Everyone hates them for some reason, but then again I don't know anyone who uses them the way they were designed to be used. From economics to biology or mathematics or political science, they're a great way to develop frameworks for thinking about entire bodies of knowledge. People spend years of their lives creating them, and I can consume this knowledge for only 50-200$? Sign me up any time.
- Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives (John C. Hull): https://www.amazon.ca/Options-Futures-Other-Derivatives-10th...
- Financial Accounting Theory (Scott & O'Brien): https://www.amazon.ca/Financial-Accounting-Theory-8th-Editio...
- Networks (Mark Newman): https://www.amazon.ca/Networks-Mark-Newman/dp/0198805098/
Approximately in that order below:
Too many stat mech books, but honestly favorite is this old one. If you want a real challenge try to read to the OG Gibbs. Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics
Lectures On Phase Transitions And The Renormalization Group
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms
Information, Physics, and Computation
Elements of Information Theory
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
The Nature of Computation
Principles of Cyber-Physical Systems
Introduction to Embedded Systems, Second Edition: A Cyber-Physical Systems Approach
Data-Driven Science and Engineering: Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control
An Invitation to Applied Category Theory: Seven Sketches in Compositionality
BTW, feel free to ask for recommendations in physics, especially stat mech, simulation/computation, condensed matter theory
If you're into science, you might like Quanta Magazine. I don't think there's any science journalism that will ever not bother me, but this one tries really hard. I happen to know that Jennifer Oullete in particular puts a lot of hard work into her articles
You could just look at Ivy League universities, or maybe the top N universities for undergraduates in field X.
One can start from the least rigorous and work up to the more rigorous courses. Even some of the top schools may have honors and non-honors versions of courses.
One thing I'll do once in a while is visit a university bookstore to get a sense of what's being used in classrooms. I ended up with a lot of my law textbooks like that. In law, I've really loved:
- Canadian Administrative Law (Guy Régimbald): https://store.lexisnexis.ca/en/categories/shop-by-jurisdicti...
- Tort Law (Horsey & Rackley): https://www.amazon.ca/Tort-Law-Kirsty-Horsey-dp-019886776X/d...
- Handbook of Canadian Higher Education Law (Shanahan, Nilso & Broshko): https://www.amazon.ca/Handbook-Canadian-Higher-Education-Law...
I've been on a maths, stats and ML/AI binge in the last year, and so far my top picks are:
- Calculus (Stewart): https://www.amazon.ca/Calculus-James-Stewart/dp/1337624187/
- Linear Algebra Done Right (Sheldon Axler): https://www.amazon.ca/Linear-Algebra-Right-Undergraduate-Mat...
- An Illustrative Guide to Multivariable and Vector Calculus (Miklavcic): https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/3030334589/
- Probability: A Graduate Course (Allan Gut): https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1461447070/
- Statistical Rethinking (McElreath): https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/036713991X/
- An Introduction to Statistical Learning (James, Witten, Hastie & Tibshirani): https://www.amazon.ca/Introduction-Statistical-Learning-Appl...
- Regression and Other Stories (Gelman, Hill & Vehtari): https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1107676517/
- Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models (Gelman & Hill): https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/052168689X/
- Statistical and Data Analysis for Financial Engineering (Ruppert & Matteson): https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1493926136/
- Reinforcement Learning (Sutton & Barto): https://www.amazon.ca/Reinforcement-Learning-Introduction-Ri...
- Deep Learning (Godfellow, Bengio & Courville): https://www.amazon.ca/Deep-Learning-Ian-Goodfellow/dp/026203...
- Networks (Mark Newman): https://www.amazon.ca/Networks-Mark-Newman/dp/0198805098/
I have a ton of textbooks in my wishlist that seem noteworthy and interesting, but that I haven't gotten the chance to read yet: no promises, but you might find something in there https://www.amazon.ca/hz/wishlist/ls/1FWW046Q3RWWM
My area of expertise is biochemistry, life science, immunology, cell bio... So if anyone wants good recommendations in these topics I have plenty! :)
Either way, the first thing you have to know is that it's a huge huge field, and you won't find any single book that introduces you well to every subtopic (it's just impossible), and the amount of background/support knowledge you need in order to be able to fully and critically appreciate even basic research papers is pretty enormous.
General biochem and cell bio:
- https://www.amazon.com/Biochemistry-Reginald-H-Garrett/dp/13...
- https://www.amazon.ca/Molecular-Cell-Biology-Harvey-Lodish-d...
- https://www.amazon.ca/Lehninger-Principles-Biochemistry-Davi...
Biotech:
- https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biotechnology-Principles-Ap...
Cell signaling:
- https://www.amazon.com/Cell-Signaling-Wendell-Lim/dp/0815342...
Immunology:
- https://www.amazon.ca/Janeways-Immunobiology-Paperback-Versi...
- https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Inflammation-Charles-Ser...
Microbiology:
- https://www.amazon.com/Jawetz-Melnick-Adelbergs-Medical-Micr...
- https://www.amazon.com/Microbiology-Laboratory-Fundamentals-...
Embryology:
- https://www.amazon.com/Developmental-Biology-Michael-J-F-Bar...
Haematology:
- https://www.amazon.com/Hematology-Clinical-Practice-Fifth-Me...
Genetics and bioinformatics:
- I actually have never found a great textbook, please let me know if you know of any.
Anatomy & physiology (leaning more towards human & medical):
- https://www.amazon.ca/Human-Anatomy-Physiology-Elaine-Marieb...
- https://www.amazon.ca/Guyton-Hall-Textbook-Medical-Physiolog...
- https://www.amazon.ca/Medical-Physiology-Walter-Boron-PhD-dp...
Basic/general medicine (don't shoot me I'm trying to keep the list short and general):
- https://www.amazon.ca/Robbins-Cotran-Pathologic-Basis-Diseas...
- https://www.amazon.ca/Cecil-Essentials-Medicine-Edward-FIDSA...
- https://www.amazon.ca/Harrisons-Principles-Internal-Medicine...
Neuroanatomy (deserves a mention, one of my all time favs):
- https://www.amazon.ca/Neuroanatomy-through-Clinical-Cases-Bl...
USMLE step 1 prep materials are surprisingly good outlines, but not great for an introduction on their own:
- https://www.amazon.ca/First-USMLE-Step-Thirty-first/dp/12604...
Cancer:
- I don't know of any good textbooks on the subject, but once you have some of the fundamentals of biochem under your belt, start reading the papers referenced here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer
That's how I ended up with Practical Homicide Investigation Tactics, Procedures, and Forensic Techniques. It's amazing.
There's one downside however -- college textbooks are incentivized to be comprehensive and hence they will often cover chapters on topics that don't matter or ought to be given less weight in the larger scheme of things. If you are uninitiated in a particular subject, you will be hard pressed to discern what's important and what's not. Many textbooks also tend to cover textbook theory which are useful for understanding the subject matter but not useful in the real world (e.g. the determinant method for solving linear systems of equations is almost never used in the real world)
Textbook authors are also incentivized to add chapters every couple of years so that new editions can be published. Sometimes those new chapters are important, sometimes they are not.
Textbooks are a starting point but they generally should not be read end-to-end. A better way to read them is the guidance of an instructor or a (online?) community of practitioners that can tell you what to pay attention to and what chapters to skip.
Here's some of my favorites:
- Statistical Rethinking : Richard McElreath (also great Twitter and online lectures)
- Introduction to Quantum Mechanics: Griffiths (anything he writes is good)
- Classical Dynamics of Particles and System : Stephen Thornton
His Electromagnetism book was also really good.
I was convinced that I wanted to go into aerospace, mechanical, or software engineering before I read this book. They all made logical sense, within their layer of abstraction, compared to electronics which seemed closer to a dark-art. Granted I still sometimes see it that way, but with much less fear. No-one I knew could concisely explain how electronics worked to me (outside of some very rudimentary explanations), so this book felt like I was reading occult material.
I devoured it cover-to-cover in the space of a few of months, completed every exercise, and either simulated or built all the circuits that I thought to be interesting or useful. I still have a shelf full of stripboard circuits from that time that I still reference for projects. The local dump workers knew me by name, as I was there every weekend to scavenge old toasters and microwaves and gut them for parts. To this day it's still some of the most fulfilling engineering work I think I've ever done, and my personal edition is now dog-eared like a good Christians' bible.
This makes them practically impossible to read on an e-reader and even reading on a tablet isn't ideal. Meanwhile the physical copies can often be large and unwieldy.
If there was an easy way to sit and read them in bed, on the bus etc. like there is with normal books and my Kindle then I'm sure I'd read a great many more.
Alternatively, you could see if there exists a loose-leaf copy of your textbook.
Reading on the bus gets you barely any mileage out of the textbook - you are better off reading a popular book on the subject.
(And if you want to know why they sell the same books for less money to different markets, pick up Principles of Economics by Mankiw)
also some subreddits, like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ - especially the weekly digests.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html - 'astronomy picture of the day' this one has lots of links to wikipedia, fun to follow them.
http://wikiroulette.co/ - random wikipedia page, sometimes interesting to click on the links.
and of course the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page the featured articls, etc.
youtube channels like this one
Lots of 'casual' content there but I'm not sure if this was what you meant precisely.
Economist is a rare source in that each time they have an article about a topic I know I have fairly good grap of, they generally offer a fairly _correct_(!) popular summary of the issues. This is why I have a fairly high trust of those articles where the subject matter is less familiar.
Some Overdrive libraries subscribe to the magazine, so you may be able to read it via Overdrive if your local library has it.
https://shop.economist.com/products/the-economist-style-guid...
Anyways, in addition to reading blogs that get promoted here HN.
I watch a lot instructional / educational videos on YouTube.
Been enjoying, for example, learning Excel from this person: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJtUOos_MwJa_Ewii-R3cJA
I've also been enjoying channels like number numberphile and/or computerphile as well.
The biggest obstacle to acquiring new knowledge is getting past the "I have no clue what this means" on your own. This helps to get you through it and not to give up.
For a lot of other topics around general knowledge it can be very interesting to browse the various levels of 'Vital articles' on Wikipedia (ie, there are 11 Level 1 Vital articles, around 45K Level 5 Vital articles and around 1K Level 3 Vital articles). I like browsing the Level 3 Vital articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles when I'm looking for something to read.
- New York Times (in-depth news). - Financial Times (business news). - Library for new books about interesting topics. Currently, I am reading "The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance", which I borrowed from the local library. - Medium and bunch of newsletters about specific topics.
It’s not perfect but it gives me a decent idea of what I might like to read next.
I live in the Bay Area and subscribe to the Mercury News. I enjoy reading through the ‘e-edition’ on my iPad every morning (though you _could_ still get a physical copy if you’d appreciate the ability to disconnect for 1/2 an hour)
I know I’ll get the important national and international news (so less need for doomscrolling to satisfy my FOMO), learn what’s going on in city and state politics (which I see _very_ little of online), and get a bit of pop culture and local entertainment events.
I often learn things I value that I’d never ‘seek out’ online, and would likely never make it past my social media filter bubble.
Its growing faster than my RSS feed atm and that has over 1k feeds in it.
I should probably add more useful information to the opened page. Right now it says "You will see more content from 2 RSS feeds and 3 people that recommended this". But I could add links to the item details page that has related recommendations. Or I could add links to the RSS feeds so you could explore them more.
To give an an example, in the front page of hacker news I only see what is boiling i.e what caught the attention of the masses. I hardly learn new stuff. I think this is true for any crowd-based news site rating system.
In contrast, when I open up my RSS reader and see posts of the blogs I subscribed to, I often learn new things that perhaps were simply not very interesting to the common HN in the same period of time, but are enriching to my general or technical knowledge.
The idea is to accumulate 300 or so low-frequency blogs, so that each day you would have a few posts to read from interesting people. Low frequency is good because the signal-to-noise ratio is often better.
Plus another tool for saving extra stuff (useful web apps, recipes and the like) I find there or in other places is really handy too, think like (now Mozilla's) Pocket or Raindrop, which allows you to sort your links in categories and access and sync them between your devices.
What does your list look like?
Would have shared RSS subscription list if was easily possible, however I use the newsboat [1] program and read the aggregate in the terminal. It's stored locally.
If you have a way to share you list, I'd love to see it :)
I take it newsboat doesn't have a way to export its list of feeds?
Lesswrong.com - thinking rationally
The Economist's World this week (and other content related to my liking) - news and current affairs
PG's essays
I also subscribe to a few newsletters like Farnam Streets, James Clear, Ness Labs
I find the news to be too event-oriented.
I use RSS to keep up to date with some tech fields.
>YouTube channels:
Forgotten Weapons (world-class firearms history)
The Tim Traveller (general European infrastructure et al history)
Project Farm (one-man Consumer Reports-esque testing)
MedCram (excellent in-depth scientific but accessible medical information)
Tasting History with Max Miller (culinary history)
Two Minute Papers (covers recent scientific papers; rather tech-related but I see no other coverage of most of the stuff he touches on)
U.S. Department of State (the press briefings are immensely insightful and not a circus like the White House equivalents)
>Other:
Standard Ebooks (if its in the public domain and somebody bothered to professionally process it, it's probably worth reading!)
Father Stephen de Young's The Whole Counsel of God Biblical lectures (In my opinion, easily the best English-language dissection of the Bible ever written or recorded. Presented from an Orthodox perspective but frankly immensely useful for anyone interested in the Bible generally.) (Also, not to be confused with his related but separate blog of the same name.)
Drudge Report (obviously a hard right bias, but nevertheless more insightful than most mainstream publications, plus the formatting is such that you can digest a day's news in 30 seconds from skimming around the page)
Middle East Eye (a rare seemingly independent middle east media outlet. Broadly left-wing bias.)
4chan (quite frankly, while there is a lot of noise, there's also signal buried in there that simply isn't possible with other mediums. For example, the photography board's current film thread: https://boards.4channel.org/p/thread/3971021 )
Science, current affairs, history, films, literature that was written in the last 300 years or so, geography pertaining to the history, current affairs, news, etc.
Read lots of trivia, do trivia quizzes, etc. Lots of general knowledge looks like trivia, but the trivia part of it is what binds lots of those little bits of general knowledge together, making one one connected edifice.
For some insight, go to YouTube and look a James Burke's "Connections" series. He used to have a monthly 'Connections' column in the Scientific American magazine too.
They're organized in levels, with the 10 most general articles (e.g. Human, Language, Life, Mathematics, Philosophy) on level 1 and then sort of branching out, level 2 consisting of 100 articles (e.g. Civilization, Literature, Logic, Psychology, Arithmetic) and so on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level...
For local and world news I often glance at the homepage of a local media site hln.be. It is very clickbaity and low-quality but they usually are first when it comes to breaking stories. I use it as a news barometer to see if something is going on or not.
When some topic interests me I tend to go on DDG/Wikipedia rabbit holes and I often buy non-fiction books on topics of sustained interest.
> I miss reading broader content, like self improvement, professional development, history, culture, etc.
Plenty of that here, IMO. At least more than I have time to devote to reading it.
This stuff, at its heart, imo, is very meta -- as in, how the world actually works.
He often refers to what he considers to be good books -- there are lists online -- not sure if they are accurate or not -- but those books often drill down on various more specific topics, like "the investment theory of politics".
If you're American, you will probably end up super depressed for a couple weeks.
But I feel like understanding how the world works is a kind of foundation for everything else.
Science and biology and all that is important and even more fundamental, but Chomsky stuff attacks all of your core assumptions even about those things.
Like, I read his opinion on how he was shitting all over gpt-3 or something -- not for the reasons you might think. That happens to be a nerdy topic that might show up here on HN, but of course crosses over into ai, and language / thought / human nature stuff.
So if you've ever had an aha or whoa-type moment -- while reading or being in a new situation, like your first trip overseas, there tends to be a lot of that.
So it's not always new info, but new and more accurate ways to understand what you already knew -- or thought you already knew.
I pay particular attention to books that are reviewed in these and other publications. If a book is well-reviewed and seems interesting, I'll buy it and read it.
Otherwise, I'll pick a topic of interest and buy a short introduction: OUP's Very Short Introductions to X [0] are quite good, although as with all summaries, it's worth keeping mind that it's the view of one academic. I'll read the introductory text and then use its bibiography to find my way to other books. Bibliographies are very useful.
[0]: https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/v/very-short-...
2. Pocket : https://getpocket.com/explore
3. Reddit
4. Serious websites & books on specific matters i.e. I like to read on Philosophy, so I read websites & books on that (such as plato.stanford)
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/
[2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/12/de...
And I follow my own advice (https://antipaucity.com/2012/12/10/finding-your-niche/#.Ybit...): "grab the first book [or magazine] in the history section that starts with an “A” in the title – then go for “B”, “C”, etc. Then do it from some other section of the shelves – maybe relationships, scifi, teen, romance, home improvement, etc"
Also blogs of Bruce Schneier and Brian Krebs. I don't always read everything, but I do read some, and even just the titles are interesting.
And I echo what others have said about RSS feeds in general.
Washington Post
Wikipedia
The Guardian
Talking Points Memo
The New Yorker
The Atlantic
Hacker News
NPR
BBC
History, biography, public intellectuals such as David Graeber or Chomsky
Library of America
whatever comes up when I google for stuff I don't know about
I still read the Guardian regularly, and glance at headlines on the Washington Post, but I've cancelled my subscriptions to those for now.
I pay for Medium but mainly read tech-related content ... I keep looking for substantial articles on other subjects, but a lot of it reads like long form Twitter.
Harper’s
Audible