The 61 Books Elon Musk Has Recommended on Twitter (mostrecommendedbooks.com) 106
Entrepreneur magazine writes:
Although his days are presumably filled with Tesla, SpaceX, cyber pigs and lots and lots of tweeting, it seems Elon Musk also finds the time to make reading part of his routine. The billionaire businessman is known for sharing (and oversharing) all his recommendations and thoughts on Twitter, so it's no surprise that books are part of that.
Most Recommended Books compiled a list of all the books Musk has commented on in the past several years, and you can see all 61 here. But if you're short on time today, click through to see 11 of the most interesting picks from his list.
The list includes Peter Thiel's 2014 best-seller Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, as well as business magnate Richard Branson's 2011 book Screw Business As Usual.
Musk also calls a 2004 biography of Howard Hughes "a cautionary tale," and a 2005 biography of Stalin "One of the few books so dark I had to stop reading." And for a 2011 biography of Catherine the Great, he wrote "I know what you're probably thinking ... did she really f* a horse?"
His favorite books about space include John Drury Clark's Ignition! as well as Modern Engineering for Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines. But there's also Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. ("My favorite spaceship ever is in [this book].") And he calls Isaac Asimov's Foundation series "fundamental to [the] creation of SpaceX."
Also on the list is Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (which Bill Gates also named as one of his 10 favorite books about technology) as well as Frank Herbert's Dune, which Musk calls "Brilliant," while noting that Herbert "advocates placing limits on machine intelligence." In fact, for eight different books on the list he'd added the same cautionary warning: "Hopefully not too optimistic about AI."
He also says he read Karl Marx's Das Kapital at the age of 14, and also read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (which Musk called "a counterpoint to communism and useful as such, but should be tempered with kindness.")
But Musk says his favorite book ever is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
Most Recommended Books compiled a list of all the books Musk has commented on in the past several years, and you can see all 61 here. But if you're short on time today, click through to see 11 of the most interesting picks from his list.
The list includes Peter Thiel's 2014 best-seller Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, as well as business magnate Richard Branson's 2011 book Screw Business As Usual.
Musk also calls a 2004 biography of Howard Hughes "a cautionary tale," and a 2005 biography of Stalin "One of the few books so dark I had to stop reading." And for a 2011 biography of Catherine the Great, he wrote "I know what you're probably thinking ... did she really f* a horse?"
His favorite books about space include John Drury Clark's Ignition! as well as Modern Engineering for Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines. But there's also Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. ("My favorite spaceship ever is in [this book].") And he calls Isaac Asimov's Foundation series "fundamental to [the] creation of SpaceX."
Also on the list is Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (which Bill Gates also named as one of his 10 favorite books about technology) as well as Frank Herbert's Dune, which Musk calls "Brilliant," while noting that Herbert "advocates placing limits on machine intelligence." In fact, for eight different books on the list he'd added the same cautionary warning: "Hopefully not too optimistic about AI."
He also says he read Karl Marx's Das Kapital at the age of 14, and also read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (which Musk called "a counterpoint to communism and useful as such, but should be tempered with kindness.")
But Musk says his favorite book ever is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
One of us (Score:5, Informative)
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Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment.
Re:One of us (Score:5, Interesting)
What is wrong with you? No one is talking about being a billionaire.
People are excited that a space nerd/science geek has made it big enough to actually push the limits of what the human race is messing with.
Whether you like the guy or not, whether you like his cars on not, you can't deny the guy is doing things that many of us wish they would be doing. And, speaking of myself, it has nothing to do with how he is enjoying his money (come to think of it, I know nothing about his, if any, excesses, and I do not care)
I'll never be a billionaire, I do not like Elon Musk too much, when I'm on my own, I still drive a 30 year old Supra that's on its third engine, and I am not too happy with the fact that by the time my young daughter is of driving age, driving the Supra will probably be outlawed, in part due to Elon Musk's success.
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As for being born into wealth, I was born in the People's Republic of Bulgaria in the 60s. It may have been luck all the way, but I am perfectly fine with my life today. I do not feel wealthy, but then, no one does.
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I agree, some of the stuff he does is great and I'm glad space technology is being pushed forward.
What annoys me is the way he is worshipped with articles about what random books he tweets about. It just feeds into the myth that if you act like a billionaire you can become one, when in reality you also need to be extremely fortunate. It's how they get you to act against your own best interests, to blame yourself instead of seeing that they are stacking the deck against most of us.
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>> myth that if you act like a billionaire you can become one, when in reality you also need to be extremely fortunate
part myth + part fact : I'll break it down because I was wealthy at one time
Extremely fortunate : This aspect is based on upbringing, you do need to learn how to network and how money is handled, how lawyers and accountants work. If schools taught the money handling aspects, society as a whole in the USA might be slightly more conservative in the lower to middle income brackets due to
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Most billionaires started life already rich.
Re: One of us (Score:2)
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“Luck” in this context means external forces one does not control.
I could launch my own microblogging competitor to Twitter tomorrow and it’s not going to make me rich. Even though the internet is littered with stories of scrappy garage upstarts pulling a David vs Goliath, the reality is that such success stories are the exception, not the rule.
This is why we tell kids to “go to college and become a doctor or lawyer”, because going into a well-paid profession leads to repeatab
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Telling your kids to go for sports in the hopes that he/she becomes the next Magic Johnson is just as ludicraous. Ditto for all the aspiting Actors in Hollywood who hopes to become De Niro/Streep. Ditto for aspiring musicians who are shooting to become the next Rolling Stones. Chances are ... slim.
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Mostly factual: in sports, music and Hollywood, making it to the upper levels is for the very few, well qualified, and with resources. I know personally, I've read and seen personally more than once:
A) actor's that are great but can't get the time off for a cattle call. Harrison Ford almost was one of these stat's. these new reality shows are filling a niece for them.
B) sports drivers, a basketball player, and a football player that should have been the very best but because they did not have the resources
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I don't understand why they down voted your comments.
makes perfect sense that in the USA, people are taught
to take the safe route to wealth and not the riskier higher reward side.
>>>. Even though the internet is littered with stories of scrappy garage upstarts pulling a David vs Goliath
yes mostly gobbled by Goliath, easier to buy the established talent and idea than to re-invent the wheel.
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It's book recommendations. I've actually got some great book recommendations from slashdot in the past.
If you want to list a few books you recommend reading I'd take your list about as seriously as Musk's
As you were going to ask :-) "The selfish gene" and "the extended phenotype" are probably the books I'd recommend most highly. The first three hitchhikers guide books are great entertainment but the last two were rubbish.
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If you’re not born into wealth, you’ve gotta be a good showman at convincing other rich people that your ideas are worth investing in. Or, be already somewhat wealthy enough that you can afford to spam bad ideas in front of enough gullible rich folks that a few take the bait.
Even then, as you said - it’s luck. As the small print says: Many will play, few will win.
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that's not true at all, Wealthy people invest in successful people.
the best wrench turner, the best coder, the best at whatever, is what they hire.
FYI, there are a lot more billionaires then documented publicly, you just never
see them and they stay private. these people teach their kids about not showing
off wealth and how to mix in with the crowds without fear. Germany has a ton
of them and they keep a very low profile.
AHA! (Score:2)
There is no dog, and Asimov, Heinlein, and Adams are its prophets.
Re:One of us (Score:5, Funny)
as well as Modern Engineering for Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines
... that fine line between 'Billionaire CEO' and 'Terrorist Watch List'.
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Personally I find it amusing that the US is pulling its hair out about gun ownership but Elon Musk, an immigrant, owns his own ICBM!
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Unfortunately nobody asked him which of the actual three books is his favorite. It comes off like a mention at the end that the focus group thought would have a good impact.
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Basically. he is one of us. "One of us! One of us!"
I guess it shouldn't be surprising that a guy who's not far from my age has read a lot of the books I've read. I realize he's South African, but he's more or less been watching the same world I have.
That billion dollars, though... I'm not gonna lie, Elon, that's always going to be a wall between us.
Depends Upon When (Score:1)
My favourite was voyage of the space beagle (ae van voight), books are fixed in point of time to when you first read it, so that was my all time most fun read, I might have read better as I got older, but that was the most fun, so far, second would be Planet of Adventure (jack vance) somewhat surprised no one has turned it into a computer game, it has all the elements of a RPG adventure. Reading tied to age and what you have read before and what you sought from it. Text books, there is no favourite, it alwa
Re:Depends Upon When (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you bother to read Das Kapital or Atlas Shrugged both are not very good reads and you get the gist of them from multiple sources,
You could say the same thing about the Gospels. You don't need to be a Communist, Objectivist or Christian to read them. They will not corrupt you.
It is sad that the world has become a place where people only read media that tells them what they already believe. Marx and Rand may not have been literary or economic geniuses, but they certainly had some interesting ideas and original expression. It is kind of boring and lazy to just read the Cliff Notes.
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I have also not read an religious books, they are crappy reads. There are a whole bunch of books out there, and only so much time. So there are a lot of textbooks where I only read the chapter that was of interest, done and finished. Now mostly the applicable content elements from the internet and sadly no time for non-fiction read unless the power goes down, too much interactive content available on the internet and I live comfortably and do not crave the escape as much. As for Atlas shrugged, I came acros
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I started in the bible. Not very believable, when it goes against established facts. A god would have gotten it right.
Red the Cow, the first chapter of the quran. Crappy read as well.
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This is exactly the attitude this world needs. Right now the world is divided by those who seek nothing but confirmation of what they already believe. Personally I believe the US is headed for civil war sometime in the next 50 years unless it reverses it's spiral of ever increasing division.
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It is kind of boring and lazy to just read the Cliff Notes.
Not as boring as actually reading Ayn Rand. I couldn't finish Atlas Shrugged, I just couldn't bring myself to pick it up again after a certain point about 3/4 of the way through... which is way further than I got through The Fountainhead.
Re:Depends Upon When (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair to Musk what he wrote about Atlas Shrugged was "Very appealing if you’re a sophomore in college. It’s a counterpoint to communism and useful as such, but should be tempered with kindness."
Also, it's not like Musk has curated a list, it's just things scraped from his Twitter feed.
Re:Depends Upon When (Score:5, Insightful)
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers, Kung Fu Monkey.
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Don't pee all over yourself that Atlas Shrugged was on the list.
I, too, prefer the Fountainhead. It is far less didactic and carries a stronger message about artistic and creative freedoms. It's disappointing that Musk chose A.S. as his preferred book about Objectivism.
Another "CEO's recommended books"? (Score:5, Interesting)
How often do we have to get them before people learn that this is like reading the "100 tips on playing the lottery" books written by those that won the jackpot? Success in business is about as much luck as it's work. If not more. Aside of him, hundreds started out with very similar, if not identical, ideas for startups, all of them failed. You only get to hear the success stories.
Or would you want to buy a "how I did my startup and failed" book by Joe Nobody?
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And how many people who are not successful have read those books?
That's pretty much the point. Read those books or don't, it won't make a difference.
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It's not even a list of books recommended by Elon Musk, it's just a list of books he happened to comment on, scraped from his Twitter feed. It's not like Elon Musk is actually recommending these books, or that he's saying you need to read them to be successful. That's just something you made up.
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So the list is even less relevant? How is this news?
Seriously, do we comment on every fart that guy passes now?
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Success in business is about as much luck as it's work.
When it happens at least three times in a row (Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX), maybe work is more relevant than you think for success.
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How many car start ups failed? Most of them. How many rocket startups failed? Most of them.
And neither of the two companies make run of the mill products. They are both cutting edge. I think it has to do with their CEO.
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When it happens at least three times in a row (Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX), maybe work is more relevant than you think for success.
When you can cascade your dot.bomb earnings into new and further investments into companies you did not originate, it does mean a certain amount of 'work' was done. That sweaty kind like the stuff Warren Buffet and Bill Gates do.
Why, then, is Musk so worshipped here?
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Success in business is about as much luck as it's work. If not more. Aside of him, hundreds started out with very similar, if not identical, ideas for startups, all of them failed. You only get to hear the success stories.
You might not become a billionaire but success comes from work. You can see the alternative in homeless shelters. And you can hear the grievances of the too enlightened to work crowd at a hundred protests about whatever issue — not a single one of them happy.
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Have you ever worked in a homeless shelter?
You will hear quite a few stories like Musk's. They just don't end in "and then I got rich" but in "and then I went bankrupt".
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I tend not to blindly believe random stories.
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Success is highly correlated (also necessary, but insufficient) with being willing to fuck over everyone.
Smart is also necessary but insufficient.
Maybe if you're an asshole, smart, resourceful, driven, and the odds fall out in your favor then you can be a billionaire.
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It also helps to have been raised as a privileged white person in the Apartheid regime of South Africa. He had a heads up over almost everybody around him from the start.
Re: Another "CEO's recommended books"? (Score:2)
It also helps to have been raised as a privileged white person in the Apartheid regime of South Africa.
Utter horseshit; growing up soft and weak is not an advantage. To Musk's credit, he's obviously overcome any inherent disadvantages to having grown up without adversity.
Re: Another "CEO's recommended books"? (Score:1)
Privileged people don't grow up "soft and weak".
That's exactly what they do but it's understandable that you might think otherwise as you've clearly never fucking met any.
Re: Another "CEO's recommended books"? (Score:1)
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I grew up at exactly the same time as him in South Africa, and actually met him as a 16 year old, he was in the neighbor school from me. So I feel I can comment on that part. Growing up in South Africa in the 80s was weird. People who live there, especially the Afrikaners are not very worldly, they live in a very closed inward looking place. It has improved, but the 80s?
South African whites (and European settlers in other colonies) already consisted of the people who had the guts to flee the very oppressive
Success is not correlated with that (Score:4, Interesting)
Success is highly correlated (also necessary, but insufficient) with being willing to fuck over everyone.
Smart is also necessary but insufficient.
Maybe if you're an asshole, smart, resourceful, driven, and the odds fall out in your favor then you can be a billionaire.
Success is highly correlated with intelligence, it's the trait with the most correlation with success with a coefficient of about .46. That means that about 20% of success variation is due to differences in intelligence.
Conscientiousness is the 2nd most highly correlated success trait: it's the "do a good job, be industrious, be orderly" trait and it makes "being good at your job" a predictor of success.
There's some subtlety with different forms of success: conscientiousness is distinct from intelligence (which falls under "openness", a different trait), so people high in conscientiousness will do well in jobs that require less cognitive ability, and people high in openness/intelligence will do well in jobs that require creative problem solving.
"Fucking people over" would fall under agreeableness, which is largely uncorrelated with objective success but correlates quite well with *subjective* success: people who are high in agreeableness (and low in neuroticism - another trait) are happier with their lives than people low in agreeableness.
So in summary: "fucking people over" is uncorrelated with objective success (ie - salary), but negatively correlated with subjective success (feel good about your life). Source [nih.gov].
Success is highly correlated (also necessary, but insufficient) with being willing to fuck over everyone.
Smart is also necessary but insufficient.
Maybe if you're an asshole, smart, resourceful, driven, and the odds fall out in your favor then you can be a billionaire.
I rather suspect that your post is less an insightful observation about successful people, and more a resentful dismissal of the success of others.
And for the record, success is a skill that can be learned. You can't change your personality traits, but you can change your knowledge and behaviour to make better use of the traits you have. Lots of resources on the net will tell you how to do this.
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Because i'm not lucky.
Did you read what I wrote there? Success is not a matter of what you can do or how smart, how "good" you are, it's mostly a matter of luck and being at the right place at the right time.
The invisible hand of technology (Score:5, Insightful)
These books are a little predictable, and speak to the same technological deterministic blind spot that most technologists have, especially in Silicon Valley.
Do you find yourself agreeing with ideas like:
- "The best way to predict the future is to invent it"
- History is one long line in which technology developed exponentially, and this line can be extended to the future (e.g. to a singularity)
- Technology has an impact on society, and is what changes it into new forms. E.g. the printing press determined a new shape of society.
If you recognise these thoughts, I'd recommend reading some books from the digital humanities as a counter weight. They really help develop critical thinking, and recognising the wishfull and ideological component in narratives about technology. Especially when it comes to AI, where Elon seems to have an overly reductive view on what factors drive and limit its development.
1.
Learn what technological determinism and social constructionalism are, and learn to detect these ways of thinking and talking in others. This is fundamental.
Good sources:
- Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
(Marx was a strong technological determinist, and Musk read his work when he was 14...)
2.
Learn to recognise the paradox of the technologist. The funny thing about technologists (and I include myself here) is that we like to think we're rational, but in fact are often led by unexplored irrational and almost religious drives. There is a strong belief that technology will and must create a better future.
Good sources:
- The Digital Sublime - Vincent Mosco. Breaks down the tantalising promises of technology.
- Grant McCracken has written about our need to believe that the future will be better, and how it's difficult to criticise technology because it's the thing so many of us have placed our hope in, now that politics, religion and the 'invisible hand' of the economy are no longer perceived as effective drivers of positive change.
3.
Learn more about the political aspects, and how these are woven in. How the hopes of technologists are molded to align with capitalism. E.g. The strong paralels between neo-liberalist ideas (e.g. deregulation) and the naive utopian values we project(ed) on the internet (unregulated decentralised space).
Good sources:
- Richard Barbrooke's classic analysis of the 'Californian ideology'
https://www.metamute.org/edito... [metamute.org]
- Deleuze - Post-script on societies of control. So prescient it's scary.
https://cidadeinseguranca.file... [wordpress.com]
Lawrence Lessig's conception of how power works around technology is also useful. For a technological determinist, the development of technology is the single most important factor that "impacts" society. But in reality things are much more complicated, with regulation (law), politics and norms and values playing an equally important role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
4.
Stop worrying about conciousness level AI taking over, and start worrying about really dumb AI that is already given much more power and influence than it should.
Reductionist technological determinist narratives are attractively simplistic. This can make them a powerful force for good, as they are easy for many people to get on board with. For example, musk's position what we can protect our environment is great.
But when it comes to AI however, these simplistic narratives blind politicians from the actual issues they should be dealing with. And they give Elon way more stress than necessary.
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We should read books to learn to doubt blind optimism or blind pessimism or belief in destiny or determinism? We need someone to tell us not to get hyped up about [whatever thing] someone is pushing/selling?
Hey, everyone:
- Don't get too hyped up.
- Don't get personally invested in stories about the bogeyman.
- Stuff happens because it happens, not because of your preferences or fears.
- People do what they do, not what you wish they would.
- Others' choices are not yours. They might not choose what you would
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- VR is going to be huge!
- Everything will move to the blockchain! Bitconneeeeect!
- A 3D printer in every home, a FabLab on every corner.
- Video calling will be the next big thing we'll want to do all the time!
- Our offices will be paperless soon!
- The decentralised internet "somehow" became a surveillance system? Let's build a blockchain, something that's extra decentralised. Surely the commercial interests won't know how to use this for evil...
The point is that Silicon Valley creates two things:
- Technolo
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If you still think this is silly, at the next tech conference you visit, try counting the 'optimistic' talks that push for adoption versus the talks that point out the potential limitations or even issues of the technology. I'd be amazed if you find even one truly critical talk.
What if we just don't take predictions seriously regardless? There's no more reason to believe negative hype than positive hype.
All those technologies you mentioned are useful and deserve attention — ideally thoughtful attention with no exclamation points.
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Do you find yourself agreeing with ideas like:
- "The best way to predict the future is to invent it"
- History is one long line in which technology developed exponentially, and this line can be extended to the future (e.g. to a singularity)
- Technology has an impact on society, and is what changes it into new forms. E.g. the printing press determined a new shape of society.
In short, yes, yes, and yes.
From the digital humanities? Weird.
I believe these things because these ideas are supported by a broad variety of sources. History shows us that cultures DID fundamentally change because of new technologies, like for example writing, agriculture, motorization, mechanized locomotion, or the internet. All of these techs ma(k|d)e possible fundamental shifts in how cultur
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> History shows us that cultures DID fundamentally change because of new technologies, like for example writing, agriculture, motorization, mechanized locomotion, or the internet.
It's honestly not that simple. If you really dive into it you'll learn how at all these moments in history things were way more complicated. Enlightenment was equaly driven by sociological changes in society. If you look at history you'll find many similar attempts to create printing-press like technologies, but they were never
Re: The invisible hand of technology (Score:2)
All that reading sounds hard. I have a shortcut.
1. Read Atlas Shrugged.
2. Think about it.
3. Laugh at its naivete.
4. Recoil in shock when you learn some people think we should model society on it.
Ignition! (Score:5, Informative)
IMO that's a pretty poor characterisation of the book. It's the memoirs of a rocket fuel chemist [sciencemadness.org]. There's the odd throwaway remark about how certain characteristics of a fuel combination make it more useful for extra-atmospheric rockets rather than air-to-air missiles, but that doesn't make it a book about space. It's a fun read, though, if nothing else then for descriptions like this of chlorine trifluoride:
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It's a great read, and it details the different paths explored during his time at the Naval Air Research Test Station. That's useful for not repeating work already shown to be unfruitful, or to be at least aware of the issues before undertaking new work.
I would argue that it influenced his choices of RP-1 and LOX and now methane and LOX.
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It's a great read, and it details the different paths explored during his time at the Naval Air Research Test Station. That's useful for not repeating work already shown to be unfruitful, or to be at least aware of the issues before undertaking new work.
I would argue that it influenced his choices of RP-1 and LOX and now methane and LOX.
Not only that, but Asimov wrote the forward...
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I'm not saying it's not useful to people wanting to go into space (although it is a few decades behind the cutting edge). Just that it's not about space.
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Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline has a category of posts on "things I won't work with" which features CFl3 prominently, starting with a post titled Sand Won't Save You This Time [sciencemag.org].
Ignition makes an appearance in that post, but he also has a link to safety notes [archive.org], which includes a description of a one ton spill, which burned through a foot of concrete and then a yard of gravel. He adds "That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-product
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>>For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
if there was ever a line that should have been written for the HHGG ( hitchhikers guild to the galaxy) that was one of them.
thank you for making me laugh and laugh loudly.
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Ok, he's Space-Jesus but why is this posted here?
Okay, here's a counterbalance: 86 books Barak Obama has recommended during his presidency [mentalfloss.com]
Also 10 books Donald Trump loves [usnews.com] - no idea if he's read them, but he loves them.
Strange Bedfellows (Score:2)
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Even stranger when you consider that Banks was quite left-wing and would certainly be uncomfortable with the likes of Bezos and Musk being fans of his work, especially given their employment practices.
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But Banks is an extremely compelling writer and I don't blame anyone for enjoying the Culture series. I've read and enjoyed almost all of his M books, but didn't like some of his M-less books.
I've read a few other books on the list, but I think Musk was lying about a couple of them. Or else he was just recommending the books on reputation without reading them.
Yeah yeah i get it (Score:1)
I get that some ppl are enamored with Musk, but its pretty clear hes kinda a narcissistic jackass.I don't think I'm interested in an article that might as well be from a fan club news letter.
Re: Yeah yeah i get it (Score:2)
Even taking that for granted, hes still a brilliant and visionary man. Im sure he's no profet, but I wouldnt turn your nose up at his predictions just the same.
Foundaton Trilogy (Score:3)
That's an odd series to base your spaceflight company on.
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He's a salesman, who like sales books... and just enough geek/nerd books to reinforce the sheen of geek/nerd
Salesman (Score:1)
He is a Salesman, nothing else
He is a surface level geek/nerd who knows how to sell, himself, his companies, his products ,,, but cares about nothing else
Only vapid geeklit, sci-fi and other garbage (Score:1)
> He also says he read Karl Marx's Das Kapital at the age of 14,
I'm 100% sure he's lying.
Nobody would give a fuck about Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged after he read a serious philosophy or economy book. Even one as dated and flawed as Marx's Capital.
Or FWIW, even some good realistic fiction (realistic as in artistical realism, not as in "matching some self-important cunt's prejudices" and his just-world or mean-world fallacies)
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Dear anonymous coward: you're an utterly ignorant idiot, who has never read anything about socialism, much less read Marx. You're a vapid fool who disbelieves authority... unless it comes from Rupert Murddoch's billionaire asshole.
Horse hockey (Score:2)
He "read" Das Kapital at 14? Suuuurrre he did.
I read a 300 page abridgement when I was 18 or 19, and it took months.
And he recommends Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand is a TERRIBLE writer, if she hadn't had people who wanted her propaganda published, it would never have gotten past the slush pile.
You, at work, are going to listen to your CEO give an hour and a half or two hour speech? Really? All you libertidiots, how bout I start a company, you come to work for me, and I give you a socialist speech?
Usual quote on Rand and Tolkien (Score:2)
Nice List (Score:1)
reading Books (Score:1)