Siddhesh Recommends - May 2023

The best stuff I've listened to, watched, and read last month.

Siddhesh

Jun 01, 2023

Siddhesh Recommends is a series in which I share the most memorable stuff I come across each month.

Click any of the titles for the link.

You can view all previous months’ recommendations here.

Enjoy!

📝 Books are subjectivity-merging devices, not efficient information transfer devices (7 min. read)

“When you read a book, you aren’t just accessing a series of propositions. You are becoming immersed in a worldview, through the rhythms of a given prose style, the facts selected and omitted, and the author’s chosen self-disclosures. Reading is hypnosis. Just like hypnotists lead you into a trance in which a simple suggestion can become forceful, skillful writers, by absorbing you in their pages, give you a perspective, from which certain selected facts take on greater relevance.”

Most recommended.

📝 The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals (5 min. read)

“Whenever I have a new idea, I ask GPT-4 to write the most basic version, I provide feedback, it apologizes, and we iterate until we reach the 1.0 version I have in mind. […] With the support of GPT-4, I feel unstoppable. The overnight surge in productivity is intoxicating, not for making money or starting a business, but for the sheer joy of continuously creating ideas from my mind, which feels like happiness.”

📝 Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro (20 min. read)

“Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson are not only the best biographies I have ever read - and not only the best histories I have ever read. They're perhaps the best books I've ever read.
The unexpected death of a president provides the closest thing to a natural experiment that history can offer. In an instant, one man is substituted for another - and how much the man matters (in comparison to the forces around him) becomes obvious rather quickly based on how different are the results he can obtain.
The reason why Robert Caro is able to write so compellingly about these qualities of Lyndon Johnson - his resourcefulness and ruthlessness, his inexhaustible energy, his need to win, his inability to take no for an answer - is that the biographer shares many of the attributes of the subject.”

🎸 I made a Spotify playlist of great 7+ minute songs!