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.