M. John Harrison in an unpublished interview from way back before Sunken Lands… came out:

If people didn’t have Joseph Campbell’s artful wish-fulfilment (sic) fantasy to place them at the centre of events and keep them enchanted with their own reflection, they might dump their wish to be princess of all they survey, and instead channel their dissatisfactions into making a better world for everyone.

This line of thinking is why I am a grateful reader of Harrison’s and… not a Campbell fan.

Michael Lopp wrote something yesterday in the useful-not-true category:

[…] I liked to describe humans in stark, clever ways. This often took the form of a “THIS or THAT” black-and-white structure, but I was 100% clear that the answer to humans was a hard-to-define grey area. My job was to get you to think, not to define every possible configuration of human behavior.

Derek Sivers had a similar idea:

Use what you learned from jigsaw puzzles. Start with the edges. Come up with extreme and ridiculous ideas that you’d never actually do, but are good for inspiration and finding the middle.

They are writing about different settings — Lopp about figuring out what’s already there, Sivers about creating something new — but the approaches are similar: to get to the grey area, first figure out the edges. This also tends to be my approach, but it is not how many people think and if you are to avoid painful misunderstandings better have a preamble ready.

📚 I’ve just finished reading a preview of Useful Not True from Derek Sivers, and you can too if you click on that link. It is a slight book that very much deserves to be a book and not a blog post — I can’t wait to get a hold of a hard copy.

Sivers takes the aphorism that all models are wrong, but some are useful — well-known to statisticians and, increasingly, scientists of “hard” sciences — and applies it to mental models. At least that is how I read it: he never mentions the aphorism by name and stays clear of explicitly aligning himself with any particular school of thought. I wouldn’t expect anything else from the author of How to Live.

The stated intent is to introduce the reader to reframing as a way to — and this is now my interpretation — decrease anxiety, increase agency and lead a more purposeful life. It does that splendidly. So well, in fact, that I plan on buying a dozen or so to give out as presents this holiday season (apologies if I have now spoiled the surprise). There is some selfishness there: conversations would be so much more fruitful if we didn’t have to preface everything we said with “I believe that…” and other true but not very useful verbal ticks.

📚 Finished reading: The Friction Project by Robert I. Sutton, one of those books that should have been a blog post. The fluff is a rapid-fire succession of case studies that are too brief to be memorable but too detailed to be quickly filed away. Just listen to the podcast episode and skip the book.

M. John Harrison writes about agency:

For one thing, “main character” is a foundational pillar of storification; & the storification of everything has led directly to the Babel we live in now. The least fiction can do, now that everything–from “news” to science–is presented/exploited as story, is to destorify itself. & that’s before you get to consciously fake news & science.

One reason I liked his books is that this perspective comes out very clearly. Now only to destorify science…

📚 Finished reading: False Dawn by John Gray, written in 1998 and getting many things right, most of all the vibes of a post-liberal, post-free market world. He still writes in the same timbre, though now he sounds more like a broken record played in an echo chamber. What a difference 25 years make.

As seen in some regulatory documents I have been reviewing:

… which is submitted herewith and incorporated herein by reference…

And now I’m looking for a good book that could explain how legalese came to be, because surely there was a reason “which is submitted and incorporated here” wasn’t sufficient.

When I first saw Patrick Collison’s “vague tech cannon”, the preponderance of biographies and Silicone Valley histories seemed like too much navel gazing. Tanner Greer had a more charitable perspective:

To study the great men of a community’s past is to study what greatness means in that community. That I think is half the purpose of these biographies of Roosevelt and Rockefeller, Feynman and Oppenheimer, Licklider and Noyce, Thiel and Musk. These books are an education in an ethos. Such is the paıdeía of the technologists.

Roosevelt, Rockefeller, Feynman — yes. But Thiel and Musk?

📚 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.