I thought I had seen a thread recently asking for book recommendations, and I had a recommendation to post there, but the thread I found is from about a year and a half ago. I didn't want to make an entire thread for my book suggestion, that would be a bit extreme (I will post it in the comments though). So I was wondering what people's thoughts were on a yearly or monthly discussion thread recommending good new books, perhaps with a brief synopsis or explanation. Would we have enough new recommendations to fill one? (I'm still astonished there are as few repeats in the quote threads as there are) Would we have so many that monthly would be a good idea? Should there be any guidelines like there are for the quotes threads? The only one I can think of would be just requiring a brief summary and why one thinks LWers might be interested in it.
Here is the link to the freakonomics post for those interested. I thought it was OK. You might also be interested in the works of Bill James. Bill James was doing freakonomics and cognitive bias analysis back in the early 1980's, selling his Bill James Baseball Abstract self-published to a list of subscribers gathered by word-of-mouth. He is the man most responsible for the state of modern Major League Baseball statistical analysis--the emphasis of On Base Percentage, the de-emphasis of pitchers' Won-Loss totals and a number of other changes and innovations.
I tried to argue in this post that the collection of large numbers of baseball player performance statistics and the incessant analysis towards meaning and reliability of them by fanatics make them as good a raw data set on human performance we have anywhere. The prediction accuracy of Las Vegas sports bookmakers may well be the singular most successful prediction market anywhere at anytime.
If you like movies, Moneyball is recent and about sabermetrics.