reading
33 libros en el 2019
Como ya he comentado antes, vivimos en una época en que el autoaprendizaje es cada día más relevante. En la medida en la que menos gente lee libros, leer se puede convertir en una ventaja competitiva importante. Es un modo muy efectivo de pararse sobre los hombros de gigantes.
El 2019 leí 16 libros de no-ficción y 17 novelas. Del primer grupo, estos son los que más disfruté y recomendaría:
- 21 Lessons for the 21st Century por Yuval Noah Harari.
- This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See por Seth Godin y Ken Blanchard.
- Building a Better Business Using the Lego Serious Play Method por Per Kristiansen y Robert Rasmussun.
- Atomic Habits por James Clear.
- Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad por Austin Kleon.
- AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order por Kai-Fu Lee.
- Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age por Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman y Amanda Palmer.
En la categoría de ficción/fantasía, esta es la lista corta. Si tuviera que quedarme con uno, escogería la trilogía de Liu Cixin, Remembrance of Earth’s Past.
- A Year and a Day in Old Theradane por Scott Lynch. (Fantasía)
- The Murderbot Diaries por Martha Wells (All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rouge Protocol, Exit Strategy). (Ciencia ficción)
- The Quantum Evolution Series (The Quantum Magician, The Quantum Garden) by Derek Künsken. (Ciencia ficción)
- Lady Astronaut series (The Calculating Stars, The Fated Sky) por Mary Robinette Kowal. (Ciencia ficción)
- Delta-V por Daniel Suarez. (Ciencia ficción)
- Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death’s End) por Liu Cixin. (Ciencia ficción)
- The Technologists por Matthew Pearl. (Misterio histórico)
Photo by Nong Vang on Unsplash.
Reading to Lead
Ryan Holiday, in How To Digest Books Above Your “Level” And Increase Your Intelligence:
(…) in an age where almost nobody reads, you can be forgiven for thinking that the simple act of picking up a book is revolutionary. It may be, but it’s not enough. Reading to lead means pushing yourself—reading books “above your level.”
Worth reading the whole article.
Follow the questions
Tyler Cowen, in Reading and rabbit holes:
Follow the questions, not the books per se. Don’t focus on which books to read, focus on which questions to ask. Then the books, and other sources, will follow almost automatically.
(via Brain Food, Farnam Street’s weekly newsletter.)
Meaningful vs Expiring Information
As time remains constant and information becomes abundant and ubiquitous, the question of how to read things that lead to meaningful knowledge becomes ever more relevant.
Some people are worried about how Facebook or Twitter maybe “manipulating” their timelines by deciding which news or tweets they see and which don’t. I don’t think that’s a problem per se.
Newspapers, for example, provide us with a series of news curated by an editorial staff, which certainly has its own view about what’s happening in the world. More important, some newspapers have a long-term vision about that worldview. Also, consider that most people read the newspaper that is more akin to his or her tastes, politically and socially speaking. But isn’t this falling into some kind of confirmation bias1? Some people read two newspapers to have a more “independent” view of the news, but I bet that they are few.
The problem is not Facebook’s or Twitter’s algorithm, but our decision to rely on Facebook and Twitter as a source of relevant information. For some years now —and the trend probably will go on forever— we rely on algorithms to find information. The information available is far too much for us to see without filtering. For example, Google optimizes search results for us. Which is a great convenience in a wide range of situations. Facebook customizes what is shown in our timeline according to its own criteria. We don’t know that criteria for sure, but I would bet that maximizing the time we spend on Facebook is a factor that carries a lot of weight in the algorithm. What’s Twitter’s criteria? How about LinkedIn?
Farman Street’s Shane Parrish concept of expiring information can help us make better use of our time. “Information has a predictable half-life: the time taken for half of it to be replaced or disproved. Over time, one group of facts replaces another.2” Expiring information is information that has a short half-life, and we should avoid it:
Here are a few telltale signs you’re dealing with expiring information. First, it’s marketed to you. Second, lacking details and nuance, it’s easily digestible. This is why it’s commonly telling you what happened, not why it happened or under what conditions it might happen again. Third, it won’t be relevant in a month or a year. Expiring information is one reason I stopped reading most news. It’s a false map.
Attention is the valuable asset we need to take care of:
Avoid the noise because it messes with the signal. Your attention is valuable, so why spend so much time on stuff that will be irrelevant in a few days? Read what stands the test of time. Read from publications that respect and value your time, the ones that add more value than they consume. Read what prompts you to think for yourself. Read fewer articles and more books. Read books that have stood the test of time, those that are still in print after 20 years or so.
What did you read today? Will it still be meaningful next week? What about next year?
Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash.
- Confirmation bias is “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.” (cfr Wikipedia, Confirmation Bias.) ↩
- cfr Half Life: The Decay of Knowledge and What to Do About It. ↩