Weekly Highlights #1

A weekly round-up of things I found interesting, fun or useful.

📚 Books

The Black Swan

I find myself wanting to buy books all the time but have this nagging voice in my head reminding me that I haven’t finished this book, or that book. I’ve been reading The Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb who seems to understand that a library isn’t a trophy hall of books you’ve finished but rather it’s a resource, ready and waiting to help guide you.

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

📜 Articles

If you find yourself stuck when it comes to decision-making, this article offers 5 heuristics to help stop you procrastinating:

Overchoice and How to Avoid it

🎧 Podcasts

With the weather starting to drop and we start to pick up bugs, for those who like cold plunges a sensible question might be ‘If I’m feeling under the weather, is cold exposure a good idea?’ Andrew Huberman discusses the science behind this question in this short AMA.

💡 X/Notes

💭 Quotes

“We look at the world once, in childhood, the rest is memory”

Louise Gluck