Top Hacker News Book Recommendations in Science & Math (past 6 months)

All Time Past 6 Months

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition

Marc Reisner

4.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Calculus: Early Transcendentals

James Stewart , Daniel K. Clegg, et al.

4.2 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

James Suzman

4.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Calculus

James Stewart

4.4 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The Hidden Life of Trees: The Illustrated Edition

Peter Wohlleben and Jane Billinghurst

4.9 on Amazon

3 HN comments

A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)

Barbara Oakley PhD

4.6 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

David Deutsch, Walter Dixon, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Carl Jung, James Cameron Stewart, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Robert M. Sapolsky

4.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Steven Pinker, Arthur Morey, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

3 HN comments

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking

4.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

R for Data Science: Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data

Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Simple Techniques to Instantly Overcome Depression, Relieve Anxiety, and Rewire Your Brain

Olivia Telford

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

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njarboeonAug 10, 2021

I found the book "The Beginning of Infinity" shattered this objectively incorrect world view (and a few others). :)

twirligigueonJuly 3, 2021

Elephants form social hierarchies too (which provide 'value comparison', surely?) and have larger brains than us but still they are less smart, no?

They make vocal calls and signals but they haven't evolved a general-purpose language. Presumably they could have. But they haven't.

Whereas humans did. Language is a huge meme transmission booster and we evolved other boosters such as large sclera so you tell roughly where someone is looking.

I don't know why elephants haven't gone that way. Perhaps because their adaptive niche and lifestyle isn't so dependent on memes to start with. Whereas our ancestors were relatively helpless, physically speaking, and thus utterly dependent on their memes both for survival as well as for social position. Which placed strong survival and sexual selection pressures for improved meme transmission and storage.

People who behaved or even dressed differently were looked down upon by their tribes or social groups and thus were less likely or simply unable to access food and mates. So, you're right, there is a connection between social hierarchy and intelligence. But fundamentally it's to do with memes (see David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, Chapters 15-16).

adolphonApr 12, 2021

Iirc this is part of a podcast series in which Naval talks about ideas stemming from a book "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch [0..2]. The conversant Brett is of the TOKcast podcast [3].

0. https://www.thebeginningofinfinity.com/

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_of_Infinity

2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-o...

3. https://brettroberthall.podbean.com/

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