Max Mednik
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Readings and musings

Notes on The Voice of Reason by Ayn Rand

1/21/2015

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I started off the new year of reading with some philosophy. After reading Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, I began to read The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. This book was the next one on my Ayn Rand to-do list, and it was a collection of published essays and lectures she and Peikoff gave to students and businessmen.

My favorite essay was “Apollo 11,” where her infectiously enthusiastic writing describing her witnessing the shuttle launch made me feel the pride and excitement shared by the entire American population that day. I loved her descriptions of how hard working, dedicated, and thoughtful all the scientists and staff of the mission were. This was a perfect, extremely visual example of the power of man’s mind and productivity to shape his life and the world around him through reason and hard work.

I also really liked the essay, “Medicine: The Death of a Profession,” which explained through some very poignant examples how government involvement in healthcare is strangling doctors and hurting the care of patients, especially those that the government is claiming to help.

Finally, I greatly enjoyed the Epilogue, “My 30 Years With Ayn Rand,” because it gave me a brief glimpse into what it would’ve been like to hang out with her and hear her talk about philosophy off the cuff, something I can’t really sense from her polished writing.

Overall, it was a really interesting read and has given me a lot of food for thought.

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Notes on The Most Powerful Idea in the World by William Rosen

9/18/2014

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I just finished reading The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen, and I enjoyed it a lot. It was quite a long book, and I expected it to be a history of the locomotive. While it did get to that point, the focus was really on the history of the science of invention in the Industrial Revolution, most notably of the steam engine and all its related "technologies." But in the words of Randy Pausch, that's just the head fake: what this book is really about is the most powerful idea in the world -- which is not the steam engine or one of the technologies but is in fact the idea of intellectual property and invention.

The book goes very deep into the physics that was developed in the 18th and 19th centuries and the individuals who made the huge advances, and it argues that it was Britain's nacent intellectual property and patent laws that properly incentivized individuals to invent and make the extremely drastic advances in productivity that the Industrial Revolution is known for. The idea that you should be able to benefit and own what you create, all the while sharing the benefits of your creation with society, is very powerful and is likely at the core of why America (originally a British colony) turned out to be such a fertile ground for the invention culture to blossom (as America continued to build on Britain's patent laws).

While this book is about the 1800s, the process of invention and tinkering that it describes is no less relevant for 21st century entrepreneurs.

As the author writes in the book, "the most important invention of the Industrial Revolution was invention itself," and understanding this process and how it was intentionally fostered and supported was the part of this book that I enjoyed most.
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Notes on Abundance by Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis

8/29/2014

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I heard about Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis on some blog post and thought it was an intriguing idea. I am typically optimistic and think there has been so much progress made in civilization, and I was curious to hear why the authors of this book were optimistic too.

The book was effectively a long catalog of many of the exciting technologies people have recently launched or are actively working towards across many fields such as robotics and medicine. It was nice from the one hand to hear about the many big problems facing the world and the different initiatives people are taking to fix them. But I found the book to be too descriptive of the current solutions and approaches, and so I think it will be quite dated in a few years. I would have preferred more detail on the actual problems because those are the entry points to real opportunities.

Even though I expected a bit more depth to the various arguments and less cataloging of examples, it was still an interesting read.

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