33 Books Like Scale

The author starts with the question: “Are you smarter than my chimpanzee?” When you finished the book, you’ll be so humble to say: I am not!

While reading the book, I was several times surprised by how adults (including myself) have a distorted perception of reality. For example, eighty percent of children worldwide are vaccinated. This means that almost all human beings alive today have some access to basic modern health care. However, on average, just 13 percent of people get the right answer.

Don’t forget that you can only make correct decisions based on accurate data. For this, you can rely on (the many) reliable databases that are available via the internet.

It was for me the first book that convinced me to think and work more with facts and data, i.e., evidence-based management

Daniel Kahneman’s book is a must read for all who desire to understand their mind/brains and thereby maximize the use of the mind’s power over our lives.

In clear language, Daniel Kahneman illustrated the heuristic shortcuts that often limit our understanding and predispose our actions. We all hold onto outdated psychological mechanisms that create self-imposed limitations, and in doing so, we can find ourselves living out self-limiting lives.

Kahneman does an excellent job at showing us how we think we understand what we really don’t. His transparent and careful treatment of his subject has the potential to change how we think, not just about thinking, but about how we live our lives.

The author covers the many biases we all hold and how they influence our every decision as well as our interpretation of our observations.

Someone once said, "It is far easier to entertain than it is to educate." What McRaney pulls off with shocking ease in this book is that he provides a little education in an entertaining fashion. He explains the complex in a simple, understandable, and entertaining fashion.

McRaney makes a perfect cut between the simple without being base and the intellectual without being too professorial. He takes real-life situations, places you in them, gives you what you think your reaction would be to them, and explains to you why you don't really react in the manner you think you do. He explains why you're not as self-aware or as smart as you think you are.

Randall Munroe brings a magic combination of impressive science and fun cartoons that make me laugh. I found this book great fun throughout.

As I read Randall's absurd methods of solving problems—for example, literally moving a house by lifting it with multiple helicopters —I also have a sense that I'm actually learning, if not helpful science exactly, at least intelligent ways of thinking about problems.

Munroe had a job building robots at NASA—reading the book, you can tell he's a brilliant guy—and his charming and disarming distinctive stick men picture style keeps things fun all the way through.

I admire James Gleick’s Chaos. Who doesn’t? It’s a landmark book, a masterpiece of science writing. But let’s be real: it’s not exactly a beach read, is it? If Chaos is a complex aged wine, then this book is a simple autumn cider: a photographic collage of nature’s fractals, sweetened with a splash of Gleick’s lyrical prose.

This book loves to pretend to be a Raymond Chandler type thriller with a hard-boiled detective, but what might be a stereotype is offset by the detective's past and his personal struggle with depression, as well as a romantic interest in his client, an attractive female mathematician who hires him to figure out why three different mathematicians she contacted about the exact same topic have all died recently.  

Pieces are gathered and put together bit by bit to form a well-balanced mystery complete with false leads and a twist at the end. What makes this novel quite unique is the place given to the actual mathematics of fractals, with enough explanation to communicate not only their fascinating nature but also several applications, much of which is even relevant to the mystery. Best of all is the accurate depiction of the passion of the mathematicians for their subject, their lifestyle, and… show more.

Readers of this list may be surprised that there are no books by Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals. I found his books fascinating but frustrating. Feder’s book, by contrast, was readable and usable.

This book taught me how to do fractal analysis. While Feder’s book has nothing to do with markets, it has everything to do with applications. While I reuse much of Feder’s methodology in my books, readers will find it useful to see other practical applications of fractal analysis.

This isn’t a book about biology, but it makes the list anyway. Genes, chemistry, and mechanics stretch our conception of life. Still, there’s more needed to make sense of it all: the emerging understanding that dynamic interactions, feedback loops, and a bit of randomness make life alive. We need more books that lay this out; this was one of my motivations for writing my book.

Philip Ball’s very recent How Life Works seems masterful, and I’m sure it would make this list if I were writing a month or two later, after I’ve finished reading it. But since I can’t list either my book or his, I’ll list Gleick’s book, one of the best popular science books ever. It dives into the science of order and chaos, from the turbulence of Jupiter’s red spot to the unpredictability of weather, with a bit of biological pattern formation in the mix.… show more.

Where The Alchemist is considered the beginner's book on esoteric wisdom, The Puppet Master's Secret is the PHD book about Fractals and what it means to be one, how it feels to be one, as well as the possibilities an awakened Fractal may consider after an incarnation.

This book hits home hard as I'm a Fractal of my Overself as well. The author is a personal friend who used some of our conversations in this book, making it a private biographical adventure for me. This book is meant to assist other Fractals on their journeys to decide if they want to become their own individuals.

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.