Book Recommendations

My picks, some of which have already been mentioned. I would classify these all as "viewquake" books for someone who hasn't encountered the concepts in them before.

1. Godel, Escher, Bach - gets a huge credit for sending me down the rabbit hole of "what your brain is actually doing", though like others I'm not sure if I would like it as much on a second reading.

2. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - Stoicism at its best, I count this as the most motivational book I've ever read.

3. The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon - retreads topics that are probably already somewhat familiar to LW readers, but still has one of the highest insights/page ratios I've ever seen.

4. 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene - instrumental rationality in the social arena.

And one dis-recommendation:

1. A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander - the concept of "design patterns" which gets quite a bit of mention nowadays got its start here, but this book is a mess. The support Alexander uses to back up his choice of patterns is laughably sparse, often completely wrong and picked to support his somewhat warped sense of eco-morality. Avoid.

Wow, can't wait for the unknown gems this discussion will bring up!

Anyway, some of my own; these are all non-fiction.

• Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene is such a magnificent book, introducing all the wonderful solutions that evolution has come up with, and the insight that the battle for the 'survival of the fittest' takes place at the level of individual genes (or is at least a powerful model for understanding things)
• Jared Diamonds' Guns, germs and steel which suggests that there are non-racial/non-ethnic reasons for the differences in wealth and power amongst various regions in the world. I think the writer's claims go a bit further than his evidence warrants, but nevertheless a good way to look into this field, and provides a lot of food for thought
• As mentioned already, Hofstadters Gödel/Escher/Bach and The Mind's I (bundle of essays of various writers, redacted together with Daniel Dennett) are playing with all these interesting concepts like conciousness, AI, meta, self-reference.
• Also Richard Feynman's work is fantastic -- the auto-biographic (You must be joking, Mr. Feynman and What do you care what other people think) are inspiring. I plan on going through some of his real physics works (like the Feynman lectures on Physics). Just seeing some of the interviews on Youtube show how well Feynman is able to make both complex and simple things understandable, at all levels; such a towering intellect.
• For computer science stuff, earlier I mentioned SICP, which I am currently re-reading.
• Then, Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming; I have read much too little of it, but it's such a rewarding experience to (slowly!) go through a few pages and finally the 'click' of understanding. I plan to read more of this. Knuth is truly the master of the field of programming and algorithms, and while reading it, I can almost feel how it sharpens my brain.
• Finally, a lot of bad things can be said about pop-psy, but I really liked Dan Ariely's books (Predictably irrational and The upside of irrationality) that show where the classical picture of people being rational, homo economicus, has its limitations, and all the weird biases we have. He has some interesting TED-talks as well.

I'm currently reading Introduction to Bayesian Statistics, which is an introductory statistics course taught from a fully Bayesian perspective. It seems very good so far, though I can only evaluate it from the perspective of someone who actually needs an introductory stats course; I don't have much to compare it to.

Edit: Does SIAI have an Amazon affiliate code? I'd format my links accordingly if so, and others might like to as well.

The links from my post which I couldn't get to display properly in my article.

The Logic of Failure

Great Books of Failure

books for a gifted young teen

books on cogsci

Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett's The Mind's I is now available for free online. It's essentially a huge collection of interesting articles and thought-experiments, from all viewpoints, on theory/philosophy of mind, with H&D's materialist/computationalist commentary. A pleasure to read.

This has actually gone public, without any request not to say anything, so I trust it's OK to mention it to anyone who finds themselves here and doesn't know yet. I know I'd want to know! :-)

Eliezer has completed the first draft of his rationality book based on his two-year sequence of blog posting on Less Wrong, packed with hundreds of pages of novel content.

The manuscript is over 280,000 words long (over 500 pages) and has been split into two sub-books. The next steps are thoroughly editing the text and moving towards publication.

Yay! :)

I recommend Edward Tufte's books on information visualization (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations). I'm surprised that I haven't seen these mentioned on LW before (except in passing once or twice). They're short but full of clear thinking about using graphic design to effectively communicate scientific reasoning. And even if you don't think you have much to learn from them, they're still beautiful books.

(I've heard his newest book, Beautiful Evidence, is not as good and mostly recycles material from the other three.)

Computer sciences (General Introduction):

• Marvin Minsky, Computation Finite and Infinite Machines
• Michael Sipser, Introduction to the Theory of Computation
• Charles Petzold, The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
• Michael L. Scott, Programming Language Pragmatics

Eclectic lists can be fun. Here are a few titles:

1. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca;
2. Obliquity by John Kay;
3. Mistakes were Made but Not by Me by Tavris and Aronson;
4. Master and Margerita by Bulgakhov;
5. Social Cognition by Ziva Kunda;
6. The Synaptic Self by Joseph LeDoux;
7. Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz;
8. Knowledge and Its Limits by Tim Williamson;
9. Dilemmas by Gilbert Ryle; and 10.The Sacred Canopy by Peter Berger

When I moved back to the US from Japan, I made an ordered list of the books I had to determine which ones to ship home. This is the top ten:

• Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
• Taleb, The Black Swan
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
• Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• Thomas & Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth
• Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
• Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
• Wolferen, the Enigma of Japanese Power
• Chabon, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

This might be old hat for the crowd here, but I've just discovered Karl Popper and I'm working through his collection of talks and essays, "Conjectures and Refutations." It contains a lot of very clear insights about the philosophy of science and its application to political and historical questions; the two most interesting pieces to me so far were one on Hume's problem of induction, discussing the difference between acceptance and logical certainty, and one on the development of the scientific mindset in Greek-era philosophers. I strongly recommend it if you're interested in such topics.

I also recently read Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind", which is just a fantastic book. It's a very fleshed out introduction to some of Minsky's ideas about how surface-level phenomena of the mind like memory, learning, and volition can be explained through a model of the mind as a hierarchy of tiny agents with very specific goals that communicate among themselves. It's amazingly written; completely accessible, written in simple language, but every paragraph has a thought-provoking concept about something or other. (The single flaw is that it doesn't really reference a lot of actual research or data; it's more or less just laying out some food for thought based on our intuitive understanding of our mind.) I would pretty much recommend it to anyone at all.

Finally, I read Hermann Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" -- although Hesse has been a favorite of mine for a long time, I never got around to that one -- and I found it to be the best fiction I've read in a year or two. You can head to wherever for a summary, but I highly recommend it to anyone. I suspect the premise will especially appeal to the sort of systematizing, truth-seeking folks around here.

Non-Fiction

Proofs and Refutations by Imre Lakatos, seconding JoshuaZ's recommendation

Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, and Science and Method by Henri Poincare

The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee

Journey through Genius and Euler: The Master of Us All by William Dunham

The Book of Numbers by John H. Conway and Richard Guy

Fiction:

The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano

Never Let Me Go and An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

Contact by Carl Sagan

Niels Lyhne by Jens Peters Jacobsen

Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Songmaster by Orson Scott Card

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good broad neuroscience book/textbook or books/textbooks (preferably including everything from neuroanatomy to relevant machine learning algorithms), primarily to be used as a reference for both AI and IA (intelligence amplification) research? Surprisingly we seem to be missing one at Benton house, though it could very well be I'm not looking hard enough.

Good and Real: This is pretty much LW in book format.

Influence: The psychology of persuasion: It's a biases and heuristics book.

A Farewell to Alms: Economic history, presenting a generally Malthusian view of world history, and crediting genes with the Industrial Revolution, with overwhelming amounts of data. I've seen people essentially get high off this book. (Inspired by djcb's recommendation of Guns, Germs, and Steel).

science fiction recommendations

Anyone care to distinguish between rationalist science fiction and science fiction rationalists are apt to like? I don't think Card has huge amounts of rationalist content.

I have a category of cognitive fiction-- fiction which rewards thought. I think cognitive fiction is mostly likely to be found in mystery, sf, and historical fiction, though there should be some in every genre.

I recommend Mary Renault's The Persian Boy. Who knew that the difficulties of putting together an empire of the very civilized Persians and the very uncivilized Macedonians could be so interesting? SF fans tend to like Renault-- she had a talent for choosing the details which indicate a lot about a society.

And if you like puzzles, not to mention ER Burroughsian invention presented in a large vocabulary, try Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun. People have put a lot of thought into figuring out who Severian's parents are. Also, there's a duel with razor-edged hypnotic orchids? It's definitely a novel with a fantasy presentation and science fictional elements, but I'm not sure whether all the events have a more or less scientific explanation.

Kuhn's "The Copernican Revolution" and "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" are both excellent. The first is a very good history of astronomy, the second is a mix of history and Kuhn's views on the philosophy of science. Kuhn, is, as far as I can tell, deeply wrong about the nature of science, but he makes good points and where he is wrong he's wrong for interesting reasons. The Copernican Revolution does a very good job helping one understand just how complicated the history of astronomy is and how often subtle premises can impact scientific investigation even when (or possibly especially when) the premises are not explicitly stated. Alan Hirschfeld's "Parallax:The Race to Measure the Cosmos" is also an excellent book within similar lines.

Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" is still very readable and shows an example of really good thinking even under incomplete data.

I'm trying to get through Priestley's "The History and Present State of Electricity" which is fascinating and gives good thoughts about how to approach thinking (it has gotten I think multiple quotes in the rationality quotes threads here), but the archaic style and grammar makes it sometimes difficult to read.

"Proofs and Refutations" by Lakatos is an excellent and enjoyable look at both the psychology and philosophy behind discovering mathematical proofs.

I've been reading a lot this summer; a lot of it has not been particularly Less-Wrong-themed, though.

For people who have a math, cs, or electrical engineering background, "A Wavelet Tour of Signal Processing -- The Sparse Way" by Stephane Mallat is a very useful overview of recent research that you'd otherwise have to chase through papers, written with more verve than any textbook I've ever seen, and yes it can change the way you see the world.

Other summer highlights:

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson (essentially, built to spec especially to entertain me. Kinda dumb in places, but mostly fun.)

Vietnam, Stanley Karnow (the war was very, very weird. Can be a "rationalist" book in the sense that it's a historical exercise in how smart people can reason poorly.)

Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote (if you've only seen the movie, this is infinitely more serious and poignant.)

The Possessed, Elif Batuman (a memoir of life as a Slavic Literature grad student. Lots of memoirs have funny anecdotes, and so does this one, but what's special is that Elif also gets across her intellectual excitement.)

Exiles, James Joyce (yep, he wrote a play. I have a thing for Joyce and I read this like five times in a row.)

The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem (a novel about growing up in Brooklyn in the 70's. If you want to know what great contemporary writing looks like, here it is.)

Generation of Swine, Hunter S. Thompson (I just love having his voice in my ear.)

The New Testament (long delayed but I really needed to read it. I've just gotten through the Gospels so far.)

Fiction
Anathem by Neal Stephenson - Covers much of the history of philosophy while telling an engaging story that really shows off the power of rationalist thinking. Also touches on the many worlds interpretation and all kinds of other fun stuff.

Non-Fiction
Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá - A great example of how to use mountains of evidence to justify controversial conclusions.

If you don't have much money: some of these books are available on the Kad network(eMule) others have a preview on google books.

Norman Doidge: the brain that changes itself

Jonah Lehrer: How we decide

Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

And the brainsciencepodcast - while technically not a book there are transcripts.

Could you put links to the referenced articles into your post?

Nonfiction: As someone who leans toward biology, I've found Richard Dawkins to be consistently fun and thought-provoking. For explaining hard-to-understand concepts clearly, Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell" are great. For general awesome, "Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is both educational and funny.

Fiction: Neal Stephenson is a genius at world-building. I've read "The Diamond Age," "Snow Crash," and "Anathem," and they've all been hits.

I can't really recommend a book I've only just started, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World isn't about rationality, nor is it obviously in the majority's tastes here (surrealism, repressed sexuality, unicorns).

But Clippy might like it more than most fiction. Paperclips promise to play some pivotal role in the next phase of evolution or the end of the world.

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers - psychological stress damages human health - tedious but important (and well sourced)

Probability Theory - the Logic of Science (Jaynes) - only halfway through it. I can't justify its length unless I were really willing to work through all the computation shown (I'm not). The text is still somewhat meaningful if you merely read it.

Long, unexplained list:

• The Wasp Factory, The Player of Games, Matter (Iain Banks)
• Return from the Stars
• Lilith's Brood
• Cyteen
• Godel, Escher, and Bach (EGB)
• His Dark materials (juvenille, mediocre movie, but fun)
• Black Company
• Malazan Book of the Fallen
• The Glass Bead Game
• Jane Eyre
• The Dispossessed
• The Feynman Lectures on Physics
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
• The Gods Themselves
• The Ugly Little Boy
• Permutation City
• A Fire Upon the Deep
• Neuromancer
• Diamond Age
• Anathem
• Lovelock
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
• Songmaster
• Enchantment
• Kushiel's Dart
• The Shadow of the Torturer (Book of the New Sun)
• The Deed of Paksenarrion
• Flatland
• White Light
• The Eyre Affair
• Pronoun Music
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
• Air: Or, Have Not Have
• Never Let Me Go

Some freely available books that I liked:

Generatingfunctionology by Herbert Wilf

Information, Physics, and Computation by Marc Mézard and Andrea Montanari

Sustainable Energy – without the hot air by David MacKay

Some fiction....

1. The Color of Magic (Discworld series) -- Terry Pratchett -- pretty funny, top British author. The first book (this one) seems to be unmatched by at least the next five in the series, but there are like 30 in the series total, so...

2. Neutron star -- Larry Niven -- a collection of short stories in Larry Niven's fascinating future.

3. Fire upon the deep -- Vernor Vinge -- just the best picture of a future filled with GAI's that I have read.

4. Neuromancer -- William Gibson -- incredible action/cyberpunk story, incredible characters. Gets pretty boring at the end though.

Some nonfiction...

1. Madness and civilization -- Michael Foucault -- exquisite historical/philosophical writing. This book I think shows an example of what it means to be a real scholar.

2. Road to reality -- Roger Penrose -- an interesting attempt to delve into the exact sciences of physics/mathematics in one, singular drive. Not recommended without extensive prior experience in math/physics, since unfortunately it doesn't explain so much as shed new light on things you might have already learned. There needs to be more books like this.

3. Die nigger die -- H. Rap Brown -- this book is written with such passion and intelligent revolutionary spirit, it really had a major impact on me when I read it. (Brown was an important figure in the civil rights movements of the 60's. )

I'm reading through this now and trying to collect some actual books-to-read from here. It's not that easy. People have lists with just the titles of the books in them, and I'm picking promising lists based on finding books I know I like or don't like on the lists. Lists that are just book titles which I don't know are hard to do anything with.

Maybe next time we do this everyone could make a top-level comment for each individual book they recommend that hasn't been mentioned yet, with some short description on why they recommend the book. People who also liked the book can then upvote this comment, and we'll get a handy sorting of forum favorites. People can also add their own comments about mentioned books under the top comment.

Let me advertise my absolute favorite: an obscure Hungarian writer called Geza Csath. He was a doctor and journalist at beginning of the 20th century and he wrote the most beautiful and objective stories on self-deception and other human weaknesses. Highly accurately, without moralizing or romanticizing.

I've only read the originals, but I hope the translation is not too bad. (Unfortunately, in English, it is available only used: http://www.amazon.com/Magicians-Garden-Other-Stories/dp/0231047320/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281569193&sr=1-4

A good book I am reading currently is The Art Of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar.

A superb neuroscience popularization is Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran. He is a different kind of neuroscientist that uses a "Sherlock Holmes" method of investigating brain disorders like phantom limbs with a simple yet inventive experiments that shed insight into the workings of the mind.

I can't help but feel this is a complete retread. Isn't there a wiki page for this sort of thing?

Lucy's Legacy: Sex and Evolution in Human Intelligence by Alison Jolly. Pink Brain Blue Brain by Lise Eliot. Bayesian Data Analysis, 2nd ed. by Gelman et al. (upper-level undergrad to postgrad level stats). Scientific Progress Goes "Boink" by Bill Watterson. Seconding The Brain that Changes Itself and Predictably Irrational.

Nearly any book by Smullyan is likely to be enjoyable to LW readers, if not particularly on-topic for Less Wrong.

• What is the Name of this Book? is classic - this is the canonical source (maybe the original source, I'm not sure) of the liars/truth-tellers puzzles and other delights.
• "To Mock a Mockingbird" is a nicely-paced set of puzzles that just happens to lead the reader through the first few key insights of combinatory logic.
• "The Tao is Silent" is what happens when you soak a brilliant logician in Taoism for a while. Somewhat in this flavor is his story Planet Without Laughter, which is the best defense of something between mysticism and realism I've met.

Can anyone recommend a good book on improving social intelligence? This is probably a subject that would be helpful to many of us.

Epictetus' extant works have much to recommend them. The basic themes are that you are in control of your thoughts and behavior to a greater degree than you might think, you are less in control of others' behavior and other "externals" than you might think, and that fretting about what's not under your control will lead to unhappiness. It's not hard to quibble with the details and arguments he offers, but the basic picture he offers is very inspiring to me.

It's rather repetive, and it's not systematic. With books of this type, I like to read a bit each evening and then re-read the same bit the following morning. Upon the second read, I pick a passage and memorize it, repeating it to myself on occasion throughout the day. I'd be interested to learn whether others have similar habits.

• Good Freely Available Textbooks on Machine Learning
• Learning About Statistical Learning
• Learning about Machine Learning, 2nd Ed.

I came across those links lately and thought there might be some gems to be found in those lists. For example:

• An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications
• Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning (Free)

A smart graduate friend is feeling that their brain has got a little rusty through underuse of late and is looking for good ways to kick-start it. I'd love to hear your recommendations for interesting, non-daunting, light and breezy pop science that could help get the neurons fired up again. Thanks!

Someone mentioned a book about computation machinery. I thought it was in this discussion, but I couldn't find it here and it's near impossible to google here.

The person who mentioned it said that it explains the history of building computers and gives you a very deep understanding of how they implement computation, and its interface with the software inputs.

This is something I really wish I understood better, so if anyone knows a book like this, please let me know what it is. Or, if you know of any good resource on this topic, please post it.

Peter Unger's Living High and Letting DIe is excellent, especially the first few chapters. It is mostly applied ethics, partly moral psychology, partly methodology for first-order moral philosophy.

The book makes a strong case for an obligation to engage in high-impact philanthropy. Rationalists will enjoy it because it highlights various forms of irrationality in our ethical judgments. Unger identifies various factors that influence our ethical judgments for the worse, many of which have not received similar discussion in psych literature on heuristics and biases (at least I haven't seen it). [When I say he shows that these things influence our judgments for the worse, I have in mind that many people would cease to approve of the judgments if they understood what was driving them.]

Definitely in agreement with Pirsig's Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Also in non-fiction - Both Rand novels - Fountainhead AND Atlas Shrugged

Good lists of books on decision making on Quora.

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-books-writings-on-the-psychology-behind-human-decision-making-and-irrationality