Books by Daniel Kahneman

“Kahneman’s most well-known book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, as well as his seminal work in the field, explore…how we can recognize our biases…Noise is a really cool sequel. It’s what the second book of Dune was to the first book of Dune…Noise is about the fact that while we have a lot of cognitive biases, in many cases the world is random. It’s what gamers call RNG or random number generator — a fun shorthand way to describe all the randomness in a game’s world, randomness that’s mirrored in ours. It creates this variability in our observation of the world and makes it even harder to make good decisions, because not only do we have to fix for all our biases and get all the systematic priors out of the way, but even accounting for all of that, testing the same samples six times may sometimes yield very different results.” Read more...

The best books on Making Good Decisions

Sebastian Park, Entrepreneurs & Business People

“Kahneman developed research with Amos Tversky, who unfortunately died young—I think it would have been a co-written book otherwise. It’s a brilliant book that summarizes their psychological research on cognitive biases, or is patterns of thinking, which all of us are prone to, which aren’t reliable.” Read more...

The best books on Critical Thinking

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“This is another really good set of essays in a rapidly growing branch of intellectual enquiry called behavioural economics where they look at the irrationalities in the way that humans behave. I thought this was brilliant. One essay in particular on irrational optimism caught my eye. It’s the idea that individuals who have slightly inflated expectations of their own abilities tend to persevere longer and perform better. These top sportsmen when they perform under pressure – if they believe they are going to win they often will. This belief makes them more efficacious and the book is a really interesting look at that whole idea of positive thinking.” Read more...

The best books on Champions

Matthew Syed, Journalist

“I like to say that this is the best-edited book that I’ve ever seen, at least since the New Testament. It has become gradually more popular over the last few decades; now it’s sometimes called behavioural economics, but it’s basically psychology. I think it’s just incredible – studies of overconfidence, of how people estimate uncertain quantities, the importance of the framing – I could give you a million examples of where if you describe a decision option in a different way, people make a different choice.” Read more...

The best books on Statistics

Andrew Gelman, Mathematician