Reading Time: 2 minutes

December was busy.  Budgeting, year end projects, and skiing twelve days in a row is all hard work!

Updated stats through December:

Here are my most influential reads – in no particular order:

1. The real scam of ‘influencer’ – “Part of the scam is that the pyramid scheme of attention will somehow pay off for a lot of people.” Stephen here: this is my vote for the part of the economy to get the biggest wake-up call during the next downturn (i.e., mortgage brokers in 2007 – no more $30 filet at Cheesecake Factory for you!)
2. An End to War! – “They are memes of An End to War!, good-sounding narrative constructs structured to pretend that stand-off weapons, cruise missile strikes, targeted assassinations and UAVs are not part of what needs to end, but things we will define as not being acts of war at all.”
3. Social Media’s Shift Toward Misery – “The largest effect we found in our entire meta-analysis was the negative correlation between well-being and SNS content consumption.”.
4. Time arbitrage and the art of reading a book – “Books represent the culmination of decades of education on the part of the author and years of writing. Yet we have access to them oftentimes for free. The only investment we need make is the time to read them. This asymmetry is one we should all be taking advantage of.”
5. Hyakujos Fox – “Accumulating wealth and power are just games we play.”
6. Sunday Firesides: Simplicity Is Not Laziness – “By all means, ruthlessly cut out those commitments that don’t contribute to your desires, but ensure that which fills the gap does.”
7. The attention crisis is real – “And each of us gets the same amount of attention to spend each day. It’s a competitive advantage to figure out how to focus it to get something done.”
8. The Lies We Tell – “We tell ourselves stories that are convincing, cheap, and often wrong.”
9. The Electoral College’s Real Problem: It’s Biased Toward the Big Battlegrounds – “A winner-take-all system within states can produce results counter to the majority for no high-minded reason.”
10. The Art of Decision-Making – “He points out that Benjamin Franklin used a more advanced pro-and-con technique: in what Franklin called “Prudential Algebra,” a numerical weight is assigned to each listed item, and counterbalancing items are then eliminated.”

Note: This is based on when I read the article, not necessarily when it was first published.  Unfortunately, my backlog of things I would like to read always seems to dwarf the amount of time I can devote to reading.