Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life, by Jeremy Campbell. Now somewhat dated (it’s been twenty years since it was first published), this book first made evident to me the intricate relationships between information theory, evolution, language, and human existence. Almost every non-fiction book I’ve read since, and most of my intellectual interests since then, have been a result of my desire to follow threads I first picked up in this book. I suppose I should mention that I came to read Grammatical Man as a result of an interest in information theory spawned by reading Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 in graduate school, so it really belongs on this list as well.
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, by Daniel Dennett. I’d read a lot of evolutionary science by the time I got round to this book, but this one firmly put me in the Darwinian camp for good and all. Methodical, as informationally dense as any book you’re likely to read outside of extremely specialized technical literature, and, in my opinion, completely convincing in its argument that evolution by natural selection was “the best idea anybody ever had”.
The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, by Judith Rich Harris. Completely overturned many of my most cherished notions about the role of parents, genes, and environment in shaping the lives of children. This book makes lots of people mad (including me when I first heard of it), but once I picked it up and read it I found it nearly impossible not to be won over by the evidence Harris marshals for her contention that human children are much more predisposed by their genetic makeup to be influenced by their peer groups than their parents in their behavior outside of immediate family settings.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell. I rarely read one of Gladwell’s New Yorker articles without having one or the other of my assumptions about the world overturned, or at least learning something new and fascinating about an aspect of the world I’d never really considered before. It was an article by Gladwell that first pointed me toward Judith Rich Harris’s book, for instance. The Tipping Point, for all its success, ultimately is less than sum of its parts, but what parts! The book explores as a common thread the nonlinearity of causes and effects – small causes having large effects – and in doing so revisits many of the topics Gladwell had previously explored in his New Yorker articles for evidence. Often, however, the evidence is more interesting than the case Gladwell’s making – which is really much less of a criticism than it sounds, because the topics are often fascinating, and deal with many of the most interesting areas of science and (for want of a better term) sociology. Throughout, current research in the sciences that relate to human behavior is deployed to illustrate insights about how we behave that are often surprising and in many cases run counter to our assumtions about the world. You can hardly help but having your outlook altered by such realizations as the fact that if you’re mugged on a dark street, you’re better off if only one or two other people around than if there’s a crowd, or that the notion of a single monolithic “self” that is essentially unchanged in different environments is almost certainly a myth, and that under the appropriate circumstances, nearly all people are capable of behavior that they’d never dream of under other circumstances.
I hate to include two books by the same author on such a list, but when the author is Matt Ridley, it’s hard to avoid, given the influence he’s had on my understanding of how people behave and why. The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation profoundly altered my understanding of human behavior, explaining in impeccably supported arguments how it is that characteristically human altruistic behaviors are perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory that assumes maximizing of reproductive success as the only goal of genes. The final third of the book makes an compelling argument for a strongly libertarian mode of social organization and government, in which I’m not quite ready to joing Ridley (though I’m getting closer). Another poster has mentioned Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which is indeed an outstanding book (as are the rest of Pinker’s books for general readers), but I actually prefer Matt Ridley’s Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human, which makes the same type of argument, minus some of Pinker’s polemicism, and with a broader view of the current state of scientific understanding of the interrelationship between genes and experience; as a working scientist specializing in one area, Pinker is perhaps less able to see and evaluate the entire field, while Ridley, as primarily a writer concerned with explaining the current state of knowledge to the general reader, is able to develop a more balanced, well-rounded, and objective view, which is even more convincing, in part because Ridley’s not working nearly so hard to convince as Pinker.
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A book like no other I’ve ever read, by an options trader who prides himself on being like few if any other options traders you’ll ever meet. Taleb devastatingly demonstrates how a failure on the part of almost everyone to understand the nature and implications of randomness leads us to misunderstand much of what happens in life, and especially in the financial and business world. He demonstrates how the natural human tendency to find or create explanations for what has happened prevents us, in many cases, from recognizing outcomes for what they frequently are – random sequences of events representing one of many possible outcomes resulting from given set of starting conditions. He also demonstrates how bad people are at recognizing that the value of potential outcomes is crucially important in assessing the risk associated with a certain course of action – that a course with slight risk of a horrible outcome is usually not worth taking, even if a more positive outcome is, statistically, much more likely. He does a sprightly fandango on the heads of all those CEOs who publish self-congratulatory autobiographies celebrating the virtues of whatever strategy they claim, in retrospect, to have pursued, while demonstrating that in at least a large number of cases those captains of industry and business succeeded by virtue of pure, blind, dumb, luck. There’s so much in this book that challenges the way we generally approach the topics of risk, randomness, causality, and logic that it’s impossible to give even a hint of all that it offers. It’s also very entertainingly written, which is no mean feat given that much of what the author has to say could be construed as self-justification and self-congratulation for being so much smarter than the rest of us.
- also age 28?