Books I loved reading this year | Hacker News Reader

Books I loved reading this year

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I recently read Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life, by Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard. Written during the 2008 recession, it's so much more than a business book. It highlights in detail how the financial industry at large leeches so much wealth for itself while creating so little, and offers insights from someone truly introspective of life, business, finance, and the future of the country. Highly recommend a read/listen.

https://amazon.com/John-C-Bogle/e/B001H6NWEM

Check out The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care - And How To Fix It, for a similar story and crisis facing the healthcare industry right now. Written by a Johns Hopkins professor and surgeon.

The title "Enough" made me think of this great poem/story from Kurt Vonnegut:

  True story, Word of Honor:
  Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
  now dead,
  and I were at a party given by a billionaire
  on Shelter Island.
  
  I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
  to know that our host only yesterday
  may have made more money
  than your novel ‘Catch-22’
  has earned in its entire history?”
  And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
  And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
  And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
  Not bad! Rest in peace!
  
  — Kurt Vonnegut

This anecdote is cited by Bogle as the inspiration behind the title of the book.

How much money does it take to make a man happy? Just one more dollar. - John D. Rockefeller

He spoke at my commencement with a a paraphrase of that and it's always stuck with me. Also led me to read most of his books!

https://commencement.me/kurt-vonnegut-at-rice-university-199...

So what does this Methuselah have to say to you, since he has lived so long? I’ll pass on to you what another Methuselah said to me. He’s Joe Heller, author, as you know, of Catch 22. We were at a party thrown by a multi-billionaire out on Long Island, and I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch 22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed world-wide over the past forty years?”

Joe said to me, “I have something he can never have.”

I said, “What’s that, Joe?”

And he said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

His example may be of comfort to many of you Adams and Eves, who in later years will have to admit that something has gone terribly wrong — and that, despite the education you received here, you have somehow failed to become billionaires.

Tolstoy along similar lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Land_Does_a_Man_Need%...

- List for the lazy -

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, by Walter Isaacson.

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell.

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir.

Project Hail Mary was so good. I loved The Martian but Artemis not as much. By that measure Project Hail Mary was a return to form.

It was just a fun, breezy read that hit the problem solving part of my brain in just the right way, but with a different angle on things than "The Martian".

We're reading this one for my at-work bookclub, looking forward to it. We did the Martian back when and people enjoyed it. Although easy reading it has enough depth to spark a good discussion.

It's an interesting choice for a book club. Due to the way the narrative progresses (you start with an amnesiac protagonist and gradually reveal backstory via memories) discussions could get tricky/problematic if anyone is reading ahead faster than the rest. Obviously all books have some risk of that but PHM is more challenging than most in my opinion.

Our book club finishes the whole book before we have the discussion. You're right, an as-you-go approach would be much more challenging.

artemis was disappointing, Weir seems like he has no idea how to write a female protagonist. this was my introduction to his work, seeing that others feel the same way makes me think it was probably just the wrong pick and I should try his other books.

Project Hail Mary is worth a read. Totally different vibe.

It felt like he was trying to do something very different with Artemis and failed. I rarely have to put a book down but I just couldn't finish Artemis. The whole scene with the "strong" cop holding her down had my eyes rolling so hard they almost got stuck.

I somewhat agree, though I did finish the book and enjoyed it despite its flaws. The Martian was a delight, and Project Hail Mary follows in a similar vein.

What does Weir not understand about a female protagonist? It's not possible that the female protagonist just doesn't fit your mold of what you believe a female protagonist should be?

project hail mary's audiobook is the best audiobook i've ever listened to. it's.... incredible. they adapted parts of the book that were kind of hard to "get" perfectly (and for people that read it, i think you know what i mean).

i totally recommend it.

Yea when they added that element I first assumed my Airpods were dying or Audible was broke. Really loved it in the end.

I listened to Audible, and that made me wonder how effective it would be in the book, or how it would be written in the book at all.

+1 for Audible.

It absolutely is the best. Ray Porter’s way of narration opened a new, almost visual, dimension. Maybe it’s this very intimate „inner speech“ style, but to me this was a truly novel experience.

Whoa. I didn't realize the audiobook was adapted.

I just kept thinking that the inner commenting was so weird. Like a the book was partially movie script. I think I should have read the book instead.

But still, it was good.

I was going through goodreads yesterday and came across my review of The Martian there. I gave it 5 stars because I use what I understand is the Roger Ebert style of rating. The Martian is imperfect, pulpy and at times a bit over sentimental. But it succeeds at exactly what it sets out to achieve. It isn't Dostoevsky or Proust but it isn't trying to be. It made me laugh, kept me engaged and turning pages. It made me think, this situation is impossible but if it was possible then this is about as realistic as I could expect a novel to portray. In exchange for suspending my disbelief it gave me an enjoyable diversion.

All that to say, if Project Hail Mary is equivalent to that, it is going on my to read list.

It is, very much so.

>I gave it 5 stars because I use what I understand is the Roger Ebert style of rating

As I understand the Ebert system your review seems like a 3 star, that is to say if you like this kind of thing (hard sf, survival story in harsh environment using ingenuity) you will definitely like this example of it.

In 45 years as a reviewer Ebert gave nearly 1000 films 4 stars, I think about a 100 5 stars, although he was often thought of as being too lenient about a film's quality - https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/you-give-out-too-many...

I started reading The Martian and the whole chapter on shit had me giggling like an 8 year old boy. Which meant I made sure my 8 year old boy read The Martian. I think it really helped him get (more) into reading.

I liked a lot of the ideas in PHM. I found the protagonist insufferable throughout, though. Perhaps Weir was going for a more flawed character after Watney? (Never read Artemis, so I can't comment there.)

I still think it's a good book, and well worth the read. But man did that character grate on my nerves.

Yes, I think he was going for someone less likable. Watney was almost too likable.

Maybe Matt Damon pushed his likability over the top.

If Willem Dafoe was cast, it could seem different :)

I either listened to or read an interview with Andy Weir where he said that he was aiming for just such a flawed protagonist in PHM. I think he felt the Watney character was criticized for being the fantasy self-projection of a certain variety of nerd/geek (a variety that is over-represented on HN) and so he decided to try to make a hero who was not as likable, brave, or self-sacrificing as people like to think they are.

His story, his choice, but man, what a shame. The world is already awash in crapsack dystopic sci-fi filled with unlikeable characters. Watney (and the entirely of the rest of the cast, for that matter) being a competent professional was so refreshing! I want to read about competence, not (as in PHM) self-absorbed whiny man-children who exhibit no growth across the entire story.

Rocky was an amazing character though.

Fully agreed.

Haha. I thought this too but I can’t quite place my finger on it. What exactly made the protagonist so insufferable?

He was a literal self-absorbed man-child, and worst of all exhibited no apparent growth throughout the entire story. So much so that it was hard to suspend belief in that he was also capable of doing the real thinking required to move the story forward. I know Weir attempted to insert a reason in-story for why such a poor choice would still be sent, but I found it both unconvincing and obvious why the author needed to add it. I think it would have made a more satisfying story to revamp the character so that his position made sense naturally.

In comparison, Rocky was fantastic as a character, the problem faced novel, the solutions enjoyable. That all tips the scales into the 'still well worth the read' territory, but (IMO) it could have been so much more.

I read PHM straight after Termination Shock, which I also thoroughly enjoyed.

Fantastic couple of books.

Doudna has her own memoir, "A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution." Why would you read Isaacson's third-person account, when you can get the information from the scientist herself?

Well, I read both books, and Isaacson's is much better. In fact, Doudna's book was largely written by her coauthor, her then-graduate student Sam Sternberg, based on long interviews. This is the same process Isaacson used. But, in my opinion, Isaacson does it better, incorporating more of Doudna's personal anecdotes with similar levels of science.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30971755-a-crack-in-crea...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54968118-the-code-breake...

Isaacson has a knack for writing flowing non-fiction prose that make for a great read. Sometimes the detail can border on excruciating but he seems to have resolved this in his later works.

Awesome comment. Thank you.

Thank you for that - I'd recently read A Crack in Creation and thought the same question you had posed.

^ List of books I’ll now never read.

Project Hail Mary was a fun read but at times it felt like a high school essay or someone practicing creative writing. Even the science bits didn't feel like in The Martian, here they were scattered around sometimes not linked to the story. Regardless, I do recommend it.

================= Begin of the Interesting Part, Discussion & Recommendations ==================

Above parent nothing but man mumbling after famous persons to invoke the Goddess of transitivity of all properties.

Seriously though, i brought this upon myself by opening one of the fanboi threads <Famous Name> does/reads/eats, but how do i filter out the filler more efficiently?

Enter: Dang from Hammerspace

I was disappointed by A Thousand Brains. The last part of the book veered into ... I don't really know. On the other hand, I loved Jeff Hawkins' earlier book on this topic: On Intelligence [1]. It's easily one of the top 5 books that I've read and the first part of A Thousand Brains recaps much of that work, so still relevant today according to the author.

[1] https://numenta.com/resources/on-intelligence/

How well regarded is the Numenta software regarded in the AI community?

It seemed like the ideas from On Intelligence were ahead of their time. I'm surprised it never seemed to pan out into anything industry leading (at least as far as I can tell).

Did it just not get enough eyes and resources? Was it a flawed premise? I'd be curious to know more.

Not well. They have almost literally nothing to show for over a decade of work.

Coincidentally, their own links to their research paper section results in an error https://numenta.com/neuroscience-research/research-publicati...

To me, top level, this seemed like a re-discovery of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind but with more detail as to how the actual neocortex works.

I think the most important part of 'kilobrain' was the clear description of a single Functional Unit, that appears to be replicated throughout the neocortex and, ultimately, performs all functions we consider 'higher'. This, in a way, reduces Applied Intelligence to building an actual 'Function Unit' in something other than meatware (e.g. CMOS); and having high-bandwidth ways to hook FU's together to build (at first) sub-parts of the brain (e.g. maybe the auditory system). This would be an "MVP" type proof-of-concept that 'should' allow construction of a Full Brain. Now, exactly how such h/w would be 'programmed' (or trained) to perform said function -- that, I don't understand yet.

I had a similar reaction. I very much enjoyed reading On Intelligence shortly after it was published and was eagerly waiting for A Thousand Brains, but it left me with a conflicting impression. I found some of the details I was looking for missing and it seemed like the book was sort of all over the place (especially in the second half). I was reading another book on related topic (how the brain operates and why/how the consciousness has evolved) at about the same time (The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness) and had a much more positive impression with a good picture on what the author was trying to convey.

Something I remember from Netflix's documentary Inside Bill's Brain- He reads really fast and synthesizes really well...That's a gift to read 150 pages an hour...90 percent retention.

I follow his lists/ recommendations and in the process have read some very good fiction/non-fiction books.

I haven't even finished it yet, but my favorite book of 2021 is certain to be Rutger Bregman's Humankind. If you are feeling cynical about your species thanks to climate change, COVID, etc. it may be exactly what you need.

Have anyone read the recently released 'Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity' by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

The articles I read about was thinking it was superlative.

It's on my list. The reviews have indeed been rapturous. Before "Dawn of Everything" (his final book) was published this year, Graeber (an anthropologist with a specialty in economics) had already been long acknowledged as one of the world's best and biggest brains.

Something that I have read, and highly recommend, is Steven Pinker's latest book, his 17th: "Rationality." As a person who considers himself to be coldly rational, I found the book quite humbling.

I'm somewhere in the early middle of it. It's dense but incredible. I also read Humankind. Funny enough both of these books are sitting on my desk right in front of me.

Both provide ample hope that humanity can mature (back) out of some of the destructive states we've found ourselves in, and provide historical context and supporting evidence.

The Dawn of Everything is already becoming one of those books that I'll remember forever as one of those identity-shaping texts that most readers will be familiar with. And I'm not even halfway done.

I’m 30% in.

I had very high expectations from the book because of Graeber (the Debt book fame).

I’m happy to report that it’s surpassed it. It’s not an easy read, need to take it slowly. But what an incredible achievement. That book, if I may say so, is a celebration of ordinary humans. Can’t recommend it enough.

I read it a few weeks ago. It is very good and highly recommended. I feel this opened my eyes quite a bit in the following ways:

- history is not a linear progression and narrative, sometimes things happen in leaps and also can go "backward"

- farming was something that was dabbled in for a millenia before fully committing to it

- the idea of "egalitarianism" is quite vague and can be understood in many ways

- ideas about egalitarianism moved from native americans to the french .. not they other way around

- lots of very interesting stories about how our ancestors were not stupid

- lots of questions about how archeology has been interpreted and how a lot of the evidence does not support the mainstream narrative

- gives examples of societies where "leadership/politics" was actively avoided

- has a nice background on different ingredients of statehood and how they manifested in history

I have a feeling this might be the seminal book for having a fresh analysis and reassessment of lot of what is called "prehistory".

Very highly recommended from my side. I will re-read it a few times probably and gift it to a few friends.

> - ideas about egalitarianism moved from native americans to the french

Humankind touches on this same topic too. Basically, it wasn't until we settled down in one place that humans were able to create massive inequality. In order to protect those levels of inequality, the powerful elite created concepts like property ownership, the divine right of kings, etc.

Egalitarianism had to be essentially rediscovered after it was lost during the transition to agrarianism. Non-agrarian cultures are naturally fairly high in equality.

+1 for Humankind, read that at the beginning of the year in between lockdowns and it really helped make me feel more positive about humanity in general. It's not always as bad as we think it is.

Struggled to get into his next book "Utopia for Realists", might need to give it another whirl.

I also found Humankind to be very enjoyable, illuminating and worthwhile antidote to a lot of the default assumptions we make about human behavior.

What if I'm feeling cynical about humankind but for very different reasons? Like historical trajectory, discrepancy of growth between technology and culture, or even cynical about the very idea of life?

So I was excited about Project Hail Mary and went to the Wikipedia page [1].

Can someone who has read the book tell me if the current intro is a spoiler, or something we learn in the book's first third? ("He gradually remembers that...")

I know Wikipedia doesn't put spoiler tags, but they are usually confined to the "Plot" section.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Project_Hail_Mary...

That is revealed in the first third of the book. I would prefer not having that info before reading, but it is part of the basic premise.

Okay thanks. That's on me for being too impatient I guess.

It's not a major spoiler.

He remembers that within the first few chapters, well before you're a third into the book.

Thank you!

Yes, very slight spoilers but probably not much more than you'd deduce from reading the jacket of the book. Certainly something that you find out from the first few chapters. Basic progression without too much spoilers is main character wakes up and deduces that:

1. He is not on earth 2. He is on a spaceship 3. He is not in our solar system 4. He is there for a reason

I loved PHM and was particularly relieved that it was great after the letdown that Artemis was. It's definitely a much more fanciful story than The Martian (you know what I mean if you've read it), but I think it's a good balance of still being totally believable and plausible.

Recommendation: "Dark Matter" (https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Matter-Novel-Blake-Crouch/dp/110...)

> The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, by Walter Isaacson.

The Nobel prize should have gone to Francis Mojica. Of course, he does not have all the PR machine that Doudna has, the futuristic TED talks and all.

Why?

Mojica did important work on CRISPR, yes, but Doudna and Charpentier were the ones who showed how to use it as a DNA editing tool, without which very few people would care about it.

He did not just "do important work". He discovered and described the CRISPR mechanism. Without CRISPR, there is no CRISPR-cas9.

> showed how to use it as a DNA editing tool

Don't we care about basic research anymore?

The book is great at emphasizing and re-emphasizing the incremental nature of the journey, all the competition and co-discovery and the tiny steps building on each other's work that led up to Doudna and Charpentier's breakthroughs. Including the researchers that concurrently discovered CRISPR. Despite centering around Doudna's life and career, it very firmly gives credit where credit is due.

A general-purpose DNA editing tool is still basic research by most standards.

The Nobel Prizes are awarded for conferring the greatest benefit to humankind. Showing how to use CRISPR as a genome editing tool (Doudna and Charpentier) confers much more benefit to humankind than "just" characterizing CRISPR (Mojica). I don't mean to trivialize Mojica's work, but at the end of the day if not for the later work of Doudna and Charpentier, Mojica's work on CRISPR would be unknown and irrelevant to 99.9999% of the world population.

> I don't mean to trivialize Mojica's work, but at the end of the day if not for the later work of Doudna and Charpentier, Mojica's work on CRISPR would be unknown and irrelevant to 99.9999% of the world population.

And if Mojica had not discover CRISPR...

Anyways. Here's an article if you are interested:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/nobel-crispr

The point here is that if Mojica (or Šikšnys) instead of professors in a random European university, were supported by University of California, MIT, or any of the big names, they would not be in the predicament they are today.

> And if Mojica had not discover CRISPR...

And if Janssen had not invented the microscope... clearly all Nobel prizes in medicine and physiology should go to a Dutch guy who died 400 years ago.

Mojica made a contribution. Doudna and Charpentier made a contribution which clearly conferred greater benefit on humankind. Šikšnys made a contribution but got scooped, which sucks but that's how science goes sometimes.

It has nothing to do with university support and it's not a predicament. The prize as awarded accurately reflects the relative impact of each step forward.

The Nobel prize is 120 years old and I don’t think it can be awarded posthumously.

> but got scooped, which sucks buts that’s how science works sometimes

I work in science. It hasn’t been always like this and it is getting worse. Nobody does basic or risky research anymore.

> I don’t think it can be awarded posthumously.

Correct.

> I work in science. It hasn’t been always like this and it is getting worse. Nobody does basic or risky research anymore.

Getting scooped has always been a risk. Crick and Watson fretted about it when they were working on the structure of DNA. Newton and Leibniz bickered over priority for calculus hundreds of years ago. My wife fretted about it when she was isolating and studying the function of a 450kDa protein for her PhD a decade ago. I don't think it has really changed that much.

> Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

No. Just no. It is hard science fiction, but there is no character development. I had no empathy for the main character and did not care about him or his fate. Also he is unusually prude, which he blames on being a school teacher, but even his inner dialogue consists of “HOLY COW!” when surprised. I mean, really??

I think that's just Andy Weir at this point. I enjoyed The Martian, but Artemis was horrible. Characters were indistinguishable from one another, they were all just Andy trying to emulate the success of the cocky sarcastic hero from The Martian. After reading that I don't think I need to read any more of his work.

> Andy trying to emulate the success of the cocky sarcastic hero from The Martian.

Yeah. And he went on and on about his dead crew mates, how sad and depressed he was for them, but he had barely any connection to them besides sharing a single space flight.

> I enjoyed The Martian, but Artemis was horrible.

I personally hated both. With the risk of sounding elitist, the guy writes like /r/SubredditSimulator/

It's kind of like junk food. A little bit is enjoyable, too much makes you sick.

With The Martian, a later "classroom edition" was published with the profanity removed. Maybe he just wanted to avoid making a second edition this time.

Interesting, I did not know about that. Thanks.

No, you're supposed to feel empathy for Rocky! Poor little guy...

We need the HN 2021 list.

Fiction and non-fiction:

There used to be monthly(?) threads, but I guess that got shut down because it doesn't really lead to interesting discussions?

Aw, that's a bummer. I'd definitely participate.

I second the suggestion, I love a good book list

There's also at least one project that aggregates the HN threads,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967 ("40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning")

I'm reading Dune and I just bought a couple of neuroscience and math books. Maybe I'll even have time to read them!

What neuroscience books did you purchase?

Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, An Introductory Course in Computational Neuroscience, and Principles of Neural Design - all bought used for an okay price. Not exactly very theoretical books, but the topic fascinated me recently and I have to get started somewhere. Recommendations always welcome.

Edit: I even have another half a dozen of them in my cart, but I can't keep buying books...

Dune is pretty good, actually. It's an artistic allegory on "the path" (as the author calls it). Dune's bene gessiret looks like an allegory on one of the schools whetr candidates who come to the exam (gom jabbar in dune) unprepared, die. The name itself, bene gessiret, the Dune's author must've taken from "binah tipereteth" which means something like "intuition and will". Without at least some familiarity with occult symbolism, it will be difficult to appreacite Dune.

"Bene gesserit" is from latin "quamdiu se bene gesserit" = "until it will behave well". It come from "bene gero" = "I behave well".

Is Bill Gates still programming nowadays? He seems to have completely abandoned it. Which seems a little sad, because if he really liked doing it you'd expect him to at least work on a utility app or something in his spare time.

He said in a fairly recent AMA:

> My code no longer goes into shipping products so I am rusty. I do like to try the new tools to understand how they help. I just did a review of the low-code tools where there is a lot of great innovation.

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/m8n4vt/im_bill_gates_...

Time is an extremely precious commodity. It seems somewhat arbitrary to assume that if you like something, you automatically do it in your spare time. It's fairly easy to like more things than you could possibly have time to pursue :)

But when you’re a billionaire almost all of your time is spare time. Aside from basic bodily functions billionaires can spend their all of their time doing whatever their little hearts desire.

Yes. But time is still finite. And a much lesser quantity than "what our hearts desire".

To put into a very simplified example: I work 8 hours a day, sleep 8 hours a day, spend 4 on chores, and 4 on doing what I want. That's 4h/day. Bill Gates has almost immeasurably more money than I have, but he still, at best, gets 16h/day. He can do 4 times as much as I.

And I can guarantee you that "things I'd love to do" is significantly more than even 24h/day. I'd assume the same holds for Gates. This is one of the reasons rich people usually have an entire staff running their lives - if you make billions, spending $100k to save 30 minutes a year is actually a reasonable investment.

And so, even if he loves to code, he might well not be able to never get to it. (TBF: I'm not saying "poor Bill", I'm sure the other stuff he gets up to is reasonably fun :)

I think the point is that you might like so many things, you cannot do all of them.

And then, how do you prioritize them an allocate time? Some of us might go for 'whatever is the most fun', others 'whatever delivers the most results (for society, or for some obscure personal goal like making a clock that lasts 10,000 years, or a speed metal guitar university for girls, or... anything).

I really like coding, and plan to do it into old age. But I suspect if I suddenly found fifty billion dollars, I would have so many new options for how to spend my time I might well never write a line of code again.

I remember reading somewhere,

  When you have no money, time is your friend 
  when you have money, you buy back your time.

So certainly, he has delegated tasks to prioritize and do things he really wants.

I partially liked Hail Mary. Most of the book was good, but I found Eva's character too hard to suspend my disbelief.

IMO, I found her character "lazy" on Weir's part. I wish he tried a little harder to make her easier to believe as a real person.

Agree, but Weir isn't very good at writing women. I'm glad that he kept her character relatively simple and as a sort of driver for the narrative. Had he attempted adding more depth she'd end up in a cringey love triangle or something.

I found Jasmine in Artemis very believable.

Eva doesn't need more depth, that's not the issue. Her interactions just aren't believable. It's not a gender thing, either, because I wouldn't believe a male version of Eva.

Maybe because I can't believe that someone would ever have that much power and be a jerk at the same time?

I'd second Hamnet, which is a really fascinating take on Shakespeare's early life and relationship with his wife and son. I liked Project Hail Mary too, but Hamnet has more compelling characterisation and believable world-building.

I'm reading a novel with my PIM (partner in mischief) titled The Mandibles, by Lionel Shriver. I was thinking that the novel may have been written recently because so much of it reminds me of our current economic & political situation, but I was very surprised to learn it was originally written in 2016! It's eerie how much the author has gotten right!

> PIM (partner in mischief)

What do you mean? I haven't seen that expression anywhere and google wasn't helpful.

Partner in crime. Partner in class 3 misdemeanor. Partner. Friend.

I think they're just saying "partner in crime," which literally means someone you commit crimes with, but in slang means someone who has your back no matter what (e.g. a spouse), but in this case they wanted to emphasize that while the two of them don't commit crimes, they do get into a bit of mischief together.

I have no idea why it was made into an acronym.

The others pretty much got it right. I'm almost 50 and at this age, feel strange calling my partner my "boyfriend". So, I came up with the term Partner in Mischief because we have lots of mischievous adventures together!

I'm super impressed by the production level of his 5 books I loved reading video.

Assign me a $140B net worth and I can do the same :)

Doesn't that video seem odd though? I don't understand what's going on here, it's just surreal. Like if I was a multi-billionaire would I hire a film production crew including a bunch of extras and Christmas themed set to tell the world about 5 (already high profile and best selling) books? Is this just marketing for Bill? To what end? I guess everyone has to have a hobby.

Yes this is just marketing for Bill.

things just grow on their own sometimes, especially if you're successful enough.

it's perfectly reasonable for a multi-billionaire to want to write a blog to publish his thoughts on various things. the existence of "the gates notes" is pretty normal. and when you're rich, you hire somebody to run the website for you. web design and marketing are pretty interlinked, so the guys running the blog do some promo, and generally run it the same way they would run any other content site. which includes making some video content targeting the most widely-viewed types of posts.

It's interesting to think about how they'd measure success with this. Like, I guess with normal marketing for a product, it's already difficult but at least you have metrics around increased sales etc. What do they measure here, positive sentiment for Bill Gates?

> Doesn't that video seem odd though?

I say yes. In fact: I'd say entire Bill Gates persona and his media portrayal is a bit odd.

> Is this just marketing for Bill?

I'd say so. From my point of view is shocking how the public (and tech world) did a 180 turn on Gates' public image. Some twenty years ago he was hated in the tech world. There are even Paul Graham's essays about how Microsoft "stopped being dangerous" around 2005 (ie. few years after Gates stepping down from CEO position).

You know those memes around Zuckerberg being a lizard person? This is how I remember Gates 20 years ago (except there weren't really memes occasionally someone would email you some funny pictures or a flash app).

> To what end?

I guess he didn't like people seeing him as Dr. No? Paul Allen described him as a "ruthless schemer". During his tenure as CEO he turned Microsoft into this scary giant that will crush any competition.

My personal conspiracy theory is that he enjoys having power - power over market, power over people - and now uses his foundation to exert this power. However, this wouldn't work given his old reputation as an Evil Technocrat, so he also spends a million here and there for things that will make him look good. Why not spend a billion here and there if you still have 140 of those left? So, probably one of his PR guys figured out that his annual book list blogpost are popular in the tech niche and wants to reach wider audience. To go deeper into conspiracy thinking, I'd say that this list is carefully tailored to affirm his image as genius-nerd-philantropist (sci-fi) and extend power of his foundation.

Unreal. That's easily $100,000+ to make that video. The set and prop design team had a lot of fun. Then there are all the extras. The snow machine.

He should have at least pasted affiliate links to get himself an Amazon gift card or two.

I’m surprised to see Klara and The Sun on the list. Though I enjoyed the character of Klara, the book itself felt like a huge letdown and don’t see how it makes it on anyones top 5 list.

Would love to hear others thoughts on it?

I was also not blown away (and surprised to see it on the list). I thought the perspectives were good i.e. how a new intelligence would interpret the world, sensory overload, etc., but I don't think it brought anything really new to the table.

I found it very boring. I wonder whether Gates was using it to signal: "Although it takes place in a dystopian future, the robots aren’t a force for evil. Instead, they serve as companions to keep people company. This book made me think about what life with super intelligent robots might look like—and whether we’ll treat these kinds of machines as pieces of technology or as something more."

Good books. Surprised to see some fiction, didn't know Bill reads that :)

He’s been doing his list for years and often has fiction:

https://bookriot.com/bill-gates-book-recommendations/amp/

I read Hawkins's "On Intelligence" a few years ago and enjoyed it. For anyone here who's read both that and "New Theory of Intelligence", what's the relation between the two?

Basically it’s his updated thoughts along with some new research his company has done on cortical columns being the basis for human intelligence. It’s a good read but perhaps a bit over-ambitious in trying to propose a unified theory of cognition.

I also read "On Intelligence", though quite some time ago. It was much better than the various Ray Kurzweil books that I had read around the same time. "A New Theory of Intelligence" is on my reading list.

If you're interested in the biological aspects of the human brain, I would suggest "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter, which explores a concept of where consciousness comes from, or "The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks.

I expected him to include "Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story", I wonder why not.