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A good non-fiction book: pleasant, even entertaining to read. The author writes in stories and is sometimes able to touch me.

The stories I will remember:

The declaration of love to the dragonfly in chapter 6, a beautiful organism for a life in flying, followed by the hint that flies (and thus also mosquitoes) evolved evolutionary-biologically from something similar to the dragonfly. "It was only because evolution is random that this was possible." Which changed my idea about the position of humans in evolution.

The characterization of the mathematician John von Neumann in chapter 8 as someone who regarded selfish thinking as natural law. Now the whole game theory seems to me like a theory of everyone fighting everyone.
J.v.Neumann was then also the one who chose the cities on which the first atomic bombs were dropped and recommended the armament of America with atomic missiles. He served as a model for "Dr. Strangelove or like me learned to love the bomb".

The layout, the notes and the bibliography, all very nicely presented and pleasing.

But as a mathematician and potential gambler I have to nag about the overall concept and only want to give 4 out of 5 stars. The very short explanations about entropy in chapter 3 are not enough for me. A good story could have been possible here, starting with Laplace's principle of indifference and ending with the principle of maximum entropy. The important equilibrium condition of the principle of maximum entropy is missing, and thus all the explanations about life make quite little sense to me.

It is obvious that the author has dealt with brain research in his academic life and that his previous non-fiction publications dealt with questions of evolution, among others.

There are decisions that we cannot make through reason. These are, for example, decisions that change us in such a way that we cannot imagine the situation after the decision. Should I have a child? Should I join the church? Or, to quote an example from a book I recently finished: Should I accept the inheritance or not? L.A. Paul speaks of transformative experiences and sheds light on the problems that a rational, reason-based approach entails:

1. Is the information available on the consequences of the decision applicable to me?
2. Problems of merging information: "There might be a mistake in trying to reduce the richness and quality and character of human experience to numbers".
3. Diachronic decision-making: "Which self matters: the self making the decision, or the self that would result?"

It's about the value of first-hand experience. There is a difference between getting explained what "red" is and seeing red. It is worth pursuing this value of self-made experiences and not relying or not relying solely on the views of others. "There's a role for first-person experience for evaluating quality of life".

The book by L.A. Paul is for me an example where reason shows limits to reason. "I want us to recognize what we can do and what we can't do. What we can know, and what we can't know. Not set ourselves impossible tasks. So, take a stance involving epistemic humility; and then, from that stance, look at what kinds of decision models we might be able to build". I like that. Other examples for me are Karl Popper on truth and Noam Chomsky on the limits of knowledge that follow from language.

Actually, I didn't read the book at all, but heard an interview (www.econtalk.org/l-a-paul-on-vampires-life-choices-and-transformation/) about the book. From her voice, the author seems to have found peace in reason. I am not planning to read this book, but am waiting for her next book, "Transformative Religious Experience and the Paradox of Empathy", expected 2021.

I read the book because Robert Seethaler was recommended to me, and in the book store this book had the most appealing blurb. Wien, Freud, the time just before the Nazis came to power in Austria.

Sometimes I wonder what I would do if I would have lived in the pre-Nazi time. Would I be a conformist? Would I close my eyes? Would I stand up? It is really hard to say, and the book did not bring me on a mental journey to figure that out. Or did I simply not get the main character? Why does he lie to his mother about Trnskie? Why does Franz suddenly decide to place Trnskie's trousers on the flagpole in the center of the city? This comes completely out of the blue, I mean, he does exactly what his "friend" Freud says to do. There is no explanation, no inner dialog (about this), nothing.

Also I was interested in learning something new about Sigmund Freud. Little of his work is well-received nowadays. But the book gives almost nothing on Freuds work, Seethaler uses him just as a prominent example. I think it is missleading to believe that Freud was in any way similar to the person Seethaler describes.

All in all, nothing new, nothing challenging, nothing out of the ordinary. It is well written though, has reoccurring elements like the doves or the associations with the rural life as a child. It has some wit. It is not monotone. But all that craft does not help since Seethaler has nothing to say.

To be frank, this book feels like a commissioned work: the Nazi theme, antisemitism, love, coming of age -- all nicely packaged and easy to read. An engineered smash hit.

1) Childrens cooperate, even when they cra or when they are aggressive.
2) There is an inner quality "self-esteem", which is nutured by being seen and by being experienced/witnessed as precious the way we are, and there is an outer, acquired quality "self-confidence", which is nutured by praise and critique. The difference between both is the difference between existence and performance.
3) Successfully setting limits typically requires a passive part, where we describe the situation and our feelings, and an active part, where we take responsibility for us and our well-being. This active part can start with "I want that you..."

The are three ideas I took from the book. They help me rethink my interaction with my partner's kids. And I could not stop thinking what all this means when dealing with my inner child as well.

The detailled descriptions and interpretation of small moments in life show that Juul is really an expert in his field.

It was a long and challenging read, partly because I am new to most topics of the book (linguistics, mind-body-problem), partly because it is not self-contained. For me, it was a book to work with -- googling, reading the footnotes, googling again, making notes -- and so on.

Here are some highlights of what I learned. First, what is the difference between humans and (other) animals? Our language. It allows to generate "unbounded arrays of [...] expressions" of what happens in our head. Animals may have languages, too, but are limited in what they can express, mainly because the elements of their language have a direct link to what happens outside them. The "atomic concepts" of human language, on the other hand, can be seen as linked to mental activities, "though there are of course actions of refering and denoting." To me, this distinction is quite sophisticated and makes a lot of sense to me.

Second, while equipped with an infinite variety of what we can express with our language, our "human mind is [still] a biological system with a limited array of admissible hypotheses." Noone would doubt that our gut brain has limited capacity to understand the world, everyone would agree that rats can never solve prime number mazes; as Donald Hoffman puts it in his TED talk, evolution seems to favour fitness, not understanding reality. So once we agree that our cognitive capacities are limited, it makes sense to separate between problems (that lie within our cognitive capacities) and mysteries (outside our understanding, including questions we can not ask, or topics we can not provide evidence for). It also means that if the reality outside our understanding/ experience is entangled with the world as we understand it, we do simply (cannot help but) ignore this.

Third, the anarchist Chomsky challenges the concept of "physical" or "material". This concept, he argues, steems from a mechanical philosophy view point of the 16th century, according to which physical objects are persistent in time and space and causality is explained through contact. This world view comes soon to its limits: Gallilei could not accept any theory that explains the tides, Decartes realized that the creativity of language can not explained in these terms and hence proclaimed a spiritual world apart from the physical, Newton discovered gravity as "action at a distance" -- without contact -- that finally proved the mechanical world view as wrong. Until today, so I understand Chomsky, noone brought new meaning to the concept of "physical" or "material". I think that is what the principle of complementarity is about, slowly moving away from the notion of a particle that acts through contact.

This great book has deserved a place in my bookshelve to be read again in a year or so when the first impressions have sunk in.

Swensen argues that there are basically three sources of returns: asset allocation (which market(s) do you choose? Bonds, stocks, real estate?), market timing (when to sell and when to buy) and security selection (after you chose your market(s), which stocks, bonds, etc. do you pick?). The book is structured by this argument.

I skipped large portions of the book as I realized that I want to look at different markets as Swensen. I am more interested in the token economy than the "core asset classes" he suggests, also his critique on mutual funds was not interesting to me because I do not plan to invest there.

However, I liked the way Swensen substantiates his claims. His book has some careful selected and compiled tables that actually show that his points are not some sort of gut feeling. That is something I did not see that often in Personal Finance literature.

What I remember from this book is: Market Timing is hard. Portfolio Rebalancing (for example, pick ten stocks with the highest estimated Sharpe ratio on regular intervals) may work, performance chasing most likely not. At least my investment strategy should benchmark against a strategy that does very little market timing.

Gruen elaborates on the concept of blind obedience. He explains how we identify and sympathize with, and rationalize ourselves as loyal to, the persons who have power over us (or we think they have).

What I learned from the reading was that submission to an authority is often unconscious to us. The obedient tends to sympathize with the powerful instead of opposing him. Hence the structure is self-enforcing.

Many examples Gruen draws from are from the Third Reich. Current political events are only mentioned: Fukushima, refugee crisis, income inequality.

I seem to have a reluctance against psychoanalysis (I did not know Gruen's profession before reading), I currently prefer arguments from evolutionary psychology. That is why I believe that, while on one hand self-alienation might be an important factor and self-reflection might be a way to overcome blind obedience, on the other hand there might be other even more important factors such as group conformity that this book fails to explore.