Library · Tag

Thinking

An annotated collection of 3 books & essays on thinking, spanning 1982 to 2017. Featuring works by Donald C. Gause & Gerald M. Weinberg, Paul Krugman, Carlo Rovelli — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.

Are Your Lights On? How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is

Donald C. Gause & Gerald M. Weinberg, 1982 · Little, Brown and Company

A short, funny book that is mostly a sequence of anecdotes making a single argument: most problems people try to solve are not the problems they actually have, and the work of defining the problem is usually harder and m…

How I Work

Paul Krugman, 1993 · MIT personal page (originally delivered as AEA address)

Krugman's short essay about his own methodology — the four "Krugman rules" for doing serious work in a fuzzy field. Listen to the Gentiles (take seriously ideas outside your discipline), question the question, dare to be…

The Order of Time

Carlo Rovelli, 2017 · Adelphi (Italian original), Riverhead Books (English, 2018)

Rovelli is an Italian physicist who writes about his discipline with unusual literary grace. The book dismantles the common-sense picture of time — flowing, universal, one-directional — and replaces it with the stranger…