Shelf

October 01, 2025

I used to read widely. Never the same book twice. Over time I became intensely dissatisfied with my understanding of the world. I spoke of topics while my words rung shallow, I was right without ever quite knowing why. Writing, speaking, thinking felt empty. It was not that I had never understood, nor that I could not with some effort. The understanding was just never all mine.

Now I only read the books below, and in some sense treat them as a set of prompts for data generation. As AI advances, I suspect the value of shallow understanding will crater while the value of deep understanding will rise, so in another sense these represent the intellectual bets I want to make over the next decade. Consider choosing your bets as well.