I keep failing to finish it so this is kind of a placeholder draft. Seems important to have something here.
Top 10 books from the 21st-century that mindful people should read soon
Today has been a travel day, and it seems to be the case that my travel days are always characterized by conversations about the things I’ve learned in my travels. I’ve been realizing quite a bit lately that I often lose track of which knowledge came from what trip or where I read an interesting fact that I find important.
Tonight while at a retail checkout counter, the clerk who was checking my ID noted that we have the same astrological sign, and I said I don’t believe that the stars are influential as such, but it can certainly make a difference what time of year you’re born, and I told him the story about how you’re more likely to become a successful pro hockey player if you’re born in January. That story is covered in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, I said. And we spoke briefly about the books we had respectively read or were reading, and I realized I was short on a concise recommendation for where to start.
And now I realize as I sat down to write it definitive list of books I recommended to people, what is even the theme that we are going for? What ties together the books that James Ratchford would recommend to a person who wants to be a wise and worldly decision-maker?
Really, it’s the same theme as the essay book that I’m working on, and I’m still working on a title that doesn’t sound pretentious and condescending, but one working title might be “everything I wish you had learned in college.“ Let me know if you have some better ideas on that. One book to save you four years and 100 grand? Or how about, liberal arts in a nutshell subtitle, a teaser of stories you might learn in an excellent liberal arts program.
When I recommend books, it’s usually for the purpose of edification. As a child I was told by certain people in my life that only one book really mattered, but I will never circle back to that mentality. The more the merrier, and I think if you asked me to choose one book for the rest of my life I would be paralyzed over the decision. Instead, let me take you through a brief literary history of my own development as an adult.
Let’s start with Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. This book is best known for popularizing the idea that it takes 5000 hours to get to proficiency in just about anything. I don’t believe that Gladwell invented this idea, but he came to be popular associated with it, and this is the book in which he really fleshes it out. The book is largely a set of essays debunking various versions of great man theory. Gladwell points out through numerous examples how the exceptional people that we revere in our society, who he calls outliers, or seldom as inexplicable as they seem. The hockey birthday story starts with the odd coincidence that most Canadian pro hockey players have January birthdays. Doesnt this seem like a very odd coincidence? It can’t possibly be the case that through sheer random chance such as spectacular number of athletes share the same birthday. Does being born in that month somehow cause a person to be more likely to be discovered for their great talent, or is there something else at play? Ultimately, Gladwell walks through the selection process, and particularly how young hockey players born in January have a totally rational likelihood of being the oldest and therefore the largest and most developed child athletes in their community team, simply because they are sorted by birth year, and of all of the Boys born in 1985, the boys born in January 1985 typically larger, faster, and generally better athletes than the ones born in December 1985, at least, if you do the measurement in 1992 when they are all different kinds of seven-year-olds. What actually happens is that the older seven year olds do better than their slightly younger peers, and are therefore that much more likely to be selected by the coaches to proceed onward to next year‘s team, and this trend of distillation continues through high school and college. If the cut off point was June instead of January, we would probably see a lot more athletes with summer horoscope signs, and nobody would’ve ever heard of Wayne Gretzky.
Freakonomics, by Steven Dubner and Steven Levy.
This book is probably the modern classic on a pop culture accessible introduction to the field of economics. Free economics began as a blog before becoming a book and a podcast, and I found it as a podcast before anything else. These two university of Chicago economist (I think one of them is actually a journalist First) decided it would be fun to look at unusual social questions through the lens of the science of economics. In the book, they tackle the range of perhaps controversial topics, including the odd phenomena of decreases in violent crime often lagging years or so behind the legalization of abortion in various jurisdictions. Now of course, we have to be careful about what conclusions we might draw from such data, and their original finding being profoundly controversial was challenged by many who offered alternative explanations for the perhaps coincidence, although intuitively, it does kind of makes sense that if you reduce the number of unwanted children growing up in poverty, you might end up with fewer of the kinds of people who tend more often to become criminals. I won’t say that I think this is the best economics book out there by any stretch of the imagination, but my goal and recommending it is not to teach you the fundamentals of economics or present a useful introductory textbook; instead, it is a book that makes the basic ideas of behavioral economics a little more reader friendly than they usually are.
Thinking about these two selections, I wonder if maybe we should make this a topical list. But, what are the topics? Academic subjects? OK, so freaking Alex is the subject of economics, outliers is what, statistical psychology? It certainly an integrative text, and the core premise of liberal arts is integrative studies – the basic idea that field of science operates in a vacuum, but that instead a good thinker is well rounded.
What are the important core subjects of an effective education under the liberal arts philosophy? Philosophy for starters, and specifically, the epistemology, which is asking the question, what is truth, and then certainly ethics, which is one of two ways to ask the question, what is good, with the other aspect being aesthetics. I’m not a big fan of aesthetics, I don’t think it matters that much so I’m not gonna make recommendation on it. and I think that my own dismissive attitude toward aesthetics is probably wrong, and I probably should revisit it. Most integrative studies are gonna give you some of that through the arts, which I think is a much better way to deal with the question of what should I like.
Mathematics is obviously very important, but which field of mathematics is most important? Social scientists care most about statistics. Physicists tend to care more about calculus. I haven’t really read a lot of books without math, instead taking a very unusual set of classes in different programs. my naval nuclear power education was essentially pre-calculus, never really getting beyond shortcut approaches to derivatives because that’s what we needed to handle things like reactivity deltas. I took calculus my senior year of undergrad just because it was interesting to me at the time, and can’t say that I’ve ever actually needed it beyond again the shorthand versions. You don’t need calculus to understand general relativity it turns out, and Einstein’s book relativity is fairly comprehensible without it. Yet I’m really not sure that I would give you Einstein on the reading list. Instead, I would probably start you with Brian greens quote the fabric of the cosmos“, or Stephen Hawkings a brief history of time. Both cover essentially the same subject matter, and I would have to go back through both to really pick one.