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May 23, 2021
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More book recaps and articles to share! Here's what I read this past February and March, including three recommended books.
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New Posts on E2B
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Stories Worth Sharing
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Life Lessons
Shane Parrish (Farnam Street)
Published in January 2019
Medium read
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"Without such a goal you will tend to wander like a drunken sailor. The sailor takes one step in one direction and the next in some independent direction. As a result the steps tend to cancel each other, and the expected distance from the starting point is proportional to the square root of the number of steps taken. With a vision of excellence, and with the goal of doing significant work, there is tendency for the steps to go in the same direction and thus go a distance proportional to the number of steps taken, which in a lifetime is a large number indeed." (Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn)
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Fine Wines
Carl Sagan (Skeptical Inquirer)
Published in October 1987
Long read
It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, which ever one it is, you’re in deep trouble. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful.
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Stuff You Didn't Know You Wanted to Know
Venkatesh Rao (Ribbonfarm)
Published in October 2009
Long read
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So why is promoting over-performing Losers logical? The simple reason is that if you over-perform at the Loser level, it is clear that you are an idiot. You’ve already made a bad bargain, and now you’re delivering more value than you need to, making your bargain even worse. Unless you very quickly demonstrate that you know your own value by successfully negotiating more money and/or power, you are marked out as an exploitable clueless Loser. At one point, Darryl, angling for a raise, learns to his astonishment that the raise he is asking for would make his salary higher than Michael’s. Michael hasn’t negotiated a better deal in 14 years. Darryl — a minimum-effort Loser with strains of Sociopath — doesn’t miss a step. He convinces and coaches Michael into asking for his own raise, so he can get his.
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The Crime Beat
Jason Leopold (Buzzfeed News)
Published in September 2020
Long read
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The FinCEN Files expose an underlying truth of the modern era: The networks through which dirty money traverse the world have become vital arteries of the global economy. They enable a shadow financial system so wide-ranging and so unchecked that it has become inextricable from the so-called legitimate economy. Banks with household names have helped to make it so.
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Excerpt of the Week
From Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller's The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team:
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of Feh was for us to do nothing, so when I dropped my objection, the matter was essentially settled. Walker would make the team as long as someone didn’t demand the ball even more forcefully before first pitch. Next time someone tries to tell you to “put yourself out there” – join an online dating site after a bad breakup, maybe, or interview for a job whose requirements you can’t quite meet – remember Matt Walker, the patron saint of putting oneself out there. Walker went from total stranger to Opening Day starter in the span of ten days, just by being around.
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