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paraschopra

- The Origin of Wealth. Fantastic book on the new field of complexity / evolutionary economics

- The Language Instinct. How mind creates language.

- The Elephant in the Brain. I’ve posted notes here https://invertedpassion.com/notes-from-the-elephant-in-the-b...

- Existential Cafe. History of existential thought. Excellent book.

- 12 rules of life. Highly opiniated but well argued book on how to live life

- Skin in the game by Nasim Taleb.

- Daemon. The sci-fi book that anticipated what rouge blockchain like programs can do. Again, highly recommended

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There are two books called origin of wealth by the same author. "Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics" and "The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society". Which one did you mean?

It's the same book. For some reason they changed the title for the later printed paperback version.

Daemon was a good story and so was another by him, "Kill Decision", which is about autonomous killing drone warfare.

> The sci-fi book that anticipated what rouge blockchain like programs can do.

It would have to be a fantasy book to truly go rogue - if it was sci-fi it would get bogged down in network congestion or high transaction fees, or consume all of the planet's energy production, before it could do much damage.

It's not a block chain, just a rogue distributed network. But saying too much more would ruin the plot.

It gets a little bit over the top, but the concept is very entertaining.

Sorry, was just a sarcastic comment about the limitations of blockchain tech. If it is about a distributed network in general that makes much more sense. Have checked it out.

Check out the Unfolding of Language if you're interest in the Language Instinct. Also Elephant in the Room made me think of the Master and his Emissary, very interesting book, check that one out too.

Thanks. I'll check them out.

For your like on language check:

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter & Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff

i love taleb but i thought skin in the game was the most disappointing of all of this books.

I could never get into Taleb for some reason. Am I the only one who thinks his writing is extremely long winded?

When I was reading "Black Swan" I was prepared to believe he was a genius. Then I got to the part where he bags on the Uncertainty Principle and I realized he's just a clever fool with a good way with words.

Nevertheless, it behooves us to try to remember that we are susceptible to the "Black Swan effect", the very real tendency to immediately forget that our sacred cows shit the bed.

I am not convinced he is right about how susceptible people are to the black swan effect: it seems like your average person overvalues tail probabilities, not undervalues (hence why people play the lottery and buy insurance). It's been a while since I read anything by him, but I remember not being convinced by how he dealt with the problem of induction either, which seemed to lean dangerously close to intellectual nihilism.

Edit: grammar

Not the only one. I think most of his books are actually prolonged intentionally arrogant blog posts sprinkled with pseudo-science and weightlifting metaphors with the recurrent 'fuck you money' motif.

Black swan, the concept which brought him in the spotlight is somewhat valid but it's worth at most a chapter in a risk management book. But he milks the black swan cow to biblical proportions.

Antifragile is so longwinded it's an exercise in attention and patience. I think it's remarkable how he managed to fill so many pages.

In my view, Taleb resides close to Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin, the 'thought leaders' experts at rebranding/refactoring common concepts and milking the proverbial cow in publishing, speaking events, etc..

i think you need to start with fooled by randomness, it's shorter and i think it prepares you for the black swan. i thought antifragile and the blank swan were life changing, they're on the short list of books I re-read every year because I think they are so important. He is a huge dick, but as long as you can get over his arrogance, I think he has a lot of great insights.

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