Recommended

Since our current search engines are increasingly unable to uncover great things, we’re back to trading curated lists.

Here’s my incomplete and running list of good writing and ideas. Send me your recommendations.

Essays

What I can remember from the last few months

• Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech. Pair with @jack’s later statements and Fat Protocols
• Rethinking how technology uses our personal data. Well written, designed and polished
• How Complex Systems Fail
• WTF happened in 1971?
• Bret Victor’s curated notes and quotes. Highly dense and awesome
• Beware the Casual Polymath | Applied Divinity Studies and Where are All the Successful Rationalists?
• Intellectual Gluttony
• Entropy explained with Sheeps
• Research Debt. Everything on distill.pub is extraordinary
• An Introduction to the Underlay
• The Anti-Mac User Interface. Old but on point
• On Bullshit
• Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
• How Life Sciences Actually Work
• Startup Engineering Slides from a Stanford Course by @balajis
• What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix it
• The Gap Between Large and Small Companies Is Growing. Why?. I don’t read HBR but this is worrisome. Also American Ph.Ds are failing at start-ups

More Technical Essays

• Graph Computation
• Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Yes, read the actual thing
• Proof Development Environment PDE
• My friend Bruno researches the fundamental principles of intelligence
• The future of software, the end of apps, and why UX designers should care about type theory
• clojure.spec very specific the programming but lucid. This is how to communicate design philosophy
• 5th ELSI Symposium: Eric Smith. I understand 1% of this and it’s still amazing. Cross-disciplinary tour de force
• Quanta Magazine in general

Books and Fiction

• Joseph Campell Power of Myth. Get the audiobook of the conversations
• Conversations with Goethe
• Das Café am Rande der Welt - good and short [German] audiobook, thanks Jan
• The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
• Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
• Antifragile and Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
• Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth... by Jeffrey West. Metabolic scaling gets my “best of biophysics” reward
• The first four chapters of Sapiens. Skip the rest
• The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin - incredible mental and psychological awareness
• The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. This is the best audiobook performance ever produced. His Dark Materials would be as big as Harry Potter if they didn’t mess up the movie (and series).
• Ted Chiang’s Understand and The Story of Us (which the movie “Arrival” was based on)
• The Artist’s Way
• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Podcasts

• Eric Smith on Jim Rutt. Jessica Flack on Jim Rutt
• Joscha Bach on Lex Friedman
• The Portal with Eric Weinstein. Especially Eric’s essays in the beginning of recent shows. Favorite episodes: @balajis, Bret Weinstein, Tyler Cowen
• Audrey Tang talking with Tyler Cowen

Video Games

• Disco Elysium. An unexpected masterpiece
• Conceptual/Artistic: Antichamber, GRIS, 4D Toys, Chroma Lab, Everything
• Wurroom. In a class of its own. Free and takes 10 minutes to play .. smoke.
• 140. Amazing for how “simple” it is.
• Strategy: CIV, Black and White, Dungeon Keeper
• World of Warcraft. You had to be there...
• Battlerite. Intense and balanced arena mechanics
• Action: Dark Souls III, Star Wars Jedi Knight Series, Gonner, Ape Out, Plunge, Nex Machina
• Edu-game: Immune Attack. Taught me the most molecular bio intuition in the least time. Immune Defense was good too

Curated by Others

Careful! Potentially recursive

• Bret Victor’s Most Favorite Things in the World
• Fantastic Anachronism’s Recommended Reading
• Aaron Z. Lewis’ Starterpack
• James Yu’s favorite stories
• Nabeel Qureshi’s favorite books
• Great Books - Tommy Collison

Not Recommended

A waste of time and suppliers of bad memes:

• Business, psychology and cogSci pop science books in general.
• HBR, businessinsider, vox
• Malcom Gladwell books (well written, good sounding, wrong conclusions)

My TODO list

• The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere
• Biological Physics Student Edition: Energy, Information, Life by Philip Nelson
• Random Walks in Biology
• Feynman Lectures
• Christopher Alexander: The Nature of Order
• Essential Cell Biology (Bruce Alberts) FINISHED!
• Systems Biology
• Modern Principles of Economics by Marginal Revolution
• States of Matter by David L. Goldstein
• (more of) Borges