Book Suggestions

[DanielTakeshi]

Thanks for the great list @zackchase !! I shall queue up some of these on my reading list.

Here are some book recommendations, roughly split by category, with publication date in parentheses. (I'm excluding books I haven't read, since I can't judge them yet.)

Business/Tech

• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (1991)
• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (2011)
• The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014)
• How Google Works (2014)
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers (2014)
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014)
• Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies is Changing the World (2016)
• Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (2016)
• The Industries of the Future (2016)
• Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You (2016)
• Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future (2017)
• Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data (2018)

AI, Science, Biology (Loosely)

• Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2011)
• Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World (2011)
• The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive (2011)
• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014)
• Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (2015)
• Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy (2015)
• Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (2016)
• Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe (2016)
• Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence (2017)
• Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence and Where It’s Taking Us Next (2017)
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017)
• AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2018)
• Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (2018)

History + Current Affairs

• From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989)
• The End of History and the Last Man (1992)
• The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2007)
• The Post-American World (2009)
• How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region (2013)
• The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2010)
• Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (2014)
• The Billion-Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (2015)
• The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (2016)
• Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era (2016)
• Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (2016)
• Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018), and all of Pinker's other books which I'm still plowing through...
• American Dialogue: The Founders and Us (2018)
• LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (2018)
• Identity: the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018)

Biographies

• Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983)
• My Beloved World (2013)
• Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (2013)
• Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (2014)
• Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015)
• My Journey at the Nuclear Brink (2015)
• Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (2015)
• Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016)
• Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built (2016)
• Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom (2017)

Psychology + Random (Loosely Speaking)

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (1989)
• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011)
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t (2012)
• Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (2013)
• The Road to Character (2015)
• Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2016)
• Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (2016)
• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016)
• Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (2016)
• Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are (2017)
• Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More (2018)

Other Comments

Of the books in your 2019 queue, I highly recommend:

• Thinking Fast and Slow
• The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
• All of Atul Gawande's books (I assume you've read "The Checklist Manifesto")

PS: When do you normally read books? I find I never have enough time and can only allocate mostly Saturdays for reading, along with plane rides (when it's impossible to get real work done in coach class).

[zackchase]

Thanks for the list and suggestions! Re time to read:... plane rides++ --- falling asleep. Weekend hours decompressing at coffee shops. Probably helps that I don't have kids. I got a head start on 2019 mainly because of a round trip to South Africa.

[DanielTakeshi]

Interesting!

PS: I enjoyed your talk at the "retrospectives in ML workshop" at NeurIPS 2019. 👍

[zackchase]

Hi @DanielTakeshi sorry not to reply to that nice note, my organizational skills are only slowly catching up with the number of directions in which my attention is scattered.

Revisiting the book list you posted, while I have read (all other n-1 books by?) Autul Gawande, I actually have not touched the Checklist Manifesto, largely on account of an aversion to anything that smells like self-help. Perhaps if I were better with Checklists, I would have replied sooner to your generous post in more detail :).

I'm a fan of some the books here (e.g. Kahneman), although would politely express some dissenting opinions on others (e.g. Bostromn, Thiel).

Read anything great in the intervening year?

[DanielTakeshi]

Hi @zackchase no worries, the schedule of assistant professors is far more insane than those of a PhD student. Looking at what you already read, I enjoyed the other two books by Yuval Noah Harari so those could be something to consider.

Lately I've been reading a lot of books about China, given its geopolitical importance and AI strength, such as:

• China in Ten Words, by Yu Hua (2010)
• On China, by Henry Kissinger (2011)
• Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, by Leta Hong Fincher (2014)
• Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, by Leta Hong Fincher (2018)
• China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Jeff Wasserstrom and Maura Cunningham (latest edition 2018)

This is in addition to books like AI Superpowers as noted in my earlier post. I'm curious about where you get your China-related news. :). I read the official Communist Party of China's newspapers every now and then but generally prefer books. [Despite how my politics are the polar opposite of theirs, it's not hard to find areas of agreement when they criticize the US.]

I also really liked this physics book which I read last month:

• Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies, by Geoffrey West (2017)

Since it seems like you're interested in reading about race in the US, and particularly given what's happening in this country right now, I have this massive book lying on a table nearby (which won National Book Award):

• Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X Kendi (2017)

Haven't read it yet but likely I will read it soon.