I constantly buy textbooks and use them as bedtime reading. A wonderful way to pick up the fundamentals (or at least a superficial familiarity) with many subjects. However, just reading any textbook is unlikely to actually give a great insight into any field. Doing exercises, and in particular having a teacher or mentor point out what is important, is necessary for actually getting anywhere.
To add at least some thread-relevant material, I’d like to recommend Eliezer’s web page “An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning” at http://yudkowsky.net/bayes/bayes.html
I’m reading Piattelli Palmarini’s “Inevitable Illusions” right now, but I’m not that impressed so far. Most of the contents seem to be familiar from this list.
I constantly buy textbooks and use them as bedtime reading. A wonderful way to pick up the fundamentals (or at least a superficial familiarity) with many subjects. However, just reading any textbook is unlikely to actually give a great insight into any field. Doing exercises, and in particular having a teacher or mentor point out what is important, is necessary for actually getting anywhere.
To add at least some thread-relevant material, I’d like to recommend Eliezer’s web page “An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning” at http://yudkowsky.net/bayes/bayes.html
I’m reading Piattelli Palmarini’s “Inevitable Illusions” right now, but I’m not that impressed so far. Most of the contents seem to be familiar from this list.