CityReads│61 Books Nassim Taleb Recommends: 31-61

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61 Books Nassim Taleb Recommends: 31-61

When it comes to reading, don’t just follow your passion. Broaden your passion. You’ll never know what you are going to get.

Source: https://medium.com/the-mission/61-books-nassim-taleb-recommends-you-read-in-his-own-words-fc2e17a7f3c1

Picture source: https://me.me/i/happy-winter-solstice-6059165

 Nassim Taleb, the polarizing author of best-selling books The Black Swan and Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, offers 61 reading recommendations, which cover a wide variety of fields, including foreign affairs, economics, cognitive sciences, philosophy, language, novel, biography, history, geography, medicine, diets, etc. It is a long post. CityReads posts in two installments. Here is the second installment, from 31 to 61. I am not familiar with these books recommended by Nassim Taleb. But I feel I need to broaden my reads. You never know what you’re going to learn.

31.  Thinking and Deciding (5 stars)

People vote with their wallet –particularly when they do it a second time, when they REpurchase. Those who believe in the “revelation of preferences” should note that there are books one buys again when a copy is lost –particularly when they are read cover to cover. I am buying another copy of this book as mine was lost or misplaced. That should speak volumes.

32. Critical Phenomena in Natural Sciences: Chaos, Fractals, Selforganization and Disorder: Concepts and Tools (5 stars) 

As I am teaching the statistical mechanics part of a graduate class in mathematics, I was looking for a textbook on complex systems & statistical physics with derivations, intuitions, and some physical examples. I did not realize that I was looking too far –Sornette, with whom I correspond regularly, is well known for his contributions and his prolific output (actually some physicists make fun of the quantity of papers he writes). So his book did not come to mind. I once stumbled on a problem with the derivation of preferential attachments; he recommended his book, which I took with a grain a salt. After spending some time working the derivations on scalable laws, extreme value theory, renormalization groups in this book, I elected to use it as my textbook. There is no equivalent. I have a dozen such yellow manuals; this one is complete and ultimately clearest. I do not know of a better textbook.

33. The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older (5 stars) 

If you like the thinker’s prose, the so-called “romantic science”, a style attributed to the Russian neuroscientist A. R. Luria, which consists in publishing original research in literary form, you would love this book. Clearly intellectual scientists are vanishing under the weight of the commoditization of the discipline. But once in a while someone emerges to reverse such setbacks.

Goldberg, who was the great Luria’s student and collaborator, is even more colorful and fun to read than the master. He is egocentric, abrasive, opinionated, and colorful. He is also disdainful of the conventional beliefs in neurosciences –for instance he is suspicious of the assignment of specific functions, such as language, to anatomical regions. He is also skeptical of the journalistic “triune” brain. His theory is that the hemispheric specialization is principally along pattern matching and information processing lines: the left side stores patterns, while the right one processes novel tasks. It is convincing to see that children suffer more from a right brain injury, while adults have the opposite effect.

I am now spoiled; I need more essays by opinionated, original, and intellectual, contemporary scientists.

34. The Sunday Philosophy Club : An Isabel Dalhousie Mystery (5 stars)

If your interests are limited to mystery books, nothing else, this book is not for you.

I initially bought this book because of the title, thinking that we would have a female version of Her Professor Dr Dr (Hon.) Moritz-Maria von Igenfeld, the Pninish uberscholar philologist who wrote the seminal Portugese Irregular Verbs (“after which there was nothing left to discuss about the subject, Nothing.”). I was curious to see how he would present a female version of such scholar.

He did not. Nor was it a detective story, although there is an element of suspense. This book is about Applied Ethics, a subject about which the author seems to know a bit. It also makes you feel like leading a quite thinking life in Edinburgh.

I don’t want to spoil the story but I felt that I was reading a detective story until I realized what it was… 

35. How Nature Works: The Science of Self-organized Criticality (5 stars) 

This book is a great attempt at finding some universality based on systems in a “critical” state, with departures from such state taking place in a manner that follows power laws. The sandpile is a great baby model for that. 

Some people are critical of Bak’s approach, some even suggesting that we may not get power laws in these “sandpile” effects, but something less scalable in the tails. The point is :so what? The man has vision.

I looked at the reviews of this book. Clearly a few narrow-minded scientists do not seem to like it (many did not like Per Bak’s ego). But the book is remarkably intuitive and the presentation is so clear that he takes you by the hand. It is even entertaining.

 36. Social Cognition: Making Sense of People (5 stars)

I spent some time looking for a simple bedside aggregation of the various topics associated with the psychology of decision making and the various perceptual biases, without finding much. Most of the books are excellent; but, aside from this one (and Jon Baron’s) they are usually compilation of original research. I like to have a readable consolidation of the material not far from my fingertips. 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.

Now the bad news. The author passed away recently at the age of 48.

37. The (Mis)behavior of Markets (5 stars) 

I have been involved in the professional practice of uncertainty for almost all of my adult life. I’ve seen and read books and papers on the subject of deviations, with “this is interesting” here and there. I closed this book feeling that it was the first book in economics that spoke directly to me. Not only that, but this astonishing simplicity, realism, and relevance of the subject makes it the only work in finance I’ve read that seemed to make sense.

I cannot make justice to the book other than say 1) MAKES SENSE, 2) EASY TO UNDERSTAND, 3) PRESENT SUCH EMPIRICAL VALIDY that it will make financial economists (charlatans) have to hide deeper from the common man with their complicated “mathematics”.

Mandelbrot brought fractals into mathematics by going to the general public. He is doing the same here: pleading to the regular man unburnded with knowledge of economics.

38.  The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity (5 stars)

You are a hot shot in a company, though not the boss. You are paid extremely well, but, again you have plenty of bosses above you (say the partners of an investment firm). Is it better than deriving a modest income being your own boss? The counterintuive answer is NO. You will live longer in the second situation, even controlling for diet, lifestyle, and genetic predispositions.

Marmot spent years poring over data; he left no stone unturned and is well read in the general literature on human nature. This idea of people living longer when they exert control over their lives has not spread yet. That people lead longer lives when they trust their neighbors and feel part of a community is far reaching. The book is well written, humorous at times, and rigorous. But it feels that it is just the introduction to a topic. Please, write the continuation.

39. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (5 stars)

I find it clear in its exposition of the problems of modern psychology. In addition to the ideas of “satisficing”, it displays the major ideas in the psychology of happiness (hedonic treadmill), along with the theories of choice & decision making. Clearly this is not for scholars ; this is a popular science book. Still, I could not put it down.

40. The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (5 stars) 

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. He investigates and provides a fresh look at the material. liked his constant questioning of the labels put on philosophers and philosophies by the second hand readers. Clearly he missed a few authors who deserve real coverage like Algazali, but I take what I can get. Someone should bug the author to hurry with the sequel on Locke, Hume, etc.

41. Intellectuals in the Middle Ages (5 stars)

Excellent! Another of the attributes is the readability of the work Le Goff is a gifted writer.

42. Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition (5 stars) 

When I started reading the book I was taken aback by the combination of depth and the vividness of the style. The notion of categories is not trivial: you need a simple conditional prior to identify an object; it is a simple mathematical fact. You need to know what a table is to see it in the background separated from its surroundings. You need to know what a face is so when it rotates you know it is still the same face. Computers have had a hard time with such pattern recognition. A PRIOR category is a necessity. This was Kant’s intuition (the so-called “rationalism”). This is also the field of semiotics as initially conceived. Eco took it to greater levels with his notion of what I would call in scientific language a compression, a “simplifation”. This leads to the major problem we face today: what if the act of compressing is arbitrary? Not just very deep but it is a breath of fresh air to see such a philosophical discussion nondull, nondry, alive!

43. Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper (5 stars) 

This is not a popularization /adult-education style presentation. Magee sees things form the inside; it is his own formation of philosophical ideas & techniques that we witness.

Magee was close enough to Popper to present us with his ideas first-hand (nobody reads Popper; people read about him). He also debunks a few idiotic myths about Wittgenstein as an atomist.

Magee writes with the remarkable clarity of the English philosophers/thinkers.

44. Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (5 stars) 

Philosophy has been under severe challenge from science, literally eating up its provinces: philosophy of mind went to neuroscience; philosophy of language to Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, etc. This book shows that there is a need for someone to just specialize in the TRUTH, its structure, its accessibility, its INVARIANCE.

Aside from the purely philosophical answers that scientists were grappling with, the book is like a manual for a new regimen in philosophy. It reviews everything from epistemology to the logic of contingency, with insights here and there about such topics as the observer biases. I am not a philosopher but a probabilist; I found that this book just spoke to me. It certainly rid me of my prejudice against modern philosophers.

45.  A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness (5 stars)  

Humphreys is the only person I know of who can work on nonhuman primates, write philosophy, and edit a literary magazine.

The latter shows in this writing: I read this book in a single sitting. You may not agree with the ideas on consciousness (I don’t) but you get a clear exposition of all the work from Descartes to McGinn. Also if you want to figure out what Dennett is saying it helps to read this book first.

46. Bull! : A History of the Boom, 1982–1999: What drove the Breakneck Market–and What Every Investor Needs to Know About Financial Cycles(5 stars)

Maggie Mahar had the courage to take a look at what was behind all of this religious belief in markets. Clearly I do not understand how she was able to work as a journalist when she has the attitude and mindset of a truth-seeker. I spent some time looking at the difference between her book and Lowenstein’s: not even possible to start comparing. One needs to be a trader to value her work.

47. I Think, Therefore I Laugh (5 stars) 

I found this copy last week at Waterstone in London . It made me feel the plane ride was very short! I should have bought a couple. This is a great book for a refresher in analytical philosophy: pleasant, clear. Great training for people who tend to forget elementary relationships. I did not know that JAP was a logician. Go buy this book!

48. The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy (4 stars) 

This is a great book but I felt something cold inside of me while reading it. I don’t know if it is cultural (the modern English philosopher’s fear of displaying passion) but I had the feeling to talk to a plumber who developed expertise in abstract concepts and their relationships just as if they were small plumbing problems fitting together under a generalized plumbing theory. Perhaps philosophy needs to be treated like that, just like engineering –but not for me. At least I give myself the illusion of doing something more…literary. 

Colin McGINN teaches us that we need nevertheless to master the art of clarity of both thought and exposition. He write with perfect clarity: a clear, unburdened, unaffected, UnFrench UnGerman philosophical prose.

49. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (4 stars)

I became interested in this book while reading a review panning it in The Nation by one Danny Postell. Clearly it was visible that John Gray was after a definition of humans that integrates our discoveries from cognitive science, that we are just animals who are curse with intelligence, sufficient intelligence to figure out things but insufficient to control our actions –what I call the ability to rationalize (“much of the difference between us and other primates lies in our being considerably better than them at explaining our behavior”). Postel was panning Gray exactly for the reasons that would make this book insightful. So I BOUGHT THIS BOOK BECAUSE OF A BAD REVIEW!

This book is worth 4 stars because here we have a literary intellectual who manages to break through the mud in his knowledge. It would have been worth 5 stars had Gray read a few more works in scientific thought beyond Darwin. Anyway I am very impressed with a literary intellectual capable of this empirical and realistic view of man.

50.  Mapping the Mind (5 stars)

I started my interest in neurobiology in December 1998 after reading a discussion by Rita Carter in the FT showing that rational behavior under uncertainty and rational decision making can come from a defect in the amygdala. Since then I’ve had five years of reading more technical material and thought that I transcended this book.

But it was not so. 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! I was looking for a refresher as I am trying to capture a general idea of the functioning of that black box and found exactly what I needed without the excess burden of prominent textbooks.

Very pedagogical.

51.  The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way (5 stars)

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”. In brief the essay is an attack on massive modularity by saying that there are things after all that escape the programming.

The man is critical of his own ideas, and of the current in thought that he he helped create –one may use Fodor-1 against Fodor-2. Perhaps persons I hold in highest respect are those who go after their own ideas!

Bravo Fodor. Even if I do not agree I can’t help admiring the man.

52. Consciousness: An Introduction (5 stars)

I am glad to find a complete book dealing with all aspects of consciousness in CLEARLY written format, with graphs and tables to facilitate comprehension. The book covers everything I had seen before from Artificial Intelligence to Philosophy to Neurology to Evolutionary Biology.

Say one wants to get an idea of Dan Dennett’s theory of consciousness (without having to get through Dennett’s circuitous, unfocused and evasive prose) or Searle’s Chinese room argument or Turing’s test or Chalmer’s position or Churchland’s neurophilosophy or a presentation of research on the neural correlates of consciousness…Everything I could think about is there.

53.  Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts (5 stars)

I read the book once when it came out. Since then I’ve had the chance to reread it a few times, discovering more and more layers as my interests take me in new directions(for instance the discussion on the happiness treadmill goes to the core of the current discussions in the economics of happiness). I now carry a copy on my trips as I can kill time in airports by perusing random sections.

The book is so readable as to perhaps set a standard. Yet it is complete in the sense that it covers more of the evolutionary thinking than meets the eye. I didn’t realize it until I went to the ite www.meangenes.org and got into the more technical research material.

Reread it.

54.  Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems (5 stars)

The author aside from the problem of crashes presents an insightful exposition of tipping points. His work builds on the “abyssus abyssum invocat” (panic begets panics) and the dynamics of compounding disequilibria. In addition the notion of “CRITICAL POINT” is made very clear. Honestly I don’t care for the idea of crashes; the same concepts can apply to sudden and unexpected euphorias. I learned more from this book than any other on disequilibrium.

 55. The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (5 stars)

Robert Shiller has the remarkable ability to think independently and the courage to propose ideas that to middlebrow thinkers may sound speculative.

Think of what your reaction would have been had someone discussed risk sharing (insurance) before it became popular. A lunacy people would have thought. Most risk management is like that: we think backwards with the benefit of past history and find these ideas obvious. They were not at the time.

Throughout his career Shiller stood for unpopular ideas and was proven right (his 1981 paper on volatility, his 2000 discussion of the bubble). I would read and re-read this book.

 56. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (5 stars)

The book that carried the most influence on my thinking this year (I went back to it half a dozen times).

57. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (4 stars)

The book is a great exposition of modern scientific thinking and understanding of the nature of man–but it spends some time on topics that are entirely obvious outside of the humanities academia. Indeed Pinker gives them too much respect by honoring them with such a lengthy reply. His other two books are much better.

58. No Bull: My Life In and Out of Markets (5 stars)

As a speculator I learned to take the best from books and ideas without arguments (many readers seem to be training to be shallow critics)–good insights are hard to come by. One does not find these in the writings of a journalist. There are some things personal to the author that might be uninteresting to some, but I take the package. The man is one of the greatest traders in history. There are a few jewels in there.The man did it. I’d rather listen to him than read better written but hollow prose from some journalist-writer.

59. The Statistical Mechanics of Financial Markets (5 stars)

Very useful book, particularly in what concerns alternative L-Stable distributions. True, not too versed in financial theory but I’d rather see the author erring on the side of more physics than mathematical economics. As an author I don’t ask much from books, just to deliver what they indend. This one does.

The book in short provides an excellent perspective on the statistical approach to asset price dynamics. Very clear and to the point.

60. Tartar Steppe (Verba Mundi) (5 stars)

I never understood why the book never made it in the Anglo-Saxon world. Il deserto is one of the 20th century’s masterpieces.

Note: actually, there is an English translation of The Tartar Steppe, which was done by Stuart C. Hood.

61. A Guide to Econometrics — 4th Edition (5 stars)

The best intuition builder in both statistics and econometrics. I have been reading the various editions throughout my career. Please, keep updating it, Peter Kennedy!

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