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This book is excellent. Much like Kahneman's* definitive book on bias, Thinking Fast and Slow, Noise provides an excellent, fairly comprehensive treatment of another source of error in human judgement, which the authors define as noise. Noise is, as a term in this book, used to describe inconsistency in human judgment, as opposed to bias, which is a systematic departure from “correct” results. There is some overlap in terms here, as, for example, hungry judges systematically make harsher decisions, which is referred to as bias in Thinking Fast and Slow, but because we're looking at error across the entire range of outcomes in a different way here, is called occasion noise. I do not believe this detracts from what the book brings to the table, but it's worth noting that in this book, bias is used to refer to the difference between the average outcome and the “correct” outcome, or other errors across the range of outcomes such as minorities being treated differently in cases where there isn't a “correct” outcome to measure.

What this book does not do is claim that all noise should be completely eliminated. Eliminating noise has costs. However, a wide disparity of outcomes in similar cases can be extremely unfair. Should two people with similar histories and mitigating/aggravating factors have several years of difference in sentencing for the same crime? Should the luck of who evaluates your insurance policy or what mood they're in when they do make hundreds of dollars in difference to your premiums or policy payouts? Certain types of judgements are judgements where inconsistency is inherently unfair.

Noise looks at these judgements. It looks at hiring decisions where projection is inherently difficult and outcomes are hard to evaluate. It looks at expert judgement in fields like forensics where experts are asked to make evaluations of objective facts and whether there is noise in those outcomes as well.


I feel like I should be writing many more paragraphs about this book, but for now I'll leave it here. This book is held to a high standard of rigor and is evidence backed throughout, again in line with Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. The two books combine to provide an extreme amount of information on how to improve your judgement as an individual or an organization. I highly recommend this book and it will be very close to the top of my list of “must read” books on intelligence and the human brain.



*There are three authors here and I don't wish to downplay any role of Cass Sunstein or Oliver Sibony, which I am obviously not in position to evaluate. This book has led me to investigate their other work and likely will result in me reading at least one from each. However, Kahneman is the most well known partly because he's one of the most influential figures in the field of human judgement, widely cited by psychologists and behavioral economists, and Thinking Fast and Slow is in my opinion is probably the best book on the brain everyone should read.

This book is 45 years old at this point, but it ages well. If you could ignore the handful of references to computers and floppy disks of the era, you could believe it was written relatively recently. We have, of course, learned since it was initially written, and the 30th anniversary edition I read did include some helpful interjections in addition to the extra chapters added to the second edition in 1989.

The Selfish Gene is and continues to be wildly popular for a reason. It provides an extremely accessible explanation of the mechanism of evolution, popularizing the concept that the gene is the fundamental building block that the whole process revolves around. What's a gene? The definition he uses is approximately “any sequence of any length of DNA”, with the understanding that shorter sequences are more likely to survive longer unaltered than longer sequences, but allows him to ignore quibbling over terminology of specific lengths when it's largely not meaningful to the concepts being presented.

The core idea is that genes that are successful are genes that increase the number of copies of themselves in existence. It explains the concept that there is a mechanism for even extreme “altruism”, such as an organism sacrificing itself for others to be selected for, if you recognize that multiple close kin relations each have many of their genes in common with that individual, and that dying saving several siblings increases the number of copies of your genes propagated to future generations than failing to do so.

It goes further into many other elements of how to view evolution from the perspective of individual genes, in specific environments, and how natural selection does and doesn't work to change species over time.

One thing I'm not sure I was aware of, going into this reading of the book, is that Dawkins also coined the term “meme” and gave the first(?) presentation of ideas as replicators subject to very similar selection pressures as genes. This explanation is relatively simple and there are entire books on the concept now, but I did enjoy his short treatment here.

Brethren is fascinating as a demonstration that even at the level of the highest court in the US, that was created and is intended for the purpose of objectively interpreting laws, human nature reigns supreme. It's centered around Chief Justice Warren E Burger's court from 1969-1975, and paints a particularly uncomfortable picture of and both his leadership ability and his legal mind, but it goes beyond any one individual.

There are several interesting cases decided during this span. To me the most notable would be a couple desegregation cases, primarily involving bussing, the Pentagon papers, Roe v Wade, and the Nixon tapes. The story this book tells involves multiple justices conspiring to rework Burger's opinions sentences at a time, others threatening to dissent over single phrases, Burger repeatedly changing his votes just to be able to assign the majority opinion, justices telling each other, “I don't agree with this ruling but I'm going to be the fifth vote anyways to make Justice X happy”, and all sorts of other manipulation and gamesmanship.

Ultimately you're relying on the word of the authors, and I believe they're fairly credible, but I can't speak to veracity. But man, the story it tells is terrifying and this is well worth a read.

The signal and the noise is all about prediction. It starts with the subprime mortgage financial crisis and discusses the combination of perverse incentives and overconfidence that caused the rating services to fail to accurately portray the risks of those securities (primarily the assumption that even with housing prices astronomically high, the risk of default of each individual mortgage was completely independent rather than affected by the economy). Next he looks at television pundits and the fact that more television appearances is negatively correlated to forecast accuracy. Here he gives a solid introduction to Philip Tetlock's work on forecasting, which can be found in more depth in his book Superforecasting. He touches on baseball, an information-rich environment, before moving on to irreducibly complex problems like the weather, seismic activity, and the economy where you fundamentally can't get anywhere near enough raw data or information on interactions between data points to paint a complete picture.

The second half moves towards giving you an idea how to approach problems probabilistically and how to improve and refine your process over time. He starts with simple problems like sports and poker before moving onto more complex problems like terrorism and global warming.


I wouldn't consider this book a complete guide to rational, evidence based decision making (ignoring that it doesn't give you the math), but it's a pretty accessible introduction to the topic and is largely technically sound. It's a solid place to start.

This is the story of precision engineering from precisions of .1 to 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 01, or early cannons and steam engines through guns and automobiles, modern jet airplanes, then ultimately to modern microprocessors and the tools scientists are using to investigate the universe at infinite and infinitesimal scales.

I don't think this book is perfect, but it's pretty well written and provides a cohesive narrative of how we, as humans, have sought and achieved more and more ridiculous levels of replicable precision and how even small imperfections can cause catastrophic damage with the tolerance high performance products are designed for. It's not at the top of my list, but it's a pretty good read and you'll learn a little.

This is second on my all time list behind Kahneman. This thing is huge, it's as close to a comprehensive multi-field discussion of human behavior I've seen, and it manages to stay coherent, well structured, and compelling throughout.

This book goes from the basic structure and biology of neurons, the brain, neurotransmitters and hormones, genetic elements of behavior, epigenetics, development of the brain and behavior from early in pregnancy through adolescence and how negative events (malnutrition, abuse, neglect) alter that development, a pretty damn in depth discussion of evolution and the various selection processes in play from survival of the individual to close family to the species as a whole, and how social structures and culture influence behavior just to lay the groundwork for how much goes into any single decision.

The second part starts to look into behavior closer to directly through the lens of research by psychology. It starts with in-group bias, with solid coverage of how researchers have manipulated whether people feel someone is an us or a them. Next is peer pressure. Excellent coverage of Milgram's electric shock work and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Really there's a lot here and touching on every subject in depth. What I will say is that the psychology, which is the material I'm most familiar with, is presented masterfully, engaging, does a good job of being clear on what the research does and doesn't say, and consistently refers back to the groundwork in the first part of the book.

There is a third part where he discusses what we should take away from all of this, and he loses me a bit at points in the discussion of the justice system. I'm not entirely sure what he's trying to say. But he comes back strong with discussions of how to work past large scale conflict including war and even genocide, then the overall message that we can use our understanding of context to frame things in ways that allow us to be better to the people around us and drive positive change. Overall with some very minor hiccups, he manages to keep a consistent thread throughout this absolutely insanely broad work. He doesn't just skim through topics. There's a solid level of depth throughout. The organization is excellent. To the best of my ability to determine, it's one of the best sourced books I've read. He does all this while keeping a light, not too serious tone and throwing in mild wit and wordplay in a way that adds to the level of engagement.


If that's not enough, the appendices are great too.

Cuddy has a TED talk that is a reasonable introduction to the content in this book.

This book talks a fair bit about body language, but instead of what it tells others, the primary focus is about using body language to communicate with yourself, and uses her own academic work, along with some others, to allow yourself to behave with confidence and set yourself up to project your genuine belief in yourself of your ideas to others. The TED talk might be sufficient for you, but if you want to go a touch deeper and get basic information about the research and methodology this is a sold read.

Edit: I have followed this up with Behave by Robert M Sapolsky and it completely puts this book to shame. I still don't think this book is awful, but the fact that there's a book that basically covers everything this book does, is better structured and written, gives a better idea of what's well backed vs speculation, and does it in more depth knocks a star off here for me. Maybe it's unfair because it's a couple years newer and didn't exist when this book was written, but there's really no reason to read this book over behave. Even at significantly longer length, it manages to be an easier, more coherent read.

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This one is interesting. There's a lot here backed by evidence, and overall the book takes an interesting look at how various changes to brain structure/development (from early malnutrition or abuse to genetics to physical trauma) tend to result in a higher rates of criminal behavior, with the focus on violent and sexual crimes. But it's intermixed with bits here and there of jankiness that's less supported. When he gets to the final subject discussing the ethics and future steps, he goes off the rails a bit for me. “Your brain made you read this book” is a weird argument that free will is nonsense even if he comes around a little later, and his argument that we should treat the person with a clear tumor basis for wildly out of character behavior the same as someone with a slightly smaller brain region is really uncomfortable. Then I'm not entirely sure he's not advocating a Minority Report style precrime intervention system when he uses it to raise questions.


Overall, though, I am convinced by the case that we should be focusing on proper nutrition and mental health access and that the better we take care of our kids, as a society, the less likely they are to turn to violence. I think even with its flaws, it does encourage you to think about things that we should probably think about.

This is a good introduction to some big ideas in science and technology. Hawking touches on a bunch of subjects from a super quick overview of a variety of future looking ideas, including AI, space travel, aliens, and black holes. Because it's so brief on a lot of the topics, it wasn't really the book for me, but I do think it would be worth it to someone who isn't looking for the same depth I want.

I did find the afterword which was a tribute from Lucy Hawking to her father pretty moving.

“Still, nothing is as wildly age-inappropriate as a toy that Tesco, the UK retailer, released in 2006: the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, a pole-dancing play set marketed to females under ten—as something that will help them “unleash the sex kitten inside.”

This is the most disturbing example of marketing gone to a gross extreme in this book, but it's far from the only one. Lindstrom tells the story of how marketing takes advantage of understanding the brain to push your buttons and sell products. He starts with research indicating that you can start to form brand attachments by babies in utero and continues with efforts grooming kids into perfect little customers, and influencers of parent purchases, before getting into how they target adults.

Then, while this book is about a decade old at this point, he starts to discuss all the ways big companies are tracking you with technology. Many more people are aware of some of the ways big data is used for advertising now, but it's likely you'll learn things about how deep those tentacles go reading this book as well, even though it's starting to slow its age a little.


Finally, he discusses an experiment where he set up a family in a new neighborhood to test the efficacy of guerrilla word of mouth marketing to friends and neighbors. This also serves to demonstrate why astroturfing is such big business in the tech driven world of today.

As it's partly driven by his personal involvement in the industry, not every claim is sourced to academic research, but a decent bit is. For additional science backed information on the subject, Influence or Presuasion by Robert Cialdini are the way to go, but Lindstrom's insider perspective is worth reading as well.

Very good book. You'll find it disturbing, but knowing is the only way to protect yourself from manipulation.

Did you know men and women are physically different? Why don't doctors get taught that? Why don't vehicle safety tests take that into account? Why is medical and drug research heavily biased towards male subjects with minimal effort to evaluate the physiological differences that do show up?

The Invisible Woman takes a look at all the small (and big) things that get overlooked when women's input isn't considered. It discusses UI, personal protective equipment, company policies, city design, medicine, and more, with much of the discussion supported by some academic tier research.

I don't universally agree with all her positions on political/policy changes to address the issue, but she does make a compelling case that this is something people need to be aware of and make deliberate effort to mitigate.

The introduction is a bit rough, barraging you with numbers that in my opinion don't work particularly well to introduce you to the topic, but it's worth powering through.

I also, as someone broadly interested in intelligence on the individual, collective, and artificial levels, took it more broadly as a cautionary tale of making decisions without making effort to understand a variety of positions, and the dangers of treating groups of people as one homogenous entity. In some ways, while the subject matter is different, there are a lot of parallels to David Epstein's Range. You can't make effective decisions without some understanding of several distinct perspectives on a problem.

So, from multiple angles, this book is worth reading. It does get a little dense at times and makes some points strongly, but if you let yourself you should learn a lot.

I wanted to like this, but it just never really grabbed me. The coverage of the physics seems too surface level, the overarching narrative was basically “this guy thought imaging a black hole would be good but it costs money and he thought he was more important than anyone else”, and it really didn't even explain the questions they thought the images would answer particularly well.

It's not terrible. Most of the science is accurate enough and it does show some of the technical difficulties of capturing distant space objects. But I can't recommend it unless you're really interested in black holes, and if you are I'd look at Hawking's Black Hole book (which I haven't read yet) or the Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind (which I have and enjoyed) first.

This book is a lot. It starts with cosmology and the Big Bang, goes into particle physics to explain what dark matter is, touches on theories of the origin of life, finally gets to the fossil record and what that tells us about mass extinction events, goes into some concepts of probability theory and statistical significance, then describes large scale features of the Milky Way and our solar system's traversal through it.

All of this is used to illustrate her idea (which she is very careful to describe as speculative and a “thought experiment”) that there is a disc of dark matter, much thinner than the distribution of normal matter, through the central plane of the galaxy, and that the spike in gravity caused by this disc is responsible for knocking objects out of the orbit of the Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system every 30-35 million years and sending big spikes in the number colliding with Earth, causing mass extinction events including the death of the dinosaurs.


Randall is very clear, though out the work, that some ideas are not established yet and should not be taken as factual, but she does heavily reference other academic work on the variety of fields involved. As a nonexpert I am unable to verify all of the background material, but provided there are no glaring omissions or misrepresentations I believe she makes a compelling case for her theory.

Overall this book is densely packed with a lot of science and will take some thought to follow, but the frame of her “dark matter killed the dinosaurs” hypothesis allows the book to flow reasonably well.

It's hard for me to evaluate this book. As a biography of Einstein and Schrödinger and their interactions of the years, it's interesting. As a look at how politics and life events can affect the ability of scientists to do their best science, it's enlightening.


In terms of the actual science, I still mostly don't get it. I think the coverage of Schrödinger's cat and Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is presented well, but I was already comfortable with those subjects. A lot of the other science is hard to follow. Now, that's not the prime purpose of this book, and it's a hard subject, so to some extent that's reasonable, but it seems weird to me to carry the science well past their deaths when I don't think it's covered with sufficient depth to be truly educational to most.

That said, it's not a bad book. The primary subject of Einstein and Schrodinger is presented in an interesting way with enough of the big picture timeline of the science to follow. But I wouldn't expect to learn that much of the science even if it's presented through the book in a way implying you can.

Where do new ideas come from? Is the most effective way to create one to sit and stare at a problem until you figure it out?


Pang uses a mix of stories with research to explain that no, staring at a problem won't magically solve it and after a certain point, is counterproductive. When you rest your brain, there is still background activity going on that is working on your problem. That means sleep, but it also means doing other things in between sessions of work. He discusses the benefits of naps, exercise, a consistent schedule, and leaving work in progress instead of continuing through burnout. He also discusses the benefits of longer rest, full days off, and hobbies that engage your brain but in different ways.


My primary critique would be that the introduction felt a little long and convoluted, and he takes a while to get into the meat and the evidence behind it. But it's worth pushing through. After reading this, you should not feel guilty about setting boundaries with your time or enjoying hobbies or leisure activities. It makes a strong case that you're doing yourself and your productivity a disservice if you don't.

The core premise here is that innovation often comes from applying old ideas in new ways. Whether tools are physical or mental, having a variety of tools in your toolkit allows you to approach problems more different ways. Epstein uses historical examples of groundbreaking ideas born from familiar concepts in one field being transferred to another to solve a big problem, examples where hyper-focused ideologies led to disaster, and various pieces of scientific evidence to support the premise that, while we need subject matter experts, we also need well rounded thinkers who can think abstractly about problems and apply old ideas in new ways.

While he critiques the 10,000 hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, I feel the presentation of the research behind it is caught in the crossfire. Gladwell's presentation is a problem, but at times the way he presents critiques of that presentation are overly critical of the research. He could have acknowledged that in Peak, Ericsson isn't advocating putting your kid in a room with a violin 20 hours a day. He addresses that highly specialized skills don't transfer unless they can be integrated into your existing mental models. He emphasizes that a core element of deliberate practice is being able to maintain a high level of focus throughout, and that repetition without the focus isn't going to be that helpful. He doesn't advocate anything like just abandoning everything else to train one skill.


Ultimately I don't think they're that far apart. They're both selling the message that you can improve at things you want to improve at, and that it's never too late to start learning. It did sour me a little to see how he presented Anders work, but I think both works can be used to inform your efforts at self improvement. I highly encourage both.

How do the exceptional become the exceptional? Is you kid who isn't learning Calculus by age 6 doomed to a life of mediocrity? And what about this “10,000 hours makes you an expert” thing I hear about?

Peak is, at it's core, a book about how we learn. The 4 word answer to that question is “practice the right way”, and Anders Ericsson uses his own research and the work of others to provide you a path to improving your ability to learn a new subject and to, with time, achieve expertise.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hour idea in his book Outliers, and there's an element of merit to it, but it's incomplete. Ericsson was responsible for that research, and goes into detail, but the short version is that the research was done in highly specialized fields with a lot of shared expertise already. He calls this deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice, as he defines it, may rely on a solidly established field with clear definitions and outcomes, but that doesn't mean there's nothing we can take away to our own areas of interest. Setting goals, finding a way to get feedback to evaluate outcomes, and ensuring that you are engaged and challenging yourself the right amount are all strategies encouraged through the book.

Overall, the message is that the human brain is incredibly adaptable and that systematically approaching new subjects (or old subjects you want to improve) can allow you to reach levels you didn't believe were possible.


This is a must read if you have interest in the brain.

Jonathan Haidt is psychologist who primarily researches how people come to ethical opinions/actions. This book takes an evidence based look at some big ideas of philosophy and great thinkers through history about how to be happy.


It uses a pretty wide array of illustrations of ideas, referencing scenes from The Godfather to demonstrate social strategies, Edwin Abbott's Flatworld, and using the Bible, Buddha, and Machiavelli to present the history of ideas, then examines some of the experiments by modern psychologists that are applicable to those ideas. It's not a perfect book and I won't claim to agree with every conclusion made, but it's fairly easy to follow the difference between citing research and conclusions drawn from that research.


I have a hard time judging the approachability of this one because I've read a disproportionately high number of books in psychology, but it doesn't seem to assume that much knowledge. It does get somewhat dense and technical at points, and I intend to give it a second read, but I believe it's something you can follow without a strong background if you know what you're getting into.

It covers a wide range of ideas from structural elements of the brain, to childhood development, the role of trauma in personal growth, religious experiences, psychedelics, and how ideas about ethical decision making differ and contribute to happiness. It's a lot, packed through with citations, but it's reasonably well structured and presented. Overall, if you read everything printed in psychology you'll recognize a lot of the research, but might think about some of it in new ways. If you haven't read much, it might be a bit daunting but even if you miss details I think you could take away a lot of understanding of how our brains work by reading this book.

I view this book as equipping you to answer the question “Where is the line between the privacy of citizens and the ability to protect them from threats (terrorism, cybercrime, the potential of a hostile state to crash the grid in the event of full out war)?”. It does this by examining the modern (WW1-around Snowden) history of signals intelligence, cryptography, and hacking, and providing examples of mass surveillance winning wars, being used by totalitarian governments to suppress human rights, and successfully and unsuccessfully using surveillance/espionage to protect citizens from extremists and cyber criminals.


It also presents the arguments (with quotes) from a variety of people connected to the cyberintelligence world, and well enough that he had me wanting to agree with several different (and conflicting) stances throughout the book. If the title sounds compelling to you or you're interested in the modern questions on data collection and use, this won't give you much technical information, but it will provide you a lot of background on how we got to today and what some of the big issues are.