10 Books on Thinking About Thinking
Here’s a winter reading list that might give a little more insight into why we get so many things wrong.
Bloomberg, December 14, 2019
Thanksgiving is behind us, Christmas is around the corner and the rest of the long, dark winter lies ahead — and that means peak reading season is upon us.
So here are a few books I will read, or at least start. What attracted me to these books is how they approach thinking about thinking: Each tries to tease out why our general understanding on a subject is so often wrong; they explore better cognitive frameworks that could help us comprehend issues more clearly; they consider unique perspectives in securities trading, national security, genetics and artificial intelligence.
On to the reading:
“Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst” by Robert M. Sapolsky.
“The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator” by Timothy C. Winegard.
“The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution” by Gregory Zuckerman.
“Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity” by Jamie Metzl.
“Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do” by Jennifer L. Eberhardt.
“Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein.
“The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War” by Ben Macintyre.
“Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion” by Jia Tolentino.
“Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know” by Malcolm Gladwell.
“Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence,” by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb.
Full column here.
~~~
I originally published this at Bloomberg, December 14, 2019. All of my Bloomberg columns can be found here and here.
