Books, blogs & notes
Writers I return to, books I'm working through, and a pile I still mean to get to.
Try a title, an author, or a subject such as memory.
Thirteen places I keep going back to. The links beneath each note are starting points.
Technology
I go here when I want to see the work behind an argument: sources, calculations, qualifications and later corrections. The scaling essay is also a useful record of what the AI debate looked like in 2020.
The Scaling HypothesisSystems & history
Rao is good on the things an organisation chart leaves out: status, timing, stories people tell themselves. The Gervais Principle is the obvious entry point. Tempo is the book I want to spend more time with.
The Gervais Principle New writing at ContraptionsMind & attention
A notebook you can wander through. The notes on attention, remembering and writing connect to one another instead of pretending each essay is a finished thought. Evergreen notes is a good place to begin.
Evergreen NotesMind & attention
How To Understand Things made me reconsider how I learn. It stays with the work of understanding: examples, questions, confusion, and the moment an explanation stops being somebody else's words.
How To Understand ThingsTechnology
Performance, software reliability and the trouble with repeating advice nobody has measured. Start with his essay on why building a working demo says so little about the work of running a large service.
I could do that in a weekend!Systems & history
Long essays on technology, philosophy and politics. Useful when a question needs more room than the tech conversation usually gives it.
The Mythology of Conscious AITechnology
Hardware and software discussed together, including the decisions a product team usually hides behind the finished machine. The RFDs are worth browsing for how a technical argument is made and recorded.
Reflections on Founder ModeSystems & history
I come back for the book reviews and the writing on coordination. Meditations on Moloch asks why a system can settle into an outcome that almost nobody involved would choose.
Meditations on MolochMind & attention
Erik Hoel writes about consciousness, fiction and the experience of having a mind. His scientific proposals and his cultural criticism make for an unusual combination. The dream-as-overfitting idea is a hypothesis, not an explanation to treat as settled.
Exit the supersensoriumMind & attention
Speculative work on the structure of experience, including attempts to describe it mathematically. I read this for the questions it is willing to ask. The answers need considerably more scrutiny.
What Qualia Computing is trying to doSystems & history
Aggregation Theory gave me a useful way to think about platforms: who owns the customer relationship, and what happens to everyone supplying it. Some of the writing is paid; the starting essay is open.
Aggregation TheorySystems & history
A spare website with several good rabbit holes. The labs page gathers material on research institutions. Fast collects projects built in surprisingly little time. Both are worth returning to.
LabsA mixture of fiction, minds, old philosophy and people building things. Reading status is from April 2026.
Two books with very different approaches to consciousness.
Fiction
Watts makes intelligence without consciousness an unsettling possibility. That runs against the place awareness holds in my Vedantic reading. I want to stay with the disagreement before writing a response from Shankara's perspective.
Read on the author’s site
Mind & attention
The distinction between attention and awareness is the part I keep returning to. A detailed meditation manual, with practical descriptions of distraction and dullness. Its models help organise practice; I don't read them as settled maps of the brain.
About the bookThe part of the list that tends to grow faster than it shrinks.
Systems & history
Scott's idea of legibility interests me: what has to be simplified before an institution can administer it, and what gets lost along the way. A useful book to have nearby when a dashboard starts to look like the world.
Mind & attention
Perception as an active process, with the brain's predictions shaping what is experienced. I want to read it beside The Mind Illuminated and see where the two accounts help each other, and where they part ways.
About the bookMind & attention
McGilchrist builds a broad argument about different modes of attention and their place in Western culture. I'm interested in the attention question. The civilisational claims deserve to be examined on their own terms.
Mind & attention
Self-reference through mathematics, music and pictures. I've been circling this book for years. The question drawing me back is how a system comes to represent itself.
Mind & attention
Varela, Thompson and Rosch bring cognitive science into conversation with Buddhist thought. The organism's activity and its environment belong in the account of cognition. I want to understand what that changes about the usual picture of a mind.
Fiction
Borges turns a library, a labyrinth or a branching path into a problem you can't quite put down. The stories are short. The questions about memory and possibility have more room in them than that suggests.
Fiction
An encounter with an ocean whose apparent responses resist human explanation. I want to read Lem alongside Watts: two very different ways of making intelligence unfamiliar.
Mind & attention
Improvisation, status and the habits that get in the way of spontaneous thought. Johnstone's account of the small ways people negotiate status is what drew me to it.
Systems & history
Rhodes follows the science and the people into the making of the bomb. I'm interested in the work of the laboratories, and in what responsibility meant once the experiment had become a weapon.
Systems & history
Rao looks at decisions through time and the stories in which they happen. I'm interested in the difference between choosing a sensible action and recognising when to take it.
Fiction
A heist novel with memory, privacy and identity built into the world itself. I want to see what Rajaniemi does with those rules once people start trying to get around them.
These can wait. I want to give them time when I get to them.
Mind & attention
Sapolsky approaches behaviour through different timescales, from the immediately preceding moment to evolution. I want to read his account alongside the philosophical material, particularly where agency becomes difficult to explain.
Mind & attention
Godfrey-Smith's encounters with octopuses open a question about the evolution of minds very different from ours. Their nervous systems extend through the arms as well as a central brain. The differences are interesting enough without making them into aliens.
Fiction
Hoel puts a murder mystery inside consciousness research. The attraction for me is seeing the philosophical problem become a problem for particular people, with reputations and lives attached.
Fiction
Mathematicians living apart from ordinary society, and a world built around that separation. I want the long version of the argument this time.
Mind & attention
Becker examines the part that awareness of death plays in culture and identity. His idea of an immortality project makes some familiar ambitions uncomfortable to look at.
Mind & attention
Sacks follows particular people living with neurological conditions. I want to spend time with the lives around the symptoms, not only the neat explanation a case history can tempt us to take away.
Fiction
A house of halls, statues and tides, known through the attention of the person living in it. This is on the list partly because it seems to ask for a different pace of reading.
Fiction
A companion to Blindsight, with a collective intelligence and a very different point of entry. This can wait until I've finished the first book.
Systems & history
PARC's inventions and the uneven path from a research lab into the world. The familiar story that Xerox commercialised none of its work is wrong: laser printing alone was a substantial business. That makes the real history more interesting.
PARC’s historySystems & history
Licklider and the people and institutions behind interactive computing. I want to understand how an idea about working with computers became something people could build toward together.
Systems & history
Rich's account of Lockheed's aircraft programme. I'm interested in the working arrangements behind the machines: a small group, technical responsibility and decisions close to the work.
Systems & history
Carse's distinction between playing to win and playing to continue has stayed in my reading queue. It gives me a way to question which kind of game I have made out of work.
Some have made their way into essays. Others I prefer to keep reading.
Fiction
Story of Your Life changed how I think about language and perception. Understand takes a very different route into an altered mind. Chiang gives the idea room to work through someone's life.
Fiction
The scale stayed with me: centuries, civilisations, plans whose authors won't live to see them through. I wrote about the dark forest and other ideas from the trilogy in my science-fiction essay.
My notes on science fiction
Fiction
The attraction is the tension between a forecast about large populations and the people who have to live inside it. Psychohistory makes a powerful fictional premise. I wouldn't confuse it with a working theory of prediction.
Fiction
Deep time and the consequences of travelling without faster-than-light shortcuts. The Inhibitors give that enormous setting something specific to be afraid of.
Mind & attention
I return to this when I notice myself getting attached to an explanation. Krishnamurti keeps asking what I can observe directly, including the comfort I get from following a system.
Mind & attention
Short aphorisms that open into questions about consciousness and practice. My essay on Spanda comes from the same Kashmir Shaiva tradition.
My essay on SpandaMind & attention
A dialogue that begins with freedom rather than treating it as a distant achievement. I sometimes read a few verses before meditation. The directness is part of the appeal.
If a book on this list changes how I think, it will probably turn up in an essay.