Mira Krishnan

Important but flawed.

Revisado: 03-04-21

Okay. Yes. I read this book because another book noted it was on Xi Jinping’s bookshelf. It is good. It also has remarkably large blind spots. It doesn’t really think or talk about the dangers of technocratic totalitarianism or surveillance capitalism. It also doesn’t think critically about the way that secular stagnation risks might continue to play out in an AI age. Beyond this the other thing is that it is just really lacking in technical content - I don’t feel like you’re very likely to learn anything about AI from this book you didn’t already know. But it is important insight into technofuturism and so I do still think it’s worth reading.

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Powerful but partial analysis

Revisado: 12-17-20

This book has a powerful analysis of the history of Nazi child psychiatry and the child euthanasia program under the Reich, and this analysis, with harrowing narratives from survivors and those lost, need to be heard. The fundamental conceit of the book, contextualizing Dr. Asperger's development of his concept of autism within the Nazi conceptualization of Gemüt is crucial and is almost completely absent from the modern scientific discourse in the topic (as Ms. Sheffer points out, this is largely due to certain critical actions, such as the lack of an accessible English translation of the introduction/preface of Dr. Asperger's thesis).

It is well performed and engaging, and certainly at a minimum everyone working in the autism field should listen to this book (I think in many ways it is far more powerful in audio form than it would be in reading it). There are two major weaknesses with which I do take some issue. The first is that the horrors of Nazi psychiatry and the euthanasia program are not adequately contextualized within the longer running horrors of institutionalization both on the European and North American continents. This is not meant to downplay the atrocity of the Reich, but rather to emphasize that many similar atrocities happened before and after the war and outside of the Reich. This is acknowledged in the book but only mentioned in the briefest of passing, and there is little/no critical analysis of this. The second issue is just a warning - the book begins with the goal of critically evaluating the modern conception of autism against its roots in Nazi psychiatry. This is, actually, almost completely absent from the book - in terms of the book read time, it represents about 20 minutes at the end of the book (she even dismisses this as an "open question"). I do think that the conceptualization at this point is too dominated by an anti-psychiatry bias to really have a fruitful discussion. I think this is too bad - this is really a valuable book, and I am glad I read it, but I really would have liked a discussion of what we today think is a real phenomenon (that is, that there are really autistic people with both unique potential and unique challenges). It is really important for us to think about how we adapt how we think about this to understanding the model of autism as a Gemüt pathology under the Reich and coming to terms with how to talk about concepts like mindblindness without ignoring that cultural expectations vary (and sometimes, as in the case of the "culture" of the Reich) may be outside the capability for humans to meet.

If the author were to write that second book, however, I would gladly read it.

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I want to know more about methods

Revisado: 09-20-19

I really enjoyed this book and I learned a lot about the history of quantitative finance. As a science trained PhD myself, I feel like this is also a really eye-opening discussion of the dangers and promises of when we collaborate with the financial and other sectors. The narration is also very good. The major criticism is that I am used to really good books like this (Billionaire's Apprentice is amazing, although the narration on Audible is deplorable; or Crashed by Tooze, which is excellent all around also) is that I want to know how this author did this work - what were the research methods, what is the strength of accuracy of the author's claims? What are the gaps in his knowledge? I would see this as a barrier to say picking up his next book - I don't know anything about dark pools, and I want to know, but my immediate concern is … essentially... how much of these books are Bob Woodward and how much of these books are Michael Wolff (referring to Fear and Fire & Fury)? In the case of Quants, I know some of the background data, but I really want this presented in a way that I don't have to start from scratch and fact check the book myself. The narration is good.

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Higher level analysis is needed before critiquing.

Revisado: 09-20-19

When I looked at picking this book up, I noted a lot of reviews complain about the author (and narrator - she is one in the same). She engages in a tremendous amount of name dropping, but I think it is important to remember that NXVIUM preyed specifically on this caste of people, and preyed on them specifically because of their character foibles. The author often times demonstrates shockingly poor psychological insight. But this is a part of the story - and I think there is tremendous value in this not being censored. I also don't want to be that girl who screams from the couch to the character in the horror movie not to open the door. I'm not saying any of this because I think I'm better. To be honest, I understand the allure of NXVIUM much more intuitively than I think she does. I think at many points in my life, probably were it not for the large checks they demanded (my mother's financial sense imparted on me would have prevented me from writing them in spite of being able to afford them and would certainly never have let me run up credit card balances) I see myself as someone who would easily have been susceptible to a cult like this. So I think this is basically an unvarnished tale. The author's flaws are directly related to how she and her daughter ended up in this mess, but in the sense of how slick this cult was a marketing operation that spearphished people like her. We should think about how any of us could equally be suckered in with the right pitch. Any of us.

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Now that's a dissertation

Revisado: 09-20-19

The author's work is so impactful (and it shames those of us, cough cough, whose dissertations were not valuable in the way this was). This is a detailed, thoughtful, and thorough analysis of for-profit education that is driven by original research including strong use of qualitative research models. I have been following this issue closely, particularly with the implosion of Argosy, but I learned so much from this book. Also I have said before and said again that I would be perfectly happy if Lisa Reneé Pitts narrated every book on audible. She is, bar none, the best narrator I have listened to (she narrates, also, the amazing Color of Money, and she delivers the words of wise black women with ferocity, but I wish they would use her more often and not as a niche narrator). This book is an easy recommendation.

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Write in blood and find that blood is spirit

Revisado: 09-20-19

This was fantastic. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a strange book, even by Nietzsche's standards, but it does a wonderful job of documenting the thought journey that leads to critical pieces of his thinking. It is a critical piece of an intellectual puzzle woith which many talented people deal. The narrator was well suited to the task and to the poetry. Love it, thank you for having this excellent narration on Audible!

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Lacking in detail

Revisado: 09-20-19

I do not have an MBA - I was accepted to a prestigious MBA program and decided not to go down that route. I do have a PhD and am now a businesswoman, and also a nonprofit leader, and I sought this book out in the midst of nonprofit M&A issues looking for best practices and case analysis. The major issue is that, for a book length work, albeit a shorter one, is that the vast majority - probably 75% - of the M&A case studies in this book are the ones every single person knows before they even walk into an MBA program - the ones that everyone has read about over and over again. They are not presented in very much detail and new ground is often not broken beyond what everyone has already read in business journals. The summaries and conclusions are fly-by-the-pants and drawn without any kind of rigorous or quantitative analysis, even when the book is arguing that M&A's go sour because people ignore the fundamentals. It's hard to recommend this book unless you really do not pay attention to this space at all.

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Thorough, provocative, and insightful

Revisado: 09-20-19

This book is a tour de force. The author's thorough analysis is excellent, and he offers a detailed, thorough analysis of Russian capitalism, ranging from the issues with intersections between free market forces and the government, and an incredibly insightful analysis of Mr. Putin's financial history and current status. It is well narrated and, overall, very easy to recommend.

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As an expert, is this invective or is it fruitful?

Revisado: 09-20-19

By way of disclosure, I am a board-certified neuropsychologist, with a PhD and post-graduate training in that area as well as a bachelor's and master's degree in engineering. So I get it. I feel this on a constant basis, and in particular, this book really did address questions such as why my patients who have the most ill-founded opinions are the most vocal about them (and my patients who have well founded opinions much less so). However, at times, this book is basically just ivory tower invective - it's too easy for us as experts to just decry a stupid world that fecklessly ignores us. Also as an expert in psychology, I feel obligated to say this book has very little structure. There is little attempt to systematically, critically, or rigorously analyze this problem, and almost none of it is quantitative. The solutions are sketched in relatively bare form. Overall, my opinion of this book is that this is an incredibly important topic, and I wish someone would write a better book about it, although in the absence of such a book, I do think this one is worth listening to. The narration is very good and plays no part in the complaint.

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A lesser read (it seems?) but important classic

Revisado: 09-20-19

Veblen really attempts to demonstrate that the rise of a moneyed (or capital-rich), leisure class gives downward rise to a wide variety of phenomena in modern economies, and that they are really an ultimate driver of stratification, segmentation, and both the positive aspects of the modern, complex economy and its ills. At times, Veblen is not just a little but quite overtly sexist. These aspects of the book weather the most poorly, because in them he makes the model predictions that are most flagrantly erroneous. However, there is some merit to the overall model, and it's worth thinking about in terms of thinking about how the world is evolving, particularly in light of recent predictions (e.g. Piketty) that the world is heading back in the direction of long-term inequality and entrenched moneyed classes. Narration is dry but suitable.

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