/sci/ - Science & Math

Not a Maths book at all, but I highly recommend everyone reads this book. It's fucking amazingly deep.

From pic related:

We are good intuitive grammarians — even quite small children intuit language rules. We can see that from mistakes. For example: “I maked it” rather than the irregular “I made it”.

In contrast those of us who have training and decades of experience in statistics often get statistical problems wrong initially.

Why should there be such a difference?

Our brains evolved for survival. We have a mind that is exquisitely tuned for finding things to eat and for avoiding being eaten. It is a horrible instrument for finding truth. If we want to get to the truth, we shouldn’t start from here.

A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped. … you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyM3d4gQGhM

What are the greatest /sci/ books for laymen?
Like pic-related.

>>8153702

This is a pretty good book as well.
Easier in layman terminology.

ITT popsci books that actually are really good

Theses are mostly layman books, complicated and complex work simplified for an intelligent but non-academic audience.

The Emotional Brain by Joseph Ledoux is a good text that is intermediate between being digestible and intellectually stimulating. Affective neuroscience, or at least cognitive science, is a better foundation for people's entrance into studying the brain than neurology or cog neuro.

Avoid Gazzaniga like the plague. Be wary of people like Oliver Sacks, who are better authors than actual scientists/clinicians. Sacks can write a good story that is entertaining and gives the impression that you now think differently about the world than you did before, but he's mostly just surface and gets onto shelves for the "cool" factor.

Interesting that you put Steven Pinker so far down. I didn't like How the Mind Works either, but probably not for the same reason as the OP; Pinker is too closely married to linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and symbolic computation, but most people don't like him because they find him boring.

In the end, you'll learn more about the mind and brain from reading academic papers in something like Trends In Cognitive Science than you will from texts like these, which gloss over big issues and mostly just exist to sell.

Pic related, one of the "better" books out there.