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

I started reading this book and am half way through and, although I'm not finished, I would have to disagree with you. This book is mostly pop-psychology with overstated implications and reliance on low-stake experiments that can not always be replicated. Also, the book glosses over actual results by saying "the participants were more likely to x than y". How much more likely?

A typical example of psychological discovery discussed in the book: 1. Ask someone to give 3 or 10 examples of when they were assertive 2. Ask someone to grade themselves on how assertive they are

And the study shows that people who were asked for 3 examples of how assertive they are were more likely to grade themselves as more assertive that those who were asked for 10 examples due to recollection bias.

I mean, I could see how this is sort of interesting but it's such low stakes. How would anyone be able to grade themselves from 1 - 10 on how assertive they are? What does that even mean? What implications does this have on anything?

I don't know. Psych experiments that are so glorified in the book seem to me to be too convenient and a form of story telling, which is fine except for the troubling implications that our cognitive biases and inefficiencies somehow trump our free will and freedom. But then again, I have my own biases.

The best book I've read in the last 5 years is David Simon's, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets"...if you've watched The Wire, half of its material is derived from this real life account of being embedded in Baltimore's homicide unit: https://books.google.com/books/about/Homicide.html?id=N8LS0b...

All of Atul Gawande's books, notably:

The Checklist Manifesto [1]: http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance: http://atulgawande.com/book/better/

[1] You can read the essay that this book is based on in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist

Most useful book I've ever read, period. Changed the way I think about decisions and influenced how I think about building products.

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.

Functional programming in Scala by Paul Chiusano and Rúnar Bjarnason. Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World by Joe Armstrong. Even if you have no desire to learn Scala, Erlang, or functional programming, I still think most people would enjoy these books. Every page of these books contain a golden nugget.