Ask HN: Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2020?

The Breakdown of Nations by Leopold Kohr (1957)

Kohr presents his theory that the larger (physically) a government the worse it is. He laments how size has been ignored by political scientists, and that the pursuit of political unity is actually the pursuit of tyranny. He argues the ideal political structure is the sovereign city state, especially with regard to democracy. It’s not the best writing, but it completely changed my perspective on government.

The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō (1906)

Essays on tea, its history, and its relation to Japanese aesthetics. Also includes commentary on art, and the cultural relationship between East and West.

1. Humankind, a Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

Pokes a big hole in the popular post-apocalyptic stories of humanity.

2. Rewire Your Anxious Brain by Pittman and Karle

This book genuinely changed my life this past year or so. If you're dealing with anxiety in any form, I can't recommend this book highly enough. Clear, easy to read, understand, and apply.

3. One Small Step Can Change Your Life--the Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer

I actually re-read this little gem of a book in 2020. It's practical and clear. I've given it as a gift to many people.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh (2016)

Ghosh changed my perspective on climate change. He argues that the modern novel struggles as an art form to describe and grapple with the concept of climate change which lowers our awareness of it. Further the book gives an rare non scientific view on climate change from a third world perspective.

Behave—The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, by Robert Sapolsky.

I spent a good four months immersing myself in this magnum opus. It's a 720-page tome, and has an "avalanche of information", as Sapolsky himself calls it. As ever, the patient reader gets handsomely rewarded.

The narrative structure of the book is extremely appealing—Sapolsky starts off by examining a behaviour in the present moment and gradually zooms out. Starting with exploring what happened one second before the said behaviour occurred—the realm of neurobiology[+]. Then slightly zooms back to the prior seconds to minutes, and then back to what happened hours to days before—territory of hormones and endocrinology[+]. Followed by what events from days to months that shaped the behaviour; adolescence, and all the way back to evolutionary factors from a millennia ago.

[+] The appendices in the book contain a helpful primers on neuroscience, endocrinology, and protein basics. Don't skip them!

            • • •

The most important idea in the book: "when you explain a behaviour with one of the various disciplines [biology, psychology, culture, et al], you are implicitly invoking all the disciplines [...] A 'neurobiological' or 'genetic' or 'developmental' explanation for a behaviour is just a shorthand for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective."

Six hundred pages later, Sapolsky restates the central thesis: "the biology of human behaviours that interest us, in all cases, is "multifactorial". What does it mean? There's a dizzying array of factors that influence our behaviour; too many enumerate, but a quick few: blood glucose levels; the socio-economic status of your family of birth; sleep quality and quantity; prenatal environment; stress and glucocorticoid [a key stress-signaller] levels; if you live in an individualist or a collectivist culture, and so on.

            • • •

As I noted in an earlier HN thread[1], my only quibble—Sapolsky quotes the infamous "priming" research by Daniel Kahneman and others. As some here already know, Kahneman has admitted[2] elsewhere that he "placed too much faith in underpowered studies" when a researcher failed to replicate the said priming-related experiments.

My theory for forgiving this: Kahneman's admission (Feb 2017) and the public release of Behave (May 2017) were way too close for Sapolsky to have noticed it in time. Otherwise, I bet he would've put in a word of caution. On what basis do I make this bet? Elsewhere in the book, Sapolsky cautions when studies did not replicate.

            • • •

An icing on the cake (for me): Saposky speaks positively of virtue ethics-based philosophy (e.g. Stoicism—he doesn't name this, but speaks of "virtue ethics" in general). Not because of his personal beliefs, but based on experimental evidence. I was naturally delighted, because I spent quite some time studying virtue ethics-based philosophy in the last couple of years. So reading the experimental evidence on how virtue ethics "sneaks through the back door" to facilitate doing the harder thing, when it's the right thing to do, was a sweet harmonic note.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148588

[2] https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und...

How to measure Anything - https://www.howtomeasureanything.com/3rd-edition/

These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore