October monthly round-up


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

  • The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef (32 mins) — an accessible book about how we should strive to think more like scouts trying to work out the truth, rather than soldiers trying to defend an existing position.
  • Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio (25 mins) — there are some good ideas in here, but overall the book is not very well-written and I wouldn't recommend it.

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'.

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To Summarise

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