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ArisKatsaris comments on August 2013 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Nonfiction Books Thread
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Talking about nuclear arms, I much liked Richard Rhodes's two books -- esp. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, but also the "sequel", Dark Sun -- The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.
The first book focus much on the science (in a non-technical way) and the politics, while the second spends a lot of time of the espionage that helped the Soviets to create a bomb, too.
Yes, Rhodes's books seem highly recommended but unfortunately, they're not on libgen.
inconceivable! http://bit.ly/11G83DY
What - how - I was sure I checked - IMPOSSIBRU!
"Don't Shoot the Dog" by Karen Pryor is about conditioning / elementary hedonics for humans and other mammals. This book is really really important and I should write more about it at some point.
The book is worth reading even if you're crunched for time because the author get right to applications and helpful ideas. And, they're not trivial ones. In a way, reading the book was a bit like learning Scheme; big bombshells at the beginning and details later.
How to Think Straight About Psychology is the best introduction to the ideas of science that I've read. It's by Keith Stanovich, the cognitive scientist who wrote Lukeprog's favourite book on the cognitive science of rationality and who is also on the board of advisors at CFAR. It introduces, amongst other things, important ideas of how science works, how pseudoscience works, two chapters on probabilistic reasoning and recommends reading Kahneman, and also a section on why we shouldn't be arguing about the meaning of words, only the differences that exist in the real world (y'know, anticipated experiences that let us test hypothesise). It also destroys a lot of public misconceptions about science and psychology.
I plan to give it to all of my friends who need a simple introduction to science. Contact me about a pdf.
Edit: By the way, for a typical LWer though, it would be very basic; sorta like one of the best books of 'Traditional Rationality' or something.
The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow. A popularisation of the P=NP question. Very readable.
The Emperor of all maladies An excellent laymen's book about cancer specifically, but also about the culture of medicine, how they deal with uncertainty, etc.
Via a comment in the proggit thread about an online Haskell and music theory book mentioning Guerino Mazzola's very intimidating The Topos of Music, I ended up looking up the author and finding that he's also written Comprehensive Mathematics for Computer Scientists 1 and 2. These look intriguingly compact, while staying at a sufficiently fundamental level that someone with a modest theoretical background might still have a chance of following them.
Now I'll just need to try to actually read them properly.