December 2023
This was my best year of reading since undergrad or law school, perhaps because I worked to be indistractable and prioritized books and research papers over most types of content. 2023 was a seminal year in the takeoff of artificial intelligence toward generality, so that frenzy dominated much of my time and thinking. My reading was eclectic, jumping from Indian philosophy and Sanskrit to utopias, biology, applied math, and much history.
I had a three-way tie for the best books (“Ageless” about biogerontology, “Three Laws of Nature” about thermodynamics, and the avant-garde novel “The Last Samurai”). I’m also adding a short section about audio and video, the works richer in bits, that struck a chord.
BEST BOOKS OF 2023
Steele, Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old. This is the best layman’s book on the new field of biogerontology that took off in the 1990s and especially in the last decade, which focuses on how to slow down, stop, or reverse aging. If that sounds fantastic, it’s because few understand the science and the author makes a case that this is one of the most important fields of scientific study today, given how much disease and death are tied to underlying aging factors. Steele breaks down aging into 10 hallmark factors (DNA damage and mutations, trimmed telomeres, protein problems like autophagy, epigenetic alterations, the accumulation of senescent cells, malfunctioning mitochondria, signal failures like inflammation, changes in the microbiome, cellular exhaustion, malfunctions of the immune system). He then goes into research on promising animal and human studies on each of these factors and the health and lifespan gains researchers have seen (from 10% to 600% in some species). Alongside AI and clean energy (eg solar panels and nuclear fusion), biogerontology promises to be one of the most exciting and interesting fields in the next few decades.
Berry, Three Laws of Nature: A Little Book on Thermodynamics. Einstein said of Thermodynamics: “It is the only physical theory of universal content, which I am convinced, that within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts will never be overthrown.” I never felt I understood the 3 laws in physics classes. Despite seeming simple, much didn’t land. So this book by Stephen Berry (UChicago Chemist, known as a “Renaissance scientist” and “one of the most influential chemists of his generation”) finally lit my fire and it walks through the history and development of the 3 laws. It turns out it took many of the brightest scientists nearly 150 years to work them out with careful experiments (never taught in today’s schools), and it started with mining entrepreneurs trying to dig more coal in Northern England and that industry and practice was decades ahead of theory (similar to modern machine learning). The 3 laws, along with electromagnetism, are the basis of most technology supporting humans today, from electricity to mechanical gadgets, cars, planes, rockets, and computers – we would be savages without them. What’s also strange and intriguing is modern physicists explain and interpret the 3 laws very differently, as I learned by finding and reading the explanations from Fermi, Feynman, Penrose, Weinberg, Suo, and Wolfram. For even more detail, check out Hanlon’s Block by Block.
DeWitt, The Last Samurai. A short novel about a brilliant mother and her precocious son, who is searching for his father. I consider this one of the great novels of the 21st century and was delighted to learn that some others do too. Beyond compelling characters and a touching plot, DeWitt pushes forward what the form of the novel could be, in a rare way similar to Joyce, James, and Hemingway.
Entropy as described by Roger Penrose
NON-FICTION
Smith, FDR. Roosevelt was the most important American politician and statesman of the 20th century, and this is the best biography I’ve read of him (it captures his painful past, his brilliance, and his many mistakes). I wish Smith would write a similar biography of Lee Kuan Yew, who I’d argue was the most important global politician of the 20th century.
Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe. A fun and readable biography that still goes into technical depth and tries to explain Einstein’s ideas in plain English, while contextualizing him in late 19th and early 20th century physics. I also read Isaacson’s Musk biography and enjoyed it, but Einstein is a much better and more interesting book, as what he gave to humanity was more fundamental (e.g. relativity, photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, field equations, EPR, etc).
Easwaran, Upanishads, 2nd Ed. This is one of the world’s philosophical and spiritual classics and I hadn’t read this translation of the 13 principal Upanishads. It is easy to read due to being poetic and crisp, while being fairly accurate to the Sanskrit (whenever I checked it). Olivelle has the best technical translation with the Devanagari text side by side while Dalal has a detailed and thoughtful introduction to all 108 Upanishads. Radhakrishan and Nikhilananda had the older, classic translations that I read years ago.
Wallis, The Recognition Sutras. An underappreciated classic of Panpsychism from a thousand years ago, with an accessible commentary. If you want to dig deeper into Kashmiri Shaivism, try Dyczkowski’s Doctrine of Vibration (I took a course on this philosophical tradition at GTU in UC Berkeley this year).
Grimes, A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy. Sanskrit Terms Defined in English. A nice intro to the worldview and esoteric vocabulary of Indian philosophy, as a series of short essays on concepts that are hard to understand and better kept in Sanskrit instead of their many translations (words like dharma, karma, brahman, atman, etc). If you want to dig deeper, I’d suggest Monier Williams Sanskrit English Dictionary.
Hietelbietel, Dharma: Its Early History in Law, Religion, and Narrative (South Asia Research). Dharma is a key philosophical concept in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and translates into something like “duty”, “righteousness”, “law”, “truth”, etc. Still, none of these get to the heart of this elusive concept, which has been key to guiding the lives of billions of humans (similar to the “Sermon on the Mount” for Christians).
Miller, Chip War. The most important manufactured goods in the world today are microchips, and the specialized tooling that make them (lithographic, ion implantation, CVD, and other tools). One Dutch company, ASML, uses American research to make $200mm EUV lithography tools with 400K+ moving parts; this in turn is used to make high-end chips which one Taiwanese company, TSMC, dominates the manufacturing. This history goes into why Americans lost the manufacturing of their semiconductor and EUV research to these 2 countries and the geopolitical importance of the chips and supply chains, as these are the most important inputs for AI systems.
Winkler, We The Corporations. The first political entities in North America were corporations like the Virginia Company or Massachusetts Bay Company, which eventually transformed into cities or states. Hence corporate charters are the basis of future colonial and state charters, and even the US Constitution, as a compact between many stakeholders (similar to its predecessor corporate charters). Basically, the US as we know it evolved from corporations, which are older than the country and states, and that mercantile mentality of stakeholder governance and shareholder voting created modern democracy. And over time 19th and 20th century corporations became “persons” and won the rights that Americans had.
Dalio, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail. A hedge fund tycoon lays out his theories for long-run civilizational growth and decline, applies them to 500 years of history, and then tries to make predictions mostly for the US and China (while sadly ignoring India, the EU, and Africa). There’s much to ponder here and I disagree with his conclusion that China will dominate the 21st century, as he misses the key variable of where the rule of law is strongest and where the most talented and entrepreneurial people in the world want to live (hint: Not China).
Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. A Brookings social scientist documents an emerging demographic trend – boys in the developed world are seriously falling behind girls in education, health, and overall predictive life outcomes, and we’re seeing institutions silently adjust for this (e.g. affirmative action in colleges in the last decade was more likely to favor boys). We need more discussion on the solutions Reeves offers, like making schools and colleges more inclusive for boys and directing them to high-end new jobs in the CARE professions.
Church and Head, A Concise History of Switzerland. A straightforward history of Switzerland, which I think is the model country most relevant to the US, EU, China, India, etc., in that they have balanced regional needs and control with sensible federalism, evolving from the 13th century till today. Switzerland, New Zealand, the US, and Singapore are the multicultural, wealthy, well-educated model countries setting the standard for the 21st century.
Kramer, Maimonides. A biography of the OG 12th century mensch, who grew up in a stew of cultures in Cordoba and Cairo (e.g. Spanish Christian, Moorish, Jewish, etc). He’s my favorite model of the practical man of action, the useful philosopher: he served as a community and palace physician, a community leader, and a thinker and philosopher about key Jewish texts. My favorite part of the book was his letters to friends and followers; some nice archival work by the author here.
Kaiser, Karl Lagerfeld – A Life in Fashion. Lagerfeld is one of my favorite designers and I love how omnivorous he was in his inputs (his massive collections of books, music, photos, art, etc) and his prolific output (drawings, shows, photos, books, homes).
Sacks, On the Move: A Life. A fun and touching memoir by the writer and neurologist about his whacky life, including that 5 year period where he was jacked on amphetamines and practicing as a doctor in West Coast hospitals.
Clark, Tao of Charlie Munger. RIP Munger, not just a great business philosopher, but a rare practical man of wisdom. This book offers a good intro to his thoughts and you’d have to read his quotes or speeches to get a better sense of the man. A useful and less-known investment book I read on the side was 100 Baggers (recommended by Pabrai).
Metz, Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World. If you believe that AI is the most important progress in human civilization since the printing press, industrialization, or modern physics, this book offers the story of modern machine learning and its billion-scale use in an accessible and easy way. For more details on AI, read the new 4th edition Russell and Norving textbook or Prince’s textbook on Understanding Deep Learning.
Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. The Palm co-founder presents his practical view of how intelligence requires many interworking modules, including reference frames and a grid. Specifically, he proposes that the brain operates through numerous independent but interconnected columns in the neocortex, each capable of understanding the world through hierarchical learning and spatial “reference frames.”
Stephen, Breath Taking: The Power, Fragility, and Future of Our Extraordinary Lungs. We can survive months or years being brain dead but will die in minutes if our lungs stop functioning. Stephen explores the vital complexity of the lungs, illustrating their importance to individual health and human survival while discussing respiratory health challenges and the future of pulmonary medicine. The book combines personal stories, medical insights, and the latest research on our lungs.
FICTION
Zukofsky, A. A strange and fantastic book of poetry, spanning 5 decades of the poet’s life. As Goodreads says: “No other poem in the English language is filled with as much daily love, light, intellect, and music.”
Callenbach, Ecotopia. An overlooked 1970s novel set in California about a West Coast that secedes from the United States and forms its own green, socialist, hippie state. I was delighted by how well it was written, like a jaded New York journalist visiting the new state to report on it for other Americans. Much to ponder about alternative lifestyles and futures, from this far-sighted Berkelian author. This should be required reading at all American high schools and colleges (let’s get rid of Gatsby and Salinger).
Banks, Consider Phlebas. A fun but overrated novel, whose best character is a Mind, a superintelligent machine stuck on an isolated planet with enemies trying to capture it while the Culture, an advanced future civilization that is a descendant of humanity, tries to rescue it. Ultimately the plot was ridiculous and the characters kept making obviously bad (teenage boy-level) decisions, but the depictions of what AI and advanced civilizations could be were what redeemed it and made it noteworthy.
Louise Gluck, Poems 1962-2012. I didn’t know much about Gluck and picked her book up on a whim while visiting City Lights in SF. Her poetry is both sparse and luscious, with visions and stories that moved me. Here are the final lines from “Dawn”: ”You get home, that’s when you notice the mold. / Too late, in other words. / As though the sun blinded you for a moment.”
TECHNICAL
Foster, Generative Deep Learning, 2nd Edition. I may have read around 200 GenAI papers, but it was helpful to step back and put them into a framework and connect them to some foundational ideas. Foster does a great job and this is probably the best GenAI textbook out there.
Havil, Gamma: Exploring Euler’s Constant: As one reviewer states it well: ”Gamma is the limiting number, as n gets larger, of the difference (log(n)- (1+1/2+1/3+…+1/n)). It’s about 0.577. No one knows whether it is the solution of an equation or not, like pi or e. The book successfully answers the question “Just what is it about the the complex zeros of the Riemann zeta function that makes them relevant for the distribution of prime numbers and the Prime Number Theorem? Hence in some sense, this book could be regarded as a follow-up to John Derbyshire’s book Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics.”
Odifreddi, The Mathematical Century: The 30 Greatest Problems of the Last 100 Years. A masterpiece of mathematical simplicity and brevity. The author describes thirty highlights of pure and applied mathematics, telling the story of an exciting problem, from historical origins to a modern solution, in simple prose free of technical details. This is a book I will return to a lot, and it also points one to many great papers and monographs (my immediate next step was to learn about the Banach–Tarski paradox and read some books on that one).
Cook, In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman. The Traveling Salesman problem asks what is the most efficient itinerary to visit N cities, and it turns out to be a deep mathematical problem that is tied to one of the most important mathematical questions of the day, whether P = NP (likely not). The author covers many of the clever algorithms behind this, along with art made from it. These are what power Google/Apple Maps and much of the routing software that sends ships, airplanes, trucks, and more around the world.
PAPERS
I read ~200 AI papers this year, both professionally for work and for the sheer fun of it. It was the annus mirabilis for AI research and new models being released, and the only thing that scares me is whether is the first year of an exponential takeoff where every year is meaningfully better than the last or if the pace slows down and the magnificent future of the abundance of intelligence and material goods is just a mirage. As many AI researchers believe, if we can solve the problem of intelligence and manufacture cheap and widely available intelligence, we can then solve all of humanity’s problems in short order. I don’t have the time to summarize what I found notable about all the papers below, but these were the best of the batch that I read, and I present them in no particular order.
Bai et al, Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback (2022)
Girdhar et al, ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All (2023).
Bowman, Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models (2023).
Yang et al, Auto-GPT for Online Decision Making: Benchmarks and Additional Opinions (2023)
Kirilov et al, Segment Anything (2023).
Reed et al, A Generalist Agent (2022).
Touvron et al, Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models (2023)
Singhal et al, Towards Expert-Level Medical Question Answering with Large Language Models (2023)
Wu et al, BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance (2023)
Park et al, Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior (2023).
Pan et al, Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap (2023).
Wei et al, Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models (2022)
Yao et al, Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models (2023)
Besta et al, Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with Large Language Models (2023)
Jones and Bergen, Does GPT-4 Pass the Turing Test? (2023)
Dettmers et al, QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs (2023)
Kosinksi, Theory of Mind Might Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models (2023)
Ganguly et al, Predictability and Surprise in LLMs (2022)
Wei et al, Emergent abilities of LLMs (2022) (but see the skeptics’ response)
Ouyang et al, Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback (2022)
AUDIO AND VIDEO
I had some time for the video series, albums, podcasts, and playlists below (mixed among lots of junk Netflix and varied YouTube videos that I sampled). My tastes lean toward math and physics videos, intellectual dramas and discussions, and contemporary classical music – so if that’s your cup of tea, enjoy what’s below.
Theory of Everything: The Quest to Explain All Reality.
Classical Takeover: Max Richter
People I (Mostly) Admire Podcast
IN SUMMA
यद्यदाचरति श्रेष्ठस्तत्तदेवेतरो जनः ।
स यत्प्रमाणं कुरुते लोकस्तदनुवर्तते ॥ २१ ॥
Whatever action is performed by an excellent person, common people follow in their footsteps. And whatever standards they set by excellent acts, all the world pursues. [Bhagavad Gita, 3.21]
PAST LISTS
Best Books of 2022 (Lives and Machines)
raohacker.com 