Wisereads Vol. 4 — A new newsletter by Readwise
Last week, we shared an exclusive preview chapter from Founder vs Investor: The Honest Truth About Venture Capital from Startup to IPO. This week, we’re excited to share another exclusive preview chapter from The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life
Reading about reading and highlighting about highlighting. We're here for it. “Keep a commonplace book.” Yes. “Don’t just read books, re-read books.” Also, yes. “Reading is better if you’re taking notes.” Now we’re talking. ”Never read a book that is not a year old [because only good books survive].” That's Lindy. “If you see a book you want, just buy it.” Agreed. Same for reading software. “Physical books only.” Wait.
Fewer Losers, or More Winners?
Bond investors succeed entirely via negativa — by avoiding losers. To do better than bonds, investors must also seek winners. But there's a tension between the two as discussed by Howard Marks in his latest essay. “I’ve always been interested in old books. A few years ago… I came upon a rare book fair… and my eye immediately fell on a book he had for sale: How to Trade in Stocks, by Jesse Livermore. Here’s the quote the dealer had highlighted: ‘Winners take care of themselves; losers never do.’”
Respect and Admiration
We all know money can’t buy happiness. Morgan Housel shows us that money won't bring you respect or admiration either. “Steve Jobs didn’t have any furniture. It didn’t matter. He’s a genius. He’s Steve Jobs. Material stuff makes no difference when you’re respected and admired for internal traits.”
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
How to Take Smart Notes
You’ve read about how to read. You’ve highlighted about how to highlight. But have you taken notes about how to take notes? "All that underlining, all that highlighting, all that note taking is giving us the illusion that we're learning something new while our brain is just relaxing like a potato."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
How I make time for 3 kids, a job, fitness, volunteering, and more
Men only want four things and it’s disgusting: lift weights, see friends, do business, and raise a family. Matt Ragland shows us how he pulls this off. “🔴 Work = 40-45 hours, little early/late 🟢 Social = Church, kids baseball, football 🟢 Family = 90% of wknd time and all evenings 🔵 Workouts = 3-4x CrossFit, BJJ, plus playing with boys.”
Most highlighted PDF of the week
The Lindy Effect
Nassim Taleb is credited with introducing the Lindy effect to the masses using old books as his example. Philosopher and Oxford research fellow Toby Ord explores this statistical phenomenon using mathematics and probability. “The Lindy effect is an important and much-discussed principle but has had surprisingly little formal development. This paper attempts to address that need.”
Hand-picked book of the week
The Coming Wave
All technologies have unintended consequences, but thus far the unexpected positive spillovers haved overwhelmed the negative. In his new book, Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, helps us consider whether the coming wave of artificial intelligence might be different. “For most of history, the challenge of technology lay in creating and unleashing its power. That has now flipped: the challenge of technology today is about containing its unleashed power, ensuring it continues to serve us and our planet. That challenge is about to decisively escalate.”
The Coming Wave was officially released last week, but the publisher is sharing an exclusive sample chapter with the Readwise community. If you are as captivated by this chapter on The Containment Problem as we were, you should order the book through Penguin Random House.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
The Marginalian
Through her evocative essays on art and books, Maria Popova acts as a gateway, connecting readers to the reverberations of words felt only by one's soul. From Becoming the Marginalian: After 15 Years, Brain Pickings Reborn: “In the margins of books, in the margins of life as commonly conceived by our culture’s inherited parameters of permission and possibility, I have worked out and continue working out who I am and who I wish to be — a private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of thought, feeling, and wonder that binds us all: What is all this?”