📚 Thinking rigorously, with tools, lists, & agency

Micro reviews of nonfiction I read recently. On problem-solving, offloading our thoughts, AI tools & the struggles centaurs would face.

The little 📚 emoji is meant to signal that this article is a selection of interesting nonfiction I read since the last Reading Roundup edition, which mostly focused on cognitive catalysts.

• If you enjoyed my Christmas edition detailing the history of the American chestnut, check out the Atlantic’s subsequent article touching on some of the recent developments in the quest to bring back America’s “perfect tree.”

• I was quoted in this article, on the topic of what I wish I’d known before I started my newsletter.

• The Early History of Counting is a great article focusing on how long humanity has been offloading its brain, which makes me feel way less awkward about taking so many notes and using fancy tools like calculators and LLMs. Ancient philosophers like Socrates complained about books making people lazy because of not doing oral memorization anymore, which solved into people complaining about computers. Stone Age cavemen probably complained about people offloading their number sense onto tally sticks.

• I recently changed careers, which has been amazing but also a bit tricky sometimes because the norms in a tech startup are very different from the norms for teaching. This guide to rigorous thinking really crystallized for me how my bosses probably want me to handle problem-solving and communication, and I’m really glad I found Wes Kao’s newsletter. The questions she listed out really do help ideas become more concrete, which is valuable.

• This advice for new software developers is intended to be a little off the beaten path, and as someone who is not a software developer, I particularly appreciated the insights about the importance of understanding the underlying reasons a particular ‘best practice’ was adopted. As with laws that don’t always make sense on the surface, it’s usually compensation for a weird edge case. There was also great advice about how to balance the importance of ‘breadth’ vs. ‘depth’ when it comes to developing skills.

• Speaking of developing skills, here’s an inspirational reminder that most of us do have agency over our own lives.

• I don’t typically share things for the comments, but there were lots of good advice here, and I think the people who follow me would enjoy the insights about how various people in the LessWrong community became more hardworking.

• This is the best explanation of what challenges centaurs would face in society and war if they were real I’ve ever seen. If you’re a speculative fiction author or, and enjoy games, books or movies, I highly recommend checking it out — it was incredibly thought-provoking. For example, consider: Any obstacle which would foil a horse will foil a centaur.  No low doorways, no stairs.

• Here’s Jeremy Caplan’s “best tools of 2023.” Many — like Oasis, an AI dictation app — offer fancier, more streamlined versions of things I think are useful, as well as his own use-cases & prompts for ChatGPT. Incidentally, he also thinks Coda is the most underrated app of the year, evidently it has very robust AI features and lots of organization & management options.

• Julia Child’s notebooks offer useful examples of what kinds of people logging daily activities (like what you ate, or what restaurants you’ve visited) can be useful for, and why it was useful for her in particular, as someone who went on to become a famous (and quite admirable) cookbook writer. For my own self, I’ve finally reached the point where I need to keep track of which nice restaurants I’ve visited on various occasions — I felt pretty silly last month when, for my husband’s birthday dinner, I recommended an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ place it turned out we’d already been to years ago for an earlier birthday. My restaurant reflections log is another case where themed logs are more useful than daily notes.

If you have any interesting hidden gems you’d like to share, please do. I’m always looking for more stuff to read, particularly if it’s insightful, funny, or weirdly obsessive.