Judea Pearl and Dana MacKenzie – The book of Why
The practical and relevant examples (health effect of smoking, impact of humanity on climate change) of causal inference alone make the book worthwhile.
Flawed data collection and interpretation hurt the position and prospects of women in many different ways
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible women
Great exercise in spotting biases, and understanding how these manifest themselves in how the world around us is shaped.
Folk tales about vampires and werewolves are based in an exaggerated fear for rabies
The detailed synopsis of (what seems like) every book, play, or movie that ever mentioned rabies gets boring pretty fast.
Feigning intelligence is not too difficult, considering that people can be fooled in many different ways
Brian Christian – The most human human
Unfortunately, the book does not explicitly challenge if humans are adequate judges in the Turing test.
Whenever you need to come to a rational decision: use Mathematics
Jordan Ellenberg – How not to be wrong
A cornucopia of charming mathematical anecdotes and facts
The left terrorizes the right while bathing in victimhood
The purposeful one-sided rant makes the book lose all credibility, in particular since the arguments can easily be reversed – especially in the wake of Trump’s desperate challenge the US election outcome.
20th century science gave rise to some truly mind-blowing concepts
Benjamin Labatut – When we cease to understand the world
A highly entertaining fictionalized history of landmark scientific breakthroughs.
Ongoing advances in technology make that ethical norms develop incredibly fast
Filled with highly interesting statistics about the evolution of public perception on ethical issues.
Natural philosophy transformed into science thanks to the commitment and sacrifice of some thrill-seeking geeks
Richard Holmes – The age of wonder
Conveys lively how science was considered an undertaking for daring adventurers.
Finding and copying manuscripts used to be a major factor in the preservation, transfer and loss of knowledge
Violet Moller – The Map of knowledge
Well narrated account of how Christian and Muslim scholars traveled the world in search of ancient knowledge and preserved it through diligent copying.
Turing’s suprisingly practical perspective on logic, intelligence, and machines was far ahead of his time
Andrew Hodges – Alan Turing: The imitation game
A quite complete account of the life and death of one of the most fascinating figures of early computing.
One can obtain elegant mathematical insights without becoming overly formalistic
An elegantly narrated exploration of mathematics , heavily lening on our intuition for time and space (thereby defyingL.E.J. Brouwer‘s adaption of Kant).
The human brain spends an incredible amount of energy on social interactions
Line of argument that primary characteristic of humans as a species is their social behavior dovetails nicely with Daniel Dennett’s thinking on evolution of memes.
There is magic in the chemistry of every day materials
Mark Miodownik – Stuff Matters
Skillfully composed , mind-blowing narrative at different scales.
Forget about stopping climate change, but don´t let that stop you fighting it
David Wallace-Wells – The uninhabitable earth
The book clearly illustrates that climate change is the prisoner’s dilemma ‘par excellence’
The combination of vested interests in theoretical physics and experimental energy limits leads to bad science
Sabine Hossenfelder – Lost in math
The author stresses that following negative results of experiments, theories are typically watered-down just to the extent that they are untestable – reminiscent of Bruno Latour’s “social constructionof scientific facts”
Entropy (and thereby time) emerges out of our limited ability to distinguish different states of the universe
Carlo Rovelli – The order of time
Remarkably intuitive and enlightening expose of a deep and complex subject; in the audio version even more appealing due to the warm yet solemn reading by Benedict Cumberbatch.
Making a great painting is in large part a scientific achievement
Walter Isaacson – Leonardo da Vinci
Isaacson’s narrative falacy (‘Leonardo never finishing what he starts’) is at odds with the public recognition he received in his own day and age.
Bayesian statistics had its MVP in WWII and has safely crossed the chasm on the back of Moore´s law
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne – The theory that would not die
Shocking to realize how much controversy surrounded Bayesian statistics before the explosion of computing power.
The Kelly formula defines the tipping point between aggressive and suicidal bets
William Poundstone – Fortune’s formula
Despite all mathematical considerations, the prerequisite for a truly successful betting strategy inside knowledge.