scorchio's comments

Leave it to Psmith - 10/10 Anna Karenina - 8/10 The Code of the Woosters 8/10 Fooled by Randomness 7/10 Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life 8/10 How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia 9/10 Reluctant Fundamentalist 9/10 The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes 8/10 The Last Question - Asimov - 9/10 The Magic of Thinking Big - 6/10 The catcher in the Rye 8/10 Models 7/10 High Fidelity - Nick Hornby 8/10 The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman 7/10 The Surrender Experiment - 10/10 Untethered Soul - 9/10 The Autobiography of a Yogi - 7/10 Raja Yoga - Swami Vikekandanda - 7/10 Something Fresh, something new - 7/10 Karma Yoga - Swami Vikekandanda - 8/10 Thinking, Fast and Slow - 9/10 Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates 10/10 The Pearl by John Steinbeck 7/10

Why would you recommend See Satan Fall Like Lightening over Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World as a starting place?

I agree. But such access to Silicon Valley luminaries is rare and a seed round from PG and Levchin is going to distort and inflate investment in subsequent rounds.

The initial seed round gave Homejoy more rocket fuel than was natural. I watched the speech live, and at the time I felt that Homejoy was a Mini with a jet engine. It was imbalanced and was likely to blow up.

The unnatural way Homejoy raised their seed rounds, with Cheung basically calling up Levchin and PG [1] was instrumental in setting up a failed business. This gave the startup undeserving social proof and let to the huge funding it should have never received.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVDmyRxeGCo&list=PLQ-uHSnFig...

For engineers, the last paragraph is the most pertinent:

"The key weapon is abstraction," he says. "If you can build abstractions well enough, you should be able to break things down into bits you can handle." That maxim guides every other discipline in engineering, not least the design of computer hardware. Why not apply it to software, too?

Culture is made up of many abstract ideas ranging from values and customs that combine to make an interdependent complex system, prediction is impossible. And as the norms and values were shaped by situations that were random and or completely different to the situation we currently experience, we get another layer of complexity.

Sam Harris' book on the same subject - http://www.samharris.org/free-will