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YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List

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Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List

#31

Post by b_b »

westoncb wrote: post #27
b_b wrote: post #9

I saw someone mention it in a HN comment before, but I'd like to restate it here since it is definitely one of those perspective-altering books: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. The author is a professor and prolific researcher of the effects of sleep on the human body, and goes into nearly every nook and cranny of what sleep does for the human body. He has scared me off of my usual practice of sleeping 6 hours or l…

> Throughout the book, the author cites a scientific study and article on nearly every page, so you know that these are real hard facts. This is almost discouraging to me. If spending too much time on HN has taught me anything, it's that citing a study (especially medical, nutrition, and psychology papers, among other fields I'm probably missing), is not nearly enough of a guarantee that some assertion should be call…

I definitely get where you are coming from, given the unfortunately common practice of misconstruing scientific studies to make exclamatory headlines.

I should add then, that the author definitely backs up the studies (which are multiple and often independently discovered) with reasoning about why certain things are evolutionary advantageous and how they fit in to societal phenomenons. I hope you will give this book a chance :)

Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List

#32

Post by edwinksl »

_fs wrote: post #13
edanm wrote: post #4

Happy to see some great books recommended there. Specifically, let me call out: The Three Body problem. The Lathe of Heaven. And while I haven't read Parable of the Sower yet, everything I've read of Octavia Butler has ranged from really good to some of my favorite books ever, so I'm sure it's a good one. One anti-recommendation (kind of): I recently read Finite and Infinite Games, after many (many) recommendations f…

The three body problem: I found this book fascinating how the cultural revolution was weaved in to the story. It really highlighted my ignorance of recent Chinese history, and many times found myself turning to Wikipedia to learn more of the specific events mentioned. The English translation also includes several lengthy footnotes and see-also's when historical characters or events are mentioned, as I'm sure many wes…

I basically read the whole trilogy at one go. The first book in particular is a page-turner.

Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List

#33

Post by kraftman »

H is for Hawk:

I gave up reading this book about halfway through. It drags out a lot with needless fluff; she spent about 3 pages just naming the bird! She seemed to really hate T.H. White's 'The Goshawk' so I decided to give it a read. I much preferred it (he names his bird in one sentence) and felt she'd read between the lines much more than there was in the book.

The three body problem:

This is a brilliant book until the end, which basically solves all of the interesting problems it's been building up to throughout the book with 'magic supercomputers that can do anything!', which is a shame because it had me hooked.

Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List

#34

Post by westoncb »

psyklic wrote: post #29
westoncb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Throughout the book, the author cites a scientific study and article on nearly every page, so you know that these are real hard facts. This is almost discouraging to me. If spending too much time on HN has taught me anything, it's that citing a study (especially medical, nutrition, and psychology papers, among other fields I'm probably missing), is not nearly enough of a guarantee that some assertion should be call…

I prefer references so I have more information available to assess the validity myself. If an author makes assertions without evidence to back them up, then they are much less credible. Having many recent studies available to back up a hypothesis at least informs us that it is credible, given our knowledge at the time.

Sure, all things being equal, it's better to have the references than not.

That said, as a practical matter, if the author cites 100 papers, and each paper takes half an hour to judge the reliability of it (assuming you have good command of statistics and scientific methodology, and some domain knowledge, and access the the required journals), we're talking on the order of 50 hours to validate the argument (of course this is a crazy rough estimate)—who is going to do that? You may as well just take the list of papers, try and validate them, and skip reading the book (and this is largely ignoring the fact that most likely your ability to validate is probably not that great in the first place).

Instead, for ~99.9% of readers, the argument presented will end up working solely as an authority argument.

Not sure what the solution is aside from waiting longer, then coming with maybe a handful of extremely reliable authoritative results that the reader can reasonably verify on their own. I'm not sure. I just know reading a book grounded in 'hard facts' because a study is cited on every page is not at all appealing to me.

Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List

#35

Post by westoncb »

b_b wrote: post #31
westoncb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Throughout the book, the author cites a scientific study and article on nearly every page, so you know that these are real hard facts. This is almost discouraging to me. If spending too much time on HN has taught me anything, it's that citing a study (especially medical, nutrition, and psychology papers, among other fields I'm probably missing), is not nearly enough of a guarantee that some assertion should be call…

I definitely get where you are coming from, given the unfortunately common practice of misconstruing scientific studies to make exclamatory headlines. I should add then, that the author definitely backs up the studies (which are multiple and often independently discovered) with reasoning about why certain things are evolutionary advantageous and how they fit in to societal phenomenons. I hope you will give this book…

Thanks b_b, that does increase my interest and I'll probably look a bit closer now :)

Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List

#36

Post by mrexroad »

kraftman wrote: post #33

H is for Hawk: I gave up reading this book about halfway through. It drags out a lot with needless fluff; she spent about 3 pages just naming the bird! She seemed to really hate T.H. White's 'The Goshawk' so I decided to give it a read. I much preferred it (he names his bird in one sentence) and felt she'd read between the lines much more than there was in the book. The three body problem: This is a brilliant book un…

You read Dark Forrest or Deaths End (other books in the 3BP trilogy)?

Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List

#37

Post by kraftman »

mrexroad wrote: post #36
kraftman wrote: post #33

H is for Hawk: I gave up reading this book about halfway through. It drags out a lot with needless fluff; she spent about 3 pages just naming the bird! She seemed to really hate T.H. White's 'The Goshawk' so I decided to give it a read. I much preferred it (he names his bird in one sentence) and felt she'd read between the lines much more than there was in the book. The three body problem: This is a brilliant book un…

You read Dark Forrest or Deaths End (other books in the 3BP trilogy)?

Nope, is it worth continuing?

Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List

#38

Post by jseliger »

westoncb wrote: post #25

Anyone else read "The Undoing Project" (a Michael Lewis book on Daniel Kahneman, which was on the list)? I thought it sounded super interesting, but I'm getting mixed impressions from Amazon reviews.

Yes: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/12/22/the-undoing-project-a-fri...

Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List

#39

Post by gonehome »

b_b wrote: post #9

I saw someone mention it in a HN comment before, but I'd like to restate it here since it is definitely one of those perspective-altering books: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. The author is a professor and prolific researcher of the effects of sleep on the human body, and goes into nearly every nook and cranny of what sleep does for the human body. He has scared me off of my usual practice of sleeping 6 hours or l…

I've seen this recommended a lot and I heard him on NPR.

His comment of not being able to recover from sleep deficit because you don't sleep 16 hours the night following a night with less than 8 hours of sleep made me wary of everything else he might have to say.

That seems like an obviously wrong assumption to make and suggests that there's limited understanding of the underlying system.

Re: YC’s 2018 Summer Reading List

#40

Post by henryw »

Yay for The Untethered Soul. I would add:

  Adversaries into Allies: Master the Art of Ultimate Influence
  Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box 
  Rejection Proof: 100 Days of Rejection, or How to Ask Anything of Anyone at Anytime
  Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen
  The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life's Perfection
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