Book Worm

Who is considered the greatest writer in the English Language?

William Shakespeare.

His work Antony and Cleopatra contains some of the finest poetry. It was inspired by Thomas North’s 1579 English translation of Plutarch’s Lives. To say that Shakespeare took inspiration from North’s work would be an understatement.
[Read more…] about The Elements of Eloquence

In recent months, as the world’s second-best healthcare system (Italy) got crushed with the corona pandemic, the doctors faced an unprecedented dilemma that they were never trained for — triaging the Covid patients, i.e., deciding who gets a bed in the hospital and who’s left to die.

A news article reported in March —

The most devastating medical crisis in Italy since World War Two is forcing doctors, patients, and their families to make decisions that Marco Resta, a former military doctor, said he has not experienced even in the Kosovo war.

How do you decide who gets the ventilator and who doesn’t? How does one measure the value of human life? I have no clue how even to begin answering this question. But as Daniel Kahneman observed that humans, while thinking about a tough problem, often replace the original question with an easier one.

Bill Bryson, in his book Body: A Guide for Occupants, starts the text by exploring the easier question – what is the value of a human body?
[Read more…] about The Body : A Guide for Occupants

Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other. Which means every single person on this Earth is connected to every other person. It’s just a matter of finding that chain of connection.

What’s true in the context of human connections is also true for creativity and ideas.

A familiar saying recommends, “There’s nothing new under the Sun.”

Every novel body of knowledge is the result of some permutation and combination of prior discoveries.
[Read more…] about Bookworm: A Technique for Producing Ideas

We all take pride in claiming that humans are the most intelligent creatures on planet earth. That’s ironic because the definition of intelligence is also created by us. In other words, we’re giving ourselves high ranking on a scale created by us.

But the irony doesn’t end there.

Inspite of wearing our intelligence as badge of honour, we all make errors which our “so-called intelligence” classify as dumb mistakes. That’s because no matter how hard we try, we can’t fight mother nature — the traits deeply ingrained in our behaviour by millions of years of evolution.

In the popular rationality blog Less Wrong, while explaining the thoughts behind the blog’s odd name, Ruby writes —

1. A humble recognition that no human is ever going to attain perfectly true beliefs and be right about everything. We should always believe that some of our beliefs are mistaken, we just don’t know which ones.

2. A bold recognition that notwithstanding the impossibility of being perfectly right, there is still the possibility of being less wrong. Everyone believes false things, but some believe a lot fewer wrong things than others. [Read more…] about Bookworm: You Are Now Less Dumb

In 2012, Scott Young took upon him the challenge to complete the four year computer science curriculum of MIT and pass the exams without attending the classes. It was literally a moonshot for two reasons. First, Scott had a degree in business and no prior knowledge of computers. Second, he was planning to finish the challenge in under one year.

He did it. And that started him on the path to mastering several other hard skills like learning to speak four different languages (fluently) in one year and learning to draw like a professional in 30 days.

How does he do it — mastering hard skills in a shockingly short amount of time?
[Read more…] about Bookworm: Ultralearning