📚 Forty books that comprise the Vague Tech Canon, per Patrick Collison:

• The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce
• Seeing Like a State†
• The Dream Machine
• The Sovereign Individual
• The Beginning of Infinity†
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman*
• Softwar
• Ashlee Vance’s Elon biography
• The Mythical Man-Month
• Mindstorms
• Masters of Doom
• Skunk Works
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Thinking in Systems‡
• Superintelligence
• The Whole Earth Catalog
• Zero to One
• The Hard Thing about Hard Things
• Founders at Work
• Showstopper
• Dealers of Lightning
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb
• PG’s essays
• The Rise and Fall of American Growth
• The Big Score
• Finite and Infinite Games*
• A Pattern Language*
• The Selfish Gene*
• The Lean Startup
• Marginal Revolution (if it has to be a book, Stubborn Attachments)
• Revolution in the Valley
• Uncanny Valley
• LessWrong
• Slate Star Codex(/ACT)
• The PayPal Wars
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• The Diamond Age
• What the Dormouse Said
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt†
• Titan (on Rockefeller)
• The Power Broker*
• Gödel, Escher, Bach

Linked are those I wrote about, starred are the ones I’ve read, daggered are the ones already on my pile and double-daggered are the ones that got on it thanks to this list. There is a single ‡ entry — the list had too much navel gazing for my taste. (ᔥTyler Cowen)

For the second time this week, my man at the Financial Times knocks it out of the park:

To read well is to ignore the now. This is true of no other art form, because no other art form is so time-intensive.

Pair with Taleb’s advice on writing.

Nassim Taleb wrote about how he writes:

The common fallacy is that if you want people to read you in the future, you must project something related to the future, focused on the contemporary and be as different from the past as possible –say by populating your work with space machines, high technology, and revolutionary ideas. My U.S. publisher still tries to squeeze modern art on the cover when I am looking elsewhere.

No, no; it’s the exact opposite. If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the contemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.

But there is also this:

Another discovery I made then, and to which I have been adhering until the present. If you consider writing a creative endeavor, then avoid practicing it in mundane matters as it may both dull your vitality and make it feel like drudgery, work. I find it painful to write outside of my books (or mathematical papers) –and immensely pleasurable to write in book form. So I limit my emails to one or two laconic (but sometimes incomprehensible) sentences, postcard like; the same with social media posts that are not excerpts from books. There is still such a contraption called a telephone. Likewise, I don’t read letters and emails longer than a postcard. Writing must have some solemnity. Reading and writing, in the past, were the province of the sacred.

Not to belabor the point, but I too have found pleasure in writing articles of a certain length — and it’s not the length of a book! To each their own.

Andrew Gelman has a new — and free — textbook out, Regression and Other Stories. From the cover:

Many textbooks on regression focus on theory and the simplest of examples. Real statistical problems, however, are complex and subtle. This is not a book about the theory of regression. It is a book about how to use regression to solve real problems of comparison, estimation, prediction, and causal inference. It focuses on practical issues such as sample size and missing data and a wide range of goals and techniques. It jumps right in to methods and computer code you can use fresh out of the box.

Between that, his Bayesian Data Analysis and many other freely available lectures and books, has there ever been a better time for high school students bored out of their minds by the pedestrian curriculum? But I am now just projecting to myself from 20-some years ago — I am sure high school students of today would rather spend time on their PS5, and my past self would probably have joined them. (↬Andrew Gelman)

📚 Finished reading: Moonbound by Robin Sloan, which is a light, fluffy, summer-time — someone less charitable may have said paper-thin — version of some of my favorite sci-fi series. But please don’t mind my inner snob showing off: it is a fine book and I anxiously await the sequel.

📚 Finished reading: The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer, who continues to mix enlightenment philosophy, history and some dark, dark humor to produce an artifact from the 25th century that may answer some question we have in the 21st. I am at once sad and relieved that there is only one book left in the series.

📚 Finished reading: Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer. The only thing I have to add to my initial impressions is that I have promptly picked up the third Terra Ignota book. If you don’t think you like sci-fi but have interest in history, philosophy or religion, these may be the sci-fi books for you.

📚 Currently reading: Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer and holy smokes is this good. After only a day of reading I am half-way in, and even the most macabre plot points from Part 1 have been paying off handsomely. I can’t wait to see what miracles the rest of the book brings.

📚 Finished reading: Toxic Exposure by Chadi Nabhan, in record time. The prose may have been clunky but the drama of the Monsanto Rondup trials was real and the book was a page-turner, so it took me less than 48 hours to zip through cover to cover.

The court transcripts make the story, especially when Chadi was cross-examined about the nuances of probability, causality and informed risk. If those topics sounds appealing, I recommend you listen to Chadi’s one-hour conversation with Nassim Taleb about the book. If only Taleb could have been there as an expert witness…

📚 Finished reading: Writing to Learn by William Zinsser, which was less an instruction manual and more of an overview of the best of non-fiction from the mid 1800s until the 1980s. Interestingly, the person who first comes to my mind as the proponent of the writing-is-thinking school, Richard Feynman, got a negative mention for his irreverent memoir. So it goes…