Reading — Arne Bahlo

Homo Deus

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This book was tough, I was angry a lot.

Yuval Noah Harari starts by explaining how humanity has solved famine, plague and war and will therefore focus on advancing humans themselves (even if you ignore COVID-19 and the Ukraine invasion, what about the climate crisis?). God is dead and the new religion, Humanism, has the goal to create super-humans, therefore creating the next evolutionary stage after Homo Sapiens: Homo Deus.

He's talking about consciousness, how it will be decoupled from intelligence and how every living being, including humans, is just a complex algorithm that we'll just reverse-engineer and recreate in the future ("there is no human touch").

Harari makes it hard to distinguish between fact and opinion because everything is presented as a fact. Even if there are references that are supposed to back it up, they often only cover a very small part of the statement. And the statements are wild. At one point he's saying that national socialism is just a variant of humanism (see this statement by Humanists UK: Yuval Noah Harari and ‘humanism’ ).

I would've given this book a two-star rating but I've read this in a book club and what this book actually does well is sparking discussions and making you think about these topics.

The Employees

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This book is strange.

It's a collection of numbered statements from human and humanoid employees on a space ship after the crew took on some "objects" from the planet New Discovery. The statements are not ordered so you only get pieces to the puzzle and nothing makes sense in the beginning.

I loved the weird and unique way of storytelling and how it showed different perspectives, struggles and tensions. The "objects" were weird, I can’t imagine what they‘re like (maybe that’s the point).

Not an easy read, but if you‘re into dystopian sci-fi I would recommend it.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

When I first heard of this book I immediately dismissed it, mostly due to the title sounding weird to me. But this book popped up again on reading lists and recommendation threads all over the internet and people were praising it. When I finally decided to check it out, I was pleasantly surprised.

Dale Carnegie shares 30 principles for dealing with people in four parts:

Fundamental techniques in handling people
Six ways to make people like you
Win people to your way of thinking
Be a leader.

Each principle is annotated with anecdotes from famous people or reports from people that attended his courses. These can feel arbitrary and constructed, especially towards the end, but they do show how a principle can be applied in practice.

This was nonetheless a great read and I recommend giving this a try, there's lots of good advice and I sincerely believe it will elevate how you deal with people.

The Psychology of Money

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

If you struggle with managing money or making smart investments, this book is your lifeline. And if you reckon you know what you're doing, you will still find immense value in this.

Morgen Housel takes a complex topic and distills it into 20 parts, each talking about a specific angle of looking at or working with money.

This is the kind of book I'll give to my sons when they're old enough. It gives you an understanding of how markets work (and why they work like that), which investment strategies make sense for which people and how to prepare for retirement.

Here's a quote that made me laugh:

When most people say they want to be a millionaire, what they might actually mean is ”I’d like to spend a million dollars.“ And that is literally the opposite of being a millionaire.

Digital Minimalism

Thu, 11 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Do you feel naked without your phone with you? Are you spending too much time on social media?

It's not your fault, but you can do something against it. Humans have evolved over millions of years to read social cues in face-to-face conversations and we're having a hard time figuring out the digital "replacements" that came up in the last decades.

Cal Newport takes on the attention economy and helps you to reflect on your digital consumption. Not only social media, but also checking the news and texting can be a waste of time and even harmful to you. Digital minimalism is not against technology, but using technology wisely and living an intentional life.

This book made me go through my notification settings and disable almost everything (I recommend using the scheduled summary on iOS liberally). I'm also using the iOS Personal focus, which disables almost all notifications, more often, especially when reading or during family time.

If you're asking yourself if you should read this book: you should. It makes you more mindful of the things you spend your time on.

How Democracies Die

Wed, 03 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

American democracy has worked by relying on two norms: Mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance. Donald Trump openly violated these norms, but he wasn't the first—in fact the GOP has been on a shift away from democracy's guard rails since 2008.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt start by talking about the ways democracies fell apart in the past. Some of them by coup and some, more recently, by autocrats undermining democratic values. For example eroding the trust in the voting system, being openly hostile to their opponents instead of respecting them as part of a democracy or attacking the press ("Fake News").

I learned, how Davic Price, a Democrat from Chapel Hill, put it, that "American democracy may be more fragile than we realized." But I also learned what to look out for, how to behave when a party is violating democratic norms and how (American) democracy can be saved. All this can be applied to other democracies as well, some of which already show similar signs of partisan hostility.

Highly recommed reading this if you care about democracy (which I hope you do).

How to Live

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This book gives you exact instructions how to live. And then it does it again, 26 times, and they're all incompatible.

One chapter tells you to get a rural off-the-grid home with your own electricity, water and food. Another tells you to go into a small village that hasn't adapted to new technologies and uses the old, tested ways. Yet another tells you to go into the big city because that's where ambitious people live.
These all make sense in the context of the priorities, but you can obviously only do one.

I read this book and found my values represented less in some chapters, more in others, but almost every chapter had at least one or two points I could agree with.

Derek Sivers writes a masterpiece that gives you lots of answers, you have to pick the ones you want to apply. There's no right or wrong. It's all a matter of values.

Dune

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This book sat on my shelf for the better part of last year. After reading a few non-fiction books I longed for a novel and decided to pick up Dune.

It took me the first 100 pages to really get into it, but then I was immerged into the fascinating world of the desert planet Arrakis (or "Dune") with its sand worms, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood with superhuman powers, the native Freemen who learned to live in the harsh environment, the intrigues, the politics and the religion.

I loved to see the evolution of the main character from being a royal youth from House Altreides to leading the native Freemen as Muad'Dib.

This quote really stood out to me, as it's still relevant today:

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

Can't wait to read the other books in the Dune series!

The Design of Everyday Things

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Did you ever push on a door that's pull only or the other way around? How did that make you feel? Probably not great, but I have good news: It's not your fault! They're designed badly. A door should have a push plate or a pull handle, signifiers which clearly indicate what actions are possible without you having to stop and read the signs.

Don Norman talks about human psychology in interacting with objects or machines, the principles of discoverability, of feedback and affordances, signifiers, mapping, and conceptual models. Those all work together to create delightful, natural user experiences.

This book has changed how I look at objects and UI design forever, making me appreciate good design and notice bad design everywhere I go. It's a classic and will be relevant as long as humans interact with objects.

I cannot recommend this book enough if you care about design at all.

Invisible Women

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This book opened my eyes to the systematic exclusion of women in areas I didn't see before. Did you know, for example, that crash tests are in most cases done with male dummies only, which results in cars being way more dangerous to drive for women? Or that most medicine trials are done with no or only a few women (so a drug might be safe for men but too potent for women, or the other way around)? And there's many situations like this, where the default human is male (and white) and everything else is an anomaly and not even considered. This creates data gaps, where we don't even know how women are affected.

Caroline Criado Perez argues that we need to start collecting sex-aggregated data in studies and stop excluding them from decisions that affect them. And I agree.

Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve read a few management books and this one stands out for being so hands-on. Sarah Drasner provides systems for your everyday work as an engineering manager and guides you through your different areas of responsibility in four parts:

Your team
Collaboration
Helping your team do their best work
Your work

She talks about 1:1s, giving feedback, navigating conflict, holding good meetings, happiness and drive, change management, prioritizing your time and much more.

One of the cornerstones of the book is the chapter about values. Values are defined as the "fundamental belief that guide us, motivate us and drive our action". They can help to give us context so we can be see where people might be coming from. Aligned values can build trust in a team and misaligned values can lead to burnout.

This sentence at the end has me stop and re-read because it's so on-point:

Your job is to be interruption-driven so your team can be focus-driven.

Highly recommended.

Never Split the Difference

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Chris Voss makes this non-fiction book exciting by telling stories from real hostage negotiations from his time at the FBI. Each chapter is about a specific tactic and filled with psychological information as well as real-world experience and has a nice summary at the end (remind me to collate those into my notes).