Interesting Excerpts From The Books I Read In 2019
One of my goals every year is to read 10-12 books. In 2019, I re-read two books which I had read over a decade ago. Surprisingly, it felt like that I was reading them for the first time. Another new thing I did last year was to give up on the books after the first chapter if they did not keep my interest.
Following are a few brief excerpts from the books 12 books I read last year:
More and more collectors are opening their own exhibition spaces. Their official reasons are philanthropic, but their covert motives have more to do with marketing. The work of living artists needs to be promoted if it is to generate consensus. Moreover, collectors of contemporary art have to be proactive about developing the aura of their collection. In our cluttered multimedia culture, a significant collection does not just arise, it is made.
How can I feel proud about an artist's work? I didn't have an idea, and I didn't make the art. There is no pride to be had by simply buying it.
Newtonian physics is scientific because it allowed us to falsify it, as we know that it is wrong, while astrology is not because it does not offer conditions under which we could reject it. Astrology cannot be disproved, owning to the auxiliary hypothesis that come into play. Such point lies at the basis of the demarcation between science and nonsense (called "the problem of demarcation").
To be a philosopher is to know through long walks, by reasoning, and reasoning only, a priori, what others can only potentially learn from their mistakes, crises, accidents, and bankruptcies - that is, a posteriori.
At big companies, nobody wants to own a new idea before it's clear whether or not it's a stroke of genius.
Human ingenuity is infinite when translating power and discretion into personal gain.
How and why did this centuries-old dance form and its most celebrated practitioners - ballerinas - begin to influence fashion in such profound and meaningful ways in the 1930s? And why did ballet culture soar in Great Britain and the United States, two Western countries with no previous ballet traditions?
No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response.
Bitcoin does not require personhood. A software agent can own money.
If there are n workers on a project, there are (n2 - 1)/2 interfaces across which there may be communication, and there are potentially almost 2n teams within which coordination must occur.
11. Finite and infinite games
Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.
12. The internet of money (volume two)
Bitcoin introduces a platform on which you can run currency as an application on a network without any central points of control, a system completely decentralized like the internet itself.
Bitcoin introduces a platform on which you can run currency as an application on a network without any central points of control, a system completely decentralized like the internet itself.
The excerpts are from what I underlined while reading. Underlining what I find interesting while reading is an old habit and what I find interesting depends on my frame of mind at the moment.
See the 2018 book list here.
