The best way to learn a subject is undoubtedly by reading a textbook on it. But I find textbooks a drudgery, and tend to give up after a couple of chapters.
On the other hand I don’t need a deep broad formal knowledge in every subject. I often just want to know enough that I know what it’s about, the broad questions in the topic, and how to learn more when I need to.
On the other hand popular books are easy to read, but often teach you about the subject, without actually teaching any of the subject itself. They’re full of anecdotes about the founders of the field, and metaphors for what some of the fields are like, but at the end you may end up more misguided than you went in.
There are however the rare popular books that aim to actually give the reader useful knowledge, rather than the illusion of knowledge. For example Godel, Escher, Bach on logic and formal systems, Quantum Computing since Democritus on computer science and Who We Are and How We Got Here on ancient DNA.
These examples vary hugely in how involved they are, their style, and how readable they are, but they all share one thing in common: none of them talk down to the reader—they all assume the reader is an intelligent person whose perfectly capable of understanding the topic, but might just be missing a lot of background knowledge.
What other books do you know of like that?
Ideally all answers should give the title of a single book, optionally with a brief description, and a set of bullet points describing what they liked and didn’t like about the book.
I’m more interested in physical sciences than social sciences, since it’s common in the social sciences to introduce a thesis in book form, so it’s easy to find good quality non-textbooks. Meanwhile in the physical sciences most original research is done in research papers, and most pedagogical work in textbooks, leaving much poorer pickings for non-textbooks.
Book: Quantum Computing since Democritus
Description: An introduction to a wide ranging set of fields in computer science based on lecture notes by Scott Aaaronson
Positives:
Broad range of topics.
Proof sketches for most results.
Quirky style makes for reasonably entertaining reading despite being quite information dense.
Negatives:
Can get quite heavy
Sometimes forgets himself and assumes more knowledge on behalf of the reader than he’s explained—e.g. it will be very difficult to understand some of the things he talks about in the chapter on formal logic without first understanding the mathematical concept of a syntax, a model, or what it means for a syntax to assert that a proof of a statement exist.
Book: Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Study of Adult Development by George E. Vaillant et al
Description: Summarizes the analysis of three longevity studies spanning, in some cases, almost eighty years.
Positives:
Creates a clear picture of the different challenges in six successive life stages: Identity, Intimacy, Career Consolidation, Generativity, Keeper of Meaning, and Integrity.
Introduces what they call “mature coping strategies,” like humor, that people dealing well with adversity develop and that differ from immature coping strategies like suppression.
Negatives:
There are a lot of anecdotes that you can skip. The book is generally lengthy but readable.
The study’s original population were “healthy young men from Harvard University.” There have been later cohorts with different demographics, and there are many pointers to find more information on them.
Book
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Description
Behave explains how neurochemical and genetic factors cause the best and worst behaviours of our species.
Positives
Self-contained: Behave provides the necessary background knowledge in neuroscience, endocrinology, and biochemistry through apendices.
Good narrative: despite discussing complex scientific topics the author has organised the material into a narrative structure that makes the book feel more like a novel than a textbook.
Evidence-based: all scientific claims have appropriate citations and cases of conflicting credit are appropriately discussed.
Connects theory and practice: reading Behave teaches one about genetics and endicronology while connecting these concepts to cognitive biases and group behaviour.
Negatives
One dense book: despite presenting all the necessary background information it takes a significant amount of effort to go through it all and understand it for a reader without a background in the field.
Book: Expert Political Judgment
Description: A technical introduction to forecasting by Philip Tetlock that covers his decades-long experiment on eliciting quantitative forecasts from experts in politics and international relations.
Positives:
The book is both quantitative and qualitative: it goes over statistical measures of forecasting performance such as Brier scores, discrimination and calibration while also leaving plenty of space for discussion of specific forecasts by experts, how they justified their forecasts, how they updated on new information, et cetera.
Covers a lot of temptations that forecasters often fall into in order to avoid admitting they are wrong. Detecting these patterns of behavior in yourself can be quite valuable.
Negatives:
Some parts of the book can be too technical for a lay audience. The book is primarily written in an academic style and the quantitative parts can be difficult to parse if you’re not acquainted with probability theory & statistics.
Most of the events referenced in the book date to the 1980s and 1990s, so if you’re unfamiliar with the history of this period then most of the qualitative discussion of specific forecasts can fly over your head.
Did you read Superforcasting by him? Thought it looked interesting, wanted to see which is better from someone who read both.
I haven’t read Superforecasting but second-hand information tells me that Expert Political Judgment is his best book for those with a technical background. If you don’t have such a background, Superforecasting might be the better read for you.
Thanks—a useful and thoughtful reply.
Book: Economix (How Our Economy Works, and Doesn‘t Work)
Description: An introduction to how economic theories have evolved and shaped cultural thinking in the context of history. A comic book!
Positives: extremely easy to understand, actually enjoyable, clearly states the limits of theory, organized in a way that meant I was able to anchor the new information to background history that I was somewhat familiar with already, author clearly points out limitations in his viewpoint, covers some modern economics
Negatives: US centric, much less useful for someone who wants more than a launching point
(I would note that there is another economics comic book with a similar title that is, imho, much worse)
Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran is a fun read, and will teach you a thing or two about neuropsychology.
Really enjoyed that book when I read it about 10 years ago!
Book: The Myth of Mirror Neurons—The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition
By: Gregory Hickok
Negatives:
He spends about half the book telling you about why lots of claims regarding mirror neurons are wrong. If you started out not having strong opinions on these ideas, it gets a bit tedious.
Positives:
In the other half of the book he lays out the best overview description of the brain I’ve seen so far. (However any such storry is nesserarely speculative, so “good description” mostly means “seemed reasonable to me”.)
He compares his views with other theories.
The chapter on Autism is awsome.
I’m currently reading a neuroscience textbook too. The textbook is full of brain damage anectotes, and specific experimental results, but no overaraching storries to put it all toghether. I’m guesing this is becasue any overarching storry is too speculative to put in a textbook. I found this book helpfull in binding it all together.
If you’re really interested, I recomend reading both a textbook, and several non-textbooks, to get both the detailed facts, and several speculative models. That’s what I’m doing. But if you’re only going to read one book, this is the one I recomend.
Logical positivism in one witty lesson. Make your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences.
Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story if you’d like to know all about a huge variety of phenethylamines from the inside and out, including how to go about synthesizing them.
Book: The Great Big Book of Horrible Things
Description: A compilation and ranking of the 100 most deadly atrocities in history by Matthew White.
Positives:
Matthew White is a real expert on this subject and is familiar with the literature surrounding the events he quotes. He has a whole website where he compiles numbers from many sources, even obscure ones only available in print and in short supply, to try to get at the truth about the death toll of various events in history. Even if you disagree with his numbers you can see where he’s coming from with his estimates.
He has an easy-to-read writing style which has traces of black humor, and he can make it not only interesting but also entertaining to read through what otherwise would be a macabre catalogue of the worst mankind has to offer.
The book goes into detail about various events in history in length roughly proportional to the logarithm of the death toll. This means you’ll learn about many events in history that you may have never heard of before, and get a new perspective on the scale of events that you may already be familiar with on a qualitative basis.
I’ve found just seeing how people go about estimating death tolls of wars and atrocities in the absence of reliable records to be quite interesting and valuable. White makes many points about this and you’ll pick up more as you go through the book. One lesson I’ve learned is that atrocity statistics from the past are often more reliable than we think they are, while those from the present are less so.
Negatives:
I’ve heard that some people find the format of the book to be repetitive and difficult to read through in a few sittings given its substantial length. I personally didn’t have this problem but I’m bringing it up in case someone here does.
There are a few small mistakes I’ve found in the book, such as White saying the Battle of Trafalgar took place in 1804 and not 1805. While the book is trustworthy when it comes to atrocity statistics, not every historical recounting or detail in it is accurate, though I’ve found the mistakes to be quite rare even here.
Book: “Statistical Rethinking” by Richard McElreath
Description: in-depth introduction to Bayesian statistical analysis
Positives:
- Each chapter begins with an intuitive short story of what the meaning of the statistical concept is in real life
- Contains exercises in the end of the chapters
- Wide variety of example types, not constrained to just one field
Negatives:
- It is pretty much a textbook otherwise—it’s the narrative style stories in the beginnings of each chapter that makes me share this. For all intents and purposes you may ignore the parts where he tries to teach you Bayesian stats via R :)
The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
Good introduction to the general idea of evolutionary psychology (human psychology has been influenced/shaped by natural selection, like the rest of the body).
Then discusses some particular psychological traits (jealousy, love, altruism, reciprocity, etc) through this lens.
Not really the hard science desired in the original post, but hope someone finds the recommendation useful.
Review/notes here:
https://digitalsauna.wordpress.com/2016/02/05/the-moral-animal-by-robert-wright-1994/
Who doesn’t like to opine about the free will problem? This short book will quickly catch you up on the philosophical state of the art so you can do so more cleverly and can understand the weaknesses of the easy answers you thought up in the shower.
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen delivers what it promises: a deep understanding of the materials and processes involved in home-scale food production.
Code by Simon Singh is a nice, low-effort intro to cryptography.
Interesting. I wasn’t impressed by his Fermat’s last theorem book which was basically purely a biography of various mathematicians and contained very little actual information. Is this one better?
As it happens I found Applied Cryptography extremely readable (albeit out of date), so in this case I’m happy to recommend a textbook.
Assuming that rank-biserial is referring to the same book I have on my shelves with the title of “The Code Book”, here’s a brief breakdown of what’s in it, ignoring merely-historical stuff like biographical titbits about Alan Turing:
“The cipher of Mary Queen of Scots”: introduces simple “classical” ciphers—transpositions, simple-substitutions, and the like—and says a bit about breaking them via frequency analysis. The titular cipher isn’t quite a simple substitution cipher but isn’t far off. It was broken, presumably basically by frequency analysis; Singh doesn’t say much about how.
“Le chiffre indechiffrable”: the Vigenere cipher, other polyalphabetic substitutions, homophonic substitutions, the “Great Cipher” of Louis XIV (repesenting syllables by numbers), Babbage’s approach to attacking Vigenere-enciphered text (look for repeating sequences in the ciphertext; their spacing is probably a multiple of the key length; the idea is usually credited to Kasiski, because he published it and Babbage didn’t), some 19th-century fiction about ciphers, the Beale ciphers.
“The mechanisation of secrecy”: wartime ciphers: ADFGVX, the Zimmerman telegram (no information about the actual cipher used), random one-time pads (motivated by showing how in practice it might be possible to decipher a Vigenere-ciphered message where key and message are the same length, if the key and message are both ordinary text rather than random garbage), cipher machines with particular reference to Enigma.
“Cracking the Enigma”: Rejewski’s cycle-length-based approach (described in reasonable detail), his bombes, transfer to Bletchley when extra wheels and plugboard cables made decryption too onerous for the Poles, Turing’s crib-based approach (described in reasonable detail) and his bombes, vague stuff about other WW2 ciphers.
“The language barrier”: Navajo code-talkers, Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Rosetta stone (Young, Champollion), Linear B (Ventris, Chadwick). Reasonably concrete about these.
“Alice and Bob go public”: DES and Feistel ciphers (bizarrely, the latter described in text but no diagram), Diffie-Hellman key exchange (actual algorithm given), public-key encryption, RSA (details left to an appendix), a bit about the earlier discovery of the same ideas at GCHQ.
“Pretty good privacy”: PGP, symmetric session key shared using asymmetric cryptography, legal nonsense around crypto exportation etc., key escrow, certification authorities.
“A quantum leap into the future”: handwavy discussion of breaking ciphers with quantum computers (mostly at the “quantum computers do exponentially many things in parallel” level), quantum cryptography (with actually a reasonable level of detail).
So, like his FLT book, it’s more historical than technical. If you read it and pay attention throughout you will learn some technical details, but e.g. you won’t learn anything about how modern symmetric ciphers are designed and broken, or what distinguishes good cryptographic protocols from bad ones, or implementation-level details like side-channel attacks, or any public-key methods beyond RSA.
If you went into Fermat’s last theorem looking for an intro to elliptic curves you were out of luck but as a book about why maths is awesome it is great—precisely, I think, because of that emphasis on mathematicians biographies. Reading it was one of the pivotal moments in my life, setting me on the path that lead me to a maths PhD (and incidentaly lesswrong too).