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!
My latest summary is for The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life by Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson. In it, the authors attempt to distil the most useful techniques from over 100 self-help books into just 368 pages. Spencer founded Clearer Thinking, a research organisation that conducts studies and creates digital self-help tools for the public. I've been following Clearer Thinking's podcast for a few years and have gotten a lot of value from it, so...
My latest summary is for If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. The "It" in the title refers to an artificial superintelligence that is vastly more capable than humans across a broad range of domains. The authors argue that once it crosses a certain threshold, such AI would pose an extinction-level threat to humanity. As usual, the key takeaways are below, and you can find the full summary by clicking the link above. KEY TAKEAWAYS What is AI? One way to think...
Hard to believe we're halfway through the year already! Just a quick update this quarter with only 2 summaries. But I have some more free time now and expect to publish more next quarter. Book summaries Chokepoints by Edward Fishman (24 mins). A very interesting (and timely!) book about how the US started using its financial and technological power to achieve foreign policy goals. Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller (21 mins). This is a much lighter read about how different attachment...