Rating: 7.5/10. Book with collections of diagnoses, similar to the House TV show. There’s not really a central “point” that the book is trying to make, more like a bunch of insights about the art of diagnosis, interspersed with real-life examples of patients with various diseases and how the doctors figured out what’s wrong with…
Author: Bai Li
Four Views on Free Will by Kane, Fischer, Pereboom, and Vargas
Rating: 8.7/10. Ch1: Libertarianism (Robert Kane) Libertarianism is the view that the universe is not deterministic, and this is necessary for FW; also, FW is necessary for moral responsibility. It’s closest to laymen’s intuitions about FW. Compatibilists attack it in two ways: (1) by claiming that determinism doesn’t conflict with FW, and (2) that indeterminism…
Kiss Your Dentist Goodbye by Ellie Phillips
Rating: 7.4/10. A lot of people have tooth decay, but the usual treatment is fillings, followed by root canals, crowns, extraction, and there’s not as much emphasis on prevention. This book outlines a program to get healthier teeth. Often, tooth decay is viewed as problems of individual teeth, but actually, tooth decay has to do…
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
Rating: 7.1/10. A common mistake in economics is to enact a policy that benefits some group of people, without realizing that it harms some other group (usually the broad society not taking part in the transaction). The most basic example is with the “broken window theory”: when a window is broken, the glassmaker gets work,…
The Lexicon: An Introduction by Elisabetta Jezek
Rating: 8.2/10. Ch1: Basic notions The lexicon is the set of words in a language, abstract object stores in our mind; a dictionary is a concrete object (printed book or electronic) that describes the lexicon. Dictionaries do not always store everything in the lexicon, either intentionally or unintentionally. A vocabulary can refer to either a…
The Price We Pay by Marty Makary
Rating: 8.0/10. The American healthcare system is rotten to its core: the country spends about twice as much on healthcare as other developed countries, and gets worse outcomes. This book by a surgeon and public health researcher examines what’s wrong with the healthcare system. In short, the free market brings prices down only with transparency…
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson
Rating: 6.6/10. Jordan Peterson’s first book, written in 1999, two decades before he became famous and wrote “12 Rules for Life“. This one is over 400 pages and is a lot more dense, although not written for academic philosophers. The basic theme is that mythology should be studied as a representation of meaning, in an…
The Perfect Theory by Pedro G. Ferreira
Rating: 5.0/10. Book about Einstein’s theory of general relativity; I got bored after reading about 90 pages. Given that the author is a theoretical physics professor, I expected a more satisfying explanation of general relativity. Instead, this book is entirely about the history of general relativity, with descriptions of various scientists’ personalities. It overlaps substantially…
A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma by David Eimer
Rating: 7.5/10. David Eimer’s second book, after “The Emperor Far Away”, describes all the corners of Burma / Myanmar. This country is seldom visited, is ruled by an oppressive military junta, and is far less developed compared to neighboring countries in Southeast Asia like Thailand and Vietnam. The Burmese people migrated there from Yunnan around…
1587: A Year of No Significance (万历十五年) by Ray Huang
Rating: 7.8/10. In the year 1587, nothing really major happened in China, but in a lot of ways, this year marks the point of no return for the Ming dynasty. Even though there’s still another 50 years until the dynasty collapses, it’s already clear by this point that the bureaucracy and institutions are no longer…
Understanding Syntax by Maggie Tallerman
Rating: 8.5/10. Overall impression: this book gives a well-rounded overview of syntax, good for an introduction and avoids most of the more theoretical issues. It’s split about 50/50 between English constructions and examples in other languages. This is a good balance, using English examples is easier to “ground” the theory to reality, while there are…
The Second Kind of Impossible by Paul Steinhardt
Rating: 8.5/10. A scientific adventure that starts out in theoretical physics but ends up in geology. The author is a physicist, who hypothesizes the existence of a new type of matter called a quasicrystal, which has no translational symmetry but only rotational symmetry, and is made up of atoms in a Penrose tiling. You can…