Excellent Reviews of Excellent Books

There are a lot of books out there that claim to make you successful. Let’s discuss if there is actually some merit to this. A little guide how to use self-help success books, if you will. Most books go “Our research shows that successful people do X!” and “Successful people attribute their success to Y!” – and now I am going to explain why there is a crucial and fundamental difference between those two premises. Let’s talk about biases in books, shall we? Imagine there was a book where successful persons get asked for the foundation of their accomplishments. Actually, there is no need to imagine such a book. Now a majority of the interviewed people claim said the main contribution to their success comes from getting up very early in the morning, way before 05:00 AM. Would it be a logical conclusion that rising early is a key factor to success? If you said yes, then congratulations, you have just experienced survivorship bias. You think of successful guys and gals doing business before anyone else. You did not think of the millions of people that work the morning shift in the factory. People who drive the garbage truck around…

The End of Strife: The four horsemen of the Apocalypse are Famine, Plague, War and Death – pop culture does not always get this right – and after defeating the first three we might now just continue and conquer Death, too, and see, where this leads us as a species. Homo Deus starts with a rather bold claim: throughout history, famine, plague and war were the central topics of human life, and recently, all three of them have been made all but irrelevant. For all of history, humans have lived a couple bad days away from starvation, a couple bad rats away from the pocks and a couple bad words away from an all-out war against their neighbours. There are still starving people in the world, but no longer because there is not enough food for them, but because letting them starve furthers someone’s agenda. We talked about his before. There are still infectious diseases in the world, but they remain local outbreaks, and we no longer perceive them as a force of nature, but rather as a consequence of our own lack of hygiene and prevention. And there are still combats fought in the world, but they are no…