The Dictator's Handbook

Right now, One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel García. I have been taking a break from scifi and nonfiction to enjoy some classics. The latest book I've read just before this one were 1. The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. They present a compelling argument for their framework to understand political structure and action based on the size of the coalition. The book is actually a condensed, much more readable version of the academic research of both authors. It was both a depressing and exhilarating read (as implied by the title, the whole book has a very sarcastic tone). It was also very interesting many of their arguments also apply in corporate environments just as they do in "normal politics"; the corporate power structure is not that far removed from the royal palaces of the kingdom or more generally from a dictatorship. Recommended read. 2. Social Acceleration by Hartmut Rosa. This one was a though read, but absolutely illuminating. It presents an extremely clear analytic analysis on why we increasingly feel like like "we don't have enough time".…

The following have all had a significant effect on my worldview. You can find more information at [1]. - The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany - Thinking, Fast and Slow - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Crime and Punishment - The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York - Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity - Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead - Franny and Zooey - Master of the Senate - Atlas Shrugged - Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed - Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics - The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't - Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans - Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage - Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World - Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones - Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow…

I'll second "The Dictator's Handbook". And if anyone is thinking, "I don't need this, I don't have any plans to become a dictator", you're thinking just like I was thinking a few years ago. When finally I read it, I kicked myself for passing on such a great book because of its silly name. This book does indeed change the way you understand the world (Small caveat: the authors stretch their theory to cover some cases such as corporate governance. That part felt quite weak to me. You can just ignore it. The rest of the book more than makes up for this). And here's another one that's somewhat similar: "Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook". The title is not just a joke, unfortunately. Some coups were indeed carried out following the advice in this book (which was obviously not the author's intention, but life sometimes takes unexpected turns). The second edition of this book was published in 2015, just one year before the attempted coup in Turkey. Armed with the knowledge from this book, you can go and analyze what happened in Turkey and it's going to make a lot of sense.

* Factfulness and Thinking Fast And Slow. The latter helped me internalise that my thinking, like most humans, is biased. Even being aware of those biases doesn’t always help. We need to go above and beyond to overcome our biases. Factfulness goes into detail about what those biases are and how they lead to a distorted world view. Rather than taking the easy way out by blaming journalists/politicians/rich people, he turns the focus onto us and our biases and speaks about how to look at the world in an objective fact based manner. * 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]…

Deep Thinking really sounds fun! I agree, The Dictator's Handbook is really good, but sometimes really repetitive and it takes a bit of dedication to finish it. As for my current one, I'm really enjoying Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others.

I'm reading a few. The Power Broker (really good, but really long). The dictators handbook (good, but repetitive). Deep thinking (easy and enjoyable if you're interested in AI). Investment Science (very good if you're interested in math finance).

- Ishmael and Story of B by Daniel Quinn His thoughts on religion and interpretation of religion as propaganda and how we've framed our taker society very much influenced my young mind. - 1491 and 1493 by Charles C. Mann The way we look at the new world and how vastly different standard teachings and what actually happened are. - A Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine Put to words what I already mostly practise, it identified my issues I had with buddhism. - A Dictators Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita An interesting flip on politics, it made me stop worrying so much about the here-and-now of it, and quelled my anger with the (further?) realisation that it is a game. If we want to fix what's happening we need to fix the rules, not the players.

For my birthday this year some friends got me The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Marx’s Capital Illustrated by David Smith. I’ve always been at least tangentially interested in political/economic theory and these two books offered an easily accessible new perspective on their respective subjects I hadn’t gotten before. The Dictator’s Handbook I found to be particularly insightful.