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Clayton delivers an incredible book for the ages, reviewing the methodology, math, and history of different statistical and probabilistic approaches to illustrate how twisted current scientific publishing has become. This is a masterful combination of the mathematical and historical to a degree I don't think I've ever seen, and while some probability background is definitely helpful I think it'll probably be accessible to novices as well. Clayton also doesn't shy away from the racist origins of most bedrock statistical methods, critiquing modern naming conventions as well. How many books on statistics quote bell hooks?!?! Finally, the book gets into the importance of taking Bayesian approaches to hypothesis testing, making the inherently subjective enterprise of science more explicit and the tests we run more understandable and valid. Highly recommend

The chapters of this book that deal with financial markets and how they operate are exceptional and insightful, detailing different aspects of how they work and contrasting this reality with past idealized versions of "efficient markets." Lo also offers an illuminating explanation of different recent financial crises and possible ways to mitigate them in the future. There are unfortunately a number of extraneous chapters on partially discredited/dated psychology and neuroscience phenomena. These add nothing to the rest of the book and are what you would find in an intro textbook in these topics ~25 years ago. If you skip these chapters the book is a must read. Highly recommend

This book is a high level introduction to work on virality that includes a number of cases that illustrate the potential of narratives to build and gain their own momentum, causing real changes in the economy. Many of these connections are anecdotal, and while I loved the engagement with the literary theory literature there was surprisingly little with natural language processing and complex contagion research. This makes for a good read if you're completely unfamiliar with these fields, but otherwise it'll mostly feel like a rehash of basic concepts.

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was undeniably an extremely important work in his era, but arguably its legacy as a philosophical touchstone in the centuries since is even more profound. After all, anyone today with a BA in accounting or economics knows much more about economics than Adam Smith did. Rather the use of Adam Smith as a quasi-religious figure for different purposes - from justifying US industrial policy in the 18th and 19th century to neoliberal principles in the 20th shows the contradictory readings of his work. Liu traces and examines all of these issues methodically, revealing not only much more about Smith himself but also why it's important to critically engage with any invocation of his work. Highly recommend

This book covers a lot of fundamental social psychology research and a number of compelling cases to demonstrate the different types and effects of failure. There's not a lot of new data here, and while the mostly case-based approach makes for good storytelling I feel like one could probably get the core of this book from one of the HBR pieces Edmondson has written. If you want a wide variety of examples to draw from to bring to a discussion around the importance of failing effectively, though, this book will serve you well.