Updates

  1. Person pages list letters, writing, profiles and links as sortable tables with filters, and show each person's companies as links; Fund letters show each letter's description in its own column.
  2. Experts show a checked job title and a short description of each person; 30 more people have photographs.
  3. Every company, fund, university and publication the experts work for has a page listing the people there.
  4. Fund letters show each letter's thesis and filter by it; 225 person pages list the essays, columns and newsletter issues the person wrote.
  5. Person pages list every essay and newsletter issue a person wrote, and their own books as a table in List view.
  6. Recommends shows the five largest kinds of book and the rest under More; browse pictures load sooner.
  7. Podcasts and talks link the original episode, filter by Audio and video or Press, and list each publisher once.
  8. Pages are wider, Recommends has List and Grid, and a filter clicked again turns off.
  9. Book cards sit in a ruled grid with Open Library and Goodreads links and each book's one-line note.
  10. Funds is now Investors; each investor's styles are buttons that filter the table.
  11. Podcasts and talks on a person's page filter by year and publisher and show as a list or a grid of pictures.
  12. Quotes show only people's own words: 472 summaries written by list sites are gone.
  13. Country pages open from Browse again, and every link on the shelf lands on a page.
  14. Subject and person pages show their sections as tabs, and each book appears once on a person's page.
  15. Book cards show the quote, who said it and the source; grids show five cards to a row.
  16. On a phone, a menu holds the sections, search, Updates, Feedback and dark mode.
  17. Feedback takes a screenshot of the page with no browser prompt, opens a screenshot full size when you click it, and clears itself once sent.
  18. Book cards are centred, search names the topic each book sits in, and any text cut short shows whole on hover.
  19. Search groups its results by kind: people, companies, geographies, subjects, topics, books, funds, fund letters and papers.
  20. The Books table lists who recommended each book by name, and the browser tab names the section you are in.
  21. Feedback can take a screenshot of the page, or one you paste or choose, and opens in the corner beside Updates.
  22. Each rail button reopens its section where you left it, and Browse, Table and People show on every book and subject page.
  23. Filters grey out choices that hold nothing instead of hiding them, and Books › People filters by authors or recommenders.
  24. Feedback takes a subject line and up to three screenshots.
  25. Biographies are grouped by the person they are about: 41 new pages, from Abraham Lincoln to Lee Kuan Yew.
  26. Sport splits into 23 sports, and Religion into one topic per faith.
  27. Book lists show as cards: the cover, one recommendation quote and every recommender by name.
  28. Seventeen subjects that had two or three pages under different names now have one page each.
  29. Every page lists its Experts as authors and recommenders, with a link to them on the Experts tab.
  30. Economics, Financial history, Financial panics and Accounting are subjects of their own, with one page per financial crisis.
  31. Book, person and subject pages open inside the app, so the tabs stay in view.
  32. 996 more book covers, and photographs or logos for 227 more people and companies.
  33. Books › Browse shows every subject as cards, and the rail holds Fund letters, Papers, Experts, Books and Funds.
  34. Every topic over 150 books splits into narrower topics, each with a page of its own.

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Systems Thinking

Seeing stocks, flows, delays and loops rather than isolated events, so that behaviour is explained by structure rather than by blame. Interventions at the wrong leverage point produce policy resistance, where the system pushes back and restores its old behaviour. For investors it reframes an industry as a set of relationships that will keep producing the same outcomes until the structure changes.

Start here

  1. Thinking in SystemsDonella H. Meadows, 2008
  2. The Fifth DisciplinePeter M. Senge, 1990
  3. The Origin of WealthEric D. Beinhocker, 2006
Christopher Alexander · 1977

253 patterns for building, from the layout of towns down to a window seat.

Douglas R. Hofstadter · 1979

How a mind could arise from parts, traced through Godel, Escher and Bach.

Donella H. Meadows · 2008

Meadows wrote this before systems thinking became a popular phrase, and it remains the clearest account of why short-term interventions in complex systems so often backfire. The chapter on leverage points is the conceptual core of what long-term thinking actually requires from decision-makers.

Norbert Wiener · 1948

Control and communication in animals and machines run on the same principles.

Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers · 1972

A computer model of world growth that overshoots its limits and then declines.

Recommended by: Bill Gates

Peter M. Senge · 1990

Five disciplines, led by systems thinking, that let an organisation learn.

M. Mitchell Waldrop · 1992

The founding of the Santa Fe Institute and the people who built complexity science.

Edward O. Wilson · 1998

How the sciences and humanities can be unified by causal links from physics up.

“I was inspired by E. O. Wilson's book Consilience, which came out in 1998 and is a book I'd recommend.” — Michael Mauboussin

Source: MOI Global interview with Michael Mauboussin

Recommended by: Michael Mauboussin, Mohnish Pabrai

Eric D. Beinhocker · 2006

The economy as a complex evolving system rather than one in equilibrium.

Recommended by: Ryan Peterson

Thomas D. Seeley · 1995

Honeybee colonies as a decentralised allocation and search system

“As Thomas Seeley writes in his delightful book, The Wisdom of the Hive” — Michael Mauboussin

Source: Capital Ideas Revisited (Legg Mason Capital Management)

Recommended by: Michael Mauboussin

Robert Wright · 1988

Information theory as a unifying idea across three scientists' work

Eric Abrahamson, David H. Freedman · 2006

The case that disorder is often more efficient than imposed order

“This idea comes from a wonderful book called A Perfect Mess” — Marc Andreessen

Source: The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity

Recommended by: Marc Andreessen

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