Category: Social Sciences

Rating: 7.7/10. The Culture Map by Erin Meyer: Decoding How People Think, Lead, and Get Things Done Across Cultures Book about how cultures differ across the world, categorizing differences among cultures along eight dimensions. Cultural differences can often lead to misunderstandings without either side realizing it. This is especially important in management where your words…

Rating: 8.0/10. This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century by Mark Engler and Paul Engler Book about the mechanics and strategies of protests: a common misconception that protests and uprisings are spontaneous, but in reality they involve careful planning. The book studies the strategy behind successful nonviolent protests and what…

Rating: 7.4/10. The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris Book about parenting, arguing for the thesis that parents essentially have no effect on how children turn out. Except in cases of extremely severe abuse, parents have no effect on children, after accounting for factors like genetics. Culture…

Rating: 7.4/10. Book about analyzing “systems”: basically, any collection of things that are interconnected and produce emergent properties. In many situations you will be led astray if you only look at individual events or pieces of the system, you have to analyze the system as a whole to understand its behavior. Examples of systems are:…

Rating: 6.7/10. Influential book by Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on behavioral economics. The main idea of this book is we have two systems for making decisions, call them System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and effortless; System 2 is slow, logical, and takes…

Rating: 8.0/10. Book containing several mostly independent essays about aspects of science, mostly from a historical and sociological perspective. The first essay compares Greek and Babylonian science: Greeks were more geometric while Babylonians were good at calculations, but when their cultures came in contact, new ideas emerged combining their sciences to predict astronomical motion. Essays…

Rating: 7.7/10. Summary Why do dictators consistently become terrible instead of doing what’s best for their country? This book explains the rules that govern dictatorships: using selectorate theory (proposed by the authors), they explain how incentives in dictatorships naturally tend toward a stable equilibrium that’s bad for most of its inhabitants, but democracies tend towards…

Rating: 8.3/10. Book about city planning, specifically designing for public transit. Public transit is any form of transport that has a fixed schedule and is open to the public. Although public transit is familiar to all of us, there are still many non-obvious design considerations, and often there are tradeoffs where you cannot satisfy all…

Rating: 8.0/10. Fairly short book, describing life in rural America and why they consistently vote Republican. Unlike the cities, rural Americans live in small and medium-sized communities with two characteristics: (1) it feels like everyone knows everyone else, and (2) it feels like everyone thinks the same way. Both of these are not literally true,…

Rating: 8.4/10. Summary Why is America so segregated? It’s often believed that the segregation is de facto, due to cultural reasons like people wanting to live with people of the same race. But this book argues that this is a myth, and in fact, blacks suffered de jure (systematic and legally enforced) discrimination for many…

Rating: 9.0/10. Trump shocked the world in 2016 when he won the election. How did this happen? This book explains how this result is actually a cumulation of decades of eroding democratic institutions and political polarization. It’s not the people’s fault for voting Trump: several people (eg: Henry Ford) have gotten similar levels of popular…

Rating: 7.8/10. The classical theory of emotions says that at least a few basic emotions are universal (happiness, fear, sadness, surprise, disgust, anger). However, this “essentialist” theory is put into question because it is difficult to find any consistent physiological fingerprint for these emotions; there is a lot of variation and interpretation is subject to…