Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
I like reading non fiction but a lot of it is like pop psychology with not a lot of informational content.
I've picked up two books recently and I've learnt a lot :
The Selfish Gene By Richard Dawkins
The 10 Day MBA By Steven Silbiger
There's very little fluff in these books and you learn something useful on almost every other page. I'd like to read more such books , especially on technical subjects.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 61.5 ms ] thread2. Subroto Bagchi’s MBA At 16: A Teenager’s Guide To Business
3. Jugaad Innovation: A frugal and flexible approach to innovation for the 21st century by Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, and Simone Ahuja
A typical example of psychological discovery discussed in the book: 1. Ask someone to give 3 or 10 examples of when they were assertive 2. Ask someone to grade themselves on how assertive they are
And the study shows that people who were asked for 3 examples of how assertive they are were more likely to grade themselves as more assertive that those who were asked for 10 examples due to recollection bias.
I mean, I could see how this is sort of interesting but it's such low stakes. How would anyone be able to grade themselves from 1 - 10 on how assertive they are? What does that even mean? What implications does this have on anything?
I don't know. Psych experiments that are so glorified in the book seem to me to be too convenient and a form of story telling, which is fine except for the troubling implications that our cognitive biases and inefficiencies somehow trump our free will and freedom. But then again, I have my own biases.
For instance, one experiment shows that frowning can have effects on your disposition. As an experiment, a subject is told to hold a pencil in their mouth in a certain way as to unknowingly produce a frown or smile and then do some task. The difference between behaviors is then attributed to smiling or frowning, as though the only thing going on with a pencil awkwardly in your mouth is the smiling or frowning.
Maybe I do view all psychology in a negative way but I imagine I find it distasteful the same way (I imagine) most people find the study of IQ differences among races distasteful. Is this a valid field of study? I don't know and I don't care to know because the racist overtones are so strong.
Unfortunately psychology, especially 'pop' psychology has been used to deny people their free will and restrict freedoms.
It goes along with an overall trend of the sciences to rely more and more on statistical methods which I find troubling.
Loosely speaking, Eagleton is best known for Marxist literary theory (dialectical materialism).
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Homer and a few Greek plays
Sample a bit of the great story teller Herodotus, then read the birth of historiography in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, which by itself is also very interesting and important (wonder why the Founder of the US didn't like direct democracy? There are very important object lessons in it).
Surely Plato and Aristotle deserve some attention! The contents of the latter's Rhetoric is essential for when you can't reach people with dialectic.
Euclid's Elements is still about as good as you can get for what it teaches.
Plutarch is great, but I really like that period of history. To it I would add reading some of the earlier bits of Livy.
Read, or better yet listen to audio of a few of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, out loud you can follow their Middle English.
Machiavelli's The Prince is still damned good, and a landmark in talking about politics as it is, not as how people would like it to be.
Shakespeare surely needs some attention by English speakers. Swift's Gulliver's Travels were amusing when I read them in their original, and obviously very influential.
So, yeah, check out some of the classics.
I love food, and I love the anthropology of food. The writing here is engaging and entertaining, but the content is quite interesting if you are at all curious about mid-century French cuisine from the perspective of an American ex-pat chef.
The reason I think these are more valuable than the pop psychology/business airport books is they don't operate under the pretense that the world's great truths can be boiled down to 240 pages. Rather, learning about people's experiences and stories on there own terms helps you develop a much more nuanced worldview.
For example, I'm reading The Battle Cry of Freedom, an overview of the Civil War, and it's astounding how much more insight a book about something 150 years ago offers into today's society than just about any of the Gladwell genre stuff.
Thats the period I was least interested in going in, but have ranked as the best History book I've read.
Ignition: http://web.gccaz.edu/~wkehowsk/ignition.pdf
"Excuse me, sir...": ftp://www.fourmilab.ch/pub/etexts/www/gergel/isopropyl_bromide.pdf
http://books.simonandschuster.com/1776/David-McCullough/9781...
It's absolutely the best book for anybody who keeps a blog or writes any sort of non-fiction. I try and re-read it once a year.
It is literally one idea per page. Virtually noise free - but does demand some thinking on behalf of the reader.
All of Atul Gawande's books, notably:
The Checklist Manifesto [1]: http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/
Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance: http://atulgawande.com/book/better/
[1] You can read the essay that this book is based on in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist
But we are not doing it. Why? Because we misallocate the founds.
Looking at the data (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1306801) there were 721,800 what they call health care associated infections in 2011 (I couldn't find newer data). If the rate goes down at what the article suggest, (75%) then we will save 541350 people a year using this method whereas it would cost more than 1.8 Billion dollars to save the same amount of lives using the Against Malaria foundation.
This is almost 500 times as effective!
How do we get this knowledge to people who have 2 million dollars to spare?
The Information, James Gleick
A Universe from Nothing, Lawrence Krauss
Abundance, Peter Diamandis
I was also thinking that a non-fiction book with no fluff and no injection of personality/flair from the author is a textbook. There are many outstanding textbooks (like Molecular Biology of the Cell) which offer pure information, but I think commercial non-fiction books are aimed at a more general audience. The author needs to fluff a book up a bit to make the material approachable. I also wonder how some non-fiction books would read if untouched by editors.
Asimov was also a master at nonfiction writing for laypeople. Most of his books were nonfiction (they were easier for him to write).
One critique I received was that there is repetition of ideas but I think its because primarily humans carry past successes anf failures so most of the changes are evolutionary to what worked previously and second this book is akin to a thesis and every chapter is essential to building up the case.
By far the best non-fiction I've read.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1rzm07/wha...
So the OP asks for high signal to noise ratio. There comes a recommendation, and then I read some good discussion on Reddit on how the book is actually kind of wrong.
This begs the question: What's "high signal to noise" anyways? Someone who has read 10 books on a subject will find barely anything new. One who just starts out might find "gems" on every other page.
And also: If a recommendation here in this "Ask HN" is given and then debunked as mediocre, how sure can one be to actually find a book with high signal to noise without reading the book?
In that sense: Thanks for your comment. In-depth discussions like the one on Reddit is really necessary, because I, as a starter, have no clue how to evaluate a book. Every recommendation should probably come with a lengthy discussion about its accuracy by people who know the subject :)
My emphasis with my comment is to read books, ideas with healthy dose of skepticism, rather than worshipping it as gospel.
(1) In the first sentences, the author (a PhD student in history) cannot really hide his irritation that someone with a background in animal physiology has written a popular book about history. I have seen this ad hominem several times about Jared Diamond. Somehow those historians cannot stand that someone with no degree in history has written such a popular book.
(2) "Guns, Germs, and Steel attacked the notion that racial superiority explained Western global pre-eminence, a view taken seriously by almost no one who’s taken seriously"
Actually, what Guns, Germs, and Steel did, was to provide a first comprehensive theory (that I have heard of, anyway) that explains why Europe, and not someone else, rose to dominance. This is the merit. The main merit is not that it, as a side product, discredited the racially based theories.
Failing to understand this difference does not speak highly of the writer of the review.
[1] http://www.columbia.edu/~saw2156/HunterBlatherer.pdf