The Best Books I Read in 2015
Some of these books were published in 2015, others are a few years old.
Non-fiction
V. S. Ramachandran, The Phantoms in the Brain. It starts like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat—describing curious cases, mostly related to the phantom pain and limbs (say, a person has a half of her body paralyzed and not only denies it, but goes to great lengths to invent reasons for not moving the hand: maybe she is tired, maybe she actually moved it, but you didn’t notice, maybe this is her brother’s hand), which is quite interesting, but not that useful. What is useful is the discussion of reasons and testable hypotheses, which is the better part of the book.
This is what seems strange: while even an ordinary educated person knows something about functions of the stomach or the kidneys, the brain is usually a black box (expect for the hemispheres and, if you’re Luc Besson, the ten percent myth). Not exactly strange, given how bad we are even at teaching evolution, but still. You don’t need to go all the turtle-way down to the neurons to get results; just knowing what is the amygdala and how the major pathways are working can give something (testable something!) on the stuff like Capgras and Cotard delusions.
Dr. Ramachandran later developed and updated some of this ideas in The Tell-Tale Brain; I haven’t read it yet, but you should probably start there.
Alvin Roth, Who Gets What — and Why. This is completely what it says on the cover—a book by a Nobel laureate which explains his ideas (namely, how to create good matching markets). For some reason, the oft-criticised structure of the book (a pretty slow, post-rock-like buildup based on stories about kidneys and universities) worked really good for me; it’s possible you won’t like the structure, but the explanations should stay the same.
Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Completely unrelated to the previous one, except that both Roth and Sapolsky work at Stanford, so maybe I’m wrong. Contrary to what it says on the cover, this isn’t the book just about stress; Dr. Sapolsky sneakily makes this both a popular book and a semi-required reading for his Human Behavioral Biology course (which is excellent and available on YouTube), so there’s a lot about anything that can influence your behavior via hormones (it’s still a book on stress, so the main focus is on glucocorticoids).
Douglas Hubbard, How to Measure Anything. If you ever catch yourself thinking (or worse, saying), “We can’t measure this, since we can’t measure this precisely,” go and read this book. Some discussions of practicalities are too elaborate, though, and can be safely skipped.
I found Why the West Rules for Now much more compelling than Sapiens.
Both Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and The Rap Year Book are interesting and useful; obviously, in different ways.
You should definitely read Doing Good Better if you feel confused by this effective altruism thing; Superforecasting is a good overview; The Poison King is an interesting look at the Roman world from outside the empire (if you are interested in this kind of perspective); I’ve finally read Cialdini’s Influence and it’s as good as expected.
Fiction
Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels. You should read all four of them, of course. Possible readings: 1600 pages on friendship; a bildungsroman; a book on why Southern Italy can’t be helped; a book on why social coordination is hard; a nineteenth-century realistic novel set in the ‘hood.
1600 pages, and yet, none of them wasted. Every page is filled with details—not plot dumps (needless to say, you shouldn’t come for the plot), but something you didn’t know yet about the character.
John Williams, Stoner. Written in 1965 and being rediscovered now. William Stoner is the professor of English in a minor university, and Stoner is the story of his solitary and mostly unremarkable life. It is also a perfect novel.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. You probably either already like it or think it’s not worth your time. I couldn’t stop reading—for multiple reasons (some make sense, some are personal, and some are Gary Stu-related, not in a usual way, but in a way of being able to make changes that are hard in the real world—including, yes, the dreaded social coordination problems). By the way, if you’re feeling that Rey is a Mary Sue, your reading is not completely wrong but utterly boring.
Echopraxia is as good as Blindsight; The Three-Body Problem is at its best when it lets the world fall apart; by now you probably already know if you want to read Seveneves.
The books I hoped to like more
Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk. I couldn’t stand the abundance of magazine profile clichés (“X, with Y hair and Z eyes”). I also didn’t get enough Musk in the book—there was too much “Elon decided to do this, here‘s what happened next” and too little “Here’s why Elon decided to this not that”.
Garett Jones, Hive Mind. It does a great job of explaining why you should take IQ seriously even though it’s not perfect (see also How to Measure Anything above). However, I have two concerns. First, the most interesting idea (high-IQ people cooperate more) is mostly based on several laboratory games (which probably have many more iterations of prisoner dilemma variants than the real-world interactions). Second (an issue also raised in the Scott Alexander’s review), stronger predictive power of IQ among nations (compared to individuals) may simply be an issue of sample size (an individual’s life has a lot of random events). Do read the whole review (by the way, I don’t feel like there are issues with inverse causation, since we are indeed trying to find independent reasons for collective IQ to raise the nation’s wealth).
Edit: see also the response by Garett Jones.
George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh. An important idea (we should review the philosophy using what we now know about how the human mind works) is really failed by execution. The premise is suddenly changed to “we think in metaphors” and is applied in strange ways (up to “we can’t build models to independently verify our thinking”).
Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind. Really could’ve used an editor. Still an important and useful book (solid while trying to convince that sexual selection should responsible for many features; helpful when giving examples on how to think in this framework). It is also possible that reading Robin Hanson made some of the discussed-in-too-much-detail issues too familiar for me.
Overall, I feel like I’ve read too many mediocre books, and this list is therefore a bit lacking in variety.
