I summarise non-fiction books with more detail and critical analysis than you'll find elsewhere. Join my newsletter to get new summaries delivered straight to your inbox!
October monthly round-up
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I'm happy to say I cleaned up both the All Summaries and Blog Posts archives this month so you can now sort by things like author, title, date, rating and topic. I've kept the old pages for now in case of teething issues—please let me know if you see any! During October, I posted 2 book summaries and 3 blog posts: Book summaries
Blog posts
My next summary will be for Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a thought-provoking book pushing back against "modest epistemology"—the idea that you should defer to "experts" or "the crowd" since the average person won't be able to outperform them. It was interesting to read this shortly after The Scout Mindset. The two books don't exactly contradict each other (and I found both to be valuable), but there's definitely a conflict in the general 'vibes'. Thanks for subscribing! Until next time, To Summarise |
ToSummarise.com
I summarise non-fiction books with more detail and critical analysis than you'll find elsewhere. Join my newsletter to get new summaries delivered straight to your inbox!
I'm back! I took July and August off because of a move, but this month I managed to get out 1 book summary and 2 blog posts: Book summaries How Asia Works by Joe Studwell (30 mins) — argues that the East Asian economies of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China became developmental success stories with a 3-part formula involving agriculture, manufacturing, and the financial system. Blog posts How Asia Works with causal diagrams (5 mins) — tries to distil Joe Studwell's theory into a diagram. How AI...
After a long hiatus, I'm back with a shiny new book summary for How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region by Joe Studwell. Though published in 2014, it holds up pretty well, with some of its insights on industrial policy and central bank independence might be more relevant than ever (though one must take care not to overgeneralise from things that worked in a particular context in the past). Anyway, as usual the key takeaways are below, and you can find the full...
Hope you've all had a good June. I've only posted 1 book summary and 2 blog posts: Book summaries Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom (22 mins) — this weird book explores the question of what utopia could look like and what problems might be left after we've reached a state of technological maturity. Blog posts — both posts this month came about as I've been thinking and reading about the economics of AI. I'm planning to do a third post that will address that more directly, but these two lay the...