We Are Anonymous—entertaining though necessarily a bit dumbed-down discussion of the Anonymous/LulzSec hacks. In this genre, I prefered The Hacker Crackdown or Mitnick’s Ghost in the wires, but it was interesting to see where the ‘Anonymous’ hackers came from, where they succeeded, and how they got caught.
Miller’s Spent—sex, evolution and consumer behavior which was recommend to me here, and discusses EvoPsy / consumerism. Overall, an interesting book, until the last few chapters where the author unsuccesfully attempts to show how to overcome consumerism.
Linden’s The Accidental Mind was a particularly insightful pop-sci discussion of how our brain works, with an emphasis on how buggy/imperfect it is, and how the brain works around that.
Some other books that I liked: Shell’s Bargaining for advantage (pretty good book about, well, bargaining, which presents the subject in a structured, non-BS way). If finally read Cialdini’s Influence (it was a bit anecdotical for my taste, but it’s a pretty good overview of the little tricks people use to influence others)
Read Brain Rules after seeing a quote from it in one of the rationality quote threads. I thought it was hit-or-miss with some real quality parts, but some parts seemed too vague to act on. The author shies away from quoting studies directly and point you to his website for more details (which I have not checked out). I would have liked more empirical evidence, even if it is only summarized. When he does include such material, it tended to be quite good. I tended to skip over his physiological descriptions since I found them too metaphorical and of little relevance to the rest of the material.
The author takes his own advice very seriously in this book, which makes me more confident in his opinions. But one of these points is that people’s attention lasts only 10 minutes and so there has to be a ‘hook’ quite frequently. So very predictably through the book are personal anecdotes, sports stories, and the like which would be OK but they often have only the thinnest connection to the material at hand and feel forced. One good benefit of the ‘take your own advice’ approach is that each chapter ends with a brief summary which usually does a good job of reiterating the most interesting points.
The author also includes digressions into the real of “what if?” where he postulates a superior world where we take these rules seriously. If viewed as genuine suggestions, they almost universally seem impractical and so far from the current state that they would never catch on. In retrospect, I think the better way to view these are as illustrations meant to reiterate the points of the chapter and give concrete examples to the mind that we can remember more easily—again, following the author’s own advice to some effect. (As an example, the author says we should give each student a treadmill because in the ancestral environment people routinely walked 10 miles a day. But anyone who has used a treadmill knows that even if you could fit 20 into a typical classroom, the noise would force the teacher to shout all day. Yet the example serves its purpose through sticking in my mind rather than being realistic.)
My favorite fact from the book: a research went to a 40 minute-old baby and stuck out his tongue and waited. After a little bit, the baby stuck out its tongue to. Wow! A really simple experiment, and very interesting conclusions—babies instinctively know what tongues look like, how to move their tongue, and to mimic others without any practice.
Non Fiction Books Thread
The Checklist Manifesto lives up to its reputation as being interesting and a practical look at a very useful tool. Previously recommended
Some of the books I read recently:
We Are Anonymous—entertaining though necessarily a bit dumbed-down discussion of the Anonymous/LulzSec hacks. In this genre, I prefered The Hacker Crackdown or Mitnick’s Ghost in the wires, but it was interesting to see where the ‘Anonymous’ hackers came from, where they succeeded, and how they got caught.
Miller’s Spent—sex, evolution and consumer behavior which was recommend to me here, and discusses EvoPsy / consumerism. Overall, an interesting book, until the last few chapters where the author unsuccesfully attempts to show how to overcome consumerism.
Linden’s The Accidental Mind was a particularly insightful pop-sci discussion of how our brain works, with an emphasis on how buggy/imperfect it is, and how the brain works around that.
Some other books that I liked: Shell’s Bargaining for advantage (pretty good book about, well, bargaining, which presents the subject in a structured, non-BS way). If finally read Cialdini’s Influence (it was a bit anecdotical for my taste, but it’s a pretty good overview of the little tricks people use to influence others)
I personally found the research in Influence rather lacking and thought Cialdini speculated too much. But chapter 3 of the book is dead on.
Read Brain Rules after seeing a quote from it in one of the rationality quote threads. I thought it was hit-or-miss with some real quality parts, but some parts seemed too vague to act on. The author shies away from quoting studies directly and point you to his website for more details (which I have not checked out). I would have liked more empirical evidence, even if it is only summarized. When he does include such material, it tended to be quite good. I tended to skip over his physiological descriptions since I found them too metaphorical and of little relevance to the rest of the material.
The author takes his own advice very seriously in this book, which makes me more confident in his opinions. But one of these points is that people’s attention lasts only 10 minutes and so there has to be a ‘hook’ quite frequently. So very predictably through the book are personal anecdotes, sports stories, and the like which would be OK but they often have only the thinnest connection to the material at hand and feel forced. One good benefit of the ‘take your own advice’ approach is that each chapter ends with a brief summary which usually does a good job of reiterating the most interesting points.
The author also includes digressions into the real of “what if?” where he postulates a superior world where we take these rules seriously. If viewed as genuine suggestions, they almost universally seem impractical and so far from the current state that they would never catch on. In retrospect, I think the better way to view these are as illustrations meant to reiterate the points of the chapter and give concrete examples to the mind that we can remember more easily—again, following the author’s own advice to some effect. (As an example, the author says we should give each student a treadmill because in the ancestral environment people routinely walked 10 miles a day. But anyone who has used a treadmill knows that even if you could fit 20 into a typical classroom, the noise would force the teacher to shout all day. Yet the example serves its purpose through sticking in my mind rather than being realistic.)
My favorite fact from the book: a research went to a 40 minute-old baby and stuck out his tongue and waited. After a little bit, the baby stuck out its tongue to. Wow! A really simple experiment, and very interesting conclusions—babies instinctively know what tongues look like, how to move their tongue, and to mimic others without any practice.