Library
Books and other pieces I enjoyed. Inclusion can mean anything from "this is worth checking out" to "this completely changed how I view the world".
Particularly great ones are marked with an ★, ones I wouldn't recommend are greyed out and marked ✗.
Nothing matches those filters.
- paperPeople systematically overlook subtractive changes · Adams, Gabrielle S. et al.#↗ nature.com
When evaluating possible design solutions, people tend to overlook options that subtract something from the existing design rather than add something to it, even if the subtractive options would be better (and would make the overall design or system simpler, which has its own benefits). One obvious follow-up question to think about is how this can be addressed in designing systems and organizations and their incentive structures. Musk is famously adamant that you should delete more, but outside of a leader who drills this into everything, I’m not sure how best to institutionalize it.
- bookAmericanah · Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi#↗ goodreads.com
- bookMolecular Biology of the Cell★ · Alberts, Bruce et al.#↗ goodreads.com
- paperUncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory · Alchian, Armen A.#↗ jstor.org
Alchian criticizes rational profit-maximization as something a firm can’t really do in practical reality, and turns to evolution instead. Only firms that happen to take actions that generate profits survive, the rest “dies”. The outcome is that it looks as if existing firms were actively maximizing their profits. In this framework, it doesn’t really matter if they calculated their optimal behavior, bumbled around and got lucky, or decided to copy what was working for someone else without even knowing why it worked for them. What can I say, I’m a sucker for evolutionary framings. I also really like the role attributed to imitation, spend five minutes on LinkedIn or in a lecture about corporate innovation and it feels on the dot.
- bookNotes on the Synthesis of Form · Alexander, Christopher#↗ goodreads.com
An extremely formal theory of design, the formality of which Alexander himself apparently called misguided later on. Design, according to this, is about eliminating misfit between the form of what you are designing and its context (IIRC he explicitly said you can only solve this via negativa). To eliminate all misfit, you map out which of your design variables interact, break the graph down into densely connected but externally loosely coupled subsets, solve each of these in isolation, then put the design solutions together into a whole. It seems extremely obvious that you are not going to do this set-/graph-theoretically for any real-world design problem, but I find the intuition behind the approach interesting and useful anyway. He also claims that traditional cultures have done this “unselfconsciously” by way of cultural evolution, but “modern” designers are operating “selfconsciously” (more rooted in rational attempts at problem-solving) — I don’t find this part particularly relevant, a traditional culture hasn’t had to optimize global logistics or design a CPU, so it’s only natural that the approaches differ.
- bookSystems Medicine: Physiological Circuits and the Dynamics of Disease★ · Alon, Uri#↗ goodreads.com
Alon takes the framework of dynamical systems to understanding physiology and diseases. The parts I’ve read so far go beyond showing how a certain condition arises, and make an argument for why the underlying system is constructed in such a way as to be vulnerable to the condition. I don’t have enough of a background here to judge how fruitful this approach is in clinical practice or pharmacology, but it feels like one of those things that is obviously the right theoretical lens. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but the cover alone feels extremely insightful.
- essayStop Aggregating Away the Signal in Your Data · Armstrong, Zan#↗ stackoverflow.blog
- bookPoor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty · Banerjee, Abhijit & Duflo, Esther#↗ goodreads.com
- bookAgainst the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk✗ · Bernstein, Peter L.#↗ goodreads.com
A sweeping history of the theory of probability and its application to managing risk and uncertainty. I wanted to love this because the topic is right up my alley and I like what it aspires to do. Unfortunately the books is very disorganized and quite badly written.
- bookThe Aleph and Other Stories★ · Borges, Jorge Luis#↗ goodreads.com
- bookFicciones★ · Borges, Jorge Luis#↗ goodreads.com
Be aware that if you read two volumes of his short stories in short succession, you will probably get a bit tired of how clever Borges gets with things.
- bookInvisible Cities★ · Calvino, Italo#↗ goodreads.com
I don’t really have a “favorite” book, but this is probably the one that most absorbed me and tickled my brain just right. It is also the only one I happen to have a perfect music pairing for.
- bookWorking · Caro, Robert#↗ goodreads.com
A sort of placeholder semi-memoir while Caro is focused on finishing the fifth volume of his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson before his time runs out. Part memoir, part details of his famously meticulous writing process. One gets the impression of a writer absolutely driven by the compulsion to figure things out, and then driven again to make sure what he found out lands with readers. But the biggest standout, which doesn't seem to occur to Caro himself as anything special, is his immense empathy for his subjects in all their complexity. A great short read, made me finally want to read his (considerably longer) biographies.
my notes → - bookHenri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations · Cartier-Bresson, Henri#↗ goodreads.com
- bookExhalation★ · Chiang, Ted#↗ goodreads.com
- bookStories of Your Life and Others★ · Chiang, Ted#↗ goodreads.com
The titular “Story of Your Life” was the basis of the 2016 movie “Arrival”. Chiang’s short stories are probably the closest contemporary thing I’ve read to Borges and Calvino, highly recommended.
- bookThe Idea of the Brain: A History · Cobb, Matthew#↗ goodreads.com
The first part, on the history of neuroscience, was great. The middle part, on contemporary research, lacks an overarching framework and turns into a string of disconnected findings. Pleasantly surprised by the outlook at the end, which does a good job summing up larger theoretical questions again.
my notes → - bookAre We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design · Colomina, Beatriz & Wigley, Mark#↗ goodreads.com
- essayHow to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily · Covington, Michael A.#↗ web.archive.org
- essayWhat's going on here, with this human? · Duncan, Graham#↗ grahamduncan.blog
An essay about Duncan’s approach to hiring. I like it for the underlying approach more so than any of the specific advice he gives: The skill you should be cultivating is seeing yourself and other people clearly, everything else follows from that. Selecting a candidate, then, is less about testing them, and more about figuring them out so you can see where they fit, and whether that’s the position you are trying to fill. I’ve had very little experience sitting on the employer’s side of job interviews, but as a candidate I’ve rarely felt like the person on the other side of the table was actually curious about me. And besides how the interaction feels, I agree that this is how you actually get signal from talking to people.
- bookMiddlemarch★ · Eliot, George#↗ goodreads.com
- bookHow Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life · Ellenberg, Jordan#↗ goodreads.com
- bookMy Brilliant Friend · Ferrante, Elena#↗ goodreads.com
- bookSurely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman · Feynman, Richard#↗ goodreads.com
- paperFour Ways to Scale Up: Smart, Dumb, Forced, and Fumbled · Flyvbjerg, Bent#↗ ssrn.com
How do you successfully achieve large-scale ventures? According to Flyvbjerg, you make them modular (instead of turning each part into a bespoke subproject) and you go fast. Modularity enables learning curves (each module you roll out makes you better at rolling out the next), allows you to experiment cheaply on some of the modules (which in turn feeds back as learning), and delivers value incrementally. Speed allows you to avoid variance: Every year your project goes on is further from the initial conditions under which you planned it and deemed it worthwhile, which increases risks. The empirical argument is about as thin as you’d expect of a business paper, but I like the framework and think there’s a lot to learn from it.
- essayWhat Is Code? · Ford, Paul#↗ bloomberg.com
- bookThe Machine Stops · Forster, E.M.#↗ goodreads.com
- essayThe Tyranny of Structurelessness · Freeman, Jo#↗ jofreeman.com
One of the best texts on org structure and management, written in the context of feminist activist groups in the 1970s, but applicable a lot more broadly. A lot of orgs pride themselves on not being hierarchical or overly formal, thinking what happens in absence of such structure is more just and meritocratic. Freeman argues that there is no such thing as a group without structure, and what actually arises in such cases are opaque, unaccountable, and hard to navigate informal structures of influence and power. Structurelessness, then, is the cop-out of people who don’t want to deal with creating structures, or bring a naive kind of skepticism of any and all authority. This doesn’t mean you should put in place a dictator and count on them staying benevolent, or make everything uber-rigid — but you should make structures legible, so they can be navigated on equal footing by everyone while they are working, and deliberately criticized and changed when they no longer are.
- bookThe Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement✗ · Goldratt, Eliyahu M.#↗ goodreads.com
Process improvement and optimization, what’s not to love? The fact that it treats its readers and protagonist with utmost contempt for their intelligence.
- essayThe Eleven Laws of Showrunning · Grillo-Marxuach, Javier#↗ okbjgm.weebly.com
- paperThe Use of Knowledge in Society · Hayek, Friedrich A.#↗ stephenhicks.org
- bookThe Secret of Our Success★ · Henrich, Joseph#↗ goodreads.com
- bookWe Are Bellingcat · Higgins, Eliot#↗ goodreads.com
- bookThe Hard Thing About Hard Things · Horowitz, Ben#↗ goodreads.com
- bookGenentech: The Beginnings of Biotech · Hughes, Sally Smith#↗ goodreads.com
- paperTowards a Theory of Conceptual Design for Software · Jackson, Daniel#↗ dl.acm.org
- paperCould a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? · Jonas, Eric & Kording, Konrad#↗ ericmjonas.github.io
- bookThe Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology★ · Judson, Horace Freeland#↗ goodreads.com
The history of molecular biology from roughly the 1930s to 1970s. Be warned, this is not a breeze to read, but it is one of the most remarkable science books I ever picked up. Reading this is about as close as you can get to having a front-row seat to how scientists go from ignorance and confusion to insight and unifying theory without being one yourself. I want to do this one justice and write more about it at some point, ping me if you see this after 2026 is over and I still haven’t!
- bookThe Trial · Kafka, Franz#↗ goodreads.com
I had been warned about the absurdity of Kafka as something to be wary of, like it would be a huge slog to get through. Turns out it’s actually hilarious.
- bookThinking, Fast and Slow · Kahneman, Daniel#↗ goodreads.com
- bookThe Soul of a New Machine · Kidder, Tracy#↗ goodreads.com
- bookDoppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World✗ · Klein, Naomi#↗ goodreads.com
An extremely frustrating mix. The personal story behind this book is pretty fascinating, and on that front Klein has some really good insights. Unfortunately she also goes on to make a lot of confident but extremely incoherent political arguments about the world.
- bookCreative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs · Kocienda, Ken#↗ goodreads.com
- bookMasters of Doom · Kushner, David#↗ goodreads.com
- bookAn Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management · Larson, Will#↗ goodreads.com
Should be read with two things in mind: First, it deliberately focuses on the “systems” part of management (largely to the exclusion of interpersonal aspects). Second, it comes from a particular context that has many properties that won’t apply to most organizations (extremely fast-scaling venture-backed tech startups). With these caveats, I liked it precisely because of how tactical and systems-focused it was. A lot of the material has previously been covered on the author’s blog. Some favorites include the point that teams are an abstraction, and his playbook on tackling migrations, which applies well beyond software.
- bookStaff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track · Larson, Will#↗ goodreads.com
Highly specific to its US/Silicon Valley context as well as very tactical and concrete, much like the other Larson book I read. Good insight into what staff roles actually look like (I wasn’t aware of the breadth/types before reading this). The “Operating at Staff” chapter had useful and actionable advice for any leadership role that included at least some engineering or even technical product work. I previously encountered similar topics in the context of companies about as far from SV big tech culture as you could get while still touching computers, and I think it would have been a very handy reference there or anywhere in between. Mostly skipped the concrete career advice as it wasn’t immediately relevant to me, so I can’t judge its usefulness.
- bookThe Left Hand of Darkness · Le Guin, Ursula K.#↗ goodreads.com
- bookThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas · Le Guin, Ursula K.#↗ goodreads.com
On second read, I kind of agree with the contrarian interpretation.
- bookThe Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia · Le Guin, Ursula K.#↗ goodreads.com
I once read Asimov’s “Foundation” and felt transported into the mind of a very smart and somewhat autistic twelve-year-old. Le Guin’s humanity and nuance are the antithesis to that. The love story is great too!
- bookThe Laws of Trading: A Trader's Guide to Better Decision-Making for Everyone · Lebron, Agustin#↗ goodreads.com
Less a guide for trading, more a tour of the associated worldview. I’ve encountered much of this already over the years by way of economics, interviews with people with a finance background, and “general online exposure”. This is the most concise summary of this kind of reasoning and the associated mental models I’ve seen so far. Recommended reading, even if you keep your money in a cheap broad index fund, as you probably should and which reading this will make you more likely to do.
- bookThe Periodic Table · Levi, Primo#↗ goodreads.com
- essayHow the System Works · Mann, Charles C.#↗ thenewatlantis.com
A large part of what underpins my worldview and politics is summed up in this essay series. The achievements of modernity are mind-bogglingly amazing, but we don’t realize it because their comforts and the infrastructure that supports them are to us as water is to fish. Things could, of course, be a lot better, and we shouldn’t stop trying to fix the bad parts, and trying to get to a point where more of us get to enjoy the good parts. That being said, it annoys me to no end when people act like we used to live in Eden until their favorite bogeyman came along and messed it up. The fix, as so often, is curiosity about how things actually work.
- bookDo No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery · Marsh, Henry#↗ goodreads.com
- essayStrategies for learning · Masley, Andy#↗ blog.andymasley.com
- bookStatistical Rethinking★ · McElreath, Richard#↗ goodreads.com
- paperLeverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System · Meadows, Donella#↗ donellameadows.org
- bookThinking in Systems: A Primer · Meadows, Donella#↗ goodreads.com
- bookThe Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985–1993 · Mechner, Jordan#↗ goodreads.com
- bookComplexity: A Guided Tour · Mitchell, Melanie#↗ goodreads.com
- bookPnin · Nabokov, Vladimir#↗ goodreads.com
- bookThe Design of Everyday Things · Norman, Don#↗ goodreads.com
This is the canonical book explaining timeless and domain-agnostic principles of good design. Unfortunately it also seems to fail to apply its own insight to writing and is terribly disorganized. Looking past that, I still found it worthwhile as an introduction.
- bookLiving With Complexity · Norman, Don#↗ goodreads.com
Norman argues against calls for making tools and technology simple. He distinguishes between things being complex and things being complicated. Complexity, in his view, is an inherent feature of many domains and tasks, or simply of reality, and any tool worth anything in dealing with reality has to match that complexity to be useful. Good design, then, does not simplify the inherent complexity of reality (it can’t), it makes it easier for humans to make sense of and engage with it. It’s been a while since I read this and the details are hazy, and the complicated/complex thing is semantic nitpicking, but regardless of the words you choose the distinction feels like a really important one and matters a lot if you want to design anything useful.
- bookThe Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect✗ · Pearl, Judea#↗ goodreads.com
A book on general principles of causality and causal inference that doesn’t get bogged down in the mathematics of this or that statistical method seems way overdue. Which is why it still annoys me how bad this one turned out. Pearl spends considerable time talking about how nobody but him got the importance of causality, and how they still haven’t seen the light, and so on. When he finally gets around to explaining the concepts, he does such a bad job at it that I’ve told multiple people who thought this was out of their intellectual league something to the effect of “it’s not you, it’s him”.
- essaySchleps, Puzzles, and Packages: Solving Complex Problems the Iron Man Way · Rao, Venkatesh#↗ ribbonfarm.com
- bookGottlieb Duttweiler · Riess, Curt#↗ goodreads.com
Duttweiler was the founder of Switzerland’s largest supermarket chain, which (of course) is organized as a federation of cooperatives. Randomly found this in my university’s free library one day. The writing is so-so, and far from impartial, but I stuck with it and was rewarded. The origin story of Migros, and Duttweiler’s various other ventures, are a pretty inspiring example of entrepreneurial spirit winning against incumbents trying everything to entrench the comfortable-for-them status quo, majorly improving the situation for consumers. I also did not fully realize before how weirdly protectionist and cronyist Switzerland used to be, e.g. enacting a law (German) that prohibited chains from opening new stores or expanding existing ones.
- bookWho Gets What — and Why · Roth, Alvin#↗ goodreads.com
Roth concerns himself mainly with the design of matching markets. Unlike “normal” markets, the focus is on both sides choosing who they can or want to transact with — students and colleges, employees and employers, organ donors and recipients, etc. The book outlines some common failure modes of matching markets: 1. There’s not enough participants on either side (lack of “thickness”). 2. There’s too much evaluation to be done (“congestion”) and search costs go through the roof. 3. Markets “unravel” because decisions get pushed too early, before participants can adequately evaluate. 4. Mechanisms make it unsafe for participants to express their true preferences, so they have to game the market to get a good outcome. His main fixes are centralized clearinghouses which aggregate participants on both sides (thickness) and enforce simultaneous clearing (no unraveling), and making market mechanisms strategyproof so people are incentivized to reveal their true preferences. Importantly, this only works if the market produces stable outcomes that people don’t want to defect from — otherwise, they will circumvent the process. Roth also introduces repugnance as a reason why some markets (e.g. organ donations) can’t use prices as an allocation mechanism.
- bookGood Strategy / Bad Strategy · Rumelt, Richard#↗ goodreads.com
Rare refreshingly bs-free business book. Rumelt says good strategy needs a "Kernel" of three things: 1. Accurate diagnosis of where you are and what you're trying to solve, 2. guiding policy for dealing with the situation, 3. a set of coherent actions to take to implement the policy. Bad strategy, by contrast, refuses to face and engage with reality, is indecisive about actions and tries to do everything at once, and sets arbitrary goals instead of figuring out how to achieve them. A bit snarky in tone, a bit long-winded in the last third, but really insightful.
my notes → - bookOn the Move: A Life · Sacks, Oliver#↗ goodreads.com
- bookUncle Tungsten: Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood · Sacks, Oliver#↗ goodreads.com
Sacks has recently been somewhat disgraced for apparently making up a lot of stuff in his case studies. Luckily I mainly knew him as the extremely colorful and unhinged character of this and his other memoir, so I don’t think my view shifted much and I’d probably still recommend reading this if you like the genre.
- essayReality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail · Salvatier, John#↗ johnsalvatier.org
- bookBecoming Steve Jobs · Schlender, Brent & Tetzeli, Rick#↗ goodreads.com
- paperDriven by Compression Progress · Schmidhuber, Jürgen#↗ arxiv.org
- bookSeeing Like a State★ · Scott, James C.#↗ goodreads.com
Maybe more meme than book at this point. For the gist, read vgr’s post about the central idea of “legibility”. He hints at parallels in tech (waterfall project planning), but I often find myself thinking about this when someone wants to add 20 strictly-validated form fields across 15 rigid workflow steps in some tool, hoping it will make reality conform to the platonic ideal of the process, but most likely just making people hate their job and put everything important in the unstructured “notes” field instead.
- essayOntology of Psychiatric Conditions · Siskind, Scott Alexander#↗ astralcodexten.com
Three-part series on the question “what are mental illnesses, really”. Casual debates around this abound — “what even is normal”, etc., but then people still go out and try getting a black-and-white diagnosis of ADHD. This series of posts does a great job exploring the topic. The first part covers taxometrics, a set of methods you use to figure out whether some condition is more likely to be caused by something underlying you have or don’t have, or is just the tail end of trait variation. The second part looks at psychiatric conditions through the lens of dynamical systems. The third part asks whether conditions are more likely to be a failure of evolution, or one side of some tradeoff.
- essayWhat Colour Are Your Bits? · Skala, Matthew#↗ ansuz.sooke.bc.ca
Good exploration of a reality missed by the naive programmer: Information has properties that are socially and/or legally relevant that are not directly present in the information itself. For example, provenance of source code matters — if I copy a small function verbatim in violation of a license, that’s meaningfully different from if I happen to write it myself the same way someone else did before me. Probably an interesting re-read now in light of training of and content generation using AI.
- bookEnergy and Civilization: A History★ · Smil, Vaclav#↗ goodreads.com
Felt like reading a spreadsheet at times. Also made me want to read more spreadsheets. I forgot most of the facts and numbers, but what remains is a pretty substantial shift in awareness of how fundamental energy flows shape life and society, and how much fossil fuels have subsidized a lot of what's good about modernity.
my notes → - essayI Should Have Loved Biology · Somers, James#↗ jsomers.net
I did not “get” biology in school either — I did well enough, but it felt like memorization and I never really cared about it. I discovered it for real in my 20s, after falling down a bit of a rabbit hole via a hacker type’s youtube video on a DIY genetic engineering project, and this incredible essay really captured my feelings about the subject once things started clicking into place and I grokked its significance.
- bookUnflattening · Sousanis, Nick#↗ goodreads.com
- bookPrinciples of Neural Design · Sterling, Peter & Laughlin, Simon#↗ goodreads.com
- essayThe Bitter Lesson · Sutton, Rich#↗ incompleteideas.net
- bookFooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets · Taleb, Nassim Nicholas#↗ goodreads.com
- bookMo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove · Thompson, Ahmir#↗ goodreads.com
- bookSeven Days in the Art World · Thornton, Sarah#↗ goodreads.com
- bookAnna Karenina★ · Tolstoy, Leo#↗ goodreads.com
- bookThe Visual Display of Quantitative Information · Tufte, Edward#↗ goodreads.com
- bookBreakfast of Champions · Vonnegut, Kurt#↗ goodreads.com
- bookConsider the Lobster and Other Essays · Wallace, David Foster#↗ goodreads.com
- bookThe World of Yesterday★ · Zweig, Stefan#↗ goodreads.com