Book Recommendations

Ah, the classic, in this book Taleb talks about how random events are inherently unpredictable and that people are often fooled by thinking that their success for example is because of skill and not luck, which is oftentimes no the case. Definitely recommended read.

This is a pretty interesting view on probability theory through game theory, proving some of the famous theorems without using any measure-theoretic concepts

There was a lot of fuss made about this book. You can say that it's a very long advertisement for using causal reasoning rather than traditional statistics. Nevertheless, it's a nice read and Pearl gives compelling arguments accompanied by examples to why we should reason causally about the world. If you want a more rigorous introduction to causality, I would go for another book - i.e. this is not a textbook.

In this book, Taleb describes what is the difference between fragility, i.e. being vulnerable to external influences and anti-fragility (the opposite). I'm in the process of finishing up this one.

I read this one because I was interested in the mechanics behind the wars in Yugoslavia from the 90s, how it came to it and what were the underlying issues. This book does a good job of decomposing the underlying mechanisms.

Easily one of the best books to understand energy consumption and how to get rid of fossil fuels. Besides being a master Bayesian, the late great David MacKay provides the data and statistics for energy production and consumption.

Black swans are events that are unpredictable and have big repercussions on society or the individual, a nice read but also quite lengthy with long descriptions. Definitely a must read if you are a Taleb fan.

I don't care if you land in the Peterson side of the court of somewhere else, I'm not a big fan of self-help books, but this one helped me through some dark times. It has a bit of a sciency flavor, which I like.

A simple one-liner: what does it take for a startup to succeed, what are great founder made of? Relatively easy read.

Another startup book that I read, Ben Horowitz does a good job describing his journey as a CEO with the leadership hurdles that he needed to tackle.

Business logic applied to drug cartels — franchising, HR, supply chains. The parallels are uncomfortably good.

Incentive theory meets sumo wrestlers, drug dealers and helicopter parents. Makes you think about causality differently.

Everyday decisions mapped onto CS algorithms — when to stop searching, how to sort, explore vs exploit. Surprisingly practical.

A rigorous and personal look at psychedelic research — part neuroscience, part history, part memoir.