Cem Yilmaz is the Director, Strategy for Samsung Electronics America. Previously he was the Associate Principal for Samsung's Global Strategy Group in Seoul, South Korea. Prior to that he was a Senior Consultant at Booz & Company. He graduated the Columbia Business School with an MBA, and previously received a BA in economics from Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, his home country. His expertise is in consumer technology and international business. While his core professional interest is in tech empowerment, he is fascinated by urban architecture, contemporary art and the history of commerce. He is an avid traveler and photographer and published this book, with images from 30 countries from my 10 years of travel.
I had the wonderful pleasure of meeting Cem, who was part of my son, Nathaniel's academic cluster at Columbia. I have learned to appreciate his intellect, warmth, incisiveness, and wit, and yes, his passion and remarkable skill at strategic board games, which he and my son and daughter-in-law Kelly insist sharpens their management and diplomatic skills. I have also witnessed his dancing prowess at my son's wedding where he was an honored groomsman.
Cem is an invaluable and wonderful intellectual companion. At the time I insert this description he and I are preparing for a Thanksgiving conversation on Originalism’s Charade on the Constitution and the Supreme Court. He defines for me the word cosmopolitan and is acutely aware of both the world’s goodness and cruelty. Our interactions are very varied and he recently has connected me with significant Ukrainian contacts.
We are both book omnivores and he has tasked me with helping him build his library. We are in a friendly competition to see what and who reads the most annually. At the time of this entry his most recent books include: The Science of Can and Can't by Chiara Market to and Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch.
I yield! Mine are: Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and The Art of Growing a Backbone by Juli Berwald, This Is How They Tell You The World Ends: The Cyber-Weapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth, and The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Cem sent me this wonderful commentary:
https://fs.blog/the-antilibrary/
The Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are The Most Important - Farnam Street
How can we navigate the unknown — the vast chasm between what we know and what we don’t know, and come to grips with what is unknowable?
***
This week, I caught myself feeling guilty as I walked into my office and looked at the ever-growing number of unread books. My bookshelf, which seems to reproduce on its own, is a constant source of ribbing from my friends.
“You’ll never read all of those,” they say. And they’re right. I won’t. That’s not really the point.
It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.
— Lincoln Steffens
Some questions are only asked by people with a fundamental misunderstanding. The friends who walk into my office and ask, “have you read all of these” miss the point of books.
In his book, The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb describes our relationship between books and knowledge using the legendary Italian writer Umberto Eco (1932-2016).
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Taleb adds:
We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head.
A good library is filled with mostly unread books. That’s the point. Our relationship with the unknown causes the very problem Taleb is famous for contextualizing: the black swan. Because we underestimate the value of what we don’t know and overvalue what we do know, we fundamentally misunderstand the likelihood of surprises.
The antidote to this overconfidence boils down to our relationship with knowledge. The anti-scholar, as Taleb refers to it, is “someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device — a skeptical empiricist.”
My library serves as a visual reminder of what I don’t know.