Recent Books -- Fooled by the Winners, Polarized, Vanishing Asia, Broken Glass, Will to Kill
20 August 2022
- Fooled by the Winners by David Lockwood. The parts of this book that went into survivor bias were decent, but marred by the midbook tangent off into climate change and our potential responses to it. I don’t necessarily disagree with much (but not all) of the author’s view on climate change, but it just derailed the whole book, and the pages could have been better spent digging into survivor bias examples and implications.
- Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein. Good assessment of the state and causes of polarization. Highest recommendation, I learned a lot. One insight about our changing demographics for instance – political power shifts lag 10 years behind demographic shifts, while cultural shifts lead by 10 years. This alone creates a lot of stress in our society. Also interesting is how the parties both basically abdicated control of candidate selection to the popular vote, and the implications of that change. A ton of good stuff.
- Vanishing Asia by Kevin Kelly. Photos of an incredible broad swath of human society. Entrancing.
- Broken Glass: Mies Van Der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece by Alex Beam. An architecture project gone awry, triumph of ego and design over utility.
- A Will to Kill by R.V. Raman. Clumsily authored, and really clumsily formatted for the Kimdle, very hard to read, obviously automatically converted into Kindle format with very little care – choppy paragraph breaks, missing quotation marks around speech, just painful to look at. Ugh.
