You are what you read – Five articles that shaped my view of science and the world (and can shape yours too)

I read a lot, but I think even more about the stuff that I read and how to use it toconnect dots.

And many times, throughout my career, in spite of the nature of the problem, I kept coming back to some of the same articles that I have read before for the explanation/solution. I can say now that they helped shape my view of science and the world, guided me through dilemmas and problema solving, and helped me teach. So I decided to share them in this blog post.

Very important to say that, despite all the time that I spend searching for information, most of these articles weren’t found on my own. They were all suggested by teachers, professors, fellow scientists and friends. We count on our friends to help us select information in a world overloaded with information. But I have a strong belief that that is the main thing that teachers and professors should be doing: helping students select information and through this, developing criteria. A class can matter and professors can matter too! Unfortunately, I think that Pareto’s rule applies here to: you get 80% of what matters from 20% of the classes. And you have to attend to them all. Hopefully, in time, you can learn which matters and which don’t very fast, and leave.

So I will start each commentary by acknowledging the person that introduced the article to me.

People actually are what Dwarkesh Patel call ‘popularizer’ or ‘Intelectual Market Makers’. People that help you sort out the chaos of information and add a lot of value to you.

I hope this articles will help you like they helped me. And I hope to be an intelectual market maker to you.

Besides this 5 articles, there are 2 more, more recent, that are influencing me a lot. First is ‘Saving Science’ by Daniel Sarewitz, published in 2016:

and the second the #Bitcoin white-paper:

It’s true I could add the double helix article by Watson and Crick to this list. I will!