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Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?

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Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?

#151

Post by Ollinson »

hga wrote: post #89
asmithmd1 wrote: post #83

The Making of Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, he stars with the science of the atom as it was figured out in the late 19th century and continues through the end of World War II

While that's a tremendous book, especially in the first 300 or so pages on the history of nuclear physics there's also a tremendous amount of fluff/noise, like paragraphs about the village where Lise Meitner and her nephew and fellow atomic physicist Otto Frisch were doing their Christmas vacation when she was the first to receive from her friend and former colleague Otto Hahn his stunning radiochemistry results prov…

I think a lot of what you call fluff/noise was the author's attempt to show the humanity of scientists who some readers might misidentify as gods on earth. I absolutely agree it can sometimes be tedious but I don't think it was just padding to make the already 900+ page book longer.

Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?

#152

Post by hga »

Ollinson wrote: post #151
hga wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that's a tremendous book, especially in the first 300 or so pages on the history of nuclear physics there's also a tremendous amount of fluff/noise, like paragraphs about the village where Lise Meitner and her nephew and fellow atomic physicist Otto Frisch were doing their Christmas vacation when she was the first to receive from her friend and former colleague Otto Hahn his stunning radiochemistry results prov…

I think a lot of what you call fluff/noise was the author's attempt to show the humanity of scientists who some readers might misidentify as gods on earth. I absolutely agree it can sometimes be tedious but I don't think it was just padding to make the already 900+ page book longer.

I don't think he padded the book, but I otherwise have difficultly explaining why he included those vacation location paragraphs. They didn't humanize Meitner and Frisch, or otherwise add to the story; yeah, they were walking in the snow when they came to the big conclusions (and Meitner's encyclopedic knowledge of the relevant physics facts was truly amazing), but no more than one setting paragraph was needed, and a couple of sentences would done in this place.

It wasn't like e.g. the Cambridge labs where so many critical experiments were done with such simple apparatus ... which got if anything less coverage outside of describing the experiments.

I suppose he found the story he told about the village too neat not to include in the book, but he or his editor should have had a little more restraint, it's pure noise. I shudder at imagining the size of the original manuscript....

Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?

#153

Post by qrendel »

kashyapc wrote: post #121

Sapins[1] by Yuval Noah Harari. Currently 220 pages into it, I wholeheartedly recommend -- it's remarkably well written and is full of very interesting perspectives. Credit where it's due: learnt about this book in an edge.org conversation[2] between Dr. Harari and the eminent psycologist Daniel Kahneman. Speaking of professor Kahneman, I recently finished his "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (I did notice it's mentioned in…

I read Sapiens after seeing the same edge.org conversation, and while it was mostly good, I think it started off strong and then became less so as it went on. Especially towards the end it became almost a hot list of current events the author had read about in the newspaper, like browsing through a lot of TED talks, without a lot of coherence to a larger picture. My other complaint would be that some portions seemed less scholarly and heavily influenced by the author's opinions and personal worldview. Not a bad book by any means but somewhat less than the "history of humankind" I had hoped for. The first quarter focusing on prehistory through agriculture was very informative, though leaves me questioning if I'm just suffering from Gell-Mann amnesia. Rated it 4/5 on Goodreads when I was finished.

I found Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond to be perhaps a better book of similar nature overall, and would add in The 10,000 Year Explosion by Cochran and Harpending as another good one for those who liked Sapiens.

Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?

#154

Post by WesternStar »

Lately I've been reading about the functional artist and writer because ultimately they do similar work to what we do. Our work is more concrete and has definite correctness but at least for me some of the admonishments towards Craftsmanship are good. I'm Reading Art and Fear at the moment. On Writing Well is also good.

Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?

#155

Post by Blahah »

A good option is to look for winners of science book prizes.

The Royal Society Winton Prize is excellent: http://www.theguardian.com/books/royal-society-science-book-....

Some personal favourites:

The Incredible Unlikeliness Of Being by Alice Roberts is a wonderful book that describes how a human being develops from conception to adulthood in minute biological detail.

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh is fantastic, if a little out of date by now.

Cosmos: The Story of Cosmic Evolution, Science and Civilisation by Carl Sagan.

Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?

#156

Post by Blahah »

Houshalter wrote: post #57

Now that it's finally been released, I recommend Rationality: From AI to Zombies : https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/

Currently reading this and while it's pretty good, there's a considerable amount of fluff in the earlier chapters.

Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?

#157

Post by maxerickson »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #123
cjf4 wrote: post #19

I think if you're really looking to get a sense of how the world works, the best stuff to read are journalistic accounts and histories. Just pick a subject your interested in, do a bit of googling on well regarded accounts of that subject, than go to town. The reason I think these are more valuable than the pop psychology/business airport books is they don't operate under the pretense that the world's great truths ca…

I also think histories and biographies can be great for high S/N nonfiction. Good examples that I really enjoyed include "Ignition" by John D. Clark and "Excuse me sir, would you like to buy a kilo of isopropyl bromide?" by Max Gergel.

I greatly enjoyed 1776:

http://books.simonandschuster.com/1776/David-McCullough/9781...

Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?

#158

Post by danieltillett »

auntienomen wrote: post #84

A few books at various levels with very high signal-to-noise ratio: Feynman's little popular science book _QED: The Strange Theory of Light & Matter_ is a gem. It's very short and non-mathematical, but still manages to get remarkably close to the truth. If you're more mathematically inclined (e.g., fluent in multivariate calculus) and know a little classical physics, the first 5 chapters of Wald's _General Relativity…

Some nice books on this list - Keynes’ book is certain packed with advice that was completely ignored at the time.

Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?

#159

Post by maxerickson »

timbuckley wrote: post #56

"Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Steven Pinker Bill Gates calls it one of the most important books he's read in his life. "People often ask me what is the best book I’ve read in the last year. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined stands out as one of the most important books I’ve read – not just this year, but ever." http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/The-…

Also read what Pinker is reading (he basically squees over this book):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption

Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?

#160

Post by eliben »

brudgers wrote: post #90

Even his noise is signal. He is Donald Knuth. The Art of Computer Programming .

While (probably whimsically) not what the OP meant, I will attest to the accuracy of this recommendation - TAOCP has one of the highest SNRs I've ever seen in a book. For its thousands of pages, this says a lot.
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