Here are 100 books that The Primacy of Doubt fans have personally recommended if you like
The Primacy of Doubt.
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I’m an economist who started out in stockbroking. But that felt like an exploitative industry and, looking for a more positive role, I moved to the consumer organisation Which? There, I cut my teeth helping people make the most of their money and then started my own freelance business. Along the way, I’ve worked with many clients (including financial regulators and the Open University where I now also teach), taken some of the exams financial advisers do and written 30 or so books on personal finance. The constant in my work is trying to empower individuals in the face of markets and systems that are often skewed against them.
US economist Frank Knight is credited with distinguishing uncertainty from risk back in 1921. Yet the two are often conflated.
Kay (an eminent economist) and King (a former Governor of the Bank of England) argue powerfully that the distinction does matter. They range widely across macroeconomics, politics, and consumer choices to show why reducing the future to a set of numbers (probabilities) creates a false – and often disastrous – illusion of power over future outcomes.
They argue that instead we should aim to make decisions that stand a reasonable chance of being robust against unknowable, as well as forecastable, paths that the future might take. That’s very much the ethos of my own books: building in resilience is a key part of successful personal financial planning.
Some uncertainties are resolvable. The insurance industry's actuarial tables and the gambler's roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000,…
I believe that knowledge is power. Understanding how something works leads to practical applications. In markets, I believe you should develop your own ideas on how to invest rather than being told. After all, how can you profit if you’re doing what everyone else is doing? Markets are efficient enough to give an opportunity to everyone but advantage to no one, unless you do something different than the crowd. My list is designed to give you information to develop investment strategies based on chaos theory, complexity, and fractals. It is not designed to tell you how to invest.
The Austrian School of Economics has been completely non-mathematical. Yet their concepts have direct analogies to complexity theory. Reading this book gives you fundamental economic ideas that tie back to the mathematical foundations of complexity, chaos, and fractals.
When dealing with markets, which are made up of people, after all, I have always found that basing your ideas on behavior rather than pure mathematics is always the way to go. Otherwise, you will not know when the markets have changed, and your ideas may no longer work.
This book also brings us back to the idea of cycles and explains them in an intuitive way. O’Driscoll and Rizzo also write well, so this isn’t a dry academic overview. It is a book that gives you both theory and intuition.
The Economics of Time and Ignorance is one of the seminal works in modern Austrian economics. Its treatment of historical time and of uncertainty helped set the agenda for the remarkable revival of work in the Austrian tradition which has led to an ever wider interest in the once heretical ideas of Austrian economics. It is here reprinted with a substantial new introductory essay, outlining the major developments in the area since its original publication a decade ago.
I sometimes describe myself as a stealth Zen teacher working in the business world. I've founded and been CEO of three companies, including the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, a company I helped create and launch inside of Google's headquarters. I'm an executive coach and consultant to CEOs and leaders in the corporate and non-profit worlds. Prior to my business career I was a resident of the San Francisco Zen Center for 10 years. I'm the author of 5 books.
This book offers profound insights on navigating life's uncertainties, with wisdom and compassion.
Chodron guides readers to embrace impermanence and find freedom within uncertainty. She encourages cultivating mindfulness and compassion as tools for transforming fear and resistance into opportunities for growth and awakening.
Through humor, personal anecdotes, and teachings, Chodron guides us to live authentically, discover resilience, and find greater meaning and success in all parts of our lives.
Best-selling author and spiritual teacher Pema Chödrön shares life-changing practices for living with wisdom, confidence, and integrity amidst confusing situations and uncertain times.
We live in difficult times. Life so often seems like a turbulent river threatening to drown us and destroy our world. Why, then, shouldn’t we cling to the certainty of the comfortable—to our deep-seated habits and familiar ways? Because, Pema Chödrön teaches, that kind of fear-based clinging keeps us from the infinitely more powerful experience of being fully alive. The teachings she presents here—known as the “Three Commitments”—provide a treasure trove of wisdom for learning to step…
As a thirteen-year-old boy, I read Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and I became totally fascinated by Freud’s slow, methodical questioning that eventually revealed deeply hidden unconscious conflicts in the lives of his patients. Then and there I resolved to become a psychiatrist. As a psychiatrist, I explored my patients’ early memories. Over the years, I authored seven books, including The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, published in 28 countries now. I have previously taught at Harvard University, the University of Toronto, York University (Toronto), and St. Mary’s University. This book takes my studies of memory a step further and drills right down to the intelligence of cells.
Andy Clark is a Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He asks as I and many others have, how does mere matter give rise to non-material mental states, including consciousness? He explores with brilliant wit and wisdom the intersecting domains of neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. We are both synergizers, gathering ideas from leading scientists and thinkers arriving at new theories and explanations of natural phenomena based on those studies.
We explore the wiring and plumbing of the brain; we are spelunkers of cognition, brain, and mind. While much of Clark’s discussion veers towards artificial intelligence and robotics, my interest lies in understanding the functioning of cells, both neuronal and corporeal.
How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
In this groundbreaking work, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores exciting new theories from these fields that reveal minds like ours to be prediction machines - devices that have evolved to anticipate the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they…
As a professional emergency and risk management practitioner, I’ve spent my career supporting and shaping emergency management policy and practice in every context from the village to global levels. What I’ve found to be most rewarding are those opportunities where I’ve been able to translate this knowledge and practice into training the next generation of emergency managers. The textbooks I’ve written, which include the first comprehensive book on emergency management (Introduction to Emergency Management, currently in its 7th edition) and the first book on homeland security in the United States (Introduction to Homeland Security, currently in its 6th Edition), are currently in use at hundreds of universities worldwide.
We’ve all felt like a Cassandra at times, imploring people to see the obvious disaster to come - only to be ignored.
And even when that disaster as predicted materializes, we are rarely credited for having successfully seen what others could not so easily imagine. That said, for every accurate prediction, there are dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of predictions that prove false.
As risk managers, our job is to reduce uncertainty by predicting the future as accurately as possible. So how do we sift through the chatter and find the most accurate warnings?
This book, written by former national security experts, offers an interesting methodology that can help us do that.
All of these books come with elements of uncertainty and risk – it takes heroism (or stupidity) to tackle them head-on. Fantasy and Science Fiction are nice settings for it – authors can and have conjured up situations that we possibly couldn’t tackle in the real world – but their solutions are often very much what we would go with in the real world. Besides, anxiety creates problems. The more we have anxious, unprepared people – the more problems we get – which is why it should be important to learn everything one can about uncertainty, heroics (and not the pathological kind), and risk.
Incerto, that is Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile and Skin in the Game (+ Bed of Procrustes, which is a collection of very smart aphorisms) are not exactly fiction, but maestro added fiction into it anyway. Nero, Fat Tony, Jevgenia demonstrate on unrelated occasions how the ideas and properties (found in the "real world" discussed in the book would unfold. The overall theme of the book, however, discusses risk - risk-taking. And believe it or not, risk exists in all domains of life, hence, using this book to meditate on it deeply made me appreciate... It made me appreciate life, and all things in life – more than I used to. It might sound like a lot, and it is... If there is just one non-fiction book you will read, make it Taleb's Incerto.
The landmark five-book series—all together in one ebook bundle
The Incerto is an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions, in non-overlapping volumes that can be accessed in any order. The main thread is that while there is inordinate uncertainty about what is going on, there is great certainty as to what one should do about it.
This ebook bundle includes: FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS THE BLACK SWAN THE BED OF…
“You have such an interesting career.” “You should write a book.” Both are statements often heard by the co-authors of Crossing the Line. ‘Algor mortis’ is the postmortem cooling of the body and so when two board-certified forensic pathologists decide to write a book under a pseudonym, A.L. Gomortis is born. While our book is not based on actual autopsies we have performed, we draw upon our 40 plus years of experience working in six different jurisdictions. With our professional expertise and experience we are able to take real-world experiences and engineer a realistic novel.
As a long-time college friend of Jonathan Martin, I was witness to Jon’s passion of meteorology during his undergraduate studies.
An example of his passion, prior to an intra-mural championship softball game, he stood watching a unique cloud formation instead of warming up for the game. To this day, nary an email or conversation is without a meteorologic reference.
His biography of Reginald Sutcliffe not only details the math and science behind Sutcliffe’s professional life, but he also intertwines Sutcliffe’s personal life.
Jon spent his sabbatical to interview Sutcliffe’s colleagues and family for the book.
Despite being perhaps the foremost British meteorologist of the twentieth century, Reginald Sutcliffe has been understudied and underappreciated. His impact continues to this day every time you check the weather forecast. Reginald Sutcliffe and the Invention of Modern Weather Systems Science not only details Sutcliffe's life and ideas, but it also illuminates the impact of social movements and the larger forces that propelled him on his consequential trajectory.
Less than a century ago, a forecast of the weather tomorrow was considered a practical impossibility. This book makes the case that three important advances guided the development of modern dynamic meteorology,…
Accurate and precise forecasting is essential for successful planning and policy from economics to epidemiology. We have been keen to understand why so many forecasts turn out to be highly inaccurate since making dreadful forecasts ourselves, and advising UK government agencies (Treasury, Parliament, Bank of England) during turbulent periods. As simple extrapolation often beats model-based forecasting, we have been developing improved methods that draw on the best aspects of both, and have published more than 60 articles and 6 books attracting more than 6000 citations by other scholars. Our recommended books cover a wide range of forecasting methods—suggesting there is no optimal way to look into the future.
A wonderful read on how weather forecasting has improved so dramatically since Robert Fitzroy’s initial efforts in 1859. The amazing developments in mathematical modelling of the climate and advances in super-computers are excitedly and clearly described, starting from Blum wondering how one week ahead it was possible to forecast that Hurricane Sandy would strike New York.
'Revelatory ... convey[s] the technical brilliance and political significance of an achievement that hides in plain sight' Telegraph
From satellites circling the Earth, to weather stations far out in the ocean, through some of the most ingenious minds and advanced algorithms at work today - In this gripping investigation, Andrew Blum takes us on a global journey. Our destination: the simulated models weather scientists have constructed of our planet, which spin faster than time, turning chaos into prediction, offering glimpses of our future with eerie precision.
This collaborative invention spans the Earth and relies on continuous co-operation between all nations…
Since my first college course in quantum physics, I have been fascinated with this enigmatic, infinitely interesting theory. It's our most fundamental description of the universe, it's been found to be unerringly accurate, yet it's quite subtle to interpret. Even more intriguingly, "nobody really understands quantum physics" (as Richard Feynman put it). For example, the theory's central concept, the wave function, is interpreted radically differently by different physicists. I have always yearned to grasp, at least to my own satisfaction, a comprehensive understanding of this theory. Since retirement 23 years ago, I have pursued this passion nearly full-time and found some answers, leading to several technical papers and a popular book.
Given the radically distinct and often incongruent views of what quantum physics means, it is wise to glean a balanced sense of many views by studying the topic's history. Kumar's telling of the great, decades-long debate between two of the field's leading practitioners is authoritative and excitingly told. The book centers on the founding of quantum physics during the 1920s, the famous 1927 Solvay Conference on photons and electrons, and the thoughtful debate between Bohr and Einstein concerning the nature of reality. The author is a physicist, philosopher, and science writer.
'This is about gob-smacking science at the far end of reason ... Take it nice and easy and savour the experience of your mind being blown without recourse to hallucinogens' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
For most people, quantum theory is a byword for mysterious, impenetrable science. And yet for many years it was equally baffling for scientists themselves.
In this magisterial book, Manjit Kumar gives a dramatic and superbly-written history of this fundamental scientific revolution, and the divisive debate at its core. Quantum theory looks at the very building blocks of our world, the particles and processes without which it could…
I have always had a fascination with science. It came not from school or college, where lessons were sometimes dull, but from books about the discoveries and the people who made them. After careers as a soldier and as a government statistician I felt impelled to spread the word by writing, or at least try. After 40 rejections, my first book – about James Clerk Maxwell – was published and, to my joy, found many readers. My aim in writing is simply to share enjoyment with readers in an equal partnership. And I hope always to leave the reader feeling that he or she really knows the people I am writing about.
Self-published on Amazon, this book is a blast of fresh air. Bold, deep, and engagingly written, it takes an axe to received wisdom in physics. In Timms’ hypothesis, the universe we perceive is one half of a duality, its partner existing deep within atoms and inaccessible to us because of the huge amounts of energy required to probe such small scales. The partners communicate at the atomic scale, where the quantum of action becomes the currency unit of exchange. Timms makes his case elegantly and plausibly, using many quotes from authoritative sources. You may not agree with some of his propositions but it is stimulating, and enjoyable, to have one’s ideas given a good shake-up.
This book explores the ultimate information technology of the Cosmic Computer, and how it supports the Perennial Philosophy, the core consensus of all spiritual and mystic experience. Evidence is presented for a dual representation of information at large and small scales in the Universe. This simple idea not only allows science to be reconciled with spirit, but can also make sense of quantum mechanics and other mysteries of physics, and suggest new lines of research. The Cosmic Computer is an update of David Bohm's holistic interpretation of quantum mechanics for the information age. Numerous quotations from physicists and spiritual masters…
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