(Part 2) Best products from r/CGPGrey

I'm personally getting a lot of great recommendations who cares if Grey's assistant likes them.

[TLC: High middle ages]
(https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/high-middle-ages.html)
Really interesting professor does a very broad overview of the changes happening in Europe during this time period.

[Unfamiliar Fishes]
(https://www.amazon.com/Unfamiliar-Fishes-Sarah-Vowell/dp/159448564X) Actually most Sarah Vowell books are pretty interesting and entertaining. This one covers the time period of Hawaii from when it was a kingdom to a state, when it's soul is being fought over by missionaries, fruit companies and shipping.


[What I talk about when I talk about Running](
https://www.amazon.com/What-Talk-About-When-Running/dp/0307389839) I'm not a runner, neither is Grey, still a really interesting reflective book.


[Cod: The biography of the fish that changed the world](
https://www.amazon.com/Cod-Biography-Fish-Changed-World/dp/0140275010/ref=sr_1_1?
keywords=cod&qid=1566160678&s=books&sr=1-1)
You need to read this just for the charming cod wars Iceland engages in, also a ton of history and geography.

[Stephen King: On Writing](
https://www.amazon.com/Writing-10th-Anniversary-Memoir-Craft/dp/1439156816) Very nuts and bolts book about the physical act of writing and a lot of inside baseball about the state of mind King was in while writing some of his most famous books,

Re: Mars

If you've not taken the time to read The Martian by Andy Weir, do it. Now. I mean right now.

It's fantastic, beginning to end. You can read the first chapter at the author's website, and it should hook you instantly.

The audio book version, read by R.C. Bray, is fantastic. There is a movie version coming in November staring Matt Damon, directed by Ridley Scott.

One of my favorite books I've read as of late. Accurate, fun, harrowing, interesting, and just technical enough to make it feel entirely real beginning to end.

Weir's talk at Google about the novel goes into depth about it; he actually researched and wrote programs to help him keep the book as accurate and realistic as possible.

His descriptions of what happens in people with "split brains" is pretty accurate. It's truly fascinating what happens when you separate parts of the brain. (By far the coolest in my opinion is left-sided hemi neglect, where the patient just does not acknowledge the left side of things existed - they will shave only the right side of their face, only draw the right side of a clock, etc.)

Most of what he discussed can be found in most neuro textbooks. As far as the "who is you" part of the question, I think that's best found in the philosophy section.

If you're interested in a specific textbook, I've enjoyed (as much as one can enjoy medical school) the neuroanatomy through clinical cases book

I think Grey may know this, but we're more like 50 or 200 on a neurological level, rather than two. Quite a lot of our brain systems don't talk to each other, not just the right and left hemisphere in corpus callosotomy patients. Robert Kurzban has a great book about this: Evolution and the modular mind

Edit - Should have mentioned, but he makes a pretty convincing case (moreso than Grey imo) that one's coherent sense of self is mostly an illusion.

Most people probably already know about this, but I think Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar, is an amazing read for every business owner/manager.

As opposed to a lot of business books, this one is pretty entertaining and cannot be easily summarised. The key takeaway I got from the book is that success hides flaws in your company.

I'm looking at some reviews of the Kindle and it seems like the lower settings/disabled buzzing is pretty popular with people?

This might be your fussiness, Grey. Which is perfectly fine, you gotta find the device that works best for you.

Oh.....oh /u/imyke Do I have to teach you the error of your ways with using Beats by Dr.Dre Bluetooth headphones?

Please just toss those into the trash. You paid ~$200 USD for headphones that sound like $50 Bluetooth Headphones. You paid for the Beats name and trademark look.

I can link you to so many better Bluetooth headphones for either cheaper then Beats or the same cost. But sound 100% better. (Well as good as Bluetooth can do because Bluetooth compresses audio files an extreme amount.)

Like for instance The Jaybird X3's

Or the Bose SoundSport Pulse

Or the Sennheiser Urbanite XL If your looking for over ear instead of In Ear.

All of these headphones are 100% better than Beats and cost close to the same price. Well... Except the Sennheiser, but that because it is a studio quality Headphone company that professionals in the recording industry use.


EDIT: Sorry everyone this got out of hand. I thought my post was written in a clearly sarcastic way. I guess I did not. I never meant to personally attack Myke or claim that "I am right and you are wrong." I respect anyone's decision on what they want to buy. I might try to convince you to buy something else, but if what you want fits the requirements you have, buy what you want.

I'm not sure how terrible it is, but I'd be pretty curious to hear your thoughts on The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin. My wife talked me in to listening to it and it seems like it has some good ideas on how and why you should externalize memory systems.

Naked Pilot: The Human Factor in Aircraft Accidents ...as well as being an excellent gift for Brady is a book made of paper that a friend reads on planes. Very bad form indeed.

tl;dr dozens of examples of perfectly safe and functional planes experiencing "controlled descent into terrain" at the hands of unsafe and dysfunctional humans.

Make sure to try them out first though. Noice cancelling headphones might make it feel like you constantly have a preassure on your ears (like the one you get when you're on an airplane and it's climbing) and that's really uncomfortable. Not all people experience this but I do and I can't stand to have noice cancelling headphones on for more than 5 minutes. Instead I bought a pair that are closed headphones that passively cancel out noice instead of actively like the Bose quiet comfort do. I have pair of these and they are also great on a plane but they don't fold down as nice as the Bose ones do.

/u/imyke /u/MindOfMetalAndWheels Not sure how scientific this is, but I've found these spikey mats super effective for insomnia. I've had nights where my brain just won't turn off, especially when there's something on my mind. I will lay on it on bare skin for 10-15 minutes. The pain is like a forced meditation, and then I can fall asleep pretty easily after. Highly recommended.

Rites of Passsage at $100,000 to 1 Million by John Lucht is near the top of my list. If you work in a company it's important to reflect on what got you here won't get you there.

In fact, anywhere in life, the behaviors and skills that got you to where you are won't necessarily be the same things that make you successful.

Example: Grey tried many things to discover that educational videos make him a living. But continuing to try many things will not cause him to be more successful - in fact it will detract from enjoying his life.

This one looks ony for U.S.

https://www.amazon.com/Making-South-Park-Days-Air/dp/B014X6IC38/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1518355372&sr=8-1&keywords=Making-South-Park-Days-Air

This one looks like only for U.S. too:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/6-days-to-air-the-making-of-south-park/id1030416859

Less legal options are also available of course but depend on your willingness to take them which probably depends on the country where you live in :)

As a minor side note South park itself isn't region locked on its website which is amazing to me.

Grey if you want to read a non fiction book that you would never pick yourself I can reccomend this one:

How soccer explains the world. An unlikely theory of globalisation.

Don't get fooled by the title. This is a soccer book, but it's not really about soccer. It's a collection of weird and interesting stories connected to the game.

I think the Newsweek review on the back of the book give you the best idea of what I am trying to explain: "A riveting analysis of soccer struggle to come to term with the forces of free trade, multinational brands, and cultural imperialism"

Its available on amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Soccer-Explains-World-Globalization/dp/0061978051

We already have an issue in the united states with not enough jobs to go around, if this dystopian outlook is truly inevitable, what are our options for mitigating it, or at least coping with it?

I have thought quite a bit about autonomous vehicles and how I can't wait to buy one and never have to drive again, how many benefits it will have on society (faster commutes, fewer accidents, etc), but I hadn't considered how much the transportation industry will be affected and especially how much truck drivers in particular would be ideal to replace. The NYT ran a story the other day (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/upshot/the-trucking-indust...) about how we don't have enough drivers to fulfill the needs, but "Autos" could swing that pendulum swiftly in the opposite direction once legeslation and production catch up. How do we handle 3.6M truck, delivery and taxi drivers looking for a new job?
I haven't read it yet, but I have recently had recommendations of the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (http://smile.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00LOOCGB2/0sil8/re...) which I look forward to reading and hope it might be relevant.

(cross posted from HN)

If anyone else happens to like those short-format thought collection-style books, two other interesting ones that I really like are:

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

I come back to both of these books repeatedly for creative inspiration, I like them so much. I have yet to read Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, but from what Grey said, I feel like the two that I mentioned might be a little bit more in-depth and may require a bit more work to understand in some cases.

AI - If anybody is having nightmares like Grey on the AI issue I would strongly recommend the recent book: 'What to think about machines that think.' (edited by John Brockman) http://www.amazon.com/What-Think-About-Machines-That/dp/006242565X
It is a collection of short essays by 186 leading thinkers on the question and contains gems by generalists such as Daniel C. Dennett, Susan Blackmore, Martin Rees, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker and many more specialists in the field. It presents a wide range of well argued views on the question and it seems clear that: 1) We are much further from 'hard AI' than you might think and 2) It is by no means clear that AI poses an existential threat. I particuarly like the argument put forward by Martin Rees (former president of the Royal Society) that AI represents our best hope for the long-term survival of consciouness/thought/meaning in the long term and that any AI would either be a product (descendent?) of humanity or would be an integration of the human mind with a non-organic substrate.

Alright I don't know if you have looked into this, but have you tried charger converters?

So for example, instead of looking for a block that has 10 different USB-C plug ins, you get it with USB-A plugs like you have now. Then when you want to plus them into your computer, you can get a converter like this one that turns the USB-A into the USB-C so you can plug them into your laptop.

As for being international, my parents, who travel a lot for their jobs, have a converter that can convert almost any plug type into any other plug type like this one (which also has USB-As which is neat). This means you would only need one type of plug (which ever one they use in the UK I would guess, but I don't know), and you can have one or two adapters when you need to convert.

As far as the other end (Lightning vs. USB-C vs. microUSB), I don't fully know your device position, but I'm in a spot where I only need one cable - USB-C - and it makes my life vastly easier, but I probably have a lot less devices than you so I don't know (Phone, Laptop, and Nintendo Switch is all I bring)