My non-fiction books of 2024
By asking questions, I learn. Writing down what I have learned helps me explore, and some explorations become pictures. At every step, I take my time and embrace the role of randomness.
Learning to question by Paulo Freire
”I have the impression - and I don't know whether you will agree with me - that today teaching, knowledge, consists in giving answers and not asking questions.”
“Because, I repeat, knowledge begins with asking questions. And only when we begin with questions, should we go out in search of answers, and not the other way round.”
On Writing Well by Willian Zinsser
“I then said that the professional writer must establish a daily schedule and stick to it. I said that writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself. He is also going broke.”
“That condition was first revealed with the arrival of the word processor. Two opposite things happened: good writers got better and bad writers got worse. Good writers welcomed the gift of being able to fuss endlessly with their sentences—pruning and revising and reshaping—without the drudgery of retyping. Bad writers became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen.”
Thinking in Pictures by Michael Blastland
“How do we do this in practice? One of the best ways is with the most simple, naive questions: 'And is that a big number?' Naive maybe, but powerful. I made half a career from asking that question, and plenty of important people looked silly trying to answer it.8
Here's £10 million for school singing lessons, says a government minister, riding the wave of a popular TV show about choirs. And is that a big number? Context: there are about ten million school kids. What's that when it's mapped? It's £1 each a year, or £30 for a teacher for one class a year, if you're lucky.”
”We tolerate complexity by failing to recognize it. That's the illusion of understanding, say Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach.”
Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton
“People’s willingness to engage in delicate explorations on the edge of their thinking could be easily suppressed by an atmosphere of even minimal competition and judgement.”
“Have you noticed how much easier it is for you to tell me about your failures than your successes?”
“This neural model also makes it clear why creativity favours not just a relaxed mind, but also one that is well-but not over-informed.”
“Time spent discovering things for yourself, even though someone could have simply told you the answer or given you the information, may be time well spent if the outcome is greater confidence and competence as an explorer.”
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“But there is a more severe aspect of naive empiricism. I can use data to disprove a proposition, never to prove one. I can use history to refute a conjecture, never to affirm it. For instance, the statement
The episode taught me a lot.
Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure.”
“Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human; they are marred by the biases humans have.”
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