MAIN IDEA:

This book discusses the issue of qualitative change when the state of the system changes from 0 to 1, which is entirely different than quantitively evolving from 1 to 2. This discussion proceeds mainly in the business area about building businesses that create new things that did not exist before. It touches on many relevant areas and concludes by presenting four future development scenarios, only one of which will be realized.   

MY TAKE ON IT:

I agree with most of the ideas expressed in this book, especially in the business area. However, the most significant problem of them all, is the gigantic social change we are going through today, which is the growing redundancy of humans for the production of goods and services. The book does not explicitly recognize this problem, leave alone propose a solution. Instead, the authors allocate lots of attention to founders, stressing their role in going from zero to one, which is understandable because they belong to this personality type. But it is insufficient because the founders could exist only when everybody’s survival and even minimal satisfaction were guaranteed. Otherwise, all energy would be spent on survival, meaning just moving from condition 1 – the level below survivability, to 1.01 – the level of minimal survivability. It is also an excellent guide to the logic and circumstance of business innovation.    

MAIN IDEA:

This book reviews a few known successes and many failures of the American Intelligence community, its continuously growing structure, its history, its present dysfunctionality, and its increasingly complicated future. The main point this book makes is the dramatic increase of the information available to civilians, who are often capable of providing better analysis than multibillion-dollar agencies of the intelligence community. The second point is that cyber intelligence has become both: a growing business industry and a growing hobby for many people. The result is such an increase in the scale of intelligence community failures that one could not possibly even imagine a couple of dozen years ago. An excellent example would be an acquisition by Chinese intelligence of OPM security clearance data on millions of Americans.   

MY TAKE ON IT:

After reading about the apparent dysfunctionality of the American intelligence community, I should be distraught and scared, but I am not. Being somewhat familiar with both sides of Cold War intelligence and security competition, I believe that the stupidity and dysfunctionality of former Soviet and now Russian intelligence significantly exceeds the same of their American counterpart. I am pretty sure the same applies to Chinese. So, all things being otherwise equal, Americans would win. However, I would like to suggest a few upgrade measures that could make such an outcome guaranteed:

1. Remove all generic security clearances and substitute them with clearances for a specific document. With current technology, it is not that difficult to keep in the database for each document names of individuals authorized to use this document. Similarly, it should not be a problem to save in the database entry for each individual code of documents this individual is authorized for. The ability of private Manning or technician Snowden not only to read but also download millions of classified documents was beyond any conceivable level of incompetency of officials responsible for the design of the security protocol.
2. Combine all agencies into two, each of them covering the full scope of intelligence services and competing between themselves.
3. Keep public track record for senior intelligence officials, so consistently failed individuals could be excluded from positions of responsibility.
4. Change attitude to defectors from the enemy side by treating them as our own under suspicion in treason, meaning constant surveillance combined with conditional trust. Retaliate for any harm to them as if they were our own and provide them with the same level of support. For example, if Kennedy provided the same level of support to Cubans on Playa Giron as they were marines, Cuban people would not need to endure 70 years of communist tyranny.

MAIN IDEA:

This book reviews various types and nature of work, from hunter-gatherers to agricultural labor to work in the contemporary economy, whether as salaried people or self-controlled high-tech workers. The book is based not only on theoretical knowledge but also on detailed anthropological observations of hunter-gatherers and the destruction of their world after an encounter with more powerful societies. The book also looks at functional developments of the work process in energy, production, and use of tools. It also analyses the development of various forms of interaction with the environment, whether concerning types of living: cities vs. villages vs. nomads or division and organization of labor and trade. Finally, the book discusses our automated future, which inevitably includes the creative destruction of the currently existing form of society. It is unclear how it will look, but it has to be sustainable or else…

MY TAKE ON IT:

It is an excellent description of the historical development of human interaction with the environment in the process of resource acquisition from the earlier stages typical to the most animals to uniquely human and very complex contemporary world. This description is nearly utterly consistent with my understanding of these processes, so there is little to add. However, I would like to expand something that the book only hints at: “Other interesting approaches propose extending the fundamental rights we give to people and companies to ecosystems, rivers, and crucial habitats.”. I believe it will be a crucial change in the organization of society if all people get equal and unalienable property rights on all forms of shared and undividable resources. If implemented, such an organization would provide necessary resource flow to everybody without the need for work as the long automated process could generate such resource flow. However the idea of giving rights to non-humans such as “environmental systems” means just giving power to some people to control activities of others under pretense of defending these “rights”. This approach would lead to no good because it would mean fighting between humans for representing rights of these “environmental systems”, which would be no different than traditional fight for resources.

MAIN IDEA:

This book is about conformity and the human tendency to comply with authority in fear of short-term punishment even at the cost of losing long-term benefits. The idea is to look at the process of such compliance that usually includes lying, accommodation to dominant ideas and powerful leaders even if one does not believe these ideas and despises these leaders. The author also suggests using some specific tools to overcome this problem. These include asking questions such as “why we do it this way?” and rejecting living by the lie. Finally, the essential tool in overcoming illusions is maintaining congruence of one’s personality, actions, and behavior.    

CONTENT:

MY TAKE ON IT:

Everything here is pretty much nice, meaningful, and even somewhat helpful, especially concerning empirical research results. It would be wonderful if “the living in truth” would not be so detrimental to one’s health in typical situations of totalitarian societies like the USSR and even semi-totalitarian groups as American Academy today. People read Solzhenitsyn and have no clue how unusual is his case, not because he was a great writer, but because he survived. The noncompliance with dominant opinions and behaviors always has a cost, which could be very steep. If one to survive, it is essential to keep the balance between maintaining congruence of one’s personality and continuing existence of one’s body. It is not for nothing that the same people that were heroic revolutionaries before the Russian revolution when they were fighting czar’s political police – Okhranka became scared and highly compliant non-heroes with Stalin’s NKVD. It was not easy, but it was heroic to go on hunger strike when newspapers promoted, and many people admired one’s heroism. And the hunger strike is entirely different thing when nobody cares about it, while one is already starving to death anyway. In short, always consider the price and your readiness to pay it.     

MAIN IDEA:

This book discusses the results of sociological research based on an analysis of the hundreds of civil wars in the XIX and XX centuries. It identifies the key parameters that create conditions for societies’ breakdown into Civil War. First, the condition of the Anocracy– the state of society being strictly between autocracy and democracy, is necessary but insufficient. On a scale of -10 to 10, it is -1 to +1 when war occurs and -6 to 6 when serious troubles arise. The addition to Anocracy, the fractioning of the society into multiple factions, some of which are rising up at the expense of others that are going down, is an additional factor. Finally, the loss of hope for peaceful resolution of problems either via fair elections or via negotiations makes violent competition all but unavoidable.

CONTENT:

Introduction
Chapter 1: The Danger of Anocracy
Chapter 2: The Rise of Factions
Chapter 3: The Dark Consequences of Losing Status
Chapter 4: When Hope Dies
Chapter 5: The Accelerant
Chapter 6: How Close Are We?
Chapter 7: What a War Would Look Like
Chapter 8: Preventing a Civil War

MY TAKE ON IT:

I find this book very interesting and quite curiously separated into two. On one side, it is the work of the social scientist based on the wealth of experimental data thoroughly processed and analyzed that resulted in a very well-formulated and well-communicated model of societal degradation into the factions fighting each other to death. It is an excellent analysis, and I generally agree with its inferences. On the other side, it is a primal scream of the white women of North European background heavily indoctrinated into leftist, racist antiwhite ideology who consistently expresses hope to see “black and brown” people becoming the majority and expunging whiteness of America while substituting it with some kind of benevolent form of National-Socialism. All this combined with the extreme form of Trump derangement syndrome. I think that the first side is well worth reading, and the second side deserves skipping without any loss of value whatsoever.