inefficient (or worse) politico-economic regime by cowing its critics into silence.”
  • “If we’re not going to be able to stop the flow of data, therefore, we need to become more knowledgeable about the entities behind it and learn to control their use of it. We need to hold business and government to the same standard of openness that they impose upon us - and complement their scrutiny with new forms of accountability. We need to enforce the laws that define fair and unfair uses of information. We need to equalize the surveillance that is now being aimed disproportionately at the vulnerable and ensure as best we can that critical decisions are made in fair and nondiscrimatory ways. We need to interrupt the relentless cascades of judgment that can turn one or two mistakes into a self-fulfilling prophecy of recurrent failure. And we need to plan for the inevitability that as soon as we open one black box, new modes of opacity will arise.”
  • “But at what point does a platform have to start taking responsibility for what its algorithms do, and how their results are used? These new technologies affect not only how we are understood, but also how we understand. Shouldn’t we know when they’re working for us, against us, or for unseen interests with undisclosed motives.”
  • “Data deployed to serve users one moment can be repurposed to disadvantage them the next.”
  • “Silicon Valley is no longer a wide-open realm of opportunity. The start-ups of today may be able to sell their bright ideas to the existing web giants. They may get rich doing so. But they’re not likely to become web giants themselves. Silicon Valley promulgates a myth of constant ‘disruption’; it presents itself as a seething cauldron of creative chaos that leaves even the top-seeded players always at risk. But the truth of the great Internet firms is closer to the oligopolistic dominance of AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast.”
  • “Innovation in search depends on access to a user base that ’trains’ algorithms to be responsive. But the user base belongs to Google. Innovation in analysis depends on access to large quantities of data. But the data belongs to Google. And Google isn’t sharing. As long as Google’s search data remains secret, outside innovation is dead in the water.”
  • “‘Value at Risk’ models purported to predict with at least 95 percent certainty how much a firm could lose if market prices changed. But the models had to assume the stability of certain kinds of human behavior, which could change is response to widespread adoption of the models themselves. Furthermore, many models gave little weight to the possibility that housing prices would fall across the nation. Just as an unduly high credit score could help a consumer get a loan he had no chance of paying back, an overly generous model could help a bank garner capital to fund projects of dubious value.”
  • “Mark to model accounting can obscure a firm’s true financial situation as much as it reveals it. The value of an asset is not determined by a market-based consensus but by the interaction of algorithms and byzantine legal classifications that outsiders cannot decode.”
  • “Far too much of contemporary finance is premised on hiding information: from borrowers, lenders, clients, regulators, and the public.”
  • “Like monocultural farming technology vulnerable to one unanticipated bug, the converging methods of credit assessment failed spectacularly when macroeconomic conditions changed.”
  • “Nonviolent political views, for example, should never be a predicate for law enforcement investigation. And we need to assure that employers and banks are not basing key decisions on surreptitiously gathered health data.”
  • “Individuals should have the right to inspect, correct, and dispute inaccurate data. We should also know the sources of the data, unless there are very good reasons to maintain their anonymity.”
  • “There is little evidence that the inability to keep such systems secret would diminish innovation. Such concerns are more than outweighed by the threats to human dignity posed by pervasive, secret, and automated scoring systems.”
  • “Audit logs ought to be implemented at any government agency or private contractor engaged in intelligence gathering. To identify intelligence personnel who are diverging from real national security work into political witch hunts, someone needs to watch exactly how they are watching other people.”
  • Look to how health care fraud in the 1990s was dealt with as an example of how to deal with “too big to fail” banks.
  • “Instead of using surveillance technology against American citizens, the government could deploy it on our behalf, to monitor and contain corporate greed and waste.”

• The Design of Everyday Things - You will look at doors differently after reading this.

  • “Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding. Discoverability: Is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible and where and how to perform them? Understanding: What does it all mean? How is the product supposed to be used? What do all the different controls and settings mean?”
  • “The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.”
  • “Designers need to focus their attention on the cases where things go wrong, not just on when things work as planned.”
  • Affordances are the possible interactions between people and the environment. Signifiers signal things, in particular what actions are possible and how they should be done. Signifiers can be words, illustrations or perceived affordances that are unambiguous. Signifiers are more important because they communicate how to use the design.
  • “Don’t blame people when they fail to use your products properly.”
  • “Take people’s difficulties as signifiers of where the product can be improved.”
  • “Eliminate all error messages from electronic or computer systems. Instead, provide help and guidance.”
  • “Make it possible to correct problems directly from help and guidance messages. Allow people to continue with their task: Don’t impede progress - help make it smooth and continuous. Never make people start over.”
  • “Assume that what people have done is partially correct, so if it is inappropriate, provide guidance that allows them to correct the problem and be on their way.”
  • Seven principles of design: Discoverability, feedback, conceptual model, affordances, signifiers, mappings and constraints.
  • “The most effective way of helping people remember is to make it unnecessary.” Done through good mapping (example: controls for burners on a stove - there are good and bad ways to do this).
  • “We can’t fix problems unless people admit they exist. When we blame people, it is then difficult to convince organizations to restructure the design to eliminate these problems.”
  • “Rather than stigmatize those who admit to error, we should thank those who do so and encourage the reporting. We need to make it easier to report errors, for the goal is not to punish, but to determine how it occurred and change things so that it will not happen again.”
  • “The design of warning signals is surprisingly complex. They have to be loud or bright enough to be noticed, but also not so loud or bright that they become annoying distractions.”
  • “Given the mismatch between human competencies and technological requirements, errors are inevitable. Therefore, the best designs take that fact as given and seek to minimize the opportunities for errors while also mitigating the consequences.”
  • “Requirements produced by asking people what they need are invariably wrong. Requirements are developed by watching people in their natural environment.”

• Overkill

  • Medication that suppresses fevers weakens immune response. Our immune system works better at higher temperatures.
  • It is often unnecessary to continue taking antibiotics once you start feeling better. Excessive use of antibiotics is resulting in resistant bacteria.
  • Evidence that antibiotic drops treat pinkeye is weak.
  • Most people don’t need to take a vitamin D supplement. The people and organizations responsible for getting the message out that most people should be taking a vitamin D supplement benefit from more people taking them. Low vitamin D is a marker for poor health, not a cause.
  • Although antioxidants in food decrease the risk of cancer, taking them as supplements increases the risk of cancer. A single vitamin C tablet has the same amount of vitamin C as 14 oranges. No public health organization recommends supplemental antioxidants. In the US the FDA doesn’t regulate dietary supplements so marketing trumps scientific studies.
  • “The best way to avoid peanut allergies later in life is to embrace peanuts early in life.”
  • Sunblock provides a false sense of security. People who use sunblock spend more time in the sun, increasing their exposure to UV rays. Sunblock helps prevent getting sunburned but doesn’t help much at preventing skin cancer.
  • Prostate cancer screening doesn’t save lives. Possible explanations: most tumors detected were so slow growing that you die with prostate cancer not from it. Some cancers were so virulent that early detection doesn’t matter. In some cases the cancer regresses on it’s own.
  • Heart stents don’t prolong lives. A blockage in a large artery is often accompanied blockages in smaller arteries downstream. Relieving the blockage doesn’t solve the problem.
  • Surgery for knee arthritis doesn’t produce better results than physical therapy, but has much harsher side effects.
  • Mercury filling for cavities are not dangerous. Levels of mercury released so well within levels shown to be safe.
  • Vitamin C doesn’t help prevent colds. Many studies exists where vitamin C does not better than placebo.
  • Icing sprains might actually make recovery slower (similar to taking medication for fevers). Applying heat might be better since it promotes blood flow.
  • Reasons procedures that don’t help are still common: ignorance, doctors get paid for what they do not what they don’t do, doing what patient wants to increase patient satisfaction scores, it’s hard for people to admit they have being doing something that hurts patients for years, drug advertising and fear of lawsuits (more likely to get sued for not doing something that most others do than for doing it)

• Essentialism

  • Do less but better.
  • Get better at saying “No”. If it’s not an easy yes, say no. Only say yes to what really matters to you.

• Winners Take All

  • One the private sector being better suited to solve issues relating to inequality - “This faith holds a great many decent, thinking people nowadays. Many of them are trapped in what they cannot fully see. Many of them believe that they are changing the world when they may instead - or also - be protecting a system that is a root of the problems they wish to solve.”
  • “But there will always be situations in which people’s preferences and needs do not overlap, and in fact conflict. And what happens to the losers then? Who is to protect their interests? What if the elites simply need to part with more of their money in order for every American to have, say, a semi-decent public school?”
  • “On issue after issue, the ascendant thought leaders, if they are positive, unthreatening, mute about larger systems and structures, congenial to the rich, big into private problem-solving, devoted to win-wins - these thought leaders will edge out other voices, and not just at conferences. They get asked to write op-eds, sign book deals, opine on TV, advise presidents and premiers. And their success could be said to come at the expense of the critics’. For every thought leader who offered advice on how to build a career in a merciless new economy, there were many less-heard critics aspiring to make the economy less merciless.”
  • “Thought-leaders-in-the-making might have to compromise themselves, but that compromise can be lavishly rewarded. And in the embrace they receive, it is not their values that are revealed so much as the values of those MarketWorld elites who are their patrons and impassioned base: their love of the easy idea that goes down like gelato, an idea that gives hope while challenging nothing. Their susceptibility to scientific authority, no matter how thin or disputed. Their need for ideas to be useful, results-oriented, profitable in order to receive their support. Their wariness of collective political purpose, and their preference for purpose to be privatized into something small and micro, trapped inside companies and executives…. That ideas like these guide the rich and powerful in their business lives is what it is. But is this the kind of thinking we want to guide the solution of our biggest shared problems?”
  • “The question is whether the republic can thrive when ideas are thought of as an industry, and the prevailing incentives so heavily favor bad product. Is this how we want ideas to be generated? And are the elites who embrace and sponsor such ideas the people we trust to arrange our future?”
  • “The thought leader, when he or she strips politics from the issue, makes it about actionable tweaks rather than structural change, removing the perpetrators from the story. It is no accident that thought leaders, whose speaking engagements are often paid for by MarketWorld, whose careers are made by MarketWorld, are encouraged to put things in that way. To name a problem involving a rich man’s daughter is to stir his ardor. To name a problem involving everyone’s daughter, a problem whose solution might involve the sacrifice of privilege and the expenditure of significant resources, may inspire a rich man to turn away.”
  • “Take, for example, the question of educating poor children in a time of social mobility. A true critic might call for an end to funding schools by local property taxes and the creation, as in many advanced countries, of a common national pool that funds schools more or less equally. What a thought leader might offer MarketWorld and its winners is a kind of intellectual counteroffer - the idea, say, of using Big Data to better compensate star teachers and weed out bad ones. On the question of extreme wealth inequality, a critic might call for economic redistributions or even racial reparations. A thought leader, by contrast, could opine on how foundation bosses should be paid higher salaries so that the poor can benefit from the most capable leadership.”
  • Framing an issue as poverty vs inequality gets much different responses among the elite. Poverty can be addressed via charity. Inequality is about the nature of the system and makes you question how your money was earned.
  • “The business-trained problem-solvers, having recast the problem to be specially solvable by them, having sidelined those with more established ways of thinking about it, now stand before a blank canvas that they can paint with their own frameworks and biases.”
  • “The bearers of these protocols were, ironically, rushing in to shape the solution of problems that their methods were complicit in causing. Corporate types from the energy and financial industries were drafted into charitable projects to protect the world from climate change, even if their way of thinking about profit, as practiced in their day jobs, was a big part of why climate change was happening. Business leaders were drafted into strategizing for women’s rights, even if their tools were to blame for the always-on work culture that made it harder for so many women to claim their rights and for the tax avoidance that made women-friendly policies like universal daycare more elusive.”
  • “Thanks in part to the emergent protocols, a new culture of business had developed in which each microscopic element of a company’s activities had to be perfectly optimized, and this, Porter said, had made it easier to mistreat workers and ignore questions about one’s effects on the larger system.”
  • Why don’t the people who are beneficiaries of the help have a seat at the table? Why don’t we think they may have the best insight in how to solve their problems?
  • “Here lay the almost constitutional principles that one day would govern MarketWorld giving: the idea that after-the-fact benevolence justifies anything-goes capitalism; that callousness and injustice in the cutthroat souk are excluded by later philanthropy; that giving should not only help the underdogs but also, and more important, serve to keep them out of the top dogs’ hair - and, above all, that generosity is a substitute for and a means of avoiding the necessity of a more just and equitable system and fairer distribution of power.”
  • Prime example of charitable contributions leading to turning a blind eye to how someone actually makes their money: Sackler family got rich off starting the opioid crisis and fought against any regulation to limit the sales of OxyContin but did a lot of philanthropic work that helped limit critics.
  • “In her reluctance to be the only fool, Tisch[daughter of the Loews founder] was revealing the hold that the status quo had on her. Again and again, she had voiced an ideal for which in the end she was unwilling to sacrifice. It was important for her to feel superior to her friends, but she was unwilling to rush out in front of them and be the only one not to take advantage of a system she knew to be wrong.”
  • Clinton Global Initiative values: “Doing the market-friendly thing instead of the idealistic thing; elevating what the people supposedly needed economically over what they wanted politically; believing that the right, data-driven, technocratic answers speak for themselves; judging politicians’ success by investors’ returns; thinking of market forces as an inevitability one must give in to, make way for, adapt to.”
  • “The political system that Rodrick speaks of is not just Congress or the Supreme Court or governorships. It is all of those things and other things. It is civic life. It is the habit of solving problems together, in the public sphere, through the tools of government and in the trenches of civil society. It is solving problems in ways that give the people you are helping a say in the solutions, that offer that say in equal measure to every citizen, that allow some kind of access to your deliberations or at least provide a meaningful feedback mechanism to tell you it isn’t working. It is not reimagining the world at conferences.”
  • “If the logic of our time had applied to the facts of an earlier age, someone would have put out a report suggesting that ending slavery was great for reducing the trade deficit.”
  • On the Democratic Party: “Even their proposed policies, though, reflect ambivalence: health care for all, but not through public provision; help paying for college, but not free college; charter schools, but not equal schools.”
  • On Bill Clinton’s solution to childhood obesity being to have the offending companies make money selling healthier products: “The needs of the market came first. Even a man who had spent his lifetime in politics felt a duty to be solicitous of the businessperson’s concerns. Rather than insist that the companies stop shaving years off of children’s lives, especially poor ones’, we had to make sure they had a better business model waiting on deck to replace the current, noxious one.”

• The Biggest Bluff - Maria Konnikova’s journey from knowing nothing about poker to becoming a pro under the guidance of Erik Seidel. Focus is more on the life lessons that can be learned and applied from poker. Hard to imagine there being a better book about poker for a non-poker audience than this.

• Pillar of Fire - History of America during the civil rights era covering St. Augustine, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the FBI’s wiretapping of MLK, the Civil Rights Act, Malcolm X vs Elijah Muhammad.

• Thieves of Bay Street - There is no better place to be a white collar criminal than Canada.

• Tip and Trade - Details on the largest (known) insider trading scandal in Canada.

See also

• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week