This Book Changed the Way I Think

I was very pleasantly surprised a couple of years back that I reopened an old book, which I had read, or I thought I'd read, about a decade ago called "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch. Sometimes you read a book, and it makes a difference right away. Sometimes you read a book, and you don't understand it; then you read it later at the right time, and it makes a difference.

This time, when I reopened this book and I went through it much more carefully than I had in the past, meticulously rather than reading it to read it and to say I was done reading it, I read it to understand the concepts and the topics. I stopped at every point where something was new. It completely started reforming my worldview; it changed the way that I think.

I would credit this book as being probably the only book in the last decade, except maybe a few of Nassim Taleb's works and maybe one or two other scatter books, that I feel made me smarter. They literally expanded the way that I think. They expanded not just the repertoire of my knowledge but the repertoire of my reasoning.

People throw around words like "mental models" a lot, and I find most mental models not worth reading or thinking about or listening to because I find them trivial. However, the mental models that came out of "The Beginning of Infinity" are transformational because they very convincingly completely change the way that you look at what is true and what is not.

Karl Popper laid out the theory of what is scientific and what is not, what is a good explanation, what is not, and what Deutsch does is he expands on that dramatically in "The Beginning of Infinity." But even that is to do it a disservice. The wide-ranging nature of what he covers in "The Beginning of Infinity" is incredible.

He goes from the theory of knowledge, which goes by the fancy word epistemology, all the way to quantum mechanics and physics and multiverse theory to infinity and mathematics. He examines the reach of what is knowable and what is not knowable. Universal explanations, the theory of computation, what is beauty, what systems of politics work better, how to raise your children—these are all encompassing, long-range philosophical ideas.