Book Review

The 15-year review of The World Is Flat

Re-reading The World is Flat now, after going through Lexus and the Olive Tree, I would…

Review — Principles for Dealing with a Disappointing Ray Dalio and his “Changing World Order”

Nexus

Nexus is a Mark Buchanan book, and being a writer-scientist of complexity, would also rank highly on this list. His other book — Forecast, is also on this list. This was written in the early 2000s, as the Internet was beginning to become mainstream, as the first heady promises of the Internt was being pronounced.

Collapse of Complex Societies

Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies is an important, remarkable book, and is a framework that is…

The Black Swan

The Black Swan remains a fascinating book. It is a part rant, part statistical guidebook on the occurrence of extreme events in the world. As Taleb himself writes, The Black Swan is part of his own investigations into the probability and statistics.

In the BookTree: Steven Johnson’s How We Got to Now

Steven Johnson writes good science-history books. Not just science books, or history books, but science-history books. They are usually a composite of the the material history of the science, as well as the ideological history of the material artifact. Steven Johnson looks…

BookTree — Age of the Unthinkable

Age of the Unthinkable is one of the top books in eigenvector centrality.

Normal Accidents

This is part of a larger project to look at the books that are useful for understanding complexity. I do this also as part of the…

Thinking about Future(s) from the Pasts

Can we learn from our histories, and discern what could happen in the future(s)?

That’s what we do everyday, actually. We constantly thinking about possible steps in the future(s) from our past experiences. Why do you try something…

Learnings from Sapiens

This is part of a series of the authors who look at macro-history — historical works that spans pre-civilisation time periods to the present.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is a tour de force. In the book, he makes several claims about why people were able to form…