Range by David Epstein

If you like Malcolm Gladwell-style writing you'll like this book: it has lots of often cutesy, counter-intuitive stories and plenty of "studies show" scientific studies that prove the author's points (naturally) throughout. It makes the book a diverting and easy read. Plenty of ideas in here to think about too if you'd like to get better at courting serendipity and insight in your day-to-day and/or professional life. All in all, a fairly useful book.

Notes:

* Kind learning environments (chess) versus wicked learning environments (reality).

* Cognitive entrenchment

* Rule seeking behavior... Learning by multiple choice or if/then statements. Why giving hints or supplying rules does not help you learn, where the appearance of learning isn't actual learning.

* "Easy learning" versus more "difficult learning," where more difficult learning actually sticks.

* Your perceptions of your own learning can be misleading. if it seems like it's easy, like you're making rapid progress, you're most likely not learning as well as you think.

* "Far transfer": a knowledge structure that is so flexible that it can be applied effectively even in new domains or extremely novel situations.

* Thinking analogically. Kepler using analogies.

* Career and job "match quality," how the army had trouble keeping people "matched" to careers that suited them or challenged them. Why it's important to have the ability to switch jobs or fields.

* "You have to carry a big basket to bring something home" [This goes toward open-mindedness, can you think broadly, how much can you "enlarge" your basket?]

* Serendipitous "outside thinking" to arrive at solutions. "Lateral thinking with withered technology": Gunpei Yokoi at Nintendo, making games out of very old tech materials.

* The "perverse inverse relationship" between fame and prediction accuracy. Yet another reason to ignore media pundits!!

* "Dropping your tools" as metaphor for cognitive flexibility in wicked learning environments: firefighters, NASA engineers, etc.

Stress Without Distress by Hans Selye

A short book distilling Hans Selye's groundbreaking technical work The Stress of Life into practical principles for handling daily life. Articulates a basic philosophy that can be boiled down to "earn thy neighbor's love." Selye calls this "altruistic egotism" and argues that satisfaction in life can be achieved by seeking genuinely satisfying work, earning the goodwill and gratitude of others through that work, and by living with a philosophy of gratitude. Not his finest book, but it is interesting and useful to hear the values and prescriptive statements of one of biology's most eminent scientists. The ideas in this book are not original--the author candidly admits as much--but offer helpful guideposts for how to live. Notes: 1) The first chapter is essentially a layperson's summary of Selye's main work The Stress of Life , defining key terms, what he means (in biological terms) when he talks about stress, describing the evolution of the stres

The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Francis Golffing)

Of the three essays of The Genealogy of Morals I recommend the first two. Skim the third. Collectively, they are extremely useful reading for citizens of the West to see clearly the oligarchic power dynamics under which we live. Show me a modern Western nation-state where there isn't an increasing concentration of power among the elites--and a reduction in freedom for everyone else. You can't find one. Today we live in an increasingly neo-feudal system, where elites control more and more of the wealth, the actions, even the thoughts of the masses. Perhaps we should see the rare flowerings of genuine democratic freedom (6th century BC Athens, Republic-era Rome, and possibly pre-1913 USA ) for what they really are: extreme outliers, quickly replaced with tyranny. The first essay inverts the entire debate about morality, as Nietzsche nukes centuries of philosophical ethics by simply saying the powerful simply do what they do , and thus those things are good by definition. La

The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 by Peter Brown

Late Antiquity is a rich, messy and complicated era of history, with periods of both decline and mini-renaissances of Roman culture and power, along with a period of astounding growth and dispersion of Christianity. And it was an era of extremely complex geopolitical engagements across three separate continents, as the Roman Empire's power center shifted from Rome to Constantinople. There's a lot that went on in this era, and this book will help you get your arms around it. And Christianity didn't just grow during this period, it was a tremendous driver of political and cultural change. It changed everything--and to be fair, really destabilized and even wrecked a lot of the existing cultural foundation underlying Mediterranean civilization. But then, paradoxically, the Christian church later provided the support structure to help Rome (temporarily) recover from extreme security problems and near collapse in the mid-third century. But that recovery was an all-too-brief min

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