It was the first book I started reading I could not put down until the end. Gained a lot of appreciation for literature at that time.

The other book that I enjoyed and changed me was ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ by Alan Watts. I was a fan of Alan Watts works through his lectures already and it was wonderful to hear his ideas in writing for the first time.

The book is available to read for free online (https://antilogicalism.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/wisdom-of...).

I wish everyone read or watched Alan Watts lectures and books. The world would be a much nicer place if that was the case.

My favorite quote is by him:

‘We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.’

If anyone doesn't have the time or attention span to commit to a full-blown book, The Joyous Cosmology [0] and Become What You Are [1] present some of Watt's ideas in a more condensed format. The former is a ~30 page essay freely available online. The latter is a collection of ~15 very short essays (1-12pg each) - a perfect replacement for smartphone scrolling when confronted with 5-10 minutes of free time.

https://holybooks-lichtenbergpress.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content...

https://www.amazon.com/Become-What-You-Alan-Watts/dp/1570629...

Everytime I read it I gain more insights. I absolutely recommend reading this book alongside a readers guide which gives more background and depth, there are many biblical, historical, and author-related references that won't be understood otherwise. The author's own life is massively relevent to the events of the novel. I recommend this guide:

https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Critical-Companion-A...

The latter argued that, contrary to a common notion, Woland is emphatically not the Devil. I did not get far in trying to understand it, but this and the similarly non-understandable commentary really took away some fun out of reading the book, because I constantly felt I was too stupid to get it.

Reading commentary is good, but maybe on a way lower level than literature professors trying to make a name.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/582270/Everything/

Another book similar in spirit and quality to M&M is "Danilov, the violist" by Vladimir Orlov.

But you can recover a lot of understanding even without speaking the language with a bit of work. By say trying to get a feel for what Moscow might be like in the 1920. Political persecution and censorship are major themes. Even things like psychiatric hospitals are important because they were often used as an alternative torture and imprisonment system. Writers are poets were also important. That was before TV, radio was just getting started so writers were sort of like the Youtube celebrities of the day. And controlling what they say, do, and act was critical. In other words things that might seems kind of "meh" or odd carry significance and knowing about it might make it for a richer interpretation and a more interesting read.

I really liked the book, but mostly because I thought it was funny and had great plot. I fear I missed all the deep wisdom.

(This is Pontius Pilate's response to Yeshua.) To me this is about staying silent when you see evil being committed. But it doesn't even have to be 'Evil with a big E', it's just about speaking up when you see something that doesn't sit right with your morality.

The other big takeaway for me was about how Margarita threw away all the rules of society to save the Master (her beloved). But she did it for more than just his sake, I think; she certainly took her liberation from society's expectations of women.

I think the first example is just some innocent banter of a couple characters from long ago, who had a very naive understanding of the world because they couldn't begin to comprehend its true complexity.

I think the second example is something any cool person would have done, because witches are awesome.

IMHO envy, fanaticism, cruelty also cause more harm than cowardice.

Absence of cowardice (also known as self-preservation) will severely limit what people allow to do to them. This includes limiting all the things that you listed as worse than cowardice.

On the other hand, lack of fear will empower ideologies that employ suicide bombers.

Also it will make nuclear wars much less unthinkable.

Another book that changed allot about how I look at the world is "The long tail" by Chris Anderson. Maybe too thin of a concept for a whole book, but definitely interesting.

Parties would become a lot more insufferable.

wonderful in comic form! :D

In MoM the all 3 main characters have real prototypes. Master is Author (Bulgakov), Margarita is Author's wife Elena, Woland is Stalin. Bulgakov was under assault of Soviet regime, he wanted to emigrate, but Stalin kept him in country. He was in constant fear of being detained for anti-soviet propaganda. Her wife which he loved a lot was forced to became secret informer, she reported periodically to officials against him. Bulgakov knew that, and this theme also in book. This moment is so tragic and central, because her wife was editor of the book. MoM is about exceptional courage of Bulgakov, his personal response to Staling, his sole main reader. At that time, just comparing Stalin to Statan was enough to be executed.

I highly recommend this course to understand better MoM https://arzamas.academy/courses/39 unfortunately it's in Russian.

No idea whether Fagott has some linguistic extravagance in the original, but it works really well on this Master of Ceremonies.

I mean, come on, the devil himself vs the communist party of Russia, sprinkled with loads of humour. What else do you need?

It was the first time I realized books could be dangerous, subversive, and truly educational as well as simply informative or entertaining.

Luckily if you're in Australia, you can read this book for free because it is public domain there.

[1] https://bubblin.io/cover/animal-farm-by-george-orwell (iPad-book)

[2] http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100011.txt

You have to only look at the management hierarchy in your company. Pigs in the Animal Farm novel eat apples.

We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for YOUR sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.

Why do you think your bosses get business travel, no limit credit cards, RSU, big bonuses and neat double digit monthly pay check.

It is for YOUR sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.

Sorry, but i dont believe this is an accurate analogy. The reason is that otherwise they might leave for another opportunity. No-one is telling workers what the pigs are saying in AF.

That is to say, I very rarely find anyone who will agree that the book is anti-capitalist at teh same time that it's opposed to Stalinism.

I see the book continually taken happily anti-communist text. But the text is certainly not _just_ about the Soviet system under Stalin.

Over the years, the big impact of Orwell to me has been how readily people can look at systems that they consider to be Other than their own and critique them while eagerly ignoring the implications for their own situation. That is, everyone here thinks the sheep are dumb, but at least they went through a period of time where they tried to replace the farmer with a different pig... where I live in Texas, all the sheep just think they are the farmer.

Just "overthrow the current leaders and then (??? magic happens here ???) and then we get a better society" doesn't work. You end up where you started or worse because usually the ideas haven't changed.

Intellectual revolutions must precede political ones.

This is why I'm kind of a dull boring centrist politically. I dont support any major attempt to rock the boat because there has been no intellectual improvements that might guide such a thing.

They have grievances with the existing systems, reason to believe those in power won't address those grievances, and reason to believe replacing those in power with people more sympathetic to their grievances will address them.

Also, there has been a boatload of revolutionary thought about how to make a better society over the last century or so. There are clear ways that our system is imperfect and clear ideas of how it could be improved. I'm not sure why you claim there are no "intellectual improvements" over the status quo.

So they are doing exactly the same as those in power, which is taking care of themselves.

Those are mostly not exceptions; successfully uprooting an existing power structure takes more than good ideas and solid values, and replacing it with something that will stably sustain itself both during the revolutionary emergency and afterwards without either falling apart or enabling a power hungry would be despot to exploit it to create an authoritarian regime takes far more than that.

The US “Revolution” was a regional separatist movement led by the local elites and local governments that did not upend the basic local social, economic, or political power structure save for severing the latter from a remote central government (and the resulting new central system was replaced with something more closely approximating, and deliberately modeled on, the old one very shortly after the Revolution in the face of widespread perception of imminent failure otherwise.)

In other words, it mostly wasn't revolutionary and in the one way that it was it mostly failed.

* they bore the brunt of Mongol invasion which utterly wiped the aristocracy at the time and set back the countries development by generations and depopulating the land. Luckily, the Mongols stopped there and didn't move further west, saving the populace of Western Europe

* Without warmwater ports, Russia lacked the capacity to participate in maritime trade that bolstered the economy of Western Europe

* Brutal and absolute monarchical rule suppressed any kind of representative government; Serfdom (essentially, slavery) was abolished only in the late 19th century

* Once it got its act together and started Industrializing in good stead... now comes the Crimean War, depleting morale, resources and will of the people

* Oh... was that not bad enough? World War 1, which strains the country so bad, that Germans successfully foment unrest and ultimately Revolution. The Revolution itself ends up being the best strategic decision by the Germans, and the Communist Government signs a treaty essentially ceding large parts of the country to the Central Powers

* But wait! That didn't mean the end of troubles for Russians, and they endure a prolonged Civil War fought not just on the Western theater, but also on their Eastern provinces. Red and White Russians fight each other constantly, appropriate resources from the peasants by force.

* The Country has barely recovered from all of this, Stalin comes to power. The madman purges experienced officers and intelligentsia leading to a very ineffective State and Military; he signs a pact leading to (temporary) peace as they know they can't fight the Germans

* Whoops, nope, the Germans invade anyways, reach as far as Moscow. Millions of Russians perish. St. Petersburg is besieged in one of the most destructive sieges ever, period

* At the end of the war, Russia has lost millions of its population, resulting in a demographic catastrophe that will affect it forever

* Once again, Stalin foolishly throws away a chance for friendship, and instead of working in good faith, we end up in the Cold War. The Soviet Union makes tremendous progress, but is no match for the economic and military might that comes with the vast (and now booming) population of the West. The Soviet Union was _offered_ aid as part of the Marshall Plan, and could have possibly used it for kickstarting their economy and supercharging economic growth but no

* Despite having a highly educated workforce, Soviets fail to capitalize on it, instead becoming the same repressive state they replaced. They fail to take advantage of the technological improvements and ultimately fall far behind

* the final kick: right after the fall of Soviet Union, when the people finally hope to be free and pursue and obtain the benefits of modernity, they're hit by an economic and social collapse. Again, the result is depopulation; crimes are high, lives are wasted by alcohol and tobacco.

And this is just the highlights. So... I do feel bad for the Russian people.

"here, 40k prisoners of war. 300,000 soldiers here. 500,000 POWs. Here, 1.2 million soldiers. Another 120k POWs." on and on and on. The scale of it is just unthinkable.

1941: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu3p7dxrhl8

1942: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pucJTYK7_Yo

1943/44: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA9QBHDtfCQ

Though as years go by, I hate this snow mush more and more. With a passion.

> they bore the brunt of Mongol invasion which utterly wiped the aristocracy at the time and set back the countries development by generations and depopulating the land. Luckily, the Mongols stopped there and didn't move further west, saving the populace of Western Europe

It's actual Russia (now called Rus` or Kievan Rus` in modern history), then Little Russia, now Ukraine.

> Without warmwater ports, Russia lacked the capacity to participate in maritime trade that bolstered the economy of Western Europe

It's bunch of various nations, then Great Russia, when part of them was captured by Russia, then Grand Duchy of Moscow, then Russian Empire (since 1860), now Russian Federation.

  Time span | Historical name | Modern name | Language then and now
   ?? - V   | Russia (Русся)  | «Old Russa» town | Old Norwegian, not exists
   VII-XII  | Russia (Русь)   | Kievan Rus`, Ukraine | Slavonic, Ukrainian
   XVII- pt | Russia (Россия) | Russian Empire, Russian Federation | Many, Russian (modernized Church Slavonic)

>Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Russia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

Shockingly less blue than you might hope.

I took it as more an anti-authoritarian story than purely anti-capitalist or anti-communist. The anti-capitalist parts are fairly self-evident, at least to me: that's the rather brutal system the farmer has imposed on the animals at the start.

Booting the farmer out and starting again with the animal-owned collective sets the story up for the real message, which is that power corrupts and it is very easy for anyone attracted to power to co-opt legitimate grievance for their own ends. The return of the farmer brings a nice circularity to the story as well as giving the idea that the imposition of will on others is usually to their detriment. Capitalism or communism are basically indistinguishable to everyone existing without power or influence.

Now, arguably "Emmanuel Goldstein" in 1984 is meant to be a kind of Trotsky figure (and his book within 1984), and the fact that Goldstein and his book are ultimately shown to be fake and created by the Party may be a kind of critique or renunciation of Trotskyism and similar currents. Hard to say.

I suppose all book interpretation eventually shows the ideology of the reader. It doesn't even have to respect the presumed intention of Orwell who, from what I know, never expressed any support for veganism or actual animal rights.

"Capitalism is terrible" is a pretty constant meme on the left in US politics right now, perpetuated by many people who have read that book.

>where I live in Texas, all the sheep just think they are the farmer.

Ah the classic "people that don't vote to tax the rich for entitlements think they are rich". If your model of how people vote depends on people being completely stupid, it's wrong.

Also perhaps 'Watership Down'.

* https://www.revolutionspodcast.com/

I'm not an historian or anything of that kind but I'm really interested about the Russian Revolution and I spent quite a few hours on finding the best books about it. My knowledge about those books mainly comes from r/askhistorians (highly recommended!) and academic journals such as the American Historical Review and the Slavic Review. I saw a few other people recommending Miéville's October and even Reed's Ten Days. Now, I'm not claiming those books are bad in any way (I own Reed's) but if you're interested in an historical analysis those are probably not your best shot. Miéville is a sci-fi author who describes himself as a socialist, so he is not trained as an historian and, at the same time, he's definitely simpathetic to the Revolution. Reed's book was written during the Revolution and is a great book if you look at it as a primary source, but it's definitely a partial one. If you're interested in a book of history, then I would recommend you either Fitzpatrick's "The Russian Revolution", which is a short (about 200 pages) book from one of the great pioneers of the revisionist school in soviet historiography. For a more recent (and longer) book I would take a look at S.A. Smith's "Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928". I want to make it clear: Miéville's and Reed's books are great, but one should approach them knowing the context. It's similar to another great book (highly recommended!) by Orwell: Homage to Catalonia. It's similar to Reed's Ten Days, but I would not recommend it as an history book. Hopefully, those recommendations should be enough, but if you have other questions feel free to ask. For a quick look about Soviet historiography, here is a _great_ article by Sheila Fitzpatrick (the author of one of the books I recommended above) reviewing 5 books that came out in 2017: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n07/sheila-fitzpatrick/whats-left

Once you know the context, you can appreciate more books like Reed's and Mièville too.

Happy reading!

  * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution_Betrayed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Finland_Station

Unfortunately not available in electronic form, but well worth the trouble of paper.

I picked up A People's Tragedy after reading Figes's book on the Crimean War - do you happen to know if that book is similarly criticized? In other words, should I put a mental asterisk just next to A People's Tragedy, or next to everything by Figes?

That book is not exactly autobiographical. But she does draw very heavily on her own personal experiences to draw that time and place as accurately as she could. For example the purge that ended Kira's university education was not made up, and indeed would have ended Ayn Rand's career if she had been one year younger.

But really it's such a pivotal moment in modern history that you're not going to starve for material. It sounds glib, but in this instance you could do worse than start on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution

He fought for socialism and he stayed a socialist - but he became a enemy of Stalinism.

The brotherhood and spirit of the socialist militia he was in, he praised as real and something he never experienced before or after.

My interpretation was that he was always anti-authority, but his experiences led him to believe that an authoritian figure will always try to grab power and it doesn't matter what `side` they say they are for, power is their aim.

True he liked the spirit of his socialist militia but by the end I think he felt its spirit had been crushed and abused by others.

* The Dictator’s Handbook. One simple axiom - leaders do what is necessary to stay in power. Using that idea they explain the basis of all political systems, whether autocracy or democracy or somewhere in between. I didn’t really understand politics before I read this. CGPGrey has a video where he summarises the book. [1]

* (Only for Indians) India After Gandhi. You can’t really understand your country if you don’t know it’s history. History stopped in 1947 according to our history books, and most people are blissfully unaware of what came after. They don’t know how close India came to losing democracy or how easily it could happen again. They don’t understand the dangers of promoting one language at the expense of others because they don’t know that it’s been tried before. Every Indian needs to know so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past over and over.

[1] - https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

While his admission concerns mostly the theory of priming, the problem is not specific but a methodological error. In my view all his research should be looked at with suspicion and with a view to have his experiments replicated independently sooner rather than later. This has been a problem throughout social psychology and other branches of science, so nothing specific to Kahneman, he's just the best known. Which brings up the next thought, which is I always look at information from the epistemic point of view: where does this knowledge come from: rational thought, experiment, experience, faith? I just notice, without judgement, how eager some of the posters here are to accept a theory or a philosophy even when it has already been debunked, or the evidence is flimsy, or maybe it's formulated in ways that are not even "debunkable". And there is a pragmatic view that if it feels right and it helps, why not.

Nevertheless, Guha is truly an amazing historian and all of his books deserve to be read!

The book was recommended to me as being mainly about bias, with the state of the world as examples, but this was wrong – the book is mainly about the state of the world, and it gives a few basic biases I already knew about as examples. The state of humanity all over the globe is not something I care about as much – I can’t personally affect it and it won’t affect my personal life – and the book never explicitly justified its assumption that it is important for people to know.

I did appreciate one thing: the book’s description of exactly what system is supposed to replace the “developing”/“developed” dichotomy. I was told as a child that it was obsolete, but never what was supposed to replace it. The book proposes categorizing countries within a distribution of four income levels in which most countries fall in level three. The author never justified his choice of four levels, nor his choice of boundaries between the levels, but I am willing to believe based on the graphs that at least this model is more useful than the older two-level dichotomy.

However, the rest of the book was pretty boring. I didn’t fall in the category of “people who think the world is getting worse” that the introduction assumed I fell into, so the next few chapters that kept insisting that the world was getting better were redundant and boring for me. The other chapters all seem the same and I don’t think I’ll learn anything useful from them.

I can guess that Bill Gates recommended this book because it is written for people like him – rich philanthropists who are wondering how best to use their power to make a difference in the world. Most people do not fall in this category.

Would it have been a bad thing? Well, China is doing swimmingly well. And please don't give the oh-India-is-very-diverse argument. Those who claim China is not diverse, doesn't know China.

Democracy was not something that originated out of India. It got shoved upon and lapped up by the very white-washed freedom-fighting leadership back in the day. No other alternative has/was ever been considered ["A political system with Indian characteristics"]. Also, for a country with a very high illiteracy rate, I never figured out how democracy actually works.

>>They don’t understand the dangers of promoting one language at the expense of others because they don’t know that it’s been tried before.

So let's just promote English and ensure there will always be animosity and division amongst the intellectuals (since by definition, they'd already know English) and the rest who only speak a "regional vernacular". The thing that has shocked me most on my interactions with the Indian English-speaking (elite) is on how unoriginal they are. I could have well been speaking with a Brooklyn hipster and wouldn't have been able to tell the difference (other than the appearance and context). Well with none of their "regional vernaculars" being developed and growing up on just a diet of American and British books and (liberal) ideas, can't quite blame them.

ps: I do a lot of business travel to India. Let's just put it that I have a love-hate affair with the country.

On the flip side, I think most of the modern generation has a better understanding of what needs to be done and where our priorities should be but it's gonna be a long time before those in power go away for good. But it might be too late by then, and I'm afraid we'll be stuck in this cycle.

Not so much for the tidying part (though I did find that extremely helpful), but the whole idea of only keeping things in your life that "spark joy" (not an exact translation by the way - "spark excitement" or "spark meaning" are other ways I like to think about it) has had a profound impact on me.

I realized there were lots of things in my life (much more than just physical objects) that I had just sort of accumulated without thinking about what I really like or if something was good for me. I found the benefit of "practicing" this concept without mundane household objects allowed me to have a stronger sense of what I really enjoy in the more important aspects of my life.

"Only keep it if it sparks joy"? Yeah, just burn the house down, I'm fine.

I had bookshelves full of books I never read, architecture books, art books, children's books, clothing I never wore, toys and figures I didn't play with, stuffed animals, framed posters, and entire household of stuff.

5 years later I miss some of that stuff. For lack of a better word I think it was part of my identity. Of course not all of it but lots of little things, even if I didn't use them they served as anchors for memories. Even if the only anchor was when I bought them that would remind me of other things that happened around the time I acquired the item etc..

I'm still mixed on if it was the right thing to do.

That's not the Marie Kondo thingy. Ms. Kondo's recipe is that you go through your stuff category at a time (books, shirts etc) and per each item figure out if that thing "brings you joy" or not.

My wife was into it. We went through our stuff and ended discarding lots of crap. So, it's rather "go through all of your stuff once in a while and throw all crap away" than "ultra minimalism at all cost".

From her I learned that all items have a home. I had heard such an idea before, but her explanation made it stick. Now I don't lose keys or gloves or ear muffs, they all have a home in my house. It's not ideal placement, I often end up backtracking a bit, but I think the idea isn't to wring efficiency out of every decision, but to just know and accept, and that feels ok when you're around joyful things.

It never gets old. There is no real reason to sell one because each instrument is almost childlike in some incorporeal manner.

I ended up purchasing more things, but just being more tidy.

http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

Hazlitt wrote another good book Thinking as a Science.

I also went looking for an audiobook version. Looks like Downpour has it DRM free: https://www.downpour.com/economics-in-one-lesson

> Among the theoretical contributions of the early years of the Austrian School are the subjective theory of value, marginalism in price theory and the formulation of the economic calculation problem, each of which has become an accepted part of mainstream economics.

Hayek was considered partly Austrian and he got the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974, well after this book was written. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek)

The core lesson of the book is fantastic:

> The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

This is not fringe at all.

Economics is a value free science, at least how Austrians practice it, but happens to show that government intervention is usually harmful. For example, Keynesians believe that the business cycle is an inherent failure of markets with no known cause and that government must intervene heavily to correct such errors. By contrast, the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle takes nearly the opposite position -- that intervention, mainly in form of credit expansion causes booms. A bust is a correction of errors made during the boom and should not itself be corrected with more easy money, starting the cycle all over again.

Now, the vast majority of working professional economists derive all or much of their income from the government in one way or another. Many work for the federal government or the Federal Reserve Bank or consult with them. Or they work in government funded universities doing research with money from government grants.

Early last century, Hoover then FDR discovered and embraced John Maynard Keynes who offered a general theory that supported heavy government intervention. The Keynesian prescription just happened to provide an intellectual basis for policies that would require government to grow much larger and more powerful. Before long government began to fund more and more professional economist jobs. And no surprise, those jobs went to Keynesians.

A few decades later Milton Friedman (not an Austrian) said, "We are all Keynesians now" -- not as an admission that the theories were correct but a concession that in practical terms it's nearly impossible to work in the field and not be a Keynesian.

What for example, do you think of Subjective Theory of Value or the Theory of Marginal Utility, which were developed by the father of the Austrian School, Carl Menger, in the latter part of the 19th century? Or the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, for which Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel Prize in 1974?

Part of it is probably just the historical context - monetary systems in the modern economy are very different than the gold-standard, fixed exchange rate kind of environment the book was written in, for example, which changes a lot of how things operate. But even then I think it still would have suffered from the fallacy of composition, where you can’t start from a description of interaction between two people and just scale it up - the emergent behaviour is almost always surprisingly different.

With regards to Austrian economics, as far as I remember, the school is not even mentioned in Hazlitt's book, but you are right that he was heavily influenced by it. But the book and its propositions stand on their own, I think.

It's an interesting read, but be (very) skeptical. The world and economics is a bit more complex than the picture he portrays.

Well, I think it's part of the book to speak in favor of free markets as opposed to centrally planned "markets" (such as prices for money, e.g., interest rate).

If you're criticizing an underlying assumption, then of course I can also go ahead and criticize parts of mathematics for some of their axioms. Yet, that doesn't make mathematics wrong, only more limited in scope.

Sowell's weak point it is that (and this is is not unique to Sowell, it's common to both nominal supporters of free markets and their opponents) there's too often an implicit conflation of the economic system that actually exists with a free market. The way he taught me to look at policy in terms of incentives more than makes up for any of that though.

Edit: hehe the reviews suggest its quite the polarising tome.

Now I see muda everywhere and cringe when I overhear people talking about applying kaizen and how they think they're practicing "continuous improvement" while repeating the same rote, industrial, mindless processes that they have been for the last 40 years. We can do so much better. Toyota tried very hard to teach GM how at their NUMMI[1] plant, but it wasn't the right location relative to their suppliers for JIT to fully work and "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

[0] https://www.lean.org/Bookstore/ProductDetails.cfm?SelectedPr... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI

I believe agile was invented to incrementally improve an already well thought production process. Once the assembly line was setup, agile was used to eliminate the unproductive activities. I am not sure agile will be helpful to build the assembly line itself?

In most scenarios that's what people try to do with agile.

Setting up a mechanical assembly line is very different from setting up a software pipeline, although, as you can tell already, they use some of the same words and metaphors.

It isn't possible to build a mechanical factory in weeks with readily available tools [0]. We just don't have that kind of concentration of knowledge, we don't have the skills, the know-how etc. to accomplish that. Whereas with software: you have OSS, you have the Cloud, and all kinds of numerous tooling that helps you get started immediately, and iterate on that until you get to the final product. That kind of iteration, debugging etc. is just not possible with manufacturing. Which is why in manufacturing you need great designs and processes: bad decisions are very costly. They are costly in software too, but... your MVP will still churn out value, even if its not efficient. Once you prove that your product satisfies a need, you then make it better, you make it more efficient, scale it out, yadda yadda. But getting started is absurdly easy. And thats why lean works.

The designers of lean realized that all that worry about scaling, about automation, planning, QA... while its important, it doesn't provide the most value for everyone. For a smaller company, its more important to get out a product that solves a problem even if its janky. Once you prove its usefulness, you attract more money, more people etc.

So lean solves two problems: * gets you started quickly and fails bad ideas fast * lets you justify bad design if it provides more value

One could argue that the technical debt built up by this kind of process has to be paid down someday. If your product survives for long enough, you will have enough resources to do that. And then you have a core product that brings in revenue, and you repeat the same lean method for other products. Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum.

[0]: where this assumption fails, you see a lot more manufacturing. e.g. in China, the fruits of this kind of aggregation in manufacturing skill is visible, and that's why Chinese manufacturers are so adept at responding to changing market conditions.

My issue is with the way agile is evangelized and implemented in the Enterprise. These Enterprise people simply rationalize that if Toyota can do it then why we can't without realizing where it fit and where it does not.

Personally I think it does not fit with the culture of thousand approvals and beating the dead horse i.e. endlessly cross examining any design or implementation failures.

This happens because Enterprise people love the buzzwords. Agile and cloud are the latest buzz in Enterprise so they watch a ppt or two somewhere starts pushing agile into a culture where it does not fit at all. This results in sufferings and frustration.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/nummi

Not gonna lie, it's very hard

You're right, what has been seen cannot be unseen.

It's interesting for a number of reasons, not least because it explains that a lot of the ideas driving how Toyota worked post-war came from the fact that they knew they wouldn't be able to let people go in an economic downturn.

Granted, long-term that thinking kills companies, but short term it keeps the bills paid, the kids fed, and the beer cold.

America was able to be a powerhouse of manufacturing during WW2, I remember reading that a lot of the DNA for JIT/Kaizen/Lean came from the Marshall Plan[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen#History

The tools don't really mean anything, it's mostly adopting the principles enforced. And everyone has to adopt it for it to work. The ones that do it best, have a strong company culture. You define the why before the how and what.

Bottom line: judge your success in life by how well you make your decisions, not by your outcome. You have full control of your decisions, and often no control at all over their results.

"On The Shortness of Life"[1] is my favorite work of his, though there are many other gems among his letters.

[1] - https://tripinsurancestore.com/4/on-the-shortness-of-life.pd...

http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

Which is quite short.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/epictetus/the-enchiridion/...

He gave some really great examples of how to apply stoicism in today's world.

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0735216355/ref=tmm_h...

"If you ever struggle to make decisions, here's a talk for you. Cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths shows how we can apply the logic of computers to untangle tricky human problems, sharing three practical strategies for making better decisions -- on everything from finding a home to choosing which restaurant to go to tonight."

https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_griffiths_3_ways_to_make_bette...

[1] https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ElAnt/V1N4/thompson.htm...

https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Stoic-Meditations-Wisdom-Persev...

No, and that's the key. You cannot truly control outcomes, so judging your life and self-worth on them is leaving your happiness and fulfillment to chance.

> That is, how does one get good at making decisions? By seeing positive results flow from them.

Nope. You get better at decision-making by being reflective about your past decisions. Outcomes can be a factor in that, but only insofar as they can point you to the realization that you missed information that was available to you.

There are many decisions in life where there is no "good" outcome. There are some where the "good" outcome is catastrophic for you personally, and that catastrophe is avoidable if you compromise your ethics. If you see a child drowning in a river and know that there's a good chance that you will die if you attempt to rescue them, rational self-interest alone tells you to walk on by. Stoicism puts a layer on top of that - can you live with yourself without regret if you do that? Are you willing to accept the risks to live up to your own standards?

Just last week I sat through a meeting where no one was listening to one another, elephants were being buried underground, and we were becoming more divided. Taking a cue from ‘Radical Candor’, I invited the room’s abstract complaints and negativity to focus on me, specifically. Luckily, someone was so pissed at me and my team that they launched into a list of things we’d done wrong. That gave me a chance to listen, to show I cared, and to connect the dots with his previous discussion at the meeting. Basic stuff. But it opened the floodgates to honest conversation for the rest of the night.

I always say that computers are easy, humans are hard. Would love to see more recommendations about this topic.

The Art of Worldly Wisdom (aka The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence) by Balthasar Gracian - A set of aphorisms with penetrating insight into Human Nature.

Why we do what we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci - A short book from a psychologist.

The Empowered Manager: Positive Political Skills at Work by Peter Block

Management: A Political Activity by Ted Stephenson

I wouldn't go so far :). They're both hard; and need talented individuals to function together and come up with great ideas and processes on how to build, maintain and scale them.

And as nerdy engineers, we often discount the humans, which we ought not to do.

All this "if you answered c, e and f, we are not of the same opinion" feels passive-aggressive to me.

The whole thing feels manipulative to me. It makes me think that people try an insincere way of talking to me, in order to manipulate my feelings and reaction.

I've had huge discussions with friends who try to live the book, and neither of us could make the other see their point.

One of their examples was "My boyfriend likes to go DJing, but sometimes I'd love for him to stay home and cuddle with me. So I clearly tell him that him leaving makes me feel alone and that I would like some warmth. But I don't tell him what to do, to stay at home, for example. I only talk about my own perception and feelings." – "Yes, that's great, but in communication there is the level of pragmatics above pure logical semantics. And you telling your boyfriend that him leaving makes you feel very alone is just another way of saying 'please don't go'".

Since reading it, I have been amazed at how unclear many people communicate. They say things to express some basic emotions - anger, frustration, etc - but so many people do not express in clear terms the root of this feeling.

In your example, the woman does indeed want the boyfriend to stay at home. But saying you want someone to do something, at a minimum, doesn’t explain why you want that. It also doesn’t give them much recourse to either object, or come up with alternative solutions.

I’d be happy to discuss it more!

We're very "good" at solutionising what we think we want rather than what we need. One of the things I took away is a way to clearly consider and express the root cause of something. In the DJ example not wanting their partner to go may be due to any number of reasons that aren't clear to the DJ, they could be lonely, feel insecure, feel mistrustful of fidelity, feel ashamed at their own lack of passion for an activity etc. Any number of these things can come to the surface when you start saying why something bothers you rather than the first solution your brain offers up, plus it's a much nicer conversation when both parties are involved in building the solution.

What's also nice is I've had better "shower conversations" with myself to figure out what I really want from situations.

Importantly, saying it without coming down with harsh judgment on the other person is also key. You truly don’t know what’s going on in their mind, or what motivations they may have had in doing something. NVC encourages realizing this and avoiding assigning feelings or intent to the other person, since you don’t know if that’s accurate.

“I feel lonely much more than I want to when you’re gone DJing Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I don’t like feeling lonely. Can we figure out something to help me feel lonely less often?”

And yes, you could say “I wish you’d stay at home,” but is that really the desire? The desire is to feel lonely or ignored less of the time in this scenario I think; maybe I’m wrong!

Maybe the DJ said she couldn’t come with thinking she would be bored. Maybe she’d love to come, but thinks he doesn’t want her there.

Saying clearly the why, without judgment on the other person, certainly seems to be pretty NVC to me.

It seems natural if asked: "Can we figure out something to help me feel lonely less often?”

To respond: "Ok well, what do you want?"

If you're not willing to give actual things you want, then the other person has to "mind read." And from my experience in relationships, when people are trying to mind read what the other actually wants, this always ends up in issues/problems.