Daniel Dennett "Consciousness Explained" - on how or mind words, and why many of our intuitions / common sense knowledge about our mind is wrong (which can be demonstrated experimentally).
Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
181–190 of 213 posts
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#182For me it is certanly "The Beginning of Infinity" by physicist David Deutsch. Its every chapter answers to some deep questions I had about how the world works. Currently I re-reading it again in the 4-th time and still noticing something new and exciting.
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#183The Art of Electronics and the accompanying student manual.
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
God, yes. I still can't get over "the no asshole rule". The entire book makes literally two points: "Don't be an asshole and don't tolerate assholes". It's stuffed with so many factoids and fallacies to belabour those points that I'm still mad at the author for wasting 6 hours of my day.
So the author was... kind of an asshole?
No, not at all, just terribly verbose and opportunistic, I guess.
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question then is: how do you find such books especially as a layman?
I've tried to solve that challenge a few times now. Here's what I've learned so far, from most efficient to least: * Ask an expert; this is a simple question for them. A university library's reference desk has worked well for me. For example, looking for books on Egypt, I contacted a university library referece desk and was connected to the library's Arabic Studies reference librarian, who had a Ph.D. in the field fr…
+1 for looking into peer reviewed publications, specifically review articles.
Not only are they concise, but they are highly referenced and well annotated. As long as you are willing to dig into the specific terms and concepts relevant to the subject yourself, you will find a very high S:N ratio in these papers.
The best part is that you can easily find yourself down 4-5 different rabbit holes by the time you are done because of the easy to follow references.
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#186A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
I absolutely loved this one. I'm a programmer, but I love the history of the physical sciences like chemistry, physics, geology, etc and associated things like math. Scientists did the funniest things to find out what we know now!
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#187Quantum Computing Since Democritus, by Scott Aaronson. It covers an astounding amount of stuff -- including complexity theory, the nature of randomness and information, and quantum information theory -- into less than 400 pages.
Within computer science, I found "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" by Sipser to cover a lot of ground in a concise and comprehensible manner.
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#188 Feynman QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter;
Penrose The road to reality;
Greene The elegant universe;
Greene The fabric of cosmos;
Greene The hidden reality;
Hofstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach;
Asimov Understanding Physics;
Ivanov Easy as pi;
Boyer a history of Mathematics;
Robbins What is Mathematics?;
Russel principia mathematica;Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've tried to solve that challenge a few times now. Here's what I've learned so far, from most efficient to least: * Ask an expert; this is a simple question for them. A university library's reference desk has worked well for me. For example, looking for books on Egypt, I contacted a university library referece desk and was connected to the library's Arabic Studies reference librarian, who had a Ph.D. in the field fr…
Very astute, especially the library reference idea. In the same vein: - Avoid news brought up by social networks - people like and share what's emotionally engaging, so the story writers have a very strong incentive to embellish. Majority of the "news" on social media is either bogus or empty. - Major newspapers check credentials of their guest authors. Those guest articles aren't always correct, but signal/noise is…
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Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question then is: how do you find such books especially as a layman?
I've tried to solve that challenge a few times now. Here's what I've learned so far, from most efficient to least: * Ask an expert; this is a simple question for them. A university library's reference desk has worked well for me. For example, looking for books on Egypt, I contacted a university library referece desk and was connected to the library's Arabic Studies reference librarian, who had a Ph.D. in the field fr…
However, for the biomedical sciences, you should assume on the order of half of the scholarly, published in refereed journals papers are incorrect. See e.g. that essay by a Lancet editor, and the general history of this, which I've been watching since the late '70s.
Why? I think it's because this stuff is hard, so many variables, publish or perish, and the fact that while referees for any field can filter out a lot of guff, they have strict limits in their ability to determine correctness. That comes when the results of a paper are used as the basis of further research in other labs.