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, 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 and stopped at every point where something was new. It completely started reforming my worldview. It changed the way that I think, and I would credit this book as being probably the only book in the last decade, except maybe a few of Nasim Taleb's works and maybe one or two other scattered 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 and what is not. What Deutsch does is expand 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, to 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, and how to raise your children. These are all-encompassing, long-range philosophical ideas.