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Hello!
I don’t post very regularly anymore. I thought a lot about life philosophies when I studied in Switzerland back in 2021-2023, and this blog captures some of the thoughts I had then. It’s been real tranqil since I’ve began my shot at being a man of God.
Nice books
In general, for technical books, I look not for concepts but for skills; I work through them to build fluid sequences of activations allowing me to do things.
For other books, I look for ways to understand things. My standard for concepts is that they be organizable as models and not mere collections of facts. A model is some kind of structure that can be represented physically/pictorially in a "compact" way. Like a cat or a house, most of the book's concepts should be clearly definable relative to each-other. An exception is Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow", where understanding just the single model of systems 1 and 2 thinking warrants the entire book, and the zoo of biases that humans exhibit are sufficiently present in daily life to be hard-memorizable.
Technical
The Art of Computer Programming
A summer of post-Bachelors fun with a good friend took me through this book. It guided me to develop mental machinery to understand complicated algorithms.
Algebra and Geometry by Beardon
Etched isomorphisms between linear algebra and space deep into my neural wrinkles.
Life
The Black Swan
A pleasant first exposure to the inner life of a flamboyant intellectual who thinks about probability and the humanities
Invaluable tools for you to understand aspects of the world
The Pyramid Principle
A under-appreciated book that gives you templates for thinking.
Rigorous reasoning, yet developed by and for practioners; once used as a textbook by the best management consulting companies. I wonder why they moved away?
Contact
Reach out to me to give feedback on a post or to discuss things in general! andrew.luo1@outlook.com
