The subtitle is Time management for mortals, but Making peace with middle age would not be too off the mark. Don’t waste your life micromanaging workplace minutia while waiting for the conditions to be right to start working on what’s important to you. Just do it.

The Nike slogan echoing throughout is not the most GenX thing about it either.

There is an important point there, but I can’t help thinking it could have been made without denigrating other books on time management. From Stephen Covey’s ladders against the wrong wall to David Allen’s 50,000-foot view, most systems have a way of reminding you about the big picture — though only as a footnote and without fancy diagrams so no wonder there are some who miss it. Good thing there is now a whole book about the big picture to add to your workflow.

A brisk account of mental models and cognitive techniques to get you out of idea-defending and into idea-falsifying mode, or from solider to scout mindset, to use the author’s terminology. Soldiers care about status and will use evidence and rhetoric to shore up their established position; scouts care about reality, and will use evidence and rhetoric to seek out and build a better and more trustworthy map.

Yes, we could all do with some more of the scout mindset in our lives — the easiest person to fool being ourselves and all that. It is too bad, then, that people most likely to read and internalize the book are already the most scout-like among their friends. Back in early 2020 many a scout asked for more evidence and even went looking while others were digging ditches and building barricades; they are still pariahs.

Being a scout is a lonely endeavor. No surprise, then, that most humans actively avoid becoming one.

Continuing my streak of self-help indulgence, I decided to re-read Mortimer Adler’s less known work, the one about speaking and listening. ⊕ The best-known one being How to Read a Book, which is good despite itself and its author’s pretentiousness. Parts of the book aged rather poorly.

Lamenting the decline of liberal arts colleges — decline of the 1980s, not the deep dive that was yet to come — he offers some words of self-praise about teaching marketing executives on the importance of ethos, pathos, and logos in controling people’s actions and minds. Oh, how professioral he must have looked — my mind brings up images of a bespectacled jowly professor in a tweed suit; the internet agrees with my assessment and even adds a pipe — educating these know-nothings on the works of Demosthenes. Oh, how tragic is the path to which he led them, and the world.

But I kid. Mortimer Adler the man had little to do with the attention economy of days present, but his ponderings on how to be a good dinner host, impress CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and rile up a crowd to do your bidding are a good example of the tango mortale that academia played with industry in the mid-to-late 20th century. And we are all worse for it.

The subtitle, “A Survival Guide for a World at Odds”, is closer to what the book really is: not a manual for thinking, but rather a set of instructions for responsible use of, and participation in, social media circa late 2010s. As such it is quite useful, skipping briskly in its 100-some pages from Kahneman and Tversky’s Systems 1 and 2, through Kevin Simler’s Elephant in the Brain, to a few online anecdotes of people changing their minds after communicating with the other side — whatever the “other side” was in their particular front of the culture wars.

Left unsaid is why you would want to throw your hat into the social media ring anyway. The author Alan Jacobs has himself all but abandoned Twitter and seems to have limited his online presence to a one-way, comment-less blog. Jacobs may have correctly framed thinking as inherentialy social, but social media as they are just 4 years after the book’s publication are decidedly not the best medium for thinking.

The book that Sapiens ⊕ Reading my review of the Sapiens I realize I fell prey to the reverse form of Gell-Mann amnesia: suffering through Harari’s other book, Homo Deus, should have made me revise my opinion of Sapiens right away, and not wait for Graeber and Wengrow to put things right. wished it could be: an honest, academically rigorous, intellectually stimulating, fun overview of archeology’s current understanding of prehistory, and an exploration of the reasons why the popular view has become so divergent from the professional.

I won’t pretend to have digested all 700 pages after one read, but a few mental models popped up immediately.

The first is the importance of play: there is some evidence — and much hypothesizing — that at least some of the modern societal setup came about as a result of play. Pretend-kings of annual feasts may have, at some point, decided to be true rulers. The first use of clay modeling was to build toys, not pottery. And to extrapolate to the more recent past: powerful graphics cards built for photo-realistic video games are now mostly used for cryptocurrency mining. The outcomes don’t always need to be good!

That is another important point: the book dismantles the myth of linear progress and replaces it with a theory of multiple (social) worlds in which some may be more suitable at different times for different populations, but none could be called universally “better” than others. We are in dicey territory here, because one of the authors — the late David Graeber — was a well-known activist for anarchism and you’ll have a hard time finding a review of The Dawn of Everything which doesn’t try to frame it as some sort of a call to anarchy. But it is hardly the first book published in the last five years to point out some of the deficiencies of the current state of affairs, while pointing out that social experimentation was the modus operandi for most of human (pre)history.

The how of our mistaken ideas of the neolithic leads to another important mental model: premature codification of hypotheses as facts. The chain of events leading from Rousseau’s essay on the mythical Noble Savage to historians mistaking it for actual history echoes many of the medical myths with which I am more familiar, from iron-rich spinach to fever-causing atelectases. Most fields of human endevor won’t let facts get in the way of a good story.

My own field being as far away from archeology as you can get, I had to ask the one “real” archeologist I knew — with recent field-work experience in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean — what she thought of the facts in this book. And, somewhat surprisingly, she saw nothing new, controversial, or groundbreaking in any of the stated facts. For what it’s worth, an anonymous Amazon review from someone claiming to be an expert in the field confirms this. This is important: we can argue about interrpretation — and unlike some popular historians the authors here clearly mark the parts where they are telling a story more than stating facts — but the truth about how much we know should not be in doubt.

Meanwhile, professional book reviewers, quick to judge, easy to confuse, attention spans short, don’t know what to make of any of it: as sure a sign as any that The Dawn of Everything is a true masterpiece.

This is the bare minimum of non-medical books I should read this year. The last two years were abysmal in that regard, and I look forward to making excuses for why 2022 was no different.

• The Scout Mindset (Julia Galef)
• How to Live (Derek Sivers)
• Understanding Nonlinear Dynamics (Daniel Kaplan and Leon Glass)
• Light (M. John Harrison)
• Safe Haven (Mark Spitznagel)
• Pieces of the Action (Vannevar Bush)
• The Demon-Haunted World (Carl Sagan)
• Where Good Ideas Come From (Steven Johnson)
• Calculated Risks (Gerd Gigerenzer)
• Making Things Work (Yaneer Bar-Yam)
• The Morning Star (Karl Ove Knausgaard)
• Alexander Hamilton (Ron Chernow)
• Where Law Ends (Andrew Weissmann)
• The Fifth Risk (Michael Lewis)
• Checkpoint Charlie (Ian MacGregor)
• Checkmate in Berlin (Giles Milton)
• The Complacent Class (Tyler Cowen)
• Craft Coffee: A Manual (Jessica Easto)
• The Complete Father Brown Stories (G. K. Chesterton)
• Foucault’s Pendulum (Umberto Ecco)
• Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization (Donald W. Braben)
• Adventures of a Computational Explorer (Stephen Wolfram)

George Saunders is a modern master of the short story, so when he offers his thoughts on masters of old — all of them Russian — you’d better take it. Even if, like myself, you have no intention of ever writing short stories for a living or for personal enjoyment, it will greatly enhance your appreciation of the craft.

Similarly to Peter Thiel’s key question in Zero to One, Influence revolves around a list of seven: the seven heuristics our System 1 has accepted as a sign that we can agree to something automatically — what Robert Cialdini calls the Click, run response. Actors both nefarious and benign may use them to get wat they want from us. But of course, it works both ways: we can’t learn defense against the dark arts without picking up some of those dark arts ourselves.

As chance would have it, my finishing the book coincided with a family trip to Las Vegas where all of the principles were tried on us in an attempt to sell us a time share scheme. We got our initial hotel room stays at a well-known and renowned hotel chain (authority) at a discount (reciprocity); the sellers wanted to ingratiate with us with a wink here and a compliment there (liking), citing that she, too, was bilingual and raising a bilingual child (unity); we were taken to a room fool of other potential buyers and witnessed one occasion of a 14,000 point plan being sold (social proof); we had only that day to decide on whether we should buy into this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (scarcity), and we kept being reminded how much we spent on vacations anyway (commitment and consistency).

They were good, but the book was better: we thanked them for the offer and graciously declined. It was a $15 investment that saved us tens of thousands of dollars in frivolous expenses. Well worth an ocassional re-read.

Peter Thiel’s thoughts about startups, which I presume every founder past, present, and future has read and internalized.

But I jest. Browse Twitter and you’ll see his seven fairly simple principles of running a successful startup abused, ignored, and misinterpreted, particularly in biotech.

Instead of building a technology that will be useful 20 years from now — the durability factor — technologies are made to solve problems of 20 years ago. Layering optical character recognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning over the cruft of hand-written notes faxed back and forth between doctors' offices comes to mind. Compare and contrast to mRNA vaccines, a technology created more than a decade ago to treat today’s pandemic.

Instead of developing drugs and other treatments with at least 10 times the effect size of current standards of care — principle of technology — the regulatory agencies and markets are overwhelmed by me-too drugs whose marginal benefit requires mammoth trials for any chance of detection.

Instead of vertical integration and ownership of drug discovery, manufacturing, clinical operations and biomarker development within the same organization, with positive feedback loops between all the factors leading to a faster pace — the team prinicple — we get ghost companies made of slide decks and good wishes whose only tangible impact on the world is achieved via Contract Research Organizations.

I could go on: the principles of timing, monopoly, and distribution are also violated early and often in a biotech startup’s lifetime. But then I’d be breaking a principle myself, that of the secret.

At the very beginning, David Epstein presents a dichotomy: there are the super-specialists, who decide early on in their lives who they are and what they want to be, and put all of their time and energy into improving a narrow set of skills that make them competitive in a tightly-regulated field such as professional sports; and then there are the generalists, who try out different things here and there, learning across disciplines and using that knowledge to solve difficult — “wicked”, the book calls them — problems that don’t fall neatly into any category, but which are more and more common in our modern world full of complexities.

The model super-specialist is Tiger Woods, who picked up his first golf club as a toddler and won his first tournament at age six. Compare and contrast with the model generalist, Roger Federer, who dabbled in 11 different sports Squash, skiing, wrestling, swimming, skateboarding, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, badminton, and soccer. before finally picking up the one that will make him famous at the ripe old age of (checks notes)… eight.

The rest is of the same cloth: light on arguments, heavy on emotion. The examples of hyper-specialization it gives are telling: oncologists specializing in cancer related to a single organ and interventional cardiologists. ⊕ Apropos interventional cardiologists, Epstein attributes the massive overuse of stents for dubious indications to the said specialists “getting so used to treating chest pain with stents … that they do so reflexively”. And not because of financial incentives? Interesting. Never mind that to get to any medical subspecialty one needs to go through more than 20 years of not so specialized schooling, sample different professional careers in college, then sample different physician specialties in medical school, and not reach the subspecialty until their early thirties at best. When did the supposed generalist Roger Federer start playing tennis, again?

So, the term “specialist” gets thrown around a lot without being precisely defined. Is it the narrowness of one’s current field that makes them a specialist? Or is it the path they took to get there? Regardless, we do know what makes a generalist: meandering from field to field until you find your niche, which will, ideally, use some of the knowledge and skills gained through all of that meandering. If you start as a stocker at Walmart, then work as a florist, hair stylist, hand model for a watch company, and end up as a short order cook at McDonalds, well that’s not much of a generalist story. Flip these around so that your final job is something more glamorous and you are the master of your profession who uses the Walmart work ethic, florist’s sense of proportion and beauty, Mickey D’s sense of urgency, and a hand model’s way with wrist movements to create a work of coiffured art. It’s the narrative and Texas sharpshooter fallacies combined.

Their friends confirmation and survivor bias also show up. Each chapter has a few stories hand-picked to showcase how a “generalist” solves problems that the “specialists” were stumped with. The generalist’s life story is then picked apart to showcase their versatility, though some at first do not appear to be so versatile. There are, unfortunately, no counterfactuals, and no going over the specialists' biographies which would — I am fairly confident — be strikingly similar to those of the generalists.

Looking back at a life, your own or someone else’s, is very much like stargazing. There are a few set pieces — a marriage here, a near-death experience there — but for the most part the events are devoid of much meaning until we give it to them by imputing a causal relationship to something that is important ex post. Epstein picks out situations where a failing team of “specialists” — let’s take him at his word that they are, for their biographies are not presented and we are left wondering whether they, too, worked the summers in their family’s farm or had a brother in the concrete business or some such — well, where that team of maybe-specialists is rescued by a certified (by Epstein) generalist who expresses their generalissimo-ness via a string of anecdotes, the stars in my overwrought stargazing analogy.

There is a story to be told about narrowness of focus and the importance of not being a fachidiot. Epstein comes tantalizingly close to framing the problem as it should be framed: that specialty narrow-mindedness — no matter how you got to it — is dangerous and makes you a bad specialist and a worse human. Yet there is no mention of this wonderful German word in the book’s hundreds of pages. That’s too bad: Fachidiocracy would have been a better title.