Nassim Taleb's Reading List

"I grew up under the cultural bias that ‘Dumas was for middlebrows,’ not literary, hence one should quickly read The Three Musketeers when still in puberty, followed by Dickens, then move on to ‘real’ and ‘literary’ novelists like Flaubert, Zola, or, perhaps Balzac, as a preparation for, some day, the Russians… So it was the most pleasant surprise that, during the lockdown of COVID-19, I accidentally got into this. Owing to the early developments around the pandemic, I could not easily concent..."

"Bertaud knows cities inside out. It is a pleasure to read something by a person who knows his subject in so much depth. He reveals how planning can mess up cities, how the market is more intelligent than planners, etc. Aside from the potent Hayekian argument, Bertaud gave me some intuition for future real estate investments: a city is a labor market since people change jobs and companies add and subtract employees. Any form of planning needs to accommodate such a fact. And if cities are princ..."

"I spent part of my adult life falling asleep trying to read Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France , advancing at a pace of 10 pages every 2 years and three months (two pages are enough to induce coma). This book does the same job, but is so much fun to read. The author, visibly writes with an attitude. A lot of myths being debunked. You will never hear celebrations of July 14 without a smirk."

"This is a monument, not just a book. And the beginning of a new cultural program. On a scale of 0 to 100, paternity tests count as 99.99 and written/oral history should count for .01. Apply that to populations. That’s plain statistics/probability. We are seeing science in action: information theory displaces BS, the handwaving just so stories we got from historians."

"Very comprehensive, sufficiently technical to get most of the plumbing behind machine learning. Very useful as a reference book (actually, there is no other complete reference book). The authors are the real thing (Tibshirani is the one behind the LASSO regularization technique)."

"Very clear exposition, does the math without getting lost in the details. Although many of the concepts of the introductory first 100 pages can be found elsewhere, they are presented with remarkable cut-to-the-chase clarity."

"This is a must read as it presents a comprehensive set of the principles and axioms behind neo-classical economics. Binmore is a mathematician, hence everything is mapped properly, clearly, and thoroughly."

"This is an outstanding book on the side effects of interventionism, written in extremely elegant prose and with maximal clarity. It documents how people find arguments couched in moralistic terms to intervene in complex systems they don’t understand. These interventions trigger endless chains of unintended consequences – consequences for the victims, but none for the interventionistas, allowing them to repeat the mistake again and again. Puri, as an insider, outlines the principles and legal..."

"This book, Idea Makers , is written from an insider. It is the real thing on several accounts. Primo, Wolfram deserves to be in the book as an ‘idea maker’, in his own right. Secondo, Wolfram is the developer of a new way to do (useful) mathematics, an entirely new method, which allows us to tinker with mathematics, something that is an anathema to purists. Thus he depicts Ramanujan, not with the usual mathematical prism of the theorem crowds, but as someone who, starting with intuitions, doe..."

"Masterly! This is the page turner par excellence; every new page brings some surprise and it was impossible for me to put the book down. I even read some of it during elevator rides, not being able to resist. And truly sophisticated: Nobody but Peter Tanous would have imagined to cross James Bond with a Catholic priest."

"This book takes us through the formulation of the theorems in ‘On Landau damping’ by Clément Mouhot and Cédric Villani. Villani is playful in real life, his research is playful, and the book is playful. This is a gem for a singular reason. One sees exactly how Villani (or a pure mathematician) goes from abstract to abstract without ever exiting the world of pure and symbolic mathematics, even though the subject concerns a very concrete real-world topic."

"This book in the Latin alphabet makes both Swadaya and Turoyo alive and easy to read, with all manner of real-world expressions. One can use it to supplement scholarly studies, or just to figure out how modern people speak our ancient language."

"The point that top-down development methods are great on paper but have not produced benefits (‘so far’) is a point Easterly has made before, heavily influencing yours truly in the formation his own argument against naive interventionism and the collection of ‘humanitarians’ fulfilling their personal growth and shielding themselves from their conscience… This is more powerful: the West has been putting development ahead of moral issues, patronizingly setting aside the right of the people to d..."

"Now this book is the bible for the field. It has been diligently updated. It is complete, in the sense that there is nothing of relevance that is not mentioned, treated, or referred to in the text. My business is hidden risk which starts where this book stops, and I need the most complete text for that."

"It is almost exhaustive; many great thinkers in Information theory and probability (Ed Thorpe, Leo Breiman, T M Cover, Bill Ziemba) are represented… even the original paper by Bernouilli. Buy 2 copies, just in case you lose one. This book has more meat than any other book in decision theory, economics, finance, etc."

"We Sherlock Holmes fans, readers, and secret imitators need a map. Here it is. Peter Bevelin is one of the wisest people on the planet. He went through the books and pulled out sections from Conan Doyle’s stories that are relevant to us moderns, a guide to both wisdom and Sherlock Holmes. It makes you both wiser and eager to reread Sherlock Holmes."

"This book stands above, way above the rest: I’ve never seen a deeper exposition of the subject, as this text covers, in addition to the mathematical bases, the true philosophical origin of the notion of probability. In addition Franklin covers matters related to ethics and contract law, such as the works of the medieval thinker Pierre de Jean Olivi, that very few people discuss today."

"When readers and students ask to me for a useable book for nonmathematicians to get into probability (or a probabilistic approach to statistics), before embarking into deeper problems, I suggest this book by the Late A. Papoulis. I even recommend it to mathematicians as their training often tends to make them spend too much time on limit theorems and very little on the actual ‘plumbing.'"

"There is something admirable about the school of the Russians: they are thinkers doing math, with remarkable clarity, minimal formalism, and total absence of unnecessary pedantry one finds in more modern texts (in the post Bourbaki era). This is of course surprising as one would have expected the exact opposite from the products of the communist era. Mathematicians should be using this book as a model for their own composition. You can read it and reread it. Professors should assign this in a..."

"This book gives a complete overview of the basis of probability theory with some grounding in measure theory, and presents the main proofs. It is remarkable because of its concision and completeness: visibly prof Varadhan lectured from these notes and kept improving on them until we got this gem. There is not a single sentence too many, yet nothing is missing. For those who don’t know who he is, Varadhan stands as one of the greatest probabilists of all time. Learning probability from him is..."

"Emanuel Derman has written my kind of a book, an elegant combination of memoir, confession, and essay on ethics, philosophy of science and professional practice. He convincingly establishes the difference between model and theory and shows why attempts to model financial markets can never be genuinely scientific. It vindicates those of us who hold that financial modeling is neither practical nor scientific. Exceedingly readable."

"I owe a lot to this book. I figured out the value of intensity training and maximizing recovery. I use the ideas but with minor modifications (my own personal workout is entirely based on free weights and barbells, but I incur – and accept – a risk of injury). I have been applying the ideas for more than three years. Just get over the inhibitions (and illusions of control) and accept the idea of training less."

"Great book. I ignored the connection to financial markets while reading it. But I learned that when under stress, one should seek the familiar. Bravo!"

"Until I read this book, Buzzati’s Il deserto dei tartari was my favorite novel, perhaps my only novel, the only one I cared to keep re-reading through life. This is, remarkably a very similar story about the antichamber of anticipation (rather than ‘the antichamber of hope’ as I called Buzzati’s book), but written in a much finer language, by a real writer (Buzzati was a journalist, which made his prose more functional); the style is lapidary with remarkable precision; it has texture, wealth..."

"I don’t have time for a full review for now; all I have to say is that we have the account of a person who says it the way it was, revealing the types of truths that don’t fit the New York Times and others pawns. When history is written, this will be used, not the spin by the bankers’ slaves and soldiers (Geithner, Rubin et al.) Bravo Sheila!"

"If you want an introduction to information theory, and, in a way, probability theory from the real front door, this is it. A clearly written book, very intuitive, explains things, such as the Monty Hall problem in a few lines. I will make it a prerequisite before more technical great books, such as Cover and Thompson."

"A charming primer on the paleo idea, with an illustration through the author’s own life. I read it in one sitting."

"This is a great synthesis of the modularity approach to cognitive science. It covers the entire field and has the right footnotes for the patches. The style is readable, & the author has an attitude (with is a very good thing, but his jokes are often bland, not aggressive enough). While I strongly disagree with his treatment of morality (I am deontic), I can safely say, so far, that this is not just one of the best books in cognitive science, but certainly one of the most readable."

"I read this book twice. The first time, I thought that it was excellent, the best compendium of ideas of social science by arguably the best thinker in the field. I took copious notes, etc. I agreed with its patchwork-style approach to rational decision making. I knew that it had huge insights applicable to my refusal of general theories [they don’t work], rather limit ourselves to nuts and bolts [they work]. Then I started reading it again, as the book tends to locate itself by my bedside an..."

"But I would like to add the following. This is the most profound examination of how nationality is enforced on a group of people, with the internal colonization process and the stamping out of idiosyncratic traits. As someone suspicious of government and state control, I was wondering how France did so well in spite of having a big government. This book gave me the answer: it took a long time for the government and the ‘nation’ to penetrate the depth of deep France, ‘la France profonde.'"

"Gary Taubes is a true empiricist. I can’t believe people hold on to the Platonicity of the thermodynamic theory of diet (calorie in = calorie out). Read it twice, once for the diet, once a a rich document in the history of science."

"A wonderful book on wisdom and decision-making written by a wise decision-maker. This is the kind of book you read first, then leave by your bedside and re-read a bit every day, so you can slowly soak up the wisdom. It is sort of Montaigne but applied to business, with a great investigation of the psychological dimension of decision-making. I like the book for many reasons – the main one is that it was written by a practitioner who knows what he wants, not by an academic."

"I initially bought this book as I was curious about the differences between Eastern & Western traditions, particularly with the notion of theosis – the deification of man. This book goes far deeper, and covers pre-Christian practices (like Stoic thoughts, the deifications of Kings, Roman Emperors, that of private citizens who committed symbolic acts – such as Antinous, Hadrian’s obsession, who drowned to ‘save’ mankind and other sotirologies)."

"This book is outstanding in the following two aspects: 1) It is of immense clarity, embedding everything in real situations, 2) It uses the real-life situation to critique the statistical model and show you the limit of statistic. For instance, he shows a few anecdotes here and there to illustrate how correlation between two variables might not mean anything causal, or how asymptotic properties may not be relevant in real life. This is the first statistics book I’ve seen that cares about pres..."

"It is a MUST read. Please go buy it. Read it twice, not once. Although the author does not take my drastic ‘stochastic tinkering’ approach, he provides all kind of empirical evidence for the role of design. He does not directly discuss the narrative fallacy (q.v.) and the retrospective distortion (q.v.) but he certainly allows us to rewrite the history of medicine."

"It is a condensed, but extremely deep , and complete exposition of the subject of theoretical finance. No financial book has the clarity of this text. Other quant books do not have such notions as ‘pricing kernel’ and economic theoretical matters. I would recommend it as a necessary piece of the ‘quant’ toolkit. Every quant should have it as a background tool as the usual quant literature is standalone and devoid of these concepts."

"People vote with their wallet – particularly when they do it a second time, when they REpurchase. Those who believe in the ‘revelation of preferences’ should note that there are books one buys again when a copy is lost – particularly when they are read cover to cover. I am buying another copy of this book as mine was lost or misplaced. That should speak volumes."

"After spending some time working the derivations on scalable laws, extreme value theory, renormalization groups in this book, I elected to use it as my textbook. There is no equivalent. I have a dozen such yellow manuals; this one is complete and ultimately clearest. I do not know of a better textbook."

"If you like the thinker’s prose, the so-called ‘romantic science,’ a style attributed to the Russian neuroscientist A. R. Luria, which consists in publishing original research in literary form, you would love this book. Clearly intellectual scientists are vanishing under the weight of the commoditization of the discipline. But once in a while someone emerges to reverse such setbacks. Goldberg, who was the great Luria’s student and collaborator, is even more colorful and fun to read than the m..."

"This book is about Applied Ethics, a subject about which the author seems to know a bit. It also makes you feel like leading a quite thinking life in Edinburgh."

"This book is a great attempt at finding some universality based on systems in a ‘critical’ state, with departures from such state taking place in a manner that follows power laws. The sandpile is a great baby model for that. Some people are critical of Bak’s approach, some even suggesting that we may not get power laws in these ‘sandpile’ effects, but something less scalable in the tails. The point is :so what? The man has vision."

"I spent some time looking for a simple bedside aggregation of the various topics associated with the psychology of decision making and the various perceptual biases, without finding much. Most of the books are excellent; but, aside from this one (and Jon Baron’s) they are usually compilation of original research. I like to have a readable consolidation of the material not far from my figertips. I was lucky to have found this book, which provides a wonderful and comprehensive coverage of the t..."

"I have been involved in the professional practice of uncertainty for almost all of my adult life. I’ve seen and read books and papers on the subject of deviations, with ‘this is interesting’ here and there. I closed this book feeling that it was the first book in economics that spoke directly to me. Not only that, but this astonishing simplicity, realism, and relevance of the subject makes it the only work in finance I’ve read that seemed to make sense."

"Marmot spent years poring over data; he left no stone unturned and is well read in the general literature on human nature. This idea of people living longer when they exert control over their lives has not spread yet. That people lead longer lives when they trust their neighbors and feel part of a community is far reaching. Just think of the implications on social justice etc. Also think that everything you learn on human preferences and well-being in both economics and medicine is either inc..."

"I find it clear in its exposition of the problems of modern psychology. In addition to the ideas of ‘satisficing,’ it displays the major ideas in the psychology of happiness (hedonic treadmill), along with the theories of choice & decision making. Clearly this is not for scholars as it is extremely diluted and slow at times; this is a popular science book. Still, I could not put it down."

"I could not put it down. It hit me at some point that I was at the intersection of readability and scholarship. Clearly the value of this book lies beyond its readability: Gottlieb is both a philosopher and a journalist (in the good sense), not a journalist who writes about philosophy. He investigates and provides a fresh look at the material."

"Excellent, be it only for the presentation of the difference between the pompous scholastic thinker laboring in the academy and the other nonacademic humanist laboring in the the ‘luxe calme et volupte’ of his study. Another of the attributes is the readability of the work. Le Goff is a gifted writer."

"When I started reading the book I was taken aback by the combination of depth and the vividness of the style. Eco is sprightly and alive, something that cannot be said of many philosophers dealing with the subject of categories."

"This is not a popularization/adult-education style presentation. Magee sees things form the inside; it is his own formation of philosophical ideas & techniques that we witness. Magee was close enough to Popper to present us with his ideas first-hand (nobody reads Popper; people read about him). He also debunks a few idiotic myths about Wittgenstein as an atomist (Magee read W and realized that people read commentary on him, rarely the original). Magee writes with the remarkable clarity of the..."

"The book is like a manual for a new regimen in philosophy. It reviews everything from epistemology to the logic of contingency, with insights here and there about such topics as the observer biases (about computing probabilities when our existence has been linked to a particular realization of the process). I am not a philosopher but a probabilist; I found that this book just spoke to me. It certainly rid me of my prejudice against modern philosophers."

"Humphreys is the only person I know of who can work on nonhuman primates, write philosophy, and edit a literary magazine. The latter shows in this writing: I read this book in a single sitting. You may not agree with the ideas on consciousness (I don’t) but you get a clear exposition of all the work from Descartes to McGinn."

"Maggie Mahar had the courage to take a look at what was behind all of this religious belief in markets. Clearly I do not understand how she was able to work as a journalist when she has the attitude and mindset of a truth-seeker. I spent some time looking at the difference between her book and Lowenstein’s: not even possible to start comparing. One needs to be a trader to value her work."

"This is a great book for a refresher in analytical philosophy: pleasant, clear. Great training for people who tend to forget elementary relationships."

"Colin McGinn teaches us that we need nevertheless to master the art of clarity of both thought and exposition. He writes with perfect clarity: a clear, unburdened, unaffected, UnFrench UnGerman philosophical prose. The book has a presentation of the Kripke idea of naming as necessity of such clarity that I felt actually smart reading it."

"This book is worth 4 stars because here we have a literary intellectual who manages to break through the mud in his knowledge. It would have been worth 5 stars had Gray read a few more works in scientific thought beyond Darwin. Anyway I am very impressed with a literary intellectual capable of this empirical and realistic view of man."

"I picked up this book again last weekend and was both astonished at a) the ease of reading , b) the clarity of the text and c) the breadth of the approach! I was looking for a refresher as I am trying to capture a general idea of the functioning of that black box and found exactly what I needed without the excess burden of prominent textbooks. Very pedagogical."

"This critique of the computational theory of mind and the pan-adaptionist tradition is clearly so honest that it goes after the ideas promoted by Fodor’s own 1983 watershed book The Modularity of Mind . In brief the essay is an attack on massive modularity by saying that there are things after all that escape the programming (encapsulation and opacity are key: how can we talk about something OPAQUE? We know nothing about a few critical things…). Granted the book is horribly written (that is F..."

"I am glad to find a complete book dealing with all aspects of consciousness in CLEARLY written format, with graphs and tables to facilitate comprehension. The book covers everything I had seen before from Artificial Intelligence to Philosophy to Neurology to Evolutionary Biology. Say one wants to get an idea of Dan Dennett’s theory of consciousness (without having to get through Dennett’s circuitous, unfocused and evasive prose) or Searle’s Chinese room argument or Turing’s test or Chalmer’s..."

"I read the book once when it came out. Since then I’ve had the chance to reread it a few times, discovering more and more layers as my interests take me in new directions (for instance the discussion on the happiness treadmill goes to the core of the current discussions in the economics of happiness). I now carry a copy on my trips as I can kill time in airports by perusing random sections. The book is so readable as to perhaps set a standard."

"The author aside from the problem of crashes presents an insightful exposition of tipping points. I don’t know why his approach makes it clearer and deeper than those of Watts and Barabasi – is it due to his using financial markets as a base? or his being an expert at fat-tailed dynamics? His work builds on the ‘abyssus abyssum invocat’ (panic begets panics) and the dynamics of compounding disequilibria. In addition the notion of ‘CRITICAL POINT’ is made very clear."

"Robert Shiller has the remarkable ability to think independently and the courage to propose ideas that to middlebrow thinkers may sound speculative. Think of what your reaction would have been had someone discussed risk sharing (insurance) before it became popular. A lunacy people would have thought. Most risk management is like that: we think backwards with the benefit of past history and find these ideas obvious. They were not at the time. Throughout his career Shiller stood for unpopular i..."

"This is a clearly written presentation of our inability to forecast our own behavior and to predict our emotional reactions to positive and negative events. One would think that the repetition of experiences with consistent forecasting biases would lead to some correction but this is not the case."

"The man is one of the greatest traders in history. There are a few jewels in there."

"The book in short provides an excellent perspective on the statistical approach to asset price dynamics. Very clear and to the point."

"I never understood why the book never made it in the Anglo-Saxon world. Il deserto is one of the 20th century’s masterpieces."

"The best intuition builder in both statistics and econometrics. I have been reading the various editions through my career. Please, keep updating it, Peter Kennedy!"