Paul Kedrosky Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Paul Kedrosky

I've had a few people ask for accessible book recs on risk and complexity. Here are some: - How nature works: the science of self-organized criticality, Per Bak - Fooled by randomness / Black Swan / Antifragile, Nassim Taleb - Risk Uncertainty and Profit, Frank Knight #xp

Paul Kedrosky

"It was novel and therefore labeled an atrocity by a world which ... detests innovations." - Liddel Hart in 1930 on chemical weapons, as quoted in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), by Paul Fussell

Paul Kedrosky

A new Cormac McCarthy novel coming out this fall. Been too long: THE PASSENGER | Kirkus Reviews https://t.co/hDx3CjNvjP

Paul Kedrosky

¹ In Michael Herr's classic book about Vietnam, Dispatches, he talks about the effect of this sort of stress: "[W]hen I asked him what had happened [on his night patrol he just looked like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he'd waste time telling stories to anyone dumb as I was."

Paul Kedrosky

@qhardy I get it. A legit concern. While talking Crumb, some of my favorite work of his is in his Kafka for Beginners, renamed R. Crumb's Kafka. Unforgettable. https://t.co/oh6GdwYnHg

Paul Kedrosky

As a lapsed academic, I have an unhealthy fondness for arguments of the form, "William Shakespeare didn't write the plays of William Shakespeare. It was another guy with the same name who lived and wrote in Stratford at the same time".

Paul Kedrosky

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.” ― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

Paul Kedrosky

• The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, Christopher Lasch https://t.co/T1eR7H54BW • Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future: Ford, Martin https://t.co/lTRIkO4nun

Paul Kedrosky

Biked past some tennis courts today, and one court was a guy practicing serving, another was a guy with a ball machine, and a third was someone else practicing service. Like Robert Putnam once wrote, bowling alone, as it were.

Paul Kedrosky

It would be better, perhaps, to not notice. "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." -- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac