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Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

herman.asia

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Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#161

Post by kakarot »

jodrellblank wrote: post #45
kakarot wrote: post #28

It’s also a good idea to read some of the lowest-rated reviews first, to see what the main complaints about the book are, and whether they would put you off reading it. This goes for basically anything you purchase online. Read a couple highly positive reviews, read a couple highly negative reviews, then read some somewhat positive and somewhat negative reviews. Get the entire spectrum. Emotions or lack of considerat…

The positive reviews are always "I bought this for my grandson, I'm sure he will love it, 5 stars" or "I liked it". Negative reviews are a mix of "I hated it" and actionable information "can't use both sections at the same time, wobbles, and edge is too sharp" I contend that only negative reviews have information; positive ones are propaganda you read with excitement to reinforce your emotional feeling of " I want th…

That's simply wrong. In order to make an educated purchase, you need to know the weaknesses as well as the strengths. Reading 1- or 2-star reviews is unlikely to uncover all of the strengths of a product. Comparing products solely based weaknesses is just dumb.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#162

Post by davidivadavid »

tptacek wrote: post #128
davidivadavid wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Bad Blood cover the tech aspects of Theranos? My impression was that it was more about the psychological and legal stuff. Edit: ... which obviously doesn't make the book any less interesting.

It does indeed. The question you are asking leads me to believe you haven't read it. As a favor to the thread I will make this plain: drop everything else you're reading long-form and buy a copy of _Bad Blood_; it is fantastic . I didn't give a shit about Theranos. Until I got a couple pages into Carreyrou's book, that is.

Haven't read it. It's been sitting on a pile somewhere. Time to reprioritize!

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#163

Post by stuxnet79 »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #120
User23 wrote: post #30

I pick the shortest one on the shelf for the subject. That’s how I found Einstein’s Relativity and Feynman’s QED. Omit needless words!

Then check out the "A very Short Introduction To ..." series from Oxford University Press. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=oxford+very+short+introduction+se...

My experience with the Very Short Introduction series is mixed. I kind of wish there was more editorial oversight to ensure that the style, content and pacing are more consistent from book to book.

Some books I've read don't really follow the spirit of "Very Short Introduction" and are rather dense. The quality of writing also varies quite a bit.

Overall though, they are a good first stop if you want to get basic familiarity with a topic.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#164

Post by mcguire »

tptacek wrote: post #16

John Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much! I don't think these are very good rules. I thought it was especially amusing that this person doesn't trust journalists to write about anything but journalism. If you believ…

John Carreyrou (ok, I haven't read his recent book, only heard a lot about it) didn't write about phlebotomy or biochemistry; he writes about corporate scandals, something he has been involved with since he first shared the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Likewise, Woodward and Bernstein are the experts on Watergate. Roger Lowenstein also writes about corporate scandals in When Genius Failed---that may be all you need to know about hedge funds, but it is kind of one-sided.

How about another example: Bill Bryson. He's a brilliant writer and I really like all of his books. Except for A Short History of Nearly Everything. That's mostly a regurgitation of other popular science writers; it is a good read, but if you are fond of the genre, you'll spot his sources and it kind of ruins the effect.

Compare those with J.E. Gordon on structures and materials, John Clark's Ignition (which is a collection of amusing anecdotes and settling scores, I admit; the closest in my field is M.A. Padlipsky), Peter Ward (Gorgon), or Mark McMenamin (The Garden of Ediacara, some thumbs up).

If you want to know the story behind some event, journalists are admirably well suited to tell it. If you want to know about some field, they really aren't. In a world full of books, reading a journalist writing about phlebotomy or biochemistry is probably not all that useful.

I'm definitely in agreement about your Dijkstra amnesia effect.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#165

Post by mcguire »

msla wrote: post #153
davidivadavid wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think in some ways I've also adopted a sort of bimodal approach: * If it's a somewhat technical topic, go straight for the textbook/papers. If you don't understand them, you won't understand them any better from reading the "pop" material. If it's too complex (say, quantum physics), walk back and get acquainted with more basic material. * If it's not technical, e.g. popular non-fiction books, listen to a (cou…

> If it's a somewhat technical topic, go straight for the textbook/papers. If you don't understand them, you won't understand them any better from reading the "pop" material. If it's too complex (say, quantum physics), walk back and get acquainted with more basic material. OK, I've been holding this in and now I finally have an excuse to put it out there: Trying to talk about quantum physics without math makes it mor…

Is there any specific recomendations for: "Meanwhile, you can give people a real understanding of basic quantum mechanics with high-school algebra and a bit of simple logic"?

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#166

Post by james_s_tayler »

tptacek wrote: post #159
james_s_tayler wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm so better to just overtly state "you didn't read the post." ?

No. How about, just read the guidelines and find out.

So what you're telling me is that I didn't read the guidelines. Kind of my point exactly. But anyway.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#167

Post by nijynot »

miloshadzic wrote: post #6

Here's a rule: read stuff that you think is interesting.

I think "intersting" is often a bad rule too, especially if you've just begun reading. At the beginning, you don't have any kind of benchmark or reference for checking if what you're reading is good or not, and will therefore most likely accept anything as truth or insight.

If you've read enough on the other hand, then sure, it might work. Might in the sense that with some luck and taste, you'll find the good books. But it's still reliant on taste, which is very, very biased. Anything that looks uninteresting, but is awesome will be missed.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#168

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

nearbuy wrote: post #157

I found The Lean Startup relied heavily on anecdotes. The article gives it 5 stars, despite this being one of their main complaints about other books. To give one example, the book talks about how in their 3d virtual chat game, IMVU, as a shortcut, they initially had the characters teleport around because they didn't have time to implement walking animations. They got some positive feedback from users about the telep…

The point of The Lean Startup isn't to give you advice to run a successful VR/gaming company, though. It's to teach you that your assumptions are probably wrong, and you should figure out ways to test them and get feedback as quickly as possible. It's easy to run a bad test or misinterpret your results -- which is I think what you're getting at -- but it's still important to test things, and at least for me, it seemed like that was the main takeaway from the book.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#169

Post by Benjammer »

the_jeremy wrote: post #44
codemac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use youtube-dl and you can train yourself to go past 2x pretty easily as well.

I use the "video speed controller" extension to set the speed in increments of 0.1x. Works on any HTML5 player (netflix, youtube, most random websites).

Nice, I figured I'd probably get some of these suggestions posting this on HN, thanks! I'll check these out. I've been meaning to find something that will let me go past 2x.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#170

Post by tptacek »

mcguire wrote: post #164
tptacek wrote: post #16

John Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much! I don't think these are very good rules. I thought it was especially amusing that this person doesn't trust journalists to write about anything but journalism. If you believ…

John Carreyrou (ok, I haven't read his recent book, only heard a lot about it) didn't write about phlebotomy or biochemistry; he writes about corporate scandals, something he has been involved with since he first shared the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Likewise, Woodward and Bernstein are the experts on Watergate. Roger Lowenstein also writes about corporate scandals in When Genius Failed ---that may be all you need to kn…

I think you might be selling Carreyrou short. The "corporate scandals" you're saying he wrote about are, in many cases, scandals because he broke the story about them. There might still be a Theranos as a going concern if it weren't for him. He's not like Andrew Ross Sorkin writing about the collapse of investment banks in 2008 --- his reporting had a causal impact on the collapse he wrote about.

Read the book! It is a excellent read. There are technical details in it a-plenty.

_When Genius Failed_ isn't simply a description of a scandal, but also a pop-grade exploration of the technical factors that led to the scandal. The book is impossible to write without conversance with its technical subject matter. Which is my point: Lowenstein wasn't a quant, but he was able to accurately and effectively write on them.

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