This was ok, didn’t enjoy it too terribly. It did have some good points about how to continually think about what you are doing. I do try to be deliberate, but am very bad at it. I also try to be mindful, and again, I’ve very bad at it. I’m not sure I want to listen to the next to in the series for a while, so I’ll put it off for a while. There was a lot of pseudo-sciency things in this book, but I’m not terribly surprised by it.
This book is a really interesting case for Atheism. I’m not wholly convinced that there is no God, but I’m decently convinced that the god of the Judeo-Christian faiths is not there. I’d like to think that God is a personal God, but that is less likely than a Deist God. I plan to read the holy books of several different religions so that I can more understand them. The biggest thing right now in this arena is to amass more knowledge so that I can more fully understand the arguments for and against each religion. To start that I must understand what each religion says about itself, starting with the holy books. This will probably take a few weeks to work through, and finding audiobooks of all of them may not be that simple.
The history in this book before the modern era was very interesting. It supposes that writing came about for understanding debt. Debt is more what someone is owed for their contributions than what someone owes for their usage. The later idea of debt is more modern. The creation of money in the modern world is a very interesting topic covered in this book. I think that the way they show how bubbles are created and burst from ways groups can defraud certain groups. It also points out something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. There is a divide between those who understand and use the system that has come about, and those who choose to be used by the system.
While this book was very interesting, it was more about general interpersonal relationships than about specifically the intimate relationships. That kind of thing is certainly encapsulated in the book’s message, it isn’t really the only thing it is about. The book says there are 3 types of behaviors (really says people, but i think any person can show a type of behavior at any point). The three behaviors are Anxious, Stable, and Distant. I know I have exhibited all 3 at points. The book talks about how to handle these types of behaviors, whether they are coming from yourself or from others. It also says how to be happy with someone if they exhibit specific types of these behaviors more than others. It bases most of the arguments it makes on the idea that the monogamous relationship is the foundation of social interactions. From what I’ve read and come to believe, I’m not sure that is true. That said, the book talks about interpersonal relationships, so the true message isn’t lost even if monogamy is not the basis of society.
This book talks a lot about evolution of both societies and species. The evolution points towards nonzero gains of traits and patterns. The main premise is that nonzero gains are also inherently zero-sum, since the benefits must be split. The evolution occurs where there are nonzero gains to be made, and the path of evolution are determined by how those nonzero gains are split in the zero-sum fashion. He also says that this movement forward is self perpetuating, since the improved next generation will be able to take bigger advantages of the nonzero sum outcome, and there will be more intense competition since the pervious set of winners will make up the current set of opponents that must split the gains. This is close to one of the premises I would like to test, relating to business and women. I hypothesize that women will naturally tend towards the nonzero gains of a project and focus on that, while men will tend to more focus on the zero-sum splitting of credit for the outcome. I also hypothesize that men will gravitate to the projects that provide more zero sum gains, but higher returns for themselves; while women will tend towards the more nonzero gains, but less for themselves. The result of this hypothesis being true would be that women running the show would make everyone prosper more, but men running the show will lead towards a few businesses doing incredibly well at the downfall of others. This is just a hypothesis, and I can think of a few ways to start testing it, but that would be quite difficult.
This was a very dense book and I would need to listen to it several times in order to get a decent understanding of what was being said. A lot of it could be encompassed in venn diagrams when it came to the logic part. The if A then B, and if A then C stuff would have been much better to understand in the Venn space. I did like that part about the rhetoric and how things follow from each other. This has somewhat to do with game theory, but is a far precursor of it. Another statement that I like and is something that I tend to believe strongly is that wealth is not in the ownership of things but in the use of them. I hope to remember that owning nice things is completely worthless except to have them be used. And using nice things is the primary end of owning nice things, so if using the nice things can be accomplished without owning them you get about the same benefit overall. This certainly applies strongly to some of the hobbies I’ve taken up recently, like sailing and horseback riding. This also applies to having a car vs. using Zipcar or a similar sharing system for the car. I’d gladly pay Steph so that I don’t have to own a car, but it is not a significant burden on her that she be the one to own a car out of the two of us. The communal housing is another part of this idea that ownership is not wealth, but use is wealth. With communal housing i get the use of many things my roommates have and they get the use of things that I have, thereby increasing the wealth of all of us. I don’t think I’m going to be listening to something quite this dense for a good while, although once in a while listens to dense material is ok.
This book wasn’t what I expected. It was much more business focused. For me that isn’t such a bad thing, as it gave me a lot to think about when/if I end up starting my own company. I did enjoy the talks about partners, employees, nepotism, networking, and marketing. I have the tendency to try to do everything myself, which is good in startup phase, but quickly dies off. The beer festivals they got going sound like a lot of fun, and I’d love to go to more festivals around here.
The application of game theory supported by this book and used in practice is something I like. I would like to learn more about game theory and how to functionally apply it. It seems to me that this is naturally synergistic with Decision Analysis. Combining the two makes for a very powerful model of how people will make decisions and how I should make decisions. Since I have extra time today I will probably look up some additional material on game theory. Reading the Wikipedia article and the links from that is a good start, but I’d like it in the form of a lecture or class if that could be found.
This book was fantastic. The author uses a lot of anecdotal evidence to support good experimental data. Some of the conclusions drawn from the data i find suspect, especially those regarding the purpose of why people were doing what they were doing, but the general indicators of human behavior are fully believable. One of the things that the book talks at length about are biases. It talks about getting used to good and bad things, and how to avoid getting used to the good and make the bad not so bad. The book also says that we should avoid making decisions when emotional, as that will form an unintentional habit of choosing that decision or ones like it when dealing with people in the future. The emotional habit experiment is one that I don’t believe to be as thorough as most of the others, but it is still directionally true. I very much enjoyed this book.
It's an Exciting World 