There's a meme going around to list and discuss the ten books that have influenced you the most. Not your favorite books necessarily, not the best books you've ever read, rather the books that really changed the way you think about life and the world. In no particular order:
1. Let's start with something that isn't even a book. In the early days of the internet I was an e-mail discussion list about politics. Also on that list was a young Jimmy Wales, who went on to co-found Wikipedia. He described his philosophy as a desire to "believe true things." That stuck with me as a very concise way to put it (though I doubt he invented the phrase). There's a strong cultural message out there, given to our kids from sources as varied as Disney movies and schools, to "stand up for what you believe in." Which is great and fine, but don't forget to check whether what you believe in is true.
2. Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So. All about the cognitive biases that plague us in the whole "believe true things" quest. About our confounded brains' desires to see patterns where none exist, and to construct post hoc narrative explanations for those patterns. About confirmation bias, which gives us the happy, false feeling that we've been right all along. About the Dunning-Kruger effect which leaves us more confident the greater our ignorance. Knowing about these and other cognitive pitfalls certainly doesn't inoculate us against them but at least can put us on our guard.
3. Richard Dawkins, probably any of his evolution books, but we'll go with The Selfish Gene as a stand in for the lot. There is no greater explainer of the concepts of evolution to a general audience. You read his stuff and you get it, and you get how marvelous and fascinating it all is. The perhaps unfortunate side effect is that it leaves you with a tired feeling when you encounter creationist arguments and see how terribly ignorant they are of the deep body of knowledge they reject. Unfortunately Dawkins also has the tendency to throw in irrelevant asides which will put off people he should be trying to reach. The Ancestor's Tale is a terrific book, marching evolutionary history backwards until we're at the last common ancestor of all terrestrial life, several billion years ago. Early on, a propos of nothing, he puts in a diatribe about George Bush and Tony Blair. What's the point?
Dawkins's lifelong opponent, Stephen J. Gould, is also an engaging popular writer on evolution, though where they differ I tend to favor Dawkins's views. Not that I'm qualified to make that call, just that Gould on issues where I am more conversant tends to strike me as a little off sometimes.
I like what I do but if I had it to do all over again I might be an evolutionary biologist. As it is, reading about it makes up a fair chunk of my nonfiction reading. It's just so darn fascinating, with a nearly infinite variety of great stories embedded.
4. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate. Another great populizer of difficult scientific subjects, this time on how the brain works at a physical level. The nature of consciousness that arises from the few pounds of meat in our heads is unbelievably interesting and weird. Unfortunately I get a sense that this body of knowledge may get more depressing the further it advances. How much of a real self is in there? How much do we actually control? Perhaps very little. But we seem to muddle on anyway in our sense that we are strongly free-willed individuals, so maybe it won't matter in reality.
5. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Austen is her strong views on character, on what it means to be a good person. The specifics of the morality of her times which differ from ours (the immorality of elopement or putting on a play) aren't the important things. It's the intensity with which the moral characters think about, talk about, and live what morality is. And even the characters meant to be the greatest exemplars of Austen character make mistakes despite all of that.
6. George Orwell, Essays. Politics and the English Language is probably the most famous, and it's a great one for sure. The one that hit the hardest though was probably Such, Such Were the Joys, his memory of misery in various boarding schools of his youth. An interesting comparison is to Roald Dahl's Lucky Break, which covers very similar ground. Both describe a system of nearly unbelievable cruelty, from both the adults in charge and the older boys with their petty tyrannical powers. These weren't orphanages, these were 'good' schools that people paid dearly to send their children to. All this emphasizes the changes and continuities of history. School cruelty still exists and always will, but parenting has changed. There's certainly a case to be made that with smaller families and a more comfortable existence, we have swung to an overprotective mode of parenting, but better that than sending them away to be beaten by twisted old men.
7. William Schlesinger, Biogeochemistry. This was the text for a grad class on global biogeochemical cycles, and it introduced me to the mental model of fluxes and reservoirs. Still the way I visualize lots of things, especially in earth sciences. If the concepts behind this image were understood by more people, we'd have fewer poor arguments in the debate.
8. Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. This book from Heinlein's adult prime introduced me to the concept of libertarianism and negative vs. positive rights. It did not exactly take, for I did not become a libertarian per se. But it did allow me to see the case for it, to understand the arguments. I read it when I read most of my science fiction, in junior high and high school. That was the early 1980s. I hung with a liberal crowd, and like most teens, I was pretty much were sure of myself without really being able to understand the people and arguments I opposed. Now I at least think about the libertarian argument whenever I think about a political issue.
In the end Heinlein got a little tiresome, because he kept writing about nearly flawless supermen and women, the exemplars of his moral philosophy. This he shared with his more famous contemporary, Ayn Rand, who introduced readers to libertarianism in rather greater numbers. Heinlein's supermen were considerably more likable than Rand's Galts, Roarks, and Reardens, who felt just as strange and inhuman as Rand herself. Heinlein could at least laugh.
9. Bill James, The Bill James Baseball Abstract, a yearly that came out through the 1980s. This is on the list partly because of my lifelong baseball fandom, but mostly due to the way it changed the way I thought about truth-finding as a way of life. In that sense, it pointed me toward becoming a scientist.
James's story has become somewhat famous with the publication of Michael Lewis's Moneyball. James was working in a Kansas City warehouse as a security guard. He spent the long nights there thinking about baseball. Specifically he thought about how good baseball teams win games, and about what good baseball players do to aid in that cause.
It's only a slight exaggeration to say that at the time hitters were judged on batting average, home runs, and RBIs, whereas pitcher value was boiled down to wins and losses, ERA, and strikeouts. James noticed that there was quite a bit of potential value that those numbers missed. Batting average dated from baseball's 19th century infancy, when for reasons which are fairly obscure and meaningless to modern baseball, walks were excluded from consideration. They were included in neither the numerator nor denominator of batting average. For the purposes of the stat, it's as if a walk were equivalent to the batter just skipping that plate appearance. Now obviously it wasn't skipped--he's on first base now, and he may have moved some other runners up as well. That's considerably more helpful towards the goal of scoring runs than a skipped PA.
It's not as if this was actually unknown to baseball people. They knew a walk was a significant offensive event. It's just that, possibly because of the long unexamined history of batting average in baseball culture, the walk was considered to be a pitcher's mistake rather than a batter's accomplishment. James quickly saw this was nonsense. (To be fair, he wasn't the first. Branch Rickey was on to this in the 1940s.) Hitters walked as a repeatable skill. The same guys who walked a lot one year tended to walk a lot the next year. Furthermore, it wasn't just the power hitters that were the big walkers due to pitchers being afraid to throw them strikes. Some power hitters (e.g., Dave Kingman) were free swingers who walked rarely, and some slap hitters (Pete Rose) walked a lot. Nobody was intentionally putting Rose on base ahead of Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, and Tony Perez. Rose was just letting bad pitches go by.
It wasn't just the reliance on stats as an evaluating tool that led to the undervaluing of walks. The attitude was also reflected in the scouting reports that were filled out on every young prospect. Hitters were famously graded on the ability to hit, hit for power, run, field, and throw. A prospect who can do all that is still known as a five-tool player. Nowhere on the form was a space to evaluate the prospect's batting eye and strike zone judgment. This was despite the fact that Ted Williams, one of history's most devastating hitters, had told the world that the secret to hitting was getting a good pitch to hit. Letting balls go by led to hitting in good counts, which meant getting more fastballs over the middle, which could be hit a long way. Williams's approach also led to lots of walks as both a side effect and an addition of substantial offensive value. Note that it's a skill as well as a strategy: differentiating a ball from a strike in the vanishingly brief window of time available before the swing must be initiated is terribly difficult. Dante Bichette was a famous free swinger for the Colorado Rockies in the 1990s. He freely admitted that he knew the Williams approach was the right one, he just couldn't implement it. By the time his eyes and brain could evaluate a pitch, it was pretty much by him. So he swung at nearly everything.
So James saw that an entire billion dollar industry was making decisions that could be demonstrably and significantly improved by a fairly simple change in the metrics it used to evaluate its employees. Just moving from batting average to on base percentage (which is roughly batting average with a walk treated as a hit and an at bat) and slugging percentage (which counts extra base hits more than singles) moved you much closer to an accurate rating of a hitter. There was much more you could do too, and James investigated these and other baseball questions with intelligence. Furthermore, he wrote very well and engagingly. Eventually baseball started hiring people who didn't turn up their noses at the ideas of James and his many ideological descendants.
What was important to me about all of James's work was that it was not a simple matter of reflexive contrarianism, of declaring that baseball executives were pure idiots. There is a great deal too much of that attitude to be found out there these days, the frisson of cool that people get from believing that everything the world knows is wrong. Contrarian chic is perhaps personified by New York Times columnist/blogger John Tierney, who proudly proclaims on his site that his guiding philosophy is to disbelieve something if lots of other people believe it. It's a stance seemingly bent on making sure above all that one is never caught in the position of "believing the hype." It's also a terrible way to best orient your beliefs with actual truth. Conventional wisdom is not reliably wrong any more than it is reliably right. And really, it has to be right more often than not. Conventional wisdom correctly tells us that Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart were great composers, and that living within one's means and saving is a path to financial security. Just as it incorrectly tells us that eyewitness testimony is reliable and that the Massachusetts Senate election killed healthcare reform.
So that's a long time to spend on book number nine! Short version of what I took from James: see what you can do about figuring out the truth. Give the CW the respect it has earned. Figure out why lots of people believe it, then figure out if you should believe it.
10. Alfred Cobban, A History Of Modern France, Vols 1 and 2. Probably the first history I read for pleasure as an adult. Also the first time I thought about history in a thematic way, rather in the one-damn-thing-after-another sense I had in high school. France spent the 18th and 19th centuries trying to decide whether it was a republic, monarchy, or empire, and whether it was a Catholic or secular state.
