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Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

herman.asia

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Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#181

Post by Xortl »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #121
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…

This method does seem limited. I have read some of the best nonfiction books from Journalists over the last few years: Vance's biography of Musk, Stone's biography of Bezos and the books from Issacson including Job's biography. Author's missing all these NF books due to his disdain for the journalists.

I'm a big fan of Isaacson's biographies, but Vance's Musk biography highlights the dangers of an author that isn't an expert on the source material: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/895834554245709824?lang=...

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#182

Post by kortilla »

tptacek wrote: post #39
kortilla wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making an error in my field doesn’t fundamentally misrepresent another field to the general public though. So yes, mistakes are expected initially. But the job of the author is to get enough outside eyes to fix it. Historians go to great lengths to ensure they aren’t just repeating a single view of an event. Most authors do not seem to make any similar effort.

There's a reason journalism is called "the first draft of history", and not the final draft. Also, the idea that the errors software developers make don't have a broad impact on society is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser for me, but that might be a function of the subfield of software that I happen to work in.

>Also, the idea that the errors software developers make don't have a broad impact on society is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser for me

It’s also an eyebrow raiser to me, given that’s not even close to what I said. “Having an impact != misrepresent”.

I suspect I’ll be a long time waiting for you to make any correction to your comment that misrepresented what I said though, which is funny given the conversation.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#183

Post by kortilla »

claudiawerner wrote: post #66
Emma_Goldman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know any of the authors you've mentioned, but in my own experience, not reading books written by journalists is a good rule of thumb . That doesn't mean, obviously, that it's impossible for a journalist to write a good book. By profession, journalism is both shallow and narrow: it focuses on the surface of events in the given moment. That tends not to equip someone with the knowledge or expertise to write a t…

As a funny counter-point, Marx was a journalist and Capital is one of the most insightful books I'm reading at the moment.

Insightful maybe but drastically wrong about the whole LTV thing.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#184

Post by kortilla »

tptacek wrote: post #170
mcguire wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Ask quants if they feel that it’s a balanced view of quants though. It might seem accurate to you, but you’re not a quant now, nor were you one during the era of LTCM.

You are in no position to judge how accurately or effectively it was written (unless you judge effectiveness as entertaining you).

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#185

Post by kortilla »

tptacek wrote: post #59
mc32 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, imagine if even professionals/experts in their fields are prone to mistakes, then what can we expect from people who know little about a foreign subject? Then there are things like economics where even the experts in their field can’t agree on either theory or in data interpretation. If they can’t reach consensus being informed and all, imagine someone in a different field like journalism trying to write expertly…

What book reporting on economics that wasn't written or co-written by an economist are you concerned is too influential or widely read? As we can obviously see, even professionals in medical sciences were wrong about Theranos. How did John Carreyrou, a WSJ reporter, do such a good job reporting on them?

Flash boys was pretty much one sided incorrect views about how HFTs work designed as an advertisement for a new exchange.

It was highly read and picked up by armchair experts everywhere leading to lots of outrage against... not much in particular other than evil Wall Street people stealing muh money.

The Big Short is in a similar category although it wasn’t really an ad so much as an excuse for everyone who overleveraged on their mortgage to pat themselves on the back and shirk the responsibility of financial ignorance onto “evil Wall Street people”. The movie (while entertaining) was even worse.

>As we can obviously see, even professionals in medical sciences were wrong about Theranos. How did John Carreyrou, a WSJ reporter, do such a good job reporting on them?

Simple, medical professionals aren’t equipped to sniff out business fraud signals like investigators of businesses. Given that Theranos didn’t have technology, it didn’t take any more medical expertise to explain that then it took medical expertise to explain Bernie Madoff.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#186

Post by stared »

maceurt wrote: post #5

The idea that only 4+ star rating books are worth reading is laughable. Reading only very popular books is a recipe to read only books that fit into your own preconceived worldview.

See Tweet by Paul Graham (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1085484183466713088):

"If Newton's Principia were published today, it would have 4 stars on Amazon. There would be one cluster of 5 star reviews by people saying it had revolutionized their thinking, and another cluster of 1 star reviews by people complaining it was pointless and hard to read."

and then someone linking to actual reviews on Amazon (avg. rating 4.1).

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#187

Post by claudiawerner »

kortilla wrote: post #183
claudiawerner wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a funny counter-point, Marx was a journalist and Capital is one of the most insightful books I'm reading at the moment.

Insightful maybe but drastically wrong about the whole LTV thing.

I think that's a point if we argued about we'd agree to disagree.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#188

Post by kakarot »

jodrellblank wrote: post #172
kakarot wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Uh, if you're an alien, maybe. Most people want to buy a particular thing - a wood chipper, a paintbrush, a laptop - first. They already know the strengths without reading the review - that's what brought them to these specific products and what the marketing bullet points are. If it has a "surprise strength" which the company who made it didn't notice, and didn't advertise, that's also something which probably broug…

You're not understanding. Wood chippers don't have "strengths" compared to other objects. It's a wood chipper, you can only meaningfully compare it with other wood chippers.

Some are better than others. Why? Because each product will have its strengths and weaknesses. This wood chipper has a great coat of paint which is impervious to scratches! But this wood chipper is much more fuel efficient! And this wood chipper is fully electric!

Those are all examples of a product's strength, not a weakness.

> If it has a "surprise strength" which the company who made it didn't notice, and didn't advertise ...

The whole point of reviews is because we can't trust the advertiser. Especially on Amazon where it's likely from a reseller who may be ignorant or straight up lie about the product.

> Want a bluetooth speaker, you find all the ones you can, then look for the negative reviews of which have poor battery life and which have weak suckers for glass.

Lol. I also care about how good they sound. I don't want to see an absence of reviews saying how bad it sounds. I want to see motivated reviews by enthusiastic users claiming how great the sound is, and then taper my expectations by checking the negative reviews to make sure someone more educated about speakers hasn't made a more in-depth analysis of the sound stage and quality of drivers, cables, etc. Using either source alone provides an incomplete picture.

You're arguing for arguing's sake. You clearly don't have a good method of making an educated purchase, so consider improving it before evangelizing it over well-established, comprehensive methods of making an educated purchase which are undeniably superior.

The idea that "negative reviews by themselves will always contain the full amount of information needed to make an informed purchase" is an axiom of online shopping is laughably preposterous.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#189

Post by atulatul »

minouye wrote: post #78

Here's what I do. If I get a book recommendation, I immediately buy it and put it on a bookshelf. Every time I walk by, I scan the shelf and pick what speaks to me at that given time: fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks, science, history, classics, short-story collections, biographies, etc. If you match your what you read to your mood and frame of mind, you can consume and retain information much more quickly and enjoyab…

Somewhat similar to what I follow. Although these days I don't have a particular preference to paper books vs ebooks. And probably durable vs bestseller may be at the top of the list.

> interesting/prolific readers on Goodreads Could you share a few?

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#190

Post by xoranth »

tptacek wrote: post #170
mcguire wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I cannot speak on Carreyrou, but parts of _When Genius Failed_ make me think that Lowenstein did not have a good grasp of the subject he was writing about.

For example, when discussing LTCM volatility strategies: >The stock market, for instance, typically varies by about 15 percent to 20 percent a year. Now and then, the market might be more volatile, but it will always revert to form—or so the mathematicians in Greenwich believed. It was guided by the unseen law of large numbers, which assured the world of a normal distribution of brown cows and spotted cows and quiet trading days and market crashes. For Long-Term’s professors, with their supreme faith in markets, this was written in stone. It flowed from their Mertonian view of markets as efficient machines that spit out new prices with all the random logic of heat molecules dispersing through a cloud. From this quote it looks like Lowenstein believed that 1. Volatility is not mean reverting 2. The reason people at LTCM believed volatility was mean reverting was due to complex mathematical models rooted in market efficiency. Now, volatility mean reversion is something that can be easily seen by looking at a graph of volatility over time [1].

Also, Lowenstein does not do a good job at describing the way LTCM modeled risk, and the way it failed. In fact, he barely even tries. He just hints here and there about "correlations going to one", but nothing more. For example, which assumptions failed? Did they assume that different kind of bets (relative value between bonds, merger arbitrage, arbitrage between double-listed equities, etc) were uncorrelated? Did they get hurt more by different kind of bets being correlated, or by some bets going particularly wrong? Did they stress test their risk measures in any way?

[1] E.g. https://a.c-dn.net/b/4tKv1V/Forex-Trading-Video-SPX-and-VIX-...

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