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Andy Kessler's How We Got Here. Only a few hundred people have rated it on GoodReads, but if you wanted to trace a march of technological progress from swords
by brownbat 7y ago
Andy Kessler's How We Got Here.
Only a few hundred people have rated it on GoodReads, but if you wanted to trace a march of technological progress from swords to the Internet, it does a good job. There are definitely other stories you could tell about this accelerating sweep of technological change, but this one was a solid rapid overview and really stuck some ideas with me about how changes compound (or completely swerve to a new goal) over time.
The original tweet is more about how domain experts would rely on books nobody outside that domain has heard of, so maybe I should be thinking more about textbooks that stuck with me. Sources of Chinese Tradition, the Tractatus, and A Mathematical Theory of Computation all left pretty lasting influences in one way or another.
Sources of Japanese Tradition discusses the origins of Tendai Zen Buddhism, with some bits on Dogen, who once wrote something like, "If you want to achieve a certain thing, you must first become a certain person. After becoming a certain person, you no longer want that certain thing."
That's a pretty good tie in to Kessler's view of the last several hundred years of human progress. We were repeatedly solving some other problem, which once we had the tools to solve that, it became nearly irrelevant compared to what else we could do now.
- chubot 7y agoFWIW I read most of How We Got Here book last year after having it in my reading list for something like 15 years :-/ Somehow it popped up after all that time. I thought it was a great concept for a book, and the author has a unique viewpoint and knows his stuff, but it wasn't very well written. There seemed to be a lot of detail without defining terms, but it was also "breezy" and fast. Just my opinion.
- brownbat 7y agoYeah, it's admittedly more along the lines of an insightful blog post or a really good bar conversation than some kind of Rise and Fall, expectations management is probably due here. But it kind came on this crest of technological advancement nonfiction, like Brilliant or Salt, and gets some of the key implications across in a fast and digestible way.
- xwowsersx 7y agoHmm..reviews on Goodreads seem kind of mixed. Some make it sound like it's a bit of an idiosyncratic editing mess with disconnected chapters, etc.
- brownbat 7y agoProbably fair, I found it insightful, and held my expectations to something self published by someone in their spare time, but may not hold up to someone expecting a more professional work. The books I liked with more consistently higher ratings tended to be much better known. We could crowdsource the search for unknown greats of course. If you glance through GoodReads' highest rated books and filter down to the titles with the fewest ratings you get a mix of Austrian poetry (Rilke and Trakl), lectures by Feynman, and a volume of Love and Rockets. That's honestly not a bad place to start... https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/24716.Highest_Rated_Books_on_Goodreads_with_at_least_100_ratings_ https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/24716.Highest_Rated_Book...
- agumonkey 7y agoPotential prequel to Dartnell's The Knowledge I suppose