Book Reviews Q2 2026

Published: 2026/11/08

Same rules as last time: This is a list of books (in no particular order) I finished reading in Q2 2026 and some comments on each one. Forgot to release this after I wrote it, so you're getting it now.

80,000 Hours - Benjamin Todd

Read this book primarily to see what advice they had for which jobs will still exist after another few years of AI progress. Their advice to focus on ambiguous difficult long-horizon tasks with little training data that will be complementary to AI is reasonable, but difficult to put into practice. Overall seems like a reasonable framework for reasoning about careers. I would've said the Effective Altruism influence is a bit strong, but apparently it was the other way around!

How to Rule the World - Theo Baker

This memoir details Theo Baker's freshman year at Stanford where he "balanced" his student journalism that led to the ousting of president Marc Tessier-Lavigne with his schoolwork. Marc Tessier-Lavigne's conduct is not an isolated incident: when Baker's professor discussed the Therac-25 and asked the students if they cared about ethics, only Baker bothered to raise his hand. He portrays Stanford as experiencing a new gold rush, a talent gold rush, where a "Stanford within Stanford" tries to siphon off students to found VC-backed startups. Amidst this is Stanford's "War on Fun" where even the parties have land acknowledgments. Overall an interesting window into a very different university.

A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works - Edwin Curley

Spinoza observed that which most "men think to be the highest good, may be reduced to these three: wealth, honor, and sensual pleasure". These are fine when "sought as means", Spinoza tells us, but "always cause the destruction of those who are possessed by them" as ends. Instead, Spinoza pursues "the highest good": "the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature". Through careful analysis of Scripture he reveals that it consists of universal teachings consistent across Scripture, such as "that a unique and omnipotent God exists", while others "could be useful only for a certain time or only for certain people". He concludes his analysis claiming "it is evident that we can grasp with certainty the intention of Scripture concerning things salutary and necessary for blessedness" and therefore "there is no reason why we should be so anxious about the rest". His magnum opus, the Ethics, attempts to solve metaphysics and, as the title might suggest, ethics. He lays out a metaphysics where there is a single infinite substance, God, which we are finite modes of. He then lays out an ethics, derived from his metaphysics, based on power of action. Joy, the "passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection", is good while sadness, the "passion by which the mind passes to a lesser perfection" is bad. Unfortunately I struggled reading the Ethics and will need to revisit it. It is written in Spinoza's geometrical method which lays out his arguments as if they were mathematical proofs, and his axioms, definitions, and proofs are all filled with rationalist jargon I don't have the background knowledge to understand (and unlike the rationalists of LessWrong, Spinoza was not able to make each piece of jargon a hyperlink).

Spinoza: Practical Philosophy - Gilles Deleuze

This commentary establishes the kinship between Nietzsche and Spinoza. While Nietzsche works to move past the death of God, Spinoza goes backwards and rescues God from organized religion. Deleuze explains that both are philosophers of ethics¹, which exists along a good-bad axis, not morality, which exists along a Good-Evil axis.² He also seeks to clarify various definitions of Spinoza's philosophy including distinguishing his metaphysics as being one of a "plane of immanence" that "does not make any distinction at all between things that might be called natural and things that might be called artificial" and bodies are identified via longitude, "the set of relations of speed and slowness, of motion and rest, between particles that compose it", and latitude, "the set of affects that occupy a body at each moment".

Meaning in History - Karl Löwith

Löwith distinguishes two primary philosophies of History: Greek/pagan and (Judeo-)Christian. The Greek view holds "everything moves in recurrences, like the eternal recurrence of sunrise and sunset, of summer and winter". Historical events "were full of import and sense", but not building towards any ultimate ends. The Christian view has History building up towards some ultimate goal, the eschaton. As he attentively analyzes attempts to find meaning in History from Marx all the way back to early Christians, he finds these attempts to attribute any sort of purpose to History to be ultimately religious in nature. He concludes that "there never has been and never will be an immanent solution of the problem of history". A provocative, yet compelling, thesis that was a key piece of my essay Unplugging the Landian Motor of History.

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia - Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, & Helen R. Lane)

A "carefully constructed and executed experiment in delirium" per Mark Seem's introduction, Anti-Oedipus is a book that simultaneously succeeds on many fronts. First, as the title might suggest, is the critique of psychoanalysis. "'Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?' How can people possibly reach the point of shouting 'More taxes! Less bread!'?" As Deleuze & Guattari (D&G) explain, "under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism". Oedipus, "colonization by other means", limits desiring-production (desire in D&G's account happens on a microscopic level and is inherently productive) and suppresses its inherently revolutionary essence. The clinical schizophrenic has little interest in the neurotic daddy-mommy-me of Oedipus so capitalism sends its top guy, the psychoanalyst, to impose it. The psychoanalyst insists that the train is daddy and the station mommy while the schizo wants to be "left alone to machine [their] little machines". This is not to say the clinical schizophrenic is one to be emulated; rather the clinical schizophrenic is produced when schizophrenic-as-a-process "strikes [a] wall, rebounds off it, and falls back into the most miserably arranged territorialities of the modern world".

Secondly, there's D&G's account of history. D&G correctly point out that "no one has ever died from contradictions". They proffer not a dialectical telos-slop account of History that inevitably results in a future the author oh-so-conveniently wants, but a "universal history" that "is not only retrospective, it is also contingent, singular, ironic, and critical". Capitalism, in their account, differs from previous social-machines (modes of social-production) in that it ruthlessly deterritorializes, tearing apart the old social codes in order to allow the production of a greater surplus. Yet capitalism also must limit desire; it must reterritorialize, repressing desire and resurrecting archaic codes like writing, the despotic Great Signifier, and nationalism.

Lastly, there's the book-machine itself. D&G wrote the book in a style that intends to promote the creative energy they endorse. The book-machine successfully worked its magick on me: once you read Anti-Oedipus you can't help but put a little joyful dance into your writing and hyphenate some words that have never been hyphenated before.³

^ The concept of Nietzschean ethics may be surprising to some readers, but Deleuze would point to Nietzsche saying in the first essay of the Genealogy "Beyond Good and Evil, at least this does not mean: beyond good and bad."
^ Other authors use these terms differently.
^ Much to the bewilderment of my friends. They informed me "lemur-phantom" is unclear writing.