Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Author & risk analyst
Author of The Black Swan, Antifragile, and Fooled by Randomness. The inventor of the Lindy Effect concept as applied to books. His reading list consists almost exclusively of ancient and classical texts — anything published after 1900 is viewed with deep suspicion.
@nntaleb238
Timeless books
4,044
Avg Lindy score
2826 yrs old
Oldest book
Stood the test of time — old, widely published, and repeatedly endorsed
“The Stoics had it right. Meditations is the closest thing to a manual for living under uncertainty.”
The Republic
Plato
24k
“Plato is required reading. The Republic raises questions about justice and society that haven't been answered yet.”
“Seneca has more practical wisdom in a single letter than most modern self-help books combined.”
“Adam Smith had skin in the game. He observed markets directly and wrote honestly about what he saw.”
The Odyssey
Homer
17k
“In Book 12 of the Odyssey, the hero encounters the sirens, on an island not far from the rocks of Charybdis and Scylla.”
Tao Te Ching
Lao Tzu
17k
“Lao Tzu understood antifragility before anyone gave it a name. Wu wei is the original via negativa.”
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand
16k
“Consider the Ayn Rand phenomenon: her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have been read for more than half a century by millions of people, in spite of, or most likely thanks to, brutally nasty reviews and attempts to discredit her.”
“The Selfish Gene is one of the few modern science books that will still be read in a century.”
“Kahneman's work is the most important contribution to decision science since Pascal.”
Zero to One
Peter Thiel
14k
“When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.”
“Machiavelli had skin in the game. He wrote what he actually observed, not what was polite to say.”
“He put Guns Germs and Steel and Naomi Klein's book justiably in "fiction".”
“Dostoevsky understood human irrationality better than any psychologist. The Brothers Karamazov is the ultimate novel.”
“My preferred fiction. Tolstoy understood human nature better than any modern novelist.”
“Scott, you got me to buy Cialdini's bk. There is nothing in it that is both true & not known by 15th century chroniclers.”
“Dostoevsky was the first psychologist. Crime and Punishment should be required reading.”
“5 additional books I recommended pic.twitter.com/hhRW6Kabtg”
“1) The taste of (cold) revenge is by far the most underrated human experience. Not for cowards. Not be good for society except when revenge does not lead to more revenge. 2) Written ~170 y ago. I've never read more limpid more recent page turner.#Lindy = #ergodic seller! https://t.co/ODPZoPB6pb”
“Promoting the ideas of Jane Jacobs (and her books) on organic urbanism —with Minister @HardeepSPuri in charge of building tens of millions of homes in the next 5 years. pic.twitter.com/gV6YwcvhHs”
“For instance, the science journalist Steven Pinker played that trick with his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, which claims a decline of violence in modern human history, and attributes this to modern institutions. My collaborator Pasquale Cirillo and I, when we put his “data” under scrutiny, found out that either he didn’t understand his own numbers (actually, he didn’t), or he had a story in mind and kept adding charts, not realizing that statistics isn’t about data but distillation, rigor, and avoiding being fooled by randomness—but no matter, the general public and his state-worshipping IYI colleagues found it impressive (for a while).”
“When people ask me "what should I read", I used to avoid responding. Now, here is something necessary in anyone's ed pic.twitter.com/mxmabxeiTG”
Bible
Unknown
5.7k
“Reread --or read-- the Bible.”
“Excited to get the book of @NAChristakis as I am trying to go deeper into the notion of fractal (multiscale) localism & see what's wrong w/my thesis: It isn't individuals vs societies but fractal gradations, each w/specific dynamics, (contra the selfish gene philosophastering) pic.twitter.com/gbTxHrOKpu”
The Illiad
Homer
5.7k
“ILIAD MONTAIGNE NO NEWSPAPERS That's sufficient”
“[...] Gary Taubes is a true empiricist. I can't believe people hold on to the Platonicity of the thermodynamic theory of diet [...]”
“I remember finding on the shelves of a country house I once rented a mildewed history book by Will and Ariel Durant describing the Phoenicians as the “merchant race.” I was tempted to throw it in the fireplace.”
“My recommendation seemed impractical, but, after a while, the student developed a culture in original texts such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Hayek, texts he believes he will cite at the age of eighty. He told me that after his detoxification, he realized that all his peers do is read timely material that becomes instantly obsolete.”
“Surprisingly, the book that influenced me was not written by someone in the thinking business but by a journalist: William Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941. Shirer was a radio correspondent, famous for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”
“Witness here how salaried physicists are dismissing @stephen_wolfram Wolfram's automata BEFORE even hearing him Just as Freeman Dyson publicly dismissed *A New Kind of Science* c. 2002; it turned out that he did not read the book. & pple who refused to read it referred to Dyson! https://t.co/8PfnQVG1k7”
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
“Studies of the dynamics of networks have mushroomed recently. They became popular with Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, in which he shows how some of the behaviors of variables such as epidemics spread extremely fast beyond some unspecified critical level.”
“In one of the rare noncharlatanic books in finance, descriptively called What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, the protagonist makes a big discovery.”
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
The Aeneid
Virgil
4.2k
One of the methods, called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil), involved opening Virgil’s Aeneid at random and interpreting the line that presented itself as direction for the course of action.
“More Experts I recently read a bestseller called The Millionaire Next Door, an extremely misleading (but almost enjoyable) book by two “experts,” in which the authors try to infer some attributes that are common to rich people.”
“Mediterranean cultures actually have tall shaming. "homo lungus raro sapiens", "tawil habil", "Troppo lungo non fu mai buono", "Uomo lungo, testa corta" etc. See Reich (2018) @Steve_Sailer The closer to old settled societies, the more tall shaming. Reverse in roaming hunters https://t.co/9lANTtXnuU”
Conspiracy
Ryan Holiday
4.2k
“Wonderful discussion w/@RyanHoliday. 1) Gawker was destroying lives (weak college girls) & others w/impunity exploiting 1st amndmnt & because law suits too embarassing for plaintifs. 2) An Op-Ed or tawk woudn't fix the problem. 3) @peterthiel destroyed Gawker by bullying bully https://t.co/jzCkOTZYWY”
“Fictiones by Borges [is the best fiction book I've ever read].”
Alchemy
Rory Sutherland
4.2k
“4 hours dinner conversation with @rorysutherland and Rohan @Silva in a Pakistani restaurant in London (2 bottles of wine, but no Negroni). You must buy two copies of Rory's book, in case one is stolen, lost, damaged (by the rain), or self-destructs. pic.twitter.com/Xa5WFOGCNt”
Das Kapital
Karl Marx
4.2k
“3- Current bibles: The Bible, Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, Works by Aquinas, Montaigne, etc. They fail editorial criteria. Editors don't understand books, Academics don't get scholarship. Why?@rorysutherland : employees' objective is minimizing blame in case of failure.”
“Read the texts themselves: Seneca, Caesar, or Marcus Aurelius, when possible. Or read commentators on the classics who were doers themselves, such as Montaigne—people who at some point had some skin in the game, then retired to write books. Avoid the intermediary, when possible.”
“As Charles Darwin wrote in a historical section of his On the Origin of Species, presenting a sketch of the progress of opinion: “I hope I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.””
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
“[...] This is the first statistics book I've seen that cares about presenting statistics as a tool to GET TO THE TRUTH. Please buy it. [...]”
“Very clear exposition, does the math without getting lost in the details. Although many of the concepts of the introductory first 100 pages can be found elsewhere, they are presented with remarkable cut-to-the-chase clarity.”
Also Recommends
193 books · below Lindy threshold
Debt
David Graeber
3.5k
“In his book DEBT. Meanwhile, David, can you unblock Maximilian? He is an upright citizen.”
Scale
Geoffrey West
2.8k
“Have you seen Scale by West? Log scale, but humans are outliers. Exercise has a net effect of lowering the total beats, see @drjohnm's book.”
Against the Grain
James C. Scott
2.8k
“OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6”
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Richard P. Feynman
2.8k
“But Popper is too stern, so let us leave him for later and, for now, discuss the more entertaining and jovial Richard Feynman, the most irreverent and playful scientist of his day. His book of anecdotes, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, conveys the idea of the fundamental irreverence of science, which proceeds through a similar mechanism as the kosher asymmetry.”
Safe Haven
Mark Spitznagel
2.8k
“Spencer gets it. (All explicitly in the book"Safe Haven".)https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-news-today-04-04-2023/card/wait-your-hedge-fund-made-how-much--WRy8YA3lZ9404Qx3unVT”
Essais
Michel de Montaigne
2.8k
“ILIAD MONTAIGNE NO NEWSPAPERS That's sufficient”
Dominion
Tom Holland
2.8k
“OK, OK, restarting w/some corrections. For comments. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1544296263822213120 pic.twitter.com/US4P4JhU3T Tom Holland holds an edge over other current authors and intellectuals: the rare coupling of wide erudition and remarkable clarity of mind, two attributes that appear to be negatively correlated, as if the presence of one caused the other one to flee. This confers the ability to spot things other professionals don't catch immediately, in spite of sharing the same ensemble of information - what in my trading days we used to call "connecting the dots". And these discoveries, in spite of being hard to detect, appear obvious, even trivial after the fact. Holland is effortlessly ahead of his time: ten years ago, he was savagely attacked by the high priest of late Antiquity, the extremely decorated Glenn Bowersock, for his book on the conditions surrounding the birth of Islam. Then, only half a decade later, Bowersock quietly published a book making similar claims. So this entire book revolves around one simple, but far-reaching idea. By a mechanism dubbed the retrospective distortion, we look at history using the rear view mirror and flow values retroactively. So one would be naturally inclined to believe that the ancients, particularly the Greco-Romans, would seem like us, share the same wisdom, preferences, values, concerns, fears, hopes, and outlook, except, of course, without the iPhone, Twitter, and the Japanese automated toilet seat. But, no, no, not at all, Holland is saying. These ancients did not have the same values. In fact, Christianity did stand the entire ancient value system on its head. The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order. While ancient gods could have their share of travails and difficulties, they remained in that special class of gods. But Jesus was the first ancient deity who suffered the punishment of the slave, the lowest ranking member of the human race. And the sect that succeeded him generalized such glorification of suffering: dying as an inferior is more magnificent than living as the mighty. The Romans were befuddled to see members of that sect use the cross - the punishment for slaves -as a symbol; it had to be some type of joke in their eyes. There is also the presence of skin in the game. Christianity, by insisting on the Trinity, managed to allow God to suffer like a human, and suffer the worst fate any human can suffer. Thanks to the complicated consubstantial relation between father and son, suffering was not a video game to the Lord but the real thing. The argument "I am superior to you because I suffer the consequences of my actions and you don't" applies within humans and in the relationship between humans and God. This extends, in Orthodox theology, to the idea that God by suffering as a human allowed humans to be equal to Him. Christianity had the last vindication when Julian The Apostate, falling for the retrospective distortion, decided to replace of the Church of Christianity by the Church of Paganism along similar organizational lines, with bishops and all the rest (what Chateaubriand called the "'Levites ). For Julian did not realize that paganism was a soup of decentralized individual or collective club-like affiliations to gods. What has been less obvious is that while we are inclined to believe that Christianity descends from Judaism, some of the reverse might be true. The mother-daughter relationship between Judaism and Christianity has been, as of late, convincingly challenged. "Without Paul, there would be no Akiva" claims the theologian Israel Yuval as we can see in Rabbinical Judaism the unmistakable footprints of Christianity. Further East, Shite Islam shares many features with Christianity, e.g. the same dodecadic approach, with twelve apostles, the last of whom will accompany Jesus Christ, plus self-flagellation rituals around the memory of martyrdom; these can be possibly attributed to a shared Levantine origin. But it is clear that the latest position of supreme leader has been guided by the Catholic hierarchy. Christianity has been slow to spread its values from text to execution, and that may be the point of this book. Yes, Christianity glorifies the poor: but it took seventeen centuries from "the eye of the needle" in Matthew 19:24 to the conception of communism. Likewise it took more than a millennia for the "neither slave nor free" in Galatians 3:28 from epistle to execution. As to the "neither Greek nor Jew", alas, we are still waiting for full implementation as we have witnessed with the birth of nationalism in the late 18th C., a moral degradation and a step away from universalism with the modern contraption of the nation state -the murderous nation state. I recall vividly the TV ads in the early 2000s, promoted by Democrats to attack George W. Bush's policies in Iraq; they kept showing the tragedy that 3,800 people died in the invasion. They omitted to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis -lest the Republicans question their patriotism. These foreign casualties do not seem to count because nationalism establishes clean balance sheets: countries are only responsible for their own citizens.”
The Dawn of Everything
David Graeber
2.8k
“You muuuuuuuuuust read the next Graeber and @davidwengrow !”
The discovery of France
Graham Robb
2.8k
“Until I discovered, reading Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, a major fact that led me to see the place with completely new eyes and search the literature for a revision of the story of the country.”
Elements of information theory
T. M. Cover
2.8k
“OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6”
Chaos Kings
Scott Patterson
2.8k
“Scott Patterson @pattersonscott and I are doing Part 2 Wednesday. Please post in the🧵any question you may have so far related to Part 1. -- A Discussion With Scott Patterson's About His Book Chaos Kings, Part 1 https://youtu.be/VuoCxJ9y8-0?si=1p0RyMNfphiC1JTf”
Intelligence
Stuart Ritchie
2.8k
“My review of that book on "intelligence"https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R6SACJFYYTD40?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp https://twitter.com/QuietLion/status/1594378465503244288”
Napoleon The Great
Andrew Roberts
2.8k
“Great book pic.twitter.com/2Q8np2J7n3”
Probability, random variables, and stochastic processes
Athanasios Papoulis
2.8k
“I always always recommend the book by Anastassios Papoulis. 1) Never start with stats, start with probability. 2) Never read a stat textbook not written by a probabilist. Beware, there are plenty, plenty, plenty of stats books written by psychologists! https://t.co/tVYO73HLFB”
Summa Theologica
Thomas Aquinas
2.8k
“3- Current bibles: The Bible, Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, Works by Aquinas, Montaigne, etc. They fail editorial criteria. Editors don't understand books, Academics don't get scholarship. Why?@rorysutherland : employees' objective is minimizing blame in case of failure.”
Seta
Alessandro Baricco
2.8k
“Upload the cover of a book you love without saying why and mention the person who invited you (@mcapellanus) and invite 8 others for #WorldBookDay. @csandis @VergilDen @holland_tom @peterfrankopan @petelx60 @BrankoMilan @BellesLettresEd pic.twitter.com/kQKcFvlqJj”
The forge of christendom
Holland, Tom Dr.
2.8k
“Also @holland_tom took real risks for his book, followed something to its logical conclusion.”
Modelling Extremal Events
Paul Embrechts
2.8k
“Best exposition is the first 3 chapters of Embrecht's book.”
Un amore
Dino Buzzati
2.8k
“Yes and I have also read Buzzati on how to find love in a bordello.”
The invisible gorilla
Christopher F. Chabris
2.8k
“Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, in their book The Invisible Gorilla, show how people watching a video of a basketball game, when diverted with attention-absorbing details such as counting passes, can completely miss a gorilla stepping into the middle of the court.”
Happy Accidents
Morton A. Meyers
2.8k
“Morton Meyers, a practicing doctor and researcher, writes in his wonderful Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs: “Over a twenty-year period of screening more than 144,000 plant extracts, representing about 15,000 species, not a single plant-based anticancer drug reached approved status. This failure stands in stark contrast to the discovery in the late 1950s of a major group of plant-derived cancer drugs, the Vinca Alcaloids—a discovery that came about by chance, not through directed research.”
The Tartar Steppe
Dino Buzzati
2.8k
“As a child, I viewed the world into two types of people: those who read the deserto and were therefore marked by it, and the rest. Francois Mitterand, who was not my cup of tea, seduced me when on the literary panel Apostrophes he went on and on passionately talking about the book --"j'ai été marqué par ce livre", he said, his eyes gleaming”
The Blank Slate
Steven Pinker
2.8k
“Note: I do not disrespect psychologists because I don't know their works. It is precisely BECAUSE I read their crap. Between 2002 and 2005½ I read >200 psychology books and took notes. (Here 3 books by Pinker @sapinker who claims I didn't read his junk) pic.twitter.com/EH1VNTZgU4”
Le Labyrinthe des égarés
Amin Maalouf
2.8k
“An excellent book on modern historical dynamics, covering the stories of the rise of Japan, the Soviet Union, China, & the U.S. I learned tons lot of stuff. It reads like a novel. COI Disclosure: Maalouf did not ask me to comment. pic.twitter.com/JqOmJ1HubD t's the kind of book I didn't know I had to read.”
Quand la Chine s'éveillera… le monde tremblera
Alain Peyrefitte
2.8k
“A prophetic book I just found in my parent's library, titled (tr.) When China Wakes Up... the World Will Shiver. 53 years ago, a French diplomat thought dynamically in a world lacking in clarity of mind. I read it as a child. Today, play the same exercise. pic.twitter.com/X8eQD2WqfP”
The Second Law
Stephen Wolfram
2.8k
“It's w/some excitement that found of (personalized) copy of this book in my mailbox. If I hadn't known @stephen_wolfram v. well personally for 21 years, I would have thought that he was a committee of >12 researchers. Furthermore: 1) His output is accelerating w/time; 2) The… pic.twitter.com/ul5L18FoV4”
What Is ChatGPT Doing... and Why Does It Work?
Stephen Wolfram
2.8k
“OK, OK, we found for #RWRI 18 the best possible person for the Q&A, the one who literally wrote the book on ChatGPT. pic.twitter.com/QpFuC6sJOr”
Toxic Exposure
Chadi Nabhan
2.8k
“Monsanto, Roundup, and Nabhan's book "TOXIC EXPOSURE" with Nassim Nicholas... https://youtu.be/bAFxC5h6cEI via @YouTube”
The Haywire Heart
Christopher Case, John Mandrola, and Lennard Zinn
2.8k
“Have you seen Scale by West? Log scale, but humans are outliers. Exercise has a net effect of lowering the total beats, see @drjohnm's book.”
Wanting
Luke Burgis
2.8k
“Ordered the book.”
The Seventh Letter
Mihai Spariosu
2.8k
“The posthumous novel by my late friend Mihai Spariosu, RIP. Saw the book's progression over the past 20 y. “Entertaining & gripping ...Plato, Socrates & the Academy/ Plato’s philosophy without abstraction, as the ideas are imbedded in the narrative.”https://www.amazon.com/dp/1737922819?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details”
Corto Maltese
Hugo Pratt
2.8k
“OK, OK, my reply to the recommended list of summer reads: 1) A practical (short) manual of Latin grammar. 2) Corto Maltese (complete collection, preferably the Ballad of the Salty Sea in text form) 3) Safe Haven by Spitznagel [it can also be read in the winter & other seasons] https://t.co/eDMryP4n03”
Hurst The Heart
Valentin Fuster
2.8k
“I made a mistake. I wrote that "nobody reads textbooks for pleasure". Well, I now do. 1) They look like old illuminated MS (unlike drab books), #Lindy. 2) Much, much more pleasureable to read physically than digitally (in spite of, or owing to, the weight: 2 vol = 24lbs). pic.twitter.com/qFHq71pRm7”
Harrison's principles of internal medicine. - 18. ed.
Anthony Fauci
2.8k
“I made a mistake. I wrote that "nobody reads textbooks for pleasure". Well, I now do. 1) They look like old illuminated MS (unlike drab books), #Lindy. 2) Much, much more pleasureable to read physically than digitally (in spite of, or owing to, the weight: 2 vol = 24lbs). pic.twitter.com/qFHq71pRm7”
Socrates in Love
Armand D'Angour
2.8k
“An advertisement for Maestro @ArmanddDAngour's book on Socrates/Diotima "Socrates in Love". Reading the section where he introduces Diotima while communicating with the [collaborative] author. https://t.co/E9U87vbuy1 pic.twitter.com/sC6jyCX8vZ”
Les sceptiques grecs
Victor Brochard
2.8k
“Free on Google Books. Brochard: Les sceptiques grecs.”
Œuvre
Milan Kundera
2.8k
“It took 5 weeks to get here from France... The complete works (The Czech was translated by Kundera). Now the question: where to start. Most of Kundera's books are hypnotic. This is literature. pic.twitter.com/Q9wwtH933O”
Decamerone
Giovanni Boccaccio
2.8k
“My mind is on books I don't have yet, but did order. The Decameron in Italian/Spanish bilingual so I can improve both... Looking for more bilingual Italian/Greek/Spanish... pic.twitter.com/k098axJ6uO”
Memoirs of a Physician
Alexandre Dumas
2.8k
“My mind is on books I don't have yet, but did order. The Decameron in Italian/Spanish bilingual so I can improve both... Looking for more bilingual Italian/Greek/Spanish... pic.twitter.com/k098axJ6uO”
Lévy statistics and laser cooling
François Bardou
2.8k
“There is a book by Cohen-Tannouji and Bouchaud on the stable dist in plasma physics”
The Quick and the Dead
Pavel Tsatsouline
2.8k
“I am reading this books by Pavel Tsatsouline. He advocates short exercises to avoid lactic acid, etc. The idea is to stop the sprint as soon as you stop accelerating. Wonder what Grant and Guru make of it. pic.twitter.com/5SBtkN8d3Y”
The entropy law and the economic process
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
2.8k
“Read Nicolas Georgesu-Roetgen”
Dictionary of the Safaitic Inscriptions
Ahmad Al-Jallad
2.8k
“Maestro A. Al-Jallad @Safaitic offering me his book in a café in Columbus OH. pic.twitter.com/V52ewrEmGK”
Dolce Vita
Ángela Lombardo
2.8k
“OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6”
The U.S. Constitution and Other Writings
Thunder Bay Press Staff
2.8k
“OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6”
Possessed, or, The secret of Myslotch
Witold Gombrowicz
2.8k
“OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6”
The Mystery-Religions and Christianity
Samuel Angus
2.8k
“OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6”
En Islam iranien
Corbin, Henry.
2.8k
“OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6”
Adventures of a Computational Explorer
Stephen Wolfram
2.8k
“OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6”
Human Scale Revisited
Kirkpatrick Sale
2.8k
“OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6”
The Vermont Papers
Frank Bryan
2.8k
“OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6”
Théodoret de Cyr et le monastère de Saint Maroun
Paul Naaman
2.8k
“OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6”
Counterexamples in Probability
Jordan M. Stoyanov
2.8k
“OK, OK, here are (some of) the books I enjoyed in 2019. pic.twitter.com/UqarbFAPJ6”
The Sign of Three
Umberto Eco
2.8k
“I have a book by Eco somewhere on Sherlock Holmes, Abduction, etc.”
Cut the Knot
Alexander Bogomolny
2.8k
“2/ Maestro B. lived for math, in a nonacademic way. He had a hearing problem & left academia to do math. Luckily he was close to finishing the book compiling the twitter probability riddles. The book is now finished; to be published thanks to @WolframResearch Pict 2 w before. pic.twitter.com/VxmR5q2Dxg”
Order without Design
Alain Bertaud
2.8k
“Bertaud knows cities inside out. It is a pleasure to read something by a person who knows his subject in so much depth. He reveals how planning can mess up cities, how the market is more intelligent than planners, etc. [...]”
The Longevity Solution
Dr. James DiNicolantonio
2.8k
“Received the incredibly well made book by @drjasonfung and @drjamesdinic. They use the potent designation “nonfood items”. I wonder how many nutritional studies would still hold their conclusions if we removed “nonfoods” from the tests. Science is hard. pic.twitter.com/toI9UiRPyT”
The French Revolution and What Went Wrong
Clarke, Stephen
2.8k
“Fun to Read, Removes the fluff and "fake news" from the history”
Reflections on the revolution in France
Edmund Burke
2.8k
“I spent part of my adult life falling asleep trying to read Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France", advancing at a pace of 10 pages every 2 years and three months (two pages are enough to induce coma).”
Practice of Natural Movement
Erwan Le Corre
2.8k
“Excited to find in my mailbox the book by @ErwanLeCorre from whom I've learned so much about natural fitness/#antifragility. pic.twitter.com/A57GM8yM9E”
Adam Smith
Jesse Norman
2.8k
“On my long trip from HK to Northern Phoenician, reading Jesse Norman's new book, promising read after his excccccccccccellent bio of Burke! Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman https://t.co/qLg7f8Jij3 via @amazon”
Wrestling with Moses
Anthony Flint
2.8k
“Promoting the ideas of Jane Jacobs (and her books) on organic urbanism —with Minister @HardeepSPuri in charge of building tens of millions of homes in the next 5 years. pic.twitter.com/gV6YwcvhHs”
Seven Types of Atheism
John Gray
2.8k
“IYI @danieldennet's remark is the best advertising for John Gray's new book. https://t.co/pPIk1hFQDc”
Risk Thinking
Ron S. Dembo
2.8k
“Sub-imbecile, Denbo, Varadhan dealt with thin-tails. Read Silent Risk, imbecile. And Russell didn't even deal with probabilistic payoffs. As to Mandelbrot, I gave him his dues. Sub-imbecile.”
Probability theory and applications
S. R. S. Varadhan
2.8k
“Sub-imbecile, Denbo, Varadhan dealt with thin-tails. Read Silent Risk, imbecile. And Russell didn't even deal with probabilistic payoffs. As to Mandelbrot, I gave him his dues. Sub-imbecile.”
Invariances
Robert Nozick
2.8k
“No, Nozick was out. I read 5 of his books, though. But I had to bite the bullet: time away from Cicero is time burned.”
The Book of the Courtier
Baldassarre Castiglione
2.8k
“Indeed, the classical art of conversation is to avoid any imbalance, as in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier: people need to be equal, at least for the purpose of the conversation, otherwise it fails. It has to be hierarchy-free and equal in contribution. You’d rather have dinner with your friends than with your professor, unless of course your professor understands “the art” of conversation.”
On Kings
Marshall Sahlins
2.8k
“For Christmas bought a v. Insightful book by my favorite twitter enemy @davidgraeber pic.twitter.com/HyPYuDq6iV”
A Phoenician-Punic grammar
Charles R. Krahmalkov
2.8k
“2) My classical ref. book on Phoenician grammar uses Canaanite prefixed article "Han" then "H'" or just ' (2). But 'l seems to appear elsewhere... (anyway the levantine "Hal Bét" is not derived from "haza'l bayt" but from Hal) pic.twitter.com/HPdXF7rObp”
Atlas des mathématiques
Fritz Reinhardt
2.8k
“Dense pocket book w/a map of math in great detail. Great for travel & mathematical flaneuring. French trans. from German. No English equiv. pic.twitter.com/TFBwXDismd”
The VNR Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics
W. Gellert
2.8k
“My second favorite!”
Understanding Risk
John D. Kadvany
2.8k
“So we now can quantify by how much books on "RISK" using "empiricism" like Fischhoff's & oth. nonrisktaking academics are clueless. pic.twitter.com/A0Q4vNP9NY”
Understanding Trump
Newt Gingrich
2.8k
“The new book by @newtgingrich revolves around the IYI. --- Now this would lead to some tangible policies. pic.twitter.com/bmF9N2e0G2”
Rational Decisions
Ken Binmore
2.8k
“Must read for the foundations, back to the source, with surprises”
The Shock Doctrine
Naomi Klein
2.8k
“He put Guns Germs and Steel and Naomi Klein's book justiably in "fiction".”
The Soul of the Marionette
John Gray
2.8k
“I made a deal with John Gray where I would stop writing nontechnical books and just promote his as they read as if I wrote them myself. https://t.co/rOMK8kqTqK”
Perilous Interventions
Hardeep Singh Puri
2.8k
“Solid Book on Interventionism, Should be Mandatory Reading in Foreign Affairs [...]”
The Opposing Shore
Julien Gracq
2.8k
“5 additional books I recommended pic.twitter.com/hhRW6Kabtg”
A History of Private Life
Philippe Ariès
2.8k
“5 additional books I recommended pic.twitter.com/hhRW6Kabtg”
The Complete Guide to Fasting
Jason Fung
2.8k
“An excellent book! https://t.co/rAekuWfkAz”
La violence monothéiste
Jean Soler
2.8k
“Friends, does anyone know this book? “On Monotheistic Violence”. pic.twitter.com/qjxNZTQtoA”
Explaining Social Behavior
Jon Elster
2.8k
“Notes on one of Elster's books. He is the MAIN social science thinker; gets Lindy Effect @avermeule @biillyb pic.twitter.com/KMYP3kNCz8”
Persian Fire
Tom Holland
2.8k
“An evening (pre-squid) ink with the indispensable Tom Holland @holland_tom pic.twitter.com/ZhI39WPKLy”
Idea Makers
Stephen Wolfram
2.8k
“Excellent! Only read on mathematicians by insiders."Math=Youth"disappears when adjtd by life expect @stephen_wolfram pic.twitter.com/52AzjK5asR”
The Science of Conjecture
James Franklin
2.8k
“Stands above, way above other books on the history and philosophy of probability.”
An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications
William Feller
2.8k
“If I had to go on a desert island with 2 probability books, I would take Feller's two volumes (written >40 years ago) and ["Modelling Extremal Events"].”
The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion Theory And Practice
William T. Ziemba
2.8k
“[...] Buy 2 copies, just in case you lose one. This book has more meat than any other book in decision theory, economics, finance, etc...”
A Few Lessons from Sherlock Holmes
Peter Bevelin
2.8k
“We Sherlock Holmes fans, readers, and secret imitators need a map. Here it is. Peter Bevelin is one of the wisest people on the planet. He went through the books and pulled out sections from Conan Doyle's stories that are relevant to us moderns, a guide to both wisdom and Sherlock Holmes. It makes you both wiser and eager to reread Sherlock Holmes.”
The Dao of Capital
Mark Spitznagel
2.8k
“At last, a real book by a real risk-taking practitioner. The Dao of Capital mixes (rather, unifies) personal risk-taking with explanations of global phenomena. You cannot afford not to read this!”
Body by Science
John R Little
2.8k
“[...] I owe a lot to this book. I figured out the value of intensity training and maximizing recovery. [...]”
The hour between dog and wolf
Coates, John
2.8k
“Excellent exposition of overcompensation [...]”
The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene
2.8k
“The first book I read, during my childhood, of Graham Greene's was The Power and the Glory, selected for no other reason than its having been put on the Index (that is, banned) by the Vatican.”
The measure of reality
Alfred W. Crosby
2.8k
“In his book The Measure of Reality (Crosby, 1997), the historian Alfred Crosby presented the following thesis: what distinguished Western Europe from the rest of the world is obsession with measurement, the transformation of the qualitative into the quantitative. (This is not strictly true, the ancients were also obsessed with measurements, but they did not have the Arabic numerals to do proper calculations.)”
A Perfect Mess
Eric Abrahamson
2.8k
“Abrahamson and Friedman, in their beautiful book A Perfect Mess, also debunk many of these neat, crisp, teleological approaches. It turns out, strategic planning is just superstitious babble.”
The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays
Albert Camus
2.8k
“In the novel The Plague by Albert Camus, a character spends part of his life searching for the perfect opening sentence for a novel. Once he had that sentence, he had the full book as a derivation of the opening. But the reader, to understand and appreciate the first sentence, will have to read the entire book.”
How Buildings Learn
Stewart Brand
2.8k
“In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand shows in pictures how buildings change through time, as if they needed to metamorphose into unrecognizable shapes—strangely buildings, when erected, do not account for the optionality of future alterations.”
The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand
2.8k
“Consider the Ayn Rand phenomenon: her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have been read for more than half a century by millions of people, in spite of, or most likely thanks to, brutally nasty reviews and attempts to discredit her.”
The Management Myth
Stewart, Matthew
2.8k
“Matthew Stewart, who, trained as a philosopher, found himself in a management consultant job, gives a pretty revolting, if funny, inside story in The Management Myth.”
In the Shadow of the Sword
Tom Holland
2.8k
“I have just bought Tom Holland’s book on the rise of Islam for the sole reason that he was attacked by Glen Bowersock, considered to be the most prominent living scholar on the Roman Levant. Until then I had thought that Tom Holland was just a popularizer, and I would not have taken him seriously otherwise.”
Laughing Gas, Viagra, and Lipitor
Jie Jack Li
2.8k
“Now, instead of giving my laundry list of drugs here (too inelegant), I refer the reader to, in addition to Meyers’s book, Claude Bohuon and Claude Monneret, Fabuleux hasards, histoire de la découverte des médicaments, and Jie Jack Li’s Laughing Gas, Viagra and Lipitor.”
De beneficiis
Seneca the Younger
2.8k
“Seneca’s book De beneficiis I mentioned earlier was exactly about which obligations one had in such situations.”
Levant
Philip Mansel
2.8k
“In the recent nostalgic book Levant, Philip Mansel documents how the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean operated as city-states separated from the hinterland.”
La rebellion française. mouvements populaires et conscience sociale
Jean Nicolas
2.8k
“In a thick and captivating book, La rebellion française, the historian Jean Nicolas shows how the culture of rioting was extremely sophisticated—historically, it counts as the true French national sport.”
The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid
Euclid
2.8k
“We all learn geometry from textbooks based on axioms, like, say, Euclid’s Book of Elements, and tend to think that it is thanks to such learning that we today have these beautiful geometric shapes in buildings, from houses to cathedrals; to think the opposite would be anathema.”
The immortalization commission
John Gray
2.8k
“I was just reading in John Gray’s wonderful The Immortalization Commission about attempts to use science, in a postreligious world, to achieve immortality.”
The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
2.8k
“A vivid modern attack on the point came from the young Friedrich Nietzsche, though dressed up in literary flights on optimism and pessimism mixed with a hallucination on what “West,” a “typical Hellene,” and “the German soul” mean. The young Nietzsche wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, while in his early twenties. He went after Socrates, whom he called the “mystagogue of science,” for “making existence appear comprehensible.””
The World of Yesterday
Stefan Zweig
2.8k
“Vienna became trapped in Austria, with whom it shared very little outside the formal language. Imagine moving New York City to central Texas and still calling it New York. Stefan Zweig, the Viennese Jewish novelist, then considered the most influential author in the world, expressed his pain in the poignant memoir The World of Yesterday.”
Bull by the horns
Sheila Bair
2.8k
“A Real Person in Washington: guts & truth”
Free the Animal
Richard Nikoley
2.8k
“charming and motivating A charming primer on the paleo idea, with an illustration through the authors own life. I read it in one sitting.”
The blank swan
Elie Ayache
2.8k
“A Fresh Perspective- Standing the problem on its head”
Belle du Seigneur
Albert Cohen
2.8k
“A Proust, but with a Levantine soul and personal manners, and aggressively heterosexual.”
Mary
Vladímir Nabokov
2.8k
“His (first?) novel, when he was an exile in Berlin, before he became complicated. I reread & reread the final scene.”
Villa Triste
Patrick Modiano
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
The End of the Affair
Graham Greene
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
UN Taxi Mauve
Deon
2.8k
“I've read it six times; people tell me he is a médiocre writer --I don't know what médiocre means”
A burnt-out case
Graham Greene
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit)
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur
Marcel Proust
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Albertine disparue
Marcel Proust
2.8k
“Proust is more limpid towards the middle/end”
Paulina 1880
Pierre Jean Jouve
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Flaubert's Parrot
Julian Barnes
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Death in Venice
Thomas Mann
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
André Breton
Etienne-Alain Hubert
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
The Razor's Edge
W. Somerset Maugham
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
George Orwell
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
La condition humaine
André Malraux
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
I, Claudius
Robert Graves
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Climats
André Maurois
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
La colline inspirée
Maurice Barrès
2.8k
“Barrès is the finest French prose, emotional, unhindered with intellectualism, grand, ambitious, incantatory, uninhibited. In a way like Malraux, but without the show-off, he does not try to impress you as much. [There is nothing wrong for a writer to show-off; when he has charm...]”
Le Grand Meaulnes
Alain-Fournier
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Justine
Lawrence Durrell
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Hotel du Lac
Anita Brookner
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Memoirs of an anti-Semite
Gregor von Rezzori
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Clea
Lawrence Durrell
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Tortilla Flat
John Steinbeck
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Una vita
Italo Svevo
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
La Storia
Elsa Morante
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories
Nina Nikolaevna Berberova
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Léon, l'Africain
Amin Maalouf
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Auto-da-fé
Elias Canetti
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
How Proust Can Change Your Life
Alain de Botton
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Travels with my aunt
Graham Greene
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí
Milan Kundera
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Immortality
Milan Kundera
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
La noia
Alberto Moravia
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
La Romana
Alberto Moravia
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Amerika
Franz Kafka
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Lady L.
Romain Gary
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Howards End
E. M. Forster
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
The Man Without Qualities
Robert Musil
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Les Jeunes Filles
Montherlant
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Ferdydurke
Witold Gombrowicz
2.8k
“[From: "Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books"]”
Seeking Wisdom
Peter Bevelin
2.8k
“A wonderful book on wisdom and decision-making written by a wise decision-maker. This is the kind of book you read first, then leave by your bedside and re-read a bit every day, so you can slowly soak up the wisdom. [...]”
The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition
Norman Russell
2.8k
“The Most Complete Overview of Theosis [...]”
Chance
Amir D. Aczel
2.8k
“I’m reminded of a recent book by a thoughtful mathematician, Amir Aczel, called Chance. Excellent book perhaps, but like all other modern books it is grounded in the ludic fallacy.”
Matière et mémoire
Henri Bergson
2.8k
“I filled up a box with French titles, such as a 1949 copy of Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire, which it seemed Mandelbrot bought when he was a student (the smell!).”
Fire the Bastards!
Jack Green
2.8k
“For an anecdotal example read Fire the Bastards!, whose author, Jack Green, goes systematically through the reviews of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. Green shows clearly how book reviewers anchor on other reviews and reveals powerful mutual influence, even in their wording.”
The Recognitions
William Gaddis
2.8k
“For an anecdotal example read Fire the Bastards!, whose author, Jack Green, goes systematically through the reviews of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. Green shows clearly how book reviewers anchor on other reviews and reveals powerful mutual influence, even in their wording.”
Ubiquity
Mark Buchanan
2.8k
“I have just read three “popular science” books that summarize the research in complex systems: Mark Buchanan’s Ubiquity, Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail. These three authors present the world of social science as full of power laws, a view with which I most certainly agree. They also claim that there is universality of many of these phenomena, that there is a wonderful similarity between various processes in nature and the behavior of social groups, which I agree with. They back their studies with the various theories on networks and show the wonderful correspondence between the so-called critical phenomena in natural science and the self-organization of social groups. They bring together processes that generate avalanches, social contagions, and what they call informational cascades, which I agree with. Universality is one of the reasons physicists find power laws associated with critical points particularly interesting. There are many situations, both in dynamical systems theory and statistical mechanics, where many of the properties of the dynamics around critical points are independent of the details of the underlying dynamical system. The exponent at the critical point may be the same for many systems in the same group, even though many other aspects of the system are different. I almost agree with this notion of universality. Finally, all three authors encourage us to apply techniques from statistical physics, avoiding econometrics and Gaussian-style nonscalable distributions like the plague, and I couldn’t agree more. But all three authors, by producing, or promoting precision, fall into the trap of not differentiating between the forward and the backward processes (between the problem and the inverse problem)—to me, the greatest scientific and epistemological sin. They are not alone; nearly everyone who works with data but doesn’t make decisions on the basis of these data tends to be guilty of the same sin, a variation of the narrative fallacy. In the absence of a feedback process you look at models and think that they confirm reality. I believe in the ideas of these three books, but not in the way they are being used—and certainly not with the precision the authors ascribe to them. As a matter of fact, complexity theory should make us more suspicious of scientific claims of precise models of reality. It does not make all the swans white; that is predictable: it makes them gray, and only gray.”
Critical Mass
Philip Ball
2.8k
“I have just read three “popular science” books that summarize the research in complex systems: Mark Buchanan’s Ubiquity, Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail. These three authors present the world of social science as full of power laws, a view with which I most certainly agree. They also claim that there is universality of many of these phenomena, that there is a wonderful similarity between various processes in nature and the behavior of social groups, which I agree with. They back their studies with the various theories on networks and show the wonderful correspondence between the so-called critical phenomena in natural science and the self-organization of social groups. They bring together processes that generate avalanches, social contagions, and what they call informational cascades, which I agree with. Universality is one of the reasons physicists find power laws associated with critical points particularly interesting. There are many situations, both in dynamical systems theory and statistical mechanics, where many of the properties of the dynamics around critical points are independent of the details of the underlying dynamical system. The exponent at the critical point may be the same for many systems in the same group, even though many other aspects of the system are different. I almost agree with this notion of universality. Finally, all three authors encourage us to apply techniques from statistical physics, avoiding econometrics and Gaussian-style nonscalable distributions like the plague, and I couldn’t agree more. But all three authors, by producing, or promoting precision, fall into the trap of not differentiating between the forward and the backward processes (between the problem and the inverse problem)—to me, the greatest scientific and epistemological sin. They are not alone; nearly everyone who works with data but doesn’t make decisions on the basis of these data tends to be guilty of the same sin, a variation of the narrative fallacy. In the absence of a feedback process you look at models and think that they confirm reality. I believe in the ideas of these three books, but not in the way they are being used—and certainly not with the precision the authors ascribe to them. As a matter of fact, complexity theory should make us more suspicious of scientific claims of precise models of reality. It does not make all the swans white; that is predictable: it makes them gray, and only gray.”
Why Most Things Fail
Paul Ormerod
2.8k
“I have just read three “popular science” books that summarize the research in complex systems: Mark Buchanan’s Ubiquity, Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail. These three authors present the world of social science as full of power laws, a view with which I most certainly agree. They also claim that there is universality of many of these phenomena, that there is a wonderful similarity between various processes in nature and the behavior of social groups, which I agree with. They back their studies with the various theories on networks and show the wonderful correspondence between the so-called critical phenomena in natural science and the self-organization of social groups. They bring together processes that generate avalanches, social contagions, and what they call informational cascades, which I agree with. Universality is one of the reasons physicists find power laws associated with critical points particularly interesting. There are many situations, both in dynamical systems theory and statistical mechanics, where many of the properties of the dynamics around critical points are independent of the details of the underlying dynamical system. The exponent at the critical point may be the same for many systems in the same group, even though many other aspects of the system are different. I almost agree with this notion of universality. Finally, all three authors encourage us to apply techniques from statistical physics, avoiding econometrics and Gaussian-style nonscalable distributions like the plague, and I couldn’t agree more. But all three authors, by producing, or promoting precision, fall into the trap of not differentiating between the forward and the backward processes (between the problem and the inverse problem)—to me, the greatest scientific and epistemological sin. They are not alone; nearly everyone who works with data but doesn’t make decisions on the basis of these data tends to be guilty of the same sin, a variation of the narrative fallacy. In the absence of a feedback process you look at models and think that they confirm reality. I believe in the ideas of these three books, but not in the way they are being used—and certainly not with the precision the authors ascribe to them. As a matter of fact, complexity theory should make us more suspicious of scientific claims of precise models of reality. It does not make all the swans white; that is predictable: it makes them gray, and only gray.”
The fractal geometry of nature
Benoit B. Mandelbrot
2.8k
“Mandelbrot’s book The Fractal Geometry of Nature made a splash when it came out a quarter century ago.”
Berlin Diary
William L. Shirer
2.8k
“Surprisingly, the book that influenced me was not written by someone in the thinking business but by a journalist: William Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941. Shirer was a radio correspondent, famous for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”
The sleepwalker
Arthur Koestler
2.8k
“Almost half a century ago, the bestselling novelist Arthur Koestler wrote an entire book about it, aptly called The Sleepwalkers. It describes discoverers as sleepwalkers stumbling upon results and not realizing what they have in their hands.”
A philosophical treatise concerning the weakness of human understanding
Pierre-Daniel Huet
2.8k
“Pierre-Daniel Huet wrote his Philosophical Treatise on the Weaknesses of the Human Mind in 1690, a remarkable book that tears through dogmas and questions human perception. Huet presents arguments against causality that are quite potent—he states, for instance, that any event can have an infinity of possible causes.”
The Difference
Scott E. Page
2.8k
“One highlight of the year 2006 was to find in my mailbox a draft manuscript of a book called Cognitive Diversity: How Our Individual Differences Produce Collective Benefits, by Scott Page.”
The (mis)behavior of markets
Benoit B. Mandelbrot
2.8k
“The deepest and most realistic finance book ever published.”
Financial derivatives
Jamil Baz
2.8k
“[...] It is a condensed, but extremely deep, and complete exposition of the subject of theoretical finance. [...]”
Thinking and deciding
Jonathan Baron
2.8k
“[...] I am buying another copy of this book as mine was lost or misplaced. That should speak volumes.”
The Wisdom Paradox
Elkhonon Goldberg
2.8k
“[...] I am now spoiled; I need more essays by opinionated, original,and intellectual, contemporary scientists.”
Social Cognition
Ziva Kunda
2.8k
“[...] I was lucky to have found this book, which provides a wonderful and comprehensive coverage of the topics. It is limpid, precise, illustrative, showing a wonderful clarity of mind. [...]”
The Dream of Reason
Anthony Gottlieb
2.8k
“I could not put it down. It hit me at some point that I was at the intersection of readability and scholarship. Clearly the value of this book lies beyond its readability: Gottlieb is both a philosopher and a journalist (in the good sense), not a journalist who writes about philosophy. [...]”
Confessions of a philosopher
Bryan Magee
2.8k
“Magee writes with the remarkable clarity of the English philosophers/thinkers.”
Bull!
Maggie Mahar
2.8k
“Maggie Mahar had the courage to take a look at what was behind all of this religious belief in markets.”
I Think, Therefore I Laugh
John Allen Paulos
2.8k
“Great Refresher in Analytical Philosophy --maybe the best”
Think
Simon Blackburn
2.8k
“The only competition [to "I Think, Therefore I Laugh"] is "Think" by Blackburn (rather boring).”
Mapping the mind
Rita Carter
2.8k
“I picked up this book again last weekend and was both astonished at a) the ease of reading , b) the clarity of the text and c) the breadth of the approach!”
Cognitive neuroscience
Michael S Gazzaniga
2.8k
“Gazzaniga et al is perhaps the most complete reference on cognitive neuroscience.”
The Mind Doesn't Work That Way
Jerry A. Fodor
2.8k
“This critique of the computational theory of mind and the pan-adaptionist tradition is clearly so honest that it goes after the ideas promoted by Fodor's own 1983 watershed book "The Modularity of Mind".”
The Modularity of Mind
Jerry A. Fodor
2.8k
“["The mind doesn't work that way"] goes after the ideas promoted by Fodor's own 1983 watershed book "The Modularity of Mind".”
The Statistical Mechanics of Financial Markets
Johannes Voit
2.8k
“Very useful bridge between physics methodologies and finance”
Irrational exuberance
Robert J. Shiller
2.8k
“Professor Robert Shiller, a man known to the public for his bestselling book Irrational Exuberance, but known to the connoisseur for his remarkable insights about the structure of market randomness and volatility (expressed in the precision of mathematics).”
The Trial and Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
2.8k
“Kafka’s prophetic book, The Trial, about the plight of a man, Joseph K., who is arrested for a mysterious and unexplained reason, hit a spot as it was written before we heard of the methods of the “scientific” totalitarian regimes.”
The alchemy of finance
George Soros
2.8k
“I disagreed with his statements when it came to economics and philosophy. First, although I admire him greatly, I agree with professional thinkers that Soros’ forte is not in philosophical speculation. Yet he considers himself a philosopher—which makes him endearing in more than one way. Take his first book, The Alchemy of Finance. On the one hand, he seems to discuss ideas of scientific explanation by throwing in big names like “deductive-nomological,” something always suspicious as it is reminiscent of postmodern writers who play philosophers and scientists by using complicated references. On the other hand, he does not show much grasp of the concepts.”
The nature of rationality
Robert Nozick
2.8k
“In his book The Nature of Rationality he gets, as is typical with philosophers, into amateur evolutionary arguments and writes the following: “Since not more than 50 percent of the individuals can be wealthier than average.” Of course, more than 50% of individuals can be wealthier than average. Consider that you have a very small number of very poor people and the rest clustering around the middle class. The mean will be lower than the median.”
Descartes' Error
Antonio Damasio
2.8k
“I will present the theses of two watershed works presented in readable books, Damasio’s Descartes’ Error and LeDoux’s Emotional Brain.”
The Emotional Brain
Joseph E. LeDoux
2.8k
“I will present the theses of two watershed works presented in readable books, Damasio’s Descartes’ Error and LeDoux’s Emotional Brain.”
A Guide to Econometrics
Peter Kennedy
2.8k
“The best intuition builder in both statistics and econometrics. I have been reading the various editions throught my career.”
Manhattan transfer
John Dos Passos
2.8k
“The first time I was fooled by this bias was upon buying, when I was sixteen, Manhattan Transfer, a book by John Dos Passos, the American writer, based on praise on the jacket by the French writer and “philosopher” Jean-Paul Sartre, who claimed something to the effect that Dos Passos was the greatest writer of our time.”
The Millionaire Mind
Thomas J. Stanley
2.8k
One of the authors of the misguided The Millionaire Next Door (that I discuss in Chapter 8) wrote another even more foolish book called The Millionaire Mind.