Daniel

With all the hubbub about this book I was cautious thinking I wouldn't like it. After all, books like the Hunger Games are also very popular, but I found it to be rather poorly written and the story not that great. Harry Potter on the other hand has a lot of great elements and reminds me of great authors of the time and I don't think it's unfair to say that Rowling is like a Roald Dahl of our times. I know of only one modern day children's author that writes better, that I have read, and that would be Philip Pullman. Granted, I haven't read a lot. Sure, I've Neil Gaiman, but I very much his style of leaving a lot of loose ends, and going nowhere (Or should I say neverwhere?) with side stories.

Rowling spins a good tale, the language is good and plenty descriptive, and the characters have interesting personalities.

I should start by saying I'm neither a liberal nor a conservative. I was born in Sweden, moved to the US as a child, then back to Sweden. I went to high-school in Belgium, and did my Bachelors of Engineering in the UK, and later moved back to the US. Basically I've been exposed to several ideologies and systems of government.

There's really a lot to pick on on this book. I learned next to nothing about how to frame things. Repeating things endlessly until people believe it seemed to be the only bit in there, but I'm not sure about this strategy. It's not going to convert anyone.

The author's credentials is in cognitive science and cognitive linguistics but this book is about politics and economy to a larger part than the topics he has credentials in.

I felt that conservatives were misrepresented quite often, and the book was clearly biased when it didn't need to be. For example, I'm sure conservative parents also nurture their children, and that not everyone believes in this strict father model. The way conservatives are portrayed comes out pretty evil and as child beaters while liberals are loving and caring.

He talks about Bush and how Bush started war etc. but he fails to mention that Obama threw far more bombs than Bush did in Pakistan (http://drones.pitchinteractive.com/). This bias mentioning only the bad on one side, and not pointing out faults with their own side is intellectually dishonest.

There's not a single reference for any of his claims in this book. I'm used to reading book with factual research, but while the author makes a lot of claims, not a single one is backed up by any reference materials. Why should I believe what he just casually throws out there?

He talks about poor people are not free, sick people are not free etc. I'm going to tell you why I don't buy in to this definition of freedom. The argument is that poor people are not free, because they have limited options because of their economic status. There will always be options that are limited to people, for whatever reasons. But if having limited options means you're not free, then we're never free, because options will always be limited by one way or another. For example, can we say an ugly person is not free? It's a fact that beautiful people are treated better, and get hire salaries etc, so does it mean that ugly people are not free? No, this definition of free makes no sense to me at all. There is no link between freedom and limited options. They're two different things. Being free is being able to pursue those options, and having those options isn't freedom.

He had a lot of comments about Economics but really, I like this quote by Rothbard:

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”
–Murray Rothbard

And since I read a lot of economics, I'm going to say I was not impressed by what he had to say on the matter.

OMG. He's also an amazing author. This is one of those books that makes me feel like 5-stars for other books are undeserved because this book is such a large step above the rest.


He went through all the nervous hell stuff you'd expect for someone who is going to pull off what the did. Imagine sitting at the NSA labs copying data onto micro sd that took like 8 hours to complete, and being paranoid as all hell that someone may catch you in the act. Imagine not telling anyone about what you were going to do and keeping it all bottled up by yourself for a year.

Thanks Ed.

Love Norberg. He's very detailed and a good author.

Some quotes from the book I enjoyed below. There's lots to think about in this book.

“The religion that makes people good makes people bad, but the religion known as freedom makes all people good, for it destroys the inner conflict that makes people devils.”


“Part of waking up is that you live your life as you see fit. And understand: That is not selfish. The selfish thing is to demand that someone else live their life as YOU see fit. That's selfish. It is not selfish to live your life as you see fit. The selfishness lies in demanding that someone else live their life to suit your tastes, or your pride, or your profit, or your pleasure. That is truly selfish.”

Some interesting stuff, but I didn't learn anything useful.

Some good stuff but it felt weirdly organized and filled with anecdotes for the sake of the anecdotes themselves. Mark Manson is a terrible narrator for his own book.

Only about half the book actually felt useful. Some good writing tips. Some grammatical content felt outdated.

Very interesting all the way through. The audio book was really well made and I wish all were like this. Well done Gladwell!

Big government
Lewis spends a lot of time glorifying government and how it's the key to innovation etc. Yet, he completely fails to capture the irony of 5th risk being a result of government mismanagement. The nuclear waste that was put in the ground was because of poor government choices. However, this doesn't count for anything as he continues to harp on the normal thinly discussed “shortcomings” of the free market. He mentions the waste is a result from the bombs dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki, but he fails to mention that the a Japanese had already surrendered when the bombs were dropped [1]

Trump
He gripes a lot about Trump not being prepared in sending people to the appropriate places. Sure, that's all good and fair, but what would also be fair is to mention that Trump didn't want this job at all [2]. Further more, Trump never expected it, and we can blame the DNC from him getting elected [3] (yes, they had a very big hand in it) as part of their pied piper strategy.

Food stamps
5% of 70 billion is still 3.5 billion. The author really tries to sweep that under the rug. That's no small amount of tax payer money! My own experience was knowing some parents from my children's school, who went bankrupt, foreclosed on their house, bought another house the next year and bought more expensive steaks with food stamps then me who had a job felt comfortable on. It would be akin to going to expensive restaurants how they spent it.

References:
1. Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology, Howard Zinn, 1991.
2. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff, 2018
3. wikileaks, Podesta emails; specifically the “Pied Piper Strategy”

So good I had to change 5 star ratings of other books to 4

Really fascinating information on trauma and psychological advancement around it such as EMDR. I do wish he would leave out any mention of politics, like he mentions in the book, and there's not a lot of it, thankfully. People who don't understand economics shouldn't opine on it, anymore than I should opine on psychology as I have no background in it. I learned a lot about trauma in this book.

A bit heavy on biblical references but absolutely superb overall

Great book with great info. Super repetitive however, and not necessarily in the way you'd think but it's like the book is constantly marketing itself. Instead of an overview of the book in the first chapter, it's like the book is giving overviews throughout the book. “As you'll see in chapter X” is repeated about a million times (more or less).

5 stars for material, with a 2 star deduction for wasting my time with useless repetition.

Her writing style is so captivating. It's a book about people and it tells a good story. I wish George RR Martin had left me feeling as fulfilled with his first book. This is not a read that overwhelms with characters and doesn't resolve a large plot . It's captivating and well written.

Repetitive AF. As most of these books it can be distilled to almost nothing. Yeah the advice is 5 stars but it doesn't mean the book is

I really liked this book in the beginning but the ending was not satisfying. Some things were too far fetched, and it felt she was wrapping up just for the sake of wrapping up. Also the format of jumping between two different pasts was also confusing.

This book was way better than I expected. Unlike previous works like Remote which I found rather repetitive at times, this book was packed with goodies and common sense tips for how a business should be run. Frankly I regret never having applied to 37signals after having read this book. I was an early adapter of Ruby to boot (I wrote my first pages in 2002, 3 years before the first version of rails).

Didn't see the fuss about this book. Good buildup but the end just Meh

I like the test at the end but I think the overall strategy is more difficult to read than tsumego type problems (of which there are an abundance) so the more valuable tests would have been more battle strategies. All in all, I feel the battle strategies chamber should be longer since its the hardest to find resources on. Furthermore, it's also the title of the book.

At times I thought the conclusions reached were not so scientific that Mo had liked. He's very particular about the science behind things, but I ended up feeling there were gaps in reasoning.
At other times I found the story to be moving and compelling. Finally I don't see the science necessarily being as necessary as the peacefulness one can achieve in the pursuit of happiness.

I found the epilogue to be especially touching. All in all, it was a great story.

Been following Martin for 8 years. Great articles and a great book. Intermittent fasting is now a thing and he was a pioneer

A lot of interesting information about Leonardo in this book. However, there are definitely places where information is repeated, and sometimes it feels the author is adding words for simply the sake of adding words. It's far more long-winded than it needs to be

Crazy

First, thanks to my friend Elaine who recommended this book. I've had so much more success with meditation in general when I deviate from some fixated path of posture and concentration which so many other methods teach. This book talks about looking past all that; looking deeper