Siddhesh Recommends - September 2023

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

Sep 30, 2023

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

Click any of the titles below for the links.

You can view all previous recommendations here.

“Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time? To reduce the dissonance, people have spawned a whole industry of Musk-bashing, trying to explain away each of his accomplishments: Peter Thiel gets all the credit for PayPal, Martin Eberhard gets all the credit for Tesla, NASA cash keeps SpaceX afloat, something something blood emeralds. Others try to come up with reasons he’s wholly smart - a 4D chessmaster whose apparent drunken stumbles lead inexorably to victory.
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, And The Quest For A Fantastic Future delights in its refusal to resolve the dissonance. Musk has always been exactly the same person he is now, and exactly what he looks like. He is without deception, without subtlety, without unexpected depths.
The main answer to the paradox of “how does he succeed while making so many bad decisions?” is that he’s the most focused person in the world.”

Less of a book review and more of a deep dive into the contradiction that is Elon Musk. (“How can someone so <x> be so <y>?” Insert for x and y according to your beliefs.) Scott Alexander dives deep and comes up with as accurate an explanation as you’re likely to find.

See also: highlights from the comments on that blogpost.

Back to School (article)

“Adulthood as you understand it: if you don’t know what to write, you sit down and write anyway. If you don’t feel like running, you put on your Nike shorts anyway. If someone lets you down, you’re understanding. Everyone’s going through something…
You see now how some people make it to midlife and implode. You think the discipline will add up to something but what if it doesn’t. And what if it adds up to the wrong thing. What if one day you have the house and the boy and the baby and the book and you realize it’s no solace in the face of your own mortality.”

This genre of essay, just random melancholic meanderings, is my favourite.

The Truthiness of Hasan Minhaj (article)

“Generally, we give standup comedians the license to lie; Minhaj believed that license had no limits. Many of us might have even agreed that were no limits — hence everyone’s initial reaction of “so what?” Unfortunately for Minhaj, there are limits. We’re just discovering them as we go.”

Worth reading if you’ve followed the recent Hasan Minhaj story. Very clever juxtaposition between Hasan Minhaj and his Daily Show predecessors.

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