| Must-Read Books |
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Every so often a book comes along that really is a must-read. Must-Read books are not the same as entertaining books. Here is a selection of books that have something original and important to say, and which say it well. Click on the little flags to buy right now via Amazon.
- The Evolution of Cooperation, Robert Axelrod
- Playing God in Yellowstone, Alston Chase
- The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
- Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
- Dancing with Mister D, Bert Keizer
- The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg
- History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
- Breakthrough on the New Skis, Lito Tejada-Flores
- The New Macchiavelli, H.G. Wells
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The Evolution of Cooperation | Read this book! |
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Be nice, retaliatory, forgiving and clear. Axelrod cites four principles for success in a world that can easily spiral into disastrous rivalry, whether in politics, business or personal life. But this is not one of those vapid self-help books...
Axelrod is a game theorist. His starting point is a simple game called the Prisoner's Dilemma. There are two players. Each has to choose between cooperating with the other or "defecting". Each makes the choice without knowing what the other will do. And whatever the other does, defecting gives a higher payoff than cooperating. In any game you should expect both parties defect, earning the low defect-defect score instead of the much higher cooperate-cooperate score. Why is this important? Well, two countries deciding whether or not to enter a trade war are playing Prisoner's Dilemma. So are two companies thinking about a price war. Or a couple arguing about how much of Christmas to spend with each others' families. Or two lovers deciding whether to be selfish in bed. In short, it is the KEY game that governs the most interesting human interactions. And sure enough, in many cases we experience "defect-defect" type behaviour. But you don't always get "defect-defect". Trade treaties are signed, companies avoid price wars, Chrismases are enjoyed and lovers spend hours pleasuring each other. Why? Axelrod's great insight was to look at what happens if the same people play Prisoner's Dilemma many times, instead of just once. The book tells the story of how he invited the world's game theorists to enter computer programmes in a competition, to see which was best at playing a Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma against all the other programmes. Surprisingly, the simplest programme won: Tit for Tat, submitted by Anatol Rapaport. It started by cooperating, and then repeated its opponent's last move. Axelrod published the results, and invited another round of entries. Tit for Tat won again. No-one came up with a better strategy, and no-one has since. The Evolution of Cooperation is nothing less than a description of the incentive structure for social behaviour: why one player should accept a short-term handicap to create a long-term mutually beneficial relationship with another player without the intervention of an overbearing central authority. Of course, situations in real life are far more complex than Prisoner's Dilemma, and strategies have to be much more nuanced than Tit for Tat. Hence the four simple rules for repeated Prisoner's Dilemma-type situations: be nice (start by cooperating), retaliatory (if the other player screws you, screw him/her back at least as bad), forgiving (if he/she amends his/her way, get back to cooperation as quickly as possible) and clear (make sure everyone knows up front how you will respond - just because you start nice, doesn't mean you won't retaliate). Try them - they work! And don't forget the fifth, unspoken rule: good, cooperative, socially just outcomes are not necessarily dependent on the appropriation of personal rights by a central authority, even when there is a short-term incentive for players to be selfish. Any socialists out there? Marx sucks - Axelrod rules! | |||||||||||||
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Playing God in Yellowstone | Read this book! |
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Anyone interested in the environment should read this book. Chase demonstrates that there is no such thing as wilderness any more, and that we must be prepared to think through what sort of nature we want to preserve on this planet and then take action to preserve it actively. Chase has an encycolpaedic knowledge of the US Parks Service, having been involved with them in various ways for over 40 years. But his message is as valid in any country and region where governments and bureacrats are struggling to create a framework for the preservation of the natural environment. There is a strong desire among people to believe that wilderness still exists - that there are areas sufficiently large and remote that firstly they have not been affected by mankind, and secondly they continue to exist in a permanent state of changeless equilibrium. In fact, neither of these conditions are met anywhere in the world. Even if the impact of mankind has not yet reached a region, nature has no law that decrees stability in climate, species balance, flora etc. The most appealing resource management approach for any national park or wilderness area is to do nothing. Build nothing, introduce no species, undertake no culls. However, as Chase so amply demonstrates, that is not a recipe for eternal surival of the wilderness in its primeval state: it is more likely to lead to a runaway dominance by a small number of species, maybe even a mono-culture. A case in point is the role of fire in Yellowstone Park: without it, the forests grow to cover grasslands that were never naturally present without the intervention of the American Indians. So if you want to preserve Yellowstone as it was at the beginnning of the nineteenth century, when it first became a National Park, you have to intervene. But Playing God in Yellowstone is about much more than Yellowstone. Chase looks at the role of wilderness in our collective psyche, asking the question why we so badly need to believe it still exists. He examines the conflict between wilderness and development, between our need for wilderness to exist and our need to experience it ourselves from the comfort of our holiday homes. Mankind is the keeper of this planet, for better or for worse. Alston Chase shows that if we simply duck the issue, as the hard eco-left would have us do, and practice a policy of not intervening at all in the remaining wilderness of our planet, disaster will surely follow. Instead, we have to decide how much change we can tolerate in our environment, both physically and emotionally, and then we have to marshall our resources to achieve that goal. If we want stasis, we must be prepared to manage for it; adhering to a romantic view of never-changing ur-forests is dishonest and a cop-out. | |
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The Selfish Gene | Read this book! |
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Most people claim to accept that we, and all the life forms we see around us, are the product of evolution not creation. Yet few really confront the implications of this acceptance. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins, unchallenged king of the neo-Darwinians, achieves three things. First, he describes in a credible way the very first origins of life, how molecules capable of replicating could haul themselves out of the primeval soup hundreds of millions of years ago. Second, he pushes Darwin's theory of natural selection down to the molecular, genetic level, explaining how selection works by discriminating between the reproductive success of individuals, not between species. Third, he teases out the key implications of these core elements of an up-to-date understanding of evolution. It makes for a thought-provoking read. Dawkins's style is accessible, his argument logical, his conclusions inescapable and important. If you are prepared to think hard about what it means to be a human animal, the Selfish Gene is the best possible starting point. If you want to live a life mired in uncritical mysticism, or if you need to believe in the untrammelled power of culture vs biology, this is not the book for you. | |
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Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal | Read this book! |
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Probably the book I would most like to have written. Originally published in 1980, Hofstadter's mastepiece just fizzes with insight and provocation on the nature of human thought and attempts to mimic it using computers. There are more ideas here per page than any other book I have ever read - all strung together into a coherent world view by means of homilies, role-plays between fantasy characters and meditations on mathematics, music and art. A bit too much maths for some peoples' liking (anyone with any sort of science undergrad degree should be fine) but worth ploughing through the tougher sections for the gold that's within. The number 1 book to take with you if you are the sort of person who dreams of spending 6 months in the Antarctic tagging penguins and listening to radio interference. | |
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Dancing with Mister D: | Read this book! |
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We all know we are going to die one day. But we don't really KNOW. The only way to think about death is to half-close your eyes and look at it sideways. This book helps as much as any book can. Bert Keizer is a Dutch doctor, working in a hospice for the terminally ill. His patients, old and young, men and women, share one thing: they are all dying. Some face the prospect with apathy, some deny it, some accept it gracefully and some rage against it. Keizer tells their stories with compassion, and laced among the stories are discussions of the nature of life, death, medicine, euthanasia and the power of people's desire to cling to health. Despite the subject matter, there is no shortage of humour. Dr Keizer has written a great, thought-provoking book; may we all be so lucky as to have a doctor like him to look after us when we reach the end of our days. "Dr Keiser has looked at death more unblinkingly than anyone I know, and has produced a book which should be read long after his own demise." - Sunday Telegraph | |
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The Skeptical Environmentalist | Read this book! |
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This is the book that environtmentalists love to hate but can't answer. Lomborg is quite clear he does not believe the world's environment is in perfect shape or that Global Warming does not exist. But in the Skeptical Environmentalist he disproves, clinically, many of the favourite doom-and-destruction scenarios painted so vividly by the environmental lobby. Lomborg uses the same publicly-available data as the doom-sayers, but subjects the data to rigorous analysis. He shows how, if you adjust for an aging population, World Health Organisation figures show that cancer rates (other than smoking-related) are falling despite increasing use of pesticides. He uses UN figures to show that in both absolute and percentage terms, ever more of the world's population is receiving clean water and decent nutrition. He dares to calculate the consequences of widespread organic farming: lower agricultural yields leading to destruction of habitat and poorer nutrition. And he dares to suggest that the cost of avoiding Global Warming may be higher than the cost of mitigating its negative effects. When published in 2001 The Skeptical Environmentalist threw the environmental lobby into an absolute hissy fit. They were jubilant when the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DSCD) censured Lomborg for "violating the standards of good scientific practice". Sadly for them, when challenged the DSCD could not point to any errors in his book - it turned they had undertaken no research or analysis of their own, accepting instead the testimony of a small number of the very same self-serving environmental scientists Lomborg had criticised. In January 2003 the DCSD found itself subject to investigation by the Danish Research Agency. Bottom line - this is one of the most important books published in the last decade. Read it for yourself, and if you know any eco-fascists, buy them a copy too! | |
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A History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day | Read this book! |
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If you are looking for a concise, beautifully-written account of all the major influences that contributed to Western thought, Bertrand Russell's classic History of Western Philosophy (HWP) would be the book. Russell starts with the first Greek philosopher, Thales (not to be confused with the French arms manufacturer of the same name). He helps the reader cut his/her way through thickets of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and out into the great plains of Hellenistic and Roman thought. Backfilling with a short section on the religious development of the Jews, he leads the reader through boiling masses of Saints, Popes and Schoolmen and on to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Kant's Categorical Imperative, and finally reaches the sunlit uplands of Thatcherism. OK, so I made up the bit about Thatcherism. But the rest is all there. If you want to know why 'Cogito, Ergo Sum' made people think, or why Hobbes's Leviathan was just so damn big, you could not ask for a better guide than Bertrand Russell. The boy really knows how to write about this stuff. It was this book, published in 1946, that clinched his 1950 Nobel prize for literature. On the minus side, HWP is no longer quite up-to-date, so, it's missing sections on Objectivism, Existentialism, Post-Modernism and Damien Hirst. Whether that is a loss I leave to you to decide. Also Russell, being a sensible chap, doesn't bother to include mystics and religious fanatics (at least not once they become annoying and repetitive), or spouters-of-nonsense like Sĝren Kierkegaard. Come to think of it, he wouldn't have bothered with Post-Modernism anyway. | |
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Breakthrough on the New Skis: | Read this book! |
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Simply put, Lito Tejada-Flores is the dean of ski writers. If you buy only one book on ski technique, it HAS TO BE this one. And I say that as the author of the UK's bestselling ski-book of the 1990s and a former Olympic skier. Tejada-Flores really knows his stuff, and he really knows how to communicate too. He doesn't teach faddish techniques, he doesn't use jargon, he doesn't intimidate. He just explains what you need to do to get your skiing onto a higher level. This is the new, updated version of Tejada-Flores's first book, which is the best-selling ski book of all time. Millions of intermediate-to-advanced skiers should save on ski-school (or maybe on apres ski!) and buy this book instead. | |
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The New Macchiavelli | Read this book! |
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H.G. Wells is more famous for his science fiction - War of the Worlds, the Time Machine, the Island of Dr Moreau, the Invisible Man. The New Macchiavelli is a far more adult afair, and surely the best political novel ever written. I discovered the New Macchiavelli as an undergraduate. I was captivated by the blow-by-blow story of the hero overcoming his suburban childhood, carving out a flaming path to the peak of political achievement, and then been driven into exile because of vicious gossip about his love life. I had no idea that many of the characters were scathing lampoons of leading liberal figures of H.G. Wells's time. His publisher refused to publish, despite a signed contract, and the book was eventually modified and published by a different house. But you don't need to know all that. Just read it as a hugely entertaining story of a man of ability brought low by his private life and society's reaction to scandal. | |
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