15 Answers sorted by
140
Book: Quantum Computing since Democritus
Description: An introduction to a wide ranging set of fields in computer science based on lecture notes by Scott Aaaronson
Positives:
- Broad range of topics.
- Proof sketches for most results.
- Quirky style makes for reasonably entertaining reading despite being quite information dense.
Negatives:
- Can get quite heavy
- Sometimes forgets himself and assumes more knowledge on behalf of the reader than he's explained - e.g. it will be very difficult to understand some of the things he talks about in the chapter on formal logic without first understanding the mathematical concept of a syntax, a model, or what it means for a syntax to assert that a proof of a statement exist.
60
Description: Summarizes the analysis of three longevity studies spanning, in some cases, almost eighty years.
Positives:
- Creates a clear picture of the different challenges in six successive life stages: Identity, Intimacy, Career Consolidation, Generativity, Keeper of Meaning, and Integrity.
- Introduces what they call "mature coping strategies," like humor, that people dealing well with adversity develop and that differ from immature coping strategies like suppression.
Negatives:
- There are a lot of anecdotes that you can skip. The book is generally lengthy but readable.
- The study's original population were "healthy young men from Harvard University." There have been later cohorts with different demographics, and there are many pointers to find more information on them.
50
Book
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Description
Behave explains how neurochemical and genetic factors cause the best and worst behaviours of our species.
Positives
- Self-contained: Behave provides the necessary background knowledge in neuroscience, endocrinology, and biochemistry through apendices.
- Good narrative: despite discussing complex scientific topics the author has organised the material into a narrative structure that makes the book feel more like a novel than a textbook.
- Evidence-based: all scientific claims have appropriate citations and cases of conflicting credit are appropriately discussed.
- Connects theory and practice: reading Behave teaches one about genetics and endicronology while connecting these concepts to cognitive biases and group behaviour.
Negatives
- One dense book: despite presenting all the necessary background information it takes a significant amount of effort to go through it all and understand it for a reader without a background in the field.
50
Book: Expert Political Judgment
Description: A technical introduction to forecasting by Philip Tetlock that covers his decades-long experiment on eliciting quantitative forecasts from experts in politics and international relations.
Positives:
-
The book is both quantitative and qualitative: it goes over statistical measures of forecasting performance such as Brier scores, discrimination and calibration while also leaving plenty of space for discussion of specific forecasts by experts, how they justified their forecasts, how they updated on new information, et cetera.
-
Covers a lot of temptations that forecasters often fall into in order to avoid admitting they are wrong. Detecting these patterns of behavior in yourself can be quite valuable.
Negatives:
-
Some parts of the book can be too technical for a lay audience. The book is primarily written in an academic style and the quantitative parts can be difficult to parse if you're not acquainted with probability theory & statistics.
-
Most of the events referenced in the book date to the 1980s and 1990s, so if you're unfamiliar with the history of this period then most of the qualitative discussion of specific forecasts can fly over your head.
Did you read Superforcasting by him? Thought it looked interesting, wanted to see which is better from someone who read both.
30
Book: Economix (How Our Economy Works, and Doesn‘t Work)
Description: An introduction to how economic theories have evolved and shaped cultural thinking in the context of history. A comic book!
Positives: extremely easy to understand, actually enjoyable, clearly states the limits of theory, organized in a way that meant I was able to anchor the new information to background history that I was somewhat familiar with already, author clearly points out limitations in his viewpoint, covers some modern economics
Negatives: US centric, much less useful for someone who wants more than a launching point
(I would note that there is another economics comic book with a similar title that is, imho, much worse)
30
Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran is a fun read, and will teach you a thing or two about neuropsychology.
20
Book: The Myth of Mirror Neurons - The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition
By: Gregory Hickok
Negatives:
- He spends about half the book telling you about why lots of claims regarding mirror neurons are wrong. If you started out not having strong opinions on these ideas, it gets a bit tedious.
Positives:
- In the other half of the book he lays out the best overview description of the brain I've seen so far. (However any such storry is nesserarely speculative, so "good description" mostly means "seemed reasonable to me".)
- He compares his views with other theories.
- The chapter on Autism is awsome.
I'm currently reading a neuroscience textbook too. The textbook is full of brain damage anectotes, and specific experimental results, but no overaraching storries to put it all toghether. I'm guesing this is becasue any overarching storry is too speculative to put in a textbook. I found this book helpfull in binding it all together.
If you're really interested, I recomend reading both a textbook, and several non-textbooks, to get both the detailed facts, and several speculative models. That's what I'm doing. But if you're only going to read one book, this is the one I recomend.
20
Logical positivism in one witty lesson. Make your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences.
20
Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story if you'd like to know all about a huge variety of phenethylamines from the inside and out, including how to go about synthesizing them.
10
Book: The Great Big Book of Horrible Things
Description: A compilation and ranking of the 100 most deadly atrocities in history by Matthew White.
Positives:
-
Matthew White is a real expert on this subject and is familiar with the literature surrounding the events he quotes. He has a whole website where he compiles numbers from many sources, even obscure ones only available in print and in short supply, to try to get at the truth about the death toll of various events in history. Even if you disagree with his numbers you can see where he's coming from with his estimates.
-
He has an easy-to-read writing style which has traces of black humor, and he can make it not only interesting but also entertaining to read through what otherwise would be a macabre catalogue of the worst mankind has to offer.
-
The book goes into detail about various events in history in length roughly proportional to the logarithm of the death toll. This means you'll learn about many events in history that you may have never heard of before, and get a new perspective on the scale of events that you may already be familiar with on a qualitative basis.
-
I've found just seeing how people go about estimating death tolls of wars and atrocities in the absence of reliable records to be quite interesting and valuable. White makes many points about this and you'll pick up more as you go through the book. One lesson I've learned is that atrocity statistics from the past are often more reliable than we think they are, while those from the present are less so.
Negatives:
-
I've heard that some people find the format of the book to be repetitive and difficult to read through in a few sittings given its substantial length. I personally didn't have this problem but I'm bringing it up in case someone here does.
-
There are a few small mistakes I've found in the book, such as White saying the Battle of Trafalgar took place in 1804 and not 1805. While the book is trustworthy when it comes to atrocity statistics, not every historical recounting or detail in it is accurate, though I've found the mistakes to be quite rare even here.
10
Book: "Statistical Rethinking" by Richard McElreath
Description: in-depth introduction to Bayesian statistical analysis
Positives:
- Each chapter begins with an intuitive short story of what the meaning of the statistical concept is in real life
- Contains exercises in the end of the chapters
- Wide variety of example types, not constrained to just one field
Negatives:
- It is pretty much a textbook otherwise - it's the narrative style stories in the beginnings of each chapter that makes me share this. For all intents and purposes you may ignore the parts where he tries to teach you Bayesian stats via R :)
10
The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
Good introduction to the general idea of evolutionary psychology (human psychology has been influenced/shaped by natural selection, like the rest of the body).
Then discusses some particular psychological traits (jealousy, love, altruism, reciprocity, etc) through this lens.
Not really the hard science desired in the original post, but hope someone finds the recommendation useful.
Review/notes here:
https://digitalsauna.wordpress.com/2016/02/05/the-moral-animal-by-robert-wright-1994/
10
Who doesn't like to opine about the free will problem? This short book will quickly catch you up on the philosophical state of the art so you can do so more cleverly and can understand the weaknesses of the easy answers you thought up in the shower.
10
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen delivers what it promises: a deep understanding of the materials and processes involved in home-scale food production.
10
Code by Simon Singh is a nice, low-effort intro to cryptography.
Interesting. I wasn't impressed by his Fermat's last theorem book which was basically purely a biography of various mathematicians and contained very little actual information. Is this one better?
As it happens I found Applied Cryptography extremely readable (albeit out of date), so in this case I'm happy to recommend a textbook.
I'd be interested in a nice book about chemistry that Isn't textbook deep. It's the central field I'm most ignorant about by a mile - I have no idea how chemistry works, while i do have quite a bit of general knowledge about physics, biology, etc. I'd like to change that.
The best way to learn a subject is undoubtedly by reading a textbook on it. But I find textbooks a drudgery, and tend to give up after a couple of chapters.
On the other hand I don't need a deep broad formal knowledge in every subject. I often just want to know enough that I know what it's about, the broad questions in the topic, and how to learn more when I need to.
On the other hand popular books are easy to read, but often teach you about the subject, without actually teaching any of the subject itself. They're full of anecdotes about the founders of the field, and metaphors for what some of the fields are like, but at the end you may end up more misguided than you went in.
There are however the rare popular books that aim to actually give the reader useful knowledge, rather than the illusion of knowledge. For example Godel, Escher, Bach on logic and formal systems, Quantum Computing since Democritus on computer science and Who We Are and How We Got Here on ancient DNA.
These examples vary hugely in how involved they are, their style, and how readable they are, but they all share one thing in common: none of them talk down to the reader - they all assume the reader is an intelligent person whose perfectly capable of understanding the topic, but might just be missing a lot of background knowledge.
What other books do you know of like that?
Ideally all answers should give the title of a single book, optionally with a brief description, and a set of bullet points describing what they liked and didn't like about the book.
I'm more interested in physical sciences than social sciences, since it's common in the social sciences to introduce a thesis in book form, so it's easy to find good quality non-textbooks. Meanwhile in the physical sciences most original research is done in research papers, and most pedagogical work in textbooks, leaving much poorer pickings for non-textbooks.