Rating: 6.8/10. Kind of like the Freakonomics of math, describes a variety of situations where math (mostly statistics) is useful in real life. Some of it is heuristics to avoid common fallacies, then a mix of random topics with tenuous connection to real life events, but the author doesn’t have much of a coherent point…
Category: Nonfiction
How Children Succeed by Paul Tough
Rating: 7.3/10. Proposes that the two biggest factors that determine whether a child succeeds or fails are: Stress and traumatic events in childhood is bad, and this can be mitigated if the parents give the child attention. Grit / perseverence / self-control is important, more so than IQ. The book describes several programs implemented in…
The Book of Why by Judea Pearl
Rating: 8.0/10. Book by Judea Pearl, one of the leaders of causal inference who received a Turing award for inventing Bayesian networks. It has some equations, with a level of technicality somewhere between a typical popular science book and a textbook. Causal inference is required because it’s impossible to tell between causation and correlation from…
Chop Suey Nation by Ann Hui
Rating: 7.9/10. A journalist makes her way across Canada from Vancouver to Fogo Island in Newfoundland, surveying Chinese restaurants in small towns across the country. In parallel, she tells her personal story of how her family originated from Toisan and ended up in Vancouver running Chinese restaurants, and the family narrative ends up being quite…
The Lady Tasting Tea by David Salsburg
Rating: 8.3/10. Tells the story of how statistics emerged as a scientific discipline in the 20th century. The title comes from an apocryphal story by Fisher describing an experiment to see if a lady can taste the difference between two ways of making tea. The book describes the lives and circumstances of the people involved,…
Lesser Beasts by Mark Essig
Rating: 7.8/10. History of the pig, from when it was first domesticated, through their treatment by various different cultures, until the state of the pork industry today. The pig is unique among farm animals in that unlike other animals that are useful for various tasks, pigs are only raised for their meat. They are omnivorous,…
China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs To Know by Arthur R. Kroeber
Rating: 8.3/10. Book describing all aspects of China’s economy; unlike the previous book (“China Emerging“), this book was written by a Western author, and presents a balanced view of the situation. Since the economic reforms in 1978, the country has gotten a lot better, but the growth is uneven, with high levels of inequality. Still,…
Bargaining for Advantage by G. Richard Shell
Rating: 8.0/10. Second book I’ve read about negotiation; compared to the first book (Getting to Yes) which focused on finding mutually beneficial options, this book gives a more comprehensive view of all aspects of negotiation. Different negotiation styles are appropriate for different types of negotiations: Transaction negotiation is when stakes are high, and the deals…
Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down by J. E. Gordon
Rating: 8.0/10. Published over 40 years ago in 1978, this book gives a basic overview of material science and structural engineering. It uses mostly intuition and only a bit of math, and interleaves a lot of stories giving examples of structures like bridges, planes, churches, animals, clothing, etc. This is one of Elon Musk’s favorite…
When the Bubble Bursts by Hilliard MacBeth
Rating: 8.2/10. Explains the Canadian real estate situation, both from an economic and monetary policy perspective and implications for personal finance. Hilliard MacBeth has the controversial opinion that Canada is about to hit a housing bubble, with corrections on the order of 40-50%. The recent rise in real estate prices are due to low interest…
The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin
Rating: 8.5/10. Book by Lee Smolin describing modern theoretical physics, which is dominated by string theory. String theory arose in the 1980s as an elegant theory claiming to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, and explain the complicated standard model using strings. However, the math is very complicated, and in order to be consistent with…
China Emerging by Wu Xiaobo
Rating: 7.6/10. I got this book in Shenzhen, one of the few English books about China in the bookstore. It describes the history of China from 1978 to today. In 1978, China was very poor, having experienced famines and the cultural revolution under Mao Zedong’s rule. The early 1980s was a turning point for China,…