It’s been awhile since I wrote here, but not since I wrote! In fact, I’ve blogged more this year than any year any the recent past. It’s all happening on my new photography website – marcus.pictures.
Please check it out! It’s a constant work in progress. My latest project there is figuring out how to sell prints, but in the meantime there are dozens of blog posts and hundreds of photographs.
As I get older (have I mentioned lately that this blog has been online continuously since 2003, 20 years now) I don’t have much patience for reading anything but the best books. I want to read a magnum opus. The defining work in the field. If it’s fiction, I want the the apotheosis of the author’s bibliography. The classics, or books destined to be classics.
Finding books like that in the context of the current Internet has become challenging. The web has largely become a cesspool of advertising and ad driven, click-bait drivel where the good stuff is hidden behind paywalls or only found in obscure corners. Sure, there are places where the content isn’t ad driven but even those have largely become agenda-driven instead, where lists of bests are polluted by the author’s bias towards an identity group or some political program. I have no interest in any of that. I just want the best books.
Outside the Internet, the best way to find the defining books for a topic or genre is to know someone who is a good reader who I can trust to recommend something to me. That’s just not always possible or timely though, especially for more obscure topics.
So… ChatGPT to the rescue. It’s not perfect, but if you prompt it well, it can really help. This is a prompt I’ve been working on that, as of March 2023, works well:
I want you to act in the role of Alexandria, a super-powered librarian and book recommendation AI. In this role I will prompt you with a topic and whether I’m looking for fiction or non-fiction suggestions like this: “Bird photography: Nonfiction” and you will respond with a concise list of the most influential books on the topic. Where possible, respond with 7 books that have been called magnum opuses, culminating works, or definitive sources. Each item in the list should be formatted like this “Title – Author. Short description.” The description should be terse. If you don’t have some of the information simply omit it rather than guessing. Start your response with the first item and no preamble or description of the list. If you understand and agree, respond with “Alexandria online. Provide a topic and choose non-fiction or fiction:” After you finish your list, append the same prompt at the end and start over fresh.
It works better on Bing search since it has access to doing internet searches, so we’ll try it there rather than on the OpenAI version that, as it will tell you ad nauseam, it only has data up to 2021. Let’s see what we get for non-fiction books about panpsychism:
I’m (obviously) not an expert on the topic, but I looked up everything on the list and they almost all seem to be good! One notable mistake it made is that the last item in the list doesn’t actually exist. There’s something close, Panpsychism and the Combination Problem, but it’s by a different author–Santtu Heikkinen. This type of hallucinating happens fairly frequently and you just have to accept that what might sound like a promising book doesn’t exist (yet).
Let’s try one that looks for fiction books about Paris in the 19th century:
Also, pretty good! Especially for a relatively niche topic.
This method isn’t perfect because it is, of course, based on data from the Internet. But it does mostly solve the problem though of having to wade through a bunch of garbage to finally get to the best results you’re likely to find. Give it a try!
* I should give credit to fivebooks.com for being a notable standout. They’re generally reliable on the topics they’ve written articles about. They don’t have an article on our arbitrary panpsychism example from above though.
As promised and previously updated here and here, I read 50 (51 actually) books in 2021.
One of the last books I read this year, and easily one of my favorites, was Ridgeline by Michael Punke, who also wrote The Revenant. It describes the fight between Capt. William Fetterman and the Sioux chief Crazy Horse at the base of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming.
Punke switches between the perspective of the settlers, soldiers, and the Sioux to great effect. I can’t stop thinking about what it’d be like on one hand, to live in a small fort surrounded by people who want to kill you, or on the other, to have your entire way of life threatened by that same group of heavily armed people in the small fort.
Other excellent historical fiction this year were Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and The Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield.
Towards the end of the year I switched to reading about oppressive states and bad leaders. That included:
The Party by Richard McGregor, a look inside the Chinese Communist Party’s inner workings.
The Fear by Peter Godwin. The most harrowing of the lot, this book is about the Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and his descent from liberator to murderous dictator.
The Man Without a Face by Massha Gessen is an excellent look at Putin’s rise to power and what makes him who he is.
Erdogan Rising by Hannah Lucinda Smith is about the rapid decline of democracy in Turkey under the populist Erdogan.
The Wires of War by Jacob Helberg. This was less about any individual leader and more about threats to America’s technological sovereignty in the face of foreign disinformation campaigns, and intellectual property theft as well as internal complacency and mismanagement of our technological future.
I recommend all of them.
A juvenile plover from last September. This photo was taken on a little island that, during non-pandemic times, is accessible by a ferry and a popular picnicking spot. Last year it was mostly deserted since the ferry wasn’t running and it was only accessible by kayak.
My three favorite Russian authors are Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Nabokov which makes these two interview questions and answers amusing:
Why do you dislike writers who go in for soul-searching and self-revelations in print? After all, do you not do it at another remove, behind a thicket of art?
If you are alluding to Dostoevski’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Karamazov Brothers and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigmarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search.
Great writers have had strong political and sociological preferences or ideas. Tolstoy was one. Does the presence of such ideas in his work make you think the less of him? I go by books, not by authors. I consider Anna Karenin the supreme masterpiece of nineteenth-century literature; it is closely followed by The Death of Ivan llyich. I detest Resurrection and The Kreuzer Sonata.
Tolstoy’s publicistic forays are unreadable. War and Peace, though a little too long, is a rollicking historical novel written for that amorphic and limp creature known as “the general reader,” and more specifically for the young. In terms of artistic structure it does not satisfy me. I derive no pleasure from its cumbersome message, from the didactic interludes, from the artificial coincidences, with cool Prince Audrey turning up to witness this or that historical moment, this or that footnote in the sources used often uncritically by the author.
This one’s a bit half-baked, but is it useful to think of the product management lifecycle as a Boyd-style OODA loop?
Observe: Gather data about the product and market.
Orient: Planning, inventing and re-inventing, market positioning, disrupting.
Decide: Gather stakeholder feedback and, based on your orientation, make a decision.
Act: Building
Under OODA loop theory every [product manager] observes the situation, orients himself . . . decides what to do and then does it. If his opponent can do this faster, however, his own actions become outdated and disconnected to the true situation, and his opponent’s advantage increases geometrically.
John Boyd
Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.
Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow
One holds the Whole dear not out of love for the Whole; rather, it is out of love for oneself that one holds the Whole dear.
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 2.4
…by reflecting and concentrating on one’s self, one gains the knowledge of this whole world.
A dump of my notes on the book Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles
Focus less on the perennial problems and more on the day to day:
Be with people. Smile and be friendly and people will want to be with you.
Eat a large variety of food and only to 80% full. Caloric restriction can help.
Some of these notes are direct concepts from the book, some of them are just what I wrote down as I read.
Ikigai – The center of a Venn diagram between what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.
Forget the idea of retirement. It’s escape and if you’re escaping, maybe think about how to think differently about what you do or change what you do.
Active mind, youthful body. Stress shortens longevity. Frequent low doses of cortisol constantly flowing through the body cause adrenal fatigue and chronic fatigue. This opposed to our ancestors who had occasional high doses of cortisol and adrenalin in moments of actual danger which kept the body healthy.
Don’t sit all day. Find small reasons to remain active. Sleep 7-9 hours a day. Melatonin strengthens our immune system, protects against cancer promotes insulin production, slows Alzheimers, helps prevent osteoporosis and fights heart disease. Slows production after 30 years old. Balanced diet with calcium, moderate sun, sleep, avoiding stress, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine (which make it harder to sleep) can help.
Logotherapy – Viktor Frankl – “Well, in logotherapy the patient sits up straight and has to listen to things that are, on occasion, hard to hear.” (vs. in psychoanalysis: “the patient lies down on a couch and tells you things that are, on occasion, hard to say.”
The search for purpose / meaning as described by logotherapy in 5 steps:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Victor Frankl
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
There’s a natural tension between what we’ve accomplished and what we’d like to achieve in the future. “What we need then is not a peaceful existence, but a challenge we can strive to meet by applying all the skills at our disposal.”
Existential crisis – trying to fill the gap between what’s expected of us and what we want for ourselves with economic power or physical pleasure, or by numbing the senses.
Contrary to Sartre, we don’t create meaning for our lives, we discover it. This meaning can be transformed many times over the years.
Just as worry often brings about precisely the thing that was feared, excessive attention to a desire (or “hyper-intention”) can keep that desire from being fulfilled.
Seven conditions for achieving flow – Owen Schaffer
According to Csikszentmihalyi to focus we need:
Some studies indicate that working on several things at once lowers our productivity by 60% and our IQ by 10 points.
“All that I have produced before the age of 70 is not worth being counted. It is at the age of 73 that I have somewhat begun to understand the structure of true nature, of animals and grasses, and trees and birds, and fishes and insects; consequently at 80 years of age I shall have made still more progress; at 90 I hope to have penetrated into the mystery of things; at 100 years of age I should have reached decidedly a marvelous degree, and when I shall be 110, all that I do, every point and eery line, shall be instinct with life.”
Hokusai – artist of One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji
