Bookshelf

Here I direct you to some of the best writings or books that I come back to every year. I hope you find them as insightful as I did.

Writings I cherish

• How to Make Something Great by Ryo Lu
• 지적 호전성 (or Chutzpah) by 최진석 Jin-Seok Choi
• Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions by fs.blog
• Poszar’s writings: his past Writings at Credit Suisse and newly added pieces - Poszar truly thinks in systems
• A (Long) Peek into Reinforcement Learning by Lilian Weng - Haven’t seen a better intro to RL
• Linus’ A Beginner’s Guide to Exploration and Notational Intelligence - His writings elegantly capture layers of truth in life
• How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) by Tim Urban
• Patrick Collison’s Advice, Sam Altman’s Advice and Paul Graham’s Take on Independent Thinking (and all their other essays)

Books I can’t stop re-reading

Clarity in Life

• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Naval Ravikant
• Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder (and the whole Incerto series) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better”
• Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio - Never hurts to have principles to live by.
• The Tao of Seneca by Tim Ferris - Best for long runs

Science / Epistemology / Knowledge Creation

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
• How Not to be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg
• The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

Engineering

• Thinking in Systems: A Primer
• Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Christopher Bishop
• Reinforcement Learning by Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto
• The Laws of Trading by Agustin Lebron – the Jane Street Vet

Economics, Social Science and Progress

• The Price of Time by Edward Chancellor
• Narrative and Numbers by Aswath Damodaran
• World of Oil Derivatives by Greg Newman
• The Future of Money by Eswar Prasad

International Politics and History

• The World for Sale by Javier Blas
• The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin
• Geopolitical Alpha: An Investment Framework for Predicting the Future by Marko Papic
• 해방 후 3년: 건국을 향한 최후의 결전 Three years after liberation: The final battle for the nation by 조한성

Cognitive Science / Human Psyche

• On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done by David Badre
• The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli - Beware of your own biases!

Creating Valuable Systems

• This is Strategy by Seth Godin
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger

Art, Philosophy and Literature

• The Art Spirit by Robert Henri
• Popper Selections by Karl Popper
• What is Power and all other works by Byung-Chul Han
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
• 눈길 by 이청준 Cheong-jun Yi

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Currently reading

• A History of Religious Ideas by Mircea Eliade
• Genesis by Henry A. Kissinger, Craig Mundie and Eric Schmidt
• Shape by Jordan Ellenberg

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For those who’ve made it this far, I also present to you my life-long collection of bold questions that steer my thinking.