I, for one, really like this section of LW, which has led me to so many interesting reads. It seems there used to be more entries here, is there some other place LW-minded people now put their recommendations?
djcb
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Much agree with that! Both The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest (links to my GoodReads reviews) are some of my favorite reads in 2015, can’t wait for part 3, Death’s End, which should be available (in English) some time this year.
I’m actually not a big HPMOR fan, and I found these books quite different from that.
Reminds me of the discussion in Through The Language Glass of the Matsés people of the Amazon.
Their language has a built-in concept of evidentiality—every time they say anything about anything, their language requires them to express the amount of evidence for the statement—‘seen with my own eyes’ until ‘mere hearsay’—paper.
“The 48 Anecdotes of Power”? It’s a fun read, but sometimes taken a bit too serious (like having 48-laws-themed tattoos...)
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith: The Dictator’s Handbook
Much liked this book, which is a sort-of modern version of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Don’t get fooled by its silly title, this book is the general-audience version of Bueno De Mesquita et al’s selectorate theory, which describes any kind of power structure in terms of which groups leaders need to please (or can ignore!) in order to stay in power. It’s a rather cynical theory, with leaders having staying-in-power as more or less their only goal, and they give a great many example; leaders in democracies and authocracies are more-or-less equivalent, it’s only that the former needed to please many more people and thus are induced to play a bit nicer.
Of course, political science is a bit shaky, but the writers do have statistics and analysis (but one needs the more scholarly version of the theory for that) to back it up. Also, esp. Bueno De Mesquita is known for making quite accurate predictions of future events, more so than others. This gives some confidence, esp. against the common theme of theories that can predict anything.
With selectorate theory in hand, the book explains how we could look at e.g. foreign aid, international politics, to make it beneficial to leaders (democratic or not) to be better to their subjects, improve governance, freedoms etc. So, in the end, the cold, hard-nosed cynicism does point to some ways to make the world a better place...
Recommended. I’ll be going to watch world events through these lenses, and see how wel it works.
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.
Oh, thanks for sharing this!
Oh, that’s a really interesting idea! Is the code available somewhere?
Jon Ronson—“The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry ”
Some light reading about psychopaths (!) --how are people diagnosed to be psychopaths (often using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist), can this 1% of the population be cured (apparently, to a large extent the answer is “no”). In between, the author solves some kind of mystery, discusses some fun therapies from the 70s, and chats with some psychopaths-or-not, and the famous Rosenhan experiment makes an appearance.
Once more, the stereotype of psychiatry as an, at best, proto-scientific field is evoked. Not a bad book, good for a light read on a long flight.
Richard Rhodes—“Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb”
The title says it all—a book about the development of hydrogen bomb, in both its American and its Russian incarnation. The book is the sequel to The Making of the Atomic Bomb (which is really great).
The book roughly starts where its predecessor ended, and tells the story of the main characters in the Manhattan project, and how they started work on the Next Big Thing—the hydrogen bomb, as invented by Ulam/Teller. The book is a bit less about the science and more about the politics of the H-bomb project, but still there are quite a few details—though the DIY-crowd might need some more...
The book also details the Russian parallel development, first of their own atom-bomb and then also the h-bomb, and how they were much helped by espionage, in particular from Klaus Fuchs, who came off very lightly, and ended his days in the DDR.
Overall, slightly (only slightly!) less interesting than its predecessor, still a great read. Well-researched and detailed, but also very interesting—esp. if you’re interested in politics.
Would you recommend it?
People with high social intelligence are able to drive their (often stupid) ideas through committees by using coalition-building and hate-mongering, as well as sarcasm, dismissive humor, emotionally-laden jargon (“death tax”), distraction, and a fine sense of when they can use argument by assumption. They are the people who get grants by schmoozing, playing off the prejudices of the review panel, and snappy data-free PowerPoint presentations.
Talk about emotionally-laden! This seem a bit exagerated to me.
Summarizing, the idea is that:
high IQ → better work performance → better for society
high social intelligence → better career → better for individual
and since a better career is a zero-sum game, it makes little sense for society to invest in that.
That makes sense, but what’s unknown (afaik) is to what extent high social intelligence has (may have) positive effects not just for the individual, but also for whole organizations, society. Career success may be zero-sum game, but a organization/society with a better understanding of the social factor, may be better at reaching its goals.
The Guns Of August—Barbara Tuchman. Tuchman’s classic book about the first month of World War I. It’s written in a somewhat informal way, and Tuchman seems to be especially interested by the various character’s mustaches, for some reason.It’s a good introduction into that first month, when the German’s got so close to winning, and then… didn’t.
Moonwalking with Einstein—Joshua Foer. In short: a book a journalist how writes a story about the US memory competition, then decides to try himself, and wins the next year. While doing so, he discusses the various tricks that ‘mental athletes’ use (many of which are known since ancient times), the differences with the inborn talents of idiots savants and the little subculture of people taking part in these competitions. I liked the book—it constantly tries to understand why things work the way they seem to work, leaves room for alternative explanations etc., while keeping the book fascinating.
Feeling Good—David Burns. This book is (mostly) about Behavioral Therapy (BT), a therapy for treating depressions. I happily do not suffer from those, but I was interested in what the field has come up with, a field which still has bit of a proto-scientific smell.
BT is based on the thought that depressions are often based on errors of thinking (such as being too negative, having unrealistic expectations, all-or-nothing thinking and so on), and that patients can be help by systematically exposing these thinking errors, and making them think in more realistic terms. One of the ways to do this is to keep lists of expectations what will be happen in many daily things (‘it’s going to be a disaster’), and then later adding what actually happened (‘it wasn’t too bad’). Sounds almost /too/ rational, but apparently it worked. The end of the book also discusses chemical treatments at length, and sees them as something that is sometimes necessary, but always in combination with other therapy. This part interested me less. Overall, I liked Dr. Burn’s writing style—concise, precise and self-critical, and he seems to anticipate this reader’s “but what if” responses quite well.
Antifragile—Things That Gain from Disorder—Nassim Taleb. In this book, Taleb discusses antifragility, i.e., the property of flourishing in the face of randomness, rare events, and so one, and he contrasts this with many of the world’s systems, which are fragile—strongly depend on their environment being predictable.
Prime examples of this would be the world economy (fragile) and the human body (gets better at fighting pathogens the more it is exposed to them).
Taleb fills the book with this—and even more with gratuitously throwing around references to ancient philosophers etc., and shamelessly adding anecdotes with himself being the hero (not just the smartest, but also an impressive weight-lifter ‘looks like a body-guard’). If you can overlook that, it’s an interesting book.
I read Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon (about the periodic table), and The Violinist’s Thumb (about genetics). Both are excellent pieces of pop-science. Somewhat like Bill Bryson, but gets a bit more technical in some places.
I much commend the writer for double-checking many of the legends, anecdotes (and debunking quite a few).
The Amazon blurb doesn’t look very promising… “Change is hard. But not if you know the 5-step formula that works whether...”. Or is this one of those rare gems?
I finished Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise; I liked it. Very accessible view into the world of predicitions in very different field (earthquakes, poker, elections, stock market, …). Nice book to introduce people into quite a few of the LW-themes. One weakness I found that while Silver got to interview Donald Rumsfeld, he succeeds in not getting anything interesting out of him.
Also, I finally finished Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, a great book that discusses many of our cognivitive biases. A whole subgenre of irrationality-pop-psy has arisen in the last few years, but this is really the book that makes much of those superfluous. Book gets a bit tedious in the end, but I’d still consider it near-mandatory reading for people interested in LW-themes.
Linguistics are interesting, and this book is a classic of the field, but could you explain why you think it is so great? Haven’t read the book yet, but I’m interested to know if I should give it some extra priority in my reading queue.
I liked that third one (“The 10,000 Year Explosion”), which suggests that human evolution has been very much happening in the last 10K years; I wonder if that’s a mainstream believe now, and/or if there other books about this.
Overall, I did like Blackout/All-Clear, but the aspects of time-traveling and universe taking a special interest in human-level ‘big happenings’ were unconvincing for me.
Not really the point of the story of course, but if one introduces time-traveling in a story, it should be thought trough a bit more, I think.
(Links are to my GoodReads notes about them)
The related books Superforecasting and Future Babble are about predicting the socio-econo-political future—how people usually fail at it, esp. overconfident pundits—and how it doesn’t matter because people forget and they get invited again. The contents align nicely with LW-themes (in terms of instrumental rationality, probabilistic reasoning and recognizing biases etc.), and apply them to read-world prediction making. Some people get quite good at foreseeing events.