My Favorite Book List

[gusl]

These are books I find interesting, or that I want somehow.
I already have some of them. I checked all of them out at amazon.com. This was a long time coming.


(*) - I already have it

FUNNY
Larry Gonick - The Cartoon History of the Universe I, II, III



PSYCHOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
Steven Pinker - How The Mind Works (*)
Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Daniel Dennett - Consciousness Explained (*)
Daniel Dennett & Douglas Hofstadter - The Mind's I (*)
Marvin Minsky - Society of Mind
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
David Chalmers - The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory
Donald Norman - Things that make us smart (*)



MATHEMATICAL REASONING
George Lakoff - Where Mathematics Comes From (*)
George Polya - Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning (Volume I)
George Polya - How to Solve It
Roger B. Nelsen - Proofs Without Words: Exercises in Visual Thinking, 2 Volume Set
Edward J. Barbeau - Mathematical Fallacies, Flaws and Flimflam



THE FUTURE
David Brin - The Transparent Society
David Gelernter - Mirror Worlds: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox: How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean
John Brockman - The Third Culture
Ray Kurzweil - The Age of Intelligent Machines



LINGUISTICS
Robert S. P. Beekes - Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction
John J. Staczek - On Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan Linguistics



MEANING
Saul Kripke - Naming and Necessity
Douglas Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher and Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (*)
Douglas Hofstadter - Metamagical Themas
Anna Wierzbicka - Semantics, Culture and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations (*)



ECONOMICS
David D Friedman - Law and Economics
David D Friedman - The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism
David D Friedman - Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life
Steven Landsburg - The Armchair Economist
Joseph Stiglitz - Globalization and Its Discontents
Kenneth Schooland - The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible



EVOLUTION
Robert Wright - The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
Richard Dawkins - The Extended Phenotype
Terry Burnham & Jay Phelan - Mean Genes (*)
Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond - Why is Sex Fun?
Cavalli-Sforza - The History and Geography of Human Genes



RATIONALITY
Daniel Kahnemann - Heuristics and Biases : The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment
Gerd Gigerenzer - Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
Gerd Gigerenzer - Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox



PHILOSOPHY OF PROBABILITY
José Bernardo, Adrian Smith - Bayesian Theory
Harold Jeffreys - Theory of Probability
E T Jaynes - Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
Judea Pearl - Causality (*)
Richard Cox - The Algebra of Probable Inference



EPISTEMOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Mark Greaves - The Philosophical Status of Diagrams
Johan Van Benthem , Barker-Plummer, Beaver, DiLuzio - Words, Proofs and Diagrams
Robert Horn - Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century
Anne Harrington (Editor) - The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration
James Randi - Flim-Flam
Stephen Wolfram - A New Kind of Science
Nick Bostrom - Anthropic Principle


As always, suggestions and gifts are welcome.

Comments

[thepublicguy.livejournal.com]

Re: Gerd Gigerenzer.

I find the ideas fascinating even if reading about them would be hard-going for me. There's such a false dichotomy of human rationality or irrationality around and I think a look at the real elements of bounded rationality would clear up a lot of confusion.

Re: Robert Wright and the Moral Animal

This is quoted quite a lot in Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue, a book I recommend to everyone. It's a bit verbose but Ridley goes beyond game theory to look at myriad instantiations in biology and anthropology of evolved co-operation.

I got Jared Diamond's Gun's, Germs and Steel from the library but I didn't find the full volume added much to what I'd already read online at this lecture:

http://icg.harvard.edu/~anth100/Diamond_Reading/UCLA%20Faculty%20Research%20Lecture%20Jared%20Diamond.htm

Definitely interested in the Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan Linguistics. If it's any good, let us know.

Btw, properties of language was a pun on the word property rather than a serious point. Feeble attempt at humour, I'm afraid......

[adamas.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill?

I concur with your opinion of Guns, Germs and Steel -- it just seemed way too broad and meta; his scope and the book's length just didn't match; he just didn't *say* much (and that's not unusual for most pop books of the kind -- the lack of specificity didn't make it a bad read, it just didn't make it an exceptionally informative read, either -- too busy putting the thoughts together for you instead of expecting you to come to your own conclusions).

[thepublicguy.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill?

You might think word games a little bit adolescent, but as for reading this book now
Seems
A
Really
Sensible
time to do so.

[adamas.livejournal.com]

Er, I left out the second half of my intended first paragraph:

It, along with (the same) McNeill's The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society Since A.D. 1000 make a far better, and far more enlightening, read; Together, they expect you to think, instead of offering only the author's overview and conclusions.

[adamas.livejournal.com]

Hey, weird - our lists have about an 80% correlation rate! :D

I wanted to make a quick comment about Pinker's latest book, which is that it seemed (to me, at least) to be quite biased, and based on less science than usual. You might want to hit the bookstore and open it to any random page in the middle of the book before buying it, or wait for the softbound version... (I say the middle because I tend to look in the beginning and found TBS to look really good, so I picked it up and found it becoming increasingly disappointing the closer I got to the middle -- YMMV, of course).

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Where's your list?

I've browsed through The Blank Slate, and it seemed fine. I'm not a specialist, so I can't contest his positions. I don't expect him to justify everything either... so maybe I should read some opposing views also... such as "The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology" by Jerry A. Fodor

What's "YMMV"?

[osiris831.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman... a cautionary tale about the effect of television on the American mind. Learn from our mistakes, world; the road to the new American Empire was paved with "We'll be right back after this message" and "Coming up next..."