Book Reviews: Breath, Against Method, Freedom, Working Backwards, Beginning of Infinity
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor
5/5
We breathe a lot. Anything that gets you to change something you do as much as breathing is extremely valuable. Breath got me to change my breathing.
Breath is kind of an anti-science book. It is less Gladwellian, relying less on the popularization of science papers, and more anecdotal. He provides multiple stories of people discovering breathing techniques, curing people, helping them reach their potential, or having extreme benefits. He does this because breathing is still surprisingly mystical, we don’t know why it has such a big impact on our lives.
Breath taught me many things. Mouth breathing is bad for you. Breathing too much is bad for you. Carbon dioxide might be good for you. Hypoventilation training led to incredible results. There are many exercises to help you improve.
Before reading Breath, I was a mouth breather who knew it was bad and didn’t do anything about it. After, I’ve spent a lot of time and energy focusing on breathing through my nose. Literally life-changing, you should read it.
Side note: Wim Hof is mentioned a lot, and was the person I recognized the most. Wim Hof is kind of like Jordan Peterson if Peterson cared about physical and not mental health. Peterson provides people with intellectual challenges, Wim provides them with physical ones. It turns out, physical ones are a lot more sustainable for both him and the audience (Peterson burnt out, Wim still seems to be going strong). Physical challenges have a higher barrier to entry for participants and keeps the content focused. Peterson got too distracted by cancel culture and the intellectual dark web to provide ongoing change and improvement to people’s lives.
Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge by Paul Feyerabend
4/5
I’m not a scientist, but like anyone else on the internet, I like to pretend I could be one. I like to pretend that I know academia and what’s wrong with science more than academics do except I didn’t study any science beyond Grade 12 Chemistry. Feyerabend’s Against Method makes me feel more confident in my thoughts I could be a scientist, because what is “science?” It’s basically whatever you want.
You know how Galieo fought against “the man” (evil Church) and won? You know how that proves how great “science” is? Feyerabend argues this is a lie. He was basically a troll who used every means at his disposal (including trickery and propaganda) to convince people he was right. In many ways, the Church followed “science” in saying he was wrong. They didn’t know back in the day that telescopes were good at. The image they provided was significantly distorted compared to the naked eye. It wasn’t until later when optics were studied more that this was figured out and corrected, then the whole story falls into place.
By following methods of any capacity, we limit ourselves. We limit the ideas we can have and the explanations we can produce. We don’t know what is “right” or a “fact” now, and many people believe the case could be proven to be wrong. Consistency with the past is often a hindrance. There is many opportunities if you take up Feyerabend’s motto of “anything goes.” Have more crazy ideas.
There is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge
Something that helped me on this book was listing to podcasts and YouTube videos related to the book. For this book specifically Against Method and For 'Pseudoscience’ and Riva Tez on Epistemological Freedom: Feyerabend, Science Funding, and How to Do Whatever You Want were both helpful.
Freedom by Sebastian Junger
4/5
There are many types of freedom, and being self-reliant is one of them. It is tough to be self-reliant in modernity. Jobs, food, shelter, and entertainment all rely on other people so much. Even pretending to be self-reliant is mostly lying to ourselves. A good way to prove to yourself how self-reliant you are is to go out into a forest and keep walking. This is what Sebastian Junger did.
Throughout history, good people and bad have maintained their freedom by simply staying out of it the reach of those who would deprive them of it. That generally meant walking a lot.
Humans have a history of doing this. The Indigenous People of North America spent a lot of time being free and self-reliant. The pioneers of North America were also self-reliant. They were free because of it. Now that we are so reliant on everything around us, we are much less free.
Of course, freedom comes with downsides. The frontiers were unforgiving, brutal, and violent. In a lot of ways, they still are. People protect their property with force, and unknown passing nomads like Junger and his party are often seen as a threat. There were scenes in the book where they were pursued by police, and other scenes were they were shot at. Freedom doesn’t mean safe.
Junger gives a fascinating look into the history of freedom while going on an enlightening adventure himself. He unearths many truths in doing so. He is a true observer of the in-between.
Working Backwards
2/5
The summary of Working Backwards is to get great talent and provide them with a lot of responsibility. Force them to think about strategic decisions through written documents and relentlessly execute. The key concepts that stood out to me were Amazon’s jump from PowerPoint presentations to written documents, single-threaded leadership, and the bar raiser interviewing process.
The similarity between these processes is that they take up more energy than standard or “default” processes of the same sort. The energy Jeff and the team provided to the organization helped them do this. It allowed them to be more ambitious as well as fail more. The book doesn’t talk much about philosophy but has many stories and examples of why and how principles were used.
Overall it’s skimmable, you don’t need to read the whole thing, especially if you are familiar with Amazon’s business practices. Instead of reading it, you should spend the equivalent time writing or influencing your company to use writing more.
The Beginning of Infinity
4.5/5
A good way to summarize The Beginning of Infinity is optimistic. Humans are uniquely capable of solving every problem ever created, mostly because we are the ones who created the problems. We are destined to solve problems and destined to progress because of it. We are explanation creating machines.
Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity.
A scary part of the book is what goes unwritten, or less focused on. The fact that this optimism relies on us continuing to be able to create explanations. We cannot block ourselves, but humans are good at blocking ourselves. Saying no is easier than saying yes, so it gets said a lot more. We say no in our heads a lot more than we say yes. New explanations don’t come from “no,” they come from yes.
One interesting part, but I still don’t entirely understand why it was included was the all the talk about infinity. I get that we can create infinity explanations and I appreciate the fact that infinity is infinitely large, but I don’t know if it helped the core argument of the book. I think David liked the Infinity Hotel section and had to put it somewhere so he worked around it and put it here. It was quite memorable though. To summarize: infinity is infinitely larger than you think.
It was inconsistently interesting throughout, but the highs were very high. I’m more optimistic after reading this, but there is a lot we need to do to continue progress. Keep creating explanations.