Recommended Reading

[Nick]

OK, I've been making a hobby lately of collecting books which serve as solid summaries of fields which are (or should be) of general interest to people tryng to come to grips with the modern world. Obviously, these sorts of books can't cover a field in all of its permutations and variations - but let's face it, most of the time we neither need nor want that level of detail. The internet can be useful - but applying it effectively often requires a well-calibrated "bullshit detector" to sort out the nonsense from the good stuff. A well-written popular (i.e. equation free) science book can provide the basis for doing that in a way that the internet can't.

Anyway, below are the ones I have found - please suggest more. Note that additions to this list, should be restricted to science, logic & morality related non-fiction. Start a thread over in Off Topic for other stuff.

Historical Science: Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond)
Curious as to how the Europeans managed to conquer half the globe, and wipe out most of the Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals?
Simply curious about how a savannah or shoreline dwelling ape managed to turn the entire world into its preferred stomping ground?
Diamond traces current theories of the human diaspora, and in the process, demonstrates just how thoroughly deluded the Social Darwinists were.

Cognitive & Social Science: The Blank Slate (Steven Pinker)
Why are people so stupid?
Why do social & political 'scientists' spout so much bullshit?
Why is coupling our ideas of morality to specific beliefs about human nature one of the dumber ideas of the last century?
Why is so much modern "art" utter shit?
What do you get when you actually apply the scientific method to the study of humanity?
Pinker summarises the current scientific understanding of human nature, as well as exploring why so many of the intellectual elite and self-appointed "social guardians" fight tooth and nail against dissemination of this information.

Cognitive & Social Science: Why Men Don't Listen & Women Can't Read Maps (Allan & Barbara Pease)
There is a difference between "equal" and "same".
Men and women do differ systematically - and these two, instead of just relying on anecdotal experience, have set out to collate the best available scientific information they could find.

Economics: Reinventing the Bazaar (John MacMillan)
If capitalism is so bad, why do humans persist in reinventing it at every opportunity?
If capitalism is so bad, why was the single largest poverty reduction exercise in the modern world the relatively recent transitioning of the post-WWII Chinese economy to capitalism?
McMillan explores how capitalism comes into existence, what problems it is trying to solve, and why various forms of it are the most effective solutions we have found to the problem of resource distribution in large human societies.

[kheegster]

Any of Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkin's books. I think there's a book called something like "Why people believe in weird things" with collected articles by James Randi and other writers from the Sceptics Association.

KG

[Nova Andromeda]

--It seems to me that if you cannot/don't understand the math required in a certain feild you have a serious problem on your hands whenever you have to make a judgement involving said feild. The best one can do is look to the sciences and see what books/resources they use. I would be very wary of "popular" books though since there is all sorts of stuff that pretends to be science and is nothing but crap used to push some agenda. So in the end I would rely on whatever is in the sciences for what I haven't personally analyzed in detail so long as it can be logically defended against any basic questions I might have.

[Rhadamanthus]

Nietzche, especially Twilight of the Idols and Beyond Good and Evil.

[Newtonian Fury]

On Nietzsche, I would recommend against The Anti Christ. As much as that title might sound appealing to some(most?) of us, it's more of a rant than an analytical esay. The style is rather infantile when compared to the rest of his works. Read it only if you can handle a very, very long raving of a sickly man.

[haas mark]

Sartre's No Exit?

[Nick]

--It seems to me that if you cannot/don't understand the math required in a certain feild you have a serious problem on your hands whenever you have to make a judgement involving said feild.

That's not the point of this sort of book, Nova. These books are more along the lines of "Why do people study these things, and why should I care?".

They aren't intended to make you a historian, or an economist or a physicist - they're intended to give you a feel for what has already been discovered & accepted in these fields, and what a few of the remaining interesting questions are.

The best one can do is look to the sciences and see what books/resources they use.

This is often not helfpul, because real science books tend to assume a significant chunk of prior knowledge and/or are written as reference books, not reading books.

Additionally, they tend to contain an awful lot of detail that the casual reader simply isn't going to be interested in.

I would be very wary of "popular" books though since there is all sorts of stuff that pretends to be science and is nothing but crap used to push some agenda.

Naturally you need to apply your usual critical faculties to determine if the author is full of shit, or actually talking real science.

A few things to look for are:
1. Are their arguments self consistent?
2. Are their arguments consistent with your other knowledge/experience?
3. Do they give you some way of checking their references?
4. What do the author's credentials really mean?

The degree to which you can produce satisfactory answers to these questions represents the degree of confidence you can place in the positions described in the book.

The other thing you can do is use the Internet to check out any posted reactions. Again, you can use your critical faculties to decide whether you side with the author of the book, or the author of the critique.

In fact, this is part of what this list is meant to about - finding "popular" books which actually contain real descriptions of the fields they cover.

Just because you read it in a book, doesn't mean you have to take it at face value!

So in the end I would rely on whatever is in the sciences for what I haven't personally analyzed in detail so long as it can be logically defended against any basic questions I might have.

And how do you propose to find out what is in the fields you haven't personally analysed? I suggest the best way is to find a well-written summary from someone who either references their sources well, or is actually a valid authority in that field. This is a hell of a lot better than relying on the rubbish you hear in the media, or trying to sort through the morass which is the Internet.

For example, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is about as good a grasp of quantum physics & general relativity as you are going to get without actually studying physics.

It isn't going to let you actually solve anything - but it can give you a vague handle on what these physicists are rabbiting on about. Most importantly, it can also make it easier to spot clueless idiots who have no idea what they are talking about.

[Nick]

A couple more.

Law: From Barbarism To Verdict (Justin Fleming)
This guy has a very florid writing style (you can tell he's a lawyer), which can make this one a bit of a slog at times.
Overall, however, he gives a very interesting account of how the British concept of the common law (also used in former colonies such as Australia, Canada & the US) came into being.
Understanding what the legal system is meant to achieve, and how far it has come from the old days, may help you come to grips with why it sometimes seems so dumb. It certainly did for me.

Logic: Logic: A Very Short Introduction (Graham Priest)
Many of the people here have a reasonable grasp of informal logic - verbally demonstrating that B actually does follow from A.
Well, there is a more formalised version of that, which attempts to figure out and write down the rules underlying logical thought. This little book may be a useful way of improving your knowledge of the formal side of things - and improve your informal reasoning at the same time.