Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeteer and Small is Beautiful by Schumacher are two classic, heterodox economic works. People outside the field rarely read them, which is a shame. Both have very high S/N ratios, and will make any reader more thoughtful about the world.
Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
191–200 of 213 posts
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#192Zero to One - Peter Thiel The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
I found that The Lean Startup was three or four short essays struggling -- and mostly failing -- to escape a Praetorian guard composed of hundreds of pages of undergraduate padding.
When you learn that it's a book deal spun out of a blog, the frustrating reading experience makes much more sense.
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#193Mathematics books normally have an excellent signal to noise ratio.
The difficulty is finding ones that are both important and not too difficult or specialized; textbooks are usually a good starting point.
I can recommend Feynman's lectures on physics and Bruno de Finetti's "Theory of Probability. A Critical Introductory Treatment".
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#194The Information by James Gleick, a history of information
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#195You're probably already thinking a lot about technical systems. Donella H. Meadows' 'THINKING IN SYSTEMS' provides a profound introduction to system dynamics that might change your way of looking at systems in the world at large e.g. social, economic, and political systems and how they behave over time.
It's one of the few books I've read several times. Writing this makes me want to read it again.
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#196Mathematics: Form and Function by Saunders McLane
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#197Everything can be considered fluff if you're familiar with the topic already. For example, I respect Richard Dawkins and agree with his position, but if you read two or three of his books, everything else is just "fluff". Similarly, if you already know Calculus, every other book on Calculus will be just "fluff". So, this basically means that you need to be reading books on topics that you don't know. The main differe…
Fluff is not content that you already know. It's narrative that isn't directly relevant to the topic at hand.
This deserves more than an upvote.
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#198I love "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely and "Influence" by Robert Cialdini, both fascinating reads about how the mind works that yield useful insights for UI design and marketing.
Are these high signal-to-noise?
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#199Feynman 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;
From the few I have read, I certainly know this is a great list. Am adding others to my queue. Question: Which all amongst these are NOT high on signal-to-noise ratio, if any?
E.g., I did not find Courant/Robbins as high density, though it is a very good book still.
Re: Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?
#200Lots of good picks added to my to-read list here.
If you can read French I recommend "Petit traité de manipulation à l'usage des honnêtes gens". To give you an idea, the translated title would be "Little treatise on manipulation for honest people". Unfortunately, it is only available in French.
http://www.amazon.fr/Petit-trait%C3%A9-manipulation-lusage-h...