What I'm Reading: 2024 edition

December 24, 2024inmisc

A list of stuff I've read in the last year, along with short summaries and some commentary.

Contents

  1. Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (2011)
  2. The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines by Matt Beane (2024)
  3. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb (2019)
  4. A Final Synthesis

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (2011)

This book is: a 5,000-year archaeology of obligation, showing how debt, not money, is the real operating system of societies.

Graeber’s core claim: money isn’t the root; obligation is. Human coordination started with soft credit webs, “you owe me / i owe you.” The canonical econ story (barter → money → credit) is backwards; the actual sequence is more like credit → hierarchy → violence → money → markets. That inversion matters because it reframes markets as political artifacts, not primordial equilibria.

Main takeaways:

  • Debt/obligation, rather than money/barter, is the foundational structure of economies.
  • Money isn't a thing that was invented. It's a unit like time and weight that emerged from social relationships, as old as human civilization.
  • The idea of a "barter economy" as a precursor to money is a myth.
  • Markets existed long before capitalism; capitalism = markets + enforceable debt + institutionalized extraction.
  • Debt is a social construct, not a natural law, and has been used as a governance technology throughout history — a way to formalize asymmetry and turn social fuzz into enforceable hierarchy.
  • The moralizing of debt as a personal guilt/failure is a recent phenomenon.
  • History runs on cycles: soft relational credit ↔ hard money enforced by states and armies.
  • Periodic debt cancellations (jubilees) were normal for millennia; what’s weird is the modern aversion to resetting ledgers in the face of systemic fragility.

The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines by Matt Beane (2024)

This book is: a contemporary anatomy of how human skill forms — and how intelligent machines are quietly hollowing out the apprenticeship loops that make real ability possible.

The gist: skill-building isn’t just doing things harder or smarter; it’s about embedding novices in relational systems where they’re pushed, immersed, and connected. Machines threaten that system by stripping novices out, optimizing productivity but eroding the apprenticeship architecture.

Main takeaways:

  • Skill is built via three C's: challenge (tasks near but above your edge), complexity (rich context, not just deconstructed steps), connection (trust, mentorship, expert-novice relationship).
  • The expert-novice bond is ancient and foundational; losing it means losing the scaffold of reliable ability.
  • Intelligent machines often sever novices from experts (expert does more, novice does less), which thwarts skill accumulation.
  • “Shadow learning” emerges: people hack their way around broken systems to gain skill anyway.
  • Tech isn’t the villain per se; the design and deployment of tech matters. Tech can augment the three C's if structured correctly.
  • To preserve human ability we need to redesign work systems so they re-embed novices, expose them to challenge/complexity, and maintain connection — especially as AI and robots scale.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb (2019)

This book is: a dual-perspective memoir of therapist and patient, showing how humans edit their own lives and that therapy mostly works by destabilizing the stories we use to avoid seeing ourselves.

Main takeaways:

  • What someone presents (the breakup, the job crisis) is rarely the problem. The roots are deeper: fear, mortality, isolation.
  • Therapy is a structured environment where someone won’t collude with your self-deceptions — a controlled demolition of your favorite narratives.
  • The stories we tell ourselves protect us, but also imprison us; progress begins when we loosen the grip of those narratives.
  • Vulnerability isn’t weakness; it’s the signal that a new story is being written, the one beyond shame, pretense, and guilt.
  • Change is less about major leaps and more about hundreds of tiny, almost-imperceptible steps, over time.
  • The therapist–patient dual POV mirrors any good meta-system: observer and observed co-evolve, and the system learns by making its own internals visible.

A Final Synthesis

All three books are a defense of messy, high-trust, relational systems against the clean, low-trust, transactional abstractions that are hollowing them out.

Debt (Macro-Societal): Graeber's thesis is that the 'transactional' model (barter, money) is a violent, false abstraction built on top of the 'relational' reality (social credit webs, "I owe you").

The Skill Code (Meso-Professional): Beane's thesis is that the 'transactional' model (AI-driven productivity, deconstructed tasks) is hollowing out the 'relational' reality (the "three C's" of expert-novice apprenticeship).

Talk to Someone (Micro-Personal): Gottlieb's thesis is that our 'transactional' internal narratives (the stories we tell ourselves) are a defense against the 'relational' reality (our fears, our needs), and therapy is a relational system designed to fix them.

Each book argues that the "clean" abstraction is the one that's broken, and the "messy" human layer is the one that's real.